Great Elm Capital Corp.

Welcome to the Great Elm Capital Corporation's fourth quarter and full year 2023 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone today should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero from your telephone keypad. Please note that this conference is being recorded. At this time, I'll now turn the conference over to Garrett Edson, a representative of the company. Mr. Edson, you may now begin.

Good morning, and thank you, everyone, for joining us for Great Elm Capital Corp's fourth quarter and full year 2023 earnings conference call. If you'd like to be added to our distribution list, you can email investorrelations at greatelmcap.com, or you can sign up for alerts directly on our website, www.greatelmcc.com. I'd like to note the slide presentation posted on our website accompanying today's call. The slide presentation can be found on our website under Financial Information Quarterly Results. On our website, you can also find our earnings release and SEC filings. I would like to call your attention to the customary safe harbor statement regarding forward-looking information. Also, please note that nothing in today's call constitutes an offer to sell or a solicitation of offers to purchase our securities. Today's conference call includes forward-looking statements, and we ask that you refer to Great Elm Capital Court's filings with the SEC for important factors that could cause actual results that differ materially from these statements. Great Elm Capital Court, not undertake to update its four living statements unless required by law. To obtain copies of SEC filings, please visit Great Elm Capital Corp's website under Financial Information, SEC Filings, or visit the SEC's website. Hosting the call this morning is Matt Kaplan, Great Elm Capital Corp's Chief Executive Officer, who will be joined by Chief Financial Officer, Kerry Davis, Chief Compliance Officer, Adam Kleinman, and Mike Keller, President of Great Elm Specialty Finance. I will now turn the call over to GECC's CEO, Matt Kaplan.

Thanks, Garrett. Good morning, and thank you all for joining us today. We finished 2023 on a high note, generating an approximately 30% return on equity for the year, and we have continued our momentum into 2024 with the closing of a $24 million equity raise at net asset value earlier this month. Before diving into our strong performance, I want to further highlight our capital raise. On February 8th, GECC issued 1.85 million shares at a then current NAV of $12.97 per share, a 25% premium to the prior day's closing price. Great Elm Strategic Partnership I and SPV acquired the shares for gross proceeds to GECC of $24 million. Great Elm Group invested $6 million in and a strategic institutional investor invested the other $18 million in the SPV. This non-dilutive equity raise increases the scale of GECC, which will provide operating efficiencies as we leverage our fixed cost base. And over time, we believe will lead to an improved cost of capital. The transaction comes on the heels of success from our repositioning efforts over the past two years, further enabling us to build upon our growth strategy and execute on our strong investment pipeline at greater scale. Shifting back to earnings, we are proud to have closed out the year with NII exceeding our base dividend for the fourth consecutive quarter and another quarter of increasing NAV, positioning us for continued success in 2024. We continued to excel in the fourth quarter across all facets of our business. We generated an annualized ROE of approximately 18% bringing our calendar year 2023 ROE to approximately 30%. Additionally, we increased our net assets, generated another quarter of significant cash income, and further enhanced both our capital structure and overall operations. I remain proud of our team's unwavering execution and tremendous effort this past quarter and year, positioning us for long-term platform and portfolio growth. Turning to slide three, You can see we reported NII of 43 cents per share. Additionally, full-year NII was $12.5 million, or $1.65 per share, exceeding the $1.50 per share of total declared dividends in 2023, which is inclusive of a 10-cent special distribution declared in December. We are very pleased to have been able to deliver the special cash distribution to our stockholders, a testament to our portfolio's strong performance throughout the year. I would also like to highlight slide eight, which shows our total investment income for the fourth quarter was $9.2 million. Notably, for the full year, we generated cash income of over $30 million, easily the highest full year total in Great Elm's history. This is a true validation of our efforts over the past couple of years to enhance the portfolio's cash income generation. We also continued to proactively harvest lower yielding investments reinvesting the proceeds into higher-yielding, higher-quality credits, and improving our mix of first lien secured debt, with 98% of our deployments in the quarter going to first lien investments, all while further enhancing the overall corporate portfolio yield. These results underscore our ability to construct and maintain a high-quality portfolio for those attractive, cash-yielding investments. In addition to another quarter of solid NII performance, as displayed on slide 9, our net asset value per share grew to $12.99, up from $12.88 in the previous quarter. More noteworthy is our NAV growth over the past year, as seen on slide 10, which experienced a 16% increase from the beginning of 2023, driven primarily by gains on investments. We are committed to further growing our NII and NAV over the long term. Along with our strong results in the quarter, we were pleased to amend our $25 million revolving line of credit, extending the maturity by three years to May 2027 and reducing its cost by 50 basis points to SOFR plus 3%. This provides us with additional flexibility in our capital structure and demonstrates our lenders' sustained confidence in our business. We are continuously assessing the capital markets and potential financing opportunities strategically extend our maturities at favorable costs, priming us for both short and long-term success. With that, I'd like to hand the call over to Carrie Davis to discuss our fourth quarter 2023 performance.