The Carlyle Group Inc. (NASDAQ:CG) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Harvey Schwartz: No, I don’t think it’s a longer-term build. We don’t want to be the biggest in the world here in capital markets. And that’s really more my feeling for the strategy, but we’re coming from such a low base that incremental growth in a normalized market environment should be pretty easy. If we don’t deliver that for you, then we’re not doing our job. So I think, John mentioned it was a pretty muted quarter, but fourth quarter pipeline feels pretty good coming into 2024 in a more normalized environment. I think we have the team now positioned in a way, aligned with the businesses in terms of resources and incentives and degree of focus that I think that the opportunity set should be much better coming into ’24, again, subject to market conditions.

Now I would describe it as a Version 1.0. When we get to a Version 2.0, we’ll come back to you in terms of how we build that out. But a lot of this, as I’ve said before, we have all the raw material. We just need to leverage all the adjacencies we have internally, have the right incentives, stay focused and then we can drive value through this.

Brian Bedell: That’s great color. Can I ask one more or just should I get back in the queue?

Harvey Schwartz: You got to talk to Dan Harris about that. I let you ask, although you asked already before, but they can’t give you the opportunity about that, but I’ll. That’s a kind of guy I’m.

Brian Bedell: It will be a quick one. Just on the fundraising side, obviously, optimistic on 4Q. Are we still in the camp for fundraising in 2023 to exceed that of 2022? Or do you think the timing could be sort of squishy around the December, January time frame where they might bump into ’24 a little bit?

Harvey Schwartz: No. Our expectations will exceed 2022 subject to market conditions and some stuff flipping. And the other thing I’ll say is we’re trying to give you as much insights, but we’re not running the place for November, December, right? So we’re running it for the long term. But I understand your focus on the quarter.

Brian Bedell: No, no, that’s good, that’s good. Great.

Operator: And our last question comes from Patrick Davitt with Autonomous Research.

Patrick Davitt: Harvey, you mentioned the still uncertain environment. So could you maybe better frame how the 4Q realization pipeline looks versus 3Q?

John Redett: Yes. I mean — it’s John. Look, it’s obviously a difficult question to answer in the sense we’re in some challenging markets. But look, I would say confidence is low today. Uncertainty is elevated. And as Harvey said, we have a lot of dry powder. I like the fact that we have a lot of dry powder. Some of the better investments we’ve made at Carlyle have been in markets where uncertainty is elevated like today. So I think we feel good about that. But looking forward, projecting realizations is something that’s very difficult for us to do.

Operator: And I’d now like to turn the call back over to Daniel Harris for any closing remarks.

Daniel Harris: Yes. Thanks, everybody. We appreciate your time this morning and, of course, your interest in Carlyle. If you have any further questions or follow-ups, please reach out to Investor Relations. We look forward to talking to you again next quarter.

Operator: Thank you. This concludes today’s conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.