Kingsway Financial Services Inc. (NYSE:KFS) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

After considering both stock and warrant repurchases, $4.1 million of stock repurchases or securities repurchases could be made through March 22 of next year. The repurchase of common stock is being held as treasury stock at cost and has been removed from our common shares outstanding. As you may recall, the company had a number of outstanding $5 strike warrants that expired on September 15, 2023. After accounting for warrants repurchased by the company, all but 39,000 warrants were exercised prior to expiration. In 2023, just over $3.3 million of our warrants were exercised, resulting in $16.7 million of cash to the company. You can see a breakdown by quarter in today’s earnings release. During Q3, 2023, we completed the sale of all stock held in Limbach Holdings, Inc.

and recorded a realized gain of $600,000. Total cash proceeds from the sales were $3.3 million. I would like to close by discussing our trailing 12-month adjusted EBITDA run rate. As JT indicated, our range is now $19 million to $20 million. We often get questions from investors about this metric, so I would like to explain a few things. This metric is not intended to be guidance by management regarding the future earnings of the company. Rather, it is intended to capture the 12-month earnings of what the company currently owns or has recently acquired. As such, it includes the following: the actual operating results of our Extended Warranty businesses for the prior 12 months, which includes the recent declines; the investment income associated with our Extended Warranty float adjusted to reflect higher earnings associated with the current interest rate environment; we do not factor in any expectations on realized gains or losses, much like we had at IWS in Q3 of last year.

It also includes Ravix 12 months actual results, as well as CSuite actual 12 months results both pre- and post-acquisition. It includes 12 months of SNS results based on actual results since acquisition and adjusted results in order to reflect management’s view that performance would revert to levels more in line with pre-pandemic results. And 12 months of results for SPI, DDI, and NICR based on adjusted results from our quality of earnings due diligence reports. In summary, while our Extended Warranty segment continued to experience some softness due to claims expense, it continued to perform and deliver the best quarterly results so far this year for the segment. We have added 2 companies to our KSX portfolios and hope to add a third early next year, which will enable us to deliver on our strategy of growth.

Finally, we made further progress reducing our net debt, we were able to repurchase a meaningful amount of our securities, and we have a robust pipeline of acquisition opportunities in front of us. I’ll now turn the call back over to the operator to open the line for questions. Paul?

Operator: [Operator Instructions] And there were currently no questions from the lines. I would like to hand the call to James Carbonara for any questions submitted via e-mail.

James Carbonara: Sure. We did have a few questions come in on the e-mail. The first one is a 2-part question. It says, what is run rate EBITDA pro forma for the recent acquisitions? What is pro forma debt at KFS? And what is the run rate interest expense for the acquisitions and current base rates? I can re-read any of that, if necessary.

JT Fitzgerald: Okay. Yes, I think I got it. So first, run rate EBITDA pro forma for the recent acquisitions, I think Kent just walked through that. We have increased that to $19 million to $20 million range, and that’s sort of the TTM EBITDA of the things we own, plus the things that we expect to own. Pro forma debt, net debt at 9/30 was roughly $20.8 million. And then pro forma, I guess, would include the new acquisitions. We borrowed an additional $5.6 million to help finance the DDI transaction. And we anticipate borrowing another roughly $3 million or so to finance the NICR acquisition. We didn’t use any debt to help finance the SPI acquisition. So, I guess, if you add all of that up, $5.6 million plus $3 million plus $20.9 million would get you $29.5 million of net debt. And then, James, sorry, what was the final question — part of the question?

James Carbonara: Sure. It concluded with, what is the run rate interest rate expense for the acquisitions and current base rates?

JT Fitzgerald: Yes, I’ll take that in reverse order. So current base rates, the DDI acquisition debt has an interest rate of prime plus 50 basis points. So prime is at 8.5% today, I think. So that would be 9%. And we would expect similar pricing on the NICR acquisition debt. So base plus spread. And that translates into an additional $500,000 of interest expense, give or take, at DDI. And somewhere around $270,000 or so of interest expense at NICR.

James Carbonara: Great. And I do see we have a live question in the queue. Operator, can we take that before reverting back to these e-mail questions?

Operator: [Operator Instructions] And we have a question coming from Adam Patinkin from David Capital.

Adam Patinkin: Congratulations on a nice quarter and all of the progress along the way. Great. So I have a few questions that I wanted to jump through. And I’m sorry, they’re a little bit disjointed. So they’re kind of unrelated to one another. So my first question is, I guess, the way that I think about the value of the company is based on what, I guess, you would call normalized earnings would be or what go-forward earnings would be. And so, I guess, what I’m trying to do is to track the trailing 12 months adjusted EBITDA number of $19 million to $20 million, which is a really helpful number to know. But then to try to look forward. And obviously, there’s no guidance and you’re not predicting. But I can do some of that math where I say, “Hey, this is where I think the growth might be in some of the acquisitions that you’ve made through the KSX Xclerator”.