Q&A is a session under a company's earnings conference that institutional and retailinvestors ask some most-concerned questions to the management. By looking into $Blackstone(BX.US)$ , a leading investment company, we can get an in-depth understanding of the latest investing trends, and hopefully find valuable trade ideas.
Key Takeaways:
Attitudes: quarter-to-quarter, it's not fruitful to predict. But big picture, the company is in remarkably good position over time.
Goals: to have a vision of how big we can be consistent with great performance for our investors. The company is going to keep at tech investment and orient toward the ESG.
Investment: overall to identify where there are real secular tailwinds in the migration of everything online, sustainability, life sciences, global travel coming out of COVID, the rise in places of the middle class in India.
- For tech sector, the company invests in early stage companies in the fintech area, the prop tech area, the enterprise tech area, the cyber area.
- On ESG, as an asset class, the demands for capital are enormous.
Can you talk about on the deployment side how you are kind of able to deploy that to kind of keep returns going without affecting the market just from a pricing perspective?
One of the advantages we have is scale. Year-to-date we've been involved in 13 public to privates, which are transactions that are often harder for other firms because of their size and complexity. If you looked in the quarter, the 10 largest transactions we did in terms of investments and commitments, all of them were done in vehicles that did not exist 5 years ago. So, deploying capital for us at scale has gotten easier because we have more ores in that water and that has really helped us as the capital comes in. And we do it geographically across the globe. We do it across risk and return as well.
The last thing I'd say is this somatic approach that -- what we've tried to do as a firm is identify where there are real secular tailwinds in the migration of everything online, sustainability, life sciences, global travel coming out of COVID, the rise in places of the middle class in India, alternatives. Look at these different asset classes and try to deploy capital directly on scene and then sometimes one derivative off.
You hit your $100 billion core target ahead of schedule. So, what's next?
What we accomplished in the Core Plus area. And whenever we go into a new area or introduce a new product, actually it's fun for me to have a vision of how big we can be consistent with great performance for our investors. So, we certainly got this one right and we've got a lot of momentum of course behind that. Part of the way of managing a great firm is having amazing people and great prospects and discipline when we go into something and set targets for success, both investment-wise and scale-wise. And we're all used to that system here.
Hoping you might be able to give us a little sense of what's to come into 4Q.
As you know, we don't give sort of near-term guidance, but the big picture, as I mentioned in my remarks, is this net accrued performance revenue receivable. That's double what it was pre-COVID. Much of it is relatively liquid, so, we'll take advantage of that based on market conditions. Obviously, the invested performance revenue AUM has grown considerably. So, quarter-to-quarter, it's not a fruitful to guide to that or to predict that. But big picture, we're in remarkably good position over time.
Just hoping you could update us on some of the technology investments that you're making across the firm. As you think it about digitizing, automating parts of your business, how do you think about the opportunity set there?
Stepping back in the technology area, we've been investing in people and in hardware and software for a bunch of years now. We actually have nearly 400 employees in technology and data science. It's --we have to say it's the fastest-growing part of the firm. We have a Innovations Program. We don't talk a lot about it, it's a small program, but we do use internal capital to purchase small stakes in early stage companies in the fintech area, the prop tech area, the enterprise tech area, the cyber area. We're going to keep at it. It's still early days and there's a long way to go.
If you want to just talk about the potential for any ESG impact offerings.
On ESG. So, what I'd say on that is I think the most relevant areas for us are three areas.. In the energy credit and energy debt areas, there was much more orientation toward hydrocarbons and E&P. That -- a lot of those activities we've deemphasized in a significant way over the last 3 years or 4 years. And we've been doing much more around the energy transition and have great success. We put an investment into a public company called the $Array Technologies(ARRY.US)$ , which moves solar panels.
And I would expect the next vintages of our energy equity and energy debt funds will be heavily oriented toward the transition, toward sustainability. I think investors will react well. And I think similarly, we'll do more in infrastructure. So, I think overall as an asset class, the demands for capital are enormous.
This article is a script from the Q&A session of Blackstone's earnings call. In order to facilitate reading, we have made appropriate cuts. If you want to know more details, you can click here to re-watch the earnings call.

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