Earnings Call Excerpt
W. P. Carey & Co. LLC (WPC)
Wall Street Analyst Forum
November 17, 2008 11:50 am ET
Executives
Gordon DuGan - President and CEO
Presentation
Moderator
Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. In our ongoing attempt to adhere to the published schedule, I would like to introduce the next company in today's program, W. P. Carey & Co. as an investment management company that provides long-term sale-leaseback and build-to suit financing for companies worldwide and manages a global investment portfolio worth more than $10 billion.
Publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange as WPC, W. P. Carey and its CPA series of income-generating, non-traded real estate investment trusts help companies and private equity firms release the capital tied up in real estate assets for recapitalization, acquisitions and leverage buyouts. Now in its 35th year, the W. P. Carey Group’s real estate holdings are broadly diversified and comprised of contractual agreements with approximately 300 tenants, spanning 28 industries and 14 countries. From cycle-tested strategy portfolio diversification, tenant creditworthiness and acquiring mission critical assets has enabled W. P. Carey and its CPA programs to provide investors a steady cash flow through wearing economic climates.
So without further introduction, I would like to introduce Gordon DuGan, who is President and Chief Executive Officer of the company.
Gordon DuGan
Thank you. I will jump right into it. Our intro was a mouthful in terms of what it is we do, but there are few things I wanted to talk about in terms of how we run our business and also a couple of things in terms of how we've always been a defensively positioned company and that typically means that you give up some of the upside in a very good market to helpfully protect your investors somewhat in a down market. And so why don't we just jump in to who we are at W. P. Carey.
Some of you may know and some of you may not, we are not unfortunately a household name, except in our business. In the sale-leaseback business, which is a business of buying corporate real estate and leasing it back to companies, we are considered one of the preeminent firms if not the preeminent firm based upon our longevity, our size and our global scale. And I'll touch on all of those.
But the firm was founded in 1973. We have launched 16 investment programs dating back to 1979 and through 2006, we've had 12 of those funds to full cycle averaging 11.5% through a variety of economic cycles and credit cycles, including some very difficult periods in early 1990s and then the early 2000 period after the tech bubble blew up. Obviously today we are dealing with very difficult times as well, but the point is that these are firms that have seen difficult economic periods before and have performed well, through those economic times and we don't have a perfect crystal ball about the future. But our track record in managing those cap funds through very difficult cycles, we would put up against anybody's track record.
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