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TriplePoint Venture Growth BDC Corp. (TPVG)

Q1 2016 Earnings Call· Mon, May 9, 2016

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to TriplePoint Venture Growth's First Quarter Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] This conference call is being recorded and a replay of the call will be available as an audio webcast on the TriplePoint Venture Growth website. I would now like to turn the call over to Harold Zagunis, Chief Financial Officer of TriplePoint Venture Growth. Mr. Zagunis, please go ahead.

Harold Zagunis

Analyst

Thank you, William. And thank you everyone for joining us today. We are pleased to share with you our results for the first quarter. Here with me are Jim Labe, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of the Board; and Sajal Srivastava, President and Chief Investment Officer. Before I turn the call over to Jim, I would like to direct your attention to the customary Safe Harbor disclosure in our press release regarding forward-looking statements, and remind you that during this call we will make certain statements that relate to future events or the Company's future performance or financial condition, which may be considered forward-looking statements under federal securities laws. We ask that you refer to our most recent filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission for important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from these statements. We do not undertake any obligation to update our forward-looking statements or projections unless required by law. To obtain copies of our latest SEC filings, please visit our website at www.tpvg.com. With that, I'll turn it over to Jim.

Jim Labe

Analyst

Thanks, Harold, and welcome everyone to our first quarter earnings call. As many of you know this past March marked the second anniversary of our Company's initial public offering and we are proud to share some of the highlights for the past 2 years before getting to this quarter. Specifically, in 2 short years, we've delivered dividends to our shareholders of $3.02 per share. We funded $317 million worth of loan and that was after acquiring our initial $124 million portfolio. We had an average of $30 million to $40 million in customer loan fundings each quarter. We more than doubled our customer base from 16 to 34 customers, and our investments from 41 to 90. We delivered a consistent weighted average portfolio yield of more than 14.3% per quarter. And all of that was without the benefits or inclusion of any customer pre-payment. Speaking of pre-payments, we also had more than $130 million worth of customer pre-payments which nicely boosted the yields above 14.3% in the quarters that they occurred. We are very proud of this 2 year track record and the strategy behind it which made this possible. The strategy is reflected in our first quarters result as well and we continue to focus on a few key areas including adding some very exciting venture growth stage customer and growing and managing the portfolio. Our reputation and approach have always differentiated us in this market and our pipeline is extending with opportunities to finance some totally robust and leading venture growth stage companies. I'd now like to share some highlight to the first quarter. These include some $73 million worth of sign venture growth stage term sheets. That's at the sponsor level TriplePoint Capital. Some $90 million worth of new debt financing commitments. Almost 60 million in customer…

Sajal Srivastava

Analyst

Thank you, Jim, and good afternoon everyone. We continue to see strong demand for venture growth stage lending, given our large and growing pipeline having signed $73 million of term sheets at TriplePoint Capital in Q1, and having closed $90 million of new commitments at TPVG with 3 new companies including Jet.com which is a very high profile next generation e-commerce marketplace started by Marc Lore, the former Founder and CEO of diapers.com which he successfully sold to amazon.com. Jet has raised more than $0.5 billion of equity capital from investors including Accel Partners, New Enterprise Associates, Bain Capital, Norwest Venture Partners, Google, Alibaba, Fidelity and others. Farfetch which is a global online marketplace for luxury fashion items that enables individual high-end fashion boutiques and high-end luxury brands to sell their products online. The company has raised more than $300 million of equity capital from investors including Index Ventures, Vitruvian Partners, Condé Nast, DST Global, Temasek and others. As you may have seen, Farfetch announced just last week that they raised $110 million of equity capital in addition to our debt financing. ForgeRock which is a next generation identity and access management software company that has developed a unified platforms spending multiple landscapes including the cloud, mobile device and on-premise with over 100 customers including companies such as GEICO, Morningstar and Vodafone as well as the governments of Norway, Canada and Belgium. The company has raised more than $50 million of equity financing from Accel Partners, Foundation Capital and Meritech Capital. During Q1 we funded $56.4 million of debt investments to 7 companies in total and acquired warrants valued at $700,000 in 6 companies. All 3 of our new customers in the quarter drew a portion of their commitments at close. We also had 3 customers prepay a total of…

Harold Zagunis

Analyst

Thank you, Sajal. For the first quarter, our total investment and other income was $11.1 million. As noted earlier, this represented a weighted average portfolio yield of 15.7%, of which 10.6% was from coupon payments, 0.7% was from the accretion of upfront facility fees and warrants, 3% was from the accretion of end-of-term payments, and 1.4% was from prepayment. Our yield this quarter excluding prepayments was 14.3%. Our expenses this quarter were $4.4 million. Our base management fee was $1.4 million. Our debt expenses were $1.8 million and our administrative and general expenses were $1.2 million. As Jim mentioned given our best-in-class fee structure, the total requirement under the investment income component provides with no incentive fees payable except to the extent that 20% of the cumulative net increase and net assets resulting from operations since our IPO exceeds the cumulative incentive fees accrued end or paid since our IPO. Given our unrealized losses this quarter, we did not earn any incentive fee which resulted in $1.3 million of additional income or $0.08 per share to our shareholders. Our net investment income and core investment income was $6.7 million. I’ll remind you that core net investment income is a non-GAAP financial measure and is provided in addition too but not as a substitution for net investment income. For a reconciliation of core net investment income to net investment income, please see the press release we issued this afternoon. On an annualized return basis, our net investment income and core net investment income represented an 11.6% return on average net assets. This quarter we had net realized losses on our investment of $651,000 or $0.04 per share which were primarily due to the termination of our warrants in Hayneedle and Jasper as a result of their acquisitions, as all as the…

Jim Labe

Analyst

Thanks again Harold. At this point, we will be happy to take your questions. Operator, can you please open the lines?

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] And our first question comes from Joe Mazzoli with Wells Fargo Securities. Your line is open.

Joe Mazzoli

Analyst

Good afternoon and thank you for taking my questions. The first question relates to Virtual Instruments and of course, this seems to be very favorable outcome with the merger and the question relates to, if you can provide some more color on how this loan was originally structured maybe a loan to value. And then also how are you able to influence the merger process even as the company was forced to lay off employees midst to difficult times.

Sajal Srivastava

Analyst

Sure Joe, this is Sajal. So in general, our approach given the way we work with our select investors is to be collaborative. So I'd sum up that our process with virtual was highly coordinated with not only the venture investors and the board net members but also the exact team as well. So I’d say this was particularly hands on engaged with all those constituents managing through the various options and ultimately the sale to low dynamics which again, we felt was a very positive outcome especially given the outlook for the combined company. I don't have on the top of my hand what our LTD values were at the time of our loan, but we can look back and follow up with you on that.

Joe Mazzoli

Analyst

Okay, great. Thank you for that. And the next in relation to unfunded commitments, of course, certainly some progress in terms of leveraging the book a bit here especially on a net basis. Unfunded commitments still close to about 200 million. As you continue to grow the portfolio and maybe some slower repayments in the coming quarter you mentioned, do you anticipate lowering the unfunded commitments that you have and do you think that will be possible especially as you are originating new loans? Or maybe that’s not needed.

Sajal Srivastava

Analyst

Yes. It’s a good question. So I think our priority is disciplined portfolio growth to be at 0.3 for a couple of quarters. It's little disappointing for us and so our goal is to lever up the business and again to return to our target leverage ratio. We had a great quarter for fundings in Q1 with almost $60 million as Jim mentioned. So I think we are least focused on managing, so to speak, unfunded. We do want to keep the mixture that we have, funding capacity to meet all of our unfunded commitments which we absolutely do. But I think as you’ve seen in the past, we generally have - or generally expect 75% of our unfunded commitments to be utilized and so we had 30 expire in Q1 and generally we expect to have a fair amount expire over the rest of this year. And so we are more focused again on getting the funded assets up and we think Q2 will be a good quarter for net portfolio growth given that we are not contemplating any prepays and we are expecting to continue to be in our fundings of $30 million to $60 million per quarter.

Joe Mazzoli

Analyst

Okay, great. And just one last one from me. What were the three investments that primarily led to the $13 million write-down?

Sajal Srivastava

Analyst

Sure. There were the three names that I mentioned. So it was HouseTrip, Virtual Instruments, and Intermodal.

Joe Mazzoli

Analyst

Great. Thank you, guys.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] And we have a question from Jordan Hymowitz with Philadelphia Financial. Your line is now open. And Jordan Hymowitz, your line is open.

Jordan Hymowitz

Analyst

Thank you. The Virtual Instrument acquisition happened after the quarter, so does that mean part of the unrealized loss would be marked that because of the acquisition?

Jim Labe

Analyst

No, again, based on the contemplated structure of the merger and of the new loans, we took that into account when valuing it as of the end of Q1. I think as the company performs and its outlooks and time passes, we’d expect the loans to creed up over time.

Jordan Hymowitz

Analyst

Okay. I was confused. I missed the first 5 minutes of the call but I thought the acquisition happened with the debt at par.

Jim Labe

Analyst

Correct, the company – sorry, low dynamics assumed our loans in full including the end of term payments. And the marked down in Q1 reflected changes in the loan structure and lower yields on the loans. So more at market discount rates than anything else.

Jordan Hymowitz

Analyst

So the last accrued interest results, it basically marking the loan in a bigger discount to fair value, or accrued values what you’re saying?

Jim Labe

Analyst

No, I say the lower yields on the new loans with regard what our overall portfolio yield is results in a higher discount rate for the loan which ends up in the lower fair value.

Jordan Hymowitz

Analyst

And then my second question is, how much of that would have been in Orange at the end of the quarter? That's not a longer in Orange because it's assume.

Jim Labe

Analyst

Jordan at the end of Q1 it was still rated Orange. So the entire loan was rated Orange. We have not changed the credit rating of Virtual Instruments.

Jordan Hymowitz

Analyst

That’s my question is, how much of it would be in the $41 million that now let's assumed if I look at second quarter will be there?

Harold Zagunis

Analyst

The fair value of the Virtual Instrument loan as of 331 was $25.4 million.

Jordan Hymowitz

Analyst

So it would be about $16 million would be in Orange without that amount.

Harold Zagunis

Analyst

Correct. There are two other Orange loans which are Mine Candy and Intermodal

Jordan Hymowitz

Analyst

Got it. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

And there are no further questions at this time. I will turn the call now to the presenters.

Jim Labe

Analyst

Thanks. I'll close by again expressing my appreciation to all of you for your continued interest and support in TriplePoint Venture Growth. As I reminder we'll be hosting our Annual Meeting in Washington D.C. on May 17, and we’ll also be in attendance and presenting at the Dodd-Frank BDC Conference in New York City in June. Thanks and will speak with you all again soon.

Operator

Operator

This concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect.