Emerald Holding Inc (EEX) 2022 Q4 法說會逐字稿

Good morning and welcome to the Emerald Holding, Inc. Fourth Quarter 2022 Earnings Conference Call. (Operator Instructions) Before we begin, let me remind everyone that this call will include certain statements that constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These include remarks about future expectations, beliefs, estimates, plans and prospects. In particular, the company's statements about projected results for 2023 are forward-looking statements. Such statements are subject to a variety of risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those indicated or implied by such statements. Such risks and other factors are set forth in the company's most recently filed periodic reports on Form 10-K, Form 10-Q and subsequent filings.

The company does not undertake any duty to update such forward-looking statements. Additionally, during today's call, management will discuss non-GAAP measures, which we believe can be useful in evaluating the company's performance. The presentation of this additional information should not be considered in isolation or as a substitute for results prepared in accordance with U.S. GAAP. The reconciliation of these non-GAAP measures to the most comparable GAAP measures can be found in the company's earnings release. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded and a replay of this call will be available on the Investors section of the company's website through 11:59 p.m. Eastern Time on March 21, 2023.

I'd now like to turn the call over to Mr. Herve Sedky, President and Chief Executive Officer. Sir, please go ahead.

Thank you, Melissa, and good morning, everyone. It's great to be with all of you today to discuss our fourth quarter and full year results. We're pleased with our 2022 performance that exceeded our guidance and demonstrates that the B2B live events sector is back with a vengeance post COVID. We're excited by what we anticipate being a very strong growth year in 2023 and are satisfied with our progress on all key strategic pillars. Our 2022 performance reflects the early stages of an accelerating recovery in our live events business as well as a successful year in terms of progress towards our core strategic initiatives of customer centricity, [365-day] engagement and portfolio optimization. We hosted 124 events in 2022, including all major trade shows in our portfolio and almost doubling our 2021 total of 63 as we continue to return to a full slate of events after 2 years of COVID disruptions.

Importantly, we believe this recovery trend has not reached its full potential. We finished the year strong and business momentum is continuing to pick up in early 2023. We expect that the reopening of international travel, the easing of supply chain constraints and the removal of the COVID overhang will help drive incremental attendance and revenue growth in 2023 and beyond. In fact we're already seeing this in our prebooking trends as exhibitors are paying to reserve their space up to a year out. This performance is highly encouraging and points to the long-term growth potential of these shows. Since the new year, we have also seen a significant acceleration of buyer attendance at shows, which further supports our value proposition for exhibitors and has supported strong early rebook rates for future events.

For example, for the most recent Kitchen & Bath Industry Show, KBIS, held on January 30 through February 2, 2023; we saw a 26% increase in attendees as compared to the last prepandemic edition, which directly led to onsite rebooking more square foot space for 2024 events than we had in 2023 and we still have 11 more months before the next event to sell. While David will provide more details on the outlook, let me begin with some highlights, I will then discuss our road map for 2023 and beyond. Overall, we view 2022 as validating the exceptional value of in-person events. As we expected, our industry was not permanently impaired by COVID related shifts in work habits. If anything in an increasingly remote workplace, people are looking for opportunities for in-person connections and learning.

While routine business meetings have shifted online, trade shows continue to provide an essential in-person venue for buyers to touch and feel the products that they're buying in large volumes and for sellers to establish high quality leads. Customers have been eager to get back to in-person buying and selling that is essential to sourcing and completing high volume transactions. Recent studies and our 2022 results support this trend. A Freeman study conducted this year found that 63% of attendees prioritize discovering new products at live events, 69% view in-person events as the best source of training and content while 75% view them as the most trustworthy information force. As a result of these positive trends, our event revenues in 2022 were approximately 73% of pre-COVID levels and aggregate square footage was approximately 64%. We consider this a great success and in line with our expectations and those of the industry broadly.

The recovery in 2022 actively demonstrates that the industry is back post-COVID and there remains significant growth ahead for 2023, 2024 and beyond as the industry recovers to and surpasses pre-COVID levels. We expect to make additional progress towards pre-COVID levels this year with 2024 expected to be the year we surpass them. If you consider all the acquisitions we've made since 2019, what that means is that we are a larger and more diversified company than we were before the pandemic. Let me spend a few minutes on our strategy and how we're using all available levers of internal and external growth to get there. In addition to the recovery of live events driving significant organic growth, we've been active in expanding our offerings and capabilities to make Emerald stronger than ever through acquisitions, new show launches and greater growth at our embedded e-commerce SaaS platform, Elastic.

On the last day of 2021 we acquired MJBizCon, the leading B2B trade show in the cannabis industry along with its associated contents platform. In May of 2022 we created Xcelerator division, which is focused on launching new brands with an expected run rate of 4 to 6 new shows per year as it ramps up. In June we also acquired Advertising Week, a premier global event and content platform focused on the marketing, media and technology industries. We hosted a highly successful addition of Advertising Week New York in October bringing together over 12,000 attendees and exceeding both prepandemic attendance and revenues and launched Advertising Week Africa last month in Johannesburg, South Africa. Last July we also acquired Bulletin, a wholesale e-commerce platform that we're integrating into our New York NOW show and eventually the broader portfolio to enhance the experience for buyers and sellers with solid early results at last month's New York NOW Winter Show and momentum building for the summer one.

And in January 2023 we acquired Lodestone and its Overland Expo consumer events, extending our action sports franchise and expanding our offering to reach consumers in addition to our core B2B focus. Our e-commerce SaaS business called Elastic that we acquired in late 2020 continues to generate revenue growth in the high 20%s range in a mid-teens millions of dollars revenue base with over 30% growth in its customer base. We offer Elastic as a subscription-based product providing customers with a specialized wholesale e-commerce environment that dovetails nicely with our trade show business. In 2022 active customers using the platform grew from 185 to 248 in 2021. Elastic has proven to be incredibly sticky with its customer base and finished the year with a net revenue retention rate of 110%. For Emerald overall, our growth rate is expected to be in the 20%s in the immediate term as we benefit from the rebound in live events.

This flows through to our organic growth in the form of higher attendance and better pricing combined with the benefit of our new offerings. Our longer range growth plan post full recovery coming out of COVID is to deliver run rate organic growth in the mid to high single digits combined with growth from acquisitions in the mid to high single digits to contribute to double-digit annual revenue growth overall. Looking ahead to the rest of 2023, we remain focused on executing on our 3 pillars of value creation; customer centricity, 365-day engagements and portfolio optimization. In customer centricity, our goal is to make the customers' experience uniquely engaging and to continuously increase the value they extract from our events and other supporting properties. By intelligently investing in our brands, we can readily deliver on what the customer ultimately needs. We are a company that delivers marketing and sales leads at scale and the live events business has an extremely high ROI.

As a result, marketing executives across small and large businesses really depend on mediums like ours to garner leads in a face-to-face environment. Ultimately, what's most critical is making the experience a lot more effective when people are there in a live environment. We made substantial progress in building up our technology resources by consolidating the large amount of first-party data we generate across all of Emerald's events, content and e-commerce platforms. Our next step is to productize these valuable first-party data assets to better serve our customers, which is an ongoing effort being led by our Head of Product, a new role here at Emerald. These efforts include ID tagging customers to track their activity across Emerald's various events and products, which will help generate a continuous stream of first-party data related to transactions and lead generation.

We're also creating a single sign-on portal for exhibitors and attendees to manage their interactions with Emerald across shows, content and transactions. Over time our goal is to provide our customers with more intelligent matchmaking and a clearer picture of the return on investments they receive from the marketing dollars they put to work across Emerald's platform. This improves our stickiness with customers, incentivizes them to deploy more marketing dollars with Emerald and ultimately should help drive higher revenue per customer. An outcome of this can already be seen in our pricing where at our events in 2022, we were able to drive space rate pricing at mid-teens percent growth over prepandemic levels. Our second pillar of value creation, 365-day engagement, means that we provide multiple engine points to the customer engagement cycle throughout the year through trade shows, conferences, webinars, media content and our e-commerce offerings.

Our trade shows and conferences offer valuable in-person meeting time to make connections, build a sales pipeline and sail the cutting edge of industry changes. Through media content and webinars, our platform allows advertisers to reach our audiences in 20 different industry sectors where we have events to share knowledge, industry innovations and new products outside of the trade show environments. Leveraging our media content capabilities, we can constantly add and generate new leads for our customers on a year-round basis, which is an invaluable resource. Our e-commerce platform also gives buyers and sellers a digital marketplace for year-round selling. We are planning to launch a more sophisticated virtual showroom that will allow customers to see, interact and buy and sell products at any point during the year. Together, these offerings create a flywheel effect keeping our customers engaged year-round and delivering greater value through our complementary products.

Our third pillar of value creation is portfolio optimization, which includes new show launches and acquisitions. Our new event launches led by our Xcelerator unit are progressing and delivering a new means of driving growth and value creation. In 2022 we launched 4 new brands, including SIAL launched in March, is a food services event co-located with our international Pizza Expo and featuring 176 exhibiting companies and over 4,600 attendees. Decentralization Deciphered or D2, a Web3 oriented platform targeted towards C-suite financial and technology executives, which we launched in October. In November we launched reMind, a business resource platform dedicated to the fast growing psychedelics business community. reMind was co-located with MJBizCon last year leveraging the shared audiences across the 2 regulated industries.

And finally, we launched Mentera, a mental health focused content platform and virtual summit. Customers here are Chief Human Resources Officers and CEOs that are looking for solutions to better optimize employee mental health solutions. Mentera is scheduled to host its inaugural conference and exhibition in May of this year. These new event launches require very little in terms of new capital commitment from Emerald. Though they often initially operate at a loss while ramping up, new event launches offer the potential to rapidly scale by leveraging our existing core competencies. This allows us to calibrate our investments in response to real-time demand without making multimillion dollar a year commitments. While not all of our new shows will become a permanent fixture of our portfolio, we do expect event launches to contribute 1 percent point to 2 percent points of organic revenue growth per year while delivering higher returns on our capital as compared to a typical acquisition.

Lastly, our approach to acquisitions is central to our portfolio optimization strategy. Over the last 2 years, we focused intently on adding stability and scalability to the core Emerald platform allowing us to integrate new businesses and to do so in an efficient and effective manner to build real value. Today, we're one of the leading consolidators of live events with a portfolio of some of the most prominent trade shows. In a highly fragmented industry, Emerald can continue growing through acquisitions as we represent only a mid-single-digit percent of the U.S. market. We continue to build out our pipeline of acquisitions, highlighting our operational efficiencies and scale as a key advantage over other bidders. Acquisitions have generally been structured in a tax effective way providing us with over $70 million of present value of tax benefits. Our current trade show portfolio is highly diverse spanning a wide breadth of industries and we continue to expand our reach.

No single customer is more than 1% of revenue and our largest trade show is in the single-digit percent of revenue. Generally in the private market in our industry, there is an arbitrage opportunity between public market multiples for skilled assets like ours. And so it's truly conducive to buy things to create value and regenerate the cash, which also allows us to do so. We're operating in an industry that's benefiting from an outgoing -- ongoing post-COVID recovery and that has also shown signs that it will not only recover fully, but continue to grow well beyond its prepandemic size. We've demonstrated the ability to scale up many of our shows beyond their pre-COVID levels and we have the visibility into prebookings to expect that this trend will continue. In the meantime, we've been building up our capabilities with strategic acquisitions that are not only going to make us a bigger company than we were pre-COVID, but a better one.

Our events, content and commerce flywheel should continue to drive higher revenue per customer as we demonstrate our ability to deliver substantial ROI for our customers' marketing budgets. We have a capital-light business model supported by a strong balance sheet and multiple avenues to drive cash flow growth both organically and through acquisitions. Finally, I should highlight that we recently launched a new ESG page on our Investor Relations website. The new page provides details on our latest commitments and progress against our future goals in sustainability, social responsibility and governance. We hope you find this resource beneficial and do not hesitate to reach out if you like to discuss it.

With that, let me turn the call over to David Doft, our CFO.

Thank you, Herve, and good morning. Our fourth quarter revenue was $93.6 million compared to $41.1 million in the prior year quarter. The increase was primarily due to the ongoing recovery of our underlying business that delivered 27% organic growth and the acquisitions of MJBiz and Advertising Week, which staged their largest events in the fourth quarter. For the full year 2022, revenue was $325.9 million as compared to $145.5 million in 2021. Note that this revenue figure excludes the insurance proceeds recognized on the other income line. The increase in 2022 revenue is primarily due to events that staged in 2022 that had been canceled in 2021 due to COVID as well as organic growth which, as just noted, benefited from the ongoing recovery of the live events business. Fourth quarter adjusted EBITDA was $25 million as compared to $51 million in the prior year quarter. The decrease was due to insurance proceeds received in the prior year period partially offset by higher revenue from acquisitions and organic growth.

Excluding insurance proceeds, adjusted EBITDA in the fourth quarter of 2021 would have been negative $8.9 million resulting in a $34 million improvement year-over-year. Full year 2022 adjusted EBITDA, including insurance proceeds, was $239.6 million versus $44.1 million for the full year 2021, primarily due to events staged in 2022 that were canceled due to COVID in the prior year. Excluding insurance proceeds, adjusted EBITDA for the full year of 2022 would have been $56.8 million compared to negative $33.3 million in 2021, a $90 million improvement. Free cash flow for the full year 2022 included numerous unusual items related to our insurance litigation settlement and other items. Free cash flow was $25.3 million as compared to $12.0 million in 2021 after excluding insurance proceeds net of cash taxes, other items and contingent consideration paid in excess of the original estimate for acquisitions.

This was below our fiscal year 2022 free cash flow guidance of $60 million to $70 million due to working capital shifts related to the timing of event sign-ups and contractual deposit due dates. Let me offer a bit more context on what this all means. As a business, we typically have a solid line of sight into the timing of customer payments. Our exhibitors make advanced down payments to reserve a booth and are required to have paid in full before moving into their designated event space. This happens as much as 1 year in advance, which is a highly attractive working capital attribute. However, the COVID-19 pandemic significantly impacted Emerald's marketing and sales calendars while our customers struggled with lingering pandemic related issues like travel and supply chain disruptions. This led to shifts in the timing of event sign-ups as well as contractual deposit due dates making it difficult for us to have a high level of precision on the exact timing of cash flows in 2022, particularly in the second half of the year as the recovery gained momentum given the lack of historical precedent for such a situation.

To be clear, all customer monies are still due prior to move-in at our events and a large portion of the timing issues have begun to normalize in the new year. Over time we expect working capital changes and fluctuations affecting free cash flow to become more predictable as sales and payment cycles normalize. We expect to achieve at least $60 million of free cash flow in 2023 before the benefit of working capital improvements, which we do believe will be additive to cash flow this year given the trade show business enjoys negative working capital, which means this is a source of cash as revenue grows. Turning to the expense side. We continue to effectively manage our cost structure in this inflationary environment. Our largest exposure is labor costs either through our own FTEs or via contractors on site at our events. Also we have some minimal exposure to paper and ink costs for our content assets.

In general, we expect to maintain the ability to pass along inflation linked price increases which combined with our procurement efforts should allow us to protect margin. At the corporate level, we've made significant strides in improving our cost structure. The work we did in 2020 to centralize our purchasing has led to meaningful annual savings and helps us limit increases going forward. We've opened an offshore hub in Manila to ramp a number of functions, including telemarketing, sales support and data management. We've also rationalized our real estate footprint, including exiting 6 office properties in the fourth quarter and shifting towards a more remote workforce. In addition to estimated cost savings of $2 million per year, we expect this shift to further enhance Emerald's ability to attract top talent nationwide. Our fourth quarter results reflect the impact of a onetime lease abandonment cost of approximately $3 million.

Turning to the balance sheet. We had $239.1 million of cash as of December 31, 2022 versus $366.1 million as of September 30, 2022. Our total liquidity, including our undrawn $110 million revolver, is $348.7 million. During the quarter, we completed the extension of $100 million of our credit facility with the remaining $10 million completed in January. We also repaid $100 million of the outstanding balance of our term loan, which is now $415.3 million as of December 31 and serves to reduce our gross leverage and interest expense. The strength of our balance sheet and cash flow generation support our ability to opportunistically invest in and grow the business. We plan to continue to balance capital allocation between acquisitions, investments in our own business, opportunistic share buybacks and debt reduction. On buybacks, we repurchased 2.9 million shares in the full year of 2022 at an average price of $3.60 bringing our total buyback to 5.4 million shares since the start of 2021.

Last quarter our Board of Directors approved an extension and expansion of our share repurchase program to allow for the repurchase of $20 million of common stock through December 31, 2023. Our net debt as of year-end was $176.2 million reflecting a net leverage ratio of 1.89x trailing 12-month consolidated EBITDA as defined in our credit agreement. We do not expect to draw on our revolver in the near term. At this time, I'd like to briefly review our capital structure so that those who are new to our story can more easily value the business. At quarter-end, we had 67.6 million shares of common stock outstanding as well as 71.4 million shares of convertible preferred stock outstanding. The convertible preferred shares have a liquidation preference per share of $6.66 as of December 31, 2022 while accreting at an annual rate of 7%, which compounds quarterly.

When you divide that liquidation preference by the initial conversion price of $3.52 per share, it equates to each share of convertible preferred stock being convertible into approximately 1.89 shares of common stock. When multiplied by the total number of shares of convertible preferred stock outstanding as of December 31, it equates to 135.0 million shares of common stock on an as-converted basis. Add to that the 67.6 million common shares already outstanding and Emerald has a total of 202.6 million shares of common stock outstanding on an as-converted basis as of December 31, 2022. As of yesterday's closing price on our common stock, this converts to a market cap of approximately $709 million. We have an estimated contingent consideration on our balance sheet of $12.3 million for acquisitions made in the past 3 years as well as a deferred tax asset worth over $70 million discounted to present value based on the tax treatment of certain of our acquisitions.

This leads to an enterprise value of $825 million given our net debt outstanding. As a reminder, we have the right to force conversion of the convertible preferred stock starting June 29 of this year if our common stock price exceeds $6.16 for 20 consecutive trading days. Turning now to guidance. We expect to generate revenue in excess of $400 million in 2023 and adjusted EBITDA in excess of $100 million. The growth in adjusted EBITDA reflects an approximately 76% increase over 2022 adjusted EBITDA excluding insurance proceeds. Our guidance implies an adjusted EBITDA margin of approximately 25% and we believe we have substantial runway to continue improving on this number as we work our way back to 35% plus margins we saw prior to COVID. We expect free cash flow in 2023 of over $60 million before accounting for the benefits of working capital inflows. This would bring our net debt to adjusted EBITDA ratio closer to 1x assuming no incremental M&A.

Thank you very much for your time. And with that, we will now open the line for questions.

(Operator Instructions) Our first question comes from the line of Barton Crockett with Rosenblatt Securities.

You articulated your margin expectation for this year and the belief that there could be more to come and I was just wondering what is kind of the delta? Why are you still kind of below the margins that you had prepandemic and what do we need to develop to kind of retain those former margin levels?

Barton, this is David. I think there are 3 items that are important to keep in mind around the margins in the near term versus the long term. One is because we had the benefit of insurance proceeds, we made the choice to maintain our SG&A and continue to invest in the business even though our underlying business was not at full revenue capacity. So that means that the impact on these smaller events initially post pandemic is that the entire difference flows through the EBITDA right now because we've maintained our SG&A to build for the future. The second item is that we're also investing in launching new events and that's a new initiative for Emerald versus prepandemic and in the initial couple of years, that's a money losing endeavor while we build scale and create value in those events.

We do expect as we get to year 3, year 4 of the new event launch initiative that it will pivot from money losing to money making and then begin to be margin accretive going forward. The third is actually in the acquisitions that we've made. One of the businesses -- or 2 of the businesses that we bought are software businesses that in order to get ready to scale more meaningfully and at a more effective margin longer term, we're currently running at a loss. And so that's been the plan at the business. And so if you exclude that, already the underlying business is a few margin points higher than what we're reporting overall. And then if you take into account as we scale back to normalcy and we're clearly seeing that as you can tell from our prepared remarks, we should have high visibility on returning to those prior margin levels.

Okay. And just to kind of follow up on that. What would be a sense of how long it would take to get back to those margins given you've got some investments that will take some time to run their course and maybe there's more investments coming? How do you kind of think about the timing to get back to those prepandemic margin levels?

This is Herve, Barton. I would expect us to return to these margin levels in about 3 years.

Okay. All right. And then another question, if I can. I know that international has been an important part of the exhibition business that was disrupted and I know you flagged that as something that's going to return. I was wondering if you could give some more kind of color about what you've lost and to what degree things have kind of recovered internationally and what is yet to kind of come back?

Barton, this is David again. So prepandemic international was about 10% of our revenue in terms of exhibitors and attendees coming to our events here in the United States. But for some of our events it's more and for others it's frankly close to 0. And so the real impact is not just that 10% not coming back and they're beginning to and we'll talk about that in a second, but it's the impact that that had on others coming to the event because if key international exhibitors weren't attending, there was a trickle-down effect on some domestic players not attending as well. And so as the international travel begins to pick up again, as China opens up, as supply chain issues work themselves out; we not only are beginning to see international attendees come back and in recent weeks and months it definitely has begun to pick up particularly since the U.S. really opened its borders in the summer of '22. We forget it was only that recent that there were still restrictions on coming into the United States because of the pandemic. We expect both international exhibitors to return to prior levels and then the alternative effect of domestic exhibitors and attendees returning with them as we work back towards prior scale.

The only other thing I would add is while some events at Emerald have had some international sales resources, that was not the case across the company until recently. In 2022 we created the international sales group and now we have dedicated resources that are actively prospecting customers outside of the United States to come to the U.S. and making sure that we have processes to facilitate their participation in the U.S. So we believe that that will be a bigger part of our revenue moving forward.

Okay. And just to kind of follow up on that. You said prepandemic it was kind of 10% and there were the kind of knock-on impacts benefits in terms of attracting people. What was the international attendance last year and how did it ramp during the course of the year?

So in the first half of last year it was almost 0. In the second half it began to ramp a little bit, but we're still in the low single-digit percent of overall. And just as an anecdote, I mean up until really 6, 8 weeks ago, we saw nobody from China and now we're just now beginning to see a trickle in of Chinese exhibitors. So we're excited about that. Again for some of our events, it's more meaningful. There are events that have 30% international and as I said, others that have 0. So for those that are more meaningfully exposed to international, we expect that 2023 and then 2024 will have more meaningful bounce backs.

Okay. And then just one final question, if I can, and I appreciate you're taking these questions. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about what you're seeing in the start of this year in terms of you've got some meaningful events like the Prosper event. So what are you seeing at the start of this year? Are you seeing anything that would suggest there's any type of macroeconomic headwinds at all for your business at this point?

Sure. So the Prosper event, which is an event for established marketplace sellers like Amazon and Walmart and so forth, is actually going on as you know right now and we're pleased with that. It continues to grow nicely year-on-year. But on your overall question of the economy, we're seeing some post-pandemic tailwinds and those are more than offsetting any volatility that we could see short term in the general economy. So our perspective is we remain optimistic and don't see any major economic impact to our business or to our forecast as we've outlined it.

Okay. But just to ask a little bit more on that. What have you seen in past recession cycles in terms of its impact on your business? How does this industry trend through recession cycles in your experience?

So if you look at the historical data, our industry tends to be late into the cycle and the reason for that is because so many exhibitors prebook up to a year in advance as we've discussed that they're already locked in. The other reason is that trade shows have proven to be amongst the highest if not the highest return on investment for their marketing budgets and so it warrants continuing to spend on it. And that also has shown that it's been a much shallower impact on the trade show business historically because of the value that it delivers. But I think to echo Herve's point about the post pandemic tailwind, the reality is we've already been living in more than a recession in our business. We're coming back from 0. And so the tailwinds that we have of businesses working to build their sales pipelines and build their businesses at a time where they had to find less efficient ways to do so when the world was shut down. That tailwind is very powerful and from what we can tell is more than offsetting any volatility in the economy.

Our next question comes from the line of Derek Greenberg with Maxim Group.

I just wanted to touch on some of the financials from this quarter. Starting off with SG&A, I saw that this was kind of a lot lower than it has been historically and in the past quarters. I was wondering what this might be attributable to and how you view the run rate going forward?

So SG&A has a bunch of unusual items in it in the quarter and in the year. Those are the other items that we tend to add back to adjusted EBITDA. The most meaningful that brought the number down this quarter was an adjustment of the estimated contingent consideration paid, which was a pretty decent size number and you can see that in the press release and the notes. And ultimately, there were in some instances acquisitions that underperformed versus their earn-out target and so we have to bring down that estimate. It's a mark-to-market every quarter where we have to estimate what the estimated earn-out will be that's going to be paid in the future. And so that's the key driver on this quarter. I will add that overall we're actually extremely pleased with the acquisitions that we've made. One of the I think benefits to us of being active during the pandemic period and early post-pandemic period on M&A is we were able to align purchase prices with outcomes and trajectory of recoveries going forward to ensure we're driving the proper return on our capital on Emerald. And so this is a great example of the flexibility of the structure and how it benefits us.

Okay. Got it. Moving on to next year and your guidance for revenue of $400 million and obviously significant growth in just the entire business. I was wondering how this growth looked for the different segments that you guys have in terms of just events for software versus your content business, if you're seeing higher levels of growth in, say, software compared to the legacy events and just how you view that profile.

Sure. Overall, the growth rates actually are fairly consistent across the group. It just kind of happens to work out that way this year. The software business surely is the higher growth business and we expect it will continue in that mid-high 20%s growth rate that we've seen since we've acquired that business a couple of years ago. The events and content business otherwise have fairly similar growth profiles as well that would have more had the events shift because of the bounceback and the content business was a little more stable during the pandemic obviously versus the events. So a little more weighted on events and a little less on the content, but generally they're not too far apart.

Okay. Got it. And then maybe just some more color on how you plan to use cash on hand and maybe just continuing to pay down debt as you stated that you paid down $100 million worth this quarter. I was wondering if there's any like target leverage ratio that you're looking towards in the future, just how you view that entire situation?

Sure. So as I mentioned in the script, we have 4 potential uses of cash. One is continued internal investment and where it makes sense and where we see high returns on capital, we'll go ahead and keep doing that. The second is acquisitions and we can continue to buy businesses we believe in mid to high single-digit EBITDA multiples. With the benefits of our platform and synergies, those multiples come down pretty quickly and drive incremental growth and incremental margin for the business and truly incremental value as part of a private market to public market arbitrage. You only need to look at the recent announced transactions in the space, Informa buying Tarsus or the bid for Hyve by Providence Equity Partners, to see what the asset values are in this space as we return to the post-pandemic world.

Outside of that, we do plan to continue to opportunistically look at share buybacks and then ultimately look at our gross leverage levels and the balance of those will depend on the opportunity that's out there is really the most honest answer to give. There's no set numbers on those. Ultimately if the right acquisitions aren't there to drive value, then we might look to do more on the buyback or we might look to reduce the gross leverage going forward. As we get back to normalcy, we do plan to run the business at less than 3x net debt to EBITDA. We're less than that now because of the benefit we've had from the insurance settlement and the cash inflow we've had and so that does give us a lot of flexibility to make the right decisions for the business to increase shareholder value going forward.

Okay, great. Moving on to the Emerald Xcelerator division, I was just kind of curious you stated that new event launches could contribute up to 1 percentage point or 2 percentage points of organic growth. I was wondering if that's just like the entire slate or if that's per event? And then in addition to that, how you just plan to allocate resources to that division?

So that's the entire slate is what we expect that to do and so simply if we're guiding $400 million of revenue this year, think $4 million to $8 million of incremental revenue a year from new launches and increasing as our business increases and as we have -- as those underlying businesses themselves scale and grow as we launch new ones. As we discussed in the question from Barton around margins, that is an investment in the short term. That business was a mid-single-digit million dollar investment made in 2022 and as we scale those businesses, that investment reduces and helps us drive incremental margin going forward.

Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes our question-and-answer session. I'll turn the floor back to Mr. Sedky for any final comments.

Excellent. Well, we're very pleased with our 2022 performance that provides a very solid foundation for continued growth. And I want to thank you all for your time and participation today and look forward to speaking to you at the next -- on the next call. Have a great day.

Thank you. This concludes today's conference. You may now disconnect your lines. Thank you for your participation.