Intermediate Capital: Shares hit all-time high as asset manager’s profit more than doubles
Asset manager Intermediate Capital has raised its dividend for the 14th year in a row on the back of bumper annual earnings that saw its profit more than double.
The news sent its shares up 5.3 per cent on Tuesday morning to their highest level ever. The firm listed on the London Stock Exchange in 1994.
Intermediate Capital, which burst onto the FTSE 100 in December, reported a pretax profit of £597.8m for the year ending on 31 March, surging 132 per cent from £258.1m the year before.
Its assets under management (AuM) swelled to $98bn (£77bn), with $70bn (£55bn) in fee-earning AuM marking an 11 per cent increase from the previous year.
Intermediate Capital posted record management fees of £505m, up five per cent on the prior year. Meanwhile, its fund management pretax profit jumped 21 per cent to £375m – the 10th straight year of growth.
The company’s net investment return came in at £379m, or 13 per cent – compared with four per cent the year before.
Intermediate Capital raised its total ordinary dividend to 79p from 77.5p, marking 12 per cent growth over the last five years. The firm’s shares are up 40 per cent so far this year, making it one of the FTSE 100’s best-returning stocks.
It revised its medium-term guidance to target at least $55bn (£43bn) in fundraising between 1 April 2024 and 31 March 2028.
The firm also guided an operating margin of more than 52 per cent for its fund management company, performance fees to make up around 10 to 15 per cent of total fee income and its balance sheet investment portfolio to deliver low double digit returns.
Chief executive and chief investment officer Benoît Durteste said on Tuesday: “We have a number of large, globally-relevant flagship strategies; an exciting set of scaling products; and in FY24 we secured client commitments of almost $1.5bn (£1.2bn) across three first-time funds.”
“Our broad waterfront of products enables us to react to the needs of our clients and portfolio companies. In the current market we are benefiting from an environment in which strategies that invest in credit, structured transactions, and which provide liquidity solutions are particularly attractive.”
He added: “Our strategy of scaling up and scaling out is delivering multiple levers of growth as we continue to build ICG for further success in the years ahead.”
Updated with shares