Fidus Investment Corporation (NASDAQ:FDUS) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

So again, these are situations where we believe in the long-term prospects of the business, but they have been impacted in one way shape or form by the current environment. And in all those cases, we have financial sponsors. At the moment we expect them to continue to be supportive given these are or companies with good long-term prospects, but they’ve been impacted, for sure, the ones that have €“ this is more of a secondary market issue. The secondary market got hit very, very hard in the fourth quarter, in particular. And it’s more of like an issue with regard to that as opposed to operations. It’s not operating perfectly, but it’s not bad either. Hopefully that’s helpful.

Mickey Schleien: Yes. That is helpful. Thanks. And just one other question on the balance sheet; you mentioned cash on the balance sheet, which is still quite elevated even net of the payment for the tax liability that you made in January. Just curious, is that cash or is a good portion of it “trapped” in the SBICs? Or why so much cash on this balance sheet at this time?

Ed Ross: Sure. I’ll let Shelby answer that.

Shelby Sherard: So the short answer is we do not have any cash that is truly trapped at the SBIC funds. We do have cash there, but we have the ability to dividend that up to the BDC at the moment. And so really kind of cash on the balance sheet at year-end is just a function of kind of the flood of repayments that we’ve had kind of in the past and trying to put that capital back to work. We’ve made decent progress here in 2022. Certainly in the first quarter, kind of between the combination of the deemed distribution tax as well as the investments that we’ve already announced in sub-events. I would anticipate us largely utilizing any residual cash we have left on the balance sheet and getting that put back to work. So it’s really just a function of timing of how long did it take to redeploy cash from repayments, but all of it is accessible for reinvestment.

Mickey Schleien: With that in mind, Shelby, you had about $6 million of common share equity issuance in the fourth quarter, which obviously increased the cash balance. Do you anticipate continuing to raise common equity or just fund net investment growth from repayments and debt liabilities?

Shelby Sherard: We do have an ATM program in place. It’s authorized to raise up to $50 million. Granted it would take us some time to do kind of that level of volume, given our average trading volume. But we will continue to leave the ATM program up and running as an incremental source of liquidity throughout 2023. As I mentioned, I think we’ll largely deploy existing cash. And so the ATM program is a great way to continue to provide liquidity as long €“ as well as tapping into incremental SBA debentures. And then as always, we have our line of credit, currently $100 million available.

Mickey Schleien: Understand. Those are all my questions this morning. Appreciate your time. Thank you.

Ed Ross: Thank you, Mickey. Good talking to you.

Operator: Our final question comes from the line of Erik Zwick from Hovde Group. Please proceed.

Erik Zwick: Good morning. Most of my questions have been addressed, but I guess just one or two remaining here. One, just looking at the weighted average interest coverage for your portfolio at 3.8 times, that looks like it’s been relatively consistent over the last 12 months or so. Relative to some of your peers, we’ve seen that come down quite a bit. So I wonder if you could just kind of talk to the resiliency of some of your companies and their ability to continue to grow EBITDA in the face of higher interest coverage in the current environment.