Earnings call transcript: Brookfield Business Q2 2025 misses EPS, stock rises

Brookfield Business Partners (BBU) reported its Q2 2025 earnings, revealing a significant revenue beat but a notable miss on earnings per share (EPS). The company posted an EPS of $0.12, falling short of the $0.24 forecast—an EPS miss of 50%. Despite the earnings miss, revenue came in at $6.7 billion, far exceeding the expected $2.8 billion, resulting in a revenue surprise of 139.29%. According to InvestingPro data, BBU maintains a "GOOD" overall financial health score of 2.87, with particularly strong momentum and relative value metrics. In pre-market trading, BBU’s stock rose by 9.25%, reflecting investor optimism driven by strong revenue performance and strategic initiatives.

Key Takeaways

• Revenue surpassed expectations by 139.29%, reaching $6.7 billion.
• EPS missed the forecast by 50%, posting $0.12 compared to the expected $0.24.
• Stock price increased by 9.25% in pre-market trading, closing at $29.75.
• AI-driven improvements and strategic buybacks highlighted in the earnings call.
• Focus on operational efficiency and debt management continues.

Company Performance

Brookfield Business Partners demonstrated a mixed performance in Q2 2025. While the company missed EPS expectations, its revenue significantly exceeded forecasts. This performance reflects the company’s strategic focus on high-quality, market-leading businesses and operational efficiency. The implementation of AI-driven initiatives across its portfolio has been a key driver of productivity and cost savings.

Financial Highlights

• Revenue: $6.7 billion, up significantly from the forecasted $2.8 billion.
• EPS: $0.12, compared to a forecast of $0.24.
• Adjusted EBITDA: $591 million, up from $524 million in the previous period.
• Corporate liquidity: Approximately $2.9 billion.
• Share buybacks: Nearly $160 million returned to shareholders.

Earnings vs. Forecast

Brookfield Business Partners reported an EPS of $0.12, which was 50% below the forecast of $0.24. However, the company achieved a substantial revenue beat, with actual revenue of $6.7 billion compared to the expected $2.8 billion, marking a 139.29% surprise. This revenue performance is a significant deviation from previous quarters, indicating strong operational execution and strategic initiatives.

Market Reaction

Despite the EPS miss, BBU’s stock price rose by 9.25% in pre-market trading, reaching $29.75. This positive market reaction can be attributed to the company’s strong revenue performance and strategic initiatives, such as AI implementation and share buybacks. The stock’s current price is above its 52-week high of $28.1, indicating strong investor confidence.

Outlook & Guidance

Looking ahead, Brookfield Business Partners remains committed to its $250 million share buyback program and ongoing AI implementation across its portfolio. The company anticipates these initiatives will continue to drive productivity and cost savings. Forward guidance projects an EPS of $0.6 for Q4 2025, with expectations for significant growth in the coming years.

Executive Commentary

CEO Anuj Ranjan stated, "We had a great quarter. Our business continues to compound value and six months into the year, our overall per unit value is higher." Adrian Letts, Global Head of Business Operations, emphasized the company’s strategy, "We deliberately buy high-quality market-leading businesses that have strong competitive advantages and provide mission-critical products and services."

Risks and Challenges

• Potential trade tensions and geopolitical uncertainties could impact global markets.
• The company’s ability to maintain operational efficiency amid economic fluctuations.
• Execution risks associated with AI-driven initiatives and strategic investments.
• Market volatility affecting investor sentiment and stock performance.

Q&A

During the earnings call, analysts focused on the company’s AI implementation strategy, secondary transactions with Brookfield, and the capital allocation strategy. Executives addressed tax benefits from recent legislation and clarified their approach to debt reduction and growth investments.

Full transcript - Brookfield Business Partners LP Unit (BBU) Q2 2025:

Conference Operator: Welcome to the Brookfield Business Partners Second Quarter twenty twenty five Results Conference Call and Webcast. As a reminder, all participants are in listen only mode and the conference is being recorded. After the presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. Now I’d like to turn the conference over to Alan Fleming, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, Mr.

Fleming.

Alan Fleming, Head of Investor Relations, Brookfield Business Partners: Thank you, operator, and good morning. Before we begin, I’d like to remind you that in responding to questions and talking about our growth initiatives and our financial and operating performance, we may make forward looking statements. These statements are subject to known and unknown risks, and future results may differ materially. For further information on known risk factors, I encourage you to review our filings with the securities regulators in Canada and The U. S, which are both available on our website.

We’ll begin the call today with Anuj Ranjan, our Chief Executive Officer, who will provide an update on our strategic initiatives. Anuj will then turn the call over to Adrian Letts, Head of our Business Operations team, to share an update on the global operating environment. Jaspreet Dell, our Chief Financial Officer, will then discuss our financial results for the quarter. After we finish our prepared remarks, the team will be on and available to take your questions. With that, I’d like to now pass the call over to Anuj.

Anuj Ranjan, Chief Executive Officer, Brookfield Business Partners: Thanks, Alan. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us on the call today. We had a great quarter. Our business continues to compound value and six months into the year, our overall per unit value is higher.

Over the past few months, we realized more than $800,000,000 from asset sales and distributions and invested $300,000,000 to acquire two market leading businesses. We continue to buy back under our repurchase program, which has returned nearly $160,000,000 to our owners at the start of the year. We also generated strong financial results with adjusted EBITDA increasing to $591,000,000 supported by resilient margins and improved performance of our existing operations. As our business continues to scale, finding new ways to surface value will provide us flexibility to execute our playbook and the growth of the secondaries market has become one of the options at our disposal. In simple terms, secondaries are the sale or transfer of a private investment from one investor to another, often at a 10% or more discount to net asset value as a way for an existing investor to get liquidity.

If you think about BBU, it is really just a large private equity secondary which is publicly listed and should trade at a much narrower discount than it does. This should prove itself out as we continue to surface value in accretive ways, including the secondary sale of interest in our businesses at values that are accretive to our trading price. To that point, last month we sold a portion of our interest in three of our businesses to see the new Evergreen Fund managed by Brookfield. In exchange, we took back units of the new fund that have an initial redemption value of $690,000,000 which represents an aggregate 8.6 discount to the NAV of the interest that we sold. At these values, the transaction is highly accretive to the market value of BBU.

As the units are redeemed, the cash will provide us added flexibility to accelerate buybacks, reinvest in growth and reduce debt, all of which will increase the per unit and share value of our business. We have also been putting capital to work. Earlier this week, we agreed to privatize First National Financial Corporation, a leading Canadian residential and multifamily mortgage lender. First National is an essential service provider to the Canadian housing market, serving a critical role across the mortgage lifecycle from underwriting and origination to funding, distribution, servicing and loan renewal. Its highly resilient earnings and strong cash flows are supported by the fees and income it earns on a large and growing base of mortgages that it services.

Alongside our partners, we see opportunities to upgrade its systems, streamline operations, and strengthen its service model in a private setting which should enhance its already strong track record of returns and cash flows. BBU’s share of the equity investment is expected to be about $145,000,000 Stepping back, we have made great progress since the start of the year, and the reasons to own BBU have arguably never been clearer. First, we trade at a material discount to the private market value of our assets. Second, those assets are mission critical providers of products and services, which generate strong cash flow across economic cycles. And lastly, every dollar that is recycled and redeployed is done so by the same Brookfield team, which has generated tremendous returns on capital for decades.

With that, I’ll now pass the call over to Adrian Letts, our Global Head of Business Operations, to provide an update on the operating environment.

Adrian Letts, Global Head of Business Operations, Brookfield Business Partners: Thank you, Anuj, and good morning, everyone. It’s great to be joining you on the call today. With the first half of the year now behind us, I wanted to provide some observations on how the operating environment has evolved over the past few months and how our businesses have been responding. The global economy today is in a much different spot than the outlook most expected at the start of this year. With inflation in check, unemployment levels low and many central banks moving toward an easing cycle, growth expectations across most developed markets were high heading into the year.

However, as we know, tariffs, rising global trade tensions and geopolitical conflicts have introduced much more uncertainty in a relatively short time. While this continues, we do see signs that it is stabilizing. However, we remain cautious. The U. S.

Has been very resilient. GDP expectations for the second half of the year have stabilized. Unemployment remains low and consumer sentiment has inched higher in the past few months. In Europe, although it will take a while for things to play through, stimulus spending is increasing, including Germany greenlighting a 500,000,000,000 infrastructure fund and other countries such as The UK have put forward plans to reduce barriers to competition and accelerate delivery of infrastructure projects. Outside of Europe, it remains very clear that the GCC markets where we operate in The Middle East are very strong and India remains a growth economy.

Growth is very important to our value creation plans and while our businesses have not been immune to slowdowns, over the past few months, our principles are serving us very well. We deliberately buy high quality market leading businesses that have strong competitive advantages and provide mission critical products and services. This means they generally have pricing power, which has enabled us to pass through the direct effects of tariffs in the select cases where we’re seeing some impact in our operations. It also means that notwithstanding some pockets of softness, our volumes and activity levels on balance have held up well in spite of the backdrop. Most importantly, we’re not standing still.

We have continued to make significant progress in our value creation plans across the business. As a result, we’ve been able to maintain and in some cases increase margins in more difficult near term environments while continuing to strengthen the long term positioning of our businesses. For example, at Dexco, volumes contracted, margins have increased approximately 200 basis points since our acquisition due to the phenomenal job the business has done to right size its cost structure, strengthen its market position and optimize productivity. Similarly at Modulea, where utilization levels have been impacted by overall sluggish capital investment in Europe, the team is continuing to drive growth in value added products and services and streamline the organizational structure, which has contributed to resilient margins, which are higher than when we bought the business four years ago. Even at Clarios, where performance continues to exceed expectations, overall battery volumes have seen some impact from a slowdown in global automotive production levels.

Yet margins, which exceeded 20% through the first half of the calendar year, continued to increase, supported by improved service levels, increased operational effectiveness, and a higher mix of technologically advanced batteries. These are just a few examples of the work underway across each of our businesses, including our more recent acquisitions like Network International and Kennelex, where our integration and value creation plans are off to very strong starts. As Anuj said, we’re really pleased with the progress we’ve made over the past six months. We’ve been through cycles like these before and our playbook is tested. All the work we’ve done to optimize the operating platform should amplify performance when a broader base recovery does take hold.

With that, I’ll hand it over to Jaspreet for a review of our financial results and will stay on the line to take any more questions after prepared remarks.

Jaspreet Dell, Chief Financial Officer, Brookfield Business Partners: Thanks, Adrian, and good morning, everyone. Second quarter adjusted EBITDA of $591,000,000 increased compared to $524,000,000 in the prior period. Results reflected improved underlying operating performance, tax benefits and contribution from recent acquisitions. Adjusted EFO of $234,000,000 during the quarter benefited from lower interest expense due to a reduction in corporate borrowings compared to the prior period. Turning to segment performance.

Our Industrial segment generated second quarter adjusted EBITDA of $3.00 $7,000,000 an increase compared to $213,000,000 in 2024. Results included $71,000,000 of tax benefits at our advanced energy storage operation and contributions from recent acquisitions, including our electric heat tracing systems manufacturer, which we acquired in January. Strong performance at our advanced energy storage operations benefited from growing demand and increased volumes of advanced batteries, as well as continued strong commercial and operational execution. Volumes at our engineered components manufacturer improved across many international and North American end markets, which contributed to increased contributions during the quarter. Moving to Business Services segment, which generated second quarter adjusted EBITDA of $2.00 5,000,000 an increase compared to $182,000,000 last year, which included the impact of $38,000,000 related to one time costs at our dealer software and technology services operation.

Our residential mortgage insurer is benefiting from increased volumes of new insurance premiums written and low losses on claims. Results during the quarter reflect the timing impact of slower revenue recognition under IFRS 17 accounting standards due to revised model assumptions given the current macroeconomic uncertainty and consensus view of the Canadian housing market. At our Duart software and technology services operation, stable performance included costs associated with the ongoing investments in product modernization and technology upgrades. This is expected to continue over the next twelve to eighteen months. Finally, our Infrastructure Services segment generated second quarter adjusted EBITDA of CAD109 million compared to CAD157 million during the same quarter last year.

This reflects the sale of our offshore oil services shuttle tanker operation early this year. Industry fundamentals at our lottery service operation remain resilient despite the impact of fewer hardware deliveries and lower lottery jackpot sizes compared to prior year. Turning to our balance sheet and capital allocation priorities. Our strong balance sheet provides us options to support our capital allocation. We ended the quarter with approximately $2,900,000,000 of corporate liquidity, pro form a for announced acquisitions and realizations, including the expected redemption value of the fund units we received in exchange for the sale of a partial interest in three businesses last month.

During the quarter, we continued to maintain an increased pace of repurchase activity under our buyback program. As Inuj mentioned, since February, we’ve acquired 6,500,000.0 units and shares, returning nearly $160,000,000 to our owners, including $56,000,000 returned during the quarter. Buying our own units and shares well below their fair value is an easy and efficient way for us to generate returns for our investors, then increase the per unit value of our business. We plan to renew our normal cost issuer bid later this month, which will provide us capacity to repurchase an additional 8,000,000 units and shares over the subsequent twelve months. With that, I’ll close my remarks and we’ll open up the call for questions.

Conference Operator: Our first question comes from Devin Dodge with BMO Capital Markets.

Devin Dodge, Analyst, BMO Capital Markets: Thank you. Good morning, Ray. So I wanted to start with scientific gains. So when we look at the earnings from this investment, call it over the last twelve months or so, the trajectory has been flat to down. Look, the business is having some nice commercial wins, I’m sure there’s lot of work being done in the background to improve the operating performance.

But it just seems like this progress often gets offset by other factors. We’ve seen like hardware deliveries, lower jackpots, inflation was a challenge at one point. It just made it harder to assess the earnings power of the business. So the question for you is just how is Scientific Games performing relative to your underwriting assumptions? And when do you expect all the work that’s being done to show up in earnings?

Adrian Letts, Global Head of Business Operations, Brookfield Business Partners: Thanks, Devin. It’s Adrian. So look, I think the first thing to say, if you look at the results this quarter, you’re absolutely right. Hardware deliveries were lower this year, and we saw some impact from a performance penalty at one of our JVs. But if you adjust for those impacts, EBITDA performance was flat.

Stepping back, the industry remains very resilient, which was central to our original investment thesis. And at the same time, overall industry growth has been a bit slower than we expected. We’re continuing to scale up and put our shoulder behind digital capabilities, and we continue to see a high growth segment of the market. We’ve talked about the work that we’ve done in realigning the business with digital, having its own reporting line under new leadership. We hired a new business leader in that part of the organization.

It brings a strong depth of experience. But as you know, it takes time for the legislation to be put in place in The US, which will allow lottery operators to introduce Digital Lottery. But we’ve been winning our fair share, including a significant Digital Lottery as part of the contract we were recently awarded for The UK. And today, we’re the largest digital lottery service provider globally. And while we’ve been winning these new opportunities, some of the contracts awards have been slower to ramp up, and we’re working and continuing to strengthen our capability to accelerate these.

And as the contracts ramp up over the next twelve months, we fully expect to flow through to earnings and cash flow. So look, it’s in line with our investment thesis. It’s a little bit behind in terms of where we’d like, but we’re still incredibly positive on the business and see a big opportunity.

Devin Dodge, Analyst, BMO Capital Markets: Okay. That’s really good color. I appreciate that. Second question, brand Safeway. I think the letter to unitholders mentioned the repositioning of the business towards higher growth markets.

Just wondering if you could provide bit more color behind that initiative and how easily you can pivot the business toward those markets.

Adrian Letts, Global Head of Business Operations, Brookfield Business Partners: Devin, I’ll take that one again. Look, lower expected volumes than across all segments, particularly in the rental business, which is higher margin. And North American industrials are recovering, but the commercial markets remain soft. We do see pockets of opportunity. We’ve begun to reposition the business to strengthen the regional focus, and we’re starting to see some upturn, although it’s early.

Management is really focused on executing the transformation plan. Pricing continues to be a bit challenging in the market given some demand challenges. And volume softness, we expect to continue through the second half of the year. But as we start to reposition into some of the growth markets we see, we do see some cautious optimism towards into next year.

Devin Dodge, Analyst, BMO Capital Markets: Okay, great. Thanks for that. I’ll turn it over.

Conference Operator: Our next question comes from Gary Ho with Desjardins.

Gary Ho, Analyst, Desjardins: Thanks. Good morning. Thanks for taking my questions. A few high level ones here for me. Maybe start with Anuj, I listened in on one of your recent interviews and you mentioned leveraging AI to improve productivity in your businesses, improving margins of those businesses.

I think some of the examples you gave were automation, customer service, robotics. I’m wondering if I can pick your brain on kind of several of these larger projects you have ongoing in your portfolio, maybe highlighting ones that have more meaningful financial impact or provide a bit more kind of competitive moat or strengthen your market positions in those assets?

Anuj Ranjan, Chief Executive Officer, Brookfield Business Partners: Sure. Hi Gary. So yes, we definitely see AI as great tool. Stepping back, we’ve always bought leading industrial businesses and improved their margins with operations and AI is another tool in that tool kit to do it in a much more dramatic way and much faster. In terms of use cases, to be honest, there is probably 700 use cases right now that we are running across the portfolio.

So it’s pretty vast and pretty large. I can talk about a couple that are more higher impact and a few of our bigger operations. In Clarios, we have been implementing a way to optimize order intake, so have an executable shipment plan to all our servicing plans while optimizing service performance. In this, we automated the analysis of a lot of business processes and we’ve had millions of dollars of save from customer service penalties. We’ve added 10% improvement in the quantity that we can fulfill, 14% improvement in overall service performance.

So that’s been pretty meaningful. We’re also working on a larger scale automation in terms of robotics that we could fit into some of our manufacturing facilities as well. In EverRise, where we’ve been quite a leader, we’ve enabled automated AI driven agent recruiting, screening, hiring and training for our operations at scale. Just keep a reminder that this business employs over I think 14,000 people. So there’s quite a bit of HR work that you can automate.

We reduced training time there by about 20%. We reduced the cost of hiring an FTE by about 40% and we’ve increased the speed to offer or hire across five different countries by about five times. So that’s another example. We’ve done similar things with CDK where we launched AIVA, which is artificial intelligence virtual assistant and our core software offerings, which helps dealers do a more quick conversational responses to consumers in real time, answers every call, schedules appointments, uses intuitive conversations, speaks 50 languages and has a GPT like experience for customers. We’ve got four times increase in touch points per lead.

We have a 47% increase in sales calls per lead and overall improve the dealer experience. And I think the last one I touch on is Nielsen, where we’ve been able to reduce the manual effort required in video segmentation of our ad intelligence operations. And we’ve been able to reduce cost and labor. We’ve shifted away from manual video coding, which was done by 1,000 people. We’ve accelerated some market launches and we’ve also enhanced the data quality.

This is about $10,000,000 in annual run rate cost savings that we’re projecting and it achieves about an 80% accuracy across the segments. It’s more faster, it’s more scalable Client delivery down days versus two plus months to do the same thing before. So these are just a few key case studies, but I just say that there’s hundreds and hundreds of more of these across the portfolio.

Gary Ho, Analyst, Desjardins: That’s great. Thanks for providing the color there. The second one I have now that the one big beautiful bill signed, if your team kind of done some work on the potential read through the positives and negatives, obviously you have the 45X. If you can elaborate on the status and what you hope to receive at Clarios? And the second, how does the accelerated depreciation kind of impact some of your businesses in The US?

Jaspreet Dell, Chief Financial Officer, Brookfield Business Partners: Hey, Gary, it’s Jaspreet. I’ll take that. So the team’s kind of working through all of the provisions in the big beautiful bill. It’s, I’m sure you know, it’s a thousand pages, so we’re still going through it. I’d say overall, our assessment is that it’s going to be a net positive.

There’s a number of tax changes or extensions that are being provided. You mentioned the bonus depreciation. So specifically for our industrial businesses in The US and we’ve got a number of them, Clarios being the largest by Dexco, now Camelax, that should help all of those businesses with the accelerated depreciation. There’s, they’re restoring the deduction on R and D, and that’ll be helpful to CDK. And then I’d say across kind of most of the businesses, the enhancement to the deductibility of interest, I think will also because a number of our businesses were capped on the interest deductibility, and that capping increased is going to be helpful.

So I’d say overall, while we’re still kind of working through all of the details and the exact impact, we expect it’s going to be net positive for our business. The second part of your question on 45X. So we’re still waiting on check for last year’s filing. And again, we’re not expecting with the changes that were made, with the bill that was passed, it’s all positive, and it kind of keeps intact all of the benefits. So we’re not expecting that there’s going to be any change in our filing or our entitlement to the tax benefit.

And it’s more of a matter of time to get it processed. And I think a lot of the tax processing this year has been slower than normal. So we fully expect that we will get paid, it’s just a matter of time.

Gary Ho, Analyst, Desjardins: Okay, great. Thanks for that, Jaspreet. And then while I have you, just sounds like on the capital allocation, you remain committed to renewing your buyback later this month. We have seen your BBUC shares versus unit spread blown out. Just remind me, you look at both structures economically the same and any thoughts on narrowing that discount?

I believe your IDR is tied to the units price and not the corporate shares.

Jaspreet Dell, Chief Financial Officer, Brookfield Business Partners: Yes, that’s right. The IDR is tied to the unit price. And I think it’s really, Gary, a matter of just the market activity. From a buyback perspective, we’ve been buying back whatever is available in the market on both the units and the shares. As you’re aware, there’s limitations just on what we could buy on a daily or weekly basis with our trading volumes.

So we’ve been buying back equally on both BBU LP units as well as BBUC shares. So I don’t think the buyback is necessarily kind of driving any of that discrepancy between the price of the units versus shares. But the whole rationale for setting up BBUC was to attract kind of a broader base of investors. So we have had some net new investors buying into both the units and the shares and maybe that explains some of it, the broadening of that premium. But look, I think the shares and the units have both been trending in good direction.

So, we’re glad to see that. But also at these levels, we’ll continue our buyback program because it still is very accretive relative to intrinsic value.

Gary Ho, Analyst, Desjardins: Okay, that all makes sense. Those are my questions. Thank you.

Conference Operator: Our next question comes from Bart Jarski with RBC Capital Markets.

Bart Jarski, Analyst, RBC Capital Markets: Hi, good morning. Thanks for taking my question. Just wanted to talk about the secondary transaction. Could you give us some color as to how you decided to on the three assets that were vended in versus say other portfolio investments, like how did those three come about?

Jaspreet Dell, Chief Financial Officer, Brookfield Business Partners: Hi Bart, it’s Jaspreet. Maybe I could get started and then I can let Inuj add to it. So we went through a process and we identified investments where we had kind of an outsized share through co investment or others, and just the equity that we had invested in certain businesses where we would look and be open to kind of selling down. So we put a list together, we looked at valuations and we had discussions with the team that’s running the New Front strategy. And we set up an independent special committee of our board to oversee the process.

The retail, the team that’s looking after the Evergreen Fund strategy, they looked at the assets, they did a review based on kind of the requirements of that fund and came back to us on which assets they would be open to buying from BBU. And we had a valuation discussion and looked at kind of where secondaries trade and ended up kind of with the deal that we did. The independent committee of the board then hired financial advisors to do a third party valuation around the fairness of the transaction. And that’s how we kind of ultimately ended up with that 8.6% discount, which we think from a BBU perspective is very accretive, just given the fact that our units are trading at closer to a 50% discount relative to our view of NAV. So being able to monetize these assets at that 8.5% discount, getting that cash in the door and redeploying it, whether to buy back units, pay down debt or find future growth into new investments where we think we could earn a higher return.

We thought it was very good for BBU. And we’re gonna continue to like, these are still businesses that we like, and we have a lot of conviction around. And we’ve retained significant ownership in all of them. So we’ve only sold down part of our ownership. So we expect that we’ll continue to participate in the upside of these businesses through our retained ownership.

Bart Jarski, Analyst, RBC Capital Markets: Very helpful. Thank you. And if I could just follow-up on the on the mark. So the the 9% discount to NAV, totally agree that it is highly accretive to your unit. When when we look at secondary pricing, like pricing improved last year to about 6%, call it, and I would think BBU with your alpha generated versus other buyout players over the long term would probably warrant a smaller discount.

So can you just help us understand how that 9% was calibrated and triangulated against what you’re seeing in the market?

Jaspreet Dell, Chief Financial Officer, Brookfield Business Partners: Yeah, I’d say there’s a wide range of discounts that secondaries trade at. And it’s based on a lot of different factors, the age of the investments are kind of where they are on the maturity scale, the types of businesses, the control versus not, the vintage of the funds. So there’s a lot of factors that go into the discounts and they say the discounts vary quite a bit. Broadly, if you look over the years, about a 10% discount on average is pretty normal. You might have a year where there was a particular transactions that narrowed the discount a little bit.

And there are years where it’s been significantly wider, but based a lot of the work that we did, we were quite comfortable that around that 10% range is quite a normal discount for secondary trades.

Bart Jarski, Analyst, RBC Capital Markets: Awesome, thanks Jaspreet.

Jaspreet Dell, Chief Financial Officer, Brookfield Business Partners: Thank you.

Conference Operator: Our next question comes from Jamie McLoine with National Bank Financial.

Jamie McLoine, Analyst, National Bank Financial: Thanks. Just wanted to follow-up on that theme on the secondary, and you talked about significant demand in secondaries increasing over the past several years. And just curious as to the decision to place it with BAM. And are you receiving other inbounds? Is it a case of the bid ask is too wide or the discount’s too wide, I should say, from other third party players.

Like maybe walk us through how this increase in secondary demand is starting to or has been flowing through into the BBU businesses that you might look to monetize.

Anuj Ranjan, Chief Executive Officer, Brookfield Business Partners: Thanks for the question. It’s Nooj here. I wouldn’t say that we were actively looking to monetize through secondary transactions, time that we did this, although perhaps that could change in the future. The opportunity arose and it was quite a unique opportunity for BAM or Brookfield with its brand, its capability and its reach in the retail wealth markets to be able to provide something that we thought was quite accretive to our shareholders and that probably a better discount to NAV than what we felt could be achieved in the broader secondary markets just based on our analysis, given some of the criteria that Jasreet mentioned earlier about timing of investments, how close they are to liquidity otherwise and things like that. So it was more opportunistic, but there is definitely a growing secondary market.

It is well established. There are opportunities outside of this as well to explore secondaries if we chose to. We just weren’t actively looking at that at the time that we came across this opportunity.

Gary Ho, Analyst, Desjardins: Okay, understood.

Jamie McLoine, Analyst, National Bank Financial: Shifting into the operations, looking at the other business services line, nice step up in growth there. Can you talk to some of the organic drivers and businesses supporting that that result in the other business services segment?

Jaspreet Dell, Chief Financial Officer, Brookfield Business Partners: Yeah, it’s Shaspreet. Say just a couple of things. The biggest impact is probably coming through from our construction operations. So you might recall last year, we had a couple of projects in Australia that were quite challenged and had some cost overruns. So we booked those cost overruns through EBITDA.

And the business has now completed those projects and they’re behind us. And overall, the book at our construction business is quite good. All the projects are performing well, and you’re seeing kind of normalized EBITDA performance come through. So I’d say just that year over year depressed performance last year versus more normalized performance this year is accounting for that increase. And then I’d say broadly, some of the other businesses are also marginally better.

And some of that is offset by the sale of our road fuels operations business. So that would have been in the results last year and since we sold the business, it’s not in our results this year.

Jamie McLoine, Analyst, National Bank Financial: On the buybacks or I guess maybe a broader capital allocation question here as well too. But I believe you had mentioned targeting $250,000,000 of share buybacks. I think that was in 2025. Maybe just refresh me on that previous guidance. And does it still hold?

And then the second question around this is, how are you viewing the Brookfield preferred share and pay down of corporate borrowings as part of the use of this liquidity today that is, I believe it’s at like all time highs for Brookfield or for BBU?

Jaspreet Dell, Chief Financial Officer, Brookfield Business Partners: Yes. So, I think we’ve always talked about kind of our capital allocation priorities in three buckets, paying down the corporate leverage, just so that we can continue to have flexibility at the BBU level to fund the growth of the business and not have our bridge facilities or our CFs kind of fully drawn. The second is around funding growth of the business when we see good opportunities to make accretive acquisitions. And then finally, at the current kind of trading price, repurchases continue to be very good use of capital for us, just because they’re so accretive to underlying intrinsic value. So, those are still kind of our three priorities.

And I’d say we’ve progressed on all three this year. And we paid down our corporate line by about a billion dollars. We’ve put the first national announcement that’ll be kind of the third acquisition for BBU. And on each of the acquisitions, we’ve committed 150,000,000 to $200,000,000 So decent size to continue to fund growth. And then specifically on your question on repurchases, at these trading levels, it makes a lot of sense to continue to buy back.

You’re exactly right. It was a $250,000,000 repurchase program that we announced earlier this year. We’ve now bought back $160,000,000 on that $250,000,000 And we are at the point where we’re bumping up against kind of our NCIB or Normal Course Issuer bid limits. But that NCIB will renew mid August. And when that renews, we’ll continue the buyback program.

So we’re still committed to that $250,000,000

Jamie McLoine, Analyst, National Bank Financial: Okay, and just a quick comment on the pref share?

Jaspreet Dell, Chief Financial Officer, Brookfield Business Partners: Yes, so the pref shares, we paid half of them down, and we’ve still got the other half outstanding. Brookfield Corporation does have the right to ask for a redemption of those shares from either equity issuances or monetization activity. So that is an ongoing dialogue that we have with Brookfield. But as you know, they’re very supportive and our largest shareholder. So we’ll continue to have those discussions as we continue to kind of generate proceeds.

But I’d say, the priorities for capital allocations are kind of the things that I laid out.

Jamie McLoine, Analyst, National Bank Financial: Last one, just Jastri, can you just refresh, I noticed in the letter there’s a couple of nice refinancing transactions at the operating companies levels. Can you just refresh where we are on, let’s say, debt maturity schedule? How the rates of upcoming maturities compare to current environment? Just to comment on that for the operating companies.

Jaspreet Dell, Chief Financial Officer, Brookfield Business Partners: Sure. So, we don’t have really any large scale debt maturities in the next twelve months. We’ve gotten ahead of all of those maturities. The debt that is maturing over the next twelve months is all kind of more of the operating company debt. So if you think of business like Litrobe in Australia, where we’ve got debt to fund the mortgage loans that they make.

So those are maturing and get refinanced on a regular basis. But if you think about kind of any of the debt in our larger businesses, there’s nothing maturing over the next twelve months. We’ve been very proactive in pushing out any of our debt maturities. Most recently, we did two refinancings. One was at Modular, where our debt was maturing in 2028.

But the technicals just around the debt markets have been very positive. So we decided to extend the maturity on that debt out another three years. And then we also did refinancing at Clarios for debt that was maturing in 2027. And that maturity has now been pushed out five years. We also did something a little bit more opportunistic at Chemellex, where we were able to reprice the spread on our debt.

So the debt was priced at SOFR plus $3.50 and we were able to narrow that spread to SOFR plus 300. So that’ll be nice interest expense savings for the business. So we’re very active, we stay on top of our debt maturities. Average weighted maturity in the portfolio is close to six years, just shy of six years now. And we’ve got quite a bit of our debt hedged as well.

So we feel pretty good about kind of managing the debt within the businesses.

Jamie McLoine, Analyst, National Bank Financial: Great, thank you very much.

Conference Operator: That concludes today’s question and answer session. I’d like to turn the call back to Anuj Ranjan for closing remarks.

Anuj Ranjan, Chief Executive Officer, Brookfield Business Partners: Thank you all for joining and we’ll see you next quarter.

Conference Operator: This concludes today’s conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.

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