All right. Good morning. Welcome to Man Group's 2024 Annual General Meeting. I'd like to welcome those joining us in person, virtually or by telephone. We're pleased to be able to offer both in-person and remote options today for joining [indiscernible] maximum shareholder participation and engagement.
Since last year's AGM, there have been a number of changes to our Board at both the executive and nonexecutive level. On August 31, Luke Ellis retired as CEO and was succeeded by Robyn Grew, Man's former President, who you'll hear from shortly.
On the 30th of September, John Cryan stood down as Chair, having served almost 9 years on the Board. I succeeded John as Chair on the 1st of October, and I'd like to thank John and Luke for their years of service and contributions to the Board and to Man Group more generally, and I wish them very well for the future.
In August of this past year, we were pleased to welcome Laurie Fitch to the Board. Laurie took over from me as Chair of the Remuneration Committee. And she brings extensive experience as an equity investor and banker and a strong strategic and international perspective.
In February of this year, 2024, Alberto Musalem, stepped down from our Board in order to take up the position as President and Chief Executive Officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. I'd like to thank Alberto for his excellent contributions during his time on the Board and wish him well in this active service for the U.S. economy.
Yesterday, we also announced two new appointments. The appointment of Dixit Joshi and Sarah Legg who will join our Board effective tomorrow, the 10th of May. Dixit brings significant capital markets experience and commercial insight from senior leadership roles at leading global financial institutions over a 30-year career, while Sarah brings extensive corporate finance, audit and risk experience gained in the financial services sector. We're really looking forward to welcoming both of them to the Man Group Board.
This is my first AGM as Chair of Man Group. I'm delighted to have taken on the role, and I look forward to continuing to work with the Board and the executive team to help guide Man for the next phase of its journey.
The purpose of today's meeting is to update you on the company's progress during -- thank you very much, Robyn, during 2023 and the first quarter of 2024 before answering questions from shareholders later in the meeting.
Before I hand over to Robyn Grew, CEO, I'd like to mention how Man Group has used its strength to deliver for clients and for shareholders.
Inflation and uncertainty around near-term interest rates dominated the story of financial markets in 2023. While equity markets delivered strongly positive returns, the financial landscape was not without its share of turbulence. This created challenging investing conditions for active investment managers and tested allocators' appetite for risk. Nevertheless, Man Group's performance was resilient, and I'm encouraged by the progress that we made last year.
As an active investment manager with clients at the heart of what we do, we're committed to leveraging our technology capabilities and investment expertise to maximize the value we add for clients and to deliver excellent returns for shareholders.
I'll now hand over to Robyn, who'll give an update on the business.
There we go. I'm trying to do this in the right way, excuse me. I have to low this a little bit so that I can actually see over the podium.
Good morning, everyone. Thank you and thank you to everyone who has joined the meeting today. As many of you will be aware, this is my first AGM as CEO. So I plan to provide a recap on 2023 financial year and developments in the business, followed by a short update on 2024 Q1 performance.
2023 was a year that defied market expectations, not just once, but on multiple occasions. The world grappled with several macroeconomic and geopolitical pressures, while the level and path of interest rates, as Anne said, were firmly on investors' minds.
Against that backdrop, we still reported a solid set of results for the firm. We ended 2023 with $167.5 billion of assets under management. At the time, this marked a new high for the firm and a 17% increase compared with December 2022.
In what was a difficult period for most of the sector, the client-led growth in our business remained strong. We recorded total net inflows of $3 billion during the year across both our alternative and our long-only strategies. This highlights the continuing demand for the range of differentiated strategies and solutions that we offer.
On a relative basis, net flows were 4.9% ahead of the industry, reflecting the true value of our client-centric distribution model and the quality of our long-standing relationships with allocators around the world. We also delivered positive investment performance across all product categories with overall outperformance of 1.6%.
This isn't to say that it was all plain sailing. 2023 proved to be a more testing year for trend-following strategies. Nonetheless, performance in our flagship trend following strategies was good relative to peers and reasonable overall, and our programs stood well so far this year.
Meanwhile, core management fee earnings of $0.184 per share were resilient, demonstrating the diversification our total return and long-only strategies add to our business. Total core manage -- sorry, total core earnings per share reflect lower revenue from performance fees in the year.
The Board has declared a final dividend of $0.107 per share which, together with the interim dividend of $0.056 equate to a total dividend for the year of $0.163 per share, which is a 4% increase compared with 2022.
Following the $125 million share buyback announced and executed in 2023, we also announced the intention to repurchase an additional $50 million in shares at our full year results in February this year. This demonstrates the commitment to our capital policy, balancing investments in growth and capital returns. We will continue to actively manage our capital to maximize value to our shareholders.
Since I was appointed CEO, I've spent a huge amount of time with our clients all over the world from Sydney and Seoul to San Francisco, and it's evident that their challenges are becoming ever more complex. More than ever, investors need diversifying sources of risk-adjusted returns, access to liquidity and long-term strategic partners who are forward thinking and adaptable.
The ability to navigate complexity and deliver superior performance through a range of customized solutions is one of the most exciting challenges ahead for our industry. I have no doubt that alternative managers with excellent risk management skills and the technological edge will see strong demand, and we have a competitive advantage in these areas.
We are one of the largest liquid alternative managers with over $100 billion of assets in quant strategies, and over 35 years of experience in generating superior returns. Last year, we continued to deliver investment performance ahead of our peers, which, together with our long-term track record, reinforces our belief that our diversified range of strategies are well placed to deliver for our clients and shareholders in the future.
A key feature of our strategy has been to add to our capabilities, either through innovation or by moving into new market segments with talented, specialized teams. Over the past decade, we've made significant progress diversifying the firm, adding risk parity, risk premia, credit and private market strategies to name but a few. Not only to further diversify our revenue streams but most importantly, it maintains our relevance with clients across a range of market environments.
Our sales and marketing team of over 250 people in over 15 regions around the world make a conscious effort to listen and respond to our clients. They are amongst the best in our industry, and the trend of clients investing across the firm continues. At the end of December, our top 25 clients invested in more than four strategies on average with us with roughly $800 million invested in each strategy. This is materially higher than 5 years ago, and it illustrates the value of providing our clients with a single point of contact who understands their unique requirements.
We continue to grow our market share during the year, and that has been the case the past 4 years now, highlighting the strength of the distribution capabilities that we have built.
Our ability to deliver solutions at scale is a key differentiator, and the rate of growth in our solutions business is a real testament to that. Approximately 2/3 of our AUM is customized now in some way. We now run more customized mandates than ever before and provide scalable solutions to many of our largest clients. They have been crucial in helping us to deepen existing relationships and to add a number of new relationships with strategically important allocators during the past year.
The key reason we've been successful in this area is because of our competitive advantage in technology. It's not easy to replicate that. Quant technologists make up nearly half of our workforce. It really is core to how we run our firm, and it enables us to respond quickly as financial markets and our clients' needs evolve.
Due to the early and continuous and significant investment in our central platform, we can deliver for the world's largest institutional investors. It gives us the ability to trade a huge number of markets and execute larger volumes. It enables us to operate and grow efficiently and flexibly at speed and at scale, delivering better outcomes for our clients and operating leverage for our shareholders.
Now this slide illustrates how we've leveraged our strengths to deliver growth over the past 5 years, a period during which our industry has had its fair share of challenges. Since the end of 2018, we have grown our AUM by 54%, run rate management fees by 45%, management fee EPS by 67% and returned $1.8 billion of capital to shareholders.
We have built a high-performing incredibly resilient firm. Our investment expertise and capabilities, powered by our advanced operating platform, are helping to solve our clients' most complex problems and to generate value for our shareholders.
I'm hugely proud of the progress we have made. But I've said before, my first responsibility is not to break what we got. However, while we continue to invest in our strengths, we refused to rest on our laurels. Man Group has existed for well over 200 years and has achieved this by continuously evolving, and you'll see us innovate further to meet our clients' needs and sustain our growth to deliver for our shareholders.
At the full year results presentation, I spent some time talking about our key priorities for the firm. I'm not planning to discuss them in the same level of detail today, but I will cover the headlines. And before that, though, I really do want to reflect on our purpose as a firm.
Our role quite simply is to deliver investment performance to help our clients provide greater financial security to millions of people around the world. When we succeed for our clients, we succeed for our shareholders. My aim for Man Group is to be indispensable to sophisticated investors globally.
In order to achieve this, I've worked with my new executive committee, who are highly experienced in their fields and represent functions from across our business, and with the Board to define our strategy. We've agreed three areas of focus to drive the next phase of growth.
Our priorities are simply: One, diversify our investment capabilities; two, to extend our reach with clients around the globe; and three, to leverage our strengths in talent and technology. Each of these represent a significant exciting opportunity for us.
Our first priority, growing or adding to our existing investment capabilities is going to be critical to our success. We see the largest opportunities across quant equity, credit and solutions. Quant equities across both long-only admin frequency are particularly interesting, given our estimate of the size of this addressable or the addressable market. We're coming at this from a position of quite -- well, with strength quite frank, considering our quant heritage, our strong culture of innovation and brand credibility.
Credit will be another area of focus. Our offering is already broad with both alternative and long-only credit strategies across both liquid and private markets. As the credit market continues to grow in attractiveness to our world's largest institution, we will aim to grow our existing capabilities and explore the potential to add new capabilities, either organically or inorganically.
Finally, we're also prioritizing adding new content to our solutions offering, acknowledging that customization and transparency are of ever increasing importance to sophisticated allocators as I mentioned earlier.
Our global distribution network is one of our key differentiators, and our second priority is to extend our reach with clients across the globe. Building our presence in markets where we are underweight relative to the size of the opportunity will be an important driver to future growth. I've identified the North American region, the intermediated wealth channel and accessing the large pool of insurance capital as key areas of focus.
Our presence in North America has grown from 26% of our AUM as at the end of 2018 to 35% today with success in the institutional and wealth channels. We continue to see significant opportunity in the region considering the overall size of that market.
The projected growth rate of the wealth segment makes it particularly attractive channel for us, given that we're able to combine our sophisticated product development capabilities with local distribution expertise to develop high-quality, high-scale product offerings. We will also continue to look at adding new relationships with local partners as we've done recently in Italy and in Japan.
As I mentioned earlier, strengthening our credit capabilities is a key initiative for the firm. As we build our credit offering further, the opportunities in the insurance space become more exciting over the medium term.
Our final priority is to continue to invest in the core strengths of our business and deploy our resources strategically. Earlier this year, we announced an enhanced structure for our discretionary offering, bringing together our investment strategies and talent. It will facilitate a free cross-pollination of ideas and make it far easier for clients to navigate and for us to deliver customized high-quality solutions through a single nimble platform.
2023 brought a great deal of enthusiasm about the potential for technology to capitalize productivity across each and every sector. This is not a new phenomenon for us. We've been using AI across our business long before it was a buzzword. It offers major potential to deliver efficiencies and to increase productivity, and we will continue to invest in this area to leverage the benefits of our scale and drive operating leverage in our business.
We will also deploy capital organically and inorganically in line with our strategic priorities to drive future growth and value creation for shareholders. The level of rigor and discipline we apply when it comes to this process will not change.
Continuing to build our core business and executing successfully against our multiyear strategic priorities offers a clear value proposition with significant potential for our shareholders.
I'm really excited about the opportunities ahead. We have a fantastic business. We have built strong foundations from which to launch the next phase of our growth. I am surrounded by incredibly talented team, and we have phenomenal technology capability. We are at the forefront of active investment, and we will always strive to be the very best we can be to the benefit of our clients and our shareholders.
For Q1 2024, we were pleased to report a quarter of growth with AUM actually increasing by $8.2 billion to $175.7 billion, a new high for Man Group. We delivered positive investment performance of $9.8 billion across all categories with multiple investment strategies delivering double-digit gains. This was partially offset by $1.6 billion of net outflows, owing to redemptions from a small number of large clients on the alternatives and systematic long-only side who were rebalancing their portfolios. As we've said before, we are a highly institutional business, which means there can be some variability in quarterly net flow outcomes.
We remain focused on the long term, and I have full confidence in our ability to continue to grow and to deliver for our clients and for you, our shareholders.
And now, I'll hand back to Anne. Thank you very much.
There we go. All good. Thanks, Robyn. Before moving on to the question-and-answer session, I'd like to introduce the formal resolutions to be considered at the meeting. Full details and an explanation of all the resolutions are set out in the notice of the meeting. And with the consent of the meeting, I will take that notice as read. Great. Thank you.
Please note that any questions that you have on the resolution should be asked at this point. At the end of the question period, we'll proceed directly to the poll vote on the resolutions. We're going to first take questions from those in the room and then move on to those submitted by the Q&A function online. And then any questions sent in advance of the meeting before we'll do one last round in case there are any final questions here in the room.
For those of you who are in the room, please hold up your poll card, if you wish to ask a question. When it's your turn, please state your full name before asking. For those who are joining virtually, please type questions into the Q&A function on the right-hand side of your screen, and we will address them shortly. Please ensure when you do so that you send them to all panelists in order to make sure that we see them to be able to answer them. When typing your questions in, please also remember to state your full name.
I'd like to remind you that only shareholders, proxy holders and corporate representatives are permitted to ask questions at this meeting. And please note that only questions relating to the company's business or to the resolutions before the meeting should be asked.
In order to give all shareholders the opportunity to ask questions, can I ask you to please restrict questions to a maximum of two per shareholder in the first instance. And if we end up with additional time, we can circle back for more. So can I start with any questions from the room? Go ahead.
[ David Gom ], shareholder. I was just wondering if the early hour of this meeting is part of a cunning plan to keep the numbers down? We do seem to be quite vastly attended.
It certainly was not done by design. I think our AGM has been at 10 a.m. for the last decade or so. So apologies for any timing inconvenience. It's actually not that early to start for those up here. Go ahead.
Sheryl Cuisia, private investor and also representative of The Engagement Appeal, the hub for inclusive investor engagement and financial literacy. So a couple of questions, please.
I guess, continuing to -- with this gentleman's question. As a provider of services to sophisticated investors, how important are individual investors to Man Group, to yourselves?
And you have a very diverse Board, which is fantastic. I'd like to direct a question to the two gentlemen on the Board. How does it feel to be the minority? And secondly, what would you say to those who say that your Board is no longer diverse because it is over-indexed with women?
Okay. So first of all, the first question, all of our shareholders -- any shareholder of record is important to us. So that includes whether it's institutional, personal, retail, all of them are incredibly important.
We do now have a preponderance of women on the Board. You will have noted that we just added two new Directors who were announced yesterday. That includes an additional man and woman. So the two gentlemen here will not be the only two gentlemen by Friday, but I'm happy to give Antoine or Richard the opportunity to answer the question on how it feels.
It feels great. We have got a very talented Board. [indiscernible] but it's very talented and great representation across skill sets. So feels great.
Recognizing that those online can't hear us without a microphone. But to be honest with you, it doesn't feel very different. What -- I think what has been -- I've been on this Board now for 8 years. The greatest thing about being part of this Board is just the quality of the intellect around the Board table. And that, to me, hasn't changed at all. We've not compromised in any way in changing the makeup of the Board. So given that that's what I get up in the morning for, that, to me, hasn't changed at all.
My perspective, and I Chair another FTSE 250 Board as well, I don't -- I really don't think about it in index term. It's not just numbers. One of the difficulties we have with corporate governance is that we now have so many rules that you can end up with any one individual being asked to join an executive team or an individual to join a nonexecutive team where you end up with being very constrained on any search. Because if you're constantly operating within a narrow set of rails that you must have this shape and that shape of the Board, that actually constrains the ability to go out and get the very best talent for any single role.
And therefore, to me, I think getting overly prescriptive on any particular mix is, I think, dangerous. As I say, I am very confident with this Board that we've made no compromises whatsoever. And if it means for periods of time, we end up having a higher weighting to female than male, I'm absolutely fine with that. The critical thing is we do not compromise the quality of your Board.
Okay. Great answer, Richard. Other questions in the room? [ Lucy ], do we have questions online?
Okay. We have a question here from [ Karl Thomas ]. Can you give an indication on how you see the higher for longer interest rate environment contributing to Man's performance in 2024 and '25?
You happy to take that, Robyn?
I've spoken about a belief that there will be a period of higher for longer. Most importantly for us, we're not here to predict what happens actually in markets. We're here to ensure that we're relevant to clients, and we are there to help them navigate and construct their portfolios in a way, which means they have returns during a market cycle.
Having said that, there is no doubt that in an environment where we have higher interest rates, we have higher value inflation, you will see volatility and dispersion within markets. And that's where active managers, managers that understand the markets and actively look for alpha signals, are going to find themselves in a position of strength. That is what we are here to do is navigate markets, and volatility dispersion are attributes in which active managers play a very important role.
Great. That's the last question that we had online. We had no questions that were submit in advance. So I'm happy to turn back to the room to see if there are any last questions. Okay.
So I'll now move on to the formal voting part of the meeting. The resolutions, which are set out in the notice of the meeting will now be subject to a poll vote. This method of voting allows all shareholders, not just those who are present, to exercise their vote. Most shareholders have already sent their proxy votes in for this purpose, and details of votes received are displayed on the screen in quite small writing.
So I now declare the poll open. Please, would all shareholders, proxy holders and corporate representatives complete their poll card by putting a cross in one of the boxes for, against or vote withheld in respect of each resolution listed. Please also complete your name and address, or the name and address of the shareholder who has appointed you as proxy or corporate representative.
If you've already sent in a form of proxy, you don't need to complete a poll card unless you wish to vary your original vote. Please post all your completed poll cards in the marked box provided at the exit to the room in the back. The poll will close 5 minutes following the conclusion of the meeting. If you have any questions, please ask one of our stewards for assistance. Our registrars will collate the votes cast and the results of voting will be announced to the market and posted on our website later today.
That concludes our 2024 Annual General Meeting. Thank you for joining. We look forward to seeing you next year.
