PSHZF - Pershing Square Holdings Ltd. (PSHZF) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript
2024-05-29 16:15:31 ET
Pershing Square Holdings Ltd. (PSHZF)
Q1 2024 Results Conference Call
May 29, 2024 11:00 AM ET
Company Participants
Bill Ackman - CEO
Ryan Israel - Chief Investment Officer
Anthony Massaro - Investment Analyst
Bharath Alamanda - Investment Analyst
Charles Korn - Investment Analyst
Feroz Qayyum - Investment Analyst
Ben Hakim - Partner
Manning Feng - Investment Analyst
Presentation
Operator
Welcome to the First Quarter 2024 Investor Call for Pershing Square Capital Management. At this time, all callers are in listen only mode. Today's call is being recorded.
It is now my pleasure to turn the call over to your host, Mr. William Ackman, CEO & Portfolio Manager.
Bill Ackman
Thank you, operator. So welcome to our Q1 investor call. As usual, we distribute a legal disclaimer, which hopefully someone reads, and we're going to do our best to answer questions that we've received in advance sort of in the context of the conference call. To the extent we don't get them during the call or at least the beginning part of the call, we have extra time, we'll address any unanswered questions separately. If we don't get to them then, please contact the IR team to follow-up.
I think relatively strong start to the year, Q1 plus really up through the present. Most significant events since our annual letter, which really covered a lot of the previous year and even the early part of the year history. As we have actually added as you know, we sold our position in Lowe's, which freed up a fair amount of capital. We've reinvested those proceeds in now two new investments that we are not yet prepared to discuss, but I think it sort of speaks to what has been a somewhat idea rich environment for us in the context of markets, which on a headline basis have performed very well, really driven by a handful of very sort of mega cap tech companies principally and sort of beneath the surface, there's been sufficient volatility that I think has enabled businesses that we've tracked for some period of time to get to price levels that we find interesting. And to that end, we've two recently full-sized new investments in portfolio that we look forward to discussing perhaps by sometime next quarter.
With that, why don't we just cover the events on a company-by-company basis. With that, maybe Ryan, you can walk us through developments at Universal.
Ryan Israel
Thanks, Bill. Universal reported results earlier this month and they continue their streak of reporting very good overall results. For perspective, their organic revenues grew about 8% this quarter and the highlight was really the subscription and streaming business up again about 12% consistent last quarter, which was a very good result. I think one of the more interesting data points though was they were able expand margins very strongly. Part of that was due to the streaming business being the highest margin part of the business that performed better than everything else.
At the same time though, they're exhibiting very good cost control, which has been part of our thesis and that allowed their EBITDA to grow at about 16% versus the prior year, which is just a very strong result. I think one of the things that's interesting if you step back a little bit and look under the hood though is the results were actually in a business momentum, it's actually a little stronger than that....
Pershing Square Holdings Ltd. (PSHZF) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript