Carlyle Secured Lending, Inc.

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Carlyle Secured Lending's fourth quarter 2022 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker presentation, there will be a question and answer session. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the call over to your speaker today, Daniel Hahn. Please go ahead.

Good morning, and welcome to Carlyle Secured Lending's fourth quarter 2022 earnings call. With me on the call this morning is Linda Pace, the chair of our board of directors, Aaron Lee Kong, our newly appointed chief executive officer, and Tom Hennigan, our chief financial officer. Last night, we filed our Form 10-K initiative press release with a presentation of our results, which are available on the investor relations section of our website. Following our remarks today, we will hold a question and answer session for analysts and institutional investors. This call is being webcast, and a replay will be available on our website. Any forward-looking statements made today do not guarantee future performance, and any undue reliance should not be placed on them. These statements are based on current management expectations and involve inherent risks and uncertainties, including those identified in the risk factor section of our annual report on Form 10-K. These risks and uncertainties could cause actual results to differ materially from those indicated. Carlyle Secured Lending assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements at any time. With that, I'll turn the call over to Linda Pace.

Thank you, Dan. Good morning, everyone, and thank you all for joining us to discuss our fourth quarter and full year 2022 results. I will focus my remarks on three topics for today's call. I'll start with an overview of our fourth quarter results. Second, I'll comment on the current market environment and investment activity. And finally, I'll conclude with a few thoughts on our full year 2022 performance. We generated net investment income of 48 cents per share in the fourth quarter. This was an increase of 9% from the core earnings in Q3, as the portfolio continued to benefit from higher base rates. We declared total first quarter dividends of 44 cents, consisting of our new base dividend of 37 cents, which we have increased for the third consecutive period plus a 7-cent supplemental. We have now increased our base dividend rate by a total of almost 16% over the last three quarters and are pleased to highlight that the 37 cents per share is now back at our IPO level. Our net asset value decreased by 1% in the fourth quarter to $16.99 per share, primarily due to the impact of widening market yields. we repurchased an additional $7.3 million of our common stock during the quarter, resulting in $0.04 of accretion to our net asset value per share. Turning now to the market, the current environment continues to be lender-friendly, allowing us to selectively deploy capital into attractive opportunities. From a macro perspective, we have still not seen a recessionary contraction in the U.S. economy, despite the increased velocity of Fed rate hikes which occurred much more quickly than most market participants expected. We've seen a reduction in the level of uncertainty around interest rates and a reduction in inflation levels. However, fixed income and private credit continue to see volatility driven by less liquidity and capital formation across the debt markets. This backdrop informed our investment activity, and we remained focused on deploying primarily first lien capital at attractive yields with better economics and terms. During the fourth quarter, we funded $129 million and saw total repayments and sales of $87 million. We ended 2022 with approximately $2 billion of investments at fair value. Before turning things over to Tom, I'd like to spend a few minutes on our full year 2022 results. We generated net investment income of $1.93 per share, which was an increase of 26% compared to the prior year. We declared total dividends of $1.64 per share during the year, resulting in dividend coverage of 118%. We also repurchased shares that provided an additional 14 cents of accretion to NAV during the year. Our net asset value ended the year at $16.99 per share, up from $16.91 as of Q4 2021 due to strong fundamental credit performance. We're extremely pleased with these results and believe they demonstrate not only the power of our platform, but also our commitment to creating long-term shareholder value regardless of the market environment. With that, I'd like to hand the call over to our CFO, Tom Hennigan.