PennantPark Investment Corporation (NASDAQ:PNNT) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Paul Johnson: Got it. I understand. I understand you can’t say a lot. But taking I guess, a little bit of a step back from the mark on the investment. I’m just wondering €“ again, this has been €“ I think you guys have had some successful turnarounds in the past. I certainly don’t want to take away from that. I think you guys have had the patient approach in the past that’s worked. But at any point, has this ever become — does this become essentially, like a drain on resources where you have faculty and you have employees and important people I guess at the firm, that are obviously dedicating time and resources in to turning this around? Does that begin to I guess disrupt, I think the normal course of your just investment process?

Art Penn: Yes. So Paul, just a clarification on your prior question. Just to be clear RAM is performing well. There’s no operational issues. There’s nothing new or different on RAM. It’s a performing company that’s doing well and is healthy. On the time resource question, look we may have a different attitude than some of our peers. We get paid to maximize value. And that’s, what we do. And if it takes time and resources. And we’ll do what — whatever is the best interest of the shareholder. That’s what we get paid to do, to try to get the best outcome possible. Sometimes that means full-blown restructurings, a pivot was a recent example where there was a conversion of debt to equity. We took control. We became a sponsor. We changed management.

we dealt with all the various tranches of loans, and we worked with the company to turn around the operations and we were fortunate enough to exit at, a very high price at a really, really good time in hindsight. And RAM is another one RAM, we’ve been longer than pivot obviously. Our view is, this is what we do. And if it takes time and resources, it takes time and resource that’s our job.

Paul Johnson: Thanks. I appreciate it. And then just on the secondary purchases, you guys made this quarter. Just curious obviously, you saw good value and you’re using your informational and expertise advantage there to potentially make some par trades. But I’m just curious, how you evaluate? I guess those trades. I mean, are these secondary purchase just kind of more or less supplementing potentially depressed deal flow or deal volume in the third and fourth quarter of this year, or are these just very advantageous trades that happen to become available that you felt were good investments for the BDC?

Art Penn: Yes, each investment needs to stand on its own two feet. We do though compare and contrast and say “Okay, we can put $1 to work at $0.90 on the dollar or we can do this new loan or we can do both.” How do we look at it? So, we’re looking at it through the lens of, we do not advance any capital, we have plenty of capital, but we do not advance any capital. So we do compare and contrast and debate and really try to through our investment committee, find the best risk-adjusted returns that we can whether they be in the primary market or the secondary market, and do our best to synthesize all that and allocate capital as best we can.

Paul Johnson: Thanks. And I mean would you consider those investments to be pulled to maturity type investments that, you’re planning on holding to maturity, or are these kind of more held for trading, where if there’s any kind of recovery to par, you’d be looking to exit?