Hannon Armstrong Sustainable Infrastructure Capital, Inc.
Q3 2014 Earnings Call Transcript

Published: 9 Nov 2014

[Operator:]

Good afternoon and welcome to Hannon Armstrong 2014 Third Quarter Earnings Conference Call. Management will be utilizing a slide presentation for this call which will be available for download on Hannon Armstrong's Investor Relations Page at investor.hannonarmstrong.com Today's call is being recorded and we've allocated one hour for prepared remarks and Q&A. all participants will be a listen-only mode. (Operator Instructions) At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Mr. Steven Chuslo, General Counsel at Hannon Armstrong. Please go ahead sir.

[Steven Chuslo:]

Thank you, Operator. Good afternoon everyone. By now you should have received a copy of the earnings release for the company’s third quarter 2014 results. If not, the copy is available on our Web site www.hannonarmstrong.com. On the call today we will start out with the operating business review from Jeff Eckel our President and CEO followed by Brendan Herron our CFO who will review our third quarter 2014 financial results. As a reminder a replay of this call will be available later today on the Investor Relations Page of our Web site. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that some of the comments made on today’s call are forward-looking statements and within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 as amended and Section 21E of the Securities and Exchange Act of 1934 as amended. The company claims the protections of the Safe Harbor for forward-looking statements contained in such sections. The forward-looking statements made in this call are subject to the risks and uncertainties described in the Risk Factors section of the company’s Form 10-K and other filings with the SEC. Actual results may differ materially from those described during the call. In addition, all forward-looking statements are made as of today and the company does not undertake any responsibility to update any forward-looking statements based on new circumstances or revised expectations. With that I would like to turn the call over to Jeff Eckel, President and CEO of Hannon Armstrong. Jeff.

[Jeff Eckel:]

Thanks Steve. Good afternoon everyone and thank you for listening to our Q3 earnings call. Today we are announcing core earnings of $4.9 million or $0.22 per share in line with the $0.22 dividend we announced in September. We remain on track to grow core earnings by the previously indicated 13% to 15% by Q4 of 2014. We have singled our intent to grow the dividend as well with the Q4 target of $0.26 per share. You may note that we paid more in dividends year-to-date in core earnings which is a function of rounding the whole cents rather than a plan to payout more than we earn and we expect to make up any difference in future quarters. Execution highlights from the quarter include a 175 million of transactions closed, three quarters of which were energy efficiency transactions. Being mandated on the $144 million ten wind project portfolio from JP Morgan, this was closed subsequent to the quarter end and was partially funded with a 115 million of non-recourse fixed rate debt. We ended the quarter with 31% of fixed rate debt increasing it to 50% fixed with a wind transaction in October. This is right in the middle of our fixed rate target of 40% to 60% and increased our overall leverage to 1.9

[Brendan Herron:]

Thanks Jeff. Turning to the Q3 results. We generated $8.2 million in investment revenue in Q3, an increase of approximately 1.4 million from Q2 in large part due to a full quarter of the land investment acquisition. The increase in investment revenue was offset by higher interest expense as we increased our credit facility volumes by $46 million in Q3 and thus net investment revenue grew by 1.2 million in the quarter. We ended the quarter with 1.4

[Jeff Eckle:]

Thanks Brendan. Once again thanks to the Hannon Armstrong team for executing on our plan in Q3. Our priorities for 2014 includes capitalizing on the high growth distributed energy asset market and thus further optimizing our pipeline. Continuing to increase leverage and fixed out interest rates, growing earnings per share in the 13% to 15% range which with that growth when combined with our dividend should provide investors with a 20% total return and growing our assets to approximately $1 billion. We appreciate you listening to our Q3 update and we'll now open the call up for a few questions.

[Operator:]

Thank you. At this time we will conduct a question and answer session. (Operator Instructions) Our first question comes from Joe Houck with Wells Fargo. Please proceed with your question.

[Joe Houck:]

Good morning and congratulation on good quarter guys. The question is related to the new wind project investment which is in equity state, can you talk about both the accounting treatment I think you guys are using the equity method and then also the tax treatment of that investment I think it's in the TRS if you could confirm that?

[Brendan Herron:]

Sure, so yes, we put most of our renewable energy investments in our taxable REIT subsidiary and given the leverage that it has on it, it was the $144 million investment a $115 million debt on it so the net impact on the TRS is relatively small. As far as how we'll account for, and try to explain a little bit on the call the transaction is structured so that it throws off a lot of cash to us, but we don't get throwing off a lot of the book earnings that come from the projects. And so what that does it means it will have very little impact on our GAAP earnings, but the way we structured the deal and priced it, we looked at it in a net present value of cash flow basis using a discount rate on effective yield and that's what we'll be recording as we report in course so we'll adjust for that between the GAAP and the core numbers. As I mentioned on the call, the rate is at the high end of what we see in our clean energy portfolio couple of hundred basis points higher than the numbers Jeff talked about as our average portfolio.

[Joe Houck:]

And will that create over time a deferred tax asset/liability depending on adjustments?

[Brendan Herron:]

One of the other things that comes with the transaction is there is some tax attributes that we’ll get allocated to as far as the transaction but yes there will be a deferred tax adjustment that comes through as part of the transaction. Basically, as I think we’ve talked in the past we structure the TRS to basically be a mini yield co and in doing so we always seek to have enough tax attributes so the TRS is not a tax payer. And so we’d expect that this transaction actually helps further that goal. So we don’t expect to actually pay any tax out of the adjustment.

[Joe Houck:]

Okay, thanks Brendan appreciate it.

[Operator:]

Thank you. Our next question comes from Ben Kallo with Robert W. Baird. Please proceed with your question.

[Taylor Frank:]

This is Taylor Frank on for Ben. I was wondering if you could just touch on the overarching strategy. It looks like you guys are shifting more into investing both into land and then distributed generation projects. How do you guys see that in terms of your pipeline going forward and what should we expect as you look out over the next year or so?

[Jeff Eckel:]

Thanks Taylor. I think the overall message on the pipeline is that it is largely energy efficiency and of the renewable energy it’s largely distributed generation. And I think we’ve been pretty consistent on that over the last few quarters. The addition of the land business really just allows us to participate in grid connected renewable, a market that frankly is no longer that interesting from a yield standpoint. But we get to participate in that with very attractive yields that are senior to the senior debt in that market. So I think we’re being opportunistic in grid connected renewable but meanwhile we continue to see the business coming towards us in the sense of growing energy efficiency business and growing distributed generation business.

[Brendan Herron:]

I think the one thing to add to that is the energy efficiency projects tends to be longer lived and they’re typically federal government projects, so very high credit quality and lower rates. They’re good candidates for the securitization so you will tend to see us put more of those into a securitization transaction than hold on to our balance sheet. So thus you will see a little bit more of a renewable energy on the balance sheet. But we’ll continue to originate the blend as Jeff talked about and as we’ve consistently originated over the time period. But given the interest rate environment we think a lot of it is transactions make more sense for securitizations.

[Taylor Frank:]

Great. And then just a follow up on securitizations, is the plan still to try and bring a rated ABS to market in the immediate term and can you just provide a little more color on that?

[Jeff Eckel:]

The plan is to do it intermediate terms probably a good ambiguities phrase. We’re not sure when that’s actually going to happen. We’ve been able to achieve our goal of getting to 40%-60% fixed rate with wind deal. So the benefit of fixing out more rates with ABS has not something we need right now. But it certainly a transaction we intent to do and announce it just as soon as we get it done.

[Taylor Frank:]

Great, thank you guys.

[Operator:]

Thank you (Operator Instructions). There are no questions in queue at this time. I would like to turn the call back over to management for closing comments.

[Jeff Eckel:]

Thanks everybody. We’re going to go back to work and start -- keep working on Q4. Thanks so much.

[Operator:]

Thank you. This does conclude today’s teleconference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. And have a great day.