QuinStreet Inc (QNST) 2024 Q4 法說會逐字稿

Good day, and welcome to QuinStreet's fiscal fourth quarter and full-year 2024 financial results conference call. Today's conference is being recorded. (Operator Instructions)

At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Senior Director of Investor Relations and Finance, Robert Amparo. Mr. Amparo, you may begin.

Thank you, operator, and thank you, everyone, for joining us. As we report QuinStreet's fiscal fourth quarter and full-year 2024 financial results. Joining me on the call today are Chief Executive Officer, Doug Valenti; and Chief Financial Officer, Greg Wong.

Before we begin, I would like to remind you that the following discussion will contain forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from those projected by such statements and are not guarantees of future performance factors that may cause results to differ from our forward-looking statements are discussed in our recent SEC filings, including our most recent 8-K filing made today and our most recent 10-Q filing.

Forward-looking statements are based on assumptions as of today, and the company undertakes no obligation to update these statements. Today, we will be discussing both GAAP and non-GAAP measures. A reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP financial measures is included in today's earnings press release, which is available on our Investor Relations website at investor dot quinstreet.com.

With that, I will turn the call over to Douglas. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, Rob. Welcome, everyone. The broad-based re-ramp of auto insurance revenue accelerated in fiscal Q4 with revenue growing over 200% year over year. We also grew revenue 13% in non-insurance financial services, client verticals and 12% and home services. Overall, total company revenue grew 52% year over year to a record $198 million.

Adjusted EBITDA jumped about 500% year over year in the quarter, to over $11 million. Our balance sheet also strengthened. We now have over $50 million in cash and no bank debt.

Looking ahead, our expectations for auto insurance remain strongly and confidently positive. Carriers continue to report attractive financial results and are still ramping their spend. They have not yet reached previous peak product or geo footprints. Also, re-expanding and re-optimizing media supply to best meet the extraordinary demand in auto insurance should be a tailwind going forward, especially with consumer shopping continuing at or near-peak levels.

Perhaps most importantly, auto insurance trends should continue up and to the right as the relentless shift to digital performance marketing has returned as the dominant theme driving long-term channel and market growth. We are also confident in continued progress and performance in our other client verticals. Overall, we expect strong revenue growth and margin expansion in fiscal Q1 and in full fiscal year 2025, which began on July 1.

Turning to our outlook for fiscal Q1, revenue is expected to be between $220 million and $230 million. Growth of 82% year over year at the midpoint of the range. Adjusted EBITDA is expected to be $14 million to $16 million. Growth of over 1400% at the midpoint of the range.

As an initial, early, full fiscal year 2025 outlook, we expect revenue of between $800 million and $850 million, growth of 34% year over year at the midpoint of the range, and adjusted EBITDA of $50 million to $60 million, growth of 170% year over year at the midpoint of the range. We believe that there are opportunities to scale revenue and expand margins even further than that. And we will refine our outlook as the year progresses.

With that, I will turn the call over to Greg.

Thank you, Doug. Hello, and thanks to everyone for joining us today. Q4 was a record revenue quarter for QuinStreet. All of our client verticals delivered year-over-year growth in the quarter. For the June quarter, total revenue grew 52% year over year and was $198.3 million. Adjusted net income was $6.5 million or $0.11 per share. And adjusted EBITDA was $11 million.

As Doug noted, the strong re-ramp of auto insurance continued in the June quarter. Auto insurance revenue ramped throughout the quarter, and the demand from carriers is broad-based. Additionally, our outlook for the vertical remains bullish as carriers continue to expand footprints, and as the shift to digital performance marketing returns as the dominant long-term theme in driving channel and market growth.

Looking at revenue by client vertical, our financial services client vertical represented 69% of Q4 revenue and grew 82% year over year to $136.9 million, a record revenue quarter for that business. Our home services client vertical represented 30% of Q4 revenue and grew 12% year over year to $59.3 million. Also a record revenue quarter for the business.

The other revenue was the remaining $2 million of Q4 revenue turn into our full fiscal year 2024 performance, we reported revenue of $613.5 million up 6% year over year.

Our financial services client vertical represented 64% of full fiscal year revenue and grew 3% year over year to $392.6 million. Our home services client vertical represented 35% of full fiscal year revenue and grew 10% year over year to $211.9 million. Other revenue represented the remaining $9 million of full fiscal year revenue. Adjusted EBITDA for full fiscal year 2024 was $20.4 million.

Turn to the balance sheet. We close the year with $50.5 million of cash and equivalents and no bank debt.

In closing, our outlook on the business has never been brighter. We expect another record revenue quarter in fiscal Q1 with further margin expansion. We remain well positioned to benefit from the re-ramp of auto insurance client spending and are seeing continued momentum in our non-insurance client verticals. We expect strong total company revenue growth and adjust the EBITDA expansion driven by our diversified portfolio of client verticals.

With that, I'll turn it over to the operator for Q&A.

(Operator Instructions) John Campbell, Stephens.

Hey guys, good afternoon.

Hey, John.

Hey, so obviously really solid results as far as the client demand. I mean, it's coming in, I think, way better than any of us expected. On the FY25 revenue guidance, the high end of your range is actually above where consensus is for FY26.

So, it's tough to poke holes at it. But if I look, if I annualize the revenue this quarter, right, and this is not a seasonally strong quarter, which seems like it's pretty fair. It assumes that your midpoint of the revenue guidance is about 4% higher. I'm thinking you've probably got a lot of conservatism in there, but maybe if you could talk to if you expect a deceleration in home services or anything like that, or you know, anything non auto. Any kind of color that would be helpful.

Yeah, thank you, John. We do not expect a deceleration in any of our businesses. We expect all of our businesses to grow a pretty strong double-digit rates this year. I would say that it's a couple of things.

One is it's the first guide of the year, and it's early in the year. So we certainly don't want to get too far out ahead of ourselves. The other thing is the insurance ramp has been spectacular largely foretold by us, as you would, I'm sure you know given that we did get to the range on the year as we had said we thought we might. And we just wanna see how it settles out. We don't have any indications that it won't extend, but we wanna see how it settles out as we and others work to regrow and optimize media to align better with the surge in demand, which is now what we're all working hard on, and see if and as that has any impact at all.

So I would say first guide of the year, you're gonna find us pretty conservative when we go out with the first guide of the year. We do not expect any deceleration in any parts of the business, and we do expect auto insurance to continue to be very strong for the rest of the year and beyond. But we'd like to see how it settles out in terms of the precise numbers as the media side of the market catches up to the demand side of the market.

Okay, that's helpful. And then maybe like a bigger picture industry, maybe strategic question, but I think a lot of your competitors are -- I think this is a broad-based recovery. Everybody's feeling the strength right now. As far as the margin flow through, I think you talked a little bit about -- maybe last quarter talking about ten percent margins for this year.

But everybody's kind of chasing the same opportunity it seems like at this point. So maybe a little bit lower margin you have to obviously be there for your carrier partners you can't go sit on the sidelines. So I totally understand it, but like as I think about industry consolidation and and I've been in the industry I think you're maybe one of the godfathers or forefathers of this industry, talk to me about what you feel like the market could where the people like the market ahead over time it just feels like if you take some four or five of these competitors to make one, or two, the whole customer acquisition cost, the margin opportunity is really there for you.

Yeah, John, it's a good question. Let me touch on the margin first of all. We think that 10% is still where we're heading. In terms of this particular quarter in the near term, the heavier mix of auto insurance doesn't help that. Because as you know, auto insurance given its scale, maturity, competitiveness comes in at a little bit lower than average, medium, margin, percent.

We expect that mix to fix itself over time as we continue to expand all the other businesses. And we expect the media, the margins and auto insurance actually get better from here. As we worked as I indicated before, optimize the media against that surge in demand. Nobody had time to do that.

With the demand came so fast, what media was still available got bit up by everybody. And it's taken a little while for the other media channels to reinvest and regrow themselves to catch up. That's all good stuff for going forward. That's all tailwind stuff for going forward.

In terms of the strategic context, I'm not -- there are arguments for and against consolidation. A number of the larger clients want more than one player in the role that we play. And so it could be, and that consolidating could be -- you could not get the main, synergy you're hoping for, which is the hope for increase in media margin or gross margin through that combined market power.

And that's something that I think is a big concern for anybody thinking about consolidating. There are a lot of other potential barriers to consolidation in terms of how different companies operate, what they're good at, whether or not those are synergistic or not, if they could be combined in a way that didn't destroy more value than it created.

So I think it's a complicated question. It's not something I would count on in the foreseeable future. It's not something I would count out in the long term, depending on how these markets continue to evolve. But I think in any and all cases, we're going to be in really good shape. We are, we could not feel better about the setup for Quinn street.

All really great points. I appreciate the color.

Thank you, John.

Zach Cummings, B. Riley Securities.

Hi, good afternoon. Thanks for taking my questions and congrats on the strong into your fiscal '24. Just curious if you could give some more insight into where you're seeing strength among the carriers? I imagine there's some that are further along in terms of their recovery, but just curious of the trends that you're seeing and how you expect that to continue to play out in the coming quarters.

Yes, Zach. More broad based than ever in terms of scale demand. We have several clients doing multiple millions of dollars per month with us. We have twice that number. So, I'd say between 5 and 10 clients, depending on how you count some of it, doing over in total -- doing over one, at least $1 million a month with us. And we're seeing it across the spectrum in terms of both direct carriers as well as more agent-driven carriers.

We're seeing it across the product mix, clicks, calls, and leads, although, you know, we're dominant in the clicks on the direct side. We see have a lot more market to penetrate on the agency and lead side and call side of the industry. So a mix of carriers and a mix of products and a very healthy diverse mix and probably the healthiest most diverse mix we've ever had, honestly, in terms of the breadth of the footprint is how I would mainly characterize it.

I would say I don't see any -- but the one other common theme though is that nobody's really back to their pre-COVID peak in terms of their footprint coverage, of in terms of geo coverage and product coverage. So for example, not many folks back in California yet. And a lot of the folks not covering big parts of Florida and or not covering Florida in a certain type of coverage range.

And I could go. There's list, there's list after list after list after list. And then and there are still carriers, significant carriers who have not really moved dramatically from their lows of the past few years. So there's --it's a good broad-based mix. Still nobody back to their pre-COVID peak and still others not really up in the market.

And one of the areas that's still lagging quite a bit is the independent agency channel because they've just now started to get product back of carriers coming back into the market. And so it will still take them a while to get staff back up, get set back up and have enough that product, but they're in the right States to, to make their business work. So it's, it's been, it's broad based, but it's still not complete by any stretch.

Understood. And my one other question really centers around home services. Can you talk about your preparations and in terms of one to one consent regulations under the TCPA with those going into effect early next year? Any sort of indications of what kind of impact that could present to home services and how you're prepping to work through that?

That was a great question and it is mainly for us, as you know. It's mainly a home services thing, somewhere between 20% and 30% of our total business would be impacted or applicable under the regulation. And just to make -- to level set everybody, the FCC came out with a modification to the TCPA consumer consent rules that is slated to go into effect next January, which requires a consent rule consumers to consent one-to-one for any service provider that intends to contact them either by phone or by text.

And that is not current industry practices. Currently, you, in leads, and this applies to mainly leads based on what I just said, as I'm sure you figured out. And so that means that any lead that's generated, the consumer has to opt in, specifically opt-in for that service right of contact. And that's new for the industry, and the industry's got to adapt to it.

A few things. First and foremost, we believe that it's well accounted for in terms of any impact or any effects it will have in the plan and outlook we just gave you, including the fact that we think there's probably, assuming we continue to execute well more, that we can add to that over time. So that's probably the most important point.

The other point should be we've been involved and known about this likely regulation for quite some time. We have a good dialogue with the FCC. We understand and of course respect what their objectives are here. We may or may not have gone about it in the same way.

We think that the -- and the main reason is that it is probably going to have a pretty negative effect on smaller service providers because they won't have the name recognition with consumers. And so they'll be less likely to get an opt-in.

As you know, QuinStreet traffic is primarily and mainly in large providers, big branded players were dominated in our client base by the big brands. But we've noticed coming, we've been looking at and testing and preparing for it for quite some time. And so I think that while there may be some disruption, which again is fully accounted for in our outlook, might likely to be a lot because we've had so much notice and we've been preparing for it and it only affects, or applies to 20% to 30% of our business, to the extent it has any impact.

And I think in the longer run, and I don't mean 10 years, I think the next two to three to four years, it's a really good thing for the channel. And it's a really good thing for QuinStreet. It's going to take out, clean up, get rid of a lot of the junk in the channel. There are a lot of folks who do nothing but buy and resell leads and contacts and column leads and overmatch consumers to providers, to the tune of more than 5, 10 times.

And that is not helpful to our consumer response. It's not helpful to the long-term health of the channel. It's not helpful to the clients. We don't do any of that.

And so that means that there's gonna be a lot more market share and a lot more market demand for what we do. The other thing is it will likely make leads under that program much more highly effective and much more highly converting, which will make them more valuable. And nobody's better positioned than QuinStreet to benefit from that.

We are all about being close to our clients and right pricing to quality and to value. It's going to be something we'll get to. It's California guide. And I think probably more than a California guide. And we feel really good about the other side.

Understood. Well, thanks for taking my questions and best of luck with the rest of the quarter.

Thank you, Zach.

Jason Kreyer, Craig Hallam.

Great. Thank you guys. Again, nice results here. You included a comment about just the opportunity to scale revenue emergence faster, curious if that's just a nod to conservatism in the numbers or, or are you kind of alluding to some strategic opportunities that you see over the course of the year?

Jason, we don't have a great connection. I think Rob got the gist of that. Rob, what was that? Conservatism in the guide and any upside based off of our initiatives? We do think there's a lot of potential upside based on our initiatives, Jason, both because of the current run rate, assuming that doesn't settle out differently, and because of a lot of initiative we've got working in all of the businesses.

So while I think this is a fair outlook, given how early it is in the year and making sure that we think about, I guess what I might facetiously call a duration risk. I think in terms of where we would put it on the scale relative to what we have in our internal plans based on the execution against the initiatives, we'd say it's pretty conservative, yeah.

Okay, apologies if I have a bad connection, I'm gonna try to squeeze one more, but you just mentioned the focus on optimizing media supply. Can you just elaborate on the things you can do there?

You bet, a few things. First of all, as I said, the demand came in so quickly that any discretionary media, in other words, media that isn't proprietary to any one of us that are in this business was bid up very quickly because it was scarce, right? Scarcity. Simple supply and demand happening.

That will soften as more media comes online. Folks that had stopped investing in, stopped in either content or campaigns or other ways of driving media for auto insurance are very rapidly trying to rebuild that to catch up, including us, but also a lot of our partners. So as that catches up, that will cause media to be more right priced to its true value rather than overpriced because it's scarce. So that's a big part of it.

Another big part of it is that it has come in so quickly and in a narrower footprint than you would ever expect. And across so many different clients so suddenly that the normal process and procedure we go through to make sure that we adequately segment, match, and right price that media to the right carrier in the right way, we just haven't caught up.

And that's a huge part of what we do to add value and create and extract surplus from the media. And so we have not had -- we just haven't had time to do all of that yet. So those two dimensions are things that we will be doing and that we're hard at work doing right now.

Great, thank you very much.

Thank you, Jason.

Jim Goss, Barrington Research.

All right, thank you. I was wondering if any M&A opportunities seemed to be on the horizon, either tuck-in or otherwise. I know you made a couple that have been material in both the financial and home services side of your business.

Yeah, we're always looking. I would say nothing imminent, but we are a natural consolidator of the small to mid-sized players on the media, client, or technology side of our industry. And we will continue to be so. We've had very, very good results from our acquisitions, both small and large, including some of the smaller ones lately, but I would say we'll stay in market.

And will continue to be opportunistic. That's the number one thing we expect to use capital for over time. And it's just, but there's nothing imminent.

Okay. And if we move -- as we move toward the time when interest rate cuts seem likely to begin to materialize, are there certain verticals you expect, or businesses even, you expect will benefit more than others, either in financial or in services? And are there any new verticals to potentially target?

I think all the businesses are in pretty good position relative to interest rate cuts and, by the way, relative to a recession. We're very well positioned if, in fact, there is a recession. I think latest estimates are 25% to 35% of that. I'd love to go business by business.

I think we're in phenomenal shape relative to that. We've grown through every past recession. So I think we're very well positioned for that in terms of interest rates. I don't expect that there's gonna be a huge impact on any of our businesses from interest rates coming down.

Here are some of the dynamics though. In our personal loans business, we will likely see a resurgence of lending relative to debt and credit management. As you know, that had shifted the other way when interest rates went up, we'll see that go back. We're ready for that. We have great client coverage. We'll show just as I think, flexible and faster response as we did the one way when we go the other way.

But that will be a dynamic. I think in home services, you'll go from – you'll still have people that won't refi because I think 70% of mortgage holders are still – have still under 5% mortgage. So there won't be a lot of refi action going on. We're not in that business, but it may loosen up moving.

So more people may move. If they do, that usually does generate some home services activity. If they don't move or if they don't want to move because they're in too low a mortgage, that usually generates some home services activity, because they wanna nest and they wanna get their home ready for lots of things, including aging.

And we are highly leveraged to aging in place as in several of our trades in home services. I don't think it will have much of an effect in credit cards and probably keep the industry healthier because today the rates on balances are prohibited, even though the credit card industry is very, very healthy right now, as you heard from the banks and you would hear from us.

I think in our banking business, which is our smallest independent client vertical if you will, there'll be a shift around to different kinds of products, but I don't think that business will go away because we're not going back to zero. And if it goes back to 3%, 4%, there's still going to be a place for CDs and savings accounts and money market funds and those kinds of things in the consumer mix.

So you know, as I and insurance, I just can't expect part of the any effect. I don't know that I can't think of any way that it would meaningfully impact in the range of likely happens anything.

A reminder though, going back to the recession, auto insurance shopping typically increases during the recession. So, I think we've done a lot of scenario planning. We really like the setup for us in whatever scenario you're looking at.

Okay, maybe one last one. I wonder, you've talked sometimes of states that are avoiding adding new policies. Is there any exposure of note in your area, especially among larger states that could be important to you that are very negative and some of the new auto insurance that would be more appropriate to you?

I don't think so. We don't see anything like that that would be material at all. And by the way, I forgot to answer part of your last question, Jim, and I apologize. You asked about new verticals. Not explicitly new verticals.

But what we will do and we have plans to do is continue to add new trades and home services and some of those trades are many millions of dollars a year. So it's the effect is almost a new vertical. We expect to add new segments in banking, including trading platforms and other ways that people put their money to work and credit cards.

We expect to add new segments of cards. We're really, really leveraged promotional, miles based, cards now, and there are a lot of other areas of cards where we can get a lot bigger in insurance where we're growing, um, and it will continue to grow a new areas of insurance, including B2B and commercial insurance, which is a big initiative for us.

And so we won't, and not -- none that we would at the big name level necessarily get into. Though we didn't expect you then to personal loans when we did. So certainly we'll remain opportunistic. But we will continue to add big chunky legs to the business that create more footprint for growth in the future.

All right, thanks for all your elaboration. Thank you, Jim.

Chris Sakai, Singular Research.

Yes, hi Doug and Greg. Hey Chris. So on your experience with prior auto insurance sort of turnarounds like we're seeing, how high and how much can it keep growing before it tails off?

Hey Chris, it's a massive market and most of the spend is still offline. As far as I know, we still only have one significant, one of the majors progressive. Just a couple of years ago, five of these started spending more than half their marketing media budget online.

If you look at the consumer shopping patterns and you allocate budget based on that, most carriers, most clients of any type, should be spending 70% or more on their budgets online. So the most advanced, most penetrated carrier still isn't there. And most of the others, none of the others that we know of, except for some of the upstarts, which aren't that significant, are way, way, way below where they should be.

So that's going to be billions of dollars still to come in terms of just the natural shift over to digital and they find their way to digital performance marketplaces like ours when they do that because that's where you want to be.

And obviously, I don't think that's arguable anymore when you look at the patterns and you look at people like Progressive. And so that could last us for many, many years to come. And then you've got commercial insurance, which is super early and it's half the industry, and you've got other areas of insurance that you can tuck in.

So we, ourselves, participate in just really mainly clicks to direct carriers, which is one half of the pretty much one half of the overall P&C market. And we have clicks and we have more clicks to more carriers because the budget moving online. We have calls and leads which are very early stages for us that apply to the market that we're ramping up very aggressively, growing very aggressively.

We have the more agency driven clients which have not represented much for us historically and as we add the other products. And then we get to go into the agency side, as I indicated, which is half PNC mark and then the other half of the overall mark is commercial. So, we will be growing at good rates and insurance long past my leaving QuinStreet and I don't have any near term plans to leave QuinStreet.

Okay, thanks for that answer. And then one question as well. I know there's a lot of fires in the West Coast and storms in the East Coast. Are you seeing an increase in revenue and online searching for different insurances because of that?

We're seeing a lot of searching and shopping in California, but not a lot of carriers willing to cover California, both because of the risk and because California won't allow insurers to raise their rates big enough, fast enough.

So there's a lot of wasted shopping, if you will, going on in California because consumers just aren't finding results. But more broadly, the main thing we're seeing relative to shopping and activity is record shopping levels because of inflation and consumers trying to find ways to save money, and because of the increase in rates that they've seen over the past few years.

Insurance rates, you probably know yourself, have gone up 30% to 50% after multiple years of compound rate increases. So there's a big surge in shopping nationwide because of rate increases and because of inflation. And that's going to get bigger, we think -- with as if and as the economy softens more, so consumers are more consumers are going to want to save money.

So we expect consumer shopping to be high for a long time to come and should be a tailwind to the industry for quite a while. And the rate down cycle, if it starts happening, then you're going to get more shopping again, because then people are going to want to go see who lowered the rates first where so changes are good for us in insurance and there's a lot of change right now.

Okay, great. Thanks for the answer.

Thank you, Chris.

There are no further questions at this time. Thank you everyone for taking the time to join QuinStreet's earnings call. Replay information is available on the earnings press release issued this afternoon. This concludes today's conference call. Thank you.