Financials

Financials — What the Numbers Say

1. Financials in One Page

Partners Group is a CHF 2.56B-revenue private-markets asset manager that turned roughly CHF 1.26B of that into net income (49% net margin) and CHF 1.51B into free cash flow in FY2025 — meaning more cash hit the bank than was reported as earnings. The business is asset-light: gross margin sits near 68%, EBITDA margin near 63%, ROIC near 35%, and capex is a rounding error (0.3% of revenue). Earnings power, however, is lumpy because performance fees swing with realisations — FY2021 revenue was CHF 2.63B, FY2022 was CHF 1.87B, and the platform took three years to recover. The balance sheet has flipped from net-cash to a modest net-debt position (CHF 485M, 0.30× EBITDA) as management funded record dividends and growth investments with bond issuance. The stock fell 37% on the day of the FY2025 print (10 March 2026) after management warned of lower 2026 management-fee guidance, leaving valuation at roughly 17–20× earnings — historically the cheap end of PGHN's own band. The metric that matters most right now is gross AuM raised in 2026, because management's own 2026 fee guidance and the USD 450B medium-term AuM target both depend on it.

How to read this page. PGHN is a fee-based asset manager, not a balance-sheet investor — so the income statement is more like a software company (high margins, light capex) while the balance sheet behaves like a small bank (bonds outstanding, dividends recycled). Treat management fees as the recurring annuity and performance fees as the wildcard.

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2. Revenue, Margins, and Earnings Power

PGHN earns two revenue lines: management fees (a steady percentage of fee-paying assets under management — the annuity) and performance fees (a share of investment gains booked when underlying funds realise — the wildcard). The mix is roughly 60/40 in average years, but performance fees can swing from 25% to 50% of revenue depending on the year.

Revenue compounded at a 15% 10-year CAGR (CHF 619M in FY2015 → CHF 2.56B in FY2025), but the path was not linear. FY2021 was a once-in-a-decade realisation year — performance fees more than doubled and revenue jumped 63% YoY to CHF 2.63B. The two years after were a give-back: FY2022 revenue fell 29% as exits froze, FY2023 grew only 4%, and the platform only re-passed the FY2021 peak in FY2025.

The two lines move together, telling you operating expenses are largely variable — comp and carry payouts flex with the fee pool. That is why operating margin barely compresses even in down years: 56% in FY2011 (the worst trough) and 60–65% in normal years.

The remarkable feature here is stability. Operating margin has been a 56–65% band for a decade, with the lower end set in cyclical troughs (FY2011, FY2015, FY2022) and the upper end in heavy performance-fee years (FY2017–2018). The takeaway: PGHN's earnings power is fee-driven — if AuM keeps growing, the operating leverage will mechanically deliver, and the cycle controls the timing of when it shows up.

PGHN reports semi-annually, not quarterly. H2 is the seasonally bigger half because performance fees crystallise on full-year fund returns. H2 2025 was the strongest half on record (CHF 1.40B revenue, CHF 683M net income), yet the stock still fell 37% on the print — see Section 7 for why.

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3. Cash Flow and Earnings Quality

Free cash flow is the cash a business generates after paying operating expenses and capital expenditures — the money truly available to return to owners, pay down debt, or reinvest. For a fee-based asset manager like PGHN, FCF should track net income closely because there is little physical capital to maintain.

That is exactly what happens over the cycle. Across the last decade, cumulative operating cash flow (CHF 8.92B) and cumulative net income (CHF 9.46B) are within 6% of each other. But the annual picture is bumpier because the cash-flow statement absorbs the timing of performance-fee receivables, deferred carry payouts, and the funding mismatch between when fees are booked and when they are received.

Look at FY2018 and FY2021 — both show OCF roughly half of net income. That is the receivables-build problem: revenue is recognised when fees are earned but cash arrives later when LPs settle. Both years were followed by a catch-up — FY2019 (OCF CHF 961M vs NI CHF 900M) and FY2022 (CHF 1.06B vs CHF 1.00B). The two lines reconnect over any rolling 2–3 year period.

Cash-flow distortion	What it does to reported earnings vs cash	FY2025 figure (CHF M)
Capex	Negligible — PGHN owns offices, not factories	-8.5
Stock-based compensation	Added back in OCF; real economic cost via dilution	+63.2
Dividends paid	Largest cash use; ~87% of net income	-1,091.9
Buybacks	Modest offset to dilution	-333.6
Net debt issuance	Funds dividend + working-capital needs	+353.8
Acquisitions	Tiny vs cash flow	-95.2

The story this table tells: PGHN is distributing the business rather than reinvesting in it — see Section 5.

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4. Balance Sheet and Financial Resilience

PGHN's balance sheet looks more like a small bank than an industrial. Total assets are CHF 6.39B at FY2025 year-end, of which CHF 1.99B is cash and CHF 1.14B is receivables (mostly fees earned but not yet collected). On the other side: CHF 2.47B of debt, CHF 451M of payables, and CHF 2.19B of equity.

The structural shift is unmissable: PGHN ran with net cash of around CHF 1B for most of the last decade (negative net debt = more cash than debt), but since FY2022 has been steadily levering up — net debt swung from negative CHF 1.55B in FY2021 to positive CHF 485M in FY2025. Debt-to-equity climbed from 0.08 in FY2015 to 1.13 today. The driver is straightforward: dividend payments now exceed free cash flow, and the gap is funded by bond issuance.

Liquidity & resilience snapshot (FY2025)	Value
Cash and equivalents	CHF 1,986M
Total debt	CHF 2,471M
Net debt	CHF 485M
Net debt / EBITDA	0.30x
EBIT / interest expense (interest coverage)	17.0x
Current ratio	1.67
Quick ratio	0.85
Long-term debt / equity	0.65
Intangibles / total assets	5.7%

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5. Returns, Reinvestment, and Capital Allocation

PGHN earns spectacular returns on the capital it uses — ROE 35–55% and ROIC 35–77% for the last decade — because the business model uses very little capital. The team manages CHF 165B+ of client assets while keeping only a few hundred million of working capital on the books. That is the asset-light asset-manager structure at its purest.

ROE has actually risen in the past two years even as ROIC has fallen — that is a sign of financial engineering, not operational improvement. Lower equity (denominator) plus more debt (gross capital up) flatters ROE while dragging ROIC. The underlying ROA is steady at 21%.

The chart makes the policy explicit: dividends do almost all the work. Cumulative FY2015–FY2025 distributions: CHF 7.31B of dividends + CHF 3.70B of buybacks vs CHF 9.91B of cumulative net income — a 111% payout ratio over the decade. PGHN is, by design, an income vehicle for shareholders.

The dividend has been raised every year for 17 consecutive years (DPS CHF 8.52 in FY2015 → CHF 42.12 in FY2025, an 11.3% 10-year CAGR), even when EPS fell. The payout ratio has now climbed to 87% — leaving little buffer if performance fees disappoint. Share count is roughly flat to slightly down (26.3M → 25.8M over a decade) because buybacks roughly offset employee equity grants.

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6. Segment and Unit Economics

Detailed segment-level revenue is not available in the fundamentals feed for PGHN — Swiss filers disclose less segment granularity than US peers. The business model reporting from the company itself splits assets and revenue into four asset classes (private equity, private debt, private real estate, private infrastructure) and two fee types (management fees vs performance fees). Investor releases describe these splits qualitatively rather than line-by-line.

What the company does disclose at the asset-class level (from the FY2025 annual presentation):

Dimension	What you need to know
Private equity	The largest asset class, ~50% of AuM. Drives the bulk of carry/performance fees.
Private debt	Roughly 25% of AuM. Steadier management fees, less performance-fee upside.
Private real estate	~12% of AuM. Cyclical with property values.
Private infrastructure	~13% of AuM, but the fastest-growing pillar — data-centres are an explicit focus.
Customised mandates	~70% of AuM is in bespoke client mandates (this is where Hamilton Lane is the closest peer).
Evergreen / wealth	New retail-channel vehicles (PG ENG, PG Direct Equity Evergreen) — the platform Blackstone pioneered with BREIT/BCRED.

The economics that matter: management fees scale roughly linearly with AuM (~1% blended fee rate on fee-earning AuM), while performance fees scale with realised gains and can run from 10% to 35% of total revenue in any given year. The "wildcard" is realisations — i.e., when portfolio companies are sold or refinanced — and 2022–2024 was a thin window for realisations across the entire private-markets industry.

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7. Valuation and Market Expectations

PGHN trades at 17.7× trailing P/E and ~14.8× P/FCF at the recent price near CHF 859 (May 2026). Those are the cheap end of its own 15-year history — only the 2008 crisis and the brief 2022 drawdown saw lower multiples.

Three things to notice:

1. The 5-year P/E median is roughly 27×. Today's 17–20× is a one-third discount to that, in line with the FY2022 trough.
2. EV/EBITDA has compressed harder than P/E because net debt has appeared on the balance sheet (Section 4). The multiple of 16× is the lowest reading since FY2008.
3. P/FCF is also at a 15-year low, but FCF is unusually high in FY2025. Normalising to a 5-year average FCF would lift P/FCF closer to 23×.

The market is pricing PGHN as if its earnings power is permanently lower. The most direct evidence for why: on 10 March 2026, the company published FY2025 results plus 2026 guidance that warned of lower management fees in 2026 (a function of AuM mix shift and fee-rate dilution from the bigger customised mandates) — and the stock fell 37% from CHF 1,289 to CHF 806 on the day. The recovery since then has been partial.

Consensus price target sits at CHF 1,150 — a ~34% premium to current price. The bear-case (Citi, CHF 940) still implies modest upside, and the bull-case (Kepler, CHF 1,260) implies ~47%. There is no analyst short call on this name today.

Simple bear / base / bull (CHF per share, 12-month)	EPS	Multiple (×)	Price	Implied return
Bear — FY2026 EPS down 10%, multiple stays at 15×	43.6	15	654	-24%
Base — FY2026 EPS up 6% in line with mgmt guide CHF~51, multiple 18×	51.4	18	925	+8%
Bull — FY2026 EPS up 12% to CHF~54, multiple re-rates to 22×	54.0	22	1,188	+38%

The valuation supports a base-case total return of ~13% (dividend yield 5% + 8% price appreciation) and a more attractive bull-case (~43% with dividend). The bear-case (-24% before dividend) requires a multiple compression plus an earnings miss, and is closer to a worst-case than a likely-case.

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8. Peer Financial Comparison

PGHN's natural peer set is European-listed private-markets pure-plays (EQT, Bridgepoint) and the US alternative-asset giants (Blackstone, KKR, Apollo, Ares, Brookfield, Carlyle). Hamilton Lane is the closest economic analogue for the customised-mandates business. All figures are FY2025 (or FY2026 for HLNE, which has a March fiscal year-end).

Strip out the headline numbers and the picture is clear. PGHN has the highest operating margin (60%), the highest ROE (55%), the highest ROIC (35%), and the lowest net-debt-to-EBITDA (0.30×) of any pure private-markets peer. It also has the lowest P/E and EV/EBITDA among the European pure-plays and US giants — at 20× P/E, it trades cheaper than EQT (55×), Bridgepoint (58×), Blackstone (40×), KKR (50×), Apollo (26×), and is only matched by Hamilton Lane (17×, but on lower-margin economics). The 4.3% dividend yield is bested only by Ares (5.0%) and Blackstone (5.0%).

The puzzle: PGHN has better fundamentals than EQT or Blackstone on every single line of this table — and trades at half their multiples. The market is paying for growth (EQT's 30% 5-year revenue CAGR vs PGHN's 13%) and scale (BX's USD 1T+ AuM). PGHN's pitch is quality per dollar of revenue, not size.

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9. What to Watch in the Financials

Metric	Why it matters	Latest value	Better	Worse	Where to check
Gross AuM raised (annual)	Determines management-fee growth — the annuity	CHF ~30B fundraising 2025	Above CHF 35B in 2026	Below CHF 25B in 2026	Half-year and annual reports
Total AuM	Direct lever on revenue	CHF 165B (USD 185B)	Compounding toward USD 450B target	Flat or shrinking	AuM-update press releases (April/October)
Management-fee growth (YoY)	Cleanest read on the recurring engine	~+10–12% est. for 2025	Re-accelerates to 12–15% in 2026	Falls below mid-single-digits	Earnings call commentary on fee guidance
Performance fees as % of revenue	Drives EPS volatility	~35% in FY2025	Stable 30–40% range	Spikes above 50% (one-off) or collapses below 20%	Annual report fee breakdown
FCF / Net income (rolling 2Y)	Tests whether profits become cash	1.0x rolling 2Y	Sustained at 0.9–1.1×	Persistent below 0.7×	Cash-flow statement
Net debt / EBITDA	Tests dividend sustainability	0.30×	Stable below 0.5×	Climbs above 1.0×	Balance sheet vs EBITDA
Payout ratio	Reveals dividend safety	87%	Returns to 70–75% (earnings catch up)	Climbs above 100% (uncovered)	Annual report DPS line vs EPS
Effective fee rate on AuM	Detects mix-shift fee compression	~1.0% blended	Stable or rising	Falls below 0.95%	Half-year supplemental

The financials confirm three things: PGHN earns top-tier returns on tiny capital, the dividend is generous, and the platform has compounded AuM at a double-digit pace for 15+ years. They contradict the recent 37% stock drop — there is nothing in the FY2025 income statement, cash-flow statement, or balance sheet that explains a value destruction of that magnitude. The market is pricing a multi-year fee-growth slowdown that has not yet appeared in the printed numbers.

The first financial metric to watch is management-fee growth in the H1 2026 print (out August 2026). Management's own guidance flagged 2026 as a soft year; if reported H1 2026 management fees grow above mid-single-digits, the bear thesis weakens materially. If they grow below 5%, the 37% sell-off was warranted and the multiple has further to fall.