Financials

Financials — Partners Group Holding AG (PGHN)

Figures converted from Swiss francs (CHF) at historical FX rates — see data/company.json.fx_rates. Ratios, margins, and multiples are unitless and unchanged.

Partners Group is a Swiss-listed global private-markets manager that earns recurring management fees on USD 185 billion of assets under management, plus episodic performance fees when funds are realized above their hurdles [1]. Financially it is close to an ideal: a 63% EBITDA margin, a 55% return on equity, near-total conversion of profit to cash, almost no net debt, and a dividend it has raised every year since its 2006 IPO [2] [3]. The debate is not about quality — it is about whether the AuM engine still grows after the firm gated an USD 8.6bn evergreen fund in June 2026, an event that cut the share price by roughly a third.

All figures are translated into US dollars (USD) from the firm's CHF reporting currency at period-end rates. A native Swiss-franc version of this page is available.

The thirty-second read

Sources: AuM, revenue, EBITDA margin and dividend per FY2025 Annual Report [2]; ROE per the alternative performance metrics section [4]; free cash flow derived from the consolidated cash-flow statement [5].

How Partners Group actually makes money

Before any number means anything, you have to know what drives profit. Partners Group does not put much of its own capital at risk; it manages other people's. Revenue has two engines that behave completely differently:

• Management fees — a steady toll, charged as a percentage of assets under management (AuM). In 2025 these were $2,200m (including other revenues and operating income), about 68% of revenue, and they grow roughly in line with average AuM [2]. The fee margin — fees divided by average AuM — has stayed in a tight 1.18%–1.33% band since the IPO and was 1.24% in 2025, a sign of genuine pricing power [6].
• Performance fees — a share of investment gains, recognized only when funds are realized above a hurdle. These are large but lumpy: $1,033m in 2025 (33% of revenue) versus just $291m in 2022 [7] [8]. Crucially, up to 40% of every performance fee is paid straight back out to employees, so a performance-fee spike inflates revenue and personnel cost together and is largely margin-neutral [9].

The whole P&L flows from AuM. That is why the June 2026 evergreen redemption scare matters financially — it is a question mark over the asset base that the fee toll is levied on.

The year-wise statements

This is the audited record. Read it top to bottom: revenue is volatile because of performance fees, but the management-fee line, the EBITDA margin and the dividend grind steadily higher. FY2021 stands out — a once-in-a-cycle realization year (performance fees of $1,312m) that revenue has only now surpassed.

Sources: revenue, EBITDA, EBIT, net profit and diluted EPS from the consolidated income statements in the FY2025 [7], FY2024 [10], FY2022 [8] and FY2021 [11] reports; EBITDA margin and ROE per company disclosure [9] [4]; net margin and pre-2024 ROE derived from reported financials; dividend per share is the proposed/paid dividend for each year [3].

Growth: high quality on fees, lumpy on performance

Split the revenue line and the picture clears. Management fees compound quietly — up from roughly $1.2bn in 2020 to $2.1bn in 2025, +12% on a constant-currency basis in 2025 even as a strong Swiss franc held the reported figure to +7% [12]. Performance fees swing violently around that base: $1,312m in the 2021 boom, $291m in the 2022 bust, and back to $1,033m in 2025. This is the single most important thing to internalize about the income statement — a "down" revenue year is usually a down performance-fee year, not a broken franchise.

Source: "Management fees and other revenues, net" and "Performance fees, net" lines from the consolidated income statements, FY2021–FY2025 reports [7] [10] [11].

Where the fees come from

Private equity is still the engine (59% of revenue), but the growth story is infrastructure, which has more than doubled to $669m since 2023, while real estate — the segment most exposed to the property downcycle — has stayed soft. Royalties is a new, tiny, fast-growing toehold.

Source: Note 1.2 Segment information, "Revenues from management services, net" by operating segment, FY2025 Annual Report (FY2023 from FY2024 report). Note: the segment-mix figures published in the run's structured data had Infrastructure and Real estate transposed; the audited segment note is used here [13] [14].

Margins and earnings quality: does profit become cash?

Margins are remarkably stable. The EBITDA margin has sat near 63% for five straight years (62.8% in 2025), and management runs the firm to a deliberate ~40% cost-income ratio on newly generated fees — i.e. a target ~60% operating margin [9]. Because performance-fee-funded pay flexes with performance fees, the margin barely moves whether performance fees boom or bust. The slight 2025 dip (EBIT margin 60.1% vs 61.3%) was franc strength and the integration of the Empira real-estate acquisition, not cost slippage [12].

Source: EBITDA margin development chart and EBIT margin disclosure, FY2025 Annual Report; FY2021 EBIT margin derived from reported EBIT and revenue [9] [12].

Cash conversion is excellent — and that is the real tell of fee-business quality. In FY2025 operating cash flow was $1,911m and capex just $26m, for $1,885m of free cash flow — about 119% of net income [5]. One caveat for the beginner: FY2025 capex was unusually low because the prior two years carried the spend for the new Denver campus (FY2024 capex was $156m) [12]. Even normalizing for that, free cash flow comfortably funds the dividend. Over a full decade, cash flow tracks profit closely — the gaps are timing of working capital (the short-term treasury loans the firm extends to its own funds), not earnings quality.

Source: net cash from operating activities less purchases of property, equipment and intangibles, consolidated cash-flow statements FY2016–FY2025 (pre-2022 years as reported in company filings) [5].

The balance sheet: a weapon, not a constraint

Partners Group runs a deliberately "balance-sheet-light" model — it manages assets rather than warehousing them. Net debt, on the firm's own definition (bonds plus drawn credit facilities, less cash and the short-term treasury loans it extends to its funds), was just about $505m at year-end 2025, up from $154m, against available liquidity of $4,694m [4] [15]. Funding is conservatively structured:

• Five fixed-rate, senior unsecured CHF bonds totalling about $1,677m, coupons 0.40%–2.40%, laddered from 2027 to 2034 — no wall, and the nearest is a CHF 500m ($631m), 0.40% bond due June 2027 [15].
• A newly upsized EUR 3,000m (about $3,521m) syndicated facility that carries no financial covenants — the firm drew about $1,332m of it for working capital and treasury [16].

The one nuance an investor should watch: drawn credit facilities have climbed (about $286m → $789m → $1,332m over three years) and the firm holds roughly $2,090m of short-term loans to its own funds [17]. This treasury-bridging activity is what makes "net debt" look like it is rising; it is collateralized against unfunded client commitments and short-dated, but it is the reason the balance sheet is busier than the asset-light label suggests [15].

Source: consolidated statements of financial position, FY2025 (2024–2025), FY2024 (2023), FY2022 (2021–2022) and FY2021 (2020) reports [17] [18] [19] [20].

The firm also invests ~$2.1bn of its own balance sheet alongside clients (GP commitments, seed capital, associates) — a deliberate alignment tool, not a trading book, and the source of the $95m investment result in the financial line [21].

Returns on capital and what management does with the cash

This is where the model shines. Return on equity was 55% in 2025 (47% in 2024) [4]. Part of that is genuine — an asset-light fee machine needs little capital — and part is amplified by the fact that the firm has bought back over $1.3bn of treasury shares, shrinking the equity base. Capital allocation is shareholder-friendly and consistent:

• Dividend: proposed at $58.03 per share for 2025, +10%, a 95% payout of diluted EPS, and a 16% per-year growth rate sustained since the 2006 IPO [3]. In 2025 the firm paid out about $1,377m in dividends.
• Buybacks: about $421m of treasury shares purchased in 2025 ($96m disposed), held for employee plans and flexibility — shares outstanding edged down to 25.78m [22] [23].

A near-95% payout ratio is the flip side of the asset-light model: with little need to reinvest, almost all profit is returned. The risk is symmetrical — in a weak performance-fee year, EPS (and therefore the dividend headroom) compresses.

Source: net profit per consolidated income statement; dividend per share per the dividend section, FY2025 Annual Report [7] [3].

Valuation: a quality compounder repriced by a redemption scare

Nothing is cheap or dear in isolation. Here is the context that matters. At $813 the stock trades at about 13.6x trailing earnings and 14.1x the FY2026 consensus EPS of $57.49, with a ~7% dividend yield — a steep de-rating from the ~20x multiple it carried at its $1,240–1,300 highs only six months earlier. The trigger was not earnings: in June 2026 Partners Group capped redemptions on its USD 8.6bn Global Value SICAV evergreen fund at 5% of NAV per quarter after withdrawal requests neared 10%, and warned other evergreen vehicles could follow — sparking a private-markets sector sell-off and a ~17% one-day drop in the shares.

Source: price $813 (23 Jun 2026) and shares outstanding 25.78m per the run's market data and the FY2025 outstanding-share note; trailing EPS $61.12 per income statement; FY2026 consensus EPS $57.49 per analyst estimates; dividend $58.03 [7] [23].

How it screens against the listed alternative-asset managers. Partners Group is smaller than the US giants and, on a headline P/E, optically cheaper — but the comparison needs a health warning. PG reports under IFRS and deconsolidates its funds, producing "clean" ~51% net margins and a ~13.6x P/E on GAAP-equivalent earnings; the US managers report on a complex GAAP basis (often consolidating insurance balance sheets) and are valued by the market on fee-related and distributable earnings, not the reported net income used below. Treat the table as a size-and-shape map, not a like-for-like multiple.

Sources: Partners Group revenue growth, ROE and net margin from its FY2025 report [2] [4]; peer market caps, growth, ROE, margin and GAAP P/E derived from competitor financial data, as reported. The auto-selected peer set's "EQT" resolved to EQT Corporation (US oil & gas), a non-comparable, and CVC data was unavailable — both are excluded.

Source: financial outlook (new client assets and performance-income guidance), FY2025 Annual Report [24].

What the financials confirm, contradict, and what to watch

Confirmed: This is a genuinely high-quality business. Five years of ~63% EBITDA margins, 55% ROE, ~119% cash conversion, near-zero net debt, $4.7bn of liquidity, and an 18-year unbroken dividend record are the financial signature of a durable, capital-light franchise with real pricing power [4] [15].

Contradicted / the catch: The same statements show two soft spots. Earnings depend on lumpy performance fees and a near-95% payout leaves little buffer if a realization year disappoints; and the rising drawn credit facilities plus growing short-term fund loans mean the "asset-light" balance sheet is doing more financing work than the label implies [3] [17].

The whole investment case now turns on the asset base, because every fee dollar is a function of AuM.

The first financial metric to watch is net new AuM / net client flows — specifically whether evergreen and private-wealth redemptions keep accelerating. Management's 2026 guidance of USD 26–32bn of new client assets is the number that validates or breaks the fee engine; if net flows hold, the 13.6x multiple and 7% yield look like a quality business on sale, and if they roll over, both management fees and the dividend lose their footing [24].