Marc Rowan: Japan is like, I would say, like many economies. If you think about the structure of the Japanese market, it is primarily two financial products, bank debt and equity.

David Westin: Apollo CEO Marc Rowan sees his company as providing a much needed third way to finance the capital investment Japan needs.

Marc Rowan: The equity market in the context of the world is actually quite small, although it is the second largest equity market in the world, but it is roughly the size of Nvidia. Just to put things in perspective. There's not the well developed kind of corporate bond market that exists throughout the US. And so I think what we're watching, not just in Japan, but around the world, is corporate CFOs, corporate treasurers, now understand that there are 3 types of finance. Things that are really highly rated and short, you want to be with your banks, there's no better provider. Equity, very, very expensive. Public markets for plain vanilla, very, very good execution. Everything else comes to the private market. The largest part of the private market today is investment grade. It is these large companies who have these transformational opportunities, who want to match long dated investments, and most of what we're doing is long dated, with long dated capital. And that isn't what the banking system does well. That is not what the public markets do well. And so you're seeing this extraordinary growth. In the US, we've seen it in lots of ways. You have Meta's financing last year at some 30 billion. In Europe, we've seen the Europeans, who also have structural issues vis a vis capital availability, really embrace private finance. In Japan, we're seeing the beginnings of that. The work we've done with Sony, the work we've done with SMBC, the work we've done in financing, buy now, pay later Japanese companies, is beginning to open up in the minds of CFOs and treasurers that there's just another alternative.

David Westin: It's not that private credit firms like Apollo seek to place Japanese banks. Apollo's team says that it can supplement what the banks do.

Eiji Ueda: The public credit market is very, very small. I think there's only 60 trillion yen outstanding on the corporate bond market compared to the size of the finance that's been quite small. So a lot of finance has been done by banks who is basically private credit. So I think there's a demand for longer-dated capital and also complex capital because the bank can provide cheaper and short term finance. And with the huge capex needs, they need longer term, more complex finance structure where the private capital markets can solve the problem for it.

Marc Rowan: We will start to establish private as just another alternative for every CFO and every treasurer. And by the way, in partnership with the Japanese banking system, because at the end of the day, we don't do what the banks do. We don't provide advice. We don't provide hedging, derivatives, M&A, or any other service. That's the purview of the banking system. We provide a piece of capital that is in very short supply in Japan, investment grade, long dated to finance what they need.