Cannae Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:CNNE) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Richard Massey: Well, we think about — bring us a bid. If you — we would love for Oppenheimer to be in the restaurant business, Ian. So I don’t mean to be cute about it. We — 99 is an okay restaurant chain. O’Charley’s drinks cash. We’re in a workout sort of mode to get down to a small number of restaurants that are going to generate cash. And we’re going to sell all our fee property if we haven’t already sold it, get out of a bunch of leases. But if you look around, there aren’t — there’s not a lot of M&A going on in restaurants, and consumer discretionary in general. So we’d love to get a bid. We’ve actually entertained a few, got a little bit down the road. There have been a couple of kind of roll-up, I don’t know if you call it — they’re just very acquisitive companies out there buying brands but they’re not doing it anymore.

So — yes, look, we tried to sell our System1, but it’s just — there’s not a market in it. We’re looking for cash in every possible spot.

Ian Zaffino: Okay. I guess there’s just one more. We’re talking about O’Charley’s. What kind of EBITDA do you think that could eventually generate? Or how do we actually…

Richard Massey: Post restructuring, what would that be?

Ian Zaffino: Yes, post restructuring…

Bryan Coy: I think, Ian, it’s Bryan. I mean post restructuring, the combined restaurant group can do $15 million, $20 million a year annualized after you’ve gotten out of all these negative cash flow.

Richard Massey: That includes 99?

Bryan Coy: Yes, that includes 99. That’s the whole group. I mean, they closed — including a couple of one-offs for 99, they’ve closed almost 80 stores in the last year, and most of them were the negative cash flow one. So they’ve done a lot of work rationalizing that to get out of the real stinkers. And then get that into the ones that are performing better.

Operator: The next question comes from Kenneth Lee of RBC Capital Markets.

Kenneth Lee: In terms of the book value impairment for System1. Could you just get into a little further detail in terms of what that was based on? What was just simply based on the share price trading below a certain level? Just wanted to see what triggered that.

Bryan Coy: Sure. Ken, this is Bryan. It was a prolonged market value below where our recorded book value was. We usually will take down our — our equity method investment by the amount of their losses each quarter, but the market actually put a lower value on it than we had even in losses. So we mark all of our public ones effectively. If they get below our book value for an extended period of time, we end up taking a noncash impairment charge to bring them down to the aggregate market value of our investments.

Richard Massey: We did that with Paysafe.

Bryan Coy: Yes. We did that with Paysafe, a couple of times in the past as well.

Kenneth Lee: Okay. Okay. Got you. Very helpful there. And then in terms of the private investment valuations, as you look across the rest of the portfolio, and it looks as if you did some third-party valuation for the Sightline investment. How do you think about the rest of the private investments and their valuations?

Bryan Coy: I don’t think there’s anything in there that we’re not comfortable with, Ken. The numbers are not very big, as you can tell by the sum of the parts. I think the cost and value of everything else is sitting in the $50 million range, and that’s made up of about half a dozen or so smaller investments. The only other one we have talked about like Minden Mill, that was $50 million. We just got into that one. So I think that one is going to definitely be…