Flow Capital Corp.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Flow Capital's 2022 year-end conference call. At this time, all lines are in listen-only mode. Following the presentation, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. If at any time during this call you require immediate assistance, please press star zero for the operator. This call is being recorded today, March the 29th, 2023. I would now like to turn the conference over to Alex Belluta, CEO. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you very much. Good morning, everybody, and thank you for participating in today's call, either live or listening to the recording afterwards. I'm joined by Gaurav Singh, our Chief Financial Officer. After the close of the market yesterday, we released our financial results for the year-ended 2022 and Details can be found on our website at flowcap.com or as filed on CDAR. I'd like to remind everybody that today's discussion may contain forward-looking statements that reflect current views with respect to future events. Any such statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in any forward-looking statements. For more information on risks and uncertainties related to forward-looking statements, please refer to the management discussion analysis, which was recently filed on CDAR. We had a very good year culminating what is now four years of very strong performance, and I'm very proud of the performance of the team. Some of the highlights, revenue from royalties and interest in the quarter were $2.26 million. For the fiscal year, revenues from royalties and interest We're $7.8 million. That's year-over-year growth of 28%. Book value, excluding the re-recognition of our tax asset, our tax loss asset, was up to $0.97. That's a 29% growth year-over-year. If you include roughly $0.25 of tax loss re-recognition onto the balance sheet, that gets our book value up to $1.22, and I'll talk about that more in a minute, representing year-over-year growth of 63%. I've said this before, IFRS numbers, while important, can be misleading or at least difficult to understand because changes in balance sheet tend to flow through the income statement under IFRS rules. Nevertheless, you can see all the details, and I'm not going to go through them here on the call, but you can see the details as follows on CDAR about our IFRS numbers, and they include year-to-date income of $14.5 million. Again, hard to parse because some of that is due to balance sheet changes. But adjusted recurring free cash flow, which is something we've talked about in the past, it's a way that we use to track our business, which is really recurring revenue, less cash expenses, less interest expense, was $882,000 in the quarter. That's compared to $313,000 last year, same time. The adjusted free cash flow for the year was $2.9 million, which is a growth of 76%, another great quarter in terms of cash flow or year in terms of cash flow growth. Importantly, cash collections from various types of upside and bonus payments, including prepayments of interest on early exit, warrant exercise, other types of bonus payments not related directly to interest and royalty payments, generated about $3.2 million in cash in the year. And this is important. It's something that I don't think we've done a as good a job as we could of explaining to people is that we have recurring revenue from our royalty and interest, but then on all of our investments, we take royalties or other forms of bonus payments, depending on the performance of the company that we lend to. And those will be a material part of shareholder value generation in the coming years. And as an example, in this past year, we collected 3.2 million in cash, actual cash from those kinds of bonus payments. In particular, Almost $2 million of that was from one exit from a very successful investment that we had called Performio. Total assets were all approaching $60 million compared to $44 million last year. And cash at the end of the year was $9.5 million compared to $4.1 million in cash at the end of last year. I'll dig into some of these in a little bit more detail. Q4, actually all of 2022, really capped what I think is a fairly significant remarkable performance for the team over the last three and four years. We'll start with the book value performance. Not only was it up 29% year over year, but it was up 113% year over year. I should say over three years from a low of about 44 cents to 97 cents today. And it's because of the strong performance over the three years that we were allowed to re-recognize the tax asset. And so the tax losses are, in the range of $30 million, but on an after-tax basis, that represents a cash asset to the company saving us in terms of cash tax that we have to pay of just about $8 million. And that asset is now on a balance sheet taking our aggregate book value to $1.22. But it's because we've had regular and consistent profitability over the last three years that we're allowed to recognize that tax asset. We had it on our balance sheet a couple of years ago. We had to de-recognize it because of losses, and because of the turnaround in the company and our performance, we're now allowed to re-recognize it. And it's partly because of the transition to our business model. I've talked about this almost every conference call. From riskier permanent royalties to a portfolio now predominantly of senior secured loans made to high-growth, primarily tech companies. And it's important because those high-growth tech companies not only provide us secure senior interest revenue streams, but they tend to generate significant upside as they grow. And that's where we're getting some of the upside in our bonus payments and warrants, as I mentioned earlier. And so every one of our loans that we do today is not only senior secured on the balance sheet of the company and includes cash interest, it also generally includes warrants or if it's a complicated capital structure, something called a bonus on exit. So when the company's itself is sold, we get the equivalent of a warrant-like upside through the bonus on exit. While we've had an excellent year, I'm going to go through a couple of other highlights. We had no defaults in the year, no new defaults other than things that have already been impaired in prior years. For me, this is a reflection of the quality of not only our due diligence and selection process, but also our management process of managing our ongoing portfolio investments. We had two excellent exits. One was for Formio, which was a relatively short investment. It had a bonus on exit of almost $2 million Canadian. That was, like I said, a relatively short investment. Jorsic or Hereto was another exit. They had raised $17 million in equity. towards the end of the year. And on that investment, we still have warrants representing a couple of percentage points of the total equity of the company that have four years remaining to expiry. And so no bonus recognized on that yet, but over time, we expect that company will continue to perform. We did restructure one of our investments that had to go through a restructuring and ended up at the other side as the sole debt holder in a company that raised additional equity. It just shows the value of being senior secured. One of the highlights for me is the excellent team in place. We have a really good group of individuals who have contributed and I expect will contribute to the continued success of the company. And then as far as low lights go, the one thing I think we can do better and need to focus on is deploying more capital. Last year, we only deployed just over $7 million in additional capital into new investments. That's below the $23 million that we did before. And as we have exits, without deploying that capital, that will slow our revenue growth. So it's basically the core skills that we need to continue to focus on. Now, we had good pipeline performance in terms of aggregate numbers, over 900 leads in the year. close to the, a little bit down from 2021, but still a sizable number of leads. But we really are focusing, the two areas of focus that we're looking towards in 2023 are to increase the aggregate number of leads at the top of the funnel. I've mentioned this before, our close rate on the leads that we see is less than 1%, which is good. We're very selective. In fact, we've walked away from five or six deals in the last six months when they failed in due diligence. The risk profile just wasn't appropriate for what we were looking for. And so part of the way that we get to close more deals is we need to basically double the top of the funnel, but keep our focus on quality and to increase the number of aggregate deals that we lend to. So that's one issue. The second is to increase our focus on, well, I should say there's two ways that we're going to do that. One is continue to focus on digital lead generation, which has been doing very well for us. But the second is to improving our referral relationships. We have to build up the network of referral partners that we have, and we've been doing a good job. We've got to do that more. But I think with both of those, we're focusing on both those initiatives that should help us grow our total number of leads at the top of the funnel. And then to continue to scale the business, I think we're with the headcount and the people we have now, we can scale the business fairly dramatically from here, which should help us improve our profitability. We'll scale our, Revenue is substantially faster than we increase our costs. We have to raise more capital from a strategic partner in particular is what we're looking for. We have access to, as I mentioned earlier, $9.5 million on the balance sheet. We have some room in our preferred share. We issued a preferred share last year. It pays 9.2% to the six-year preferred share with some liquidity covenants in it for the investors. We have $4.2 million in capacity in that preferred share. And we have a funding vehicle that we use called the Priority Return Fund, but we are looking to replace the Priority Return Fund with a longer-term strategic relationship with a large-term funder. And we're doing a lot of efforts on that end, and we're looking for somebody that can help us scale from $50 million in assets that we have now to $150 million and then to $500 million. And so those are the two focuses, more focus and more investments. through continued pipeline development and better access to capital. And really, I think that's the end of my prepared remarks. Excellent year, excellent team, excellent four years, good balance sheet growth, book value growth, good revenue growth, a little disappointed in the number of deals that we did in the year, and we're working on fixing that with pipeline development. And with that, I'll pause and turn it over to the operator to see if there's any questions.

Thank you, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star followed by a number one on your telephone keypad. If your question has been answered and you would like to withdraw from the queue, please press star followed by the number two. And if you are using a speakerphone, please lift the handset before entering any keys.

Once again, ladies and gentlemen, if you do have a question, please press star 1 now. Mr. Belluta, there are no questions from the phone, sir.

Thank you, operator. Again, thank you, everybody, for listening to the call, either live or recorded. We're always available to answer your questions. We appreciate your support over the years, and we look forward to continued performance of this nature over the coming years. Thank you very much.

Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude the conference call for this morning. We would like to thank you all for participating and ask you to please disconnect your lines.