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Vef Ab

Q12024

4/17/2024

speaker
Operator
Conference Operator

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the VEF first quarter 2024 earnings call and webcast. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, please press star 1 and 1 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, you can please press star 1 and 1 again. Please note that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to your speaker, David Nangle, CEO. Please go ahead, Sam.

speaker
David Nangle
CEO

Yeah, good morning and good afternoon, everybody, and welcome again to our quarterly results conference call, this time for the first quarter of 24. I'm David Nangle, the CEO of VEF, and with me as always will be my colleague and CIO Alexis Camudos, who is with us from Rio today at a conference in Brazil. What we'll do over the next 20 minutes plus minus as per usual. I'll give you a brief rundown of the updates of our story over the last quarter, recent past. I'm looking forward to the rest of the year. And then as always, open up to Q&A at the end. The materials themselves are on our webcast or will be on our website also during the day. But getting straight into it, just from a key event of the quarter, and this is in slide two, just kind of the salient points that we think about when we think about VEF at this point in the cycle. From a NAV point of view, You know, we had up 1% in the quarter from a dollar point of view, but 9% year on year. And probably more importantly is the trend that we're now up 17% from Q4 lows. So we do like the evolution of the trend and the number of driving factors within that, whether it be micro level at a company level, but also the various aspects of market strength and multiples FX, and then most importantly, company performance. But below that 1% move was some strong moves in both directions, which Alexis will get into. But credit assets stand at a 14% plus quarter on quarter and transfer go off the back of a funding round of 36%. The other moves on the downside are more methodology evolution, but I will let Alexis double click on them as I'm sure you have some questions. Credit assets itself in the quarter had a very strong, confident quarter. They delivered their results for last year. It's all about profitability last year. This year is all about profitable growth. We like the evolution of a company from breakneck speed growth through to profitability and now controlled growth and profitable at the same time. Management's also back off the back of these strong trends, you know, on forums, at events. Once again, speaking about its IPO attentions, which is obviously key for an investment company like us at Beth. Transfergo and their funding round was a key event of the quarter. know specific it's always good to have companies having funding rounds but this is the second one that we've had in the last six months it feeds into this trend that we've been telling investors that everything that we see through the prism of beth is getting better we're not banging the table saying it's a bull market like it was in 2020 or 2021 but just incrementally every aspect of what we do and what we touch seems to be getting better and that again in q1 with transfer ago raising 10 million dollars in an up round similar to what gringo did 20 million plus in Q4 of last year. And we'll talk about that and the evolution of the portfolio as more rounds come through and that trend starts to take hold as we go through this year. The portfolio itself, the portfolio is everything for us and for you, our investors. We have a strong portfolio. It will create value over time and that will be reflected in the share price. And where we are at is we're very happy after a couple of tough years in, I guess, global macro, nevermind markets, nevermind VC and privates. Where it started this year, we've been in a bunch of board meetings on the ground, meeting our companies, sitting with them. And it's very much about talking about front foot growth strategy with these companies as opposed to 12, 18 months ago when you're talking defense, costs, balance sheets, margin optimization, etc. We're looking at portfolio revenue growth next 12 months of approximately 30%. But stronger at an average weighted gross profit level of 65% year-on-year for the next 12 months. So this is kind of key for us in terms of the portfolio growth and that feeds through to NAV and then gradually feeds through to share price as we're seeing. And then finally, it's macro. We don't like overly talk about macro, but it gets a lot of headlines globally with the US. But in our world, our markets do tend and continue to be ahead of the curve. Brazil onto its sixth rate cut since its second half 23 peak. enough positive for the macro fintech credit tasks within that and some of our other names also. But also Mexico had its first base rate cut in Q1. So the trend from a macro rate into financial services and fintech has also been a friend to Beth through Q1. Moving on to slide number three, just some key numbers. Our NAV is just shy of $450 million at the quarter and touched nearly 4.8 billion SEC. From a SEC per share, which is obviously a key indicator given our share prices in SEC, it was up to 4.558. Obviously, the SEC was weak over the quarter, so the moderate move in the US dollar of our NAV and NAV per share was stronger from a SEC point of view, up 7% quarter on quarter, hence the move to 458 SEC per share NAV from 426. Looking at our slide four on our NAV from a dollar point of view, as I say, it's touching $450 million. A long evolution of our NAV through cycle and obviously the spike in 2021 with market forces and the pullback as we got our NAV back down to right sizing in line with public market multiples and performance. But what's key for me as someone who's managing this portfolio with the team and seeing this NAV evolve as an output of what's happening in our portfolio, there's just been a gradual uptick from that December 2022 low, as I say, 17% up from that low. And kind of restarting that gradual trend that we saw back in 2015, it was a gradual up and to the right as opposed to the dramatic spike that we had in that window and dramatic pullback. So I would much more rather manage and communicate a gradual upward trend as we're seeing over the last three to five quarters. And finally, just from a market point of view, slide number five before we move on to Alexis. It's been a strong start to the year for markets. We are market dependent in many ways. Our companies, a lot of them are valued against the market, and then also we're looking to exit them into the market, market multiple. And we ourselves are obviously a listed entity and have a market share price. But markets have been strong year to date, both in terms of NASDAQ and S&P. You'll see as market participants up 10%. And the FinTech indexes, which we follow, obviously have been up similar. Obviously, the various names within there have moved to different degrees. New banks have been up strong, whereas other names have been down strong, like Paytm in India. So it's very hard to put out. These are just average numbers. And a lot of those multiples do feed through to different names in our portfolio. But overall, markets have been a tailwind for everything we do year to date and also through 2023. At this point, I'll move on to the valuation section of our portfolio NAV, and Alexis, I'll bring you in if that's okay. Great. Thanks, Dave.

speaker
Alexis Camudos
CIO

Hi, everyone. Yeah, so on slide six, I'll start by just highlighting some of the key moves in the quarter. As Dave highlighted, the valuation of credit tasks moved up 14% quarter on quarter. This was largely driven by both company performance and also the performance of the listed comps that we use in the mark-to-market valuation process for credit tasks. The other large up move was Transogo. Again, Dave spoke about this, but Transogo raised the $10 million round in the quarter, which saw the mark going up 36% quarter on quarter. On the negative side, the largest one to highlight is Confeo. the valuation for Confeo was marked down 21% quarter on quarter. This reflected pretty much an equal part, the weaker comps in the quarter, and then also the impact of the valuation evolution, the methodology evolution, which we'll cover in the next slide. And then more broadly speaking, the evolution of the valuation methodology had a impact in the quarter across some of the other names. And we'll cover that in a little bit more depth later in the presentation. But moving to slide seven. On this slide, we summarized the rationale and impact of the valuation evolution, the methodology evolution that we're using in the quarter for the mark-to-market value businesses. In a nutshell, what we're doing is that with a large portion of our portfolio now either profitable or approaching break-even, our valuation methodology has evolved to incorporate the additional data points that will drive the valuation of these businesses going forward. So as we've communicated, a big portion of our NAV now has reached a place of maturity and sustainable growth. That is The large companies are still growing into very large opportunities, but are very focused on unit economics. They're approaching or have reached steady state gross margins, and they're balancing the growth of the business with profits, ultimately solving for break even so that they're in control of their destiny. For these businesses that have reached sustainable growth and this level of maturity, we've become we've begun moving the valuation methodology to incorporate multiples further down the income statement, in particular, gross profit. As such, our valuation methodology improves with more relevant data points to value the businesses. This approach is aligned with market feedback about valuation from other growth stage investors that are likely to participate in next pricing the equity in these companies. And it's something that we've done naturally for Creditas and TransferGo over the course of 2023. And now in this quarter, we've done it for Confeo, JustPay, Solfacil and Nebo. At this point, over 90% of our market valued portfolio is valued using this methodology. And overall, we feel this results in a more robust valuation that reflects more relevant data points available to us to value these businesses the transition did prove a headwind to now the evolution of the quarter as some of the companies are still approaching steady state gross margins but as long as our companies continue to make progress on gross margins this gap will close in the coming quarters our goal in the valuation process working alongside our auditors is always to provide a true and fair value of the portfolio to the market with the highest probability of portfolio events to occur at or above ANAV. So moving on to page eight, slide eight, we show a summary of the portfolio. Of the 14 portfolio companies, 10 are marked to market representing 87% of ANAV and four based on latest transactions representing 13% of ANAV. You can see the breakdown of this on this page. The large portfolio company where there was a change in methodology was TransferGo because of the funding round that happened in the quarter. And you'll also see on this slide that we show that of the large portfolio companies that are on a mark-to-market valuation methodology, all of them incorporate revenue and gross profit multiples. On slide nine, just running through some of the key NAB and portfolio performance metrics for the quarter. As many of you will remember, in 2022, our portfolio moved to mark-to-market quickly to reflect this new environment that we were entering. What's notable in this quarter, as Dave has mentioned, is that as the environment improves and companies begin to raise rounds again, we're starting to see the portfolio shift back towards the latest transaction, which is a welcome shift. The latest transaction value portfolio increased from 7% of the portfolio to 13% in this quarter from the previous quarter. And importantly, in aggregate, this shift is happening above our NAV mark, driven by the bigger, more important companies in our portfolio. In terms of growth, the portfolio continues to execute well, expecting 30% or so next 12 months top line growth on a sustainable basis. And 95% of our portfolio are now at or can reach breakeven with existing cash position. And an additional data point related to this is a bigger portion of our portfolio now is actually at breakeven, specifically given credit announcement of reaching breakeven at the end of last quarter. And the remaining 5% who are not able to reach break even given existing cash have 18 months of runway. On slide 10, just running through the NAV bridge, showing what the biggest contributors are to the change in NAV quarter on quarter. The main positive forces driving the NAV growth in the quarter is the portfolio performance as our companies continue to execute well. The other positive impact is from the TransferGo transaction, which drove the $10 million new transaction bucket within the latest transaction valuations on this slide. On the negative front, the largest headwind came from the change in multiple bucket, which incorporates the valuation methodology evolution down the income statement mentioned before. If we isolate the impact of the valuation methodology evolution accounted for $25 million of the $24 million headwind in the NADN's bucket. FX is generally a small headwind from the depreciation of the RAI. And the change in corporate cash reflects our OPEX, which is partly offset by the portion of our unhedged bond and the translation impact of the fixed depreciation of the quarter. Overall, this was a positive quarter with portfolio growing at a healthy rate contributing to shareholder value growth whilst refining our valuation process for a maturing portfolio proved the headwind. We see this as fine tuning of our portfolio multiples with incremental data. Dave, back to you.

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