Teleperformance Ord

Greetings. Welcome to Scion Investment Corporation third quarter 2025 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. Please note this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to Charles Oresti, Managing Director and Head of Investor Relations. Thank you. You may begin.

Good morning and welcome to Scion Investment Corporation's third quarter 2025 earnings conference call. An earnings press release was distributed earlier this morning before market opened. A copy of the release along with a supplemental earnings presentation is available on the company's website at www.scionbdc.com and in the investor resources section. It should be reviewed in conjunction with the company's form 10Q 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 guaranteed to 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. Joining me on today's call will be Michael Reisner, Scion Investment Corporation's Co-Chief Executive Officer, Greg Bresner, President and Chief Investment Officer, and Keith Franz, Chief Financial Officer. With that, I would like to now turn the call over to Michael Reisner. Please go ahead, Michael.

Thank you, Charlie, and good morning, everyone. Overall, we reported a strong third quarter with continued NAV appreciation and significant quarterly earnings. We reported 74 cents a share in net investment income for the third quarter. driven by robust transaction activity involving 20 of our portfolio companies with several fee events, new investments, and repayments. As in past quarters, increased transaction activity tends to translate into higher earning quarters through increased transaction-related fees and other yield enhancement measures such as MOECs, exit fees, and call protection. During the third quarter, we realized significant transaction-related accretion related to a portfolio company that is part of our opportunistic strategy. As we discussed on our prior call, we expected this transaction to close in the third quarter, which contributed meaningfully to our net investment income. Excluding the income from this transaction, we still would have covered our base dividend for the quarter, which we believe reflects the ongoing earnings power of our portfolio. Greg will discuss this transaction in greater detail later on during the call, but I want to reiterate how we view our opportunistic strategy as a differentiated component of our overall earnings potential. While these contributions can appear episodically, we consider these potential earnings to be a strategic component of our portfolio as we manage the business and the dividend over the longer term. We appreciate that the timing of these contributions can be difficult to predict, which is why we provided the additional context on our prior earnings call. Going forward, we plan to provide comparable guidance on any similar anticipated transactional income to help manage investor expectations in the short term, should conditions allow. As we have mentioned previously, we believe the volatility that these potential returns create tends to skew meaningfully to the upside versus consensus expectations, and thus should be evaluated on a longer-term perspective. Our net asset value increased 2.5% quarter over quarter to $14.86, up from $14.50 in the prior quarter, driven largely by fair value increases in our equity portfolio, with significant increases in Longview Power and Palmetto Solar. Following the upsides of our share repurchase program announced in the prior quarter, we were able to take advantage of a meaningful sector-wide sell-off in the BDC space in September, to repurchase our shares in the open market, which remains accretive to NAV. Overall, we repurchased approximately 330,000 shares at an average price of $9.86 per share during the quarter, and have continued repurchasing shares in the fourth quarter. So far in the fourth quarter through last week, we have repurchased approximately 325,000 shares at an average price of $9.33 per share. The largest contributor to our quarterly NAV growth was Longview Power, which continues to see tailwinds from stronger fundamental performance and broader sector growth from AI-driven digital infrastructure demand. Longview is now our largest equity position and we are pleased with the underlying asset performance so far. Looking ahead, we believe successful monetization of our equity positions will be a significant driver of the growth potential for our stock and we are encouraged by recent trends on that front. Despite broader headlines about problematic loans in the credit space, we believe our portfolio continues to perform well. Underlying LTM adjusted EBITDA growth trends on our portfolio companies in our debt portfolio remain in the mid to high single digits, and our portfolio non-accruals remain relatively low at 1.75% of the portfolio at fair value. We added two names to non-accrual status this quarter, including a relatively small position and one of our very few second lien holdings. Following our quarterly review process, we downgraded three loans, including the two new non-accruals I just mentioned, partially offset by upgrading one loan that was subsequently repaid at par at quarter end. Overall, investments risk-rated four or five comprise approximately 2.4% of the portfolio at fair value. I'm also excited to announce today a shift in our timing of paying base distributions to our shareholders beginning in January, 2026. We will be converting to paying base distributions from quarterly to monthly. We are pleased with the continued performance of our portfolio and believe that shareholders will appreciate the increased frequency of our base distributions going forward. We have also declared a base distribution of 36 cents per share for the fourth quarter of 2025, the same amount as the third quarter. And Keith will discuss this in more detail. Summary, we believe that this was a strong quarter for Scion and a reinforcement of our differentiated strategy, which pairs traditional first-lane focused direct lending with an opportunistic capability to enhance overhaul returns over the longer term. We have seen a noticeable pickup in repayment activity in recent quarters, which allows us to redeploy into our active pipeline and allows us to recapture incremental fee income as the portfolio turns over. I'm especially proud of Scion's performance amidst a highly competitive operating environment. There is certainly no shortage of press out there today on the headwinds of spread compression, looser lender protections, and credit concerns driven by recent high-profile bankruptcies. We have no direct exposure to these names or sectors. We believe that our results today validate the diligent work of our team in continuing to source and execute on differentiated opportunities in a challenging environment. With that, I will now turn the call over to Greg to discuss our portfolio and investment activity during the quarter.