John Kline
Analyst · KBW. Please go ahead
Thanks Rob. Since our last call market conditions have continued to materially improve. While direct lending deal flow continues to be sluggish. Secondary trading levels in the broader sub-investment grade credit markets have nearly returned to pre-COVID levels. This is particularly true in many of our core defensive growth sectors such as software, healthcare technology and technology enabled business services. While it’s hard to entirely explain the market strength clearly all risk assets are benefitting from tremendous liquidity in the system, the expectation for more Federal Reserve support and the fact, that the base rate is almost zero. Given these factors asset classes like direct lending broadly syndicated loans and high yield remain obvious places to receive enhanced yield over the risk-free rate. With regard to new deal flow, we believe the timing of new issue sponsor backed deals remains somewhat uncertain and is predicated on a decrease and infection rates and a resumption of more normal business activities. Turning to Page 16, we show how potential changes in the base rate could impact NMFC’s future earnings. As you can see the vast majority of our assets are floating rate loans with our liabilities evenly split between fixed and floating rate instruments? As of our last call in May, three months LIBOR was 54 basis points since then it has declined to 30 basis points as of June 30th and approximately 25 basis points today. While this decline has been in earnings headwind for our business in 2020, NMFC has benefitted from 1% LIBOR floors on 75% of its assets. Given where rates are today there is negligible downside from further rate decreases. Conversely, if rates rise overtime the earnings power of NMFC could materially improve. Page 17 addresses historical credit performance on the left side of page we show the current state of the portfolio where we have about $2.8 billion of investments at fair value. $71 million of which are non-accrual. This quarter as mentioned earlier a portion of our Benevis term loan was added to non-accrual representing $33.9 million of fair value. On the right side of page, we show NMFC’s cumulative credit performance since inception which shows that across nearly $8 billion of total investments, we have $600 million that have been placed on our watch list with $220 million of that amount migrating to non-accrual. Off the non-accruals only $74 million have become realized losses. The non-accruals that have not become credit losses represent about $145 million of cost. While some of these troubled names have risk of becoming permanently impaired. We do have optimism that overtime, with the ongoing support of our private equity group we’ll be able to take actions to achieve material credit recoveries and, in some cases, gains on these assets. Page 18 is a view of our credit performance based on underlying Portfolio Company of leverage relative to LTM EBITDA. As you can see the majority of our positions have shown performance that is very consistent with our underwriting projections exhibiting either very minor leverage increases or in many cases, leverage decreases. There are four names that have more than 2.5 turns of negative leverage drift; three of these names including UniTek, Edmentum and Benevis were covered in Rob’s comments. The fourth name is company CE, which is a marketing services business that has underperformed over the past 12 months due to various internal operational challenges, still company CE continues to receive sponsor support and has benefitted from recent management upgrades and strategic acquisitions. The chart on Page 19, tracks the company’s overall economic performance since its IPO. At the top of the page, we show that our net investment income has always covered our regular quarterly dividend. On the lower half of the page, we focus on below the line items. First, we look at realized gains and realized credit and other losses. As you can see looking at row highlighted in green. We’ve had success generating real economic gains every year through a combination of equity gains, portfolio company dividends and trading profits. Moving down the page, the orange section of the chart shows year-to-date realized losses of $36.2 million, $32.3 million of which were crystallized in Q1. In Q2, we’ve experienced just $3.9 million of additional realized losses related to our balance sheet deleveraging program which is now complete. As a result of this activity, we now have cumulative net realized losses since inception highlighted in blue of $16.7 million while we do everything in our power to avoid them, over the long-term we do expect to incur realized credit losses on our investment portfolio, which we hope to largely offset with realized gains just as we have historically accomplished throughout our nearly 10 years a public company. Looking further down the page, we show the material impact from unrealized portfolio mark downs of $187 million since inception and cumulative net realized and unrealized losses of $204 million highlighted in yellow. This bottom-line number represents a $49 million improvement compared to last quarter driven by the positive change in our portfolio of March that we discussed earlier in the presentation. We continue to believe that most of the cumulative unrealized loss is reflective of temporary marketing conditions and will recover in time. Page 20, presents a stock chart detailing NMFC’s performance since IPO. While the performance of our stock inclusive of our quarterly dividend has historically been very strong compared to relevant benchmarks. Over the past five months, NMFC’s stock price has had soft performers versus certain benchmarks. Still our overall track record remains strong relative to the high yield index and the index of BDC’s that we’ve followed since our IPO. Page 21 provides a final look at the stock performance compared to the individual stocks of our peers that have been public at least as long as we have. While we seek to improve our performance going forward, this chart shows that we remain a top performance among this cohort of competitors. Finally, we break down NMFC’s total return attribution since inception on Page 22. We’re in the far-right side of the page. We show that the core of our value creation has been cash distributions of $12.97 per share supported by consistent income from our defensive growth-oriented lending portfolio. Offsetting this dividend performance has been $2.45 per share decline in book value most of which has occurred in 2020 and the $2.01 per share decline related to the contraction of our price to book multiple since our IPO. As we’ve mentioned we believe that NMFC has good prospects to improve in both areas of underperformance while maintaining a compelling and consistent dividend. Turning to our investment activity tracker on Page 23, we show a detailed schedule of the sales and repayments which supported our post-COVID deleveraging plan. As you can see, we are able to exit a number of positions at or around par even during the height of the crisis. Additionally, we had two of our high quality COVID resistant portfolio companies repay as a result of M&A during the quarter. In aggregate, we raised $259 million of cash exiting assets in an average price of $98.1. While the quarter was highlighted by our exits, we did originate $49 million of assets primarily consisting of delay draw funding supporting M&A for our clients. Overall, we believe that the success of this deleveraging initiative is reflective of the quality and safety of our portfolio which is populated with loans, issued by a diverse group of highly defensive recession-resistant businesses. On Page 24, we have several detailed breakouts of NMFC’s industry exposure. The center of pie chart shows overall industry exposure while the charts on the right and left give more insight into the diversity within our services and healthcare verticals. As you can see, we have successfully avoided nearly all of the most troubled sectors while maintaining high exposure to the most defensive and structurally advantaged sectors within the US economy. On the lower half of the page, we show that the portfolio continues to have a high degree of first lien exposure with nearly 70% of our portfolio invested in senior oriented assets. Additionally, we present a breakout of risk ratings that match the heat maps shown at the beginning of our presentation. Finally as illustrated on Page 25, we have a diversified portfolio with our largest single name investment at 2.7% of fair value and the top 15 investments accounting for 34.5% of fair value. With that I’ll now turn it over to our CFO, Shiraz Kajee to discuss the financial statement and key financials metrics, Shiraz?