Runway Growth Finance Corp. (NASDAQ:RWAY) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

David Spreng: Yeah. It’s not really a market technical thing. It’s more specific to each of those companies and without giving details, I think that, they are stumbling and so we are trying to be conservative in our valuations, and for some of those companies, we will use scenario analysis as the best way to come up with the value. And keep in mind our value is reconfirmed by a third-party and then reconfirmed again by our auditors and our audit committee. So it’s a fairly extensive process, and in both cases, there are just things happening at those businesses that we think will come to fruition, which will put the credit in a better position, but until they happen, we are conservative on valuation.

Mickey Schleien: Okay Understand. That’s it for me this evening. I appreciate your time. Thank you.

David Spreng: Yeah. Thank you, Mickey.

Operator: Thank you. And our next question comes from the line of Erik Zwick with Hovde Group.

Erik Zwick: Thank you. Good evening, everyone. I wanted to start first with a question on the leverage and the comments you made, that you believe you can safely increase the leverage up to 1.3 times, and I am curious, just given the amount of economic uncertainty, is that more of a mid- and long-term target, and in the near-term you would stick within kind of the initial range with that 1.1 times is the top, is that independent, I mean, I guess, even here in the near-term, could we see you move closer to that 1.3 times, if you are seeing attractive origination opportunities?

Tom Raterman: Yeah. Thanks, Erik. Not an unanticipated question, of course. This is something that we look at continuously and evaluate continuously. And our thought and our process in expanding that range starts really with the quality and the stability of the income and the cash flow that’s coming off the portfolio, a portfolio that is well seasoned and very late stage, 99% first-lien loans and a portfolio that has the majority, 90%-plus in our number two rating. So we are very confident in the quality of the portfolio and as we first became a public company, we used a narrower range, because we thought it was prudent to demonstrate our ability to build a quality portfolio to the — to our public investors. Now that we have done that and we see that we can support more leverage, we are going to be very judicious about adding it.

But — and we don’t intend to raise equity below NAV. So the way we can take advantage of these opportunities that are presenting themselves, and as David mentioned, the economic terms and the non-economic terms are improving. So we may well exceed that 1.1 times opportunistically and then we will see how things season out over time.

Erik Zwick: It’s great. I appreciate the commentary there. And turning to the non-sponsor portion of the portfolio, curious just about the, I guess, maybe a two-part question. One, just the general underwriting, how that differs from the sponsor side, just given that there’s not a big fund behind these? And two, the second part is, how that potentially plays out in a stressed economic environment in terms of how you would manage them and work out, find resolutions and situations that don’t work out optimally from based on original expectations?