SWK Holdings Corporation (SWKH) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good day, and welcome to the SWK Holdings Second Quarter 2024 Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please note this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to your host, Mr. Ira Gostin, Investor Relations. Sir, the floor is yours.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining the SWK Holdings Second Quarter 2024 Financial and Corporate Results Call. Yesterday, we issued a press release detailing our financial results for the 3 months ending June 30, 2024. The press release can be found on the Investor Relations section of our website at swkhold.com under the News Release section. Before beginning today's call, I would like to make the following statement regarding forward-looking statements. Today, we will be making certain forward-looking statements about future expectations, plans, events and circumstances, including statements about our strategy, future operations and our expectations regarding our capital allocation and cash resources. These statements are based on our current expectations, and you should not place undue reliance on these statements. Actual results may differ materially due to our risks and uncertainties, including those detailed in the Risk Factors section of the SWK Holdings 10-K filed with the SEC and other filings we make with the SEC from time to time. SWK Holdings disclaims any obligation to update information contained in these forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. Joining me from SWK Holdings on today's call is Jody Staggs, President and CEO, who will provide an update on SWK second quarter corporate and financial results. And Jody, it's all yours. Go ahead, please.

Thank you, Ira, and thanks, everyone, for joining our second quarter conference call. First, I'd like to welcome our new CFO, Adam Rice. Adam joins SWK from a private credit platform and brings valuable loan and mortgage accounting and operational experience to SWK. During these first couple of months, Adam has familiarized himself with our financing structures, assisted our Controller, Courtney and our consultants with the 2Q accounting reporting and started building a relationship with our partner banks. Adam will take a leading role with the financial reporting starting in 3Q, and you will hear from him then. Welcome, Adam. SWK's core business is financing innovative commercial stage life science product companies through first lien term loans and royalties with a focus on $5 million to $25 million investments. During the second quarter, our core finance segment generated $6.5 million of adjusted non-GAAP net income. The net finance receivables portfolio increased 19% year-over-year to $267 million (sic) [ $265.5 million ], and the portfolio effective yield improved 10 basis points year-over-year at 40 bps sequentially to 14.6%. Segment revenue increased 15% year-over-year to $10.7 million as receivables growth was accompanied by a 15.4% realized yield. Second quarter 2024 financial segment results were negatively impacted by a net $4.1 million of impairments taken to 2 nonaccrual borrowers and positively impacted by a $2.4 million increase in the carrying value of our Iluvien royalty, as well as a $700,000 gain on the conversion of AOTI private warrants to common stock, which was triggered by the company listing on the London AIM Exchange. As a reminder, SWK carries private warrants at 0 on our books. During the second quarter, we advanced $7 million to existing performing borrowers, and in August, we closed on an up to $11 million royalty monetization with Relief Therapeutics. We are pursuing loans and royalties to multiple innovative life science companies and have the capital available to close these opportunities. Our Enteris division is ramping work with our strategic partner, as evidenced by segment revenue nearly tripling sequentially to $800,000. Under the strategic agreement, Enteris is entitled to receive low single-digit million minimum guaranteed revenue payments for each of the 6-month periods. For the first 6 months of the year, we agreed that this requirement could be satisfied by bookings received at the end of the quarter. These bookings were deferred and the revenue will be realized over the next few quarters. Our partner made the full cash payment after quarter close, satisfying the minimum guaranteed revenue payment requirement for the period. As a reminder, the minimum guaranteed revenue payment is intended to help fund the operating costs of materials as revenue builds. We are pleased with the progress Enteris is making as evidenced by increased bookings and a growing pipeline of CDMO projects. Turning to our share repurchase program. We bought back 54,667 shares at a total cost of $1 million during the second quarter. Since quarter close, we repurchased an additional 155,000 shares for a total cost of $2.6 million. As of June 30, 2024, our GAAP book value per share was $22.75, a 4% increase compared to $21.79 as of June 30, 2023. Non-GAAP tangible financing book value per share totaled $20.17, a 6% increase compared to $18.95 as of June 30, 2023. During the quarter, we wrote off the remaining value for potential future milestone and royalty payments associated with the Enteris Peptelligence license to Cara Therapeutics. This was in response to Cara's decision to discontinue the clinical program for the underlying Oral KORSUVA program. Post this write-off, the Enteris segment has a book value of approximately $5 million, which consists almost entirely of PP&E. In summary, during 2Q '24, our financial segment had solid results, which were negatively impacted by impairments at 2 borrowers. We are pursuing multiple financing opportunities and are working to close additional deals by year-end. Our Enteris business has seen growth in revenue and bookings with the assistance of our partner and is positioned to be cash flow breakeven or better through the strategic partnership period. With that, let's open up the line to questions.

[Operator Instructions] We have a question from Scott Jensen, who is a private investor.

Nice quarter. I'm happy you took the Cara upfront charge, and it's nice to see within the 10-Q the up -- the writing up of the Iluvien. It's kind of nice to see one go the other direction. I guess my question is kind of twofold. One is, what is the market looking like to you out there? And then how do you deal with the competition that's coming from larger players, bigger institutions, all kind of coming out of different areas that they may be used to stay in their lane and now they're kind of coming in all over the lending map? Like -- so what do you see out there as far as that trend?

Yes, good question. So if you look at our pipeline this year, we've -- our pipeline is at an all-time high. We've had more inflow at the top of the pipeline. And I think part of that is due to Peter Blumberg, our Head of Business Development, has done a really good job and has started his stride. So in the funnel, it has been good. Our close rate has been down. It's been -- I think, perhaps the lowest it's been in the past few years. And I mean what we're seeing is -- I wouldn't say we're getting necessarily beat out by sort of the traditional players, but a lot of it's been things like equity. Those have fallen through -- there certainly is competition in the royalty space and some others. But I think a lot of it has been sort of discrete one-offs. In terms of -- and just to state another sort of statement of fact, you can look at the public competitors, the BDCs in our space, their bookings were down -- flat to down, kind of through the first 6 months of the year, many of them, the guys that are our size, and they talked about less deal flow and kind of that sponsor-backed sort of TRA space. So there are a lot of people out there looking to deploy capital. What we have to do, I think, is to find unique opportunities. I think this Relief Royalty being a good example where it's off the run. J.D., who is our Director of Underwriting, did a fantastic job of that one, kind of through unique royalties and some pretty heavy structuring in different geographies. So we're going to have to be creative. We're going to have to find unique opportunities. We've got to go hustle. We've got to have excellent customer service. We've got to lean on the people we've worked with. We certainly can't just count on banks to call us and give us a nice $20 million sponsor-backed deals, like we'll never put money to work that way. So it's going to be hustling and finding ways to be helpful to folks.

Okay. And another question. As you said in your opening statements about the buyback that you bought another $2.6 million. Does that then hit the $10 million? Do you have no capacity left under the current buyback? And then if so, are there any plans to...

Yes. No. So we do -- because we did renew our program, I believe -- I want to make sure about this, I think it was on May 15, 16, 17, we renewed the program. The rate limiting factor is going to be our credit facility. So we are talking and working with them to increase the bucket. But that is going to be -- I mean, as of today, it's $5 million on an LTM period. We're working with them, and I prefer not to say anything until we get that finalized. But yes, that's going to be the right limiting factor right now.

[Operator Instructions] Since we currently have no questions on the line at this time, so I will hand it back to Mr. Staggs for any closing comments.

Great. Thank you, operator. Thanks, everyone, for joining our second quarter call. I hope everyone has a great Friday and great weekend. Bye-bye.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. This concludes today's conference, and you may disconnect your lines at this time, and we thank you for your participation.