Jon Bock
Analyst · Wells Fargo
Thank you Ian. On Slide 19, you can see the bridge of the company's net asset value per share from December 31, 2019, to March 31, 2020. Now as Eric mentioned, our NAV was down by $2.43 this quarter to $9.23 per share, declined approximately 20.8%. Now this decrease was due to net unrealized depreciation of $2.44 which was offset by $0.01 for the net impact of all -- net impact of the -- of the all the other drivers combined including $0.03 accretion from share repurchase -- including the $0.03 of share accretion from our share repurchase program. You saw that a breakdown of this unrealized depreciation on NAV per share basis was also shown when Ian discussed Slide 14. Now at a high level, over 90% of of the NAV decline was driven by broad market moves caused by spread increases for middle-market loans and price declines for liquid investments. Also reflected on that chart was the fact that foreign currency fluctuations did not have a material impact on our forward -- on our financial results in the quarter which you'd expect given our hedging strategy. Slides 20, 21 show our income statements and balance sheets for the last five quarters. From an income statement perspective, we've already touched on some of the key highlights, but I'd like to point out a few high-level trends. On the top line, our consistent portfolio rotation has resulted in an increase in our total portfolio average spread of 84 basis points since March 31, 2019, with the average spread increasing from 373 basis points to 457 basis points. The average yield at par in our total portfolio however has decreased from 6.2% to 5.7% over the same time horizon as a result of lower LIBOR resulting in a relatively flat total level of investment income. Now this market dynamic could have made it tempting to pursue higher yields in order to grow the bottom line, but it's during the turbulent markets we are experiencing today that we're happy, we remain focused on a primarily first-lien strategy. You can see, on Slide 21, our balance sheet trends. Excluding our short-term investments, total investments at fair value were down approximately $106 million compared to the fourth quarter due to the unrealized appreciation that we've discussed. Excluding this impact, the portfolio would have increased $15 million based on the portfolio rotation. And similar to last quarter, our cash balance and short-term investments balance at March 31 were largely transitory due to the timing of repayment of our BSL credit facility and debt securitizations with the proceeds from our BSL sales. During the fourth quarter, we lowered the commitment on the BSL facility from $150 million to $80 million and further lowered it to $30 million subsequent to quarter end to rightsize the facility relative to our reigning BSL portfolio following a $20 million repayment. Also, during the first quarter, $27 million of the CLO Class A-1 notes were repaid, bringing the total CLO debt principal balance down to $291 million at March 31. An additional $65 million of the CLO Class A-1 notes were repaid in April, bringing the total current CLO debt principal balance down to $226 million. Details on each of our borrowings are shown on Slide 22. Our debt-to-equity ratio at March 31, 2020, was 1.42 times or, most importantly, 1.2 times after adjusting for cash and short-term investments in unsettled transactions. Pro forma for the BSL credit facility and the CLO debt repayments in April, totaling $84 million, our debt-to-equity was 1.23 or roughly in line with our net debt as of March 31. I'd also like to note that our only debt maturity in the next two years is the BSL credit facility that matures in August of 2021 which is now down to its size of roughly $30 million. Now jump to Slide 23. From a liquidity perspective, our primary sources of liquidity continue to be the proceeds from planned rotation out of our liquid BSL as appropriate and depending on those market conditions as well as the borrowing capacity under our $800 million senior secured corporate credit facility. Today's available borrowing capacity under this facility which is all subject to leverage, borrowing base and other financial covenants, would allow us to borrow amounts up to the approved regulatory limit of two times. We certainly do not plan to increase leverage to that level, but I want to use that to illustrate that we have the available liquidity to support existing portfolio codes and remain active market participants today. The chart on Slide 23 shows the impact on our net leverage of funding our unused capital commitments. While Barings did not have any revolver exposures on our balance sheet, we have $73.5 million of delayed drive term loan commitments to our portfolio company, as Ian mentioned, as well as our remaining $40 million commitments to our joint venture investment. These DDTL commitments are generally in place to support portfolio company acquisitions and also generally have incurrence tests limiting their total leverage. Thus, we'd expect usage in those DDTLs to be limited to those companies generating very strong results and further limited by the depressed level of acquisition activity that you're looking at in today's market. Now while we'd expect limited usage, this table shows that we do have the available capacity to meet the entirety of these commitments, if called upon, while maintaining cushion against our regulatory leverage limit. In addition, our $385 million liquid broadly syndicated loan portfolio also provides additional liquidity, if it was needed. While we could sell those investments to reduce leverage while not impacting current NAV, we can also sell those investments in order to redeploy the capital in other investments with improved risk-adjusted returns. Any sale, right of course would likely convert to an unrealized -- would convert an unrealized loss to a realized loss, but long-term NAV could be improved with the incremental returns on those new investments. One final point regarding our liquidity and capitalization relates to our ability to issue shares of common stock pursuant to board approval at a price below NAV which was approved at our annual meeting of stockholders yesterday. We appreciate the support that we received from our shareholders on this proposal, particularly during a period of such extreme market volatility and uncertainty. It was evidenced to us, stockholders have placed their trust in Barings and the board, and we take that responsibility to act in our shareholders' best interest very seriously. Slide 24 updates our paid and announced dividends since Barings took over as the investment advisor to the BDC. We announced yesterday that our second-quarter 2020 dividend of $0.16 a share will be paid on June 17, 2020, and this dividend level is consistent with the first quarter and represents two important points. First, the reality of the current market environment is that middle-market originations will be lower than historical levels. The breadth of the Barings platform will allow us to take advantage of opportunities as the market continues to evolve, but we would not expect overall portfolio yields to increase materially in the second quarter. Second, maintaining a consistent dividend level represents our current expectation that our portfolio continue to perform in the second quarter, given how well it was positioned entering into the crisis and how it's managing through the crisis to date. Now Slide 26 summarizes our new investment activity during the second quarter and investment pipeline. Since April 1, we closed and funded one new middle market investment of $10 million of equity and first-lien debt with an origination margin or DM-3 of roughly 9.6%. We've also funded $1.6 million for previously committed DDTLs primarily to one well-performing European portfolio company in order to fund some tuck-in acquisitions. The current Barings global private finance investment pipeline is approximately $110 million on that probability-weighted basis and is predominantly first-lien, senior secured investments. As a reminder, this pipeline is estimated based on expected closing rates for all deals that rest in the pipeline. And lastly, I'd like to provide an update on our joint venture with the State of South Carolina Retirement System. This vehicle allows us to leverage the broader Barings platform and increases the investment diversity within the BDC. And at March 31, the cost basis of BBDC's investment remained at $10 million, as we continue to ramp the JV using its subscription leverage facility, and over $4 million of investment declined while the fair value of the investment declined is $6.4 million. Now this quarter's decrease in value is largely driven by the same technical price-driven valuation market impact on Barings BDC as the JV portfolio consists of roughly 70% broadly syndicated loans, 21% middle-market debt investments and 9% public and private ABS securities. We completely evaluate the opportunities in areas such as European credit, structured credit and continue to make investments in these areas that all have attractive risk-adjusted return profiles in this environment. And with that, operator, we would love to open the line for questions.