Charter Communications H1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Quartr
Provided by Quartr
August 8, 2024

There are 7 speakers on the call.

Operator

Thank you for standing by. My name is Danica and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Burford Capital Second Quarter 2024 Financial Results Conference Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers' remarks, there will be a question and answer session.

Operator

Thank you. I would now like to turn the call over to Chris Bogard, Chief Executive Officer. Please go ahead.

Speaker 1

Thanks very much and hello everybody. Thank you all for joining us today. As usual, I'm joined by John Malo, the Chief Investment Officer and Jordan Leach, the Chief Financial Officer and all three of us will talk to some of the slides that have been posted, in what we hope will be a relatively brief presentation, and then we'll be happy to take whatever questions you might have. Before turning to the numbers and the results, I was just sort of reflecting on the fact that the next time we talk to you in the fall, Burford and Wolf have turned 15 by that point. And it's pretty interesting to reflect back on what was going on in 2,009.

Speaker 1

I think I was actually on this day in 2,009 sitting on Guernsey, putting the business together. Little did we know then that we would be launching what has become $3,000,000,000 company and fundamentally changing the way that the legal industry operates economically. It's been a terrific 15 year ride. We're really thrilled with what we've been able to accomplish and we thank all of you for making that possible with your and your patient capital. So turning to the Q2 and the report that we put out this morning.

Speaker 1

We're very pleased to report a strong quarter as to both portfolio activity and cash generation on the one hand and new business to continue to refill the portfolio on the other. And I'm on Slide 4 and that slide will just call out a few key points that I'll just talk on briefly. We were principally driven this quarter in terms of revenue and profits by strong capital provision income. In other words, the income that we generate from the core portfolio. That was up 2 37% from the comparable quarter in 2023, so a very strong showing.

Speaker 1

And that was driven mostly by realized gains. In other words, cases that had actually come to a conclusion. And not only is that nice to see, but we saw returns on those cases that were well above our historical average, really about double our historical average, so returns of about 179% on those realizations. But obviously, will be a number that will move around depending on the economics of particular cases and what happens in the portfolio. But I think that being able to produce returns at that level really does spell any notion that we're seeing degradation or compression of returns as opposed to simple variation on a period by period basis.

Speaker 1

We saw on the new business side a robust level of new business. We exceeded our trailing averages by a fair bit on both a 3 month and a 6 month basis. And so that's always pleasant in the middle of the year to see that kind of activity. As long time investors will remember, this business does tend to have a 4th quarter dominance to it. I sometimes joke with investors that it feels like we're running a retailer.

Speaker 1

And the reason for that is that lots of clients and lots of law firms frankly don't really need the money until you get close to the end of the year. And that's why the Q4 historically for us has been quite busy, but it was and the Q1 and the Q3 are often not busy at all. You can't force lawyers to engage when they don't otherwise want to. So it was very pleasant to see that kind of second quarter activity. As I said earlier, these realizations were driven not just by one big thing.

Speaker 1

When you compare, obviously, our income statement results to 2023, 2023 was heavily influenced by our success in YPF, which is a wonderful development, but it is indeed just one big thing, whereas this period we were demonstrating strength from multiple case activities, multiple case wins, and settlements, but really drove the overall numbers. And all of that turns into cash. These weren't just paper gains. These were actual cash receipts, and we've been pretty consistent in being able to demonstrate those kinds of cash receipts. So just stepping back from those numbers and before we go on, I think there are a couple of key points here.

Speaker 1

We've established that there is overall a real demand from both law firms and corporate clients for the solutions that we offer. And now that we are trying to put the pandemic in the rearview mirror, we have, I think, good runway both to continue to see the portfolio continue to perform and also to continue to add clients and develop new business. And that's where our market leadership really does count. We absolutely get business because of the quality of our team, because of the size of our capital base and the overall experience that we have in the market. So this is while this is always going to be a business with some period to period volatility, I think we've shown that we also over longer term have made a very attractive, sustainable business model that can deliver desirable returns and a lot of cash.

Speaker 1

So turning to Slide 5. What this slide really does is pull in some Q1 data to show a fair number of first half overall data points. But the fundamental message here about the first half of the year is the same. The portfolio is performing well and new business is being generated. And again, back to the client side of things, clients want these solutions.

Speaker 1

Try to find a CFO who says he or she is happy to be spending money on legal fees. They just don't exist. And so this is now we are set up now for what we hope is a multiyear ability to continue to grow the new business side of this business as we continue to add clients to the mix. I'm not going to go through all of the bullet points here. Jordan instead is going to take you through in some detail the things call out here.

Speaker 1

But I would just as we go past this slide, note a couple of things as we go. In addition to talking about realizations in new business, we not only have a strong liquidity position, but if you note the sort of coverage of cash against expenses, we're operating quite a high margin business, which is very pleasant as well. John is going to show you in terms of the existing portfolio how much we still have left to go and how consistent our performance has been with consistently low loss rates. And Jordan will talk about the asset management business, but as we've described over the last couple of years, we simply make a lot more money when we do our investments on the balance sheet, which is why you've seen us have a DM

Speaker 2

Okay. It's Jordan speaking. Sorry about that. It looks as though we lost Chris for a moment, but we lost him right at the moment he was about to turn the slides to me. So I was going to start by saying thank you, Chris, and I'm going to jump to Page 6.

Speaker 2

So let's just keep going.

Speaker 1

And I am back from my mysterious departure. Apologies for that. I don't quite know what happened there. The line just went flatbed. But Jordan was about to take Slide 6, and I'll just make a couple of comments as we go into it.

Speaker 1

So on Slide 6, we announced earlier this week that the annual testing that we have to do at the end of June to see what percentage of U. S. Holders we have had pushed us over 50%, and not just by a whisker. So that means that we're no longer, as of January 1, 2025, we're no longer a foreign private issuer in the U. S.

Speaker 1

Market. We're instead a full U. S. Listed company. And that's really the culmination of what has been more than 5 years of planning and effort along the way.

Speaker 1

We lay out here some of the things that we've done and Jordan can speak to any of those that he chooses. But I think the overarching point here is that we've done this because we think that there is a benefit to all shareholders wherever you're located of being a full U. S. Listed company. That's just a much larger and deeper capital market than anywhere else.

Speaker 1

We've seen the volume and trading benefit that comes with that. So we're happy with this outcome. We'd ask all of you to support the forthcoming Extraordinary General Meeting in a few weeks, which is one of the last steps of the other bits and pieces of this to put the articles of the company in a more U. S. Shareholder conventional form.

Speaker 1

And we look forward to continuing to grow our market presence in the U. S. And now to Jordan.

Speaker 2

Well, Chris, you gave a double thank you. I said thank you before. I'm not sure if you heard it, but we'll start again. Thank you, Chris. Good morning, everyone, and afternoon.

Speaker 2

So on Page 6, there's a lot of great accomplishment highlighted that the team has achieved over time, as Chris has described, with a lot more in the near future. So first, what you'll see over at the end of this year is the migration to a 10 ks and proxy. We're going to look to continue to provide in that transition similar depth of content that we've historically provided. But we're also going to try and make sure that the story is easy to access for new investors. Our dates for quarterly and full year reporting will accelerate to the more traditional U.

Speaker 2

S. Schedules for financial periods. So you'll see quarterly results within 40 days of the end of each quarter, full year results within 60 days of the end of each year. So more to come, but all productive items highlighted on the page. I'm going to now switch to Page 7.

Speaker 2

A quick summary of Select Financials. This page is Burford only. Look, comparisons to the 6 month period in 2023 are going to be difficult given that at the end of March last year, we received positive news regarding the summary judgment on the YPF case, and John will speak more to that shortly. And of course, that caused a multi $100,000,000 boost to unrealized gains and thus to revenue. So let me focus though on some of the key numbers and then I go into greater detail on following pages.

Speaker 2

First, we'll just start $54,000,000 of net income for the Q2, which is $0.24 per share, clearly a big increase over the same period in 2023 as well as the Q1 of this year. And net income was approximately or actually over or near 40% of total revenues. On the capital provision asset side, we've now grown to slightly above 3,500,000,000 dollars Of that, our non YPF related assets represent 2,100,000,000 to deployed cost. Tangible book value just shy of $10 per share, including the intangibles, we're now at $10.50 per share. I'll talk more about revenue and expense composition in the coming pages and some of the other key metrics.

Speaker 2

So I'm going to jump now to Page 8. This is where we highlight total capital provision income, and it's broken into the various components. The real headline is that the 2nd quarter, total capital provision income, is up 2 37% over the same period last year. Look, in simple words, we've had a lot of positive outcomes in a number of cases. Starting at the top of the table, net realized gains were up significantly period over period with just shy of $100,000,000 of gains in the 2nd quarter.

Speaker 2

And this was driven by strong performance in realizations with ROIC of 146% year to date. First half net realized gains for capital provision direct was $128,000,000 which is nearly 70% of the whole of 2023. And the only 6 month period exceeding this year's result was the first half of twenty twenty at $183,000,000 of net realized gains and that was before the COVID-nineteen pandemic had started to clog the courts and legal processes. Capital provision assets, as a reminder, are fair value quarterly and we use the observation of case milestones, both positive and negative and discount rate in that calculation. It's notable that this period we had pretty low net unrealized gains.

Speaker 2

Almost all of our revenue this quarter came from realizations where we've won cases. That's in part a function of cases concluding rather than just going through another milestone and in part due to changes in the discount rate. Over the 1st two quarters, we've seen discount rates for our assets rise by about 34 basis points. And in the most recent period, that probably was a headwind of approximately $15,000,000 to $20,000,000 The discount rates in the models generally follow market trends and bond market volatility. And as a frame of reference, our asset value on a Burford only basis would increase around $50,000,000 for a 50 basis point decrease in our discount rate.

Speaker 2

But all that talk about discount rates out, let's focus on the cash resolution of our assets and not this interim fluctuation created by rate volatility. But wrapping up on this page, overall total capital provision income of $119,000,000 was up sharply from Q2 2023 as well as the $18,000,000 we saw in Q1 of this year. Flipping to Page 9. 2nd quarter was a productive quarter for building the portfolio. Burford only commitments have been significant, as well as diversified across the sectors in 2024, with a total of $343,000,000 of capital provision direct new commitments.

Speaker 2

Recall the 2023 metric includes a large deal to support a Fortune 50 client and that was a $325,000,000 deal overall with a $190,000,000 representing Burford only capital provision direct commitments. As it resolved quickly and they had a good IRR, but it was a lower ROIC because of shorter duration and we've spoken about that in previous calls. While we can't show you all of our internal expected profit figures and we're working Just measuring dollars Just measuring dollars of commitments and deployments doesn't necessarily tell the full story. Deployments did however rise significantly since the last several quarters. We expect deployments to continue to be robust.

Speaker 2

Yes, volatile and some volatility, but we have approximately $700,000,000 of definitive commitments to deploy on the existing book. That's future profitability that we're looking forward to. But while commitments and deployments are about putting the money out, let's move to Page 10, which highlights bringing the assets to resolution. On the top far right of the page, you'll see Burford only realizations of $216,000,000 year to date representing an 11% increase over the first half of the year. This was driven by 8 matters achieving over $10,000,000 each.

Speaker 2

3 of those were $25,000,000 or more each. Realizations are obviously the critical component to creating cash and cash receipts have been consistent at or near $100,000,000 per quarter over the last 8 quarters. Our year to date numbers are keeping pace with last year's first half. Bottom line, the portfolio is performing and throwing off cash. With that, I will hand it over to John to discuss YPF and the rest of the portfolio.

Speaker 3

Thanks, Jordan. Thanks to you all for joining. I'm very pleased to be here. As Jordan says, the portfolio is just humming, lots of activity and that's what ends up generating the realizations. Starting on Slide 11 with the YPF related assets, there's not much to report other than that things are going through the litigation process on the timeframe that we had explained.

Speaker 3

So the briefing is almost concluded in the Court of Appeals on the direct appeal. You recall Argentina has appealed its loss and the plaintiffs have appealed YPF's potential liability. And Argentina's final brief has been filed and the plaintiff's final brief has been filed. There's one brief remaining from YPS to be filed on August 23 and then oral argument of decision thereafter. In the meantime, because you'll recall there was no stay granted pending appeal, the judgment of the trial court is final and enforceable.

Speaker 3

And there are enforcement proceedings that are progressing both in the United States and in multiple jurisdictions around the world. As always, we don't comment on the as is true of all litigation, the process does move forward. And in fact, it's a useful thing to if we turn to Slide 12 and step back and think about the business more broadly and this is something that you've seen before. But I feel like it's a useful thing to keep in mind at this moment, particularly in a moment of market volatility. You asked the question and Chris mentioned before, we're almost 15 years old now.

Speaker 3

We've seen high returns. How do you maintain these returns in excess of what you can get in other asset classes? And this slide kind of explains it. There's a natural process and an automatic resolution of all litigation. It's either going to go to adjudication and be decided by tribunal or court or it's going to settle.

Speaker 3

You see the historical numbers over our lifetime, 75% of our investments that have concluded through settlement. Of the remainder, our gains, our wins have far exceeded our losses and that has made for a very attractive return profile. It's kind of the lawyers understand this is how things work, but to a financial investor trying to understand how do you produce the returns you do that are uncorrelated with markets, which is quite important in a moment of volatility like this one. This kind of lays it out. And it is interesting to note, there was a mention earlier that our ROIC lifetime has gone up this quarter despite as we mentioned earlier, there was one large matter that resolved quickly with high IRRs, but then lower ROICs.

Speaker 3

Nonetheless, just the sheer quantity of things that have resolved that were good. The ROIC ticked up from 82% to 86%. And I'm not bragging about that as a trend. I've already said that could bounce around depending on what resolves in a particular quarter and we see higher ROICs from adjudication trial results versus settlements or they depend. But I think almost 15 years old and you look at the size of the capital investments that have resolved, right, this is based on $1,500,000,000 of deployments generating over $2,900,000,000 of realizations.

Speaker 3

You see the business model works and makes sense and we're very proud of it. And if you turn from Slide 12 to Slide 13, you kind of see the intuitive explanation I described in Slide 12 about why the business model sense. I'm a firm believer and I've always told the team, like, you don't make money unless you've got something that's valuable to the market and this sort of that explains why it makes sense. But Slide 13 lays out the financial results in more pure financial terms. And you've seen this before too, although I can say now that as Chris said, we are effective January 1, no longer a foreign private issuer, we're just a domestic U.

Speaker 3

S. Issuer. I can use a baseball analogy finally. And And I'll say the slide came about because a very good investor asked me a question once some years ago about what's your batting average? And on the one hand, you could provide the simple answer, which the 3rd bullet on the left shows that basically a 10.3% life time loss rate and you'd say, well, that's a pretty good batting average.

Speaker 3

But it's more nuanced than that. It's better than that number tells you because when you look at the dispersion of outcomes and the asymmetry between losses and gains, for one thing, the losses are smaller, but a portion of those gains are truly outsized home runs. The way Jordan put it was not just your batting average, it's what your hit dispersion is like how many singles, how many doubles, how many home runs, you begin to understand why it's such an attractive business. And the numbers here we've laid out, you can see on the top left in the main graphic that it's roughly 15% of the total invested resulted in an ROIC of 0% or less, right? That's what results in the 10% loss rate.

Speaker 3

But if you look at the top right, you see that roughly a similar amount of money, 15% resulted in returns on invested capital in excess of 200%. That's money back plus more than 2 times your money. And then there's lots of singles and doubles in between where we're earning attractive returns. So that really is a key to understanding the business. It's important to keep in mind, particularly at a moment of volatility because all those returns, all those bars are uncorrelated with market performance.

Speaker 3

If we turn to Slide 14, it's a slide you've seen, but again, it just packs in a lot of information about the business, which I found useful. Some people like to look at this because they can see in the past what we've done that you look at the black bars and compare them to the red bars and you see how well our past resolutions have turned out. And then you look at the shaded gray bars and you see how much is left to be resolved in investments we've put on. And you can see also at the bottom from 2,009 to 2023, yes, when you look at a vintage year of capital out, the IRRs do vary in the conclusions that it's uniform. There's some lumpiness in terms of some years are outperformers and some are underperformers.

Speaker 3

But overall, it's a really great business model and that's what has produced the blended 27% lifetime IRR when you take into account both wins and losses. So with that, I will turn it back over to Jordan to turn to Slide 15. Thanks.

Speaker 2

Thanks, John. On Page 15, just some quick highlights from the asset management business, which continues to perform. As a reminder, we use these funds to augment our balance sheet efforts. The asset management business is a cash on cash business. The actual payout in the 2nd quarter on a cash basis, we saw $11,000,000 of cash receipts and $15,000,000 year to date.

Speaker 2

We do, however, recognize income driven by the fair value movements in fund assets. Buff C, which is currently the most significant driver of this business, has close to $500,000,000 of active deployments on just shy of $900,000,000 of active commitments. I'm going to move now to Slide 16 and we'll switch briefly from the revenues to expenses. At $67,000,000 for the first half of the year, our operating expenses are 31% lower than the same period last year. Note, we see variations in the reported operating expenses that are driven by unrealized gains as well as other accounting elements.

Speaker 2

One in particular that we've discussed on previous calls is changes in our share price. When employees elect to defer their compensation in the fluctuation in our share price, that will manifest itself in salaries and benefits line. And while we look to generally economically hedge that fluctuation by purchasing shares, increases and decreases in our share price do have an impact there and are not offset in the income statement. This period, unfortunately, the reduction in our share price was a benefit of approximately $3,000,000 The annual incentive comp line represents the discretionary bonus for employees and that's finalized in the 4th quarter. But all of that accounting and so forth on a cash basis, our OpEx is pretty steady.

Speaker 2

You'll see G and A is tracking lower and that's mainly due to the reduction in expenses from last year, which had been driven by the restatement in 2023. Page 17, the next page is our highlights our liquidity. We remain in a strong liquidity position ending the quarter with $443,000,000 of cash and securities as well as another $200,000,000 of receivables. I had mentioned before the strength in cash receipts in the first half of the year. We saw $245,000,000 which is consistent with the same period last year.

Speaker 2

We're committed on the right hand top right hand side, we're committed to keeping the laddered debt schedule. Our next maturity is in 2025 and we've been slowly chipping away at that outstanding balance. We've probably purchased around $23,000,000 of that issuance below face value. Leverage metrics on the bottom are 0.8 times leverage level is well below our covenant levels as well as

Speaker 4

our stated maximum of 1.25 times

Speaker 2

and we're our anticipated cash needs as well as cash receipts to manage the business appropriately. And with that, I will hand it back to Chris.

Speaker 1

Great. Thanks, Jordan. And we'll turn to Slide 18 to close this out before we take your questions. And you've seen this slide before. We keep it here really just as a reminder of what we call the 4 pillars of our value proposition.

Speaker 1

So the holder or the buyer of a share of Burford stock is getting 4 different things. An interest in our current core portfolio, which has risen to $7,400,000,000 and that will unwind over time as those cases continue to go through the litigation process. And as a reminder, unlike, for example, private equity or venture capital, where you need a functioning market and a buyer to get exits, we don't need those things. We are delivered those exits automatically by the operation of the legal process. So you've got the existing portfolio.

Speaker 1

You've got a market leading origination platform that has been consistently capable of driving significant volumes of new business every year. You've got the asset management platform that we've already discussed. And finally, you've got the interest in the YTS assets, which as John described, are slowly but steadily making their way through the legal process. So with that, we thank you for your time and we'll be happy to take questions.

Operator

All right. At this time, I would like to remind everyone in order to ask a question, press star then the number one on your telephone keypad. Our first question comes from the line of Julian Roberts with Jefferies. Please go ahead.

Speaker 4

Thank you very much. I've got 2 questions, if that's okay. First one is on costs, which obviously a bit on a cash basis pretty flat year on year. How should we think about that in future? It seems to me that the inflation in salaries for lawyers in the wider legal world might have tailed off a little bit, but how will that affect Burford?

Speaker 4

And the second one is, is there any other change in the litigation funding market that we should think about? Different deals being done in different structures? Is there any kind of change in the competitive outlook? What should we think about in future? Thank you.

Speaker 1

Sure. So let me actually take them in reverse order. In terms of the what's going on overall in the market, I think we've seen a few developments over the last couple of years. The delay that ran through the both on litigation funding firms and also on law firms themselves, especially law firms that operate on risk. And so the simple fact of the matter, and you saw this with our business as well, there were a couple of years there where case resolutions were slowed dramatically and where cash was just not coming in.

Speaker 1

And what I think that did for some litigation funding firms is just make the fund management model that many of them use even more difficult because they were continuing to accumulate hurdle due to investors. They weren't generating cash. And I think that it made the ability to raise incremental capital more difficult. And I think in some cases, it probably called into question the viability of some of the firms. And as a result, you have seen a progression in the market So that the smaller pure play litigation finance firms that used to really drive the market are less of a factor today, I think.

Speaker 1

And the emergence of some of the larger multi strategy players that we've been competing with for some time, I think, and do have from their generally speaking from their credit funds, do have capital available, have become more of a factor. That's actually from our perspective positive for a couple of reasons. One is that the multi strat funds are better known to corporate clients. And so you now have more branded players out pitching this concept more broadly in the industry. And I think that drives incremental use of capital by corporate parties overall.

Speaker 1

And that inures to our benefit often because even if we're not there making the pitch initially, the fact that we are so central in the market often leads clients to come around and chat with us as well, because anyone who does 5 seconds of research about this market bangs right into us. So that's one sort of overall market development that we've seen. And I would say overall that there is and you've seen this in our results as well, there has been trends towards larger deals, more sophisticated deals, deals that include more of a component of corporate monetization than simply paying legal fees and expenses, although that remains a stalwart part of the business. So those are the kinds of market dynamics that we're seeing. And the other thing that you've seen is some level of activity with some specialized insurance products, most notably with respect to what's called judgment preservation insurance.

Speaker 1

So this is after you have won a case at the trial court level and that case is up on appeal. Some insurers have been selling judgment preservation insurance to basically lock in the trial win and prevent against an appellate reversal. And there was a period where insurers seems to be thinking that this was the latest great thing for them. I think they didn't do a great job in the underwriting and so there have been some meaningful losses along the way. And so I think that market has retrenched a little bit.

Speaker 1

But it's a to the extent that it continues to be available economically, it's an interesting addition to what we do because we have in the past more than once financed the premium for the insurance. And so it actually creates an additional opportunity for us as well as the ability to lay off risk if we are inclined to do that. With respect to your cost question, look, our cash costs have historically risen alongside growth in the business. And I don't see any reason to not expect that to occur. We do have some level of operating leverage in the business.

Speaker 1

But there's also no question that we're not a hedge fund. We can't double the size of the portfolio without adding heads to do some of that work. And so I think you'll continue to see the kind of moderate cost progression that we've seen during our entire history, but it's something that we've always managed pretty closely. What you do see in periods like last year is a pretty significant disconnect between the accounting version of operating expenses and the cash version of operating expenses that are driven by a whole lot of accounting accruals and value changes that Jordan talked about briefly.

Speaker 4

Yes, it makes very good sense. Thank you. And one more follow on question, if I may. Is there anything regulatory or legislative out there that we should think about? I'm sort of in my mind thinking back to the PACCAR case in the United Kingdom, England, Wales.

Speaker 4

And is there anything else that we ought to think about along those lines?

Operator

Yes. I think PACCAR

Speaker 1

is sort of a unique situation because it's a U. K. Supreme Court interpretation, in our view, sort of a strained interpretation of a statute that is being interpreted in a way that is inconsistent with its original intention. And that's something that is really unique to the U. K.

Speaker 1

And both the prior and current U. K. Government have indicated a preparedness to fix that statutorily, coupled with some review that's going on today in the U. K. So that's sort of a one off.

Speaker 1

If you leave that aside, it's not surprising that corporate defendants are unhappy with the presence, the existence of litigation finance. And John Malo has written about this for years years, even back to before the founding of Burford, where repeat players, repeat corporate defense players in the litigation system have historically had an advantage, a benefit from that status. And we have been interfering with that benefit. And so it's not surprising that there is lobbying activity and opposition to the concept of litigation finance from both companies that are historically defendants and from the insurance industry. That has been going on for our entire lives and hasn't been particularly successful, and I don't have any reason to expect that, that will change.

Speaker 1

In fact, the focus of a lot of that activity is on collateral issues now like disclosure as opposed to fundamental issues like should you be doing this in the 1st place. But I so that's sort of where we are on a regulatory matter. And we have jousting matches with the organizations that represent the corporate defendants, most notably the U. S. Chamber of Commerce, which tries hard to preserve an uneven playing field in favor of their members.

Speaker 3

Our

Operator

Our next question comes from Matthew Howlett with B. Riley. Please go ahead.

Speaker 5

Hey, thanks. Good morning. Thanks for taking my question. I just want to drill down on what drove the really impressive IRRs this quarter with the 170 9% on the realizations. I think it's pretty well diverse among cases realizations, but was there anything chunky in driving that?

Speaker 5

Just some more details on why that was so impressive?

Speaker 3

Chris, I'm happy to take.

Speaker 1

Yes, I

Speaker 3

was going to say John I was

Speaker 1

going to say maybe John would like to comment on that.

Speaker 3

Yes, I the amazing thing is it's almost like what we saw this quarter is just a manifestation of what if you've been on these calls you've heard me saying every quarter. There's lots going on in the portfolio. There are lots of cases proceeding through the litigation process and hitting positive milestone, whether that's winning trials, getting past summary judgment, winning on appeal, getting to the end, they're going into mediation on the eve of trial. And so it just turns out in any particular quarter when the cases that are resolving what the smattering is? Are they resolving that there's been a successful trial outcome and then a quick settlement before an appeal?

Speaker 3

The appeal is concluded and you've won, is it settling on the eve of trial. But we have just such a great team of underwriters, both who are there at the beginning to evaluate cases and negotiate deals, but also to see them through working with the lawyers and clients who are running them to monitor and provide whatever feedback we can. And so I'm just constantly getting feedback reports and questions from the team, not just on new matters, but also on the matters moving through. And this is just a smattering of it's just a slice, a sample of what's in the portfolio that happens to have come due this quarter. And it's something that probably I kept telling you about, but we couldn't see because you only see realizations.

Speaker 3

And this time this quarter was just realizations that reflect that activity.

Speaker 5

If I can just paraphrase, I mean, for investors, I mean, historically you've done what 8%, 90% ROICs, but I think the investment thesis or the investment cases, hey, sometimes we're going to get these great returns because of how we underwrite. Is that how do we think about it going forward? I guess that's my

Speaker 3

So I mean, it's a little bit like when you go back to Slide 12, which I talked about, there is when you have adjudication gains, you see our average ROIC there is 2 45%, whereas settlements, it's 65%. So if you and of course, there's a variation among those. A settlement where it's a slam dunk case on the eve of trial or an adjudication that has a sort of modest damages outcome compared to what we wanted, you could end up with a lower returning adjudication or a higher returning settlement. But it's not there's no magic to this quarter. And yes, the thing that is magical about our team, I don't want to use the same word magical, but you asked is because we have a great team.

Speaker 3

The thing that's great about our team is our underwriting, the blocking and tackling and our case management to make sure nothing's going off the rails is very disciplined and rigorous and sort of real world. Yes, there we have people who are well educated from top law schools have great experience at law firms, but they also practically understand and why we have a lot of decent settlements. But the smattering of which ones go trial and result in very large outcomes and which ones settle, that's not something that I can say was an outlier this quarter or that our team is just wonderful at picking. That is inherent in the process. And so I wouldn't say you'd read all you could read into this quarter that all of the stuff John has been saying about his optimism in prior quarters, he wasn't just spouting, it wasn't just uninformed optimism like now we're sort of seeing results from it.

Speaker 3

But and going forward, I'd expect again the ROICs and IRRs could bounce around in any given quarter depending on the whether the resolution skew toward more settlements or toward more adjudications. But overall, we should see performance. Well, I don't want to say what kind of performance we should see. But this quarter doesn't surprise me, I'd say, based on what I see in the portfolio for the future.

Speaker 5

Look, I think equity investors get very excited when they start to see ROICs like that. Congratulations. Thanks for taking my question.

Speaker 3

Thank you. Thank you. I'm very excited too. I love winning.

Operator

It's. Our next question comes from Alexander Bowers with Berenberg. Please go ahead.

Speaker 6

Good afternoon, everyone. I just had 3 questions, if I may. Just starting on the larger case side, you committed to a 1450 client in Q2 last year. I was wondering whether there's any further progress that have been made in terms of, I guess, taking on more 1450 or larger case clients. My second question was around headcount.

Speaker 6

I just want to understand how much headcount has grown so far this year. I think it was around 161 at the start of the year. And sort of longer term, what sort of expectations on headcount growth are you expecting? And then lastly, on the Sundance Resources, Republic of Congo Mining settlement, I don't believe this settlement was in the Q2 results. Are you able to confirm when you expect that to hit your P and L?

Speaker 6

And are you able to give us a sense of the magnitude in terms of how much Burford would realize from the case? Thanks.

Speaker 1

So let us divide those up among us. So I'll do the first, Jordan will do the second and John will do

Speaker 3

the third.

Speaker 1

So on the first one, the answer is really that it's episodic. We talk to lots of clients. It's a long process often to get people to do large deals with us. When we talked about the significant deal we did last Q2, the $325,000,000 deal that then went along and settled in 6 months, that was a long time in the making. That didn't just come together in the space of a month or 2.

Speaker 1

And so we have we continue to engage with lots of potential clients, and we continue to broaden the net. But in terms of we don't have sort of a quarter by quarter scorecard that says, okay, well, we've landed another Fortune 50 company. As you can see from the data on the website table, we did do a large deal in the Q2, not as large as last year's Q2, but we did do a $100,000,000 monetization for a corporate client. And so having the ability to continue to put those up is a desirable thing and something that we're trying hard to continue. And as John Malloy just said, that's also why the returns bounce around because that big deal that we did, which we didn't expect to resolve necessarily in 6 months did.

Speaker 1

And so that was a very pleasant IRR, but not a particularly strong ROIC because the capital was only out for 6 months. But it was still a good deal for us to have done. Jordan, do you want to take the headcount point?

Speaker 2

Sure. So look, I think headcount broadly has stayed give or take the same, Alex. Were measured in our growth. I think as Chris and John have talked about, we're constantly looking to add additional talent around the globe to support our origination efforts. And we don't but we don't we would signal to you or tell if we expected to see massive expansion or growth in one particular area.

Speaker 1

And on Sundance.

Speaker 3

Yes. On Sundance, so I think we have always said that we respect the priorities and needs of our clients, our counterparties. We have a very good working relationship with Sundance. And it's the kind of deal that's not an outlier of what we would do when a company has invested tens of 1,000,000, in some cases 100 of 1,000,000 in a project and then a government breaches a contract or expropriates an asset and they don't have the financing to see it to conclusion through very expensive multi year arbitration, we're a very useful resource and we have a lot of experience doing it, which is a boon in addition to our capital. It's not just our money, it's very helpful.

Speaker 3

That being said, many of our counterparties are clients. There's no disclosure either at the moment that they do the deal with us. It's a confidential matter between us. And there's no disclosure at the end as to what's gone on. And you see the results on our investment table anonymized and can't figure out which matter it came from and we respect the confidentiality of our clients' deals.

Speaker 3

In this case, Sundance had lawyers who gave them advice that suggested that it was a disclosable event when we did the financing and that's how that was disclosed and that it was a disclosable event when they reached an agreement in principle with Sovereign to potentially resolve the matter. But if you can look at that disclosure and I don't want to add to it because we reached the conclusion for us, this was not something material for us that would warrant a disclosure on our own, but of course, we're not standing in the way of our client, our counterparty doing what it believes it needs to do. And so I guess, to the extent it's about the accounting or the treatment of it, I would leave it to Chris or Jordan to answer. To the extent about the litigation, I'm pleased with our relationship with the client and with how things are proceeding, but I don't really want to comment more than that.

Speaker 1

Yes. I think that's right. I think, Alex, the shortened version is the only reason there's public disclosure with this is because of the client. And so the client has to drive any public messaging about timing or size or anything like that. We're not in a position to do that.

Speaker 1

So but thank you all for the questions. And with that, I think that brings us to a close. We, as always enjoyed talking to you. We're happy to engage directly with you if you have further questions for us through the IR team. And we look forward to presenting Q3 results to you sometime this fall.

Speaker 1

Thanks very much.

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Earnings Conference Call
Charter Communications H1 2024
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