Safeguard Scientifics, Inc. (NYSE:SFE) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Mark Herndon: I was going to add — yes, let me add, there’s a couple of question in here that’s asking about specific debt values and revenue values for different [indiscernible] of the portfolio. Trying to avoid giving you a specific number on the slide, I want to be accurate. But obviously, there does remain to be debt on the portfolio at our five. It is substantially less than the number that we quoted for the six companies because that other one is just a high debt entity. But — and I was not intending to provide that data at this moment. We can look into putting that out there at a later time perhaps.

Eric Salzman: Well, I mean, I’d add to it, just if you look at the Bucket 1 companies and you adjust it for the cash from the InfoBionic transaction that we mentioned earlier, there is slightly more cash than debt if you just summed it up, which, as Mark said, it’s significantly delevered compared to, let’s call it, in prior quarters. Some of that delevering happened because of capitalization by InfoBionic where there was a recap or a recast of some debt to equity. But if you kind of zoom out overall, the Bucket 1 companies today have more cash than debt slightly. Another question, the two companies that have not been out in the sale process is one of them, one that just hired a banker? Yes. Our share repurchase is possible still considering no portfolio companies are under M&A, M&A discussions until 2024.

Mark, do you want to talk a bit about how we thought about share repurchases versus dividend and as well as the goal or that to get to the fewer than 300 shareholders. So we would be [technical difficulty].

Mark Herndon: Yes, there’s — and there’s a variety of things embedded in that question, right? I mean, there’s the concept of — and I think what the questioner is getting that is the traditional, I’ll call it, window open under about material nonpublic information. So — and that’s something we would address that sort of at the time that we are trying to make a decision about whether to do a repurchase or not. The — sorry, cross the place here. What we had thought about in terms of repurchases is just to do a large repurchase like we last time requires generally more cash than we have available at this time. And we also experienced the — at the market purchases where that had a limited impact because just accumulating shares at a slow pace because of the low volume of the traded stock.

So part of our evaluation is simply taking those couple of considerations in and trying to figure out that the most exceeding way to get cash and value back to shareholders versus to pay a dividend to all the shareholders. And that’s the path and the direction that we’ve been talking about here for a couple of quarters.

Eric Salzman: We’ve another question on — you said revenue models were at the low end or about the same, about what revenue multiple ranges are you using for the low end proceeds across the five companies. Would say that it’s low single-digit revenue multiples? Yes. So we are reading this in real time as it comes [indiscernible] the web, so that’s why we …

Mark Herndon: Yes, it’s another — the next question — I’ll let Eric think for a second about, again, the dividend amount, and I understand how people are eager to think about exactly how much that value will be. And we are trying to be careful because obviously, the Board has to make a judgment decision there, and there will be — it will be ultimately a matter of judgment. The factors that we are thinking about, yes, are continuing to hold enough funds to operate the more limited scale operations of the company for a period of time to get them to completion as well as holding back amounts for any kind of contingency that we can think of that would exist, including potentially funding the company, although we don’t expect any funding.