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Vef Ab

Q22024

7/17/2024

speaker
Razia
Conference Operator

Please note that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to have the conference over to CEO David Angon. Please go ahead.

speaker
David Angon
CEO

Super. Thank you, Razia. Good morning and good afternoon, everybody, and welcome to the BEF Q2 first half 2024 results conference call. Very happy to have you all with us today. The slides for this, as ever, are online on our website, but also through the video portal. And as per usual, myself and I'm joined by Alexis Camudos, our CIO. We'll go through a number of slides, about 15 slides in the next 15 minutes, and then we're very happy to open up the Q&A. Moving to slide number two, I think the key events of the quarter. Top three are probably most important here for you, the investor. From an NAB point of view, it's been a flattish performance year to date. In the quarter, we were off a couple of percent in USD, up a couple of percent in SEK, given the weakness of the SEC, but up 14% from Q4 22 lows. I think the key message here that Alexis will go through in a bit more detail is underlying strength here today in the portfolio. That's driving the NAV, and we like that. but some headwinds in currencies which are exposed to in our local markets, as well as some multiples from a valuation comms point of view. Feeding off that strength in the general portfolio, specifically credit assets always in focus, given it's our size asset, nearly 50% of our NAB, and recently reported its 1Q2024 numbers itself, and it announced its first profitable quarter, and also as important, it's starting to re-accelerate growth, so I'll double click on that, but A key milestone for the company, a key milestone for Beth as a key shareholder in that company, and we do love to see growth with profitability coming through in some of our key portfolio companies once again. And that leads more generally into the broad portfolio, where it's just, it's a portfolio that looks a lot better. They're looking at month on month, week on week, year on year. It's now the risk reward is quite nice in what was at one point a high growth burning portfolio as was the era and the stage of the portfolio and is now majority break even 90 plus of the portfolio at break even and now starting to re-accelerate growth in some of the cyclical names like credit house confio transfer go and then some of the structural names a lot higher growth than that and namely just pay and gringo point to two and but what we're expecting in the next 12 months next uh from a revenue and gross profit point of view is 30 and 60% weighted growth in that portfolio. So quality, break even, growing, and actually raising capital. The final few points, it's a reminder on our bond. We rolled over our sustainability bond in Q4 of last year to push out the duration to Q4 2026. In tandem with the last bond we did, we released our allocation report earlier this quarter. allocating that bond money to similar names that we did the first time around. And finally, just from a regional point of view, from an emerging market point of view, it's been an eventful quarter in our world, albeit one could argue it was an eventful quarter for macro and politics in the developed world as well, be it US, UK and France. But in our world, we had elections in India and Mexico. It's always an eventful period and one in focus for investors in markets like ours. and we're quite happy to see a continuation of governments under Modi in India, and also the Moreno party winning again, the leftist government in Mexico, albeit with a new president, a female president in Mexico for the first time. So some continuity there in both markets, albeit you get volatility around election time. And then on the macro front in Brazil, a lot of focus around some of the fiscal constraints from a balance sheet point of view, and the central banks targeting and moves on interest rates and the government's opinions on them. But generally, it was a noisy window, and we saw some FX volatility as you do, notably through the BRL and the MXN, the Mexican peso, off 10% each quarter on quarter, albeit both have pulled back, as is the way in volatility we see in these names. And moving on to slide three, and just key highlight numbers, we have an NAV at the end of the quarter of $436.6 million. As I say, that's off a couple of percent quarter on quarter, but broadly flat here to date. And from a SEC point of view on a per share basis, we're at 4.45, so that's up from year-end 2023. And I get the key point here from a share price versus NAV per share, which we'll touch on, is the share price has been growing year-to-date faster than the NAV per share, but both directionally positive, and hence that discount is starting to gradually close. From an NAV, this is a dollar point of view. Slide four is the chart that we always show. It shows the evolution of our NAV from a dollar perspective over time. You've kind of seen some consolidation since the down drag of the highs of 2021. I think the key message to you, the investors, we keep on reiterating that we're starting to see confidence through the prism of our portfolio of tailwinds coming through in our NAB. And we can see that direction over time. It is up and to the right, albeit it does gradually consolidate at some points in the cycle. And last slide from my point of view before I pass to Alexis. And this is just really around the markets, and we can't get away from public markets. We're big respecters of public markets because public markets are read across the private markets, be that valuation, exits, confidence, and everything that we do. Here today, you'll have seen public markets, as indicated by the NASDAQ and the S&P, up strong here today. And again, in Q2, up 8% NASDAQ and 4% S&P. In our world, in the fintech world, It's been a flattish year to date, you know, evolution-wise in terms of indexes and, broadly speaking, multiples, albeit a lot of individual variances within that which feed into our valuation process. And Q2 was quite weak, a lot of interest rate sensitivity, given the headlines that were coming through, off 8%, 9% indexes in the quarter. At this point, I'm going to pass over to Alexis, who's going to double-click on the whole area of valuations, NAV, and portfolio, and where we are today before I come back to myself. Alexis?

speaker
Alexis Camudos
CIO

Thanks, Dave. good afternoon good morning everybody um as dave mentioned just going to double click a little bit on some of the points that they've made i think the first point here on slide six shows the evolution of our valuation marks and i the theme for the quarter is relatively flat and stable but what's important are the components of that stability um and the underlying trend of like portfolio performance um comes through on this slide when you consider some of the headwinds that we've been facing, i.e., weak FX in the quarter and weak public comps. You can see that being the case for both CREZAS and Confeo. So in those cases, we've had FX headwinds of circa 10% in the quarter and the performance of those portfolio companies offsetting that. In JustPay's case, there was a double-digit decline in public comps for the payment space. which was almost all offset by JustPay company performance, but not quite. And I think the only one other company to mention on this slide, which has a larger quarterly percentage decline is Nebo, which experienced both the FX headwinds and public comp headwinds. So the performance of the company and the growth in the company was not enough to offset both of those. One other thing that we do sometimes get questions on is the other bucket. This comprises companies that are less than 1% of the portfolio or where the mark can't be disclosed due to regulatory restrictions. And in the quarter, the bucket saw an incremental decrease. This is generally because companies, because we have become a bit more conservative on the forecast for these smaller companies, And in some cases, there were fresh rounds in which we did not participate in. And in one case, there was a down round versus a recent transaction that was Rupeak in India. So those accounted for the decline in the other bucket. On the next slide, slide seven, there's been no change quarter on quarter to the valuation approach for the portfolio. We still have 13% of the portfolio marked to the latest transaction and 87% marked to market with over 90% of those marked to market valuations incorporating multiples further down the income statement as we detailed in the last quarter. The important thing to mention here is the direction of travel for the marks over the course of the year will most likely be towards latest transaction as we see more transactions happening in our portfolio companies, which then should help increase the confidence and validate our NAV and also create opportunities for realizations over the years. On slide eight, This is our NAV bridge, which helps to quantify the drivers of the NAV over the quarter. As you can see, the NAV, the starting NAV for the first quarter is $448 million, moved to $437 million in round numbers. The biggest driver of that was portfolio performance, which contributed about 10% in the quarter the model holdings. That was quantified at $41 million. That was broadly offset by FX headwinds in the quarter, mainly REI and Mexican peso moving down 10 percent each in the quarter, which contributed to $32 million of negative NAV contribution. And then you can see that there was a net negative contribution from comps as well, specifically because of the impact of payment comps and their impact on JustPay, which was comfortably in double digits in the quarter on a percentage basis. I think on the smaller side of contributions to the NAV move in the quarter, it's worth As you can see here in the latest transaction bucket, there was negative $2 million, and part of that was because of the down round in Rupeek in India. And then you have some other cash changes and non-cash changes in the corporate bucket, the cash changes being our OPEX and coupon payments, and FX being the translation impact from our SEC bond. On slide nine, so sitting halfway through the year, we're feeling very confident, as Dave mentioned, in the portfolio and the outlook for the delivery, and therefore the opportunity for us to compound the NAV from here. I think the key thing to mention is Whilst in the past we've mentioned that 90% of the portfolio or more had the ability to achieve break-even, we have now hit that point where over 90% of the portfolio is break-even and growing on a self-sustaining basis. That includes all three of the top names, Creditas, Confio, and JustPay, but extends beyond that to TransferGo, Solfacil, and Nebo as well. So feeling very confident in the sustainable growth of our portfolio. On top of that, we are now seeing companies turn a corner and starting to accelerate growth from the self-sustaining position. Dave mentioned we're forecasting a 30% weighted next 12-month revenue growth number for the portfolio and 60% on a gross profit basis. And that's in part driven by credit tasks, but contribute to from the rest of the portfolio. I think we're really moving past the phase of solving for break-even for the portfolio and portfolio companies are now fine-tuning the self-sustaining growth and re-accelerating. And then the last point to make is that from a position of strength, i.e. well-capitalized, strongly and having reached breakeven, we're now starting to see investors lean into the portfolio for fundraisers, like has happened at both TransferGo and Gringo. So, you know, these events will help validate our NAV and create opportunities for realizations on the horizon. Dave, back to you.

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