Exhibit 99.1
Solar Senior Capital Ltd. Issues Letter to Stakeholders
NEW YORK — April 1, 2020— Solar Senior Capital Ltd. (NASDAQ: SUNS) (the “Company” or “Solar Senior”) announces today that it issued an open letter to its stakeholders regarding a business update amid the coronavirus(“COVID-19”) pandemic.
The full text of the letter follows:
April 1, 2020
Dear Valued Stakeholder,
We hope you and your family, friends, and colleagues remain healthy and safe during this pandemic. Our thoughts are with all of our stakeholders, including our portfolio company owners and employees, sponsors, investors, lenders, rating agencies, advisors, vendors, and the dedicated employees across Solar Senior and the Company’s investment advisor, Solar Capital Partners, LLC (“SCP”), who are working from home with full business continuity.
During this time of great uncertainty, we want to keep the communication channels open and provide the highest possible transparency with our stakeholders. While we are early in the process of understanding the full, potential impact that theCOVID-19 pandemic may have on our business, we are providing this update to reassure our stakeholders that we believe Solar Senior is well-positioned to weather this storm.
Our management philosophy has been defined by our commitment to invest as principals, creating a meaningful economic alignment with our fellow investors. As the result of our significant SUNS share purchases since inception, our senior management team now owns approximately 6% of our outstanding common stock. Due to the materiality of the Company’s unsecured note issuance, announced last night, the Company’s insiders were not permitted to trade in the Company’s securities during what otherwise would have been an open trading window following the announcement of Solar Senior’syear-end earnings. Additionally, all members of the investment team have a significant percentage of their annual compensation invested in SUNS stock. We believe our significant ownership creates a critical alignment with our stakeholders. We want to reiterate our confidence in the Company’s defensive portfolio, stable funding, strong liquidity, and favorable positioning to make new investments.
During the past few years of frothy market conditions, the “easy” path would have been to aggressively grow our portfolio via higher risk investments, and in so doing incur more portfolio leverage. As the saying goes, “A rising tide lifts all boats.” Instead, given our focus on long-term value creation, we maintained our underwriting and investment discipline. While no one could have predicted that this record long economic expansion would end so abruptly and catastrophically, we have been proactively managing our business to position us for an inevitable downturn.
Specifically, we undertook a multi-year initiative to build and acquire niche specialty finance and asset-based lending (“ABL”) businesses, which have historically exhibited lower default and loss rates throughout business cycles compared to more traditional cash flow lending. We also migrated the Company’s portfolio to
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