Pierre de Chillaz - Navigating European Credit Markets

00:00:07 [Pierre de Chillaz]
the nature of Europe, in my mind, I think for certainly the next 10, 20 years will remain that fragmentation and that nuance, which is going to create the opportunity. It's very easy to paint a very negative view of those sectors, yet it's a lot more nuanced. And so if you're willing to do the work, build conviction, and take that differentiated view we believe ultimately you'll generate great return but that path is complicated because there is very few people who are willing to take that view as well hello everyone welcome back to resonance spotlight the podcast where we explore investment strategies learn the story behind them and meet the expert who create them
00:00:49 [Vincent Weber]
I'm your host, Vincent, and in today's episode, we are focusing on a region that's presenting tremendous opportunities for investors, but also facing unique challenges, the European credit market. To help us navigate the complexity of this diverse financial landscape, I'm joined by a very special guest, Pierre Deschilas, who is the co-founder and CEO of Icos Investment Group, a specialized alternative asset manager focused on opportunistic credit investment across the European market. Before co-founding ICOS in 2022, Pierre was a partner and portfolio manager and a member of the executive committee at Golden Tree Asset Management, which he joined in 2007. So if you ever wondered about investing in European credit or are curious about the intricate dynamics of this market, you're in the right place. Let's get started. Pierre, welcome to the show. Great to have you here.
Thank you, Vincent. I'm very excited. Great. So Pierre, let's start with an overview. Could you tell us about ICOS Investment Group and also could you share a bit about your journey into investment management and what led you ultimately to co-found this investment firm?
00:01:58 [Pierre de Chillaz]
So as you said, I've been working and navigating the European credit markets for the last sort of 20 years. I spent about 15 years at Golden Tree, as you mentioned. I lived there through the great financial crisis. I lived through the European sovereign crisis, the taper tantrum, COVID. So it's been a great, very steep learning curve. It's been a fascinating environment. And I think what's been very interesting is credit's at the center of so many dynamics across asset classes, which I think gives you a great sort of window to the broader investing world. And so to me, What I had always in the back of my mind, and one of the reasons I like investing is really the combination of digging into businesses, understanding economics, understanding modes, understanding strategy, but also this analytical aspect.
And so whilst I've always sort of wanted to be an entrepreneur, this urge that I had to really use those analytical skills, I think really brought me to the world of investments. And after sort of 15 years doing that, so I turned 40 in the midst of COVID. And so as you tend to do at those times, you sort of reflect. And that urge of being an entrepreneur sort of came back pretty strongly. And the reason I thought also it was such an interesting and opportune timing is because of some of the changes in dynamics in the European credit markets. When I joined GoldenTree, I guess the firm was probably around 7 billion. And I think today they must be north of 50.
And so the kind of investing they did in Europe then, it's very hard for them to do now. And so I think a lot of those, and they're not alone living through those problems, which, by the way, are good problems to have. But I think what that means for a lot of those large global allocators is the only force to look at a very subset of the European opportunities. And so that leaves a huge part of the European credit markets very much overlooked. And so we felt there is a very unique opportunity to try and set up a more nimble, more specialized firm, which is really focused on Europe. And the other important point for me, which is really crucial in this decision, was really having the right partners.
and had the chance and the luck to spend the last decade at GoldenTree working with one of my co-founder, Ashkan, who is really a restructuring lawyer by background, which comes handy given sort of where we are in a credit cycle. And so I think having worked together and known each other for such a long period of time gave me a lot of confidence. And our third co-founder, Erwan, also joined us at GoldenTree as a partner and portfolio manager, having spent almost a decade at another similar firm called Varde. And so it was really the combination of an urge, an opportunity, and the right partnership that really led us to launch ICOS.
in early 2022 with a view to really build a firm focused on fundamental with what we like to call a private equity approach to credits and really focused on best ideas across the credit spectrum with the skills internally to be able to drive complex processes and transactions.
00:05:32 [Vincent Weber]
Pierre, you mentioned you have a contrarian approach to investing. So that's something we hear a lot from managers. So could you be a bit more specific about what this means for IACOS?
00:05:42 [Pierre de Chillaz]
Sure. So I think one of the things I mentioned earlier is the technical shifts in the markets and the implications it had. And one of those changes is the eruption of the European Central Bank as a key driver of the corporate investment grade markets. And as we've touched on, they have a mandate to buy, so they don't really want to think about value. And so that's really driven a huge amount of dispersion in pricing. And so the particular investments that I have in mind is a He's actually a hard asset businesses. So that's really essentially a gas pipeline. But one of the things that I think people talked a lot about over the last three years in Europe is access to storage.
And, I talked about how in Europe, one of the issues, you don't have great data. The beauty about that investment is actually you can find, if you look for it, you can find lots of great data. And so you have data on daily flow, hourly flow in some of those pipelines. You also have great data on storage capacity. So essentially, a lot of work around flows, a lot of work around assets. And the other side that we looked at is also what's the replacement cost of that assets, right?
underwriting that business from a variety of different ways i think we always came to the conclusion that that business was very solid and the downside protected with excellence and it turns out that that business actually stayed investment grade throughout the last two and a half years and so those bones that created all the way to 18 are now trading around six to seven percent which by the way we think still a very good value but clearly maybe less attractive than it was 18 months ago.
And so I think to us, that's a great illustration of how you can generate essentially 20% plus type total return with extremely good downside protection as long as you're able to really dig deep in the fundamentals and take what at the time was clearly a sort of contrarian approach to things.
00:07:43 [Vincent Weber]
Okay, great. Thanks. We get back later to how you actually approach credit investing. But before, let's turn back to European credit markets. How would you describe the unique characteristics and complexities of this market?
00:07:58 [Pierre de Chillaz]
So I think, listen, first of all, it's probably worth touching on the broader investing environment, right? And I think we see today at a time, which in my mind certainly is probably the most exciting investing environments we've had since the great financial crisis. We've got a lot going on in geopolitics. We live in a world that's a lot more polarized. We've got a huge amount of election this year. across the world. There's also technological disruptions, AI. I think we see that already impacting us in our business, and I believe there'll be a lot more, which will create, again, winners and losers. There's also a lot going on on the macro side with the return of inflation, regime shifts.
what's happening with rates, broadly higher cost of capital, and frankly, what's happening with the fiscal spending globally. And maybe a few things worth pointing out for the European credit markets, which is maybe not necessarily intuitive. First of all, the European credit market has been a growth market. when I started in this business, the opportunity was roughly 200 billion across, leveraged loans, high-yield bonds. It's now well over a trillion. So, Europe hasn't grown much for the last 15 years, but the European opportunities have grown massively. And that's really a reflection of the shrinking of the bank's balance sheets that we've witnessed since the GFC. The second point I make around European credit is a hugely fragmented market. Clearly, 27 countries in the EU.
There's also countries and markets which are maybe less integrated than another part of the world and so so that leaves us with some large corporates some large balance sheets but also a lot of what we call domestic champions, which for US investors might look like mid-cap, but those are real businesses with real moats, with real competitive edge, but they just happen to operate in one markets. And so their balance sheets in and of itself is of lower size and sometime as a result overlooked. Maybe another point to make around European credit market and the fragmentation is the quality of the information.
And so if you had all those reasons up, It means to us that Europe is massively underserved and it's underserved because the traditional buyers of European credits have been those sort of large global institutions who size have decoupled over the last 10 years. And as such, the best return on their investments is really to focus on U.S. markets and selectively some of the large European balance sheets. And so we feel. a lot of the other, the rest of the market is sort of overlooked. And that's really what we excited about. So maybe that's just a description of the market.
00:10:40 [Vincent Weber]
So that's really surprising about Europe. The European market has been growing, typically, investor, international investor associate always Europe with tech nation. Can you a bit elaborate on where that growth did come from and what segment of that market had been affected?
00:10:59 [Pierre de Chillaz]
So I think it's really a consequence of the retrenchment of the banks. Clearly, the US market has always been a lot more intermediated, capital markets intermediated. Whereas I think traditionally, the European companies would have bilateral banking relationships. And clearly, after the GFC, banks have started reducing their leverage. And through that, they've really brought in, a rise in the sort of capital markets across, investment grade bonds, high yield bonds, leveraged loans, and more recently, obviously, on the direct, on the private credit side. So that's really new companies that historically wouldn't have been part of markets which are coming in. And they tend to be the domestic champions, call it like 150 million of a big dollar business. good quality, operating in one, maybe two markets in Europe, half a billion balance sheets.
That's the type of companies that really came to our market and has been driving the growth in the market.
00:11:58 [Vincent Weber]
The second point. You mentioned AI. I mean, everybody's talking about AI, but I didn't expect to hear it today from a credit manager.
00:12:06 [Pierre de Chillaz]
So it's funny. We're having that conversation on the way over. And we're by no means AI experts. You'll probably have other people who have a lot stronger views and better insights. But I think we're starting to see already. in our business, the benefit of AI in a way, in augmenting our capability with every research, right? So I think there is the impact it has on us and our ability to get insights, get information, how quickly we get to that information. But also I think it's impacting and potentially disrupting a lot of companies that are in our markets. It often is, people say it's going to be great for that business, it's going to be terrible for that business. And the reality is probably a lot more nuanced.
00:12:48 [Vincent Weber]
When you talk about fragmentation, I think that's the elephant in the room when it comes to European markets. So it's probably as much. an opportunity as a challenge for investors. So how do you tackle this?
00:13:03 [Pierre de Chillaz]
I mean, listen, I think, as I said, there is a few large cap in Europe and there is, that's sort of where there's a few very topical situations right now. And that's where you'll see the large global distress special assist firm come in into Europe, often from the US, but often as well with teams underground in Europe. But that's going to be their focus. I think. For us, we can look at that. And right now, some of those opportunities, actually, we believe are interesting.
But we also can look at like that billion or half a billion cap stack that we just mentioned earlier, which those guys are not going to look at because that will never create an opportunity for them to deploy the kind of capital they need to deploy to make sense given their AUM and their fund size. And so to us, it's really, our ability to be nimble and to look across up and down those cap structures. It's also the opportunity to really look across Europe more broadly, but also having navigated through those markets for the last sort of 20 years, understanding and pricing as a result, the idiosyncrasies of some of those processes.
So that's the nature of Europe in my mind, I think for certainly the next 10, 20 years will remain that fragmentation and that nuance, which is going to create the opportunity.
00:14:19 [Vincent Weber]
Do you expect the market to grow further because of bank disintermination or has this already stabilized?
00:14:26 [Pierre de Chillaz]
So I think one of the interesting things in Europe is after a decade plus of no earnings growth, we've seen, and I know the last few months maybe less so, but there is a bit of earnings growth picking up. And so you'd have to ask yourself whether you think that's sustainable. But that would be the most natural way for the credit market to increase. And we continue to see some companies that add, bilateral banking relationship with our markets, but equally we're also seeing the influence and the rise of private credit. So I think there'll be, maybe not the same pace of growth that we've witnessed since the GFC, but we certainly believe it's going to continue to remain a growth market. Great.
00:15:06 [Vincent Weber]
And if we look at market today, what do you see the most compelling opportunity?
00:15:11 [Pierre de Chillaz]
Yeah, I mean, listen, let's start maybe with the the stats, right? I think when we look today at, yields in European credits, we think they're attractive by historical standards. And so the other added benefit right now is you get convexity because you still have a lot of the bonds that are trading below par. And, sometime you'll have events. We've had the dearth of M&A for the last two years. And then suddenly we're starting to see more M&A take place, right? So the value of that convexity, that discount to par is valuable if something happens to it. So the combination of attractive all-in yields and that convexity to us is attractive. The other maybe point worth mentioning is people are very focused on averages. And I think that's true in equities. That's true, obviously, in credits.
So people are obsessed about the S&P trading at 23 times, right? The reality is the S&P doesn't trade at 23 times. A few stocks trade at 45 and the rest trades at 18. And we can say the same thing about credit. So the bare case about credit is like spread averages, by historical standard, a very average. But the reality is within that spread, there's a huge amount of dispersion. And I think the story of the day for us across all asset classes is this increase in dispersion that we've witnessed. One of the reasons we think that is and why we think it's here to stay is clearly we have rates that are going to be higher for longer. And so that's got implications for some businesses that require constant access to cheap funding.
There is also in our mind across markets, less maybe willingness to do deep fundamental work. So I think there's been a tendency to go for easy narratives. And as a result, we've gone increasingly for markets which is haves and have nots. That's true across credit, but also equity, obviously. And so I think there's been less appetite for contrarial thinking. And lastly, I think the technicals also been changing quite a bit in European credit, right? So the banks 15 years ago used to carry balance sheets, intermediates. They used to absorb that volatility and they used to take view on credit. Today, there is maybe less depth. at the analyst bench, and it's more of an intermediation business. There's also, I think, the European loan market is the preponderance of CLOs. And CLOs are rules-based investing.
So they have particular rules around, B3, CCC, that enable or prevent them from doing certain things, which at times create real opportunity to be on the other side of this. And lastly, the role of the ECB. what I think we don't maybe talk enough is The ECB between 16 and 20 became the largest buyer and ultimately owner of corporate investment grade bonds. They own almost a third of what was the eligible universe. And I know they stopped buying, but I think we still live today with the implications of that behavior. And in two situations under distress that we've been involved with, they've been one of the largest lender. I don't know if you're familiar with Atos, which is a large French distressed situation, which has been very topical.
It turns out the ECB is the largest lender. They own half a billion of the bonds.
00:18:32 [Vincent Weber]
Wow, I think that's something most people are not aware of, that the ECB is the direct owner. Correct.
00:18:39 [Pierre de Chillaz]
The only way you can end up owning 30% of the eligible universe is to buy 50% of everything that's coming to market, right? And so for a period of a few years, they were the largest buyer by far, and they were driving prices. And having met those guys historically, they don't buy because it's cheap. They buy because it's their mandates. And so there's been a huge amount of pricing distortion. And some of that is never going to be an issue, but clearly in some instances, it's going to create, we have real implications in the market.
00:19:10 [Vincent Weber]
Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, I remember when the Japanese discussed that it was a stock market. It was a big topic. On the bonsai market, it's been going on for years and, I mean, unnoticed to most people. Just a small detail coming back to, you mentioned, you talk about complexity. Can you explain it to me a bit in a more simple term?
00:19:32 [Pierre de Chillaz]
It's people, there's been less, I guess, willingness and ability to do deep fundamental work. And so I think the willingness of people to go for complex situations, to take contrarian view, is reduced. And frankly, if you look over the last 10 to 15 years, what's done best has been the easy narrative. And again, we could talk about credit, we could talk about equities, we could talk about all of those classes. And so that unwillingness to take differentiated view, is something that today we feel is creating very, very unique opportunities. And we can talk later about specific sectors or ideas, but I think we see that, for instance, in some of our focus on some of the hard asset themes that we think is very exciting around telecom and real estate.
It's very easy to paint a very negative view of those sectors, yet it's a lot more nuanced. And so if you're willing to do the work, build conviction, and take that differentiated view, we believe ultimately you'll generate great return. But that path is complicated because there is very few people who are willing to take that view as well.
00:20:44 [Vincent Weber]
Can you share some specific example of how you approach this opportunity?
00:20:50 [Pierre de Chillaz]
Sure. Strategy is very flexible across the broader credit spectrum. So we really focus for what we think is best ideas with always this sort of private equity approach. and deep fundamental approach, right? So as we look at the market today, as I said, attractive all-in yields, average spreads. There's a huge dispersion, as we've said. And so actually Morgan Stanley came out this morning with their sort of mid-year credit outlook and they had a great chart in there talking about the spread per ratings category and where they rank within their last sort of 20-year from a quartile perspective, right? And so CCC right now is an 80th percentile. over the last 20 years, whereas double B is about 15.
So on average, the market is uninteresting, but average means nothing because you have such big dispersion, right? And so as we look at the markets and where to look for what we think are the best risk-adjusted return, our focus is very much barbell. And so what does that mean? That means on the one hand, we continue to find very unique opportunities in what we think is misunderstood IG. So what is misunderstood IG? Misunderstood IG might be an investment grade company in an unloved sector. Could be real estate, could be telecom, could be many different things. Or it could be a high yield company whose balance sheets and earnings to us mean it should be investment grade, but for a variety of reasons, sometimes the ratings agency criteria, it remains high yield.
And within those types of opportunities, we can still find Securities, which yield between 7% and 9%, trading at discounted par, which from a total return perspective, we believe will generate us low-to-mid teens IR with extremely attractive downside protection. So then we compared that to double B and single B in credit, where for the last few months, you've had new issues at like 5%. spreads of like 150 over 200 over. So we think that we still find outsized return opportunity in this sort of misunderstood IG part of the market. The other part of the markets that we feel really jumps out is the triple C. And so that's really the more the distressed part of the markets.
And that's where in that Morgan & Sand report this morning, they talked about how it's the one part of the market that trades at spreads that are, akin to where they were, maybe not at the same level, but the precedent goes back to the GFC. So you're wider than, obviously, 2020, wider than 2018, wider than 2011 and 2012 with the European Southern Crisis. And so the next place to look, obviously, is the GFC, although you're not at the same level. And as we said earlier, there's good reason for some of that to trade wide because some of those companies require constant access to cheap financing. And, we might get a cut or we're most likely to get a cut in a few weeks in Europe.
But listen, rates are probably a little higher for longer than we felt collectively, six to nine months ago. But I think within the CCC, we are finding excellence. and underappreciate opportunities. And so to us, that's also one of the part of the market that we feel is the most exciting. And so that's to us is the positioning from a quality perspective, barbell. Then to the question, what type of opportunities? We've lived in this world that remains highly uncertain. We talked about geopolitics, we talked about AI, we talked about macro politics. And so I think our view was let's focus on businesses, and sectors where we feel we don't need to take a view as to where the economy is going. And we find very attractive opportunities in hard assets, broadly defined, right?
So what is a hard asset? It's infrastructure businesses. It's energy-related businesses. It's real estate and telecom. The reason we like those businesses is they tend not to be consumer discretionary. So we don't have to take a view on the economy. In a world where there's been a structural step change in inflation, the replacement cost of those hard assets has gone higher. So that increased the modes of their existing businesses. And also, if you look over a long period of time, those have tended to be businesses that have demonstrated the ability to pass through price increases. And so that's a theme that we like. And within that theme, there is clearly a couple of sectors which have been very unloved, right? Real estate has been very topical and telecom is very topical.
Clearly, a problem sector requires access to constant funding, very capital intensive. However, on the thick side, we're witnessing a once in multi-generation change going from the copper network into the fiber network. Countries have progressed a very different path. So if you compare again, US versus Europe, you're roughly 60% fiber penetrated in both jurisdictions. However, within Europe, there's huge divergence. So Spain and Portugal are done. France is close to 90% fiber penetrated. The light guard in Europe is Germany.
00:26:17 [Vincent Weber]
I know, I know. Just look at my neighborhood. I'm still waiting for Fiverr.
00:26:21 [Pierre de Chillaz]
And so I think there's a huge opportunity in Fiverr in Germany ahead of you, but that's going to be very capital intensive. But if you contrast that to some telecom assets in France, Portugal, and Spain, that spend is behind them. And so the free cash flow profile of this business will change drastically. The other sector clearly around real estate. So it's a very large sector across both investment grade and high yield. It's clearly been a massive beneficiary from low rates. It's also a sector that's historically where you've seen a bunch of questionable behaviors, right? So there's a lot to pick apart, right? Clearly. I think if you take a stock today, it's very clear the residential market globally is undersupplied. And that's true in the US and that's true in Europe.
But I think there has been a lot less supply in real estate in Europe versus the US because price increases in Europe have been a fraction of what they've been in the US. The other part of the equation for supply is the regulatory limitations vis-a-vis construction. And there's a lot more of that in Europe than there are in the US. And there's a lot more of that in Germany than there is in other markets in Europe. And so, again, lots of regional differences. And maybe the best way to illustrate that is if you think about vacancy rates, Europe versus the US. So Germany for resi is sub 3%, where you're just above 6% in the US. And Berlin office vacancy is 6%, whereas New York is above 20%.
And so I think there's real differences in those markets. And I think one of the sector and themes that we've been excited about is actually German residential real estates and particularly around Berlin. Because the other added interesting thing about Germany and Berlin specifically is there's that perception that you cannot pass those prices through. And that's a read across from regulations around the Mietzschpiegel. And I think people equate Mitch Spiegel to some of the rent control, some of that you have in New York, for instance. And I think the way those things operate is very different. So the Mitch Spiegel, historically speaking, is not meant to prevent you from increasing rents, but it's meant to prevent you from huge variation. It's meant to smoothen out inflation into the rents.
And so I think if you look at rents inflation in Berlin, specifically today, you're materially higher than inflation is. So last year was around 5%. We think this year, and there is the new Mitch Spiegel for Berlin is coming out probably in the next couple of weeks. We expect that to go higher. And so there is, again, a misunderstanding of some of the dynamics. And that's creating very attractive opportunities.
00:29:11 [Vincent Weber]
But how do you access this market?
00:29:14 [Pierre de Chillaz]
So I think our focus on the real estate specifically It's really been on the high yield bonds. So a lot of those sectors have issued historically investment grade bonds. ECB was in many of those capital structures. And clearly, given the radical shift in cost of capital that we've lived through the last two, three years, a lot of those cap structures have completely dislocated. Some of them for very good reasons, given, some of the governance issues that exist in that sector. Some of those companies have been exposed to maybe some subsectors which are less attractive. But within that, we're also seeing attractive opportunities in some subsectors that we think are very attractive. And one of our largest positions is in a company that went through actually already restructuring.
And the reason we got excited after the restructuring is the restructuring forced in the open a lot of the questionable dealings that you tend to see quite often in those businesses so we felt we were coming in at a point in time where the risk of additional bad news from a corporate governance from a related product transaction was materially reduced so we like that we like the assets first and foremost very high quality residential in berlin and And given it was also a name that got to restructuring, there's a lot of investors that won't look at it. And so from a technical perspective as well, it's a situation where the universe of potential buyers is reduced. And as such, we were able to really buy into the 0 to 50 LTV.
And in that instance, we're able to create the 0 to 50 part of the capital structure at over 20% IR. And just to give you a sense of how deeply in the value and deeply covered you are, we're essentially buying good quality Berlin residential real estate for about a third of the replacement cost. So that to us was something that was extremely exciting.
00:31:16 [Vincent Weber]
Looking ahead, how do you see European credit markets evolving over the next few years? Or is there maybe some specific emerging trend? as an investor, I should be aware of?
00:31:32 [Pierre de Chillaz]
So listen, I think some things won't change. Let's start there. I think we are in a world where we expect to see more dispersion, more dislocation, given the technical setup in European credit that we talked about, given the fact that a lot of the large global managers are really looking at a sub-part of Europe. So dislocations are there to stay. fragmentation of Europe is there to stay. So those to me are the things that won't change. What's going to change? I think there is clearly the sort of two things maybe worth touching on, right? The emergence of the private credits. which clearly has been a huge growth. And it's a bit of a reminder of, before the financial crisis in Europe, we used to have the mezzanine fund, right? Now it's the private credit fund.
And it's clear that they've taken a chunk of the markets, but you haven't really seen the impact on our market, so to speak, because that really, they go to the banks. And at time of dislocation in the market, at time of excess volatility, they'll probably deliver certainty execution. to private equity sponsors. And so they'll have a role to play. But I think what we see over the last few months is in a more normalized high yield market, for instance, the high yield market competes very well with the private credits. And so that's going to be a feature of the markets. The other thing that we start to see more of is this sort of credit and credit the violence that really we haven't seen much on Europe historically.
We've seen a lot more of that in the US. And what I mean by that is, and that's really more about restructuring situations where suddenly, given the weak documentations, some subgroup of lenders managed to extract concessions working with the companies to deliver the companies something it needs in exchange for differentiated terms. And that's something that didn't really happen much in Europe, but I think we're starting to see a few instances of attempts. So I think that's something that clearly we're very mindful of. And so to us, if I look at the world again, we think the world is in flux. We think that's not changing anytime soon. But I think we think inflation is probably going to be higher for longer, although not necessarily at like 5% or 6%.
And so there's going to be a lot of disruptions, a lot of volatility, a lot of dislocations. And that's going to be a great source of opportunities at a time where we feel there is less and less investors who are willing to do the deep fundamental work, take contrarian view, differentiated view. And I think that's sort of what excites us about being in those markets.
00:34:15 [Vincent Weber]
Pierre, as we wrap up our discussion today, could you share one of the most important lessons you've learned from your years in credit investing that you think our listeners and investors should remember?
00:34:29 [Pierre de Chillaz]
Listen, I mean, we like to think that if we do good fundamental work, ultimately the right outcome will prevail. And I think one of the beauty of credit versus mid-cap equity, for instance, which can stay cheap forever, is ultimately we've got a maturity. And so I think that certainly helps defend the value of credit and the value of deep fundamental work in credits. I think if you think about the more distressed part of the market, ultimately, if you're right against everybody else, you could be wrong. And what I mean by that is sometimes price dictates. outcome. And so that's something that to us, we're very mindful of.
And maybe the broader read across to me and the great chance and opportunity we have is really working as a team where we can challenge ourselves because we're not perfect. We're fallible. We keep trying to improve ourselves. And I think there's been a lot of great times over the last 20 years and a lot of very humbling time. And having A team that's very complementary in terms of skill sets, in terms of personality, in terms of style, but also able to really openly challenge each other is something that, to me, I found invaluable. And that's really the basis upon which I think we want to build Icos.
00:35:50 [Vincent Weber]
Pierre, thank you for joining us today. And to our listeners, thank you for tuning in and for making it that far to the episode.
00:35:58 [Pierre de Chillaz]
Thank you for having me.