Deutsche Beteiligungs AG (DBAN) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Tom Alzin, speaker of the Board. Please go ahead.

Thanks. Going over straight directly to Page 3. I am happy to announce that we have fully achieved our latest revised guidance, which obviously was a bit narrowed and to the lower end, but we have been fully achieving our guidance, and that speaks to the quality of our net asset value and also of our group net income driven by exits. Also in the last quarter of our year, where we had a long-term investment, which materialized, and that also leads us to a quite significant liquidity cushion, which is quite frankly, a bit higher than I wanted to be because, obviously, it's also a drag on performance, and we're paying interest rates. But we come to that later. We see good deal flow, and now we hope to deploy that in a very, very accretive way. We reiterated our dividend proposal of EUR 1 per share, and on the next slide, you see that combined with our share buyback program, this equates to a very shareholder-friendly payout ratio of 67% this year. Bear in mind that basically, we want to keep our dividend stable and manage our excess cash via buybacks. And given the current state of the share and the huge discrepancy to the current NAV, I would assume that our current share buyback program, which probably runs dry end of December, beginning January, at least I would be asking my Board to renew a further buyback program. It's early days, but we just see that it's, at that point in time, incredibly accretive, especially that we feel very, very comfortable about our net asset value. Because if you look on the next slide, on Page 5, you see that this year-end result is a cash result, and it was driven, on average, with a 20% uplift versus our last valuations. So this gives us really, really good comfort in our valuations, in our net asset value. And hence, we think that in order to generate value for our shareholders, one of the best things we can do is to continue to buy back our shares at these very accretive levels. Nevertheless, that's not the only thing we do. We also did one new transaction in the quarter. And actually, also there's one new deal in Italy, which will be announced hopefully in December, but it's basically already secured. We did also, with the Solvares, which is an incredible asset, we took in a minority investor and rolled over our majority stake in the new continuation fund, which is just a fund, which only holds 1 asset. But basically, this allows us to increase the fee volume we are able to extract from Solvares by a staggering 77%, whilst also materializing and locking in some of our gains of this tremendous asset. Another point of attention I would draw your attention to is that the platform we built together with us and to be a dominant force in German private mid-market is showing its potential by the amount of investment opportunities we reviewed, which is now 550 investment opportunities reviewed. In 2023, it was 236. So we roughly doubled our funnel. We didn't double the amount of investments. And quite frankly, just because we still see there's a tug of war in terms of current trading. Current trading is often soft, and buyers and sellers, it's difficult to match diverging price expectations. Nevertheless, it's fair to say that the market environment in terms of pricing is very, very attractive, and we think that it will continue to be attractive, especially going into next year. And in order to protect our investors in such a soft market, we are also able to get a lot of earn-out clauses, or when the sellers reinvest, we often get them a preferred return, which we can lock in. So also in terms of structures, the structures of our equity investments are much, much safer than what we saw in the heydays of 2019, 2020. We also did our first private debt investment, which has a 3-year long call period. So we expect if this -- with a hold to maturity, we expect to do a 1.4x money and 13% IRR, which is in line with our capital costs. And we see a very good deal flow also in the private debt segment, and I would expect and hope to deploy some of our definite excess liquidity in the next couple of months in that space, earning a nice uplift combined to our cost of capital, especially compared to our convertible. On the next page, in terms of sectors, one change we did, broadband and telecoms, we don't expect that to be a sector of significance going forward, and we redefined a bit our approach on industrial services. And so we have a new sector, which is now, going forward, being called environment, energy and infrastructure. We think that this is a growth sector going forward also for the German economy as it moves away from its traditional heritage industries, and we think we are very, very well positioned in that space, and that's something we're going to report from hereon going forward. On the next page, on Page 7, you see that our portfolio has become a bit more concentrated than we would like it to be, driven by some clear winners. But we think that the top 16% to 35%, not to call it the bottom, is a source of potential upside going forward once we see that we would at least get some tailwinds regarding current trading and the headwinds start to abate a bit. Because some of these portfolio companies are very, very, very lowly valued, conservatively valued, for all the right reasons, but we think that as where we stand now, this would probably be more source of upside than downside from hereon going forward. Nevertheless, with the headlines in the macroeconomic environment, we would not expect that to materialize shortly, obviously. Jumping over to Page 8, very shortly, our net asset value bridge. You see that we had a value increase, which was obviously on the lower end what we're targeting, nevertheless, also helped by our share buybacks. Our net asset value per share increased by 8.5% year-on-year, which is honestly not great. But in a year where definitely Germany has been contracting, I think it's a good achievement, especially driven by cash realizations again. Our net asset value with EUR 688 million has come in, in the original -- is still in the original forecast and also well within the specified forecast in July. It's not an easy thing to do, frankly, with the kind of volatility out there, but we are happy that we have been a bit more -- we have been narrowing the outcomes, also driven by our change in portfolio valuation approach from hereon going forward. And I think the volatility, which historically has been driving DBAG's net asset value forecast, combined with a lot of ad hoc announcements during intra-year, I think we will be a much more persistent performer going forward from hereon. On the next slide, you see where our portfolio came from. And you see that we have -- basically, we have realized nearly EUR 100 million over the course of the year, and that was really the main driver going forward, and to a much lesser extent, value created in the portfolio per se. Moving over to the next slide. In terms of earnings, we see that the earnings over the portfolio had been negative, and same for the change in debt. That was -- the change in debt is often also due because we increased our investment exposure via add-ons, which often are hopefully financed by debt instead of equity. Multiples have been very helpful. I cannot say otherwise. But given our private market sector, we have actually dampened significantly the change of multiples effect over the course of this year. And that was also a driver which this year did not -- well, dampened our earnings. Moving over to the next slide, fund earnings. Nothing special here. We are reporting EBITA numbers because we have some amortization of the earn-outs of the ELF purchase, but I think that's the fair number. It's been driven by fees related to our entities in Luxembourg, but also the addition of ELF. And going forward, also, obviously, things like a continuation from Solvares should also be helping it. So overall, on the next slide, you see that we have -- we are full of liquidity, quite frankly. We have a very high coverage of our commitments. Actually, it's one of the highest commitment coverage we have ever been. And we think -- right now, as the CEO of this company, I feel very, very comfortable with this, because in the environment which we are in, where capital again has a value and risk -- good risk-adjusted returns are possible. That's a good thing to have. And as I said before, I think in the first phase, some of this liquidity will be transformed into some debt investments. And then we are also ramping up because we want to fully invest our Fund VIII by the end of next year. We see some potential opportunities in early phases, so I would also expect some larger buyouts to happen later next year. In terms of our guidance next year, this might be -- and I would not -- next slide, please. What could be seen as a lowering of expectation and even a negative net asset value change, I would not overstretch that. We took a very cautious stance because as a speaker of the Board, one thing I think, which we frankly did not do great this year was shortly after the launch of our convertible, we had, for some reasons, to narrow our guidance. And that was perceived by some market participants as a profit warning. That was not the intention. It was the mid of the year, and we narrowed the spread of our guidance. We came in well within our original guidance from January, which is frankly an achievement, looking from where we're coming from. And in order to be able to surprise on the positive, we took a cautious stance here, also knowing that the environment is really not supportive. We're fighting hard. I think we're doing good investments. But obviously, some companies are hit by this kind of environment. And so we took a cautious stance there to be able to continue to do -- yes, to do -- allow for positive surprises. And as I said in the beginning, I would, at least as spokesman of the Board, recommend to my Board that we would continue to buy back our shares at these very accretive levels. Yes. Thanks. If I want you to keep something in mind is that we took a cautious stance. We have a lot of cash. The opportunity environment to deploy the cash is quite an attractive one, and especially in the debt space, we don't need growth. And we see that, [ compared to today ], that some banks will have a lot of opportunities, and that's where we'll probably deploy our cash in the next couple of months. And obviously, one of our aims is also to fully invest the Fund VIII during the course of next year. Okay. With that, I would conclude then and wish you all a good day.

Thank you very much.