Burford Capital Limited (NYSE:BUR) Q1 2024 Earnings Conference Call May 13, 2024 8:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Christopher Bogart - CEO
Jonathan Molot - CIO
Jordan Licht - CFO

Conference Call Participants

Alexander Bowers - Berenberg

Operator

Thank you for standing by. My name is Krista and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Burford Capital First Quarter 2024 Financial Results Conference Call and Webcast. 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 Instructions]

Thank you. I will now turn the conference over to Christopher Bogart, Chief Executive Officer. Christopher, you may begin your conference.

Christopher Bogart

Thank you very much, and hello, everybody. As usual, I'm joined by Jon Molot, Burford's Chief Investment Officer; and Jordan Licht, Burford's Chief Financial Officer. And in fact, Jordan and I are delighted to be coming to you live from beautiful Copenhagen today, where we have spent the day with investors here, one of Burford's groupings of investors in Continental Europe and it's a lovely day here.

Quarterly results as we've said before, we are going to do these calls in what is at least for us we hope a fairly short and efficient manner. The slides really do on these quarters speak for themselves. So we'll give you a little commentary on top of that and then we'll be happy to take your questions but we'll try not to take too much of your time. And in general, when I think about quarters, while we're obviously happy to be talking to you at any time about the business, we just don't pay that much attention to individual quarters in this business. The timescale of the business operates in years, not in three-month intervals. And so you get a lot of period to period variability as you're seeing here.

And we just don't as a management team read that much into it. And that's especially true in what we think of as what I'll call almost the dead-ish first and third quarters. Although, to be fair, last year the first quarter was extraordinary because of the YPF win late in the quarter, which obviously makes comparisons with any quarter that comes later, essentially useless. So that's sort of how we think about it. But for those of you who do want to go quarter by quarter, I think, you know obviously I would characterize this as being a mixed quarter.