$Brookfield资管(BAM)$ 从历年#博枫股东信#中，随手摘选一些时效性不强的文字。
【INVESTMENT APPROACH 投资方法】
Our general approach has been to acquire control positions in assets which we manage on our behalf and that of others. We often do this by acquiring 100% interests in assets directly from vendors. Other times we purchase these assets through the stock market by privatizing publicly-traded entities. Sometimes we are unsuccessful in acquiring the entities which we pursue and, when this occurs, we generally sell our accumulated stock positions for one-time gains or, unfortunately, occasional losses. In other situations these toehold positions, which are virtually always in entities in which we would otherwise be comfortable owning 100% of the assets, have led us into other more interesting transactions.
我们的一般做法是获得我们代表自己和他人管理的资产的控股权。我们通常通过直接从卖家那里获得资产的100%权益来实现这一点。
其他时候，我们通过股票市场将公开交易的实体私有化来购买这些资产。有时，我们未能成功收购我们所追求的实体，当这种情况发生时，我们通常会出售积累的股票头寸，获得一次性收益，或不幸的是，偶尔亏损。在其他情况下，这些立足点的位置，实际上总是在我们本来愿意舒服地拥有100%资产的实体中，引导我们进行其他更有趣的交易。
There are also times when we invest through the stock market in non-control positions, or positions where we are not eligible for accounting reasons to consolidate the results. We believe that such an investment strategy can be an effective way to deploy capital when entering new markets or product areas, provided they are in our areas of expertise and have high-quality, proven management teams. This enables us to reduce the risk level while we learn about a new market and seek alternative ways to build control positions in attractive assets in these markets. Two examples of this have been our investments in Canary Wharf in London, and our hotel services investment with Accor, S.A., in Brazil, which we recently sold. Both of these investments delivered the financial and secondary benefits which we sought from these non-control investments a number of years ago, and both in many ways have also been highly beneficial to our overall franchise.
也有一些时候，我们通过股票市场进行非控制头寸的投资，或者由于会计原因而无法并表的头寸。我们相信，在进入新的市场或产品领域时，如果这些市场或产品属于我们的专业领域，并且拥有高质量、久经考验的管理团队，这样的投资策略可以是一种有效的资本配置方式。这使我们能够降低风险水平，同时我们了解一个新的市场，并寻求其他方法，以建立对这些市场中有吸引力的资产的控制头寸。
这方面的两个例子是我们对伦敦金丝雀码头(Canary Wharf)的投资，以及我们与巴西雅高集团(Accor, s.a.)的酒店服务投资，我们最近出售了这笔投资。这两项投资都带来了财务和次级收益，这是我们多年前从这些非控制权投资中寻求的，而且这两项投资在很多方面也对我们的整体特许经营非常有益。
While we believe these non-consolidated investments can often be economically compelling, the challenge for us in investing in these positions is that many people look principally at price-earnings multiples when evaluating companies. This creates a financial reporting issue for us because these investments are non-control by definition, and hence can neither be consolidated, nor possibly, even equity accounted for in our results. Consequently, a large part of the annual returns from these types of investments is excluded from reported cash flows and profits of the company. In the future, we may have to redefine our cash flow from operations for you, and include the “look-through” cash flows to properly enable you to assess the underlying cash flows generated by these categories of assets. A similar reporting style has been successfully adopted by one of the all-time great investment companies, Berkshire Hathaway Inc., and should these investment positions become more meaningful on our balance sheet in the future, we will consider adding this type of information to our disclosure.
尽管我们相信这些非合并投资通常具有经济吸引力，但我们在投资这些头寸时面临的挑战是，许多人在评估公司时主要看市盈率。这给我们带来了一个财务报告问题，因为这些投资从定义上来说是不可控的，因此既不能并表，也不可能在我们的结果中计入股权。因此，这类投资的大部分年度收益都被排除在公司报告的现金流和利润之外。
未来，我们可能需要为您重新定义我们的经营活动现金流，并包括“透视”现金流，以使您能够正确地评估由这些类别资产产生的基础现金流。$伯克希尔-哈撒韦B(BRK.B)$ 是历史上最伟大的投资公司之一，它已经成功地采用了类似的报告风格。如果未来这些投资头寸在我们的资产负债表上变得更有意义，我们将考虑在披露中增加这类信息。
【OPERATING PLATFORM 运营平台】
We attempt to differentiate ourselves as an asset manager in two ways. The first is quite simple. You, our shareholders, have endowed our company with substantial capital, allowing us to invest alongside our clients’ capital. Due to this alignment of interests, we seldom have disagreements with our partners on investment strategy, and this gives us a clear competitive advantage. The second differentiation has to do with the benefits derived from our operating platforms. We believe that the availability of full-scale operating groups within each of our chosen areas of operation has and will continue to produce superior returns on the capital invested compared with the alternative approaches to asset management.
作为一家资产管理公司，我们试图通过两种方式使自己与众不同。
第一个很简单。你们，我们的股东，赋予了我们公司大量的资本，允许我们与客户的资本一起投资。由于利益一致，我们很少与合作伙伴在投资策略上产生分歧，这使我们具有明显的竞争优势。
第二个区别在于我们的运营平台带来的好处。我们认为，在我们所选择的每一个业务领域中都有全面的业务集团，与资产管理的其他办法相比，已经并将继续产生更高的资本投资回报。
Currently, this approach reduces our corporate returns, as we have not yet grown the asset management income stream to offset the fixed costs we have invested in our respective platforms. However, over the longer term, we think that this strategic differentiation offers us competitive advantages which will not only enable us to earn back the short-term costs we have been bearing, but also will allow our clients to earn higher returns by benefitting from this operating expertise. On that basis, our asset management franchise should be more valuable and ultimately trade at higher multiples. There is no question that this method of running our business somewhat complicates operations, but we believe that the long-term potential payoff far outweighs the costs.
目前，这种方式降低了我们的企业回报，因为我们还没有扩大资产管理收入流，以抵消我们在各自平台上投资的固定成本。然而，从长远来看，我们认为这种战略差异化为我们提供了竞争优势，不仅使我们能够赚回我们承担的短期成本，而且使我们的客户从这种经营专长中获得更高的回报。在此基础上，我们的资产管理业务应该更有价值，并最终以更高的市盈率交易。毫无疑问，这种经营方式使我们的业务有些复杂，但我们相信，长期潜在的回报远远超过成本。
【INDUSTRY DYNAMICS 产业动态】
As stated in our third quarter report, our primary focus for growing our operations continues to be on infrastructure asset management, as opposed to general private equity, or other forms of alternative investments. This is in part because we have specialized in acquiring and operating these types of assets for decades. More importantly, it is our belief that infrastructure assets will be an important and growing investment class for many years based on the following four factors:
正如我们在第三季度报告中所述，我们增长业务的主要重点仍然是基础设施资产管理，而不是一般的私募股权或其他形式的替代投资。这在一定程度上是因为我们几十年来一直专门从事收购和运营这类资产。更重要的是，基于以下四个因素，我们相信基础设施资产将在未来多年成为一个重要且不断增长的投资类别:
• Increased Demand – With the generally low interest rate environment, institutional and retail investors continue to seek investments which generate predictable current cash flows and increasing returns over time. In particular, institutions are seeking stable assets which, as a replacement to traditional fixed income securities, will generate an enhanced and, in many cases, increasing yield to match their long-duration liabilities. In this environment, we believe the demand for infrastructure as a general asset class will continue to grow and that our track record of focusing on long-term growth in cash flow and increasing value over time will make us an attractive asset manager for these institutions.
•需求增加——在普遍的低利率环境下，机构和散户投资者继续寻求能够产生可预测的当前现金流和随着时间推移不断增加的回报的投资。特别是，机构正在寻找稳定的资产，作为传统固定收益证券的替代品，这些资产将产生更高的收益率，在许多情况下，还将提高收益率，以匹配其长期负债。
在这种环境下，我们相信基础设施作为一种一般资产类别的需求将继续增长，而我们专注于现金流长期增长和价值随时间增长的过往经历，将使我们成为对这些机构有吸引力的资产管理公司。
• Increased Supply – Both governments and corporations will continue to transfer the ownership of infrastructure to private investors. First, governments across the world are under intense pressure to keep up with new infrastructure investment. In our view, the privatization of infrastructure has only begun, and we believe that we are in a long-term trend which will see the transfer of the funding of new infrastructure and the ownership of current assets into private hands. Secondly, shareholders of corporations continue to encourage management to lower their cost of capital. We believe this will continue to lead corporations to separate their operating businesses from infrastructure assets. This started years ago with the separation of property assets from financial and retail companies, and has continued to occur with power plants being separated from industrial companies, timber assets from forest product manufacturers, and port terminals from shipping companies. The list will only grow longer as operating businesses and governments reduce the amount of capital tied up in infrastructure assets in an attempt to drive efficient capital allocation models for their operations.
•增加供应——政府和企业都将继续将基础设施的所有权转让给私人投资者。
首先，世界各国政府都面临着巨大的压力，需要跟上新的基础设施投资。我们认为，基础设施的私有化才刚刚开始，我们认为我们处于一种长期趋势中，这将看到新的基础设施的资金和流动资产的所有权转移到私人手中。
其次，公司股东继续鼓励管理层降低资金成本。我们认为，这将继续导致企业将运营业务与基础设施资产分离。这种情况始于多年前的房地产资产与金融和零售公司的分离，并继续发生在发电厂与工业公司的分离、木材资产与林产品制造商的分离、港口码头与航运公司的分离。随着运营企业和政府减少与基础设施资产相关的资本，试图推动高效的运营资本配置模式，这个清单只会越来越长。
• Lower Overall Financing Cost – As a result of the quality of the income streams which are generated from infrastructure, the debt capital markets have matured in order to be able to very efficiently finance those assets. This evolutionary process started with pass-through mortgage certificates on credit-worthy tenants in real estate, moved into the creation of an efficient commercial mortgage-backed securities market for property, and is now being applied increasingly to hydroelectric power, timber, toll roads, pipelines and other infrastructure assets. While overall returns to the equity holder have generally stayed in the same range, more cost-efficient financings have increased values of infrastructure assets substantially. We believe the financial markets will continue to mature in this regard, both by asset class, and by geographic region, and as a result, asset values of many types of infrastructure will be positively affected.
•较低的整体融资成本——由于基础设施产生的收入流的质量，债务资本市场已经成熟，以便能够非常有效地为这些资产融资。这一演变过程始于信用良好的房地产租户的直通抵押贷款证书，后来演变为为房地产创建一个高效的商业抵押贷款支持证券市场，现在正越来越多地应用于水力发电、木材、收费公路、管道和其他基础设施资产。
虽然股权持有人的总体回报通常保持在相同的范围内，但更具成本效益的融资大幅提高了基础设施资产的价值。我们认为，无论是从资产类别还是从地理区域来看，金融市场在这方面都将继续成熟，因此，许多类型的基础设施的资产价值将受到积极影响。
• Good Margins on a Scalable Business – The property and infrastructure businesses, loosely defined, are by far the largest businesses in the world. In our view, the duration of the funds we are creating, the stability of the associated fee revenues and the potential for growth in the size of the business should permit us to produce attractive risk-weighted margins from this business that will, in turn, create excellent returns for our shareholders.
•可扩展业务的良好利润率——房地产和基础设施业务，宽泛的定义，是迄今为止世界上最大的业务。在我们看来，我们正在创建的基金的存续期、相关费用收入的稳定性以及业务规模的增长潜力，应该允许我们从这项业务中产生有吸引力的风险加权利润率，进而为我们的股东创造优秀的回报。
We believe these four broad trends are working in our favour and should allow us to continue to grow our business profitably. In addition, as was the case for the general private equity industry, we expect a few high-performing organizations will eventually become dominant in this segment of the asset management industry. Although we have in some ways a head start, and we think that our substantial capital resources and scalable operating platforms position us to be one of these thriving entities, we also recognize that much work is still required to ensure long-term success.
我们相信这四个大趋势对我们有利，应该能使我们的业务继续盈利增长。
此外，正如一般私募股权行业的情况一样，我们预计少数高绩效的组织最终将在资产管理行业的这一领域占据主导地位。虽然我们在某些方面已经领先一步，我们认为我们的大量资本资源和可扩展的运营平台使我们能够成为这些蓬勃发展的实体之一，但我们也认识到，要确保长期的成功，还有很多工作要做。
【MARKET ENVIRONMENT 市场环境】
We recently observed comments from a highly renowned investor about the prognosis for the stock markets ahead. The paraphrased comments were “to forget the stock markets, and just keep doing what you’re doing.” While we agree wholeheartedly with these comments with respect to running our business, we find it difficult not to acknowledge that we have been, and continue to be, in “very good times”. Capital is abundant, interest rates are at the low end of recent historical averages, the economic environment in the developed world is solid, and many emerging market economies have growth rates which are advancing worldwide GDP at a rapid pace. This is in large part why there are few asset classes or areas of the world where assets can be purchased based on metrics which would historically be seen as value purchases.
我们最近看到一位非常著名的投资者对未来股市预测的评论。转述的评论是“忘掉股票市场，继续做你正在做的事。”
虽然我们完全同意这些关于经营我们的业务的评论，但我们发现很难不承认，我们已经并将继续处于“非常好的时期”。资本充足，利率处于近期历史平均水平的低端，发达国家的经济环境稳固，许多新兴市场经济体的增长率正在迅速推动全球GDP的增长。这在很大程度上就是为什么世界上很少有资产类别或地区可以根据历史上被视为价值购买的指标来购买资产。
Despite the many favourable factors previously mentioned and acknowledging that we see no immediate, meaningful negative issues on the horizon, odds are that, after the current protracted period of stock market growth, greater volatility will prevail. In our view, this should not affect our business model for the longer term and may even create opportunities in the shorter term.
尽管前面提到了许多有利因素，我们也承认短期内不会出现有意义的负面问题，但在股市经历了当前的长期增长之后，更大的波动可能会占上风。在我们看来，这应该不会影响我们的长期业务模式，甚至可能在短期内创造机会。
【SUMMARY 总结】
We remain committed to investing capital for you and our partners in high-quality, simple-to-understand assets which earn a solid cash-on-cash return on equity, while always emphasizing downside protection of the capital employed. The primary objective of the company continues to be generating increased cash flows, and as a result, higher intrinsic value on a per share basis over the longer term.
我们仍然致力于为您和我们的合作伙伴投资高质量、简单易懂的资产，获得稳定的现金对现金股本回报率，同时始终强调所使用资本的下行保护。公司的主要目标继续是产生更多的现金流，并因此在较长期的基础上产生更高的每股内在价值。
We will always strive to do better but we would be more than pleased if we could come close to maintaining the compound return for the past 20 years over the next two decades. However, on a cautionary note, it is important to remind ourselves that there may be occasional periods of time, maybe years, when the market value of any company, for various reasons not necessarily under the control of management, may not equate to the intrinsic value of the business.
我们将一直努力做得更好，但如果我们能在未来20年里接近保持过去20年的复合回报率，我们将会非常高兴。然而，值得注意的是，我们必须提醒自己，可能会有一段时间，可能是几年，任何公司的市场价值，由于各种各样的原因，不一定在管理层的控制之下，可能不等于企业的内在价值。