Radiant Logistics Inc (RLGT) 2019 Q4 法說會逐字稿

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to your Radiant Logistics' Conference Call. This afternoon, Bohn Crain, Radiant Logistics' Founder and CEO; and Radiant's Chief Financial Officer, Todd Macomber, will discuss financial results for the company's fourth fiscal quarter and 12 months ended June 30, 2019. Following their comments, we will open the call to questions. This conference is scheduled for 30 minutes.

This conference call may include forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. The company has based these forward-looking statements on its current expectations and projections about future events. These forward-looking statements are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and assumptions about the company that may cause the company's actual results or achievements to be materially different from the results or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. While it is impossible to identify all the factors that may cause the company's actual results or achievements to differ materially from those set forth in our forward-looking statements, such factors include those that have in the past, and may in the future, be identified in the company's SEC filings and other public announcements, which are available on the Radiant website at www.radiantdelivers.com. In addition, past results are not necessarily an indication of future performance.

Now I'd like to pass the call over to Radiant's Founder and CEO, Bohn Crain. Sir, the floor is yours.

Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining in on today's call. We're very pleased to report another year of solid financial results for fiscal 2019, with record results across several key financial metrics, including record revenues of $890.5 million, up $41.8 million or 5.7%; record net revenues of $230.1 million, up $30 million or 15%; record net income attributable to common stockholders of $13.7 million, up $5.6 million or 69.1%; record adjusted net income attributable to common stockholders of $26.6 million, up $11.8 million or 79.7%; and record adjusted EBITDA of $40.8 million, up $11.6 million or 39.7%. In addition, we also set a new record in terms of our adjusted EBITDA margins, which increased 310 basis points to 17.7%, up from 14.6% over the comparable prior year period.

As we've previously discussed, our incremental cost of supporting the next dollar of gross margin is very small, and we remain very excited about the opportunity to drive further expansion in our adjusted EBITDA margins as we continue to scale the business and leverage of the benefits of our ongoing investment in technology.

In the U.S., for fiscal 2019, we reported revenues of $779.7 million, up 43 -- excuse me, up $44.3 million or 6% and net revenues of $198.1 million, up $23.4 million or 13.4% over the comparable prior year period. U.S. transportation net revenues of $193.8 million were up $21.9 million or 12.7% from comparable prior year periods, while our value-added services net revenues of $4.3 million were up $1.5 million or 53.6% over the comparable prior year period.

In Canada, we reported $111.3 million in revenues, up $3 million or 2.8% and net revenues of $32 million, up $6.6 million or 26% over the comparable prior year period. Canada's transportation net revenues of $19.7 million were up $2.8 million or 16.6% from the comparable prior year period, while Canada's value-added services net revenues of $12.3 million were up $3.0 million or 44.7%. We're also pleased to -- with our results for the fourth quarter ended June 30, '19, given what was generally recognized as a softer freight environment. Although we saw a reduction in revenues during the quarter, the economic impact to the economy was generally offset by improving net revenue margins, up 354 basis points, and a reduction of $1.2 million in operating partner commissions, which resulted in adjusted EBITDA of $11 million, up $1.1 million or 11.1% over the comparable prior year period on relatively flat net revenues.

In addition, we also saw improvement in our adjusted EBITDA margins for the quarter, which increased 189 basis points to a record 18.8%, up from 16.9% for the comparable prior year period. In addition, we also reported net income attributable to common stockholders of $4.5 million, up $0.2 million and adjusted net income attributable to common shareholders of $7.5 million, up $1.8 million or 31.6% for the comparable prior year period. The business also continues to deliver strong cash flows, generating $6.3 million in cash from operations for the 3 months ended June 30 and generated $39.8 million in cash from operations for the year ended June 30, 2019.

Having retired the $21 million preferred stock last December, we continue to pay down debt. And as of the quarter ended June 30, we had approximately $13.8 million drawn on the company's $75 million credit facility and total net debt of approximately $31.2 million, less than 1x our trailing 12-month adjusted EBITDA of $40.8 million.

On the technology front, we also continue to make meaningful progress on the -- a number of our strategic technology initiatives, including, one, the continued expansion of our new SAP-based Transportation Management System that is now deployed in over 25 operating locations across the network, including both company-owned and strategic operating partner locations; to the continued onboarding of our customers to our new customer portal, which provides our customers with online booking and event-based tracking through direct integration with SAP-TM; the piloting of our international air and ocean freight forwarding functionality within our new SAP-TM platform; and the completion of our transition of our SAP production environment to Amazon's cloud computing platform, which provides us cost-effective access to computing power, database storage and other functionality as we continue to scale and grow the business.

As we head into the new year, we remain committed to our long-standing strategy to deliver profitable growth through a combination of organic and acquisition growth initiatives. We have low leverage on our balance sheet, strong free cash flows and continue our disciplined search for acquisition candidates that bring critical mass to our current platform, with respect to geography, purchasing power and complementary service offerings.

With that, I'll turn it over to Todd Macomber, our CFO, to walk us through our detailed financial results, and then we'll open it up for some Q&A.

Thanks, Bohn, and good afternoon, everyone. Today, we will be discussing our financial results, including adjusted net income and adjusted EBITDA for the 3 and 12 months ended June 30, 2019. For the 3 months ended June 30, 2019, we reported net income allocable to common stockholders of $4.461 million on $204.6 million of revenues or $0.09 per basic and fully diluted share. For the 3 months ended June 30, 2018, we reported net income allocable to common stockholders of $4.330 million on $233.8 million of revenues or $0.09 per basic and fully diluted share. This represents an increase of approximately $131,000 over the comparable prior year period or 3%.

For the 3 months ended June 30, 2019, we reported adjusted net income attributable to common stockholders of $7.539 million. For the 3 months ended June 30, 2018, we reported adjusted net income attributable to common stockholders of $5.656 million. This represents an increase of approximately $1.833 million or approximately 33.3%.

We reported adjusted EBITDA of $11.11 million for the 3 months ended June 30, 2019, compared to adjusted EBITDA of $9.916 million for the 3 months ended June 30, 2018. This represents an increase of approximately $1.095 million or approximately 11%.

Moving along to the 12-month results. For the 12 months ended June 30, 2019, we reported net income allocable to common stockholders of $13.731 million on a $890.5 million of revenues or $0.28 per basis and $0.27 per fully diluted share, which included a gain of $1.207 million unchanged in contingent consideration. For the 12 months ended June 30, 2018, we reported net income allocable to common stockholders of $8.142 million on $842.4 million of revenues or $0.17 per basic and $0.16 per fully diluted share. This represents an increase of approximately $5.589 million over the comparable prior year period or 68.6%.

For the 12 months ended June 30, 2019, we reported adjusted net income attributable to common stockholders of $26.648 million. For 12 months ended June 30, 2018, we reported adjusted net income attributable to common stockholders of $14.844 million. This represents an increase of approximately $11.804 million or approximately 79.5%.

We reported adjusted EBITDA of $40.760 million for the 12 months ended June 30, 2019, compared to adjusted EBITDA of $29.242 million for the 12 months ended June 30, 2018. This represents an increase of approximately $11.518 million or approximately 39.4%.

With that, I will turn the call back over to our moderator to facilitating the Q&A from our callers.

(Operator Instructions) Our first question comes from Kevin Sterling of Seaport Global.

So Bohn, let me kind of big picture here. When I look at this quarter and everything, your model, being an asset-light model, seems to be acting like it's supposed to be, and obviously, what I mean by that is, if revenue is a little light, you can still drive profitable growth either through net revenue or EBITDA by flushing down the cost, and that seems to be what's happening.

If I can dig into, kind of, some of the key drivers here and maybe what's different now than, say, a few years ago when this may not have happened, is it your scale? Is it the new back office system? Is it new business wins that may be profitable than in years past? Can you, kind of, help us understand your model today even in a softer freight environment is really, I think, performing pretty well, whereas years passed this may not have been the case?

Yes. Sure. I mean you are kind of I think hitting a few of the salient points. There's a number of contributing factors. And I guess, I'll start with as we talked about last quarter, we made a conscious decision to exit certain low-margin pieces of business that we've been able to replace with higher-margin pieces of business. So that's a -- that's part of the schematic.

There was certainly some softness in international freight volumes attributed to some of the trade war narrative activities that happened to land more in the agent base stores rather than the company-owned stores, which is why -- part of the reason why you see the kind of the reduction in operating partner commissions going down, kind of absorbing that or, kind of, ultimately highlighting how less sensitive our ultimate results are as a function of some of the agent-based business activities, given such a big piece of it is paid out to the agent stations in the form of a commission.

And then it ultimately goes to the health of the company stores and their ultimate financial performance and contribution as we move forward in time, as we continue to make good on our brand promise and provide exit strategies to our operating partners and a bigger relative position of our operations effectively flow through our company-owned stores. And I think as of the last fiscal year, we were -- about 40% of our gross margins actually flowed through our company-owned stores as opposed to agencies.

I think all of those things help in terms of the ultimate metrics as well as the investments we've been making in technology and back-office infrastructure that drive efficiencies and that are helping us effectively as we kind of continue to beat the drum, grow our gross margin dollars without growing our back-office cost and continuing to provide scale in that way and working hard to get more of those gross margin dollars to the bottom line.

And so even in the face of what was a softer quarter, we still delivered. I believe that was the best quarter, not only kind of on a comparative quarter basis, but I think that EBITDA margin was probably the highest margin in the history of the company for a quarter ever on that $11 million of EBITDA.

Yes. So you're breaking records, again?

Indeed. Still, still.

Yes. Still, yes, don't stop. So let me dig into that a little bit more, if you don't mind. And so to think about the organic growth opportunities, you highlighted new business wins that are obviously higher-margin business. Are some of these new business wins and some of this incremental contribution to net revenue and EBITDA and organic growth, is it coming in maybe a little bit better than what you may have thought just a couple of quarters ago?

I don't know that I would characterize it as better or worse. I would say that our industry vertical approach continues to deliver positive results for the organization, and we certainly think we'll continue to put numbers up through those initiatives, and we continue to look for additional industry verticals to, kind of, broaden that.

So I guess said more succinctly, the vertical approach is working, continues to work, and we're looking for opportunities to invest in incremental vertical industry sales resources that can broaden and strengthen that vertical approach because we've had such success in that strategy.

Yes. Okay. So as we -- as you look at your, like, sales pipeline, is it look pretty healthy with additional potential business wins, organic growth opportunities, how should we think about your sales pipeline?

You're walking me too far out on a limb here in terms of talking about sales pipelines, but I still feel comfortable with the idea. And then, I guess, to kind of come back to the way we try to frame our thinking and engage with our investors on, kind of, this topic is we're focused on growing our gross margin dollars. We think, call it, a 4% to 6% growth in gross margin dollars is a reasonable target, and we expect to grow our EBITDA at twice that, which gets back to the leverage. So without getting into the health of our sales pipeline and playing that hot-and-cold game, we still are working hard to deliver those -- that kind of baseline preacquisition growth in the base in terms of those metrics around gross margin dollars and EBITDA growth.

Okay. No, that's fair. No, that helps. And Bohn, I know -- I think you said generated operating cash flow in the quarter of $6.3 million. What was free cash flow generation?

We have our technology investments for the quarter.

We have technology investment -- hold on.

For the quarter.

For the quarter. Technology is $4.7 million versus $6.4 million, so it's about $1.7 million.

So take $2 million off of that cash from operations for our IT investments, so you're plus or minus $4 million in free cash flow.

Very good. Okay. And then lastly, and then I'll jump off and maybe hop back in queue, but you highlighted Canada. It seems like Canada is doing better. Do you expect that trend to continue? What are you seeing in Canada?

Yes. I think that's a great conversation point in that -- to put it back in context, and this is a little bit easier for me in Canadian dollars, back when we acquired Wheels in 2015, I think, kind of, the Wheels organization, including Clipper, was doing, call it, plus or minus CAD 10 million of EBITDA at that time. And Wheels Canada, now Radiant -- rebranded as Radiant Canada, and even excluding the benefit of Clipper, kind of the Radiant Canada organization is dramatically outperforming where it was at the time we acquired it. So in the -- certainly, in the early days of that acquisition, the road was a little bumpier. But we can -- we're quite pleased, and we kind of pause for the cause and, kind of, acknowledge, kind of, looking back on our decision to do the Wheels transaction, which at the time was the largest transaction for us and kind of look back now and say, are you glad you did that transaction or not? Are you not glad you did that transaction? We're definitely happy to have done the Wheels acquisition, and I think we're just at the beginning of a lot of good things in Canada.

Harry Smith and the team up there are doing a fantastic job. We talk a lot about our bundling strategy and effectively combining what most folks would call contract logistics-type services with our core transportation service offering has really -- is giving us a differentiated value proposition in the marketplace, and they continue to do some impressive things up there.

(Operator Instructions) Our next question comes from Jason Seidl of Cowen.

Bohn, Todd, I want to talk a little bit, sort of, about the outlook for your use of free cash along with potentially taking on some more debt. Your (inaudible)

(Operator Instructions)

I think I can fill in the blanks for his question, but I'll let him restate it, so go ahead, Jason.

Can you guys hear me now?

Yes, we can. Yes.

Perfect. Yes -- no, what I was saying is, when you look at your free cash flow generation and your ability to take on debt, how do you balance how you look at acquisitions in terms of where your stock's trading versus any larger acquisitions? You can forget about the tuck-in ones that seem to always work out when they come up, and then versus buying back your own stock, which can be a double-edged sword in this marketplace with your liquidity.

Yes. So I guess I'll kind of take that from the top, which is our -- we've traditionally said -- we continue -- and as you kind of alluded to, we're continuously in the marketplace looking at what would be the smaller tuck-in acquisitions. And certainly, the majority of the transactions we would do look like that. From time to time, we look at larger transactions. They would have to be compelling for us to effectively pay up to do a larger transaction. We've done it. We have done it at least once before with success with the Wheels transaction. So it's something that we would consider. It would have to be compelling strategically for us to look at doing something like that. But it's definitely something we would consider.

Now I'll try to bring that answer back into the context of your broader question, which, to say more bluntly, how do we think about M&A activities when our own stock is trading at plus or minus 6x or whatever it's trading at currently on an EBITDA to enterprise value basis. And so I think part of the answer to that question is kind of grounded in the idea that we believe the intrinsic value of the business that we have and we continue to build is -- we would like to think is at least a 10x to 12x multiple. So we think about transactions and creating value in the context of that is the ultimate intrinsic value of what we're doing. If we try to manage our long-term allocation of capital around the short-term volatility of our stock, I'm not quite sure how that would play out in terms of ever being able to get anything accomplished, and so a couple of other data points around this conversation.

We're also quite willing to buy back our own stock. If we don't find the right type of M&A opportunities and we're accumulating cash, people should fully expect us to be in the market buying in our stock, particularly at these types of valuation multiples that we see today. And then ultimately, part of this conversation would ultimately include a conversation around how we think about leverage. And kind of in that regard I think we would be comfortable leveraging up to a normalized funded debt-to-EBITDA ratio of, call it, plus or minus 3x as we would think about, kind of, a normalized balance sheet.

And then just, kind of, as a reminder for some of the folks on this call, we effectively delevered our balance sheet in the summer of 2015 when we did our public secondary. And we have -- we really never relevered the business since 2015. We've been paying off debt and -- and have worked hard to put ourselves in this position where we've got more financial flexibility than we've ever had in the history of the company. So we've got a lot of options in front of us, which we worked hard to create. We're committed to continuing to be good allocators of capital, which I think is ultimately at the heart of your question. And so -- and we're taking a comprehensive look in terms of tuck-in acquisitions, larger transactions, stock buybacks and all in the context of our opportunity and the vagaries of the marketplace with our tweeting President. So I'm not sure if I did complete justice to your question, so -- but that's the brain dump.

Well, Bohn, I guess what you're saying is, for now, obviously the tuck-ins, as they come, you can take them because you usually give them plus or minus 5x with an earn out protecting yourself, but that you do see a willingness to potentially buy something out there in the marketplace if it's the right fit, like, say, Wheels. Because while it may be a little bit dilutive in the near term, in the longer term, that will help you realize getting that higher multiple in the marketplace as you properly integrate such an acquisition. Is that said correctly?

Yes. I think the short answer is yes. The one caveat would be is, I think even if we looked at a larger-type transaction on an adjusted EPS basis, it would still be accretive. The only reason a larger transaction wouldn't be accretive would be on a GAAP basis because of the amortization of customer relationship intangibles, which we've talked about quarter-on-quarter, year-over-year since 2006 of being, kind of, a false negative relative to the underlying financial enterprise that we're building here.

Okay. And I'll ask one more here, Bohn, just on -- I'll go away from M&A and I'll go a little bit more towards the (inaudible). We heard Landstar today talk about September having less-than-seasonal trends that are out there. Just -- they're obviously 100% in the spot market, but just curious what you're seeing here in September right now at rating?

Landstar is a little more aggressive in their forward-looking comments than I would choose to be. So I think the -- I'll put it this way, I think the -- this quarter ended June for us is indicative of the run rate earnings power of the business. We have a little bit of seasonality that, kind of, rolls through our business. But all in all, I think we're in the best position we've ever been in to handle whatever is coming our way, and we're focused on growing our business.

So basically, that the trends that you saw this most recent quarter are more or less intact?

That's true.

(Operator Instructions) Our next question comes from David Campbell of Thompson, Davis.

Bohn, I'm a bit surprised -- I'm a little bit surprised, in this environment of soft trucking business that you haven't been able to find attractive acquisitions, smaller acquisitions, that would fit into your agent network or -- and secondly, I haven't heard you talk about converting any agents to company-owned offices, which I think would be more likely to happen in a soft environment than a strong environment. So I'm a little surprised about that. Can you help us out at all on why you haven't found anything?

Well, just a -- well, yes, a couple of comments. One, just because I haven't told you that I have doesn't mean I haven't, one. And two, our -- and probably a good, kind of, level set for everybody on the call, as we think about converting our agent stations to company-owned stores, we are here to support our operating partners to effectively provide them their exit strategies when they are ready. Not when we are ready but when they are ready. So we try to meet them where they want to be met in terms of agent station conversions.

With that said, none of us are getting any younger, including, kind of, the demographics of our agent station owner partners. And I do believe over time, kind of, the rate of conversion will increase. And we certainly are talking to folks across the categories that you -- that you're referencing. We're constantly talking to tuck-in-type acquisitions, both internal and external to our network. It's just we have not chose to conclude one just yet.

And second question is, on the freight forwarding business, especially the international freight forwarding business, I know you had substantial success in the Philadelphia in that acquisition some years ago and the business that brought you, I guess, in the transatlantic market, the Atlantic market seems stronger than the Pacific. So I'm surprised that your freight forwarding hasn't done relatively better than it has. Is that -- do I understand the situation or can you explain better?

Well, I'm not -- you might have us confused with somebody else relative to your reference to our acquisition of a large Philadelphia operation because we -- I mean, we have done a small agent tuck-in acquisition in Philadelphia some years ago. It was one of the SBA agency stations that we acquired in before we openly acquired Service By Air.

But I think on an absolute basis, on a year-over-year basis, International is up quite nicely. This most immediate quarter, there was some softness in international but it's hard to pinpoint whether that was -- whether that's a slowdown, whether that was a pull forward to try to accelerate to get ahead of the tariffs. It's a little, I think, premature to ultimately draw conclusions to see what's going to happen on the -- kind of on the international side.

And at the same time, ocean continues -- historically, ocean was one of our smallest modes of transportation. And our ocean is growing. From a modality standpoint, it probably remains one of our fastest growing segments. So while the, kind of, the decrease in revenues for the quarter was driven in part by international for the year, international was up meaningfully.

There appear to be no further questions at this time. I will now turn the conference back over to management for closing remarks.

All right, thank you. Let me close by saying that we remain very excited with our progress and prospects here at Radiant, and we remain very bullish on the growth platform that we've created and the scalability of our nonasset-based business model.

Our now more-than-12-year first-to-market advantage in executing our multibrand strategy and consolidating agent-based freight forwarding networks, ongoing investment in technology and low leverage on our balance sheet puts us in a unique position to support further consolidation in the marketplace. We believe this represents a longer term and almost perpetual opportunity, and we continue to invest in the technology and our people, with an eye towards building out a world-class, scalable, back-office infrastructure to support a much larger enterprise going forward.

We're patiently persistent in the pursuit of this long-term vision, which we believe over time will deliver meaningful value for our shareholders, our operating partners and the end customers that we serve. Thanks for listening and your support of Radiant Logistics.

Thank you. This does conclude today's teleconference. We thank you for your participation. You may disconnect your lines at this time, and have a great day.