Blackstone Q4 2024 Earnings Call

Good day, and welcome to the Blackstone Fourth Quarter and Full Year twenty twenty four Investor Call. Today's call is being recorded. At this time, I'd like to turn the conference over to Weston Tucker, head of shareholder relations. Please go ahead. Great. Thanks, Katie, and good morning, and welcome to Blackstone's fourth quarter conference call. Joining today are Steve Schwarzman, chairman and CEO, John Gray, president and chief operating officer, and Michael Che, vice chairman and chief financial officer. Earlier this morning, we issued a press release and slide presentation, which are available on our website. We expect to file our 10 k report later next month. I'd like to remind you that today's call may include forward looking statements, which are uncertain and may differ from actual results materially. We do not undertake any duty to update these statements. For a discussion of some of the factors that could affect results, please see the risk factor section of our 10 k. We'll also refer to non GAAP measures, and you'll find reconciliations in the press release on the shareholders page of our website. Also note that nothing on this call constitutes an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to purchase an interest in any Blackstone fund. This audio cast is copyrighted material of Blackstone and may not be duplicated without consent. Quickly on results, we reported GAAP net income for the quarter of $1,300,000,000. Distributable earnings were 2,200,000,000.0 or $1.69 per common share, and we declared a dividend of $1.44 per share, which will be paid to holders of record as of February 10. With that, I'll turn the call over to Steve. Thank you, Weston, and good morning, and thank you for joining our call. Blackstone just reported one of the best quarters in our history. Distributable earnings increased 56% year over year to $2,200,000,000 as Weston mentioned, underpinned by record FRE. Our limited partners entrusted us with $57,000,000,000 of inflows just in the fourth quarter and a $171,000,000,000 for the year, reflecting strong momentum across the institutional, insurance, and private wealth channels. A particular note, we raised $28,000,000,000 in private wealth in 2024, including $23,000,000,000 in the perpetual strategies, nearly double. I'll repeat that. Nearly double what we raised from individuals in these strategies in the prior year. And all signs point to further acceleration in 2025. After quarter end in January, we raised an additional $3,700,000,000 for our private wealth perpetuals, including the launch of our new infrastructure vehicle, representing a powerful affirmation of our unique position in this channel. We believe our $260,000,000,000 private wealth business is multiples the size of our next largest competitor. The largest single contributor to the firm's financial results in the fourth quarter was our dedicated infrastructure strategy BIP, which generated $1,200,000,000 of fee revenues. BIP has delivered remarkable investment performance since inception only six years ago, including 17% net returns annually for the commingled strategy. This performance has fueled exceptional growth with AUM today of …