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Atlanticus Holdings Corporation 6.125% Senior Notes due 2026 (ATLCL)

Q3 2008 Earnings Call· Wed, Nov 5, 2008

$25.00

+0.04%

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Welcome to the third quarter 2008 CompuCredit earnings conference call. At this time all participants are in a listen only mode. (Operator Instructions) As a reminder this conference is being recorded for replay purposes. I would now like to the turn the presentation over to your host for today’s call, Mr. Jay Putnam, Director of Investor Relations.

Jay Putnam

Management

Thanks for joining us for CompuCredit Corporation’s third quarter 2008 earnings call. Before we get started I’d like to remind you that some of our comments today will be forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements include all statements of our plans, beliefs or expectations of future results or developments such as the performance of our credit card receivables including receivables levels, net interest margin, other income ratio and charge-offs, acquisitions of portfolios from third parties, our plans to repurchase securities, growth and downsizing expectations for our business segments, expected timing and levels of expense reductions, our prospects generally, our marketing plan, plans for our micro-loans businesses, our liquidity levels and capital raising plans and general economic conditions. For information regarding some of the more important factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from those reflected in the forward-looking statements that we make today you should read the Forward-Looking Information section and the Risk Factors in our Form 10-Q for the quarter ended September 30th, 2008. Thanks again for your interest in CompuCredit. Please feel free to contact me if you ever have any questions you would like to discuss. You may also access our website to obtain a hard copy of the press release and our financial statements, to view our risk factors or to look into an archived version of this call. I’ll now turn it over to David Hanna, Chairman and CEO, of CompuCredit for his remarks.

David G. Hanna

Management

I’ll take a few minutes to review our third quarter results and update everyone on recent developments within our company. J. Paul Whitehead, our CFO, also is here to discuss our financial results in greater detail. Today we reported a GAAP net loss of $32.3 million or $0.69 per share and a managed net loss of $33.7 million or $0.72 per share. These results include a pre-tax non-cash impairment charge of $29.2 million we took during the quarter to write off goodwill within our auto finance segment. This goodwill write off reflects our third quarter refinancing of debt within that segment at pricing and advance rates that do not allow for returns sufficient enough for us to want to invest the capital necessary to achieve our acquisition date growth and profitability expectations. While we’d obviously like to be growing our auto finance segment and our other businesses the continued dislocation of credit and capital markets prohibits it. Until we see improvements in the liquidity markets which we don’t expect anytime soon we’ll continue to operate very conservatively. By that I mean continuing to cut costs, reducing credit card marketing efforts and taking account management actions aimed at freeing up cash for our use in both deleveraging our business and taking advantage of any extraordinary distressed asset opportunities in the marketplace. Some of our deleveraging is being imposed upon us by lenders who have reduced their advance rates upon our facility renewals which we saw not only in our September auto finance segment renewals as I already noted but also in a September renewal of one of our lower tier originated credit card receivables securitization facilities. Key to our success in this environment is meeting any lender imposed deleveraging requirements and balancing the cash necessary to meet those requirements against out…

J. Paul Whitehead

Management

To recap our results we reported a GAAP loss from continuing operations of $31 million for the quarter or $.066 per share compared to last year’s third quarter loss from continuing operations of $48 million or $0.99 per share. We also reported a managed loss from continuing operations of $32.8 million or $0.70 per share compared to managed net income of $50.1 million or $1.02 per share in the third quarter of last year. Both our GAAP and managed numbers for the third quarter are net of a $29.2 million pre-tax goodwill write off in our auto finance segment which had an after-tax effect of $0.38 per share for GAAP and $0.40 per share for managed the slight difference being attributable to different effective tax rates under the two systems. Our adjusted net charge off rate was 14.2% in the third quarter down 500 basis points from the 19.2% we reported in the second quarter of this year and up from the 10% we reported in the third quarter of last year. David mentioned the improvement in our quarter-over-quarter charge off rate due to the record level of credit card accounts we added in mid-2007 that reached peak charge off vintage levels during the first half of this year. I might also add that the increase in our third quarter adjusted charge off ratio versus the third quarter of last year principally reflects an atypical depression of last year’s third quarter ratio due to the discounted purchase of our UK credit card portfolio acquisition in the second quarter of last year and due to the denominator effect in last year’s third quarter of our booking the record $1.5 million credit card accounts added in the second and third quarters of last year. The balances of these accounts would have been…

Operator

Operator

Thank you for your participation. This concludes the third quarter 2008 CompuCredit earnings conference. You may now disconnect.