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Vef Ab

Q22025

7/16/2025

speaker
Operator
Conference Operator

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the VEF Second Quarter 2025 Earnings Conference Call and Webcast. At this time, all participants will be in a 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, please press star 1 and 1 again. Please note that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to the conference over to your first speaker, Mr. David Nangle, CEO. Please go ahead, Sal.

speaker
David Nangle
CEO

Thank you, Razia. Good morning and good afternoon, everybody. And specifically, good morning to everybody in New York where I'm doing this call today. Welcome to our Q2 results presentation conference call off the back of our results, which were announced this morning. And with me, as always, in the call is our CIO, Alexis Camudos. um quite a focused presentation for you today and we've got 14 slides in total but 10 active and we'll do that quite quickly and in a focused way giving you the highlights and where we're thinking about everything in life at bf and then happily open up for questions and before i get into the deck itself maybe so just some general opening comments on what we're seeing at beth and through the prism of the markets you know what i would say is that 2025 this year it does continue the improving trends that we're seeing that we have seen gradually come through since the 2022, early 2023 lows for both public markets and our industry specifically. And this is something, these trends that we've seen evolve through 24 into 2025, month on month, quarter on quarter, is something that I continue to talk about in forums, in the markets, and write about in our investment letters and in quarterly reports. Specifically, there has been a public market supportive backdrop year to date. You see that obviously in the main indexes out there. But then specifically to emerging markets and risk assets, it's been even more so. We've been accelerating and outperforming, and that's a nice backdrop to everything that we do. Importantly, within that, capital is flowing. Capital is flowing into funds that invest in private companies. Capital is flowing out into private companies. More rounds are happening. We see that through the prism of our portfolio. And finally, capital is flowing out via exits. And this is something that was tumbleweeds maybe two, three years ago, but has been picking up pace and momentum, even to the point where nearly IPOs are becoming a trend, not to get ahead of ourselves, but IPOs, M&A, secondaries, more exits are happening and you see it at FF. You know, on a macro level, growth is picking up and interest rates are broadly falling in a lot of parts of the world. So, and in FX, the currencies that we're exposed to are strengthening versus the US dollar year to date. So, A lot of positive trends happening in our world, incrementally building up momentum month on month, quarter on quarter. And this is everything that we see. And then we see it through the prism of our portfolio and our daily business. You know, against this, and these are general comments, you know, we're still early in the cycle. We're very open and honest about that. It's the best in class funds that are raising money, best in class fintechs that are exiting. That's the way it should be. We saw it with JustPay recently at BEF. And I think the investment company universe, which is focused on this space like ourselves, has been a little bit lagged in catching up, but you can feel that momentum building now in everything we do. So there are general comments on the backdrop of everything we see. Getting specific into the investor deck for the quarter, on slide number two, what we saw in Q2 from a NAV point of view, up 6%, 6.1% year-to-date, up 5% quarter-on-quarter. The main drivers in this quarter, and it's different every quarter, and was mainly on the market side with multiples being a nice tailwind as were FX in key markets like Mexico and Brazil specifically when you look at the name like Creditas. The portfolio, continued message on this front around the portfolio. One, generally the risk-rewarded portfolio is much better than it's been for a long time. The majority break even and growth is now back in focus. And we've got a nice slide on this focusing on our biggest companies. We expect 30-35% revenue and gross profit growth aggregated across the portfolio over the next 12 months. And this is all NAV tailwind effects that we expect going forward. Specific to that and our biggest asset in credit tax, you see the lead generation fact of loan originations up 44% year-on-year for the Q1 numbers that came out recently. That then drives the loan growth up double digit year on year and accelerating. We'll see that into Q2, and that then drives the income statement. There's always some volatility on a monthly, quarterly basis, but the trends are very clear around putting the foot back down on managed cash flow positive growth. Exits continue, and I think this is very important for the industry and for VEF. We have a slide we focus on exits and IPOs and in the industry at large, but it only important when those broad market trends actually impact us here at beth and our shareholders through the prism of everything we do and we've had three exits in the last 12 months we've tapped the ipo market in india with black book we've had a trade sale in brazil with gringo and we did a nice secondary sale or partial sale of our just paid position um recently in india that's 37 million dollars comes in this strengthens our balance sheet and it gives us healthy options around capital management and capital position And I guess then what we've been doing with that, and this is consistent messaging, delivering on promises around exits, using that capital in a kind of an investment management 101. It's almost the playbook. It's the right thing to do. We're joined at the hip, I think, with most of our big investors in the actions that we're taking. You know, pay down almost half of our remaining debt, 160 million sec in the quarter. It was nice to do that early partial pay down that we had obviously linked to our bond notes. And we started our buyback program doing $4 million of buybacks of our shares at these levels in the quarter, something we will continue to do and look forward to doing, and what our shares trade at a healthy discount to NAV. One of the positives of trading at this discount is our ability for capital to work in our own shares and our own portfolio at a NAV. A NAV is justified by the recent exits and fundraisers that have been done across the board. And then I guess a lot of that, what I'll say, is investment management 101. You know, why people are with us on this journey, Where is our strength? Where is our IP and our edge? It's really in pipeline. It's in finding the next credit pass, just pay, easy go, think of for our portfolio, for investors, for long-term growth. And that's where we're spending an increasing amount of our time because we are obviously delivering on the short-term value accretion by a balance sheet management. We're very much looking to the medium to long-term value accretion by adding the next portfolio winners as we go. On slide three and four, very briefly before I hand over to Alexis, specific to numbers, The NAB for the quarter is approximately $375 million. That is up 6% year to date. So we have a bit of a tailwind in where the NAB on a dollar basis is going. Up slightly higher on a NAV per share US dollar given the buybacks that are coming through. So that accretion is also helpful on a per share basis. From the SEC side, the corona, there's been obviously strength in the SEC versus the dollar. So we've got negative high single digits on SEC for NAB and NAB per share year to date. And on slide number four, what you're seeing from a dollar, we think in dollars when we're investing and we're talking to our investors for the most part, we're seeing that NAV starting to, A, stabilize or B, pick up as we move from Q1 now into Q2. And then NAV per share obviously will have a nice kicker as we go, as we continue to buy back our shares at these levels for as long as they're at a decent discount. I think we'll continue to do that. From here, Alexis, I'm going to pass over to you so you can talk about the valuation metrics for the portfolio in the quarter and the key moving parts there.

speaker
Alexis Camudos
CIO

Thanks, Dave. Hi, everyone. So on slide five, we just showed the valuation approach and key takeaways for the portfolio in the second quarter. As you can see, 43% of the portfolio is valued at latest transaction, with the transactions in JustPay and Confeo making up the bulk of this, and the remaining 57% of the portfolio valued at mark-to-model. There's been no meaningful changes in the quarter to valuation methodologies, I'd say. The greater contribution from mark to model portion of the portfolio is just reflective of the value change in that part of the portfolio, while latest transactions by nature has stayed static despite some of the market tailwinds. Moving on to slide six, this shows The NAV bridge and the breakdown of the growth in NAV in the quarter, which we've been showing for the last few quarters. Overall, $17.5 million growth in NAV was fueled by, one, the strong equity market performance and the impact of that on comps for our market model portfolio. And secondly, as Dave mentioned, the FX tailwinds, and particularly from the Brazilian RAI, I'd say one other point to point out here is in the quarter, we baked some more conservatism into some of our modeling, given some of the macro uncertainty that we're seeing right now. And then other things to point out, I think on the cash and corporate side, you can see just paying black buck cash coming in, partly offset by $4 million of buybacks or so that we've done. in recent time. And so the fewer number of shares outstanding, you'll see NAV per share growth of 6.9% versus the 4.9% in NAV growth, quarter on quarter. There's a small FX headwind on corporate cash, which is just the translation impact of SEC strengthening versus the dollar on our outstanding bond balance. Then slide seven. So just to reiterate what I think Dave said in his opening comments as well, we remain confident in the high-quality portfolio that's now delivering profitable growth. So the important message is that the portfolio is growing revenues and gross profit at 30% to 35% respectively from a self-sustaining base. And by that, we mean the portfolio is almost entirely cash flow neutral positive. And we're seeing this growth manifest in Creditas' re-acceleration of originations that Dave mentioned, and then also in some of the other key metrics across the portfolio. I think Dave in the next slide will cover some of that in Confeo and JustPay that we're seeing. And the environment for fundraising is improving, and we've seen that in the JustPay and Confeo rounds. and we feel confident that other names in the portfolio will be able to track capital from a position of strength at or above unad marks. Back to you, Dave.

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