Saratoga Investment Corp. (NYSE:SAR) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Michael Grisius: And the other thing I’d add, Casey, as well, is that those structures allow us to do some deals that if we try to be in those credits as a pure unitranche provider, we wouldn’t be able to be competitive. So the credit profile, the quality of the credit profile is such that the pricing were it to be a unitranche pricing would be below where we could make it accretive for our shareholders. So these are generally deals that are high-quality deals. The characteristics of them are very strong. And so to be competitive, the overall pricing on a facility like that is quite — is tighter. Doing a first-out last-out gives us an opportunity to create a combined pricing structure that works for the borrower, but gives our shareholders a chance to get premium yields, because we’re leveraging that first-out partners pricing as well.

And so we think it’s a terrific way for us to augment our portfolio in a way that’s balanced and still in a first lien position, but with premium quality credits.

Christian Oberbeck: If I could add as well to that, Casey, that just to, kind of, give a sort of a strategic overview. I think as both Mike and Henri has said, there’s sort of several categories here. One is how do we — as Mike just described, how do we get into really high-quality credit, which may be different pricing. The other is how we stay in. We’ve had a number of deals where we would have lost the deal, because the companies have credit quality, scale, size, enable them to get into a better credit facility pricing-wise than ours-wise. But by bringing in a partner whom we select, we’re able to bring in a senior level lender, which allows the combined package to be much more competitive maybe not as competitive as it could be if they completely went to the market, but allows us to preserve the relationship and the credit positioning.

And then the third is to provide strategic liquidity. We have a number of unit tranches we’re in, and we’ve looked to bring in, again, known partners on known documentation that is our documentation largely that allow us to basically liberate some of the capital in these credits and redeploy. And I think if you look at the most recent quarter, we had seven new relationships and having the capital to do new relationships is very important strategically, because they pay us enormous dividends down the road because we had seven new relationships, but we had 20 follow-on investments. And so all of our new relationships lead to all these follow-ons. And so it’s a combination of capital enhancement for us and staying in much more substantial credits than before.

And then — and Mike and Henri, I think it’s fair to say. I mean, all these people were doing last outs with our relationships we’ve had for many, many years.

Michael Grisius: That’s right. We’ve got long-standing relationships with our first-out partners. Casey, the one thing I would do to — just to reemphasize what Chris mentioned, a perfect example would be the hematera loan that we have in our portfolio. That’s a deal that’s sort of a great example of how we’ve attacked the market. So that get the dollars — I don’t have the exact dollars, but I’m going to say that the original investment there was for the initial platform was less than $10 million between our debt and equity investment, and we did a unitranche, $1 unitranche and a healthy equity co-investment. That company has performed very well. It’s owned by a sponsor relationship that we’ve had for a long time, and it’s a really strong sponsor relationship.