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Text: Joining me are our Chief Executive Officer, Bob Steers; our President, Joe Harvey; and our Chief Financial Officer, Matt Stadler.
Further, none of our statements constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy the securities of any fund.
These non-GAAP financial measures should be read in conjunction with our GAAP results.
Yesterday, we reported record earnings of $0.76 per share compared with $0.74 in the prior year's quarter and $0.67 sequentially.
The fourth quarter of 2020 included cumulative adjustments to compensation and benefits and income taxes that lowered our compensation to revenue ratio and effective tax rate, respectively.
Revenue was a record $116.6 million for the quarter compared with $109.8 million in the prior year's quarter and $111.4 million sequentially.
The increase in revenue from the third quarter was primarily attributable to higher average assets under management, partially offset by lower performance fees when compared with the third quarter.
Our implied effective fee rate was 57 basis points in the fourth quarter compared with 59 basis points in the third quarter.
Excluding performance fees, our fourth quarter implied effective fee rate would have been 56.3 basis points, and our third quarter implied effective fee rate would have been five point -- 56 basis points.
Operating income was a record $49.4 million in the quarter compared with $47.4 million in the prior year's quarter and $44.2 million sequentially.
Our operating margin increased to 42.4% from 39.6% last quarter.
Expenses were essentially flat compared with the third quarter as lower G&A was offset by higher expenses related to distribution and service fees as well as compensation and benefits.
The decrease in G&A was primarily due to lower professional fees and a reduction in virtually hosted conferences.
The increase in distribution and service fee expense, which as noted earlier, excludes the cost of our new closed-end fund, is primarily due to higher average assets under management in U.S. open-end funds.
And the compensation to revenue ratio for the fourth quarter was 35% lower than the guidance we provided on our last call.
The decrease was primarily due to an adjustment to reflect actual incentive compensation to be paid.
For the year, the compensation to revenue ratio was 36.1%.
Our effective tax rate was 25.8% for the fourth quarter, which included an adjustment to bring the full year rate to 26.65%.
The lower full year tax rate was primarily due to the relationship between a consistent amount of permanent differences relative to higher-than-forecasted pre-tax income.
Our firm liquidity totaled $143 million at quarter end compared with $201.9 million last quarter.
Firm liquidity as of December 31 reflected the payment of approximately $60.2 million for costs associated with our new closed-end fund and a special cash dividend in December of approximately $47 million or $1 per share.
Over the past 11 years, we have paid a total of $14 per share in special dividends.
And we remain debt-free.
Assets under management totaled a record $79.9 billion at December 31, an increase of $9.4 billion or 13% from September 30.
The increase was due to net inflows of $3.9 billion and market appreciation of $6.4 billion, partially offset by distributions of $859 million.
Bob Steers will be providing an update on our flows and institutional pipeline of awarded unfunded mandates.
Now I'd like to briefly discuss a few items to consider as we begin the new year.
With respect to compensation and benefits, we expect to balance anticipated revenue growth from year-end assets under management that exceeded our 2020 full year average assets under management by about 15%, with our focus on controlled investment in order to maintain our industry-leading performance, broaden our product offerings and expand our distribution efforts.
As a result, we expect that our compensation to revenue ratio will decline to 35.5% from the 36.1% recorded in 2020.
Continuing with the theme of investing in our business, we expect G&A to increase by about 6% from the $42.6 million we recorded in 2020.
After finishing last year 8% below 2019, which was largely driven by lower travel and entertainment and a reduction in hosted and sponsored conference costs as a result of COVID conditions, we intend to make incremental investments this year in technology, including the implementation of new systems, cloud migration and upgrades to our infrastructure and security as well as in global marketing, focused on hosting virtual conferences and expanding our digital footprint.
We also expect that travel and entertainment costs will increase as conditions begin to return to normal.
We expect that our effective tax rate will be 27.25% in 2021.
And finally, we will have earned a full quarter and full year of fees from our new closed-end fund.
And so all things being equal, we expect our implied effective fee rate, excluding performance fees, will increase by about one basis point.
Today, I will review our investment performance and provide some perspective on how our largest asset classes are positioned for 2021.
The markets were ebullient in the fourth quarter as investors continued to look beyond the valley of the pandemic, encouraged by progress with the vaccine and anticipating a potential economic recovery, relieved by clarity on our new administration and government and supported by record monetary and fiscal stimulus.
The macro environment in 2020 was unprecedented with the Fed's balance sheet increasing by over 75%, the budget deficit reaching the highest level since World War II, money supply growing 25% and negative yielding debt reaching $18 trillion globally.
Although we had some of the best relative performance ever in 2020, our asset classes, except for preferreds, lagged their market counterparts meaningfully.
Summarizing our performance at a high level, preferreds performed competitively within fixed income.
U.S. and Global REITs and infrastructure significantly trailed the technology-led performance in stocks.
And certain of our strategies with energy allocations underperformed due to concerns about the secular decline in the demand for oil, considering the growing focus on renewables.
Looking at our performance scorecard, in the fourth quarter, five of nine core strategies outperformed their benchmarks.
For the last 12 months, six of nine core strategies outperformed.
As measured by AUM, 84% of our portfolios are outperforming on a 1-year basis, an improvement from 70% last quarter, mostly due to our preferred portfolios.
On a 1- and 3-year basis, 99% are outperforming, which was consistent with last quarter.
Preferreds returned 4.6% in the fourth quarter.
We outperformed in both our core and low-duration preferred strategies.
After a brief stretch of underperformance, we've now outperformed for three consecutive quarters.
Our 12-month figures are beginning to turn positive across our accounts, which led to the improvement in our 12-month outperforming AUM.
While our relative performance was mixed in 2020, we outperformed all peers.
Taking stock of the critical factors for preferreds, unprecedented monetary stimulus has helped to compress credit spreads to near record low levels.
Credit quality should benefit as the recovery progresses.
With 2020 elections over, the expectation for more fiscal stimulus, and potentially, with the bottoming of inflation, treasury yields may be transitioning from declining to rising.
As a result, companies are taking their queue from markets and issuing significant amounts of preferreds at a very low cost of capital.
Taken together, these factors lead us to expect lower returns from preferreds, and we are currently suggesting that investors consider our low-duration strategy.
With that as a starting point, we believe that conditions later in 2021 and 2022 may create good entry points for these asset classes as the vaccine continues to be distributed, businesses reopen and recovery brings back the more cyclical real estate and infrastructure subsectors that have been disproportionately hit.
In the fourth quarter, infrastructure returned 8.4%, which lagged the global stock index return of 14.8%.
While we underperformed our benchmark in the fourth quarter, we exceeded our excess return target for the full year.
Assessing the infrastructure universe's sensitivity to the economic situation and pandemic, we believe that 9% benefits from secular trends, 50% is relatively unaffected by the economy and pandemic, 20% is directly sensitive to the economic recovery, and 21% will be reliant on successful penetration of the vaccine.
Key investment themes for infrastructure include digital transformation of economies, including 5G deployment; decarbonization and development of renewable power; and the potential for recovery in travel.
We continue to see adoption of infrastructure allocations with asset consultants and institutions.
With the new administration and potential for additional fiscal stimulus via infrastructure, we also believe that wealth advisors may have more interest as well.
In fact, our closed-end fund, UTF, is now trading at a premium to its NAV, indicating investor demand and anticipation of recovery.
In the fourth quarter, U.S. real estate returned 8.1% compared with the S&P 500, which was up 12.1%, and global real estate returned 13.2%.
For the year, we outperformed our benchmarks in all strategies by region and style and by amounts that exceed our excess return targets across the board.
In terms of where real estate is headed, all eyes are on the vaccine and the timing of the reopening of the economy.
Currently, some sectors such as apartments are seeing stabilization with rents flattening out, which is a key step in the recovery progression.
The secular winners such as cell towers, data centers and industrial continue to have great fundamentals.
Probably, the biggest unknown relates to return-to-office dynamics and the proportion of occupancy that may be permanently impaired.
Broadly speaking, lenders have been kicking the can down the road, but banks are now beginning to feel pressure to address problem loans.
While pricing transparency for many sectors is opaque, we expect transactional activity to pick up as the economic recovery takes hold.
Overall, on most metrics, REITs are very cheap, as cheap as they were in the depths of the global financial crisis in 2009.
As the recovery unfolds, considering how much REITs have lagged, we would expect a catch-up in performance.
I also want to mention that our real assets multi-strategy portfolio had very good relative performance in 2020, outperforming by 200 basis -- 240 basis points for the year, which puts us in good position with investors who are looking for inflation protection.
Looking backward over a period of low inflation, investors had not felt a need for this portfolio, which includes real estate, infrastructure, resource equities, commodities and short-duration credit.
However, it has the highest inflation sensitivity of all of our strategies, and we are seeing increased interest in inflation protection, perhaps no surprise considering the deficit and monetary statistics cited earlier.
As Matt mentioned, allocating resources to our investment department is always a priority.
This past year has been particularly gratifying as we continue to see the growing return on investments we've made over the past five years in our people, IT, processing strategies and data and quantitative resources.
One example is our transition of U.S. REIT team leadership that we announced in the fourth quarter.
Our current head, Tom Bohjalian, will be retiring in the middle of this year, and our succession plan has been put in place with Jason Yablon assuming leadership in partnership with Matt Kirschner.
It's hard to imagine replacing as a strong a leader and investor as Tom.
But in the spirit of continuous improvement, we expect Jason to give Tom a run for his money.
We'll continue to build the team for depth and succession.
We will never be complacent on performance and innovation, and we will continue to drive our Alpha Mining initiatives.
Last quarter, I noted that we have a stable of -- track record accounts for strategies that have been developed over the past three years, ranging from existing strategy extensions to new ideas generated by our investment teams.
All but one outperformed benchmarks last year.
We'll be adding more track record accounts in 2021, including one in renewables and clean energy.
Our challenge will be to convert these investment ideas into investor allocations.
Our recent hire of Greg Bottjer from Nuveen, who heads Global Product Strategy and Development, will help us bring some of these strategies to market as well as map out real asset strategy extensions for the next phase of growth.
Overall, I'd say the state of our investment department is strong.
And we are optimistic about our ability to capitalize on the investment opportunities that are expected to come along with a post-pandemic economic recovery.
Let me start by stating the obvious.
2020 was a year that all of us would like to forget.
The one-two punch of COVID and political and social upheaval has had a devastating impact on our culture and economy, and we're not out of the woods quite yet.
In contrast to the unprecedented challenges that we faced last year, U.S. equity markets posted remarkably positive returns led by the COVID beneficiary plays as demonstrated by the strength in the FAANG and related stocks, as Joe already touched on.
While most active managers continued to battle the dual challenges of declining fees and net outflows, the equity markets offered them a reprieve with the S&P 500 and NASDAQ up 16.3% and 43.6%, respectively, last year.
While alternative income strategies such as preferred securities also performed well, delivering returns in high single digits, most real asset strategies, notably real estate and infrastructure, did not.
As Joe noted, global and U.S. real estate securities indices actually declined by 9% and 5.1%, respectively, while global listed infrastructure indices also fell by 4.1%.
It's a point of pride for us that unlike our peers in the industry that benefited from market appreciation, we faced significant market headwinds last year, and yet, still generated industry-leading organic growth.
Importantly, our growth was broad-based and -- with almost every region, strategy and channel contributing to record-breaking results.
We ended the quarter with record assets, as Matt said, of $79.9 billion.
Assets under management in each of the open-end fund, closed-end fund and advisory channels also ended the year at record levels.
In the quarter, gross inflows were a record $7.3 billion and net inflows contributed $3.9 billion.
Virtually, all the organic growth in the quarter was derived from the wealth channel.
Our confidence in the new generation of closed-end funds paid off in the quarter, and we added $2.1 billion of net new assets through the IPO of our Tax-Advantaged Preferred Securities and Income Fund.
Although not a record, our open-end fund channel registered $1.7 billion of net inflows, driven mainly by preferred securities and U.S. real estate strategies.
Notably, each of the RIA, BD, DCIO and Bank Trust verticals generated positive net inflows in the quarter.
Our non-U.S. open-end fund showed modest improvement, albeit from low levels, with net inflows of $41 million in the quarter.
We are continuing to build out our EMEA wholesale distribution team and fully expect that these nascent positive trends will improve.
Consistent with more recent trends, Japan subadvisory saw net inflows of $83 million before distributions and $293 million of net outflows after distributions.
And it was a quiet quarter for subadvisory ex Japan with $10 million of net inflows.
While the headline results for the advisory channel of $101 million of net outflows was disappointing, the underlying trends continue to be strong.
five new mandates totaling $297 million, combined with $282 million of inflows from existing clients, contributed $579 million of gross inflows.
Offsetting these inflows was an unexpected $301 million global real estate outflow, stemming from the termination of a relatively new institutional account, along with a global listed infrastructure termination totaling $299 million.
We do expect the balance of the terminated global real estate account of approximately $960 million to be withdrawn in the next quarter or 2.
Lastly, the quarter ended with a record-setting pipeline of $1 billion, but unfunded mandates of $1.7 billion.
The quarter began with a $1.2 billion pipeline.
$400 million was funded in the quarter, and another $280 million has been deferred due to funding uncertainties.
New awards totaled $1.1 billion.
These new awards were diverse both by strategy and region.
Demand for our strategies, especially real assets remained strong, driven by relative performance, attractive valuations and rising concerns regarding future inflation expectations.
As you know, in recent years, our overarching goal has been to achieve positive flows in each of our core strategies and in every channel and region simultaneously.
To accomplish these results, we have invested continuously in our investment teams, IT, existing and new channels of distribution, innovative new investment strategies, and most importantly, in our people and culture.
So while 2020 was a terrible year in so many ways, it was also a year to be proud of at Cohen & Steers.
All of our teams came together under crisis conditions to deliver a cascade of record results.
For the full year, firmwide gross sales were $27.4 billion, which exceeded the prior record achieved in 2011 of $17 billion by 61%.
Open-end fund gross sales of $17.6 billion were 41% above the prior record, and closed-end fund sales of $2.7 billion similarly blew by the prior record by more than double.
Even in the transition year for us in the U.S. institutional market, our advisory channel recorded sales of $4.3 billion, which was more than 100% better than the prior -- the record set in 2018.
Net inflows last year also set a record at $10.8 billion.
While this was only modestly above the prior record set in 2011, it highlights the important progress that we've made in diversifying our sources of organic growth.
In 2011, net inflows were $10.7 billion.
However, subadvisory inflows from Daiwa Asset Management contributed 81% of that amount in one single strategy.
In contrast, last year, six strategies across open-end funds, closed-end funds and advisory contributed $5.4 billion, $2.6 billion and $1.6 billion of net inflows, respectively, and each setting individual channel records and accounting for almost 90% of firmwide totals.
Achieving these results despite significant market declines for most of our strategies is extraordinary and bodes well for the future.
Strong investment performance in our core strategies has helped us to gain significant market share from our active peers and even passive alternatives.
Seeding and launching innovative new strategies, such as low duration and tax-advantaged preferred securities, next-generation real estate and digital infrastructure has been well received, and our product pipeline is robust.
In addition, expanding and improving the delivery of our strategies through the launch of usage funds, CITs, SMAs and closed-end funds has materially broadened our distribution reach and opportunities.
Lastly, our focus on improving underperforming distribution channels such as U.S. Advisory is starting to pay dividends.
Maintaining the current level of organic growth will not only require a continuation of industry-leading investment performance but also the development of the next generation of innovative real asset and alternative income strategies to complement our existing lineup.
We believe that in the current market cycle, a significant shift in asset allocations into real assets, seeking to capitalize on depressed valuations and the potential to hedge against unexpected inflation is taking place.
Current and prospective clients are looking to us to implement their strategies through both listed and private markets.
In response to our clients' needs and to maintain our leadership position in real assets and alternative income strategies, we plan to expand our opportunity set and related capabilities to include non-traded equity and fixed income investments.
In addition, an important point of differentiation for us will be the ability to deliver all of our capabilities through strategically allocated and bespoke solutions.
As always, we're committed to invest as necessary to drive our long-term growth.
With that, I'd like to ask the operator to open up the floor to questions.

user
cohen & steers inc - diluted eps, as adjusted, of $0.76 for the fourth quarter.
cohen & steers inc - net inflows of $3.9 billion for the fourth quarter.
cohen & steers inc - quarter end aum of $79.9 billion.

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