Howard Levkowitz
Analyst · Oppenheimer. Your line is open
Thanks, Katie. I’m here with our TCPC team. And we thank everyone for participating on our call today. I will start with an overview of our performance in 2019; and then our CFO, Paul Davis, will review our financial results. After Paul’s comments, I will provide some closing remarks before opening the call to your questions.Beginning with our key accomplishments in 2019, which are summarized on Slide 4 of our presentation. First, we leveraged both our long-standing relationships with borrowers and deal sources, and the power of BlackRock platform to identify attractive investment opportunities. For all of 2019, we invested $700 million in 45 investments, almost 45% of which came from existing portfolio companies.We also continue to emphasize portfolio diversification. Our average portfolio company investment was just $15.7 million or less than 1% of total investments as of December 31, 2019. Second, we generated $94.9 million of net interest income, a slight increase from 2018, despite the pressure on yields in 2019 from a decline in LIBOR. We also continued our track record of covering our regular dividend every quarter for nearly 8 years. Third, we continue to seek debt financing on attractive and shareholder-friendly terms.Toward this effort, we successfully issued a total of $200 million of notes due 2024 at a rate of 3.9%. This is significantly lower than the 5.25% convertible notes that matured in December, and we also reduced the rate on our SVCP credit facility by 25 basis points. Finally, in connection with our shareholders’ approval of an increase in our regulatory leverage limitation early in 2019, we reduced the management fee to 1% on assets financed with leverage greater than 1 to 1. We reduced the incentive fee rate to 17.5% and we reduced the hurdle rate to 7%, while maintaining our cumulative total return hurdle, which is one of the only such structures in the industry.Before moving on to our fourth quarter highlights, I would like to address the year-over-year decline in our net asset value. The write-off of our investment in Fidelis accounted for almost all of this decline. On our last 2 quarterly earnings calls, we described several company-specific challenges that Fidelis faced in the increasingly competitive cybersecurity industry. At the time of our initial underwriting more than 4 years ago, Fidelis is operating in a high-growth industry with the strong client base.The company was well capitalized with a low loan-to-value. However, the owners and management team failed to sufficiently react to the shift in industry dynamics that accelerated in the last several years. Utilizing our extensive turnaround experience, our team worked alongside the sponsor and the management team to try to resolve these issues, but ultimately, decided to exit rather than to invest further in the company.We are not satisfied with this result, but believe the challenges faced by Fidelis were distinct and are not indicative of any broader macroeconomic issues or other trends.Moving to a few highlights from the quarter. As shown on Slide 6, we earned net investment income of $0.38 per share, outearning our dividend by $0.02. And today, we declared a first quarter dividend of $0.36 per share payable on March 31 to shareholders of record as of March 17.Additionally, we delivered another strong quarter of deployments, totaling $142 million. Dispositions in the quarter were $152 million. Turning to Slide 7 of the presentation, at year-end, our portfolio had a fair market value of $1.6 billion, 92% of which was in senior secured debt. In constructing our portfolio, we have consistently focused on seniority as well as diversification.As of December 31, our largest position represented only 4% of the portfolio, and taken together, our 5 largest positions represented less than 17% of the portfolio. Furthermore, as the chart on the left side of Slide 7 illustrates, our recurring income is distributed across a diverse set of portfolio companies.We are not reliant on income from any one portfolio company. In fact, on an individual company basis, well over half of our portfolio companies each contribute less than 1% to our recurring income. Our portfolio continues to be predominantly floating rate with an emphasis on first lien exposure. At yearend, 92% of our debt investments were floating rate and 81% consists of first lien exposure, as demonstrated on Slide 8.I would now like to take a minute to provide more detail on our investment approach, which has remained consistent throughout our team’s 2 decades of investing in middle-market companies. We continue to leverage our deep industry knowledge and experience in addition to the expanded access to deal flow and additional resources of the broader BlackRock platform to identify attractive investment opportunities.To this point, deployment activity in the fourth quarter included 10 new loans, 4 of which were with existing borrowers. Follow-on investments in existing portfolio companies continue to be an important source of investment opportunities. In 2019, nearly half of our new investments came from existing borrowers.From a portfolio risk management perspective, these are credits we know and understand well. We believe these opportunities reflect the strength of our borrower relationships and the value we deliver to them beyond just capital. We also continue to focus on investments where we lead our co-lead negotiations, which allow us to set deal terms with solid creditor protections.Our investments in the fourth quarter demonstrate our unique access to deal flow as well as our ability to drive terms in the investments we underwrite. Our largest investment in the quarter was a $19 million senior secured first lien term loan to Barri Financial Group. Barri presented a compelling investment opportunity. The company has a 35-year operating history as a leading provider of diversified consumer financial services to the rapidly growing and often underserved Hispanic community.We led a group of 3 lenders, allowing us to negotiate deal terms and loan documents to include creditor protections, taking into account the diversified nature of the business. We also provided a significant follow-on investment with a $14 million senior secured first lien term loan to Snow Software, increasing our total loan size to $29 million. The company is the largest dedicated developer of software asset management solutions.Snow Software helps companies optimize the significant dollars they invest in enterprise software applications. We originally provided Snow with a first lien term loan in February 2019. Since that time, the company has significantly outperformed relative to budget and our underwriting assumptions. The incremental financing we provided in the fourth quarter will support Snow Software’s inorganic growth strategy. Overall investments in the fourth quarter demonstrate our emphasis on building a diverse portfolio with exposure to a variety of industries and our disciplined approach to underwriting.Our 2 decades of experience through multiple cycles reminds us of the importance of investing in companies and industries that can perform consistently throughout economic cycles. Dispositions in the quarter totaled $152 million that includes the payoff of our $29 million loan to KPC Healthcare, our $26 million loan to Bond International Software and our $19million loan to Tradeshift.New investments during the quarter had a weighted average effective yield of 9.6%. Investments we exited had a weighted average effective yield of 11.4%, as several higher-yielding positions were either repaid or reduced. The overall effective yield on our debt portfolio at quarter end was 10.3% compared to 10.6% at the end of last quarter, primarily as a result of the decline in LIBOR. Our portfolio is not immune to downward pressure on yields resulting from the decline in LIBOR. However, we remain focused on evaluating each investment on its own unique merits and selecting appropriately priced credits that produce strong risk-adjusted returns for our shareholders.As shown on Slides 9 and 10, respectively, we’ve returned in excess of $11 per share in dividends and outperformed the Wells Fargo BDC Index by 23% since our IPO.Now I will turn the call over to Paul, who will discuss our financial results.