Cindy Michel

Apollo Commercial Real Estate Finance, Inc. is a real estate investment trust, which originates, acquires, invests in, and manages performing commercial real estate mortgage loans, subordinate financings, and other commercial real estate-related debt investments. It offers loan programs that include senior loans, subordinate debt, bridge loans, and preferred equity. The company was founded on June 29, 2009 and is headquartered in New York, NY.

Since its founding in 1990, Apollo has grown to become one of the world's largest alternative investment managers. As of June 30, 2012, we had total assets under management of $105 billion, with a team of 616 employees located in ten offices around the world. We attribute our success to our key competitive strengths: our investment process and approach to investing, which incorporates our flexibility to invest throughout market cycles and across the capital structure, our deep industry expertise and focus on complex transactions, our investment edge which creates proprietary investment opportunities, and our collaboration with portfolio company management teams; our integrated business model which combines the strength of our private equity, credit-oriented capital markets, and real estate platforms, and also includes a dedicated Natural Resources Fund; our long-standing investor relationships which include many of the world’s most prominent pension and endowment funds, financial institutions and individuals; our long-term capital base; our strong management team and reputation; and our alignment of interests with investors in our funds and shareholders. We operate our businesses in an integrated manner, which we believe distinguishes us from other alternative investment managers. Our investment professionals frequently collaborate and share information across disciplines including market insight, management, banking and consultant contacts as well as potential investment opportunities, which contributes to our library of industry knowledge and enables us to invest successfully across a company’s capital structure. The integrated Apollo platform and the experience of our investment team have enabled us to deliver strong long-term investment performance in our funds throughout a range of economic cycles. Our investment approach is value-oriented, focusing on industries in which we have considerable knowledge, and emphasizing downside protection and the preservation of capital. We are frequently contrarian in our investment approach, which is reflected in a number of ways, including: our willingness to invest in industries that our competitors typically avoid; the often complex structures we employ in some of our investments, including our willingness to pursue difficult corporate carve-out transactions; our experience investing during periods of uncertainty or distress in the economy or financial markets; our orientation towards sole-sponsored transactions; and our willingness to undertake transactions that have substantial business, regulatory or legal complexity. We have successfully applied this investment philosophy since Apollo's founding, allowing us to identify what we believe to be attractive investment opportunities, deploy capital across the balance sheet of industry leading businesses, and create value for our investors throughout economic cycles.