Blue Owl Technology Finance Corp. (OTF) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Blue Owl Technology Finance Corp. Q2 2026 Earnings Call. As a reminder, this call is being recorded. At this time, I'd like to turn the call over to Mike Mosticchio, Head of BDC Investor Relations. Mike, please go ahead.

Thank you, operator, and welcome to Blue Owl Technology Finance Corp.'s Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. Joining us on the call today are Craig Packer, Chief Executive Officer; Erik Bissonnette, President; and Jonathan Lamm, Chief Financial Officer. I'd like to remind listeners that remarks made during today's call may contain forward-looking statements, which are not guarantees of future performance or results and involve a number of risks and uncertainties that are outside of the company's control. Actual results may differ materially from those in forward-looking statements as a result of a number of factors, including those described in OTF's filings with the SEC. The company assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements. We'd also like to remind everyone that we'll refer to non-GAAP measures on this call, which are reconciled to GAAP figures in our earnings presentation available on the Events and Presentations section of our website. Certain information discussed on this call and in the company's earnings materials, including information related to portfolio companies, was derived from third-party sources and has not been independently verified. The company makes no such representations or warranties with respect to this information. Yesterday, OTF issued its financial results for the second quarter ended June 30, 2026, reporting adjusted net investment income per share of $0.30 and net asset value per share of $16.48. During the call today, we will be referencing materials, including the earnings press release, earnings presentation and 10-Q, which are available on the News and Events section of OTF's website. With that, I'll turn the call over to Craig.

Thanks, Mike. Good morning, everyone, and thank you all for joining us today. OTF delivered another strong quarter with stable net asset value, continued earnings growth and excellent credit quality, including nonaccrual rates that remain among the lowest in the industry. This performance was a direct result of the strength and resiliency of our borrowers' underlying fundamentals. Across the portfolio, our borrowers continue to generate steady organic growth in revenues and EBITDA, and we are not seeing any material signs of stress in the portfolio today. We continue to support NAV per share through ongoing share repurchase activity, which we believe remains prudent at current trading levels. We also made good progress ramping earnings during the quarter. Adjusted NII increased, supported by continued deployment and growth in net leverage. Since our direct listing in June 2025, net leverage has increased by 0.4 of a turn and sits just inside the low end of our target range. The investment environment has improved meaningfully. And as we continue deploying capital, OTF has a clear path towards dividend coverage by the middle of next year. We have positioned the balance sheet to capitalize on this opportunity set. During the quarter, we strengthened our capital structure by issuing an unsecured bond, adding a secured debt facility and extending the maturity of our revolving credit facility, all amid a very challenging backdrop for technology-oriented companies. Jonathan will cover this in more detail, but we have substantial liquidity and flexibility to support future portfolio growth. Looking ahead, we have several reasons to be optimistic about OTF's positioning. First, the investing environment is more attractive for technology. Reduced capital availability has allowed lenders to become more selective, leading to significantly wider spreads and stronger protections. With leverage near the low end of our target range, OTF has ample capacity to deploy capital into compelling opportunities as they emerge. Second, forward rate expectations have moved higher since the beginning of the year, which would provide a meaningful tailwind for our portfolio of predominantly floating rate loans and expand portfolio yields over time. Third, we believe the market conversation around software has continued to become more balanced. While initial AI concerns were broad-based, investors are increasingly distinguishing between businesses vulnerable to AI disruption and those built around mission-critical platforms with embedded workflows that position them to use AI to strengthen their products and reinforce their competitive advantages. We are seeing this in the rebound of certain public software categories, including cybersecurity as well as through partnerships between the AI model companies and established software platforms. This evolution increasingly reflects the characteristics we have long prioritized in our software portfolio and reinforces our conviction in these businesses. Finally, the lockup releases are now behind us. With 100% of OTF float fully unlocked for trading, we expect the technical selling pressure typical of newly listed stocks to ease over time, creating a clear opportunity to further broaden and diversify our shareholder base. Taken together, these developments improve both the fundamental and technical backdrop for OTF. We remain focused on disciplined execution and believe continued performance across our portfolio will ultimately be reflected in shareholder value. With that, I'll turn it over to Erik.

Thanks, Craig, and good morning, everyone. We have continued to make steady progress ramping the portfolio. In the second quarter, we made approximately $850 million of new commitments and funded $550 million. Although primary deal activity stayed subdued, we successfully funded multiple transactions that have been committed to before the recent expansion of market spreads. Looking ahead, a larger share of our new originations will capture today's more attractive pricing, allowing us to steadily realize the benefits of the current market conditions. While software activity remains slower, we continue to find differentiated opportunities across other areas of technology where we have deep expertise and strong platform connectivity, including life sciences and digital infrastructure. Blue Owl is a significant player in digital infrastructure, particularly through our real assets platform, which gives us broad visibility into the capital needs supporting data center and GPU build-outs. As major technology companies scale their computing capacity, we see an attractive opportunity to provide debt capital, capture compelling yields and secure resilient cash flows backed by mission-critical digital assets, often with investment-grade counterparty risk. Another area where we are seeing attractive opportunities is life sciences, where Blue Owl has built deep sector expertise and a dedicated life sciences credit and royalty team. A recent transaction highlights the benefits of these capabilities. In the second quarter, Blue Owl led a $700 million platform-wide loan for Caris, a commercial stage company focused on next-generation cancer diagnostics. Life sciences has grown to nearly 2% of the portfolio. And given the strong performance and attractive opportunity set, we look forward to continuing to grow this strategy over time. OTF received approximately $222 million in sales and repayments during the quarter. While repayment activity has been slower given the market environment, we are seeing an increasing number of opportunities to improve economics through our existing portfolio. As high-quality borrowers look to raise additional capital or extend maturities, we are often able to secure wider spreads, enhanced protections and stronger covenants. This incumbency advantage allows us to stay invested in companies we know well while transitioning our portfolio from legacy low spread deals to today's more attractive market environment. Turning to the portfolio. Credit quality and borrower health remains sound. OTF is focused on scaled sponsor-backed companies as evidenced by the nearly $300 million weighted average EBITDA of our borrowers. Software exposure represents approximately 70% of the portfolio. Within software, our exposure is concentrated in durable market segments positioned to benefit from further AI integration, typically distinguished by mission-critical applications, embedded workflows and trusted data. This targeted approach has helped the portfolio to remain resilient to recent market volatility. Our borrowers are generating high single-digit revenue and EBITDA growth with software generally growing faster than the other areas across Blue Owl's broader direct lending portfolio. Importantly, we have seen minimal signs of material disruption attributable to AI across the broader portfolio. Our internal ratings demonstrated broad stability over the quarter with our 3 to 5 rated names modestly declining to 7.6% at fair value from 8.5% last quarter. Amendment activity remains light and portfolio company revolver utilization remained consistent with historical levels at approximately 10%. Credit quality remains a key differentiator for OTF. Nonaccruals remain among the lowest in the industry at just 10 basis points at fair value, even with the addition of one small position during the quarter. We further attribute this performance to the portfolio's conservative construction. As of quarter end, over 80% of the portfolio consisted of senior secured loans and weighted average LTV remained steady at 40% with little quarter-over-quarter change. This provides significant equity cushion beneath our debt investments, which we believe has been valuable considering the equity valuation resets across software earlier this year. PIK income declined from 13.1% last quarter to approximately 12.5% of total investment income this quarter with 7.5% of that coming from PIK interest and 5% from PIK dividends. Approximately 98% of our PIK was structured at origination rather than introduced through subsequent amendments, which is an important distinction when evaluating the portfolio's credit quality. This is consistent with our view that structured PIK can be a valuable return enhancer for high-quality borrowers reinvesting in growth. These portfolio indicators reinforce what we see firsthand in the market. Our 40-person dedicated technology investing team maintains ongoing dialogue with management teams, sponsors and industry experts, giving us differentiated real-time insight into how businesses are adapting to AI. Through our observations, one theme has been particularly clear: sophisticated sponsors are continuing to invest significant resources in AI enablement across their portfolio companies, reaffirming the value of lending to high-quality businesses with the capital and strategic support to evolve through periods of technological change. Looking forward, we remain focused on growing the portfolio toward the midpoint of our target leverage range. Even as deal activity remains muted, we are staying disciplined in software deployment, prioritizing high-quality opportunities with familiar borrowers we have followed over time. We believe this environment rewards deep domain expertise, selectivity and incumbency. Our long-standing relationships, knowledge of the investable universe and dedicated technology team allow us to deploy with conviction while prioritizing opportunities with stronger risk-adjusted returns. Blue Owl's investment capabilities in innovative areas such as digital infrastructure and life sciences allow us to access differentiated opportunities that could generate attractive, less correlated returns for investors over time. We expect to continue expanding our activity across these strategies in the quarters ahead. Overall, we remain confident in the quality of our existing portfolio and believe we have multiple avenues for deployment that can be accretive for investors as market conditions improve. Now I'll turn the call over to Jonathan to discuss our financial results in more detail.

Thank you, Erik. In the second quarter, OTF reported adjusted net investment income of $0.30 per share. This was supported by continued portfolio growth and higher dividend income related to a repayment. Earlier this week, our Board declared a third quarter base dividend of $0.35 per share, consistent with our last quarterly dividend and payable on or before October 15 to shareholders of record as of September 30. We will also pay the final quarterly special dividend of $0.05 per share, which was declared in connection with the listing and is supported by spillover income generated from gains on the portfolio, which was $0.32 as of quarter end. Together with the base dividend, this brings total dividends to $0.40 per share for the quarter. Now that we have reached the lower end of our target leverage range and with rates and spreads becoming more favorable, we expect to cover our base dividend by the middle of next year. Moving to the balance sheet. NAV per share was $16.48 at quarter end, reflecting ongoing stability in the performance of the portfolio. Portfolio write-ups and accretion from share repurchases supported NAV, partially offset by the ongoing quarterly special distributions declared in connection with the listing. We repurchased over $55 million of stock over the quarter, bringing total repurchases over the past 3 quarters to roughly $170 million. These repurchases reflect our conviction in the quality of the portfolio and attractiveness of our shares at current levels, while preserving ample capital to deploy into a meaningfully improved environment for technology. Following our second quarter activity, approximately $195 million remains available under the $300 million share repurchase program authorized by the Board in February. We ended the quarter with net leverage of 0.93x, reflecting over $475 million of net funded investment activity. With leverage now at the lower end of our target range of 0.9 to 1.25x, we remain well positioned to continue growing the portfolio. The quarter's financing activity was an important external validation of OTF. In a challenging market for technology credit, we issued a $500 million unsecured bond, added $150 million of secured financing and completed an amend and extend of our $2.7 billion revolving credit facility. Importantly, every existing bank partner renewed its revolver commitment, and we added a new lending relationship that provided incremental financing capacity. As a result, all 2026 maturities have been addressed, and we preserved our unsecured funding mix and all our credit rating agencies have affirmed OTF's investment-grade ratings. We ended the quarter with over $2 billion of total cash and available capacity across our credit facilities. We view that combination as a strong validation of both the underlying portfolio and the durability of OTF's funding model. Overall, OTF finished the quarter with stable NAV, improving earnings power, significant liquidity and a stronger capital structure, positioning us well to continue scaling the portfolio while remaining disciplined in a more constructive investment environment. And now I'll hand it back to Craig to provide final thoughts for today's call.

Thanks, Jonathan. As we wrap up today's call, we believe OTF enters the second half of the year from a position of strength. The fund recently navigated a period of questions around the future of software, broader confusion around private credit and the technical overhang associated with our share lockup releases. Through it all, the portfolio remained resilient, credit quality remained strong and OTF continued to build earnings momentum. Despite this progress, we recognize that OTF's market valuation has not reflected the underlying performance of the fund, and we are disappointed by that disconnect. At current trading levels, the discount implies nearly $3 billion of credit losses. Said differently, the market is effectively pricing in a scenario where approximately 40% of the portfolio defaults and recoveries are only $0.50 on the dollar. That stands in stark contrast to the actual performance of the portfolio where nonaccruals remain just $20 million or 10 basis points of the portfolio. We view that disconnect as significant and our repurchase activity reflects our confidence in the portfolio and the value of OTF shares at current levels. While we cannot predict when the discount will close, we believe the path forward is clear. The portfolio is performing, the technical pressure should continue to ease and OTF has multiple levers to continue expanding earnings power over time. Just as importantly, we see multiple tangible drivers to improve ROE and dividend coverage from here. First, leverage sits at the low end of our target range and continued deployment toward the midpoint of that range provides a clear path towards increased earnings power. Second, we have the opportunity to continue rotating nonincome-producing equity investments into income-generating assets. And third, we're now able to deploy capital into a more attractive environment and expect to benefit from wider spreads, stronger documentation and higher base rates. Taken together, these drivers give us confidence in the fund's ability to expand ROE and cover the base dividend by the middle of next year while maintaining the same, if not an even more disciplined underwriting approach that has supported the portfolio's credit performance to date. Rate expectations are higher than they were at the start of the year. Technology spreads are much wider, and we think we have the right expertise to capture these opportunities. In addition, we intend to continue to diversify the portfolio into complementary areas like life sciences, digital infrastructure and other areas where Blue Owl has differentiated capabilities and long-standing relationships. As we look ahead, we expect manager selection to matter even more. Periods of uncertainty tend to create dispersion, and we believe OTF's combination of technology domain expertise, senior secured focus, disciplined underwriting and access to the broader Blue Owl platform positions the fund well to navigate that environment and deliver compelling long-term results for shareholders. We remain focused on executing against that opportunity while continuing to demonstrate the strength of the portfolio over time. Operator, please open the line for questions.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question today is coming from Finian O'Shea from Wells Fargo.

I want to ask, I guess, a bit of a 2-parter on earnings power. For one, if you could hit on any potential guide you can give on monetizing the equity gains from this quarter? And then also the life sciences program, or JV, I think this came up on the last call. It was described as partially onetime, but any way -- any guide on how we can think of the growth and how to think about the returns in that?

Sure, Fin. Thanks for the question. I think as we laid out in the call, there are really 4 primary drivers to drive earnings towards the $0.35, the biggest one being leverage, we're about 0.93 turns, which is the low end of the target range. So pretty meaningful room to grow there. We also talked about improved deployment economics for new bookings. We think the spread environment is meaningfully better across the board and particularly more attractive for software and technology assets going forward. We didn't say this on the prepared remarks, but we're also starting to see repricing of existing names. So assets that we've invested in that we think are very attractive that will come to us for acquisitions or for some other need can be repriced on a mark-to-market basis. Roughly right now, there's about $4.7 billion in OTF that's below S plus 500. So we think that's a natural rotation. And then to the last point, the rotation of the equity portfolio, about 7% right now is in non-income-producing equity positions. And when you look at something like SpaceX, it's been a fantastic outcome for us. We've been involved with the company since 2018. We started by lending the money. We took a fairly small equity position that's turned out to be a fantastic gain. We sold half of that. And if we sell the other half of that at today's prices, that's another 10x or $125 million of net gains that we can take and immediately redeploy into income-producing assets at the higher spreads that I was referencing. So taken all together, I think the path towards the $0.35 feels very, very solid, and we expect to cover that dividend by the middle of next year. And then life sciences as well. I don't think -- I wouldn't categorize anything as particularly onetime. That's -- the LSI JV is a collection of multiple assets and produces very stable, consistent dividends to the fund. I think there was one repayment that came with some call pro that increased that this quarter. But I would view that as sort of normal course. We're going to see repayments and some acceleration of call pro like we see in regular way loans. We continue to populate that pool of assets with really attractive loans today. So I would consider -- I would continue -- expect to continue to see that strong performance and good dividend level there.

I appreciate that. And a follow-up on one of those vectors being leverage. Jon, you gave us some color on the path there on sort of -- and the current activity of keeping the unsecured stack. But I think optimally, you want even more unsecured as you ramp and it remains a bit expensive for the time being. So does this change the way you think about your ramp and your funding mix?

I mean, look, the -- as Erik mentioned on the asset side, the spreads have widened, and we see the opportunity set there as being very, very fruitful. And as you know, in our history, we're never going to get close to the barriers in terms of making sure that the company is well capitalized with a significant cushion of unsecured. And so as we continue to finance ourselves, you should expect to see us continue to do unsecured as a portion of the incremental financing. We only have one maturity in 2027 for a small amount, $300 million. So we've got plenty of optionality with respect to what we do and over time in order to optimize our cost structure. And we're going to continue to be focused on it.

Next question today is coming from Kenneth Lee from RBC Capital Markets.

Wondering if you could just share a little bit more color on some of the deal activity you're seeing within the software space currently. I appreciate it's potentially wider spread. Just want to gauge the level of activity and what are your thoughts in terms of the potential outlook over the next few quarters there?

Yes, sure. Thanks for the question. Volumes have been somewhat muted. I think you've heard us say that. You've heard others say that in software, across technology, across other industries. But we think the current market is pretty attractive from a risk-adjusted return perspective. I think there's less competition, there's less capital. As we just articulated, we have an abundance of capital. We have that in OTF in spades as well as across the broader Blue Owl landscape. From a software perspective, there's been a few deals done, and we've seen some pretty meaningful spread widening. There are deals that we ultimately chose to not participate in, but think in the context of 150 to 200 basis points wider than what we were seeing at the tights earlier this year and last year. So we think the opportunity set for very attractive assets will be perfect for us given the amount of capital and the expertise we have on a going-forward basis. We mentioned this a bit as well on the call, but we're also spending substantial time in LSI as well as in our digital infrastructure group. Those opportunities are very large. The amount of capital, I think, as everybody knows, being raised for digital infra across the investable universe is substantial. And given our relationships and our expertise and our structuring knowledge of how to set those types of transactions up, we think there's going to be plenty of things for us to do over the course of the year.

Got you. Very helpful there. And one follow-up, if I may, just in terms of the share repurchases. And from the prepared remarks, it sounds like you continue to be active there. Just want to gauge how active OTF could be in terms of share repurchases, especially with the context of leverage and investment opportunities?

Yes. I mean, look, we talked about this as well in the context of OBDC as well. We evaluate share repurchases in terms of just the general allocation of capital. We've continued to repurchase here. We've bought a significant amount over the course of the last number of quarters, and our Board re-upped the share purchase plan to $300 million. We've still got close to $200 million remaining there. So you should expect us to continue to be deploying capital into that alongside of what is a very, very attractive investment landscape. So here, we've got room to be able to take advantage of the different opportunities that are going to be in front of us, both from an investing perspective as well as a share repurchase perspective.

Next question today is coming from Arren Cyganovich from Truist Securities.