Dwayne Louis Hyzak
Analyst · Raymond James
Thanks, Zach. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. We appreciate your participation on this morning's call. We hope that everyone is doing well. On today's call, David, Ryan and I will provide you with our key quarterly updates, after which we'll be happy to take your questions. We are pleased with our performance in the second quarter, which resulted in another quarter of strong operating results, highlighted by an annualized return on equity of 17.1%, DNII per share that continued to exceed the dividends paid to our shareholders, a new record for NAV per share for the 12th consecutive quarter and our largest realized gain in Main Street's history. We believe these continued strong results demonstrate the sustainable strength of our overall platform, the benefits of our differentiated and diversified investment strategies, the unique contributions of our asset management business and the continued underlying strength and quality of our portfolio companies, particularly those in our highly unique lower middle market investment strategy. We remain confident that our unique investment income and value creation drivers, together with our cost-efficient operations and conservative capital structure will allow us to continue to deliver superior results for our shareholders in the future. Our favorable results for the second quarter, combined with our current expectations for the third quarter resulted in our recommendations to our Board of Directors for our most recent dividend announcements, which I will discuss in more detail later. Our NAV per share increased in the quarter, primarily due to the impact of net fair value increases in our asset management business and our lower middle market investment portfolio and the accretive impact of our equity issuances in the quarter, which Ryan will discuss in more detail. The majority of our lower middle market portfolio companies continued their favorable performance, resulting in another quarter of strong dividend income contributions and continued net fair value appreciation in our lower middle market equity investments. As I discussed on our call last quarter and as David will discuss in more detail, we are pleased to have closed the partial exit of our investments in Heritage Vet Partners in the second quarter among the company's majority recapitalization with a new financial sponsor, resulting in the largest realized gain in Main Street's history and at a meaningful premium to our March 31 fair value. As noted in prior quarters, we have experienced underperformance in certain of our private loan portfolio companies, particularly those with direct consumer discretionary spending exposure, and this is having a negative impact on the contributions from our private loan portfolio. We continue to actively monitor these investments and are working with the portfolio companies to achieve the best possible outcome for each investment. Now turning to our investment activity. We are excited about the new and follow-on investments we made in our lower middle market portfolio companies during the quarter, which resulted in a net increase in lower middle market investments of $108 million. Our private loan investment activity in the quarter was slower than our expected normal quarterly activity, primarily due to lower overall levels of private equity industry investment activity, resulting in a net decrease in private loan investments of $35 million. David will discuss our investment activity for the quarter in more detail. Given our conservative capital structure and strong liquidity position, we remain very well positioned to continue the future growth of our investment portfolio, and we are excited about the current opportunities we are seeing, particularly those in our lower middle market investment strategy. We have also continued to produce positive results in our asset management business. The funds we advised through our external investment manager continued to experience favorable performance in the second quarter, resulting in significant incentive fee income for our asset management business for the 11th consecutive quarter and together with our recurring base management fees, a significant contribution to our net investment income. We remain excited about our plans for the external funds that we manage as we execute our investment strategies, and we are optimistic about the future performance of the funds and the attractive returns we are providing to the investors of each fund and about our strategy for growing our asset management business within our internally managed structure. As part of these efforts, we remain focused on growing the investment portfolio of MSC Income Fund, a publicly traded BDC advised by our external investment manager and our largest asset management business client through the increased current liquidity and path to additional debt capacity obtained through the fund's successful listing on the New York Stock Exchange and the related equity offering in January. In addition to deploying the fund's current liquidity into new private loan investments, we also continue to focus on maximizing the benefits of the fund's legacy lower middle market investment portfolio. We remain excited about the opportunity for significant future benefits to both the fund's shareholders and our asset management business as the fund executes its growth plans. Based upon our results for the second quarter, combined with our current outlook in each of our primary investment strategies and for our asset management business, earlier this week, our Board declared a supplemental dividend of $0.30 per share payable in September, representing our 16th consecutive quarterly supplemental dividend and regular monthly dividends for the fourth quarter of 2025 of $0.255 per share. The fourth quarter regular monthly dividends are payable in each of October, November and December and represent a 4% increase from the regular monthly dividends paid in the fourth quarter of 2024. The supplemental dividend for September is a result of our strong performance in the second quarter and will result in total supplemental dividends paid during the trailing 12-month period of $1.20 per share, representing an additional 40% paid to our shareholders in excess of our regular monthly dividends. We currently expect to recommend that our Board continue to declare future supplemental dividends to the extent DNII significantly exceeds our regular monthly dividends paid in future quarters, and we maintain a stable to positive NAV. Based upon our expectations for continued favorable performance in the third quarter, we currently anticipate proposing an additional significant supplemental dividend payable in December 2025. Now turning to our current investment pipeline. As of today, I would characterize our lower middle market investment pipeline as above average. Consistent with our experience in prior periods of broad economic uncertainty, we believe that the unique and flexible financing solutions that we can provide to lower middle market companies and their owners and management teams and our differentiated long-term to permanent holding periods represent an even more attractive solution to the needs of many lower middle market companies in the current economic environment, and we are confident in our expectations for strong lower middle market investment activity over the remainder of 2025. In addition, we have an increased number of existing portfolio companies that are actively executing on acquisition growth strategies that we hope will provide attractive follow-on investment opportunities for us in the near-term future and significant value creation opportunities for these portfolio companies in the longer-term future, consistent with the successes we've experienced with other portfolio companies. We also continue to be pleased with the performance of our private credit team and the significant growth they have provided for our private loan portfolio and our asset management business over the last few years. As of today, given the continued slower overall private equity industry investment activities, I would characterize our private loan investment pipeline as slightly below average. With that, I will turn the call over to David.