Earnings Call Transcript - NMFC Q4 2020

Operator, Operator

Good day and welcome to the New Mountain Finance Corporation Fourth Quarter 2020 Conference Call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Rob Hamwee, CEO. Please go ahead.

Robert Hamwee, CEO

Thank you, and good morning everyone, and welcome to New Mountain Finance Corporation’s Fourth Quarter Earnings Call for 2020. On the line with me here today are Steve Klinsky, Chairman of NMFC and CEO of New Mountain Capital; John Kline, President and COO of NMFC; and Shiraz Kajee, CFO of NMFC. Before diving into the business update, we do want to recognize that we continue to live through a public health crisis that is taking a significant human toll on our community, across our country and around the globe. We hope that everyone is staying safe and that you and your families remain in good health. Turning to business, Steve is going to make some introductory remarks, but before he does, I would like to ask Shiraz to make some important statements regarding today’s call.

Shiraz Kajee, CFO

Thanks, Rob. Good morning everyone. Before we get into the presentation, I would like to advise everyone that today’s call and webcast are being recorded. Please note that they are the property of New Mountain Finance Corporation and any unauthorized broadcast in any form is strictly prohibited. Information about the audio replay of this call is available in our February 24 earnings press release. I would also like to call your attention to the customary safe harbor disclosure in our press release and on Page 2 of the slide presentation regarding forward-looking statements. Today’s conference call and webcast may include forward-looking statements and projections and we ask that you refer to our most recent filings with the SEC for important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those statements and projections. We do not undertake to update our forward-looking statements or projections unless required to by law. To gain copies of our latest SEC filings and to access the slide presentation that we will be referencing throughout this call, please visit our website at www.newmountainfinance.com. At this time, I would like to turn the call over to Steve Klinsky, NMFC’s Chairman who will give some highlights beginning on Page 4 of the slide presentation. Steve.

Steven Klinsky, Chairman

Thanks, Shiraz. It's great to be able to speak to all of you today as both the Chairman of NMFC and as a fellow shareholder. New Mountain as an organization has always sought to explicitly emphasize downside safety and risk controls, as well as upside returns, and therefore has emphasized defensive growth industries that can best survive unexpected market downturns. New Mountain started with private equity 20 years ago and now manages over $30 billion of assets, including both private equity and credit. Risk control was part of our founding mission. Happily, we have never had a PE portfolio company bankruptcy or missed an interest payment in the history of our private equity effort. Similarly, as of today, we have had only $79 million of realized default losses or just a 0.4% loss rate. And the over $12 billion of total debt we have bought since beginning our credit arm in 2008. Meanwhile, we have had significant gains, both in private equity and credit. NMFC has paid $839 million of total cash dividends since NMFC went public in 2011, or about $13.50 of dividends per share in all. New Mountain was built with defensive growth industries and risk control in mind long before COVID hit. The great bulk of NMFC's loans are in areas that might best be described as repetitive, tech-enabled business services such as enterprise software. Our companies often have large installed client bases of repeat users who depend on their service day-in and day-out. These are the types of defensive growth industries that we think are the right ones at all times, and particularly attractive in difficult times. With that background, let me turn to the specifics of this earnings report on Page 4. Net investment income for the quarter ended December 31 was $0.30 per share, fully covering our dividend of $0.30 per share and in line with our prior guidance. The regular Q4 2020 dividend of $0.30 per share was paid in cash on December 30. Every borrower paid their interest in Q4 and no new borrowers were placed on non-accrual this quarter. We currently do not anticipate any additional portfolio companies going on non-accrual in Q1. Our December 31 net asset value was $12.62 per share, an increase of $0.38 per share, or 3.1% from the September 30 NAV of $12.24 per share. The regular dividend for Q1 2021 was again set at $0.30 per share and will be payable on March 31, 2021 to holders of record as of March 17. New Mountain as the manager has been highly supportive of NMFC and has significant resources, including a strong balance sheet to further support NMFC. I and other members of New Mountain continue to be the largest shareholder of the company with ownership of approximately 12%. Insiders have added approximately one million shares to our holdings since the onset of the crisis. In conclusion, we remain proud of the work that our team did in carefully building a portfolio to withstand the crisis and I remain confident in NMFC’s own competitive advantages and future prospects. With that, let me turn the call back to Rob Hamwee, CEO of NMFC.

Robert Hamwee, CEO

Thank you, Steve. While key quarterly highlights and our standard review of NMFC are detailed on Pages 5 and 6 respectively, once again this quarter, I would like to focus my time on getting into more detail on the crisis’ impact on asset quality, net asset value and leveraged migration and net investment income. As detailed on Page 7. In order to assess how the crisis is impacting our borrowers, we continued to have extensive conversations with both company management and sponsors. Based on those discussions, we have updated each of the portfolio companies' scores on the two metrics we use to generate our overall risk rating. As a reminder, the first metric COVID exposure ranks from one to four, the degree to which a company is currently being directly impacted by COVID. The second metric overall company strength is a combination of three sub-metrics: pre-COVID business performance, liquidity and balance sheet strength, and sponsor support, which we rank on a scale of A to C. Based on our rankings for the two metrics and the resulting risk rating for each company, we once again plotted the overall portfolio accordingly to create the risk rating heat maps. The updated heat maps show that risk migration has been positive as summarized on Pages 8 and 9, with over $200 million migrating from either orange to yellow or yellow to green and no issuers showing a negative migration. Overall we are pleased with the asset quality and credit trends across the portfolio. The updated heat map is shown on Page 10 as you can further see from the heat map, given our portfolio's strong buys towards defensive sectors like software, business and federal services, and tech-enabled healthcare, we believe the vast majority of our assets are very well-positioned to continue to perform no matter how the public health and economic landscape develops. We continue to spend significant time and energy on our remaining red and orange names and believe if the impact of the pandemic recedes in the months ahead, the majority of those credits will benefit materially. Our largest orange asset Benevis continues to make progress towards the value recovery as the impact of our new executive chairman, new CEO and our fully engaged PE operating team begins to be reflected in the operating metrics of the business. We have increasing confidence that the strategic plan that has been developed has a reasonable likelihood of achieving full principal recovery and even potential gains in the coming years. Page 11 outlines the quarter's net asset value increase and the path back to pre-COVID book value. In Q4, we recovered an additional $0.38 per share of the dramatic decline we witnessed in Q1, with the largest driver of this quarter's recovery representing $0.23 being the continuing market impact in our green names as spreads for well-performing credits in our core verticals continued to decline. The other significant driver accounting for $0.18 was a further recovery in our restructured and equity portfolio, particularly in our net lease rate, where large declines in cap rates led to material asset appreciation. Looking forward, we believe we should see further positive price movement in our green and yellow rated loans which, if our risk assessment is correct, should continue to recover in the coming quarters as the world normalizes. Even in our orange and red current pay securities while risks are clearly elevated, we would expect the significant majority of those to continue to pay full interest and principal and ultimately move back towards par. We also believe there is further opportunity across our restructured and equity portfolio for book value recovery in the quarters to come, particularly in Edmentum, Benevis and UniTek. As the slide illustrates, if the yielding assets returned to par, we would require $16 million of value increase across the restructured and equity portfolio to return to our pre-COVID book value. Given the underlying operating trends in a number of these businesses, we believe this is achievable in the medium term as $16 million represents just a 6% increase from the current holding value of these securities. Turning to Page 12, Edmentum had a noteworthy fourth quarter. The ongoing strength in the business allowed the company to sell a significant stake at an attractive valuation. As you may recall, Edmentum is a leading provider of K-12 online learning programs. In 2012 and NMFC invested $31 million Edmentum second lien term loans to support the merger of Plato Learning with Archipelago Learning. Softness in the business began in 2014 due to a significant change in competitive dynamics within the industry and a lack of product investment in innovation. In 2015, NMFC partially exited its position and became a meaningful equity owner of the business. NMFC and other equity owners installed the new management team and invested in a multi-year significant product refresh, leading to a turnaround in performance, and NMFC put further capital into the business at this point significantly increasing our ownership. COVID has been a further tailwind driving both immediate and sustainable growth. In December 2020, the exit of a Chicago-based private investment firm acquired a 50% stake in the company, deleveraging the balance sheet and resulting in a full recovery plus significant gains for NMFC. NMFC chose to reinvest a meaningful portion of the proceeds, and we made a significant shareholder due to our strong conviction in the continued growth of the company and the likelihood of material further value creation. In summary, we have invested a total of approximately $78 million into Edmentum prior to the recent sale and have now received cumulative gross cash proceeds from this transaction of $117 million inclusive of accrued pick of $60 million of which we will reinvest $89 million. We look forward to keeping you all updated on what we hope will be further positive developments on this important and exciting portfolio company in the quarters ahead. Page 13 shows that we continue to manage our statutory leverage ratio at a very comfortable level. Growth set for the fourth quarter was basically flat. So the increase in net asset value drove a further reduction in our next statutory leverage ratio, which is now down to 1.2 times. We continue to have a number of portfolio companies currently inactive sale processes, the anticipated culmination of which will give us additional financial flexibility to either reinvest further or deleverage. At this point we only have $50 million of undrawn DDPL exposure. Our intention is to manage the business at a statutory leverage ratio, net of cash of 1.02 to 1.25 times. While our first priorities in this environment continue to be asset quality and balance sheet strength, we also want to continue to maximize net investment income while preserving enterprise safety. To that end, quarterly net investment income is stable at $0.30 in Q4. We continue to maintain confidence absent a dramatic change in market conditions in our ability to generate approximately $0.30 of NII per quarter going forward to support the dividend. With that, I will turn it over to John Kline to discuss market conditions and other elements of the business. John?

John Kline, President and COO

Thanks Rob. Throughout the course of last year, despite the ongoing COVID health crisis, direct lending market conditions steadily improved. While there are pockets of ongoing stress as a result of the pandemic, we see robust multiples and strong prospective sponsor interest in high-quality defensive companies. After a seasonally slow January, we have seen the pipeline continue to build week over week, leading us to believe that we will experience solid portfolio activity going into the spring. Secondary trading levels in the broader subinvestment grade credit markets, which we view as a gauge of market health, have nearly returned and in some cases surpassed pre-COVID levels. Companies in our core defensive growth sectors, such as software, healthcare technology, and tech-enabled business services are performing particularly well. We believe these sectors will continue to attract significant capital in 2021 as investors seek to maximize exposure to forward-thinking companies that will be well-positioned in a post-COVID world. While we've seen some pressure on yields and private credit, the returns in our marketplace remain highly attractive compared to most other credit asset classes. Turning to Page 15, we now 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. NMFC's current balance sheet mix offers our shareholders consistent and stable earnings even if LIBOR remains under 1%. If base rates rise above 1% as the economy normalizes post-COVID, there is meaningful upside to NMFC's net investment income. For example, assuming our current asset and liability mix, if LIBOR reaches 2%, our annual NII would increase by 9%, or $0.10 per share. At 3% LIBOR, earnings would increase by 19%, or $0.23 per share.

Shiraz Kajee, CFO

Thank you John. For more details on our financial results and today's commentary, please refer to the form 10K that was filed last evening with the SEC. Now I'd like to turn your attention to slide 26. The portfolio had approximately $3 billion in investments at fair value at December 31, 2020 and total assets of $3.1 billion. We had total liabilities of $1.9 billion of which total statutory debt outstanding was $1.5 billion, excluding $300 million of drawn SBA guaranteed debentures. Net asset value of $1.2 billion, or $12.62 per share, was up $0.38 on the prior quarter. At December 31, our statutory debt to equity ratio was 1.24:1 and, as mentioned, net of available cash in the balance sheet the pro forma leverage ratio would be 1.20:1. On slide 27, we show our historical leverage ratios and our historical NAV adjusted for the cumulative impact of special dividends. On slide 28, we show our quarterly income statement results. We believe that our NII is the most appropriate measure of our quarterly performance. This slide highlights that while realized and unrealized gains and losses can be volatile below the line, we continue to generate stable net investment income above the line. Focusing on the quarter ended December 31, 2020, we earned total investment income of $67.8 million, an increase of $2.5 million from the prior quarter primarily due to higher fee income. Total net expenses were approximately $38.7 million, a $2.2 million increase from the prior quarter consistent with the increase in investment income. As in prior quarters, the investment advisor continues to waive certain management fees. The effective annualized management fee this quarter was 1.35%. It is important to note that the investment advisor cannot recoup fees previously waived. This results in fourth-quarter NII of $29.1 million or $0.30 per weighted average share which covered our Q4 regular dividend of $0.30 per share. As a result of the net unrealized appreciation in the quarter, so the quarter ended December 31, 2020, we had an increase in net assets resulting from operations of $66.1 million.

Robert Hamwee, CEO

Thanks Shiraz. In closing, we are increasingly optimistic about the prospects for NMFC in the months and years ahead. Our long-standing focus on lending to defensive growth businesses supported by strong sponsors should continue to serve us well. While risks are more elevated than in the past and we cannot unequivocally discount more challenging scenarios, we believe our model is well-suited for the current environment. We once again thank you for your continuing support and interest in these difficult times, wish you all good health and look forward to maintaining an open and transparent dialogue with all of our stakeholders in the days ahead. I will now turn things back to the operator to begin Q&A.

Operator, Operator

We will now begin the question-and-answer session. Our first question comes from Finian O’Shea with Wells Fargo Securities. Please go ahead.

Finian O’Shea, Analyst

Hi everyone. Good morning. First question on the UniTek upgrade, Robert, John it felt like that was last quarter the one major situational name that you were a bit more measured on your ability to recover and so forth. So could you provide and there's also a significant amount to be recovered there still. So I guess a two-part question can you expand a little bit on what happened there and any change in outlook on recovery potential.

Robert Hamwee, CEO

Yes. Absolutely. Finn I'm going to turn that one over to John as he's really more day-to-day on UniTek. John?

John Kline, President and COO

Sure. Thanks Finn. Yes, I think as we've articulated in the past, 2019 and 2020 were both tough years for UniTek. We had some bad contracts and we also had a business unit that was in a perpetual state of decline and I think what's really happened in 2020 is we got out of the business that was declining and we've also completely exited the bad contract. So now at UniTek we have a collection of businesses that are focused on really one end market and that end market is fiber construction throughout the southeastern and southern states of the U.S. and those business units that make up UniTek right now are all we believe in growth industries, they're all healthy, they're all operating reasonably well. Some units are operating very well right now. So essentially that's really been the change in the complexion of UniTek. We've had to support the business throughout these changes with a little bit more capital, but we do feel like it's a good investment to make in these markets which are growing and in the remaining businesses which are, as I said, healthy. Does that help?

Finian O’Shea, Analyst

Yes.

Robert Hamwee, CEO

Yes. I think the only thing I would add to that is that UniTek was affected by COVID-19, but as the situation has improved, the company has been able to operate at a much higher utilization rate compared to earlier in 2020.

Finian O’Shea, Analyst

Sure. That's helpful. Thank you. And then just a question on outlook for activity; we're hearing a lot from the market analysts and some of your peers that a REFI wave is coming. What's your take on that and in addition do you see that as well can you comment on your pipeline today?

Robert Hamwee, CEO

Yes sure. So I think we definitely are in the midst of a REFI wave in the syndicated market; to what degree that penetrates the private credit market it certainly remains to be seen. We're not seeing it right now, but I think we have to all acknowledge that if conditions stay attractive and spreads compress, we would expect to see some amount of REFI activity across the portfolio. The flip side to that is we are seeing pretty meaningful M&A activity. So from a pipeline perspective, it's quite robust right now.

Finian O’Shea, Analyst

Okay. Awesome and just the final question that came to mind, also from your market conditions slide. So some of these businesses, enterprise software such as a major category of yours that's obviously been high, become a higher quality part of the market in recent years and it was accentuated by COVID. Do you see this trend like the strength in business software? Do you see that impacting your market like leveraged, private credit solutions for these businesses as they go up and become higher quality? I think you mentioned that private equity money certainly still continues to find its way there or seek those businesses, but is that necessarily a good thing for you just sort of if that's something you currently see or something down the line you see?

Rob Hamwee, CEO

Listen, I think we've been seeing it for a number of years. I mean, I think the notion of lending to an asset like an enterprise software business has changed a lot in 10 years. So that's been an ongoing evolutionary thing that we have seen. I agree with you that COVID has even further cast light onto the quality of those business models and why they're attractive entities to lend to, but I don't think soon we're seeing a step function change in the overall market from a lending perspective. I think there's, for last number of years, there's been plenty of guys who like to lend to those businesses. The good ones have always been competitive to lend to. We've obviously got our stake in the ground and have good share in that market and I would not expect that to change and I do think what's good for us is we will continue to see increasing capital flows into the buyouts of those business models. So our addressable market just continues to expand as private equity funds in general become larger and then dedicate large increasing percentages of their fund sizes to the industries that we like and that we focus on.

Finian O’Shea, Analyst

Okay Rob. Thanks so much. That's all for me.

Robert Hamwee, CEO

Great. Thanks Fin.

Operator, Operator

Our next question comes from Ryan Lynch with KBW. Please go ahead.

Ryan Lynch, Analyst

Hey, good morning. Thanks for taking my questions. First one I had; I don't really anticipate you guys changing the types of businesses and sectors that you focus on going forward coming out of this downturn, but one question I did have was do you anticipate changing kind of where you would potentially look to invest in the capital structures of those businesses being that we are now on kind of the upswing and coming out of the credit cycle versus two or three years ago, but it was investing in anticipation of a credit cycle hitting? Just any thoughts on that would be helpful.

Robert Hamwee, CEO

Yes. It's a good question. I think what we're going to continue to do is really focus on a bottoms up approach to businesses, specific industries and specific companies that we know really well through PE and that we think are great credits, and I think the place in the capital structure will be more function of where the opportunity is, whether it be risk-adjusted opportunities. I wouldn't say we're going to say now we're at a different time in the cycle, so we should be 10% more weighted to junior security. That is really not what we're going to do. I think we want to get exposure in the best risk-adjusted way possible to one of the best business models that we know the best. And so I would not expect us to target a different position in the capital structure based on our read of where we may or may not be in the credit cycle.

Ryan Lynch, Analyst

Okay. Understood. Congratulations on the Edmentum investment. That's obviously been an investment you guys have been with for a long period of time.

Unidentified Company Representative, Representative

Yes. Thank you.

Ryan Lynch, Analyst

I'm just curious on kind of the outlook of that business and based on this transaction you guys kind of recommitted to that business and recommitted to that business at kind of bottom of the capital structure first exposure with your equity obviously you have some preferred and some debt as well. So can you just talk about why you decided to recommit to that business and also felt comfortable committing in some of the riskier and obviously higher return opportunity portions of that capital structure?

Robert Hamwee, CEO

Yes. So Edmentum has been a strong performer the last two or three years prior to COVID as we really kind of revamped management, particularly the CEO who's just been a superstar. And as we've gotten to just really get our arms around the business, it was a business that had some pretty strong secular trends, and then when COVID came it just put virtually all of those trends on steroids. So we see a multi-year outlook for Edmentum of you never want to say yes, also you can't say guaranteed growth, but when you look at all the factors that drive the company's prospects, they're all about as green as one can be. So we think some of the best growth is really ahead of Edmentum despite the fact that it's had incredible growth the last year and solid growth the last three years, and we just want to, we've done so much work and we frankly if we didn't have a maturing capital structure at Edmentum in 2021, we just would have waited on a transaction generally, but we had to do something either refinance the debt or bring in new equity, and given the valuations, we thought it was a good time to take some chips off the table but we wanted to recommit the bulk of our exposure because we just believe there is, you want to ride your winners in the investment world. We've had very good success with that as a firm, and we think this is one of the best potential winners that we have exposure to, and we don't think this is not going to take five years to play out. I don't want to give specific time frames, but we think there's an opportunity more in the medium term to show that that future value creation.

Ryan Lynch, Analyst

Understood. Yes obviously a business, yes. You have deep knowledge and deep experience with the fundamentals there. You sounded somewhat positive on even some of your more stressed businesses' ability to recover in 2021 depending on kind of the kind of the economic recovery and kind of the reopening. Do you guys have any sort of baseline that a baseline of reopening a recovery that you guys used to make those comments and what would that look like?

Robert Hamwee, CEO

I think it's really more around the narrower issue around COVID because if you think of some of those remaining stressed assets whether it's getting to full utilization and dental because of COVID, kind of getting significantly reduced, or whether it's an education-based business, not like it mentioned but one that is more levered to in-person education or whether it's a hotel-exposed business, those are a few remaining red and orange names. All those things will benefit materially all else equal by vaccination and by ultimately the final COVID exposed name getting recovered. So the handful of things we have there it's more about that versus whether it's GDP up two or up five. So the optimism and we're not smarter than anyone else about epidemiology but we're just reading the same things you and everybody else are that vaccines are happening and that vaccine optimism is increasing and so it's not crazy to think about a second half of 2021 where those COVID induced headwinds recede materially and that should help those few remaining businesses that are on our heat map. So really Ryan I guess it's the COVID relative to where we were a quarter ago that's driving that tone change.

Ryan Lynch, Analyst

Okay. Understood. I appreciate that Rob. Those are my questions; I appreciate the time this morning.

Robert Hamwee, CEO

Great. Now we appreciate your interest, thank you.

Operator, Operator

Our next question comes from Arthur Winston with Pilot Advisors. Please go ahead.

Arthur Winston, Analyst

Okay. Thanks for the excellent results and the amount of transparency and disclosure. It's excellent.

Robert Hamwee, CEO

Thank you.

Arthur Winston, Analyst

The originations had a higher level of interest rate and of course overall interest rates are rising, yet it sounds like because of prepayments and whatever the yield in the portfolio is definitely going to go down for the foreseeable future. Is that a fact?

Robert Hamwee, CEO

I'm not sure that totally fact. I think we're originating at similar yields as we have been. They have come down somewhat. I think the bigger driver is really the leverage coming down and we're committed to that. I think we should be relatively stable from here from a leverage perspective. So I think the question is on the one hand like you say rates are going up now. They are really going up more on the long end of the curve. We're not really exposed to that. So we are more tied to the short end of the curve, where rates are not going up. Certainly as John articulated, if the short end at some point whether it's this year or next year or whenever if the short end does start to go up some more historically normalized levels, that would be a big tailwind for us. And then it really comes down to what's going to happen with credit spread across someone this year so far, but we've seen that before and then they've gone back up. So I think we're going to be tracking that very carefully and that will really be the driver in the next couple of quarters as to overall asset level yields if that makes sense.

Arthur Winston, Analyst

But why is it that your assumptions that it is on the leverage side rather than taking the opportunity to expand a little bit with the better environment we're supposed to be seeing?

Robert Hamwee, CEO

Well, I think there's a couple of things. I think until we get the true, true all-clear that there's no new mutation that's going to screw things up again or what it may be, we still want to be somewhat defensively pastured, and then I think what we're seeing is there may be an opportunity if we keep our leverage at a slightly lower level than what we were running at pre-COVID. There may be an opportunity to more materially reduce our borrowing expenses. So we're monitoring that and trading off those that math as well. So those are the things kind of driving right now where we think the leverage makes sense.

Arthur Winston, Analyst

Okay. Thank you.

Robert Hamwee, CEO

Yes. You're welcome.

Operator, Operator

Our next question comes from Chris with Oppenheimer. Please go ahead.