Brookfield Corporation 2026 Q2 Earnings Call

Please go ahead. Thank you operator, and good morning.

Welcome to Brookfield Corporation second quarter 2026 conference call. On the call today are Bruce Flatt, our Chief Executive Officer, Nicholas Goodman, President of Brookfield Corporation, and Sachin Shah, Chief Executive Officer of our Wealth Solutions business. Bruce will start off by giving a business update, followed by Nick, who will discuss our financial and operating results for the quarter. Sachin will provide an update on our Wealth Solutions business. After our formal comments, we will turn the call over to the operator and take analyst questions. In order to accommodate all those who want to ask questions, we request that you refrain from asking more than two questions.

I would like to remind you that in today's comments, including in responding to questions and in discussing new initiatives in our financial and operating performance, we may make forward-looking statements, including forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable Canadian and U.S. security laws. These statements reflect predictions of future events and trends and do not relate to historic events. They are subject to known and unknown risks, and future events and results may differ materially from such statements. For further information on these risks and their potential impacts on our company, please see our filings with the securities regulators in Canada and the U.S., and the information available on our website. In addition, when we speak about our Wealth Solutions business or Brookfield Wealth Solutions, we are referring to Brookfield's investments in this business that supported the acquisition of its underlying operating subsidiaries.

With that, I'll turn the call over to Bruce.

Thank you, Katie, and welcome to the call. Our business performed well in the second quarter and through the first half. Distributable earnings before realizations increased 15% year-over-year to $1.4 billion in the quarter, and $5.7 billion for the last 12 months. In the first half of the year, we were active. We raised $98 billion of capital, deployed $100 billion into opportunities, and monetized $40 billion of assets, while a further $130 billion of assets were financed. We advanced several important strategic initiatives. We expanded our insurance business with the acquisition of Just in the U.K. Our assets through that increased to $190 billion. Shareholders approved the simplification of our capital structure, bringing our insurance and investment capabilities together. This creates a stronger and more simpler Brookfield.

Last, we completed the acquisition of Oaktree. Combined, our credit business is now one of the most comprehensive globally. Turning briefly to the market environment. There is no shortage of noise in the markets today. Geopolitical conflict, higher energy prices, and uncertainty around interest rates. While these factors may influence markets in the near term, our focus remains on firmly building long-term value across the business. None of these factors in the short term will matter too much to our long-term business success. The market environment continues to, though, be constructive. Economic resilience and functioning capital markets are supporting operating performance throughout the business and transaction activity. While uncertainty around growth and inflation is increasing demand for high quality, heavy assets with low obsolescence risk, precisely the type of assets and businesses which we own. At the same time, long-term investment themes shaping our opportunity set are accelerating.

Digitalization, decarbonization, and deglobalization, which we have been talking about for years, are now creating opportunities unlike anything we have ever seen. The opportunities are accelerating. Across AI infrastructure, energy addition, supply chain reorganization, and data sovereignty, the opportunities are larger, more multifaceted, and more capital intensive. Participating in these investments requires a broad range of capabilities, and our advantage sits with our ability to deliver integrated solutions at scale. We have invested decades deliberately building and strengthening the capabilities needed to pursue opportunities of this scale. Together, they have become one of the defining advantages of our business and position us to capitalize on these transformational investment opportunities in the years ahead. For us, this starts with relationships. Many of the opportunities we pursue are not broadly marketed. They come to us through bilateral discussions and strategic partnerships due to our scale or because certainty of execution matters.

We aim to be the first call because of the relationships we have built across industries, geographies, and capital markets to originate differentiated opportunities and give our partners access to transactions they could not typically source or pursue directly. Our global presence helps us determine where the best opportunities exist at any point in time. With teams on the ground across markets and asset classes, we see where demand is building, where capital is moving, and where risks are emerging. That perspective helps us focus on the best risk-adjusted opportunities. Our operating expertise is then what allows us to execute. Many of today's most attractive opportunities span multiple disciplines, and we can bring together teams across Brookfield to deliver integrated solutions that address the full scope of the opportunity. Our ability to source and execute is driven by the capital we have available to deploy.

Decades of strong investment performance have therefore enabled us to build a diversified capital base that draws on public markets, institutions, private wealth, long duration insurance, and our own balance sheet. These five things make us quite unique. This allows us to match the right capital to each investment and continue deploying through cycles. Nowhere is this more important of integrating these complementary capabilities more evident than in the rapid build-out of AI infrastructure. The build-out of AI infrastructure brings together the capabilities of our real estate, energy, infrastructure, and credit businesses, each a leader in their field. At the same time, the rapid adoption of AI is driving tremendous demand for electricity. While constraints across the grid are limiting how quickly new supply can come online, the result is a widening gap between insatiable power and compute demand with constrained supply.

Together, these trends are creating one of the most compelling investment opportunities we've seen in years, and precisely the type of opportunities our scale enables us to pursue without taking undue risks. We are bringing together power generation, transmission, land entitlement skills, financing, and long-term customer relationships to deliver solutions that few organizations can provide. Our recent $100 billion announcement to build one of the world's most advanced AI factories in Kentucky, in partnership with the U.S. government, illustrates this well. We were selected by the U.S. Department of Energy to repurpose a federally-owned industrial site and deliver a major world-class AI campus. Drawing on our certainty of execution, our ability to bring together land power, transmission, and capital at scale. This is federal land that has DOE uses on it, and as a result, today needs few approvals to move forward.

Turning now to Westinghouse, this is another example of how these long-term trends are creating new opportunities. No business we own today is more directly positioned to benefit from the growing importance of energy addition and energy security than Westinghouse. Governments and companies increasingly want reliable, domestically available generation. Base load nuclear, due to its scale, is really, really important. We are supporting the next wave of nuclear deployment. Building on our strategic partnership with the U.S. Department of Commerce announced last year, the U.S. Department of Energy recently announced a further $17.5 billion financing commitment to us alongside our utility partners to acquire long lead time items to advance the production of the reactors we're going to build. It will reduce the time periods dramatically. It will shorten development timelines and establish a repeatable model for large-scale nuclear construction.

Westinghouse is in various stages of construction today on 14 reactors, has line of sight on another 40, and another 100 coming. This is part of a $6 trillion industry build-out where we hold a very dominant position. Turning to our capital base, it's also continuing to evolve. One of the most significant developments today is the role of private markets and retirement savings. Most individual savers have had very little access to private assets with their savings invested largely in public stocks and bonds, even as the investment world has evolved over the last 20 years. Businesses today are staying private longer, meaning a growing share of the world's essential assets and value creation now sits outside the public markets. As a result, retirement savers are increasingly missing out on a meaningful share of global value creation, and only participate once meaningful value has already been created.

Recent changes to U.S. federal policy are beginning to open the door to greater private market participation in retirement portfolios. Savers will soon have access to diversification, resilient cash flows, inflation-protected assets, and all these types of investment products. This will become another important source of long-term duration capital for us, further growing and diversifying our capital base. I will end by saying that we look forward to seeing all of you at our Investor Day on September 17th in Manhattan. Additional details are on our website. As always, thank you for your continued support and interest in Brookfield. I'll now turn the call over to Nick.