Capital Southwest Corporation (NASDAQ:CSWC) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Kevin Fultz: Okay. That’s helpful. And then just in regards to portfolio positioning, are there any pockets of industries that you find particularly attractive in the current environment? And if you can, maybe parsing out lower middle market and upper middle market opportunities?

Bowen Diehl: Yeah. I mean, the vast majority that we’ve been doing is in the lower middle market. I would say business is, first and foremost, that we can underwrite a full cycle. We’ve been looking at certain situations at high asset coverage. Basically, the industries that have like higher free cash flow margins, recurring revenue subscription type businesses that have shown to be low churn in past cycles. I mean, those are the kind of sectors that that certainly we like and — in this market.

Kevin Fultz: Okay. That make sense. I will leave there. Congratulations on the quarter.

Bowen Diehl: Thanks.

Operator: Thank you. And one moment for our next question. And our next question comes from the line of Bryce Rowe with B. Riley. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Bryce Rowe: Thanks a bunch. Good morning. I wanted to maybe start on the dividend, great to see another quarter of increase here. And based on your comments, it sounds like you’re approaching these regular dividend increases pretty methodically. You noted in the prepared remarks some inclination to be careful about where the dividend or where earnings could be when rates get back to kind of a neutral level. So, any thoughts on what that neutral level might look like and how it kind of translates into kind of a neutral NII type of generation level?

Michael Sarner: Yeah. Bryce, so looking specifically at this quarter, for example, we posted at $0.60. If rates were neutral, I’d say neutral was 3%. The run rate on the portfolio would look more like $0.56 per share. So, when you look at that relative to the dividend that we paid this quarter of $0.52, still $0.04 of cushion. As we move forward and we grow the portfolio, and you see — we mentioned earlier, operating leverage, we expect operating leverage to continue to decline. That $0.56 bogey will grow. And that’s why we, as you stated, we’re going to methodically grow that dividend, but we do feel between now and high 50s, there’s safety on the regular dividend.

Bryce Rowe: Got it. That’s helpful, Michael. You mentioned the — kind of the majority of your loans kind of resetting in January maybe a 100 basis points higher based on what we’ve seen in base rates. Is your expectation that we’ll see, give or take, 100 basis points of weighted average yield expansion in the portfolio as we kind of get into April or into May when you report earnings next?

Michael Sarner: Yes. We would expect that on the revenue side. I would just say that the one overhang you’ll also see is obviously, we raised a lot of capital in the prior quarter and much of that was late stage. So, there will be some level of dilution that will offset that increase on the top line revenue. So, we will expect to see grow meaningfully next quarter, but there will be a little bit of an overhang.