Earnings Labs

Gladstone Capital Corporation (GLAD)

Q4 2013 Earnings Call· Wed, Nov 20, 2013

$18.60

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good morning, and welcome to the Gladstone Capital Corporation’s fourth quarter and year ended September 30, 2013 shareholders conference call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. (Operator Instructions) Please note that this event is being recorded. Now I would like to turn the conference over to David Gladstone. Mr. Gladstone, please go ahead.

David Gladstone

Management

All right, Keith, thank you for that nice introduction and hello and good morning to all of you out there. This is David Gladstone, the Chairman, and this is the fourth quarter and fiscal year-end earnings call for all shareholders and analysts of Gladstone Capital. Common stock traded under the symbol GLAD and we have some term-preferred shares trading out there under GLADP, for preferred. Both of them on NASDAQ. Thank you all for calling in. We are always happy to talk to our shareholders and also the analysts, and give updates on the company and the portfolio and our business environment. I wish we could do this more often. And invitation is always open to any of you out there to visit us here in the McLean, Virginia office, just outside of Washington DC. Please stop by and say hello. I think you will see some of the finest people in the business. Please take an opportunity to visit our website, www.gladstonecapital.com, sign up for email notifications. We don’t send out junk mail. You can also find us on Facebook under the keyword, The Gladstone Companies and you can follow us on Twitter under Gladstone Comps, that’s C-O-M-P-S at the end of Gladstone. Now I need to read the statement regarding forward-looking statements. This conference call may include statements that may constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Securities Act of 1933, the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, including statements with regard to the future performance of the company. These forward-looking statements inherently involve certain risks and uncertainties and other factors even though they are based on our current plans and we believe those plans to be reasonable. Many of these forward-looking statements can be identified by the use of words such as anticipates, believes, expects, intends, will,…

Melissa Morrison

Management

Sure. Hello and good morning everyone. Yesterday we released our fourth quarter and year-end earnings press release and this morning filed our Form 10-K. Starting with the income statement for our fourth quarter ended September 30, 2013. Net investment income was $4.7 million or $0.22 per share as compared to the prior quarter ended June 30 of 4.4 million or $0.21 per share. Investment income increased by 9.4% in the three months ended September 30, 2013 as compared to the prior quarter, primarily due to $750,000 in combined success fess and prepayment fees received on early payoffs during the quarter. No success fees were received in the prior quarter. Operating expenses increased by 12% during the current quarter as compared to the prior quarter, primarily due to an increase in the incentive fee and a reduction in incentive fee credits. This is due to additional investment income received. For the 12 months ended September 30, 2013, net investment income was $18.4 million or $0.88 per share, as compared to the prior year ended September 30, 2012 of $19 million or $0.91 per share. Investment income decreased by 10% due to a decrease in interest income on our interest bearing investments resulting from an increase in early payoff and also due to a decrease in success fees received as compared to the prior year. Operating expenses decreased by approximately 17% primarily due to a decrease in interest expense in our credit facility due to a lower amount of borrowings outstanding and also as a result of an amendment in January 2013 that renews the LIBOR floor on advances. Additionally, incentive fees decreases year-over-year primarily due to an increase in fee waivers that were needed to ensure distributions to stockholders were covered entirely by net investment income. An incentive fee was earned…

David Gladstone

Management

Mellissa that was a great report. I hope all our listeners who will read our press release as well as obtain a copy of our annual report, Form 10-K, which has been filed with the SEC. You can access the press release and the 10-K on our website at www.gladstonecapital.com and also on the SEC website. Just as a summary, Gladstone Capital this quarter was an okay production. Some of the deals that we were trying to close fell over into the quarter ending December 31, 2013. As you all know, this business will be uneven both on closings and on payoffs but we experienced a larger number of prepayments than we thought, as well as exits for $41 million. Inclusive in this number is the $14 million received for the debt investment, that was Lindmark. That was a great work out by our team here. Our portfolio yields have remained the same. They are strong at about 11.6% quarter-over-quarter and subsequent to the quarter end had a new investment of $7 million in a new proprietary deal and close to funding $17 million on another. In addition, we have funded $8 million in several new syndicated loans that we think will have a good return. As we have mentioned over and over, the biggest challenge today is to find new investments that we believe can survive the next recession or possibly a forthcoming strong inflation. We also need to access long-term capital market places which are more difficult even for us, as strong as we are. We have a line of credit with supportive lending institutions and it's sufficient for the near-term. However, in order to make a lot of new long-term investments we will need to raise additional long-term debt, long-term capital of some sort, such as our…

Operator

Operator

(Operator Instructions) And the first question comes from Ryan Lynch with KBW. Ryan Lynch - Keefe, Bruyette & Woods, Inc: I have kind of a clarification question. I know you said in the December quarter, one loan is already closed for $7 million. Did you say the second loan that you guys hope to close was for about $17 million?

David Gladstone

Management

Yes, that’s correct. Ryan Lynch - Keefe, Bruyette & Woods, Inc: Will that $17 million go completely to Gladstone Capital or will that be spread out between your funds?

David Gladstone

Management

It's all in Capital. Ryan Lynch - Keefe, Bruyette & Woods, Inc: All in Capital. Okay. And sticking with the December quarter, can you give us anymore color on the kind of pipeline you guys are seeing? You guys are seeing a big pickup in yield volume as kind of the calendar fourth quarter comes about, you guys seeing any shift to more M&A transactions versus refinancings?

David Gladstone

Management

I don’t think there has been any change in the last six to nine months in that. And I can't remember back further than that in sort of numerical. We see an awful lot of deals out there. We win some, we lose some. We are very attuned to the sponsor marketplace in which sponsors are doing buyouts. We hand around those folks. They usually did those out to two or three people. Sometime we like the senior lender and the senior lender will bring us in sometimes. Sometimes we bring in the senior lender. Quite frankly, it's a very uneven marketplace. And competition is very steady out there these days. We all are hammering in at about the same rate. Unfortunately there is no way of knowing when you are going to be picked up and when you are not. But we have a good relationship with a number of smaller LBO funds that really call us up each time they are going to do something because we enjoy working together. I wish that I could give you a better answer than that but that’s about as good as I can do, I am sorry, Ryan. Ryan Lynch - Keefe, Bruyette & Woods, Inc: Okay. I know this is lumpy but have you guys had any prepayments in the December quarter? I know it's hard to see but are there any that you can see in the near term coming forth [ph]?

David Gladstone

Management

Yes. We had about $2 million from one company, and I don’t know if anything special that’s coming in right now. Nobody has notified this. Anybody notified that you know? Yes, of course, Allen Edmonds. We don’t know whether we are going to be in the next round of that or not. As you know we bought that loan and that one is up for sale. It's been announced that Brentwood is going to be the buyer. So we will get a payoff on that and we maybe in on the other side and we may not there. Brentwood has got a lot of people that want that piece of paper including some of their limited partners. Ryan Lynch - Keefe, Bruyette & Woods, Inc: Okay. And then the $41 million of repayment you had in the September quarter. Were any of those sales of syndicated investments and would you guys consider selling any portion of your syndicated portfolio considering the strengths we have seen in the syndicated market lately.

David Gladstone

Management

Yes. We always look at those think should we sell them to trigger some gains. But no reason to do that right now. We have got plenty of money to invest and so it's better to hold those. We have gotten good returns on those over a pretty good long period of time now. And we are now almost all second lien transactions there. And the second lien marketplace is hot as a pistol right now. We are seeing second liens go for 750 over LIBOR. We are not buying at that rate, but every now and then we have a relationship with a senior syndicated group that we are able to get pieces of, better deals on that. So, again, that marketplace as you probably read, has billions of dollars going in every week into that marketplace. So it is very competitive now and lots of funds are picking up those second liens as well as the first liens that are trading at 350 over LIBOR. Ryan Lynch - Keefe, Bruyette & Woods, Inc: Okay. And then one final one. With your guys ability to now co-invest your other funds, do you see any change in the size in EBITDA of the companies you guys are targeting? Do you guys expect that to grow at all since you guys can now do, maybe, bigger loans and kind of spread that to all your different funds.

David Gladstone

Management

That’s exactly right and that’s why we have that ability now to invest with Gladstone Capital. We don’t invest with either one of our real estate investment trusts. So Gladstone Investment and Gladstone Capital can co-invest together and we do look at that. We are seeing larger deals with larger investment opportunities. Some of those are small deals and we split those anyway because the transaction is a transaction that will do a rollup. That is they will buy one company and then they plan to buy two or three more. And we know that they are going to need more money and so as a result we figure we could probably go up to about $40 million between the two companies, and feel relatively comfortable at that level. So that’s what we are looking at as larger transactions and I think you will see larger transactions as time goes on and I think you will see follow-on investments in which both funds are investing. So there is a good opportunity for us to do larger transactions together. Some of the transactions are very equity oriented and we have tried to stay away from that. They are very heavy equity oriented deals in Gladstone Capital and let those to Gladstone Investments. But I think there is a good opportunity for us to do larger transactions and we are bidding on and working on larger deals now.

Operator

Operator

(Operator Instructions) All right. There are no more questions at the present time so I would like to turn the call back over to Mr. Gladstone for any closing remarks.

David Gladstone

Management

Well, thank you all for tuning in and you can obviously listen to this. There is a replay that will come up. And we appreciate you all for calling in. That’s the end of this call.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.