Thank you for standing by. My name is Krista and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Burford Capital First Quarter 2024 Financial Results Conference Call and Webcast. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers’ remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] Thank you. I will now turn the conference over to Christopher Bogart, Chief Executive Officer. Christopher, you may begin your conference.

Thank you very much, and hello, everybody. As usual, I'm joined by Jon Molot, Burford's Chief Investment Officer; and Jordan Licht, Burford's Chief Financial Officer. And in fact, Jordan and I are delighted to be coming to you live from beautiful Copenhagen today, where we have spent the day with investors here, one of Burford's groupings of investors in Continental Europe and it's a lovely day here. Quarterly results as we've said before, we are going to do these calls in what is at least for us we hope a fairly short and efficient manner. The slides really do on these quarters speak for themselves. So we'll give you a little commentary on top of that and then we'll be happy to take your questions but we'll try not to take too much of your time. And in general, when I think about quarters, while we're obviously happy to be talking to you at any time about the business, we just don't pay that much attention to individual quarters in this business. The timescale of the business operates in years, not in three-month intervals. And so you get a lot of period to period variability as you're seeing here. And we just don't as a management team read that much into it. And that's especially true in what we think of as what I'll call almost the dead-ish first and third quarters. Although, to be fair, last year the first quarter was extraordinary because of the YPF win late in the quarter, which obviously makes comparisons with any quarter that comes later, essentially useless. So that's sort of how we think about it. But for those of you who do want to go quarter by quarter, I think, you know obviously I would characterize this as being a mixed quarter.…

Thanks Chris and thanks to you all as always for joining. As Chris says, the portfolio is very active. There's tons going on. And so it's very exciting to have our handful with a lot going on in the investments we've made and seeing them move through the system. If we turn to Slide 8, of course there's the very large case that people pay a lot of attention to the YPF cases. Everybody knows that we had a final judgment entered in September. That judgment was stayed during part of the fourth quarter, but that stay was lifted and the judgment is immediately enforceable. In the first quarter, that enforcement process has commenced and been ongoing. As there is in addition, appellate briefing going on, Argentina has appealed its adverse signing to the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and the Plaintiffs have cross-appealed the exclusion of YPF as a defendant from the case. A reminder, we -- Burford is entitled to roughly 35% of the proceeds from the Peterson case and 73% of the proceeds from the Eton Park case. Turning to slide 9, I think as Chris said, when you look quarter-to-quarter, it's important not to miss the fundamentals of the business. And those fundamentals continue and you can look at our performance overall, where it's a combination of adjudication wins, adjudication losses, and settlements that produce the results of our investments. And you can see that the settlements are the largest category. And then for the cases that go to final adjudication, our wins far outstrip our losses, both in number and size. And this ends up producing very attractive returns on invested capital and IRRs. And we just continue to plug away at that core business and see the matters that are producing the sort of results within the litigation process as time goes on. If you turn to slide 10, you also see kind of the other graphic we've showed you in the past that lays out the asymmetric return profile from what I showed on the prior slide, whereas the prior slide shows what it is about the litigation process that leads to lots of decent returns in settlements, but then also some asymmetric returns when cases go to adjudication. And you see those mapped out here, that whereas the loss rate is relatively low and the losses are confined or contained, the wins can be quite outsized. And that just makes for a very, very attractive asset class. And I don't know that I need to spend more time on it, but you can just see that we've got a large chunk of cases that are producing ROICs that are greater than 200%. So with that, I will turn it over to Jordan.

Thanks, Jon and Chris. Good morning and good afternoon to everyone on the call today. I'm on page 11, which shows a summary of the Burford-only financials. Chris mentioned comparisons to 2023 for the same period are going to be difficult given that right at the end of March last year, we received the positive news regarding summary judgment on the YPF cases. So I'm going to touch on a couple of the key numbers here and then go into greater detail on the following pages. In total, we had $31 million of revenue for the period. The capital provision income and asset management income breakouts are shown on the right of the page. Net income per share for the quarter was the negative $0.14. Tangible book value is just shy of $10, including the intangible were slightly above $10 level at $10.34 per share. Overall, the loss was impacted and I'll talk more about it by various fair value movements including lots that had nothing to do directly with case development. And as Chris mentioned, there were no material negative case developments in the portfolio. We'll talk more about expenses, but those start to normalize from some of the one-time items that we also saw in 2023. On the asset side, we're at approximately $3.4 billion of capital provision assets. Of that, we've got $1.6 billion in our deployed cost. Of that $3.4 billion, the YPF assets are approximately $1.4 billion. And we have $490 million of fair value gain relative, embedded in that number, relative to the rest of the portfolio excluding YPF. This fair value represents only a 31% uplift to deployed cost of the assets. So in summary there's a lot more room to run with respect to the assets. I'm going to move to page…

Thanks Jordan. And slide 16 is a slide you've seen before that just tries to pull together and sum up the key points about the business. And really, just to reemphasize them. The driver of a lot of the value in this business is the core portfolio that we have, and that portfolio continues to perform robustly. The return levels are the same as they were when we last reported to you. Those are desirable uncorrelated returns that keep powering the business forward, as does our market leading origination platform, which causes us to put meaningful capital out the door every year, in a world where we are by far the brand leader, in other words, the brand of litigation finance firm that survey respondents identify first or only as being associated with the category. Then of course, we have additional value being created, as Jordan already discussed from our asset management business. And finally, last but by no means least, we have the YPF assets, which as Jon described, are making their way through the litigation and enforcement process. So in some, if you look at this on a quarter-by-quarter basis, a mixed quarter but a very strong, very strong catch performance for us this year, this quarter, but generally a first quarter that's just not all that busy and active for us. And with that, we appreciate your support and would welcome any questions you have.

Thank you. We will now begin the question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] Your first question over the phone comes from Alex Bowers with Berenberg. Please go ahead.

Hi everyone. Just one from me. In terms of I guess, commitments looking forward to the kind of the rest of this year, what sort of level I guess we look to kind of achieve? Are you still kind of aiming for similar levels we saw in 2023 sort of $1.2 billion grew wide just under $700 million to [Burford] (ph). Is that sort of a similar level we'd expect this year or do expectations kind of move?

Thanks. Well we don't guide on future anything really including future new business but let me comment on a couple of things that go into driving the level of new business that we did. And so there are a couple of points here. You asked about that on a group-wide basis. And while we do report group-wide so that people can get a sense of overall activity in the business. There obviously a portion of the group-wide business that we do is not nearly as remunerative to us as our core balance sheet business is. So I think group-wide is again useful for showing activity overall but not really useful in terms of predicting future profitability. If you look at sort of the Burford-only capital provision direct business, that's the core balance sheet litigation finance business that drives the bulk of our profits. What we've said before and what continues to be the case is the level of business that will print in that category in any period, whether it's a quarter or a year, really depends on whether we have sort of zero, one, or two big chunky deals. In other words, we have a pretty sustainable ongoing level of smaller deals that we do. We sort of do period in, period out. And then as we continue to take especially large corporates and do significant monetization transactions with them. You saw an example of that last year with a $325 million transaction with a Fortune 50 company. The question for any period is whether one of those lands. That will have a fairly significant impact on the level of new business that we write in the period. And it's pretty unpredictable because the sales cycle on those deals is long. And they usually start a relationship by doing a smaller transaction with us. So they're in the mix, but it's difficult. It's a little bit like asking an investment banker to predict how many blockbuster M&A deals they are going to be for the rest of the year. It's hard for us to do that and so I don't have a good answer for you except that I remain encouraged by the level of interest that we have from corporates. In fact, you're going to see just in a couple of days from now, we as you probably know, regularly release commissioned research that we do to the legal market. And another release of that research is coming out just in the next couple of days. And it's pretty interesting when you look at the numbers to see just the level of interest in certain, especially in certain industry segments. There are industry segments that you'll see there where either they are half industry participants already say they are using litigation finance or plan to do so in the not-too-distant future.

Thank you.

We currently have no phone questions at this time. Rob, are there any web questions?

There is not. We have done, I think a very good job of keeping to our promise of making quarters a brief check-in but not too big an event. So in the absence of any other questions that have come in, either on the webcast, and I see there aren't any there, or on the phone lines, I think that's a wrap for us. So thank you all very much for your time and your support of Burford. And as always, we're always happy to talk to you offline and answer any other questions that you may have with anything. And we'll look forward to talking to you in a few months after June 30th numbers arrive.

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation and you may now disconnect.