Business Description

Overview Founded in 1994, Artisan is a global multi-asset investment platform focused on providing high value-added active investment strategies in growing asset classes to sophisticated clients around the world. Since our founding, we have maintained a business model that is designed to maximize our ability to produce attractive investment results for our clients, and we believe this model has contributed to our success in doing so. We focus on attracting, retaining and developing talented investment professionals by creating an environment in which each investment team is provided ample resources and support, transparent and direct financial incentives, a high degree of investment autonomy, and a long-term time horizon. Each of our investment teams is led by one or more experienced portfolio managers and applies its own unique investment philosophy and process. We believe this autonomous investment team structure promotes independent analysis and accountability among our investment professionals, which we believe promotes superior investment results. Each of our investment teams manages one or more investment strategies, each of which is designed to have a clearly articulated and consistent investment process that is well-understood by clients and managed to achieve long-term performance. Over our firm’s history, we have broadened our investment management capabilities in a disciplined manner that we believe is consistent with our overall philosophy of offering high value-added investment strategies. We have expanded our investment platform by launching new strategies managed by our existing investment teams, as well as by establishing or acquiring new investment teams when the ideal opportunity to do so arises. New investment strategies we have developed use a broad array of securities, instruments and techniques (which we call degrees of freedom) to differentiate returns and manage risk. We launch a new strategy when we believe it has the potential to achieve superior investment performance in an area that we believe will have sustained client demand at attractive fee rates over the long term. We strive to maintain the integrity of the investment process followed in each of our strategies by rigorous adherence to the investment parameters we have communicated to our clients. We also carefully monitor our investment capacity in each investment strategy. We believe that management of our investment capacity protects our ability to deliver strong investment returns, which protects the interests of our clients and, in the long term, protects our ability to retain client assets and maintain our profit margins. In order to better achieve our long-term goals, we are willing to close a strategy to new investors or otherwise take action to slow or restrict its growth, even though our short-term results may be impacted. In addition to our investment teams, we have a management team with a fiduciary mindset that is focused on thoughtfully growing the business over the long term while preserving a stable environment for our talented investment professionals and associates. We believe that maintaining the firm’s talent-driven business model and investment-focused culture is critical to generating sustainable, long-term outcomes for clients, which in turn is critical to generating sustainable long-term outcomes for shareholders. To that end, our management team focuses on managing the alignment of, and resources for, the firm’s investment professionals, managing our operational infrastructure to provide a distraction-free investment environment, adhering to our transparent and predictable financial model, and promoting the sustainability of the firm. We offer our investment management capabilities primarily to institutions and through intermediaries that operate with institutional-like decision-making processes by means of separate accounts and pooled vehicles. We access traditional institutional clients primarily through relationships with investment consultants. We access other institutional-like investors primarily through consultants, alliances with major defined contribution/401(k) platforms and relationships with financial advisors and broker-dealers. We derive essentially all of our revenues from investment management fees, which primarily are based on a specified percentage of clients’ average AUM.…