Burford Capital Limited

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. But 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 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. And with that, I will turn the call over to Chris.

Thanks very much, Josh, and thanks to everyone for joining us today. You know, it was interesting, just after the quarter closed, Bloomberg ran a piece entitled Litigation Funding Burford's Week of Big Wins. And the piece opened by saying, it's been a good week for Burford Capital. And that was absolutely true for reasons that we'll talk about with you. But in fact, it wasn't just a good week, it's been a really good quarter and a really good six months. And I'm on slide six to take you through a few of the highlights. In terms of new business, we saw a really robust period for new business. The second quarter was significantly higher in terms of new definitive commitments than any period, any quarterly period that we've had for the last couple of years. And that, if you look at this on a -to-date basis, we're up very materially from the comparable 2024 period, up 71%. So that's just showing, I think, the strong demand for our capital out there in the market and our continued ability to make substantial commitments against meaningful pieces of litigation and arbitration around the world, and continues to show the benefit of the global footprint and the incredible team that we have. Looking at the income statement, basically we were up across the board here on a -to-quarter basis, on a -to-date versus -to-date basis. And we've done that sort of throughout the piece. Net income, of course, was up very, very strongly, as you saw, five times on a -to-date basis compared to 2024, 63% up on the quarter. But it wasn't just net income, it was across the piece. So revenues were up. As Jordan will talk about, operating expenses have returned to a run rate stable basis. So we're just very pleased with not only the level of new business that we were able to create, but the financial performance that the existing portfolio has continued to deliver. That financial performance means that when you look at the combination of new business that we're putting into the portfolio and the performance of the existing assets in the portfolio, which have an impact on the base value of the portfolio. And again, this isn't a fair value thing. We're talking just about definitive commitments and cost. And you saw that that number is up 15% -to-date. That's actually a higher rate of growth than we need to achieve to be able to meet the targets that we set out, the longer-term targets that we set out in the April investor day. And then cash kept on coming in the door from cases. And that's obviously always a good thing to see. So four key messages, four key financial metrics for us, all of which were strong during the course of the quarter and have been strong -to-date. I wanna also touch on a couple of other things. First, we were successful shortly after the close of the quarter in going out and raising a new $500 million issuance. We were able to do that with great market support. That deal came together very, very rapidly, not much more than 24 hours. We were able not only to upsize it, but also to price it more tightly against the indices, both treasuries and the double B index than we've ever been successful in before. And we had also a lot of new debt investors come into the book. So that was just a very successful offering. And I think it shows the market maturity that we have and the acceptance of the proposition that we have to offer in the market. That gives us a very desirable cost of capital, especially compared to our competitors. And candidly, there's nobody else that we compete with in this market who has the ability to access capital like that on that kind of scale, timeframe and pricing. And finally, no call would be complete without a reference to YPF. YPF had a fair bit of progress during the course of the quarter. We now have a tentative oral argument date in October for the oral argument of the main appeal. That's been an item we've been waiting for for some time. And so it's delightful to see that moving ahead. We've also had not only general progress, both in the United States and in other jurisdictions in terms of moving forward with our enforcement activities, but we had a specific victory in New York in that Judge Preska and the Southern District of New York granted our motion for the turnover of some of Argentina's YPF shares. That of course will be the subject of further legal proceedings. It's on appeal as one would expect, but it was nonetheless another very strong marker of forward progress in the case. I know that the investors always want to hear a lot about YPF and it's obviously an important part of our story. But at the same time, I hope that you'll continue to understand the constraints on us in terms of talking in detail about our strategy and our assessment of what has happened. There's a lot public about YPF appellate. And so investors really are capable, I think, of reading themselves into the case at whatever level of detail that they want. This isn't one of these cases where it's very difficult to find out information about what's actually going on. But when we talk about the case, the challenge of course is a litigation challenge. You might remember that a couple of quarters ago, I gave a longer version of an update about YPF and investors found that helpful, but at the same time, so too did Argentina. And Argentina has now quoted or referred to that about a hundred times in court proceedings around the world. And it's just some noise that is probably not desirable. So I think we will continue to keep you abreast of major developments in the case, but in terms of commentary on the case, we're going to have to leave people to read themselves in on their own. And with that, let me turn you over to Jordan to walk through some numbers.

Thank you, Chris, and good morning to everybody. I'm starting off on slide nine, which gives you the overall combination of our two segments, principal finance and asset management. First, just looking at the total revenues, you can see a large increase of year to date compared to last year, 280 million versus 168 million in the same period. Bring that all the way down to the bottom line, you can see that our net income has also risen, 120-ish million compared to 24 million, and earnings per share at 53 cents is close to five times for the same period last year. I'll walk us through the principal finance segment next. John will help me, and then I'll hit asset management and walk through our expenses as well as our capital and liquidity. So let's move to the principal finance segment. I'm skipping forward to page 12. Start off in the top left, just the sheer size of the portfolio, when you look at fair value of 3.8 billion, unfunded, un-drawn commitments of another 1.7, 1.8 billion, you can see how much that has grown since 2020. Let's take that 3.8 billion, the fair value, and break it down into a couple components, which you see down below. YPF makes up approximately 43% of the assets. You then have the remainder of the rest of the portfolio, 1.6 billion of deployed cost, and then another 33%, 550 million, that's 33% of deployed cost that represents a fair value markup of the asset. Now, when you look at that 33%, you can compare that to our historical ROIC, and there is a large amount of revenue if we were to hit that historical ROIC that has yet to come into the book. But let's flip over to the right-hand side and look at the pie charts. If you look at the pie charts on the right, you see our exposure by geography. We're not just a US-based company. Our clients are global. Our cases are global. You have 51% in North America, that's predominantly the US, but then you have another 25ish, 26% in EMEA, another 20% that's a truly global portfolio. And our assets are quite diverse. I look at the pie chart down below, and I see 20% pizza slices, 21% where you truly have a mixed portfolio, 20% antitrust, 20% intellectual property, 18% arbitration, and that truly shows the diversity of our team, of our footprint, and of our asset types. I move forward to page 13 to talk about how the asset moved forward, or the asset, the portfolio moved forward over the period. Overall, if you look at our capital provision income, you see total realized and unrealized gains on par with last year. Total capital provision income, of course, is much larger. 246 million versus 140 million year to date, and a good mix between both YPF and the rest of the portfolio. When I look at the two bottom charts, they both say the same thing. Left-hand side is the second quarter, right-hand side is the -to-date bridge. I'll focus on the left-hand side, and just walk through these items. The asset grew, of course, by our deployment. This is the cash going out the door. You see a passage of time, which is the next green bar. That's the duration impact, as our assets move closer towards ultimate conclusion, and you can see when you compare the left to the right, 61 million on the left, 120 million, which makes sense given one quarter versus two quarters. Discount rates were favorable this period, and since our assets are a net present value, when interest rates come down, the asset goes up in value. Interest rates, the discount rate that we use to discount our assets was approximately 20 basis points in this quarter, and also around 20 basis points in the first quarter. You see the 25 million there of improvement. Then you have the impact of milestones and the other inputs. These are model inputs, as well as the objective milestones that we see as our cases progress, and of course, realizations, and realizations should be negative. That's when the asset completes and turns itself into cash. You can see the progression of 3.6 to 3.8 billion. Well, let's talk a little bit more about how that asset continues to grow by moving to page 14, and it grows at first by us putting out new definitive commitment. A definitive commitment is one in which we've underwritten the case, and Chris alluded to how the second quarter was a great quarter with respect to the amount of business that we put on. If you just look at year to date, 2025 versus 2024, you can see the huge growth, 518 million compared to the 300 million in the same period last year, and you can see the second quarter, 361 million is the largest quarter compared to the last nine. When you look at those new definitive commitments, you then look down at the pie chart on the bottom left, and you see that we now have over a billion dollars of new definitive commitment. We talked to you on Investor Day about growing the portfolio, and that growth in the portfolio is around deployed costs and these cases that we've underwritten. And just looking at the new definitive commitments, that's grown from under 800 million at the end of the year to the 1 billion 65 it is now. As you recall though, these commitments are not revolvers. The clients need to do the work in order to get invoiced, in order for us to put the money out, and so you'll see that move episodically through each period. Overall, our deployments were in line with what they were last year. I turned to 15 to talk about our realizations. Overall realizations were ahead of pace of last year at 225 million versus 219 million. You then look at the ROICs on the bottom, and you see that year to date we're at 37%, and I think it's important to remind people of what we discussed in the first quarter. Our assets aren't homogeneous. Some are longer in duration, some are shorter, and they have different risk bands, which we depicted on the slide earlier. We had an asset in the first quarter that was originated in 2024 that concluded early in 2025, and when you saw that, you see a low ROIC, which makes sense when an asset has a short duration, but the IRR at 40% was quite healthy and above our average, and so naturally you would expect to see the year to date 2025 ROIC be slightly lower than our historical, but that's not the only asset that concluded. It's important to note that in addition to that, we've had six additional assets generate 10 or more million dollars in year to date 2025, and with that, I'd like to turn it over to John to speak a little bit more about the portfolio.