Data Communications Management Corp

TSX:DCM

Earnings Call Analysis

Earnings Call Transcript 2023-Q3

[James Lorimer, executive]

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Data Communications Management Corp. Second Quarter 2023 Financial Results Conference Call. I'm James Lamar, CFO of DCM, and I'm pleased to be hosting today's call. Joining me on the call today is Richard Kellam, our President and CEO. Following our prepared remarks, we will be moderating a Q&A session. As a reminder, this conference is being broadcast live and recorded. We'd also like to remind everyone that Richard and I can be available after the call for any follow-up questions you might have. Before we begin, I'd like to remind everyone that we will be referring to forward-looking information as well as non-IFRS measures on today's call. This information is subject to certain risks and uncertainties as outlined in the forward-looking information disclosure in our press release from last night and more fully within our public disclosure filings on SEDAR. We have posted a brief video message from Richard, along with a summary of our results and key initiatives for the quarter on our website in the form of an infographic. This presentation will also be added to our website for your reference, along with a post view recording and transcript. Our detailed information is also available on our website and SEDAR. Please also follow us on LinkedIn to keep up to date with other business developments. I'd now like to turn the call over to Richard.

[Richard Kellam, executive]

Thank you, James, and good morning and good afternoon and good evening for anybody joining us in other time zones. We had a very exciting third quarter, looking forward to unpacking that quarter with shareholders today. Here's what we want to do from an objective standpoint. We're going to first start off with an update on our merger integration. And then we'll talk about our consolidated results on Q3 and year-to-date, and then we'll turn it over for any Q&A. So first, with the merger integration. It's progressing very, very well and ahead of target and pretty much on schedule. We talked to shareholders many times about our focus areas, those being operational, organizational procurement and revenue and originally, we put a target to the Street of $25 million to $30 million. We're happy today. Very happy to be revising that target to between $30 million and $35 million in annual savings. So we're certainly off to an incredible start.I identified a lot of opportunities across these 4 areas, which I'll talk about in a minute. And I will say, you'll see it later in the deck that to date, we have generated $17.5 million in annualized synergies that will flow through in 2024. So about 53% of that midpoint target of 30% to 35%. We'll talk about in a little bit more detail when we get into the deck. So off to a very good start. Here are some details and across each of the areas, starting with the operational initiatives we will be consolidating and optimizing our operational facilities from 14 plants to 10. That consolidation is already announced across our network. That will increase our average revenue per plant to north of 45%. So 45% increase. The first plant that we are consolidating is Edmonton, and we moved very quickly on that into our Calgary facility, and that's all happening in December of this year. Three other consolidations are going to happen over the course of the next 18 to 24 months. Obviously, we need to ensure that we're protecting client experience. And of that $17.5 million 18% of it is coming from operational initiatives. So roughly $3.75 million of that $17.5 million that we've already secured to date. Obviously, much more will flow through as we consolidate the other 3 facilities over time over the next 18 to 24 months. So great progress from an operational perspective. Moving on to organization. Happy to report that our sales or we call it our commercial team is now fully integrated. So we now have one team that's responsible for client leadership. We've optimized our spans and layers across all functions. We've completed payroll integration from 4 payroll systems to 1. So a fantastic effort from our HR team to deliver that payroll integration process. We're in the process of benefit alignment. The annualized impact on organizational initiatives is roughly $9 million that will flow through in 2024. So 51% of that $17.5 million 2024 savings are coming from the organizational initiatives that we have already implemented and executed. So great progress from our teams here. On the procurement side, again, a great momentum. We've optimized our vendor base. We've leveraged our scale. We centralized purchasing and outsourcing. We've delivered or will deliver $4.7 million in annualized savings in 2024, and that's 27% of that $17.5 million. And then on the revenue side, I see the growth initiatives that we're delivering. Our priority focus has really been on commercial momentum or growth right from the day we closed this deal. We have a very, very strong collaboration and cross-selling across the business. And we've already delivered some sizable new business wins across retail, health care, QSR, manufacturing and transportation, just over $18 million in new business wins since we closed the transaction. So very proud of the progress we're making from a commercial leadership perspective.Okay. So our integration initiatives are very much on track. And as I said, fantastic plans to deliver the $30 million to $35 million, of which $17.5 million is already initiated and will flow through in 2024, okay? All the others are going to happen, obviously, over the course of the next 18 to 24 months as we've communicated several times to shareholders. So a great progress and great team that's working to deliver these initiatives. Now I'll move on to talk about the quarter, and I'm going to start off with what we're doing to build a better business. So I'm going to start off with SG&A. You're going to see that our SG&A as a percent of revenue is down by just over 1 point at 20.4%. Obviously, the total SG&A is up in value, obviously, because of the acquisition, but the percentage is down. So very good progress there. And you'll see on the next slide, when we talk about year-to-date, our year-to-date as a percent of revenue is 19.5%. So while in the range that we put to shareholders of 18 to 20, and we certainly see opportunities to continue to progress to the low end of that range, okay? So really good progress on continuing to build a better business while we build a bigger business at the same time. And then just a quick look at restructuring expenses. Our restructuring expenses in the quarter are $7 million, and that reflects a lot of the announcements that we made in terms of consolidating organizations and operations. And we obviously booked those expenses, the people expenses once we made the announcement, the cash expenses actually happened later. So those are reflected in the quarter, $9.7 million in restructuring year-to-date and exactly what we expected sort of a 1:1 pad.Acquisition expenses were a lot lighter in the quarter at $200,000. So most of the expenses that we incurred on the deal costs have been complete and they're behind us. And then as I already mentioned in the upfront section $17.5 million in annual savings to date from integration initiatives. So all well identified, and those will flow through as we enter in -- well, as we exit out of this year, but importantly, as we enter into 2024 okay?Also happy to report headcount productivity improvements. We've shown this chart to shareholders many times. If we look at the right-hand side of the chart, you can see that our revenue per employee is now north of $300,000. So $306,000 per employee, up 2% over last year and about 36% over the last 5 or 6 years. So very good improvement and progress there. And as we deliver -- as we continue to deliver our synergies and operational organization, you'll see that revenue per employee continued to increase as well. So very good momentum there in terms of productivity improvements. Also happy to report that we are and have been very active in our ESG efforts and one that we are and have been proud of is the reforestation or environmental reforestation efforts. And since we started this program, which is a little less than 2 years ago, we have reforested 100% of our paper use, so about 90 million pounds of paper that we've used in our workflow for clients. And we've reforce that 100% of that. So that's equivalent of just under 1.1 million trees. So we celebrated the cross of 1 million trees in September. And this has been an incredible program for us. We're very committed to deliver a sustainable environment, and it's a great program and those credits flow through to our clients as well. Okay. And on our DCM digital journey, we have not taken our eye off the ball here at all. In fact, we are all in on our digital efforts with our DCM Flex platform with a digital asset management solution in some of the work we're doing on personalized video, marketing campaign optimization and then our optichannel platform. And this is the first time we're actually reporting a consolidated DCM digital revenues, and those revenues include software revenues and marketing services or -- sorry, digital services revenue, managed services revenues. And you see the chart here, we're actually up over 255% over a year ago. And we're just under $10 million year-to-date in those software revenues and managed services revenue. So great progress on our DCM digital journey as well and very -- a lot of exciting stuff that we're working on as we enter into 2024. James, do you want to talk about debt reduction?

[James Lorimer, executive]

Sure. We continue to focus on debt reduction. At the end of the third quarter. Our total credit facilities sided about $118 million. These are down a little over 18% since we closed the acquisition, which, as everyone, I think, will appreciate was fully financed with debt. Slide here, we talk about kind of net debt. And at the end of the quarter, we had a $22.5 million cash balance. So we ended up with net debt at about $95.5 million. We've been very active through initiatives to complete the sale and leaseback of our [indiscernible] plant, which was announced last quarter and through the equity private placement we did back in May to pay down debt. We're also pleased to announce that we have entered into agreements to sell both our Fergus and our Trenton facilities, which are the 2 remaining owned facilities that we acquired as part of the MCC acquisition. Collectively, those 2 sales will generate about $15 million in net proceeds. And shareholders will recall, when we first did the acquisition, we had allocated about $30 million for the real estate. Once everything is said and done and these transactions close, we'll actually have generated about $38 million. So that kind of term loan that was associated with the credit facility will be fully paid down by the end of this year with the sale of our Fergus facility, which is expected to be completed before the end of 2023. And then we'll have some excess cash to apply to our credit facilities when the Trenton facility closes, and that's expected early in 2024.

[Richard Kellam, executive]

Okay. Thank you, James. So let's -- our integration efforts, the work that we're doing to build a better business, and now we're going to move to the next chapter, which is what we're doing to build a bigger business and some of those bigger business results. We'll talk about Q3, and we'll look at the to-date results as well. Q3 revenue, up 93.6%. So obviously, solid growth in revenue underlying growth on DCM legacy and acquired growth as well. And you can see the number $122 million on the quarter, up $63 million versus Q3 2022. Looking at our year-to-date results year-to-date, up 58.3%. I'll remind shareholders the acquisition happened the 24th of April. So we now have all the acquired growth incorporated into this quarter, first full quarter. And just over $317 million in revenue generated year-to-date. Our underlying business performance, if we strip all the kind of noise out from the acquisition is exactly on target, the target we put to the Street -- our 5-year target put the street right around 5% or just over 5% growth across our acquired business and current business, if you will, DCM legacy, MCC legacy. So very much on track to the numbers that we put in the Street. So very pleased, very proud of the revenue growth we're delivering. One of the more difficult things to do when you do a transaction of this size is maintain revenue flow or client leadership in the marketplace and the team has done an outstanding job to maintain that momentum, which puts us in a very good place as we move into final quarter and into next year. If we look at revenue momentum by quarter, we've delivered 8 consecutive quarters of year-over-year growth, okay. Now moving on to gross profit. Our gross profit was up 52.4% at just over $30 million. And our gross margin came in at 24.7%, and that is down versus a year ago, but I want to explain this is very clear, and we made it very clear to shareholders that the acquired company, the MCC acquired company had roughly a 20% margin and DCM legacy roughly a 30% margin. So when you blend those margins, obviously, you're going to get a decrease in margin for a period of time as we work the journey back to north of 30%, and that's exactly what happened in the quarter, exactly what was expected. But I'm going to give shares a little bit more granularity on the next chart just to look at how the difference in margin by quarter, okay? So James, you just go to the next one. If we look at the chart on the left here, this is all preacquisition. The dark blue line is the gross margin percentage for legacy DCM. And you can see it pretty flat, obviously growing, but pretty flat across all the quarters. And that's really due to how the legacy DCM workflows and how the operations are kind of optimized, if you will. If you look at the MCC legacy business is all legacy pre acquisition, you can see that the quarters are a little lumpy from a gross margin flow. And a lot of that is due to the transactional business that MCC legacy has had in their workflow. So a very strong sort of quarter 1 and quarter 2, and then it drops in quarter 3 and quarter 4. So all that is obviously taken into consideration when you look at our slight margin, our combined margin, if you will, for the quarter. And what our Realtek shareholders is we and we've said this many times, we've got a very active plan to get our new combined margin, if you will, north of 30%. So it's a very clear plan that will come through what we call strategic revenue management. It will come through a mix, and it'll come through all the operational efficiencies that we've already announced those consolidation of facilities. So this is very much what we expected, very much what we planned, okay? But I just wanted to give a little bit more detail to put it into context. Okay. So year-to-date gross profit, same story. You can look at the far right, our combined gross margin year-to-date is 27.1% versus 30.2% a year ago. And as I said, we've got a lot of detailed plans to get this back north of 30% and back into that range of north of 35% that we put to the Street a couple of years ago. Going on to the next slide. If we look at gross profit momentum, we've actually had 9 so 8 consecutive quarters of revenue growth, 9 consecutive quarters of gross profit momentum. Gross profit, as I said, James is our best friend, and we continue to be relentlessly focused on driving gross profit momentum. Okay? And over to James to talk about adjusted EBITDA.

[James Lorimer, executive]

Yes. Adjusted EBITDA as a result of the revenue and gross profit performance that Richard described, adjusted EBITDA was up a little over 28% this quarter compared to last year, coming in at $11.8 million. As a percent of revenue, that worked out to 9.6%. You compared to 14.5% last year. And just as we have a clear plan in place to return our gross profit margins to 90%, along with the targets to increase our revenue by 5% a year or more, we believe that, that 14% adjusted EBITDA margin is certainly achievable over the next few years. So that's a major initiative for us. You can see on a year-to-date basis, adjusted EBITDA was up 35%. And I'll just remind everyone that this was the first full quarter that we had the results for MCC included. In the second quarter, we had about 2 months plus a year -- sorry, 2 months plus a week. So as in this quarter going forward, we'll have the combined results of both businesses. Likewise, you can see how our adjusted EBITDA has performed over the last almost 3 years now. And given continued strength, we certainly believe that, that should continue in the fourth quarter of this year. We quoted a brief summary of our financial results here comparing this year to last year, really just a different presentation of some of the adjustments that Richard talked about. So I won't go into detail on those other than to highlight that we certainly guided the Street that our restructuring expenses were going to track pretty much dollar for dollar with the synergy targets that we have, and we're seeing that play out over the next kind of 18 to 24 months still. And also, as Richard mentioned, the acquisition integration costs have tailed off and those kind of nonrecurring costs should be -- should really not continue going forward. On a year-to-date basis, you can see where we've landed from a restructuring side and acquisition costs and also from an adjusted EBITDA perspective.

[Richard Kellam, executive]

Okay. So thank you, James. So look, we had a good quarter, lots of work, really proud of the team. Incredible efforts and a big lift on all the integration work that's happening, continue to focus on building that better business while we build a bigger business at the same time. The market is good. We're playing our strengthening in the market, and we're seeing the results. Happy to continue to report that we are on track on our 5-year strategic financial objectives of north of 5% organic growth, getting EBITDA north of 14%. You saw our aggressive debt repayment so we'll be in that less than 1x EBITDA range over the course of 5 years, in fact, well less than 5. And then continue to focus on our DCM digital journey, and we see a path to well over north of 60% growth in our Martech stack and margins of north of 80%. So good progress on the quarter and continue to commit to our 5-year financial objectives here. So now with that, James, we turn over to Q&A.

[James Lorimer, executive]

Yes, sure. We'd like to take questions from the audience. If you have a question and are accessing the call directly through teams, you can either use the raise your hand featuring teams, and we will queue up questions. Or alternatively, you can also use the chat feature, and we will respond to chat questions as well. If you have dialed in through the telephone access code, you may press star 5 to raise or lower your hand and pressing Star 6 will mute or unmute your microphone. Please introduce yourself once you are introduced to the session. Right. We have a question from Noel Atkinson. [Indiscernible].

[Noel Atkinson, analyst]

So Richard and James, nice to see the merger synergy target going up, that's great. I guess, just firstly, on the synergy outlook. So for 2024 talking about that $17.5 million. So is that an annualized number so that at the end of 2024, you're at that $17.5 million a year run rate? Or is that the actual savings that will flow into the income statement through 2024?

[Richard Kellam, executive]

Yes. We see that Noel as being a number that will hit the income statement on a full year basis and in 2024.

[Noel Atkinson, analyst]

Okay. Great. And there's no revenue synergies in that number, right?

[Richard Kellam, executive]

No, we don't have any revenue synergies in the number at all. And I mean, the best way to think about revenue synergies are every $10 million in growth if we're at 14% EBITDA is $1.4 million in EBITDA. So we haven't modeled in that 30% to 35%, we have not modeled any gross synergies into that $30 million to $35 million number. So just hard synergies is what we factor in to the 35. So yes, it's a great question, Noel. Gross synergies are an opportunity, okay.

[Noel Atkinson, analyst]

And then Q4, so how do we -- how should we be thinking about sort of the cost savings flowing into the income statement in Q4 of this year in the current quarter? Does it -- do you see material cost savings from what you reported in Q3 to what you would be able to achieve in Q4.

[James Lorimer, executive]

Yes. Noel, it's James. Yes, we should start to see, particularly some of the organizational savings that we introduced. A lot of those were completed in September, so we'll start to see the benefit of those in the fourth quarter. Some of the operational savings will be kind of modest in the fourth quarter. A good chunk of that is coming from our Edmonton plant closure, and that's going to be completed in kind of middle of December. So we won't see a lot of those benefits this year, but we should start the year off in January with a full positive impact of that. And then likewise, with the procurement savings, a lot of those are in place right now. There are some things like early pay discounts that were -- we've negotiated with our suppliers, given our kind of higher purchasing amount. Those will probably be phased in and should hit their ground kind of 100% running probably beginning in January, but we will get a little bit of those procurement savings in the fourth quarter.

[Noel Atkinson, analyst]

Okay. And then just a couple more quick ones, if you don't mind. Richard, the 5% pro forma year-over-year revenue growth of the business that you mentioned in your remarks, is that Q3? Or is that sort of 9 months year-to-date?

[Richard Kellam, executive]

That's year-to-date.

[Noel Atkinson, analyst]

Okay. And then I noticed in the filings that you mentioned sort of that you're getting some good traction in the digital side and that you're still expecting some solid growth over the medium term in that business. But when I look at the Q3 numbers, your tech-enabled subscriptions and fees more than doubled quarter-over-quarter in Q2. It's like the biggest jump, I think we've ever seen. Is there some catch-up in there? Or is it just you're winning new customers? And can you talk at all about what are the services or platforms that you're -- where you're winning contracts there?

[James Lorimer, executive]

Sure. I'll maybe start at the in terms of the numbers, then turn it over to Richard to elaborate more on the platforms. So this was the first quarter, Noel that we included the MCC results in there. And a good chunk of that increase was related to including the MCC kind of technology services. They tend to not have a lot of subscription services like we do. They tend to be more professional services and brand management fees. But there's great opportunity for us to move their clients over to some of our technology platforms. And in fact, their legacy platform, which would be comparable to our Flex platform is called Custom Point. We've already started to migrate a number of their customers over to our Flex platform. And there's great excitement in terms of some of the other platforms that we have.

[Richard Kellam, executive]

Yes. And in addition, we have had a couple of recent wins, Noel, one pretty sizable win for a managed service model for digital asset management solution for a large transportation company that flowed through in the quarter and some of the monetization efforts that we're heading around our DCM Flex platform are starting to flow through as well.

[James Lorimer, executive]

And then we have a call, I believe this is Chris Thompson from eResearch.

[Chris Thompson, analyst]

It's Chris Thompson from eResearch. I just wanted to have a couple of questions. Noel answered about some of mine already or you answered some of them that were similar. On the restructuring charges, you've talked about the Edmonton plant. There's a large $7 million restructuring charge this quarter through the other plants. Is this the high watermark, but every quarter we're going to see like $1 million to $2 million because you're closing and gifting plants? Or how is that going to play out over the next 4 quarters?

[Richard Kellam, executive]

Yes. Chris, there will probably be some kind of modest restructuring in the fourth quarter. The bigger plant closures are going to be our Fergus and Trenton plants, and those are expected towards the end of 2024. So it may be actually a little bit lumpier than that. We'll probably see some kind of modest expenses, and you're probably not far off in that kind of $1 million to $2 million a quarter. Probably a little bit lumpier as we firm up our plans in the second half of next year on some of the bigger plant closures. With our Thistle move into bond, that's not expected to have any kind of material restructuring expenses. So it's really the kind of 2 bigger plants towards the end of next year.

[Chris Thompson, analyst]

Okay. And then on the revenue side, just looking at typically, your Q3 historically has been your -- one of your lowest quarters. With the merger happening, I also wanted to comment -- your comments on the actual market you're seeing. There's a lot of talk about slowdown, et cetera. How are you seeing this revenue number for Q3 as a benchmark, say, for the next couple of quarters with what you're seeing from client demand?

[Richard Kellam, executive]

Yes. Chris, our client demand is still very strong. We're not seeing kind of any impact from existing clients. The way we look at it is quite simple, right? It's a $10 billion market. We're, call it, combined annualized $530 million, $540 million in revenue. So a lot of opportunities for us to deliver new business development. And we've got a very growth obsessed commercial team and really good structure for us to go and identify and secure new business opportunities. And so even if there are any potential kind of headwinds that we'll experience, we are not seeing any right now, Chris, but if they do materialize at some point, the growth agenda we've got is a solid growth agenda.

[James Lorimer, executive]

And then... Yes, I might just elaborate a little bit, Chris as well, just in terms of kind of quarterly patterns. We typically -- as you rightly noted, Q3 tends to be weaker. Q4 tends to be stronger than Q3 from a revenue perspective. And then both the kind of legacy DCM and the legacy MCC businesses tend to have very strong quarters in the first quarter. So kind of fourth quarter kind of builds and then first quarter tends to be stronger. And that's largely due, particularly in the first quarter, MCC does a lot of kind of year-end tax statements and transaction statement processing. And you saw that kind of higher gross margin that Richard alluded to in the slide showing kind of historical quarterly gross margins, that's also kind of associated with a higher revenue in that quarter as well. And then we also have some kind of projects in the first quarter that tend to help us just kind of timing in the first quarter.

[Richard Kellam, executive]

We've got yes, we got a couple of questions that were e-mailed in overnight here, James.

[James Lorimer, executive]

Sure.

[Richard Kellam, executive]

Will make me pull my reading glasses on now. Okay. These came from Aaron. So I believe last quarter, you guys were in beta testing for, as you say, for more of the dam products, how is it going? Okay? So that's our -- I think the question is relating to our assemble. We actually are in beta right now. It's going very well. We're still obviously learning through beta that we can incorporate into our we call our MVP, but essentially our product that we will go to market with sort of towards the end of quarter 1 next year. But we're getting good results from our beta test with the clients, both internal and external clients that are using it. So not a lot more to say on that. Great progress and good momentum there from a development perspective. Question 2, maybe I'll turn it to you, James. If we could -- if you could break down the amount of subscription/digital services revenue for the quarter compared to last year's quarter, that would be great. So we talked a little bit about that one.

[James Lorimer, executive]

Yes. We talked a little bit about that earlier. In our detailed financial statements, I think it's Note 15, we lay out how we kind of segment our revenue between product sales, warehousing and freight services, which are typically kind of hand-in-hand. We also break out technology-enabled hardware solutions. And that would be a lot of product that we resell applications there would be distribution centers or health care networks, where they're using printers and scanners and tied into some consumable products that we would sell. So kind of equipment that we resell and get a pretty good margin on. There's also some kind of modest other things in there. We also break out tech-enabled subscription services and fees, and we don't -- at least today, we don't break that out specifically, but it includes a mixture of program management fees, subscription fees that we charge for our products like Flex and Assemble and Personal and some of those other marketing campaign management tools, but it also includes some professional services fees. And you'll see a big jump when you look at those numbers for the 3 months last year, we reported $1.4 million in that category. This quarter, we've recorded $4.5 million. And a big part of that jump is really now including the MCC business. And then likewise, on a year-to-date basis, we reported about $3.6 million. And for the 9 months ended this year, we reported $9.3 million. And that kind of not, I guess, $4.5 million, $5 million bump is largely related to MCC. And they typically don't have a lot of subscription services. A lot of their revenue is really more program management and recurring programs that they run every year. So I hope that helps.

[Richard Kellam, executive]

Okay. We had one final question from Aaron here. Question number three. What would be the biggest disappointment metric so far in the past year? And what do you guys plan to do to improve? Well, great question. Look, we were very, very well planned coming into -- well, through due diligence and coming into the acquisition of MCC that we told shareholders we used Boston Consulting Group that I had done a lot of work with in my prior world. So we were very well prepared. So it would be -- there's really no -- nothing disappointing in the metrics so far. Things have gone very well. You can see that we're over-targeted on integration. Our growth momentum continues. We have a path back on our gross margin, which we fully kind of planned and baked into the deal as well. We see great -- we've got a fantastic team, acquired team and new team and integrated team. So really nothing disappointing not from my side, the first time we've seen the question, James, anything this appointing from your side?

[James Lorimer, executive]

No, I'd echo Richard's comments. We are very pleased with how the integration is going. Obviously, there's a bit of noise in our financial results this year, given the magnitude of the acquisition. But as we continue to report combined numbers, we think that will help us kind of better understand what the combined business looks like.

[Richard Kellam, executive]

Okay. And then that's all the questions, right, James?

[James Lorimer, executive]

Yes, I don't see any further questions. So thank you very much, everyone, for attending. Richard and I are certainly available if anyone has any follow-up questions.

[James Lorimer, executive]

Thank you, everybody. And a big thanks to our entire DCM team for delivering a very solid quarter and look forward reporting quarter 4 in year-end.