| • | | Prior to closing, each of OTF and OTF II expects to continue to declare and pay ordinary course quarterly dividends. All undistributed spillover income will be paid to OTF II shareholders prior to merger close in the form of a special dividend, currently estimated to be $54.3 million as of September 30, 2024. |
| • | | As Erik noted, we expect that a final capital call will occur for OTF II shareholders in January 2025. |
| • | | As a sign of support from our advisor, Blue Owl, if the proposed merger is consummated, OTF and OTF II will be reimbursed for fees and expenses associated with the proposed merger up to a cap of $4.75 million in total, which will be paid for by OTF’s advisor. |
| • | | Lastly, as highlighted on page 13, we are expecting to close the transaction in the second quarter of 2025, subject to customary closing conditions, including shareholder approvals. |
| • | | And now, I’ll hand it to Craig to provide final thoughts for today’s webcast. |
Closing Remarks – Craig Packer, CEO
| • | | To close, we are excited by the opportunity to streamline our platform, increase the scale of the combined company, and enhance our returns through the proposed merger between OTF and OTF II. |
| • | | While OTF and OTF II are successful funds on their own, we believe the proposed merger is another step in creating additional shareholder value and that it represents a great opportunity for shareholders of both companies. |
| • | | We anticipate it will deliver a more scaled and diversified BDC with increased efficiencies and improved access to lower cost sources of financing. Over the long term, the combined company is well-positioned to drive meaningful ROE expansion while strengthening its positioning for a possible future liquidity event. |
| • | | On behalf of the entire Blue Owl team, thank you in advance for your support and for joining us on today’s webcast. With that, we will now take your questions. |
Q&A – Moderated by Michael Mosticchio
1. | Our first question is about the market environment and I’ll direct this to you Erik. So now that the election has passed and there’s some more clarity around unexpected rate cuts, what is your outlook for software M&A and deal activity more broadly? |
Erik Bissonnette: Thanks, Mike. Broadly, we’re very positive on our outlook for software M&A in the upcoming year. It’s no surprise to anyone but the overall deal market has been a bit more muted than we would have hoped for over the past year; frankly in 2023 and 2024. But I think we need to keep in mind that that was coming off of record high years in 2021 and 2022. Although it’s been down on absolute basis, the deal environment for software has actually remained quite robust. When this year wraps up, we’ll end up doing somewhere in the $2.5 and $3 billion range for net originations across both of these funds and again that’s on a net basis so absolute growth.
From a quality perspective, these have been really attractive opportunities: some very large scale take-privates. We’ve had deals for Squarespace, Smartsheet and a few others. Looking to next year, not taking a political view here, but markets generally seem to think Republican dominated government will be more growth, less restrictive from a regulatory perspective. Broadly speaking, pro-business agenda. Inflation has come down dramatically and obviously not fully tamed yet. The Fed is on its rate tightening cycle. On an absolute basis, cost capital is down, inflation driven cost pressures continue to abate across the portfolios that we monitor and valuation expectations seem to be normalizing. In the aggregate, I think these factors along with a fairly stable economy should provide a very positive environment for deal making, so the macro is solid.
As everyone on this call knows, we focus on sponsored driven deals. There’s a ton of dry powder on the sidelines and on the sell-side, there’s the reality and inevitability of needing to return some capital to LPs. We’re really optimistic heading into the new year for originations.
Probably the last thing I’ll note here is that our deployment targets for next year are not predicated on a major spike in deal flow. If the market looks like 2023 or 2024, we’ll be fine and if it pick-ups meaningfully then all the better.
2. | I think we’re getting a couple of questions on are the ROEs for the fund. So how are we thinking about longer term ROEs for the combined vehicle and what synergies do you expect to realize from the merger? |
Erik Bissonnette: On a post-close basis, we expect our ROEs to be in the low double digits. It’s a bit hard to be too precise given the movements that we see in the SOFR curve and obviously new deal spreads that we’re generating in the market. But even if you adjust the base rates down over time, we are comfortably in that range for the for the short and medium term.
I do want to emphasize that this transaction will be almost immediately accretive to all shareholders. There is a modest period of deployment and re-leveraging, but given our expected pace of deployment, that should be a fairly short dated period of time.
From a synergy perspective, we expect our ROE expansion will be driven mostly by cost savings compared to the standalone entities. We’re currently modeling about 20 to 30 basis points tighter issuance spreads in the unsecured financing markets from increased size and scale, which should drive about 15 bps on ROE or around $10 million a year.
We also believe we can likely drive down our secured financing costs pretty substantially based on what we’re seeing across the breadth of our portfolios. But we haven’t really modeled that in. Additionally, we expect to save around $5 million from other duplicative financing costs. These are admin fees, rating agency fees and just other administrative expenses and that’s another 5 bps or so. Lastly about $4.4 million a year from non-financing operating expenses. Again, just duplicative filings and other things related to SEC and legal and compliance related activities. We feel we feel really confident in the natural ROE expansion along with these synergies with our future investments. We think these are pretty conservative levels of synergy assumptions. But most importantly, this is ROE accretive to all the shareholders on a combined basis.