Rob Hamwee
Analyst · Wells Fargo. Mr. Bock
Thank you, Steve. Before diving into the details of the quarter, as always, I'd like to give everyone a brief review of NMFC and our strategy. As outlined on Page 6 of our presentation, NMFC is externally managed by New Mountain Capital, a leading private equity firm with over $15 billion of assets under management and 100 staff members, including over 60 investment professionals. Since the inception of our debt investment program in 2008, we have taken New Mountain's approach to private equity and applied it to corporate credit with a consistent focus on defensive growth business models and extensive fundamental research within industries that are already well known to New Mountain or more simply put, we invest in recession resistant businesses that we really know and that we really like. We believe that this approach results in a differentiated and sustainable model that allows us to generate attractive risk-adjusted rates of return across changing cycles and market conditions. To achieve our mandate, we utilized the existing New Mountain investment team as our primary underwriting resource. Turning to page 7, you can see our total return performance from our IPO in May, 2011 through May 2, 2016. In the 5 years since our IPO, we have generated a compounded annual return to our initial public investors of 8.8%, meaningfully higher than our peers in the high-yield index and a cash-on-cash return to our initial public investors of 10.6%. Page 8 goes into a little more detail around relative performance against our peer set, benchmarking against the 10 largest externally managed BDCs that have been public at least as long as we have. Page 9 shows return attribution. Total cumulative return continued to be driven almost entirely by our cash dividend which in turn has been more than 100% covered by NII. We attribute our success to, one, our differentiated underwriting platform; two, our ability to consistently generate the vast majority of our NII from stable cash interest income in an amount that covers our dividend; three, our focus on running the business with an efficient balance sheet and always utilizing inexpensive, appropriately structured leverage before accessing more expensive equity; and four, our alignment of shareholder and Management interest. Our highest priority continues to be our focus on risk control and credit performance which we believe over time is the single biggest differentiator of total return in the BDC space. If you refer to page 10, we once again lay out the cost basis of our investments with the current portfolio and our cumulative investments since the inception of our credit business in 2008 and then show what has migrated down the performance ladder. Since the inception, we have made investments of $3.7 billion in 174 portfolio companies, of which only four, representing just $36 million of cost, have migrated to non-accrual and only two, representing $6 million of cost, have thus far resulted in realized default losses. Approximately 97% of our portfolio at fair market value is currently rated 1 or 2 on our internal scale. Page 11 shows leverage multiple for all of our holdings above $7.5 million when we entered an investment and leverage levels for the same investment as of the end of the current quarter. While not a perfect metric, the asset by asset trend in leverage multiple is a good snapshot of credit performance and helps provide some empirical, fundamental support for our internal ratings and marks. As you can see by looking at the table, leverage multiples are roughly flat or trending in the right direction, with only a few exceptions. Of the four loans that show negative migration of two and a half turns or more, all are rated 3 on our internal scale. The one is to a business that is currently in a sale process, expected to pay off the loan in full. Two others are first lien loans to energy service businesses that, while cyclically challenged, continue to have substantial liquidity. These two loans are carried at meaningful discounts to par, reflecting significant degradation in earnings and prospects, although both are expected to pay their upcoming semiannual coupon and are therefore not near term non-accrual candidates. The fourth loan to a company called Transtar is new to our internal loss list and will be discussed a bit later by John. The chart on page 12 helps track the Company's overall economic performance since its IPO. At the top of the page, we show how the regular quarterly dividend is being covered out of net-investment income. As you can see, we continued to more than cover 100% of our cumulative regular dividend out of NII. On the bottom of the page, we focus on below-the-line items. First, we look at realized gains and realized credit and other losses. As you can see, looking at the row highlighted in green, we’ve had success generating real economic gains every year through a combination of equity gains, portfolio company dividends and trading profits. Conversely, realized losses including default losses, highlighted in orange, have been significantly smaller and less frequent and show that we're typically not avoiding non-accruals by selling poor credit at a material loss prior to actual default. The net cumulative impact of this success to date is highlighted in blue which shows cumulative net-realized gains of $43.9 million since our IPO. Next, we look at unrealized appreciation and depreciation. As you see highlighted in grey, we have $99 million cumulative net depreciation. As further detailed on page 13, this depreciation could be broken down into two broad categories, credit specific and broad market. The credit specific amount of $64 million can be further broken down into the four pieces shown on page 13. We believe a meaningful portion of this unrealized depreciation is recoverable and we expect to see the significant majority of the $35 million unrealized depreciation associated with general market conditions reversed overtime. To put these numbers into perspective, even if we did believe that the full $99 million unrealized depreciation was not recoverable, our annualized return to shareholders over the five years that we’ve been public would still be nearly 9% or approximately 400 basis points over the high yield index over the same contract. This speaks to the fundamental strength of the value proposition inherent in a well-managed BDC. That is, when one is generating asset level spreads, the 1000 basis points over the risk free rate in primarily floating rate assets, there is a lot of excess spread to cover occasional and inevitable credit impairments. The key as always is to keep losses modest, which we continue to do. I will now turn the call over to John Kline, NMFC's COO, to discuss market conditions and portfolio activity. John?