Logan Ridge Finance Corporation

Thank you, good morning, and welcome to Logan Ridge Finance Corporation's second quarter and the June 30, 2023 earnings conference call. An earnings press release was distributed yesterday after the close of the market. A copy of the release along with the supplemental earnings presentation is available on the company's website at www.LoganRidgeFinance.com in the investor resources section. and should be reviewed in conjunction with the company's Form 10-Q filed with the SEC. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded for replay purposes. Please note that today's conference call may contain forward-looking statements which are not guarantees of future performance or results and involve a number of risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements as a result of a number of factors, including those described in the company's filings with the SEC. Speaking on today's call will be Ted Goldthorpe, Chief Executive Officer, President, and Director of Logan Ridge Finance Corporation, Jason Roos, Chief Financial Officer, and Patrick Schaefer, Chief Investment Officer. With that, I would now like to turn the call over to Ted Koltor, Chief Executive Officer of Logan Ridge Finance Corporation. Please go ahead, Ted.

Good morning, and welcome to our second quarter 2023 earnings call. I am joined today by our Chief Financial Officer, Jason Ruse, and our Chief Investment Officer, Patrick Schaefer. Following my opening remarks, Patrick will provide additional detail on our investment activity to date and Jason will walk through the financials. I'd like to start by highlighting that the second quarter of 2023 was Logan Ridge's strongest quarter to date since we took over managing the company just two years ago, and largely a continuation of the performance trajectory Logan has been on since the middle of 2022. As the company's exposure to the legacy equity portfolio has continued to decline and its exposure to credits originated by BC Partners' credit platform has increased, The benefit to shareholders has been clear and has been reflected through Logan's financial results. With that in mind, I will keep my prepared remarks brief today and limit it to a few key highlights, which Patrick and Jason will provide more detail on shortly. First and foremost, as a result of the company's strong financial performance, the Board of Directors approved an 18% increase in the quarterly distribution, bringing it to $0.26 per share compared to $0.22 per share last quarter. Since we've turned the quarterly dividend back on in early 2023, we've increased it each quarter. Our net asset value was up 3% this quarter, or $1.05 per share, as compared to the prior quarter. We reported our fourth straight quarter of positive net investment income, which amounted to $1 million, or $0.38 per share, for this quarter. This trend illustrates the enhanced earnings power of our portfolio driven by the reworked capital structure we refinanced in 2022 and the success we've had monetizing the non-yielding legacy portfolio and redeploying that into income-generating names. Deployment for the quarter remained positive with $4.8 million in new investments and $4.4 million in repayments and sales, leaving us with net deployment of approximately $0.4 million. As of quarter end, the portfolio consisted of investments in 62 different companies. Finally, during the quarter, we continued repurchasing shares under our share repurchase program that was established in late March. As of June 30th, we had repurchased approximately 14,000 shares for an aggregate cost of approximately $290,000, which was accretive to NAV by approximately 8 cents per share.

Looking ahead,