Grier Eliasek
Analyst · Barclays. Please go ahead with your question
Thank you, John. Our business continues to grow at a solid and prudent pace. Prospect has scaled to over $7 billion of assets and undrawn credit. Our team has reached approximately 100 professionals representing one of the largest dedicated middle-market credit groups in the industry. With our scale, longevity, experience and deep bench, we continue to focus on a diversified investment strategy that covers third-party private equity sponsor-related lending, direct non-sponsor lending, Prospect sponsored operating buyouts, Prospect sponsored financial buyouts, CLO structured credit, real estate yield investing, online lending, aircraft leasing and syndicated lending. At March 31, our controlled investments at fair value stood at 27.7% of our portfolio. This diversity allows us to source a broad range and high volume of opportunities, then select in a disciplined bottoms up manner the opportunities we deem to be the most attractive on a risk-adjusted basis. Our team typically evaluates thousands of opportunities annually and invests in a disciplined manner in a low single-digit percentage of such opportunities. Prospect’s originations in recent months have been well diversified across our nine origination strategies. Prospect originated nearly $3.2 billion of closed investments during the 2014 calendar year. Our non-bank structure gives us the flexibility to invest in multiple levels of the corporate capital stack, with a preference for secured lending and senior loans. At March 31, our portfolio at fair value consisted of 55.6% first lien, 19.4% second lien, 16.6% CLO structured credit with underlying first lien assets, 0.6% small business whole loan, 1.4% unsecured debt and 6.4% equity investments resulting in 92.2% of our investments being assets with underlying secured debt benefiting from borrower pledged collateral. Prospect’s approach is one that generates attractive risk adjusted yields and our debt investments were generating an annualized yield of 12.4% as of March 31, an increase of 0.1% from the prior quarter. We also hold equity positions and many transactions that can act as yield enhancers or capital gains contributors as such positions generate distributions. While the market has experienced some yield compression in the two past years, we have continued to prioritize first lien senior and secured debts with our originations to protect against downside risk, while still achieving above market yields through credit selection discipline and a differentiated origination approach. We believe such a yield compression may have stabilized recently due to trading valuation discounts for peer companies. Originations in the March quarter were $219 million across one new and several follow-on investments. We also experienced $108 million of repayments in exits from several other investments as a validation of our capital preservation objective. During the March quarter, our originations consisted of 46% third-party sponsor deals, 43% online lending, 7% real estate, 2% operating buyouts, 1% CLO structured credit, and 1% syndicated debt. As of March, 31, we held 132 portfolio companies with a fair value of $6.6 billion, demonstrating both a long-term increase in diversity, as well as the migration towards larger positions and larger portfolio companies. Our number of companies is down 4% and portfolio size is up 10% year-over-year. We also continue to invest in a diversified fashion across many different portfolio company industries, with no significant industry concentration, the largest is 10.2%. Our financial services controlled investments and CLO structured credit investments are performing well with typical annualized cash yields ranging from 15% to 30%. Because of declining unemployment rates and declining commodity prices over the last year, we believe the outlook for consumer credit is positive as we proceed through 2015, boding well for our financial services companies. To-date, we’ve made multiple investments in the real estate arena with our private REITs, largely focused on multi-family stabilized yield acquisitions with attractive 10-year financing. We hope to increase that activity with more transactions in the months to come. In the June 2014 fiscal year, we made three investments in non-controlled third-party sponsored backed companies. They brought our total investment in each such company to more than $100 million. In the last two quarters, we made another three such investments, demonstrating the competitive differentiation of our scaled balance sheet to close one-stop financing opportunities. We’ve also made multiple control investments that each individually aggregate more than $100 million in size. We may look to harvest certain controlled investments in 2015 at a hoped-for significant gain over our initial cost. Over the past two years, we’ve also entered the online lending industry with a focus on prime, near prime, and subprime consumer and small business borrowers. We intend on growing this investment strategy, which stands at approximately 375 million today, across multiple third-party and captive origination and underwriting platforms. Our online business, which includes attractive advance rate financing for certain assets is currently delivering an expected levered yield of approximately 18%. We expect in the next several weeks to focus on securitizations of multiple pools of such assets to diversify our funding and increase our returns. The majority of our portfolio consists of agented and self-originated middle-market loans. In general, we perceive the risk-adjusted reward and the current environment to be superior for agented and self-originated opportunities compared to the syndicated market causing us to prioritize our proactive sourcing efforts. Our differentiated call-center initiative continues to drive proprietary deal flow for our business. As the yield enhancement for our business, earlier this year, we launched an initiative to divest lower yielding loans from our balance sheet, thereby allowing us to rotate into higher-yielding assets and to expand our ability to close, scale one-stop investment opportunities with efficient pricing. We closed our first par value sale of a lower yielding asset recently in the June quarter and expect significant such sales this quarter and beyond as a potential earnings catalyst for the future. Our credit quality continues to be strong. Non-accruals as a percentage of total assets stood at approximately 0.5% at March 31. Our weighted average portfolio net leverage stood at 4.2 times EBITDA, and our weighted average EBITDA per portfolio company stood at $45 million. We have booked $93.5 million in originations so far in the current June quarter. Our advanced pipeline aggregates nearly $200 million in potential opportunities with additions expected boding well for the coming months. Thank you. I’ll now turn the call over to Brian.