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spk01: there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question... Thank you. Adam Yates, Managing Director, you may begin your conference.
spk03: Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us for Great Elm Group's Fiscal Fourth Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded on Thursday, September 21, 2023. If you would like to be added to our distribution list, you can email GEGInvestorRelations at GreatElmCap.com, or you can sign up for alerts directly on our website, www.GreatElmGroup.com. The slide presentation accompanying today's conference call and webcast can be found on our website under Events and Presentations. A link to the webcast is also available on our website as well as in the press release that was disseminated to announce the quarterly results. Today's conference call includes forward-looking statements, and we ask that you refer to Great Elm Group's filings with the SEC for important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from these statements. Great Elm Group does not undertake to update its forward-looking statements unless required by law. In addition, during today's call, management will refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations to the most comparable financial measures are included in our earnings release. To obtain copies of our SEC filings, please visit Great Elm Group's website under Financial Information and select SEC Filings. On the call today, we have Jason Reese, CEO, Adam Kleinman, General Counsel, Nicole Mills, COO, and Kerry Davis, our newly appointed CFO. I will now turn the call over to Jason Reese, CEO.
spk04: Welcome, everyone, and thank you for joining us. This year, 2023, was a transformative year for Great Elm Group as we completed our transition from a diversified holding company to a focused alternative asset manager with a strong financial and operational foundation. In May, I stepped in as Great Elm's CEO and outlined three simple goals for the business. One, improve our profitability. Two, expand our platform. And three, grow our assets under management. We've made significant strides over the past fiscal year to lay the groundwork for success in each of these goals. I'm going to walk through these goals outlined on slide three and highlight what we have accomplished to date as well as our strategic expansion initiatives underway for fiscal 24. First, improving our profitability. While there is a lot of noise in our financials over the full year, GEG ended the final quarter of fiscal 23 with a milestone, earning cash incentives from GECC for the first time in the company's history. This comes on the back of GECC posting a strong quarter, recording the highest cash net investment income in its history. As a result of this performance, GEG collected nearly $2 million in fees from GECC in August 2023, including $1 million of incentive fees. Going forward, we believe that we are well positioned to continue collecting incentive fees from GECC, which will further bolster GEG's profitability. In addition, Monomoy continues to grow. Over the course of the year, we added 17 properties to the REITs portfolio, deploying nearly $25 million of capital, and we sold four properties for $7 million. In January, we closed on two land parcels, beginning construction on two build-to-sue projects in Florida and Mississippi, successfully launching our Monomoy BTS business. And just this month, we added Senior Construction Executive Andy Wright to our team as Vice President of Real Estate. We're excited for continued growth in this business in fiscal 24. During the year, we built out our infrastructure, providing a solid foundation to scale our businesses without adding material incremental overhead expense. This should lead to significant operating leverage as we grow our business, allowing for high contribution margins going forward. Moving to our second goal, expanding the platform. During fiscal 23, we made key changes to our management team, onboarding several seasoned professionals with many years of asset management experience. We made our last team addition in fiscal fourth quarter 23, welcoming Kerry Davis to serve as GEG's chief financial officer, in addition to her role as CFO at GECC. Kerry brings a wealth of asset management experience to our accounting and finance function at GEG. In addition to boosting our bench strength, we're focused on adding new vehicles to our platform. Throughout the fiscal fourth quarter, our team has worked to develop and structure complementary funds, and we look forward to launching a new fund offering in fiscal 24. Additionally, at GECC, our management team is executing upon the expansion of the specialty finance platform, furthering growing GECC's access to differentiated investment opportunities and expanding its asset base. Finally, we continue to work diligently to source and acquire management rights to long-duration asset management businesses. The third goal I mentioned is to grow our assets under management. As I just discussed, we're actively seeking to grow and scale our platform both organically and through strategic partnerships and acquisitions. Organically, our success in fiscal 23 is evidenced by our growth in fee-paying assets under management of 10% year over year. Entering fiscal 24, we have an actionable opportunity set of new product launches and strategic transactions to further our AUM growth objective. We are working on initiatives to leverage GEG's infrastructure and liquid balance sheet to support growth at GECC and Monomoy, as well as to support the launch or acquisition of future complementary investment vehicles. Before I turn the call over to Kerry to discuss our financial results for fiscal 23 and the fourth quarter, I would like to recap many of the changes implemented at GEG over 22 and 23 laid out on slide seven. In March of 22, key management and board changes were made at GECC, which has been successfully repositioned. In May of 22, Monomoy was acquired, doubling our AUM. Also in May, Dave Matter joined our board after retiring from BlackRock, where he was co-chief investment officer of BlackRock Alternative Advisors, bringing extensive investment expertise and contacts to Grado. In June 22, we issued $27 million of five-year baby bonds to grow our capital base. In August 22, an amendment was approved to reset GEC's incentive fee and we collected $1 million in August 23, as I mentioned earlier. Around the end of the calendar year, we closed two large strategic business divestitures, leaving GEG with ample liquidity to execute on our goals. In May of 23, I took on the role of CEO, and we asked Terry Davis to step up as CFO. Today, we enter fiscal 24 with a rock-solid balance sheet and streamlined organization poised to execute on our key goals. With that, I'll turn it over to Kerry.
spk00: Thank you, Jason. I'll provide a brief overview of the quarter and, of course, welcome all of you to review our filings in greater detail or reach out to our team with any questions. As previously discussed, Great Elm completed two significant transactions during the fiscal year, which are highlighted on slide 8. On January 3rd, we sold a majority interest in the durable medical equipment business to a subsidiary of Quip for a total purchase price of $80 million. After repayment of obligations, we received approximately $26 million in cash, as well as just over 346,000 shares of Quip common stock. On December 30th, 2022, we sold 61% of our majority ownership interest in Forrest to J.P. Morgan for over $18 million. On January 17th, we exercised a right to put our remaining 19% interest in forest to an affiliate of JPMorgan for nearly $27 million. The January sale brought our aggregate cash proceeds from the forest transactions to approximately $45 million. As a result of these transactions, we realized material gains on those investments generated significant value for Great Elm shareholders and added over $70 million of cash to GEG's balance sheet. In review of continuing operations, quarter-to-date revenues almost doubled year-over-year, driven by increased fee-paying assets under management related to GECC and Monomoy. We were pleased to recognize incentives of $1 million from GECC during the fourth fiscal quarter. AUM of $640 million as of June 30, 2023, increased 1% from the prior quarter end and was up 5% from the prior fiscal year end. while fee-paying AUMs grew to $449 million, up 2% quarter to date and up 10% from the prior fiscal year end. For the quarter, Gradome Group generated a net loss from continuing operations of $5.3 million, comparable to the prior year period. For the fiscal year 2023, Gradome Group generated net income from continuing operations of $14.5 million, compared to a net loss from continuing operations of $19.3 million in the prior fiscal year. Adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was $0.4 million compared to $0.3 million in the prior year period. For the fiscal year 2023, Great Elm Group generated adjusted EBITDA of $1 million compared to a net loss of $1.3 million in the prior fiscal year. As of June 30th, Gradome Group had approximately $85 million of combined cash and marketable securities on our balance sheet to deploy across our growing alternative asset management platform. Please refer to slide six that provides an overview of our financial position and highlights our book value per share of approximately $2.16. This concludes my financial review of the quarter. With that, we will turn the call over to the operator to open for questions.
spk01: at this time i would like to remind everyone in order to ask a question press star then the number one on your telephone keypad we'll pause for just a moment and again if you would like to ask a question please press star 1 on your telephone keypad and our first question comes from the line of nat stewart from capital advisors your line is open
spk02: Hi, good morning. It looks like things are getting on track here with GEC. I'm just curious, I'm going to review your results today, but where are you seeing opportunities for growth, especially if you're looking for opportunities outside of GEC, GED for acquisitions and so forth? All right. Do you think real estate's going to be a key? Is that the area you're mostly focusing in, or is there other BDC stuff you might look at?
spk04: Hey, Matt. This is Jason. Thank you for being on the call. I think we're both looking at credit opportunities. We really like the credit markets right now, what's happened with the banking system, what's happened with interest rates. There's a lot of opportunities for GECC at the BDC. We also think that there could be other vehicles that we could manage either de novo where we start them up or acquire in the credit space. And we do like the real estate space quite a bit. There's certain areas of real estate like industrial that we're focused in that we think are great areas right now while a lot of commercial real estate is distressed. where we would not be focusing.
spk02: Sure. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I look forward to what you guys come up with because it seems like the platform now has a lot of potential if you can add a little bit of scale to it. So keep up the good work.
spk05: Thank you. We think so too. Thank you, Matt.
spk01: And once again, if you would like to ask a question, it is star 1 on your telephone keypad. And there are no further questions at this time. I will now turn the call back over to CEO Jason Rees for some final closing remarks.
spk05: Well, thank you again for joining us today. We look forward to speaking with you in the future.
spk01: This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.
spk05: Well, thank you again for joining us.
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