HASI - NYSE

Greetings, and welcome to HASI's Third Quarter 2025 Earnings Conference Call and Webcast. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Aaron Chew, the Senior Vice President of Investor Relations.

Thank you, operator, and good afternoon to everyone joining us today for HASI's Third Quarter 2025 Conference Call. Earlier this afternoon, HASI distributed a press release reporting our third quarter 2025 results, a copy of which is available on our website, along with the slide presentation we will be referring to today. This conference call is being webcast live on the Investor Relations page of our website, where a replay will be available later today. Some of the comments made in this call are forward-looking statements, which are subject to 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 stated. Today's discussion also includes some non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP financial measures is available in our earnings release and presentation. Joining us on the call today are Jeff Lipson, the company's President and CEO; as well as Chuck Melko, our Chief Financial Officer. And also available for Q&A are Susan Nickey, our Chief Client Officer; and Marc Pangburn, our Chief Revenue and Strategy Officer. To kick things off, I will turn it over to our President and CEO, Jeff Lipson. Jeff?

Thank you, Aaron, and thank you, everyone, for joining the call. Welcome to the HASI Q3 2025 Earnings Call. Before we discuss the prepared slides, I'd like to start the call today by reiterating 4 aspects of our business model and how they interact with recent market developments. One, the demand for energy continues to increase and virtually all forecasts expect this trend to continue. This demand will clearly result in greater supply, facilitating ongoing development by our clients, which in turn increases HASI's total addressable market. Therefore, the current underlying economic trends are a tailwind for our business. Additionally, if demand causes power curves to increase, our existing portfolio of investments will become increasingly more valuable. Two, the operating environment remains conducive to business-as-usual activities. Capital markets have experienced relatively low recent volatility, and our clients' pipelines continues to be active and growing. Therefore, the backdrop remains very supportive for expanding our investment volumes. Three, we continue to demonstrate that our business is able to achieve meaningful EPS growth in all interest rate environments. Since interest rates began to rise in 2022, we've been able to continue to grow our earnings with higher-yielding investments, prudent hedging strategies and opportunistic debt issuances. With 3 investment-grade ratings and our CCH1 co-investment vehicle, we have become even less exposed to changes in interest rates. If the yield curve steepens going forward, we do not expect any material impact on our profitability. And four, virtually all of our investment markets are currently providing attractive opportunities. Utility scale renewables and storage, distributed solar and storage, energy efficiency, renewable natural gas and transportation have all been active markets for us in 2025 and continue to be well represented in the pipeline. And we remain excited with the emergence of our pipeline of Next Frontier opportunities. In summary, these 4 items reinforce the framework of our successful business model, further evidenced by our outstanding results this quarter. We just completed the most profitable quarter in our history and closed the largest investment in our history as we continue to consistently achieve our goals and provide outstanding returns to our investors. Now let's turn to the slides, beginning on Slide 3 and highlight a few key metrics. Our adjusted earnings per share in Q3 was $0.80, the highest quarterly EPS we have ever reported. This result was driven by strong growth in all of our components of revenue, which Chuck will discuss in more detail. Adjusted recurring net investment income, the new financial measure we introduced last quarter is 27% higher year-to-date over last year. And our managed assets, which includes our portfolio as well as our partners' assets in CCH1 and the assets we have securitized off balance sheet, were up 15% year-over-year to $15 billion. And our year-to-date adjusted ROE also has experienced significant year-over-year growth, rising to 13.4%. We are reaffirming our guidance for 8% to 10% compound annual EPS growth through 2027 and noting that we expect to achieve roughly 10% adjusted EPS growth in 2025. As detailed on Slide 4, we continue to make progress in the key areas of value creation for our business: one, originating new investments; two, optimizing return on our existing assets; and three, managing our liabilities and lowering our cost of capital. First, in terms of new investments, as the box on the left indicates, both volumes and returns have been strong year-to-date. Not only did we close more than $650 million of new transactions in Q3 for a total of $1.5 billion through the first 3 quarters of 2025, but we closed on a $1.2 billion investment early in Q4 that has put us on a path to close more than $3 billion for the full year 2025, up more than 30% year-over-year. We will discuss this investment in greater detail later in the call. Importantly, it is not only volumes that have been elevated, but our returns as well, with new asset yield in Q3 greater than 10.5% for the sixth quarter in a row. Meanwhile, our pipeline remains above $6 billion, even after taking into account the large October transaction. Second, we do not simply create value originating investments, but also in how we optimize returns over the life of the investment. One example of this is the targeted asset rotation strategy we executed in 2024 through which we were able to monetize certain lower-yielding assets in our portfolio for a gain while generating cash that we were able to recycle into higher-yielding assets. In Q3 of this year, we refinanced the senior ABS debt within the SunStrong residential solar lease portfolio, resulting in significant paydown of our mezzanine debt investments and a meaningful cash distribution to the SunStrong equity owners, of which we are 50%. This distribution created significant earnings in the quarter as we began to monetize the increasingly valuable SunStrong platform. We have also maintained a strong risk return profile in our portfolio as evidenced by minimal annual realized loss rate of under 10 basis points. This low level of losses reinforces the predictability of our cash flow and our ability to effectively underwrite investment opportunities. And lastly, we maximize value in our business with our low-cost, diversified and efficient debt and capital platform. It's notable to highlight that even after refinancing a portion of our low-cost debt due in 2026 at today's higher market rates, the increase in our cost of debt was only 10 basis points at 5.9% in Q3. In addition, we opportunistically added $250 million in hedges in September that reduced the base rate risk for our next debt issuance. Turning to Slide 5. As I briefly mentioned a moment ago, we are excited to announce a new investment that closed in October but is significant enough to mention on our Q3 call. It is a $1.2 billion structured equity investment in a major component of what will be the largest clean energy infrastructure project in North America once completed in Q2 of next year. HASI's involvement in providing capital to this project is truly a milestone event for our company and a reflection of the transaction size we can now accommodate given our access to capital. Developed and managed by one of the world's largest developers and owners of clean energy and transmission infrastructure, the project has several components. Our specific investment is for 2.6 gigawatts of wind power supplied by the largest U.S. turbine manufacturer and backed by PPAs with a weighted average life of almost 15 years, including counterparties spanning energy majors, utilities, community electricity providers and universities. Consistent with our discussion last quarter, we are investing at a derisked stage as most of our funding will occur in the first half of 2026. The expected return on the investment is consistent with our typical return targets on recent utility scale investments. The total investment commitment is $1.2 billion. However, the net impact to HASI's balance sheet will be much lower due to the investment closing in CCH1, resulting in an initial proportional commitment of approximately $600 million. Subsequently, we may add back leverage to the investment, further reducing our long-term hold. As noted earlier, this is not included in our Q3 financials and will be considered a closed transaction in Q4 with the vast majority of funding expected in Q2 of 2026. Turning to Slide 6. Our pipeline remains above $6 billion, including a pro forma adjustment to remove the $1.2 billion project just discussed as other investment opportunities have replaced this amount in the pipeline. Our pipeline of new investments remains highly diversified with strong undercurrents of demand in each of our key end markets. Higher retail electricity rates are facilitating demand in our BTM asset classes, including not just rooftop solar, but importantly, energy efficiency as well. Meanwhile, residential solar leases are expected to gain market share from loans and cash sales following the expiration of the 25D ITC at year-end. And our business is largely focused on leases and serving this end market. In addition, the grid-connected end market is experiencing larger project sizes to accommodate the growth in U.S. power demand, clearly driven by data centers, but also domestic manufacturing and the expanding use cases of electrification in general. Likewise, demand underpinning our fuels, transport and nature end market remains strong with RNG facilities in construction or in development expected to double the current installed base in North America. And finally, our Next Frontier asset classes remain an exciting new opportunity. And with that, I will ask Chuck to discuss our financial results.

Thank you, Jeff. On Slide 7, we highlight our Q3 profitability. And as you can see, we had meaningful growth in many of our key metrics. Jeff already highlighted our record quarterly adjusted EPS of $0.80, and our year-to-date adjusted EPS is at $2.04, up 11% year-over-year. This growth is driven largely by our primary source of revenue, adjusted recurring net investment income, which grew year-over-year by 42% in the quarter and 27% year-to-date. We are growing the recurring earnings portion of our adjusted EPS, and our equity efficiency has also helped us increase our year-to-date adjusted ROE to 13.4% compared to 12.7% for the same period last year. This growth in our adjusted ROE is demonstrating the meaningful benefits from our CCH1 co-investment vehicle, which I will speak to in a few slides. One last point on our metrics. Our GAAP net investment income does not include the earnings from our equity investments. Therefore, the adjusted recurring NII will continue to be greater than our GAAP NII. Now that I have highlighted the key results for the quarter, some additional context is useful. Jeff mentioned our diversified business model earlier, and I will add that it is also versatile, where we can generate value in different ways, such as through recurring earnings from the underwritten returns on our investments and also optimization transactions where we capture additional value that is embedded in our portfolio, such as through project-level refinancing activities, which we saw this quarter. These optimization transactions may not occur every quarter, but we consistently identify these opportunities year after year. Now on to Slide 8. Through the first 3 quarters of this year, we have closed $1.5 billion of transactions, which is greater than the same period last year. And when incorporating the transaction that Jeff spoke to earlier, we are on track to meaningfully exceed last year's total closed transactions. While transaction closings on their own are not an indicator of profitable growth, if you take into account our ability to generate new balance sheet transaction yields at an attractive level above 10.5%, we're also setting the stage for continued growth in adjusted EPS and ROE. Even as interest rates and our own cost of debt have risen over the last couple of years, it is important to note that we have been able to maintain our margins through the increase in our new asset yields and our hedging program. We expect we will continue to maintain attractive margins as well in a declining interest rate environment given our approach to investment, funding and managing interest rate risk. Next on Slide 9, we are experiencing double-digit growth in our managed assets as well as our portfolio. They have grown 15% and 20%, respectively, from a year ago. This is the base of assets from which we generate our recurring income. As we have discussed previously, we are migrating to a business model that is less dependent on new equity issuance to generate earnings growth. And the factor in accomplishing this is our CCH1 co-investment vehicle. As of the end of Q3, CCH1 has completed funding of $1.2 billion of investments, leaving $1.4 billion of available capital for future investment with the potential to increase it to $1.8 billion with additional debt at the CCH1 level while keeping its leverage level below a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.5. Our portfolio yield is at 8.6%, up from 8.3% last quarter as we are starting to see the new asset investments with yields greater than 10.5% start to come through our portfolio. The portfolio yield is the largest contributor to the growth in our adjusted recurring net investment income that is illustrated on the next slide. On to Slide 10, we provide a buildup of our new financial measure that we introduced last quarter, adjusted recurring net investment income. We are now utilizing this metric in addition to our adjusted EPS to measure the profitability of our managed assets as a whole, inclusive of both the net investment income from our portfolio as well as the recurring fee income from the other assets we manage that are not on our balance sheet. Our year-to-date adjusted recurring net investment income of $269 million has grown 27%. This component of revenue is a consistent source of earnings generated from our existing managed assets. Turning to Slide 11. We highlight a few items that will contribute to managing our liquidity and liability structure and further reduce our cost of capital. Over the past couple of years, we have significantly broadened our sources of capital and between our bank facilities, commercial paper program and our investment-grade ratings, we have a capital platform that is well-positioned to fund our growth needs at an attractive cost. First to mention is a $250 million term loan that closed after quarter end that will provide another source of potential liquidity for the refinancing of our senior bonds due next year. As we reported last quarter, we retired a large portion of the upcoming maturity through a tender offer. With our current liquidity at $1.1 billion at the end of the quarter, this term loan and our access to the investment-grade debt market, we are well-positioned to retire the remaining notes outstanding. Next, in furtherance of our focus on managing our interest rate risk, we executed an additional $250 million of SOFR-based hedges related to anticipated debt issuances and now have hedged up to $1.4 billion of our future debt issuance. On to Slide 12. This slide is a good illustration of the changes we have made to the business over the past couple of years that is accelerating our growth and returns for shareholders. We have historically just provided the total adjusted ROE metric that is highlighted in the dark blue. And while it was steadily increasing over time, it is not painting the complete picture on where our business is headed. With the introduction of CCH1 last year and obtaining our investment-grade ratings, we have meaningfully changed the profile of our adjusted ROE for new transactions. It may take some time for the higher profitability from our incremental business to fully show up in our adjusted ROE given the previous transactions on our balance sheet. So we want to illustrate where our business is headed with the adjusted ROE from incremental business by period. As you can see with our current business model since the start of CCH1 early in 2024, our newer transactions are generating a higher adjusted ROE with year-to-date being 19.6%. We expect this trend to continue and even increase as CCH1 investments are funded from debt at CCH1. Over time, you will see our adjusted ROE increase to the higher ROE that we are generating from our new business. I will now turn the call back to Jeff for closing remarks.

Thanks, Chuck. Turning to Slide 13, we display our sustainability and impact highlights, noting our cumulative carbon count and water count numbers reflect the significant impact of our investment strategy. We also remain very proud of our recognition, our targeted advocacy activities and the generosity of the HASI Foundation. Concluding on Page 14. To summarize the themes of this call, we just completed the most profitable quarter in the company's history, and we expect our investment volumes to exceed last year's by more than 30%. Economic trends remain favorable to our continued profitable growth. This success is the result of a resilient business model that focuses on asset level investing with long-term programmatic partners. Our approach also relies on disciplined underwriting and reasonable assumptions, and the model is further enhanced by a diversified and prudent approach to obtaining access to attractive sources of capital. Combining all of these elements with a talented and dedicated team results in consistent success despite periodic market volatility. Thank you, as always, to our talented team for this outstanding quarter. Operator, please open the line for questions.

[Operator Instructions] The first question comes from Jon Windham from UBS.

Great result, by the way. I'll be very specific. It sounds a lot like you're describing the Sun

Thanks, Jon. I appreciate the question. It is the Sun

Right. This is similar to other wind investments you've made in the past, you sort of get paid first. That's on the equity stack.

Yes. That's correct.

The next question comes from Chris Denginos from RBC.

Echoing Jon's comments on the solid quarter. I wanted to ask about the pipeline. And I think you mentioned $6 billion, so flat quarter-on-quarter, but you've got -- I guess, if you adjust in the $1.2 billion transaction in October, it'd be up significantly. So can you just maybe talk about the pipeline here? It looks like it's strengthened quite a bit quarter-on-quarter. And just curious what you're kind of seeing from that perspective, if there's any sort of demand pull forward going on as a result of?

Sure, Chris. I would say, as we discussed in the prepared remarks, we did replace the grid-connected pipeline, in particular, with enough new volume such that it didn't go down after this $1.2 billion transaction that we described. Beyond that, our pipeline disclosure is, of course, not precise. We say greater than $6 billion. So I know it's hard from the outside looking in to tell if it actually went up or down in the quarter. But it's certainly at above $6 billion at a level that we're comfortable we'll have enough to invest in, in 2026 to achieve our goals. And we're not seeing too much in the way of pull forward. I would describe what we're seeing as ordinary course. And as we talked about last quarter, folks executing on their pipeline, meaning our clients, everything they're working on now is grandfathered or safe harbor, but I don't really think this is the result of any kind of pull-through.

The next question comes from Noah Kaye from Oppenheimer.

I want to ask sort of a broader question around investments resulting from this announcement today, the $1.2 billion. We've historically thought about the business as making smaller investments spread across a large number of projects. This is a pretty big one. But of course, as you said, energy projects are getting bigger. You've talked about data centers as the Next Frontier asset class and they're getting just on the energy infrastructure, this type of investment. So, I guess, how should we think about this investment and what it signals for your appetite to take on larger single projects going forward?

Well, it's a good question, Noah. We've built the business on some small and modest-sized transactions over time, but we've always, at least after -- since 2020, supplemented that with some larger transactions as well. I think this transaction is a reflection in many ways of our access to capital through both being investment grade and our CCH1 relationship. The amount of capital we can bring to the table is more significant. So, we've become a player in these larger transactions. And when it makes sense, we'll do that. We're, of course, going to manage our risk accordingly. I talked about half of this being in CCH1 and some other pathways to a lower long-term hold level. So, we're certainly managing our risk. But in terms of your broader question of how we think about the business, I think you should think about the business as we're being active in both smaller transactions where we've historically found great value and continue to find opportunities, but also supplemented by some periodic larger transactions where it makes sense for us. And so, I think this is in many ways -- I use the word milestone, but it's we graduating into access to some of these larger transactions, which are going to be more frequent, as you mentioned, because of data centers and the grid-connected development focusing on larger projects.

It is a milestone, and we want to recognize that. A housekeeping item, just the ABS, the SunStrong ABS refinancing. Can you kind of quantify what the benefit was to the quarter in that because the ROE expansion this quarter was pretty noticeable?

Sure. And I'm going to ask Chuck to do that. But before I do that, Noah, I'm going to clarify a little bit a few items around SunStrong. I expected us to get a question on it, and I don't want there to be any confusion about what this distribution was. So let me just answer that a little more broadly and say we often refer to SunStrong and folks talking about us refer to SunStrong in a singular capacity, but we actually own 50% of 2 separate entities. One of them is SunStrong Capital Holdings, which is an AssetCo that primarily owns solar leases, most of which have been securitized. And the distribution we received this quarter was the result of refinancing the ABS debt, which due to de-levering and the very strong performance of the underlying leases resulted in essentially a cash out refi. So, there was meaningful cash distribution to the equity owners. And going forward, as an equity owner in SunStrong Capital Holdings, we'll just get the normal distributions from the waterfall of the securitized assets. The refi was a bit of a onetime. Now separate from that, we own 50% of SunStrong Management or SSM, as we call it, which is truly an operating business that provides servicing to consumer and commercial loans and leases, including the legacy SunPower and Sunnova portfolios. Now SSM is an operating business. It has its own executive team. It's performing very well. It has a business plan, which includes ongoing growth in the platform and expansion ideas. And our accounting for our SSM investment is as an equity method investment that we hold at fair value. So to the extent the underlying value of SSM increases, that would positively impact HASI's earnings. So I just wanted to create that clarification of when we say SunStrong, what we actually mean. This distribution that we're talking about in the third quarter was from SunStrong Capital Holdings. So sorry for the deviation to your actual question, I'm going to defer to Chuck.

Noah, so our investment in SunStrong consisted of both mezzanine level loans as well as a small amount of equity. The total proceeds from the ABS that we received was around $240 million. And the composition of that was roughly about $200 million of it went to pay off our mezzanine loans. of which we're redeploying back into additional accretive investments. But then we also -- the other remaining $40 million was related to our equity, of which we did have some small investment, like I said. And of that $40 million that we received, roughly about $24 million of it was a gain in excess of our investment. So the impact to the quarter was $24 million.

The next question comes from Davis Sunderland from Baird.

Congrats on an awesome quarter. Just one for me. I wanted to ask just how much the tax credit changes from Big Beautiful Bill have maybe impacted the types of investments you're seeing by asset class? And I guess the root of my question is just wondering if you've seen any opportunities in the last couple of months in discussions to step into a potential hole in the cap stack or any other ways that there have been puts or takes.

Sure. Thanks, Davis. I'm going to ask Susan to answer that one.

I think at this point, with the extension of the tax credits for wind and solar, by and large, for 5 years with safe harbor and started construction and storage and some of the other credits that extend longer, I think we're still seeing the traditional combination of tax equity structures and transfer structures to dominate the market. So, we're still -- we still have this longer transition period before we expect to see a change in the capital stack to not include tax credits.

The next question comes from Maheep Mandloi from Mizuho.

Jack on for Maheep here. Congrats on the quarter. A lot of third-party ownership have talked about prepaid leases. Is that a kind of product that would interest you guys? And would you see similar yields as traditional leases?

Sure. Thanks, Jack. I'm going to ask Marc to answer that one.

Jack, that's something that we could certainly take a look at but haven't been presented any opportunities yet. So we'll have to defer on that until the future.

The next question comes from Vikram Bagri from Citibank.

It's Ted on for Vik. Just looking at the principal collections, it looks like it was a larger quarter with about $382 million returns. Could you just give some insight into what the maturity profile and roll-off schedule of the existing portfolio looks like? Should we expect the pace of that to potentially increase as you approach the new wind investment?

Yes. This is Chuck. So, the $300 million number that you're seeing there, the biggest driver of why that's a little bit higher has to do with the SunStrong refinancing that I just mentioned. When I said that roughly about $200 million of the proceeds went to pay down the mezz loans that came through that line. So that was a little bit of an acceleration of normal amort profile that you'll see from our portfolio. But the way I generally think of it is that the lives of our assets, weighted average life is around 10 years or so. So you could expect looking at our portfolio that our amort in any given period will mirror that.

[Operator Instructions] The next question comes from Mark Strouse from JPMorgan.

This is Michael Fairbanks on for Mark. Just wondering if you could talk about how this large transaction and the $3 billion of volumes this year might impact the EPS growth algorithm in '26 and beyond. I know you reaffirmed the 8% to 10% range, but should we be thinking about a possible step-up in '26 from these volumes?

Thanks, Michael. Good question. Our cadence has consistently been to talk about guidance in February, and I think we're going to stick to that. So we're working diligently right now on our business plan with our Board. And I think we'll have more to say about '26 and '27 in February.

Okay. Great. And then maybe just for a follow-up. It looks like Sun

It was. It was in last quarter's pipeline. That's correct.

The next question is a follow-up question from Chris Dendrinos from RBC.

I just wanted to follow up here. And I think you mentioned during your prepared remarks, the really low rate of bad debt. I think bp Lightsource or subsidiary had reported a default with one of their suppliers. And I'm curious, I think you all have worked with them in the past. Is there anything related to that, that would impact you all?

Thanks, Chris. No, there wouldn't be. We do work with bp Lightsource. But again, we're monetizing project cash flows. And the challenge that you discussed has no impact on the project in which we're invested.