Computer Task Group Inc (CTG) 2020 Q4 法說會逐字稿

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to CTG's Fourth Quarter 2020 Results Conference Call. (Operator Instructions) As a reminder, today's conference call is being recorded for replay purposes.

I would now like to turn the conference call over to CTG's Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, John Laubacker. John, please go ahead.

Thank you, Keira. Good morning, everyone. Joining me on today's call is Filip Gydé, CTG's President and Chief Executive Officer.

Before we begin, I want to remind listeners that statements made during the course of this conference call state the company's or management's intentions, hopes, beliefs, expectations and predictions for the future are forward-looking statements. It's important to note that the company's actual results could differ materially from those projected. These forward-looking statements are based upon information as of today, Tuesday, February 23, 2021. The company assumes no obligation to update these statements based upon information from and after the date of today's conference call. Additional information concerning factors that could cause actual results to differ from those made in the forward-looking statements is contained in today's earnings press release as well as in the company's SEC filings.

In addition, the company's press release and management statements during the call include discussions of certain adjusted non-GAAP measures and financial information. These financial measures and reconciliations of GAAP to non-GAAP results are provided in both today's press release and the related Form 8-K.

With that, it is now my pleasure to turn the call over to Filip for his opening remarks.

Thank you, John. Good morning to all of you joining us on the phone and participating via webcast. It's a pleasure to be speaking with you today and report on our continued success. The team's consistent commitment to disciplined execution of our strategic plan resulted in a strong finish to a year of exceptional financial performance. Fourth quarter revenue was up more than 14% sequentially, driven by growth from our Solutions business, including increased demand for our portfolio of digital solutions offerings. Revenue from Solutions grew 22% sequentially, expanding to 42% of total revenue.

Contributing to our strong sequential growth was a larger-than-anticipated increase in Health Solutions business. During the quarter, we benefited from further expansion and the completion of an extensive engagement for a previously announced go-live implementation and training services project with a large existing health care system in the U.S. Another notable area of strength was our IT infrastructure and implementation business in Luxembourg, their year-end spending by existing clients contributed to meaningfully higher sales in the fourth quarter.

Additionally, we maintained robust utilization of our billable resources across the organization, including lower levels of unallocated bench resources within our European operations. Combined with our gradual disengagement from lower-margin Staffing business, we closed out 2020 with our highest operating margin in 5 years.

For the full year, we significantly improved overall profitability with both operating and net income as well as adjusted EBITDA increasing year-over-year to represent new multiyear highs. When considering the challenging environment and the lower consolidated revenue base, our strong operating and bottom line results for the year serve as important validation that our existing solutions strategy is working and yielding the anticipated outcomes.

We have continued to demonstrate growing momentum in our Solutions business, coupled with a focused expansion of CTG's digital solutions offerings. Our emphasis on solutions and the ability to deliver them remotely allowed us to capitalize on increased demand for digital solutions as clients adapted to the prolonged impact of the global pandemic and the remote working environment. For example, we experienced strong demand for our Microsoft 365 and Teams implementation and consulting services, which are expanded offerings that we launched in the second half of the year to complement our broader cloud conversion and integration solutions. Additionally, we were awarded the first in series of potential engagements to rapidly deploy and manage COVID-related help desk solutions for health care provider clients.

In conjunction with the sustained shift towards remote working and online collaboration that were brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic, there are also a number of megatrends emerging as meaningful market disruptors. Most applicable to CTG and our clients are new technological breakthroughs, which produce fast and constantly moving market [trends] that have effectively forced all businesses to embrace digital transformation as one of their top priorities.

At the core of CTG Solutions strategy, we provide the technologies and methodologies to meet the evolving needs of clients as they increasingly seek to integrate digitalization into their business decisions and day-to-day operations. Today, our existing portfolio of digital transformation solutions addresses clients' needs in numerous high-demand areas, including artificial intelligence, machine learning, Internet of Things and cloud computing platforms.

Notably, according to market research, a majority of the technology projects -- the digital technology projects initiated by companies ultimately fail to deliver the intended value. We believe this translates to an opportunity for CTG, given our proven track record of reliably delivering repeatable digital transformation solutions through our established network of global delivery centers. Our centralized and scalable delivery approach ensures a unique combination of higher reliability and minimized overall delivery costs for our clients.

Over the past year, we have continued to expand our capabilities and expertise through investments in our sales and business development organizations, development of new innovative digital solutions offerings and broader global Delivery Center capabilities. Today, we have a well-defined solutions strategy and dedicated leadership team in place that, together, has been the fundamental driver of our substantial progress and strong operating performance over the past year. With a solid foundation in place, we are now looking to take the next step to meaningfully advance our digital solutions strategy as a catalyst and accelerator of digital transformations.

Over the past several months, we have been working diligently on the major new initiatives, aimed at empowering a growing client base with the digital solutions they need for their businesses to succeed. We are extremely excited about this initiative, which accelerates the expansion of our digital capabilities and expertise while positioning CTG to capitalize on a substantial and growing market opportunity.

In advance of our planned launch in the coming days, I want to take this opportunity to preview 4 of the key elements and areas in which we are making focused investments as part of this initiative. Industry-leading [patents]. CTG is actively assembling a world-class global solutions organization comprised of talented industry leaders and multidisciplinary professionals that are focused on developing expanded digital solutions and service offerings that can readily be scaled to meet clients' needs. Following a series of key new hires and appointments over the past year, we have 8 solutions leaders, which includes Olivier Saucin, a proven digital strategist and transformation experts who we promoted to Vice President, CTG Global Solutions in January.

[Breakthrough] digital transformation offerings. We are working aggressively to expand CTG's portfolio of digital transformation solutions with a focus on specific areas that leverage technologies, which enable the accelerated achievement of business outcomes.

Innovative tools and methodologies. We are also making ongoing investments in tools, training programs and methodologies, which help clients increase their speed to market, maximize innovation and support high performance.

Global Delivery network. We've implemented initiatives to further leverage CTG's existing delivery centers in North America, Western Europe, India and South America. Expansion of our Delivery Center platform will enable us to provide a broader spectrum of scalable IT solutions, including process automation, application development and maintenance, testing, infrastructure and cloud solutions management and maintenance and services.

Each of these 4 key elements and areas of investment are in direct support of our larger solutions strategy, enhancing our ability to accelerate project momentum and enable clients' successful digital transformations. More specifically, we are focused on empowering clients to innovate faster, make more informed, data-driven decisions, create better experiences for end customers and ultimately, realize tangible business performance improvements. In addition to our focus on leveraging this new initiative to drive transformative growth, we will continue to pursue synergistic acquisitions that are accretive to earnings, complement our existing offerings and further accelerate the introduction of new digital solutions capabilities across new geographies and an expanded client base.

Importantly, I also want to emphasize that the primary objectives underlying our solutions strategy and plan remain unchanged. These include our continued commitment to immediately improve margins and earnings, generating longer-term growth above that of our served markets, targeting higher-margin digital solutions business and optimally allocate capital in support of continued operating performance and strategic acquisitions that accelerate the expansion of our digital solutions portfolio.

These objectives, along with our solutions strategy and our new digital transformation initiatives all go hand-in-hand. Electively, they are the driving force behind CTG being a premier global solutions provider that is widely recognized for enabling clients' successful digital transformations. As we make incremental progress toward this goal through the execution of our strategic plan, we are confident that we will continue to achieve sustained improvement in our operating performance and profitability.

I will now turn the call over to John for a detailed review of our fourth quarter results as well as commentary related to our outlook for the current quarter and year.

Thank you, Filip, and again, good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. As reported in our press release earlier this morning, consolidated revenue in the fourth quarter was $101.3 million compared with $88.6 million in the third quarter and $99.3 million in the fourth quarter of 2019. The sequential increase in total revenue was driven by multiple factors, led primarily by the continued expansion of our Solutions business that included a sizable contribution from the completion of a multi-quarter project with a Health Solutions client in the fourth quarter.

Additionally, currency translation had a positive impact of $3.1 million on revenue in the fourth quarter compared with a positive impact of $1.8 million in the third quarter and a negative impact of $1.3 million in the 2019 fourth quarter.

Total billable days in the fourth quarter were 67 compared with 63 days in the third quarter and 65 days in the year ago fourth quarter.

Solutions revenue in the fourth quarter increased $7.7 million or approximately 22% sequentially to $42.8 million and represented 42.2% of total revenue. This compared with $35.1 million or 39.6% of total revenue in the previous quarter. Solutions revenue also increased $4.9 million or 12.8% year-over-year compared with $37.9 million or 38.2% of total revenue in the fourth quarter of 2019.

Revenue from IBM in the fourth quarter was $20.1 million or 19.9% of total revenue compared with $18.6 million or 21% of total revenue in the third quarter and $21.4 million or 21.6% of total revenue in last year's fourth quarter. As previously disclosed, during the fourth quarter, CTG renewed its long-term Master Services Agreement with IBM for a 3-year period expiring on October of 2023.

No other client represented more than 10% of revenue during the fourth quarter of 2020 or in recent comparable periods.

Cost of services as a percentage of revenue were 78.7% in the fourth quarter compared with 77.9% of revenue in the third quarter and 79.6% of revenue in the year ago fourth quarter.

GAAP operating margin in the fourth quarter was 3.3% compared with 2.1% in the third quarter and 2.4% in the year ago quarter.

Non-GAAP operating margin in the fourth quarter, which excludes approximately $300,000 of acquisition-related expenses, was 3.5% compared with 2.7% in the third quarter and 3% in the year ago quarter.

The fourth quarter GAAP operating margin increased 120 basis points sequentially and 90 basis points year-over-year, while the non-GAAP operating margin was 80 basis points higher sequentially and improved 50 basis points year-over-year. Both measures reflect an increased mix of Solutions revenue to our total revenue in the fourth quarter and our successful efforts to sustain higher utilization of billable resources, especially in our European operations.

The effective income tax rate in the fourth quarter was 45.6% compared with a negative 31.2% in the third quarter and 34% in the fourth quarter of 2019. The tax rate was higher in the fourth quarter due to nondeductible expenses for tax purposes. The negative effective tax rate in the third quarter was primarily the result of implementing newly enacted legislation that allowed the exclusion of certain high-taxed income associated with the global intangible low-taxed income, or GILTI, regulations. This change in legislation resulted in a onetime tax benefit of $1.1 million or $0.08 per diluted share during the third quarter.

GAAP net income in the fourth quarter was $1.9 million or $0.13 per diluted share and included approximately $200,000 or $0.01 per diluted share of acquisition-related expenses. Non-GAAP net income for the fourth quarter was $2.1 million or $0.14 per diluted share.

For comparison, GAAP net income for the third quarter was $2.8 million or $0.20 per diluted share and included a net $200,000 of nonoperating income or $0.02 per diluted share comprised of gains from nontaxable life insurance and partially offset by acquisition-related expenses. Excluding these items, non-GAAP net income for the third quarter was $2.6 million or $0.18 per diluted share.

Both GAAP and non-GAAP net income in the 2020 third quarter included the $0.08 gain from a change in tax legislation.

GAAP net income in the fourth quarter of 2019 was $1.7 million or $0.12 per diluted share, which included $300,000 or $0.02 per diluted share of acquisition-related expenses. Non-GAAP net income was $2 million or $0.14 per diluted share in the year ago fourth quarter.

For the full year ended December 2020, net income on a GAAP basis increased approximately 85% year-over-year to $7.6 million or $0.53 per diluted share, which included a net $100,000 benefit or $0.01 per diluted share, comprised of severance and acquisition-related expenses, offset by nontaxable gains from life insurance and the sale of a building.

Non-GAAP net income for the full year 2020 increased approximately 34% year-over-year to $7.5 million or $0.52 per diluted share.

Adjusted EBITDA for the full year 2020 increased approximately 25% year-over-year to $15.6 million.

CTG's total headcount at the end of the fourth quarter was approximately 3,900 compared with 3,750 at the end of the third quarter and 3,950 at the end of the year ago fourth quarter. Approximately, 91% of our fourth quarter 2020 headcount was billable.

Turning to our balance sheet. Cash and cash equivalents at the end of the fourth quarter were $32.9 million. During the quarter, we paid the remaining outstanding balance on the company's revolving credit facility, resulting in no long-term debt outstanding at the end of the year. Capital expenditures in the fourth quarter were $169,000 compared with $685,000 in the third quarter and $1.2 million in the fourth quarter of 2019.

Looking forward, given the current business landscape remains highly dynamic, in large part due to the sustained global impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, including reduced visibility on CTG's end markets and clients, we are not providing quantitative guidance for the first quarter and full year 2021. However, we are very pleased with the recent performance across the business and the success of our strategic focus on digital solutions, which has yielded consistent and significant improvements in the company's margins and profitability. We remain committed to the execution of our strategy and investing our global solutions organization, which will yield expanded digital capabilities in support of our highest priority to deliver long-term value to all of CTG's stakeholders.

Keira, can you please initiate and manage our question-and-answer session, please?

(Operator Instructions) We do have a question in the queue. Let's go to the first caller.

This is Kevin Liu with K. Liu & Company. First question I wanted to touch on, Filip, you mentioned a couple of awards that could be the first in a series [between] health care providers. It sounded like that was related to some COVID items. Could you just talk a little bit more about what those awards were? How meaningful they are? And how you see them kind of expanding over time?

Sure, Kevin. We're talking about, like it was said, COVID-19-related help desk solutions that need to be deployed fairly quickly. You can think, for instance, of vaccination support for health systems and -- but all of that is -- and the speed of with which they're coming and the size will depend or is depending on the availability and the logistics of the vaccines. So it's a bit of a target that's in movement there. We have a first contract that's been awarded, significant. But it's a little -- at the same time, it's early, and it's already ongoing to understand how fast and how big this is going to become. I hope in the state's logistics with the vaccines are not as difficult as they are in Europe. That's for sure.

Understood. That's helpful. And then maybe more generally, in the past few quarters as the COVID pandemic was going on, you guys talked about sales cycles slowing with some -- with your health care provider customers. Given that they're still dealing with some issues here, but at the same time, maybe there's light at the end of the tunnel, curious if those discussions around other aspects of your health care business are moving forward and what you expect in terms of being able to kind of grow bookings over the course of '21.

That's a very difficult and tough question, Kevin, as you're almost asking me to make a statement on how COVID is going to evolve in the next couple of months. We all expect we're going to get out of this, and vaccination is going to prove part of the -- or a big part of the solution. We see that in countries, well, for instance, The States and also Israel, U.K. starting coming out. We also see that a lot of work has been reflected to what is actually extremely urgent.

In the beginning, it was the collaboration software, the support of work from home. Now with those COVID-related help desk solutions, we believe that when we're at the other end of the funnel or when that image is very clear, that business is going to take up. But I don't know when that's going to be because it's also very dependent on the global situation and the different speed in progress in vaccination between the continent is big.

So timing is still a question mark, and that's also why we didn't give any guidance for the remainder of 2021 at this moment.

Yes. Understood. And that being said, maybe this question is for John. But just in terms of the guidance and outlook statements, I know it's more qualitative at this point. But you talked about expecting solid revenue growth as of this year. Just curious how much visibility you guys have in that. What's driving that level of confidence? And then beyond that, just in terms of the mention of disengagement from lower-margin Staffing business, just wanted to check and see if there were other sizable engagements that you have or potentially are expecting to walk away from over the course of this year.

Sure, Kevin. So a couple of points there. Relative to the revenue growth and the solid revenue growth comment that we put in the release, we're excited, and I'm sure you can tell from the release and from the call today about the execution that we've had over the past year, really over the past couple of years on driving the solutions strategy now further with the digital solutions strategy. We do see opportunities in front of us. As Filip just said, it's -- they're somewhat hard to predict at times because the throughput from opportunity to closing a deal has become longer. But we see enough opportunities in front of us, especially in the Solutions area and especially that area where we are primarily focused that we do believe that we can continue to generate -- or we can this year would generate, rather, some revenue growth. So solid is not a double-digit number, but it is a growth number.

Relative to the Staffing business and stepping away from the lowest-margin Staffing business, I think we're going to continue to do that. All of our effort, time and resources and energy are going into driving the Solutions business in a variety of different ways, again, whether it be skills, whether it be methodologies, whether it be processes. We understand that that's where we're focused. I think our disciplined execution this year has been great, and part of that story is continuing to disengage, as appropriate, from the Staffing business. So I don't envision us doing that in a very, very significant way, but we are going to continue to critically evaluate the staffing opportunities as they come up for renewal.

Great. That's helpful. Well, congrats on a strong year here, especially given the circumstances, and good luck in '21.

Thanks, Kevin.

Thanks, Kevin.

Moving to the next caller in the queue.

Filip and John, Josh Vogel at Sidoti. So in the absence of giving guidance, I just kind of want to get a little bit of a sense of directional commentary around Q1 with the completion of the multi-order project and just general seasonality. Can you just kind of talk to what kind of step-down in revenue we could expect for Q1?

John, would you like to take this one?

Yes. Sure. I think we'll definitely see a step-down in revenue in Q1, Josh, but it won't be significant or unusual. We had strong -- as we indicated on the call, we had strong business from this multi-quarter go-live that we had done. We had very good sales in Luxembourg relative to infrastructure IT and there. However -- and there are also a few less billable days in the first quarter. So having said that, I don't think it will be materially different than sort of our run rate on billable days. So from that perspective, I think you get comfortable that we had some really good events and really good projects that drove the fourth quarter, which is fantastic. But it's not a significant from sort of a static run rate on revenue per day to be materially different in Q1.

Understood. Can you remind me the total number of billable days that you have for Q1? I just want to make sure mine matches up.

Yes. I'll -- I don't have that right in front of me, but I'll get back to you on that.

Okay. Sounds good. Shifting gears a little bit, understanding that as Solutions grows, so should the margin profile of the overall business. I know that utilization benefited from low vacation and sick time. Should we expect that utilization to maybe swing back a little in the other direction post pandemic or as things normalize? How should we think about that?

John?

Sure. Our Solutions margins have pretty consistently been significantly higher than our staffing margins. And how we've looked at it, Josh, internally, is it depends upon the service being provided on both sides of that, the Staffing service and the Solutions. But generally, the margins at the end of the day, are 2 to 3x higher. So it's not reasonable to think that a staffing engagement would yield the margins that are 2.5x as high. So from that perspective, we would, as we continue to drive the Solutions side of the business, and again, disengage from the lowest-margin Staffing business, we really think that there's a progression -- a steady progression higher on a pretty consistent basis on both 2 or 3 things: one is the overall margin for the organization; two, as we stress and sell and deliver digital solutions, we think that that's got an even higher opportunity and higher-margin within the Solutions portfolio. So we think our solutions margin again, should gradually increase.

Now we -- and we've had this -- we said it in the past, and we've said to -- in general, that it isn't always going to be a linear increase. Some quarters won't be up, or some quarters will be down. But we think long term, a very steady climb in the Solutions from mid- to high 20s to a higher number and overall beginning to look more toward the mid-20s overall. Now I'm not sure that we're going to get there in 2021, but significant improvement on both ends.

I appreciate the insights there. The -- so we had the expanded agreement with (inaudible) client in the Northeast, a driver of the increase there. [Perhaps if we can] jump in financial services sequentially. And I was just curious, was that related to the IT infrastructure and implementation business in Luxembourg? Or was there a new win or an expansion there or a bit of both?

I didn't hear the first part of the question. John, I'm not sure if you...

Yes. No, I'm sorry, Josh, you broke up a little bit at the beginning of the question. So I wasn't exactly sure.

Oh, I apologize. Just to shorten it up. I just saw a big sequential increase in financial services revenue. And I was just curious if that -- where that came from. Was there a new win, an expansion, a bit of both with what we saw in Luxembourg? Just curious as to what drove that.

I think it's a little bit a mix of everything, Josh. It's definitely the infrastructure side in Luxembourg that helped us. But also in Belgium and in France, there was higher activity towards the end of the year in the financial services market but not one specific big contract. It was more like a -- well, overall increased activity.

Okay. Great. And just lastly, given the new digital transformation initiative and the investments there, again, outside of giving guidance, I'm just curious how we should think about SG&A this year relative to 2019 and 2020. Just kind of a base for how should we think about that.

Sounds like a question for you, too, John.

Okay. Overall, we expect margins to go up as we just talked about. As you just asked, we just talked about with Solutions margins themselves. And then within the concept of disengagement from Staffing, I think overall margin will increase. We know we've got to make continued investments in our Solutions and our business development on that side of the business, and we're going to continue. We plan to continue to do that.

So from that perspective, we still think the operating margin goes up. So we think that within the direct or gross margin, we think that increases. We know that we've got to spend some more money, so we think the SG&A increases, but we think, at the operating income level that, that increases as well. Probably, again, not substantially, but we definitely believe that we can continue to improve on where we are from an operations standpoint.

I think we've used this in the past on calls, and Filip and I talk about it all the time. It's a bit of a journey, right? There's -- we know we're not at the destination today, but we're definitely headed down a path where we're going to see gradual improvement as time passes. And on the billable days for Q1 is 65 for the first quarter.

All right. Great. Well, I appreciate all the details insight, and impressive to see how the results ended up being in 2020, given everything going on. So good luck in 2021.

Thanks, Josh.

Thanks, Josh.

We have no further questions in the queue. At this time, we will turn the call back to management for any closing remarks.

Thank you, Keira. In closing, we are very pleased with our strong results in the fourth quarter. Reflecting on the past year, I'm very proud of our highly dedicated team that worked together to overcome challenges and what we, as an organization, ultimately accomplished despite the unprecedented environment. We not only rapidly adapted to the changing business landscape without any loss in productivity, but we made significant strides in successfully expanding our solutions offerings and how we deliver services to meet the evolving needs of our clients. We exited the year with growing momentum for our expanding portfolio of digital transformation solutions, and we are just getting started in terms of our realized potential.

Today, we have a solid foundation in place, and I'm excited about what we are positioned to achieve in 2021 as we accelerate CTG's strategy and empower clients with the digital solutions required to succeed. With continued focus and disciplined execution of our strategic plan, I'm confident we will drive near- and long-term success that results in meaningful value creation for all CTG stakeholders.

Thank you for participating on today's conference call and for your ongoing support of CTG. Keira, you may now disconnect the call.

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