Earnings Labs

SuRo Capital Corp. 6.00% Notes due 2026 (SSSSL)

Q1 2015 Earnings Call· Thu, May 7, 2015

$25.05

+0.10%

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good day ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to the GSV Capital’s First Quarter 2015 Earnings Conference Call. During today’s presentation, all parties will be in a listen-only mode. Following the presentation, the conference will be opened for questions. [Operator Instructions] This conference is being recorded today Thursday, May 7, 2015. I will now turn the conference over to Nick Franco of GSV Capital. Please go ahead sir.

Nick Franco

Analyst

Thank you for joining us on today’s call. I’m joined today by GSV Chairman, CEO and Chief Investment Officer Michael Moe; and Chief Financial Officer Bill Tanona. Please note that a slide presentation that corresponds to today’s prepared remarks by management is available on our website at www.gsvcap.com under Investors, Events & Presentations. Today’s call is being recorded and broadcasted live on our website www.gsvcap.com. Replay information is included in our press release that was issued today. This call is the property of GSV Capital Corporation and the unauthorized reproduction of this call in any form is strictly prohibited. I’d also like to call your attention to customary disclosures in our press release today regarding forward-looking information. Statements made in today’s conference call and webcast may constitute forward-looking statements, which relate to future events or future performance or financial condition. These statements are not guarantees of our future performance, or future financial condition or results and involve a number of risks, estimates and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements as a result of a number of factors, including but not limited to those described from time to time in the company’s filings with the SEC. Management does not undertake to update such forward-looking statements unless required to do so by law. To obtain copies of GSV Capital’s latest SEC filings, please visit the website at gsvcap.com. Now, I would like to turn the call over to Michael Moe.

Michael Moe

Analyst

Thank you, Nick, and good afternoon. We’re delighted to have the opportunity to share with you the results of what we believe was a very strong quarter for GSV Capital, including achieving our NAV since inception. First, I will review our portfolio as of March 31, 2015, then I will highlight some recent developments and update you on several follow-on investments. I’ll then turn it over to Chief Financial Officer, Bill Tanona who will briefly provide a financial overview and then open it up for questions. So let’s start with slide three. As of March 31, 2015, our net assets were $302 million or $15.66 per share, beating our previous NAV high of $15.17. This is up from our NAV of $14.80 per share as of December 31, 2014 and $14.91 per share as of March 31, 2014. Now let's turn to slide four. In the first quarter we sold 400,000 shares a Twitter, resulting in $13.2 million of net realized gains. This came from us selling a portion of our position at Twitter and an IRR of 39.3%. As we previously stated, it is our general intention to liquidate our public positions within 12 months after the IPO lock-up expires. We believe it is important to continue this successfully demonstrate ways to monetize our positions. Thus subsequently to quarter-end we sold an addition of 400,000 shares of Twitter at an average price of $5.52 per share, realizing a gain of $13.7 million for our shareholders, yielding an IRR of 43.5%. We will continue to pursue opportunities that we believe will optimize return for our shareholders. Please turn to slide five. For the first quarter, our top ten positions accounted for approximately 60% of our total portfolio. Our three large investments Twitter, Palantir, and 2U represented 34.2% of the total…

Bill Tanona

Analyst

Thank you, Michael. Today, I will be providing you with a brief financial overview and update on our current liquidity position, and update on the status of our 851E application, a brief comment on our recent change in auditors, and details about our upcoming annual meeting which Michael just mentioned. Now, please turn to slide 15 for the financials as of March 31, 2015. Our NAV could increase 5.8% quarter-over-quarter to a record $15.66. Of the $0.86 increase, realized gains of $0.68 per share and unrealized depreciation of $1.44 per share were partially offset by $0.87 per share in tax provisions related to these items and $0.39 per share of net investment losses. Although the market value of our portfolio increased meaningfully this quarter, the increase was fairly narrow and driven primarily by increasing values at four of our 52 portfolio of companies and these includes Twitter, Dataminr, 2U and Lyft. Our liquid assets ended the quarter at approximately $110 million, consisting of $8 million of cash, $2 million of unused borrowings under our credit facility, and $100 million of public securities not subject to lock of agreements, although approximately $31 million are still subject to other sale restrictions. Subsequent to quarter end, GSV sold an additional 400,000 shares of Twitter at an average price of $51.52 per share, raising an additional cash of $20.6 million. However, we use some of our excess cash to pay off the outstanding balance on our credit facility subsequent to quarter end. Now, I would like to spend a couple of minutes to give everyone an update on our pending RIC status. As many of you are aware, we resubmitted our A51E application to the SEC back in December. At the end of March, we received comments back from the SEC regarding the application…

Michael Moe

Analyst

And while we are waiting for the instructions from the operator for questions, just a point of clarification. We have our annual meeting at noon on June 3 at GSV Labs and then at 1’o clock we are having our Investor Day which is following that, which will go from 1 pm to 5 pm.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] We will take our first question from Jon Hickman with Ladenburg.

Jon Hickman

Analyst

Hello. Can you hear me okay?

Michael Moe

Analyst

Yeah, Jon.

Jon Hickman

Analyst

Okay. Good afternoon. Could you talk about some of the other names on the education, Coursera, the Avenues or the [ph] holding, you have such a large position there in – 35% of the portfolio and I know obviously to you it’s working out nicely, but could you discuss some of the other names?

Michael Moe

Analyst

Sure. I’ll be delighted. Thanks, Jon. Yeah, so, obviously, 2U is our largest position, which we made about a $10 million investment at $7 a share couple of years. And now, it’s our third largest position through appreciation. And again, we haven’t sold any shares to date and have great conviction of the future growth. Coursera is our fifth largest position overall. We’ve made nearly a $15 million investment. Coursera is a leader in what’s called MOOCs, massively open online courses, which is the leader in this area. 12 million students that they have and 110 universities have partnered with Coursera. We remain close to the company. We have with invested with Kleiner Perkins in [indiscernible] but the company is progressing very, very impressively in our mind. It brought in the former President of Yale University, Rick Levin, about a year ago. He’s done a phenomenal job. Avenues is the world school, it’s created a global network of elite K-12 schools in the world’s great cities. New York City is its first campus. By many peoples account, the most successful private school to be opened anywhere in the United States or anywhere else. Again, a very big successful opening and very exciting potential with Avenues. Another significant position of ours, but not in the top 10 is Chegg, which is public, obviously, yesterday. Reported a very, very strong quarter. Stock was up I think over $1 today. With investors starting to kind of gravitate what’s really going on. I think unfortunately when it public, it was going through the transition to an online offering and still had service legacy business, and as it was going through a transition, I think investors are confused. If you look at the business overall, the valuation is just about 2 times sales with an online piece of their business that is growing at north of 50%. And so I think as people start to really evaluate the business on what’s the future looks like, we think that has tremendous upside from there. So, those are three relatively significant positions that you can highlight. Maybe I will just make one other reference, a company called DreamBox Learning, which we are an investor in with Reed Hastings, the CEO of Netflix, and John Doerr from Kleiner Perkins. What DreamBox does is it’s creating a highly adaptive math learning technology where basically students – kids playing games with every single click. It’s adapting and becoming more individualized for each student and is proven to be extraordinarily effective and the company is growing at a really higher rate. So, we think we’ve got an extraordinarily powerful portfolio of education technology business that we think will benefit shareholders. We’ve obviously made a big bet this year, we think that’s going to drive huge value for us for the future. Thanks for your question.

Jon Hickman

Analyst

If there aren’t any other question, can I have a couple of follow-up?

Michael Moe

Analyst

Why won’t we see if there is questions – we would like to do – to give everybody a change, Jon, and then if there aren’t, for sure.

Jon Hickman

Analyst

Sure. Okay.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] And at this time, there are no further questions in our queue.

Michael Moe

Analyst

So, that’s fine. So maybe you can ask some follow-up questions.

Jon Hickman

Analyst

Okay. Any comments on the likelihood of the next IPO in your portfolio, which were due, been like available?

Michael Moe

Analyst

Yeah, I think the good news is that you’ve got a number of companies that could go public if they chose to. And so, I think, we are encouraged by – maybe when you look at Palantir, obviously, with tremendous interest, growing really fast, sizable business. Dropbox is doing phenomenally well. I think it can go public when it wanted to. And so, I mean, we got a number of companies that I think are poised to go public kind of on their terms. As we mentioned earlier in our comments, the IPO market has slowed down a little bit year-to-date, which frankly I think is healthy. I think when you put too much supply in the market, investors gets fatigued. And so, I think, as the leading companies come out, I don’t know, I think there will be strong into this because we will have, I think, a healthy overall market for growth companies and investors looking to pay for futures. So, anyway, it’s probably because of our position with a number of these companies and knowing actually if they would go or not go, it probably isn’t appropriate for us to go much further detail about it. But I just would, I guess, I would say, as you’ve got a number of these companies, which are at the size and I think kind of growth characteristics that could go if they like to.

Jon Hickman

Analyst

And then one last question, I think if I do the math right, you’ve got about 1 million shares of Twitter left?

Michael Moe

Analyst

That’s the math. That’s the math.

Bill Tanona

Analyst

800,000.

Michael Moe

Analyst

800,000.

Operator

Operator

At this time, this does conclude today’s question-and-answer session. I’d like to turn things over to our speakers for any closing or additional remarks.

Michael Moe

Analyst

Well, thank you everybody for tuning in. As I said at the beginning, we are pleased with the way things are going here. We think our portfolio overall is doing quite well. The growth characteristics are tremendous. And I think we’re in a great position to be able to invest in the leaders of tomorrow. And so, our job here is to keep on growing NAV and being smart with the way that we optimize the outcomes from the portfolio. So thank you for everybody’s interest. If anybody has any follow-up questions, please let us know here. But thank you and we will talk to you soon.