Deutsche Beteiligungs AG (DBAN) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, and welcome, everyone, also from my side. Roland Rapelius of DBAG. It's a pleasure to have you here in our H1 conference call. And I hope you can see all the slides in front of you. And without further ado, I would now like to hand over to Tom Alzin, the spokesman of the Board of Management of DBAG. So please go ahead, Tom.

Thanks, Roland. Maybe you can share us first slide, yes. So we are happy to report what we think is a strong set of results here, obviously driven by 4 successful disposals in a nevertheless complicated environment, also driven by higher capital market multiples, given the positive stock market development, and further positive operating development, which we are really proud of and working very hard every day. This all leads to a 14% NAV growth in 6 months. You can all do the math. If we would confirm that for the second half, we would obviously be way above our capital cost. This is further supported -- and that's the peculiarity of DBAG, as you know, that we also have our strong earnings and steady earnings from the Fund Investment Services. We raised our forecast, given these set of results, and obviously, if we do so in the mid of the year, we feel comfortable about our forecast. Next slide. We stand now with EUR 646 million of -- with net asset value. This equates to EUR 34 per share, roughly. And obviously, the share price is trading at a significant discount here, especially if we consider our Fund Investment Services. Our earnings before tax came in with EUR 75 million, and roughly the same amount came in from the cash flow from investment activity. This is driven mainly because we did, in our portfolio, and we'll come to that later, mostly smaller add-on acquisitions, which, again, were mostly funded with external debt. And we didn't do any larger platform investment, but had our successful disposals, cash flowing in, with further cash coming in down the road. Fund Investment Services, nothing exciting there, but as I said, very steady earnings. And altogether, this leads to a group income of EUR 82 million for the first half of the year. We are still in a structurally growing market. And above all, we have still a very high share of primaries here, with 67% of primaries and secondaries and tertiaries making 33% of our market share. What has changed a bit is that the number of investment opportunities reviewed per quarter, the investment opportunities per se, meaning the 69 investment opportunities during January and March 2023, are more on the lower end of our current spectrum. So the market has shifted a bit more in terms of average value size to the lower end of our segment. And that's primarily driven because bank financing is still quite complicated for some sectors. Nevertheless, we did not see an incremental impact on that from an SVB failure or what is going to happen in the U.S. For now, it looks like this is a completely isolated situation in the U.S., which has not impacted the willingness of our lenders, as far as we can tell for now. Next slide, Roland. As I said, we had 4 very successful disposals, with GMM Pfaudler only counting as a partial disposal. No further disposal in the second half of the year, but we're looking still for BTV Multimedia to close in our Q3. The closing is on track, and we don't expect anything to happen there. It's just, given that it was a strategic buyer, they have to pass through antitrust and more legislation than normally. On the add-on acquisition side, we are very happy that, especially, our growth platforms, metalworks, netzkontor and akquinet were very, very active. And we also see that operasan, which was a former spin-off of a part of our very successful radiology platform, is now becoming a feasible investment also, given that we see a very strong add-on pipeline and some strategic. BioLife, Fresenius are currently not active in the market and -- so competition for targets has become actually less. Let's move on. In terms of sector, you still see that we keep a very diversified sector base. And you also see, it's interesting to note that the rebound is not driven as we could have expected by the industrial sectors or the growth sectors, at least not quarter-on-quarter. But it's mainly driven by the successful disposals, which are no longer in this scheme. But that gives us also the confidence for the remaining part of our portfolio. I think with our terrible results last year, we've been very thorough in keeping our book clean. And a clean book is always a good start to play offense and also to see further upside in the valuations. Yes, they're all my comments here. Obviously, we are not keen to be market leaders, but it's nice if we are. Nevertheless, as investors, we -- it's not a metric we are guiding this company by. I think, also, the fact that we are a market leader is full circle due to the fact that we are in a market which has -- commands a high share of primaries. And we are still the natural go-to guys for primary bilateral situations. So it's more the market structure, which helps our kind of investment schemes. In terms of MBOs, you see families and founders still dominating with nearly 2/3 of our deal flow, and it's a bit higher than the German market, I say. And now I think Roland will do a deeper dive into our financials.

Yes. Thank you very much, Tom. Just commenting on the next few slides here. On this slide, we have, basically, 2 messages for you, for thoughts, because we got this question recently. One is the situation of our portfolio, the financing situation; and two is the financing situation for DBAG. So the top 3 bullets relate to our portfolio. Here, the message is that the net leverage has decreased on average year-on-year. So -- but as you are aware, this is also depending on the structure of the portfolio. So some business model are higher and some business models are lower -- carry a lower leverage. So that is what has happened here. Second bullet is that we have no credit exposure to the failed U.S. banks. So Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank, there's no significant credit exposure there. And third message, and Tom has already described that situation, which is unchanged from what we have seen by the end of last year. The banks and the debt funds continue to follow a selective approach in their lending. And then second message on the lower side of the slide is that the balance sheet of DBAG remains very solid, with an equity ratio of above 90%. So that's always been high. That's really very high after all successful disposals. And secondly, the liquidity has also improved. We have EUR 153 million of available liquidity due to cash of EUR 56 million and EUR 97 million of undrawn credit lines. And there's more available liquidity in our group investment entity subsidiaries. Next is the increase in NAV. So just a very quick overview here, and Tom has also already described the 14% increase in NAV. And on the right-hand side, you can see our new forecast, which has been raised on April 18. We now expect EUR 610 million to EUR 715 million of NAV for the full year. To go more into detail about our portfolio value. Our portfolio value in this first half year has been driven by additions. These were mainly the planned investments of the existing companies of EUR 50 million. Then we have disposals, mainly Pmflex, Cloudflight and Heytex. Note that BTV is not yet included here. And then the change in value, which I will now go to on the next slide in more detail. There are EUR 41 million -- EUR 41.2 million change in value was driven by a change in earnings and change in debt. In sum, we refer to this as the operating performance, which was positive, positive EUR 24 million. And I would say, the one message here on this slide is that nearly all the portfolio companies had this -- had a positive operating performance, except for 2 portfolio companies. So all in all, a good operating development here of the portfolio companies in the first half year. The second point to make is the change in multiples, and Tom has outlined that as well already. Of course, we had a positive development of the capital markets, but also here, the transaction effects contributes to this increase. So whenever we receive a bit, which is above our last book value, we increase the value. And this is reflected here also in the change of multiples, so it's also then the result of our successful disposals of the first half year. Miscellaneous, that's the offsetting position to the change in disposal, which is positive. So that's the technical effect here. All in all, EUR 41 million of net gains and losses on measurement in the first half year. The next slide is on our Fund Investment Services business. You see the top line steadily increasing, and the bottom line going up from EUR 5.8 million to EUR 7.2 million of EBT in the first half year. That has that to do because some of the one-off costs we had last year did not reoccur this half year. And that's mainly related to one-off expenses we had with -- in relation to the departure of a member of the Board of Management. The forecast of EUR 13 million to EUR 15 million, we are here fully on track, and therefore, the forecast hasn't changed. Financial base, of course, has also improved strongly, mainly driven by our divestments. And note that BTV is not yet included in the financial base of EUR 152.6 million. So all in all, this is our raised forecast, which we had increased on April 18, which you should now all be aware of. NAV, EUR 610 million to EUR 715 million; EBT Fund Investments Services, EUR 13 million to EUR 15 million; and group net income, EUR 85 million to EUR 115 million. And with that, I would now like to hand back again to Tom to do some closing remarks.

Thank you, Roland. And as I said, we are quite confident, otherwise, obviously, we would not have increased our guidance. We have a clean book. We see a very differentiated good market environment. Good market environment, not because we have tailwinds but we see that the market environment is complicated, that we have volatility. Volatility creates dispersions. And especially on bilateral situations, the sellers no longer talk to you about cohorted anecdotal multiple -- fantasy multiples. They heard what the company is worth of. But you can really engage into bilateral discussions with meaningful valuations and also talk about earn-outs, vendor loans and the kind of likes, which give you -- protect a bit your equity structure. And this is a set we do know quite well. And it's a set we are applying on new opportunities. So we are quite confident that this is a season where we can do good, sensible add-ons, which would have a nice return on our equity. I think the moves we did to broaden our sector expertise into growth sectors and also going into Italy was really the right move. And also, we see some special situations, which we aim to address with our long-term investment balance sheet gains. So all in all, I think we are quite happy with the initiatives we took several years ago because, in an environment like this, we really have a good playbook at hand on what to do here. We feel comfortable that the appreciation is not just a jump back of valuations driven by stock market gains, but they are really driven also and mostly driven by successful disposals in a complicated environment and also operating growth. So all in all, a very sound financial basis for growth. We are in a market environment where our strong market reputation helps, and our track record also. So we feel very comfortable where we are, and we are not afraid of the environment. With that, I would then close this presentation.