Portman Ridge Finance Corporation (NASDAQ:PTMN) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

So what are you guys thinking from a leverage standpoint at this point going forward since you guys are at the upper end, are you guys comfortable with this? Or is the intention to just to bring it down knowing that the deal environment is really good right now.

Ted Goldthorpe: Yes, it’s a great question. So I think a couple of things. One is, I think we want to bring down our gross leverage. And again, there’s a nuance to ours because we drew on that cheap facility last quarter. So that will start deleveraging, and I do think that overall, we will probably not increase leverage from where it is on a net basis of anything, we’d probably take it down. This is the first time in like a long time, like in 10 years that we’ve seen, it’s actually more accretive for us to invest new money at these kind of rates than it is for us to buy back stock. We are going to buy back stock because it’s a guaranteed return versus a non-guaranteed return when you put out money. But that threshold has now been crossed, which means it’s an incredibly interesting environment for us.

The good news — here’s the good news. The good news is, and we showed it in our deck, repayment activity was incredibly muted last year, and we’ve seen a pickup this year, not to historical levels but at higher levels. So our book is beginning to churn. And because we have some older vintage names from some of these acquisitions we’ve done, we actually have seen some of the older names getting taken out, and we can redeploy the money into newer, wider-spreading, better names, right? So — we expect to be able to take advantage of this environment a little bit differently than others, like some others can take up leverage. I think our thing is we’ll probably keep leverage flat or take it down, but we can still take advantage of the environment because we are getting paid off at a higher rate than others just because we have some older vintage names from these acquisitions.

So we’ve seen — again, we’ve seen elevated repayment activity all year this year versus last year. And again, we can replace that with newer, safer, lower leverage, wider spreading names. So I think we kind of like — I really don’t think it’s prudent for us to take up leverage. And so like I think we can take advantage of the environment just through natural churn.

Ryan Lynch: Okay. And then what do you guys — like what are your thoughts around the dividend? Obviously you guys raised it in the quarter. You guys have pretty significant dividend coverage in the quarter. You guys provided a slide showing where is probably going to go with current phase of the base now. Obviously, everybody knows the expectation is that base rates aren’t going to stay at these levels. And I think wealth managers are trying to keep base dividends at a level that can be earned in multiple interest rate environment. So what are your thoughts on kind of your current core dividend and the extremely high coverage level, which isn’t uncommon in the BDC space at this point, but it’s very high. And then do you guys have any thoughts about supplementals or special dividends? Do you guys have any thoughts on — or philosophy on how those could supplement a core dividend?