Burford Capital Limited

Ms. Tina and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Burford Capital First Quarter 2025 Financial Results Conference Call Audio Webcast. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, press star 1 again. Thank you. I would now like to turn the call over to Josh Wood, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. It's great to have many of you join us both in person and via webcast for our 2025 Investor Day last month. We certainly appreciate you spending time with us today to discuss our first quarter results. On the call, as usual, we have our Chief Executive Officer, Chris Bogart, our Chief Investment Officer, John Malo, and our Chief Financial Officer, Jordan Leach. Earlier this morning, we posted a detailed earnings presentation, which we'll refer to during the call, and also filed our Form 10-Q, both of which you can find on our Investor Relations website. Before we get started, just a reminder that today's call may contain forward-looking statements that involve certain risks, uncertainties, and other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those discussed during the call. For more information For more information regarding these risk factors, please refer to our earnings materials relating to this call posted on our website and our filings with the SEC. We'll also be referring to certain non-GAAP financial measures during the call. Please refer to today's earnings materials and our filings with the SEC for additional information, including reconciliations of these non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures. With that, I'll turn the call over to Chris.

Thanks very much, Josh, and welcome, everybody. We're very happy to be here, able to talk to you about a strong first quarter. I'll make three points about the quarter. We had a robust new business in the quarter. Sometimes for us, the first quarter can be seasonally slow. We often have a very busy December, as we did last year. It can take a little while for the law world to get back into gear. But this year we saw really a robust volume of new business, tripling definitive commitments, doubling deployments. And part of this is because, as we talked about at Investor Day, some of what we do is sort of bread and butter litigation. And some of what we do relies on something big and chunky occurring. And those don't come along predictably or reliably every quarter. But this quarter we did see the launch of a new U.S. claim family. So we're excited about that, and that certainly drove some but not all of the activity during the quarter. We also saw very strong realization cash generation activity. Realizations were up significantly compared to either of the first quarters in the last two years, $163 million. That means over the last four quarters, we have brought in really a very significant amount of cash. And as Jordan will talk later, we're sitting on a meaningful amount of liquidity, which positions the business very well indeed for new business and new flows out of the business as the year continues to build. And then in accounting terms, even though we watched the cash more than the accounting numbers, we saw revenue up significantly year over year. significantly in this context for capital provision income meant, you know, a 5X increase compared to the first quarter last year. And also an increased contribution from asset management income. So all in all, we're really very pleased about that. And it's in strong quarters like this especially that we get to really remind everybody that we don't look at this business on a quarterly basis. So while we're happy to be here talking about this quarter, the simple reality is that the cycle of this business is longer than three months. So we focus, first of all, on cash, but we also focus on longer-term arcs of business performance than on quarter-by-quarter numbers. And so I would be saying the same thing to you if this had been a down quarter, a bad quarter, which it clearly was not. We're thrilled with how this quarter went, especially for a first quarter. But that doesn't mean that I would be any less happy about the business and where the portfolio stands, and John is going to talk more about that, if the quarter had been lackluster. And, you know, you obviously saw in this quarter somewhat fewer unrealized gains, for example, and again, we don't read anything whatsoever into that. Just a couple of other points before I turn you over to John, one of which is you'll notice with John and with me just giving you some highlights, letting Jordan really walk through the numbers for you and then take your questions. We're also conscious that we have started doing this just before the U.S. market opens, and we've changed the timing of our release to try to maximize both markets trading, especially given how much liquidity has moved to the U.S. market. We're sitting now at something on the order of 85% of our trading volume happening in New York instead of in London. So we're really trying a variety of experiments to see what works best for people in both markets. And before I turn you over to John, just one other point that I'd like to make, given that this is AGM season. You will have noticed, perhaps, that we put out an additional proxy release a few days ago, maybe a week or 10 days ago. And that was on the back of coming along and recommending the shareholders vote against the re, election of 2 of our directors representing 2 thirds of the audit committee as we laid out in those materials is just wrong in our view, both factually wrong and wrong in the, in the application of even their own standards. And we'd ask shareholders who are capable. of making their own decisions as opposed to simply taking the ISS recommendations to look seriously at that material. I can't imagine that anyone thinks it's in shareholders' interest or the company's interest to eviscerate the audit committee here. And while you're doing that, we also would appreciate your support in terms of the discretionary compensation recommendation. ISS doesn't like carried interest, which we believe actually is very aligning with shareholders because we don't get paid until the company does. We get paid only when the cash comes into the business, which we think is actually an excellent way of aligning employees and shareholders. But for their own reasons, ISS doesn't agree with that. So we've got a couple of recommendations there that we'd appreciate shareholders taking a look at and reading that proxy material. And with that, gone alone.