Saratoga Investment Corp

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Saratoga Investment Corp Fiscal First Quarter 2020 Financial Results Conference Call. Please note that today's call is being recorded. During today's presentation, all parties will be in a listen-only mode. Following management's prepared remarks, we will open the line for questions. At this time, I would like to turn the call over to Saratoga Investment Corp's Chief Financial Officer and Compliance Officer, Mr. Henri Steenkamp. You may begin.

Thank you. I would like to welcome everyone to Saratoga Investment Corp's fiscal first quarter 2020 earnings conference call. Today's conference call includes forward-looking statements and projections. We ask you to refer to our most recent filings with the SEC for important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from forward-looking statements and projections. We do not undertake to update our forward-looking statements unless required to do so by law. Today we will be referencing a presentation during our call. You can find our fiscal first quarter 2020 shareholder presentation in the events and presentations section of our investor relations website. A link to our IR page is in the earnings press release distributed last night. A replay of this conference call will also be available from 1pm today through July 18th. Please refer to our earnings press release for details. I would now like to turn the call over to our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Christian Oberbeck, who will be making a few introductory remarks.

Thank you, Henri, and welcome, everyone. During this first fiscal quarter, Saratoga continued to build on the growth of our high-quality portfolio, utilizing our strong capital base and maintaining our industry leadership within the BDC sector, as reflected in our key performance metrics and overall performance. A particular note is the continued strong credit performance of our overall portfolio this quarter. While a challenging competitive environment persists, our origination efforts, combined with our flexible capital structure and diversified sources of cost-effective liquidity, continue to support our robust pipeline of available deal sources driving greater scale. To briefly recap the past quarter on slide two, First, we continue to strengthen our financial foundation this quarter by maintaining a high level of investment credit quality with 98.7% of our loan investments having our highest rating, generating a return on equity of 11.7% on a trailing 12-month basis with 16.6% annualized return on equity in Q1, both significantly beating the BDC industry mean of 8.7%. Recognizing a $4 million unrealized gain on the overall portfolio this quarter and registering a gross unlevered IRR of 13.4% on our total unrealized portfolio, with gross unlevered IRR of 13.9% on total realizations of $376 million. Second, our assets under management grew to $410 million this quarter, a 2% increase from $402 million as of last quarter. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for joining us. and finally, our capital structure and base of liquidity remains strong and has the potential to improve. We sold 76,448 shares with gross proceeds of $1.8 million through our ATM equity offering during the quarter and we continue to have significant dry powder to meet future potential opportunities in a changing credit and pricing environment. Our existing available year-end liquidity of $107 million Allows us to grow our current assets under management by 26% without any new external financing. This quarter saw a strong return on equity performance as noted above and continued solid performance within our key performance indicators as compared to the quarters ended May 31, 2018 and February 28, 2019. Our adjusted NII is $4.6 million this quarter up 16% versus $4.0 million last year and down 6% versus $4.9 million last quarter. Our adjusted NII per share is $0.60 this quarter, down 6% from $0.64 last year and down 9% from $0.66 last quarter. And our NAV per share is $24.06, up 4% from $23.06 last year and up 2% from 2362 last quarter. Henri will provide more detail later. As in the past, we remain committed to further advancing the overall long-term size and quality of our asset base. As you can see on slide three, our assets under management have steadily risen since we took over the BDC and the quality of our credits remain high. We look forward to continuing this positive trend. With that, I would like to now turn the call back over to Henri to review our financial results as well as the composition and performance of our portfolio.