VNV Global AB (publ)

All right. Thank you. And welcome to the Global Third Quarter 2024 Report conference call. On the call today, we have Per Briljot, CEO, Dennis Mohamed, who's part of our investment team, and myself, Björn von Sievers, CFO of the company. As per usual, Per will start with a summary of the developments, followed by an overview of the more meaningful portfolio constituents. After that, we will open up for a Q&A. And as a reminder, if you want to ask a question, please use the Q&A function here on Zoom, and we'll try to address those towards the end. With that, I'll hand over to Per to start with the intro.

Thanks, Bjorn. And so, yeah, this quarter, our NAV is down a bit, some 4% in US dollars to $575 million. That downtick is a reflection pretty much only of us writing down, marking down a blah, blah car on the back of... Basically, French politics. And I'll come back to some more details around that when we cover BlaBlaCar. But the rest of the portfolio is pretty much unchanged. So that's the bulk of this 4% downtick in the NAV per share. um and um i mean we invest into tech companies and as we all know um the the tech market has been tough for a couple years and uh but but but really i really sense that there is some some signs of life and i mean i'm humble about that if you look at my share price it doesn't look that way but But when we look inside the portfolio and what we see, there's really some more activity. I mean, I'll come back to it more, but there's a bunch of companies in our portfolio that have raised money successfully, i.e. at our mark or even higher. And then we've taken them up in the NAV, so there's some upticks like that. And that's something that wasn't really present, if you say, a year ago. And also on the sort of similar note, As you know, a lot of the focus of our work over this past year and more really has been to sort of raise cash out of the portfolio. So we did sell that Booksy assets to Verdane for, well, including a small earn up like $55 million. We have signed to sell Get. We expect that to close later this year. I'll come back to that a little bit as well for a total of 83. And as we announced in this report, we've had exits of another $10 million. And those are a couple of smaller names, and I'm not at liberty to go into which ones they are, but... That process continues. So it's just shy of $150 million, which we have and are primarily using to pay down the debt that we have. But it also renders us, upon the closing of GET, into a positive net cash position. which we then can start to sort of use in investing. But pretty much all of these have been done around NAV, some a little bit below, some above. And that's another reflection that I think the market we're in is starting to sort of really sort of function again although one has to be humble when it comes back into full swing importantly to be able to decide your own fate it's important to have staying power and one critical part Guys, I think you need to mute. One critical part of staying power is that the portfolio doesn't crave a lot of cash. And as we've sort of been consistently showing over the course of this year, is that the portfolio is now three quarters of it is EBITDA positive. The reason why we don't highlight Voya is that, yes, it is EBITDA positive, but it really should be EBIT positive. Now, Voya, we'll come back to that, has raised the industry first ever portfolio. public bond, which covers the funding. which is a huge step, both for Voi, but the industry at large as well. So all very good. And so I think that captures sort of a broad overview at this sort of whole coal level and what makes us excited. So with that, I'll hand over back to Björn to talk a little bit about the numbers.

Thank you, Per. And per usual, I thought I'd go through the balance sheet and the key movers during the quarter to start. And looking at the balance sheet from the top, we have investments in financial assets of approximately $650 million or 50 crowns per share. Cash and cash equivalent of $11.9 million as per end of third quarter, giving us a total portfolio of $662 million. Add to that our outstanding debt and other liabilities, we end up at $575 million NAV. or 44 crowns per share. That NAV is, of course, as Per mentioned, down 4.3% during the quarter in dollar terms, and in SEC terms, 9% given the movements in the US SEC movements during the quarter. If we flick to the next slide, I'll just walk through the top names of the portfolio and what's driving the change during the quarter. The main and essentially only significant movement is relating to BlaBlaCar. It's down 20% during the quarter. And as a reminder, and as we note in the report, the bloodlocker valuation is derived from a sum of the parts valuation model that we further find during the quarter that now values the bus marketplace business lines, including Obliette, separate to the CTC ride sharing marketplace and the operated bus business. The family change of the quarter is driven, as Per also notes in the report, by a more conservative short-term outlook on the financial contribution from these energy savings certificates in France, but also lower peer multiples in general. The Blabla composition represents approximately 17.7 crowns per share, or 40% of the NAV as per the end of the third quarter. Get is flat during the quarter, still valued on the ongoing transaction with Pango that we expect to close during the second half of this year. Get represents 6.4 crowns per share as per September 30th. And finally, if we go to the top three void, also flat during the quarter from a valuation perspective, as it's still based on the transaction, the primary transaction that closed during the first quarter of 2024. This adds another 6.2 grams per share as per September 30th. And adding this together, you have a contribution of some 30 grams per share, or just below 70% of the total NAV. Also worth noting, again, that after September 30th, cash-to-cash equivalents amounted to $11.9 million. But after the end of the quarter and the reporting period, we've added another approximately $10 million to that cash balance, following exits in a number of the company's smaller holdings. Another point worth highlighting on this slide is that during the quarter, most of you might have read that we placed a new CEC 850 million bond to refinance the existing bond that were due January 2025. This new bond settled after the end of the quarter. And later this week, we will also close the settlement of the early redemption of the previous 2022-25 bond. I'll stop there and hand it back to Per to go through some of the portfolio holdings in more detail. And then again, later on, we will move to the Q&A.