Stagwell Inc (STGW) 2024 Q1 法說會逐字稿

Good morning from Stagwell's office in Washington D.C and welcome to Stagwell Inc's earnings webcast for the first quarter of 2024. My name is Ben Allanson, and I lead Investor Relations function here at Stagwell . With me today, Mark Penn, Secretary Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, and Frank Lanuto, the Chief Financial Officer.

Mark will provide a business update and Frank will share financial review. After the prepared remarks, we will open the floor for Q&A. You're welcome to submit questions through the chat. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that the following remarks include forward-looking statements and non-GAAP financial data. Forward-looking statements about the company, including those related to earnings guidance, are subject to uncertainties and risk factors addressed in our earnings release slide presentation and the company's SEC reports.

Please refer to our website, Stagwellglobal.com/slash investors for an investor presentation and additional resources. This morning's press release and the slide deck provides definitions, explanations, and reconciliations of non-GAAP financial data.

And with that, I'd like to turn the call over to our Chairman and CEO, Mark Penn.

Thank you, Ben, and thank you to everyone joining us for our first quarter earnings call. On our Q4 call in February, I talked about our excitement and confidence in 2024, highlighting that we expect to return to growth in the first half of this year. Several factors give us confidence, including the abatement of industry headwinds such as tech restructuring activities, strong and business trends, our record-breaking political cycle, and our continued investments in digital innovation beginning to contribute .

Today I'm pleased to share that these trends are beginning to play out exactly as we anticipated. Stagwell delivered $670 million of revenue in the first quarter. These figures represented an encouraging growth in revenue of 8%. Additionally, we continue to post record net new business figures for both the first quarter and last 12 months. Importantly we deliver these growth figures while effectively managing our costs, actions we took in 2023 helped us grow our adjusted EBITDA and 25% year over year to $90 million.

These results are highly encouraging and gives us the confidence to reiterate our full year guidance today. We also drew confidence in gathering tailwinds. Advertising is once again growing. Our reputation is expanding and we are participating in record new business pitches.

AI will within the year create vast digital transformation opportunities. International work is proving a fertile area for expansion and the advocacy season promises to be historic. This quarter's performance was driven by two double digit growing capabilities. Performance, media, and data grew 13% in revenue and 12% in net revenue. Advocacy showed 80% revenue growth to 54% net revenue increase.

Digital transformation led by double digit growing gap return to revenue growth, but it's still building up their expanded pipeline as tech companies are beginning to come back online and research is still overcoming the impacts of last year's (latest) trend.

Continuing the trend from last year, we saw outsized year over year growth in our relationships with our largest most impactful customers. In the first quarter, our top 100 customers now representing 50% of our total net revenue grew 25%. Geographically we saw a return to growth in the United States, our largest market with total revenue growth of 9% year-over-year.

Our international businesses also continued their momentum with revenue growth of 7% in the quarter. Europe has been a major area of focus for us recently, and we opened our new regional headquarters in London just a few weeks ago. This focus is translating into strong revenue momentum with the EMEA region growing 14% year-over-year.

Turning to the cost and profitability , as I mentioned previously, we delivered $90 million of adjusted EBITDA in the first quarter, 25% higher than the first quarter of last year and representing a 17% margin, an improvement of 320 basis points year over year. This impressive figures are direct consequence of the proactive steps we took last year to manage our costs. In 2023, we took staffing actions have resulted in $98 million of annualized savings. As a result, our labor costs were 2% lower in the first quarter of 2024, helping to deliver a staffing to network revenue ratio of 64.3%, an improvement of 270 basis points over the first quarter of last year.

Also driving this margin improvement is a laser focus on managing our G&A expenses. Despite our growing net revenue in the quarter, our total G&A expenses were almost exactly the same as in the same period last year. We're installing modern systems for back office utilizing offshore and adding AI capabilities to streamline operations.

We've seen particularly strong growth in adjusted EBITDA from our performance, media, and data capability, growing 212% and creativity and communications growing 42% a testament to the focus that all of Stagwell is placing on controlling our costs. Net new business continues to break company records, giving us increased confidence in our full year guidance.

In the quarter, we delivered $66 million of net new business, a record for the first quarter for Stagwell. This brings our last 12 month net new business figure to $284 million, also a company record quarter after quarter, we've increased the LTM net new business figure from $212 million a year ago. Importantly, the size of our wins has grown very impressively, we continue to be clients larger global pitches. In the first quarter, the average loan size increased 13% year over year.

These net new business numbers were driven by some important wins, including Fogo de Chao, the Star Tribune, Basel, and Wilson, as well as expansions with Target and L'Oreal. In Q1, Stagwell agencies captured over 70 of the top awards across major industry shows, including an array of agency of the year designations.

Maybe 1% to 2% of the market, we are far exceeding that in terms of industry recognition. These include four agencies featuring on the NHA list, including Code and Theory being recognized as business transformation agency of the year, Yale winning US advertising agency of the year by campaign, Assembly being named media agency of the year and Exponent PR, a pecan shop within Golden Thoil, took home the disruptive agency of the year crown.

Our M&A program is active, who might not have gotten every deal we saw. But the net revenue and adjusted EBITDA from companies acquired in the fourth and first quarters exceeded the net revenue and adjusted EBITDA loss from Concentra reflects their disposition. We achieved that despite the initial outlay on acquisitions being only about 15% of the dispositions gross proceeds.

This is concrete evidence that our M&A machine can be a major driver value for investors moving forward. As I've discussed previously, we're exploring a further non-core disposition, hope to have more color on that later in the year.

In the first months of 2024, we made strong progress in expanding our global presence through acquisitions. We had a UK digital collective sidedick and our first French created agency was Next Partners. Just last month, shortly after the end of the first quarter, we announced the acquisition of Pros, a digital focus brand and marketing consultancy in Brazil which significantly expands our Latin American presence. We're looking to become more competitive internationally and by doubling our business outside of North America to 40% of net revenues over the coming year. Our current focus is in Western Europe, the Middle East.

This quarter, we took steps to sharpen our capabilities of data, media, and AI through a combination of internal initiatives and external partnerships. In the first quarter, we maintained strong investment of $14 million into the Stagwell Marketing Cloud, our AI enabled suite of products for modern marketers. We're now working to bring our research products under the Harris Quest brand to market and expect to see sales growth in the back of the year.

SMC orchestrated its first software launch with Google Cloud as we deepen the partnership on GenAI announced last year. At Google Cloud Next, we launched a data clean room solution on Google's platform that will provide our clients with a private and secure space to mix-and-match their first party data with Stagwell's vast row of payment solutions.

We're also focused on growing AI leadership across our agencies. One focus will be scaling best-in-class use cases such as GALE's Enterprise Alchemy Ai platform announced this quarter, which reduces the time spent on critical tasks across all disciplines in the agency of GALE's almost 800 people work smarter, better, and faster.

Lastly, our Late Filed Labs is incubating customer AI solutions to elevate their customer experience and our largest performance media agency assembly, except to announce a new AI solution player this month. We are making significant progress on our media studios on building the last mile, the media chain from planning targeting and audience creation down to placement and media supply.

On our last call, I announced new building at Stagwell IT solution. Today, we are partnering with Nexxan, a global unified advertising technology platform . We'll have more to share on that partnership in the coming weeks as we roll out our new offerings in data and media.

In other parts of our business, we're preparing for Sports Beach this June at the Cannes Lions Festival, where will return for a second year with more brand sponsors and more athletes, including Joe Burrow, JuJu Watkins, Mikaela Shiffrin. Sport Beach continues to benefit the company increased our exposure worldwide and leading to new business opportunities.

Finally, we're excited later this month to host our definitive future of new summit and partnership with the top publishers across the US including Axios, Business Insider, New York Times, POLITICO, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, The Trade Desk and AD Fontes media. Recognize that fears around brand safety have made advisers more cautious about advertising across opinion sites. We released a first-of-its-kind study for advertisers to better understand where an candidate should the advertise across business industry.

It's been a busy quarter. We are never standing still. We are marching forward to achieve our goal of offering everything from global full-service platform self-service. Wherever you look, Stagwell is evolving, bringing our partners along with us to the cutting edge of marketing services. We're on the forefront of AI, a global performance market, culturally relevant events of advancing online advocacy campaigns of the move to more social media and content and the combination once again of media and entertainment. These efforts and solid quarter of revenue growth gives us confidence about the year ahead.

Now I'll hand things over to Frank Lanuto, Chief Financial Officer, to walk you through some of our financial results in more detail. Frank ?

Thank you, Mark. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us to discuss our first quarter results. As a reminder, if you'd like to ask a question after the prepared remarks concluded, please feel free to submit them through the chat function.

The company returned to revenue growth during Q1, driven by strong performance in our media and advocacy businesses, improving market conditions in the US and continued momentum in the international markets in which we operate. For the quarter, we reported revenue of $670 million, an increase of 8% as compared to the same period in the prior year. Net revenue, excluding pass-through costs increased 2% for the same period to $532 million.

Building on the trend for '23, our largest customers continued to invest in their relationship with our agencies. In the first quarter of '24, our top 100 customers that represented 50% of our consolidated net revenue grew 25% versus the prior period, our largest improvement in the last five quarters. The number of relationships also expanded, but the number of customers in our top 100 being serviced by more than one of our agencies, increasing 12% year over year, providing further evidence that our strategy of delivering integrated services is working.

Another positive signal was the occurrence of an inflection plan where period-over-period revenues with existing customers from rolling relationships exceeded those from declining relations. Our net new business performance for the quarter represented the fifth consecutive quarter of increasing trailing 12 month performance and set up another high watermark of $284 million. We are tangibly benefiting from being invited to participate in larger global pitches as the average size of our wins increased 13% year over year.

The combined impact of net new business and improving performance of existing clients leaves us to reaffirm our guidance for the year.

Turning to revenue by capability, the first quarter saw revenue growth in four of our five principal capabilities. Performance Media and Data delivered $77 million in revenue, an increase of 13% over the prior year period. This performance was driven by a combination of new business wins and growth from existing customers, particular areas of strength included transportation and lodging, consumer products and financial services sectors.

Creativity & Communications delivered $292 million of revenue, an increase of 11% over the prior year. We had strong growth from a number of consumer products customers as well as clients in technology, media, and communications sectors, which grew about 2% over the prior year. Digital transformation returned to growth in first quarter with revenue increasing to $196 million, 6% improvement over the prior year, driven by strong performance in food and beverage, advocacy, and technology-based clients, which grew 20% period-over-period. This growth was partially offset by softness in financials as we anniversary the regional banking crisis from around '23.

Consumer insights and strategy reported $46 million of revenue, a decline of 7% year over year. This is largely a consequence of customers within the entertainment sector, increasing spending more slowly subsequent to Hollywood actors and writer strike late last year. Stagwell Marketing Cloud posted $16 million of revenue, an increase of 7% year over year.

The suite assortment products continues to be an investment priority for us. In the first quarter, we maintained our investment spending of approximately $14 million into the cloud as we continue to build an industry-leading suite of tech products for a modern marketing.

Finally advocacy is a significant contributor to the business mix and election years as we benefit from increased political fundraising and the spending running up to the elections in November. In the first quarter, advocacy revenue grew to $65 million, an increase of 80% over the prior period.

Now turning to geographical breakdown. We saw continued strong revenue growth in our international businesses of 7%. This was led by exceptional strong growth of 14% in the United Kingdom. In the US, our largest market revenue increased 9% over the prior year.

Turning to costs, management took decisive actions in '23 to rightsized our cost structure to better align with tariling revenue. Result of these actions can clearly be seen in our first quarter results. In the first quarter, the company delivered $90 million in adjusted EBITDA, an increase of 25% over the prior period, and it also increased the related margin to 73%, an improvement of nearly 320 basis points over the prior quarter.

Staffing is our largest cost. And in '23, we took actions that reduce annualized salaries and headcount by $98 million and 4%, respectively. We benefited from the full effect of these successive actions during Q1 as labor costs were lower by more than 2% or $7 million and the staffing cost to net revenue ratio was lowered to 64.3%. An improvement of 270 basis points versus prior year and the lowest first quarter ratio since our merger.

In addition to staffing, we also focused on efficiently managing our G&A costs. For the first quarter, our G&A expenses were just under $100 million in line with the same period in 2023. This results in G&A as a percentage of net revenue ratio of 18.8%, an improvement of nearly 30 basis points versus the prior period.

Our G&A costs are inclusive of unbillable expenses. These costs tend to grow in line with our net revenues for both the first quarters of '23 and '24, our unbillable customer expenses as a percentage of net revenue remained stable at 6%. Adjusted SG&A expenses to account for these unbillables, our G&A actually decreased by slightly more than $1 million year over year, representing a 2% decline excluding unbillables.

The cumulative impact of our revenue growth and cost actions contributed to strong adjusted EBITDA performance during the quarter and allow us to maintain our strong investment in the Stagwell Marketing Cloud. Excluding the $14 million of cloud investment in Q1, our first quarter adjusted EBITDA margin would have been approximately 19.9%.

Now moving to the balance sheet. We continue to make efficient allocations of capital to maintain a strong financial position. Starting with deferred acquisition consideration, we reduced obligations approximately $65 million from the end of the first quarter last year to $101 million at the end of the first quarter in '24. We remain on track to reduce our debt obligations to approximately $40 million by the end of the year.

We also acquired 4 million shares during the quarter at an average price of $6.11 per share for approximately $25 million. Our existing buyback authorization as of quarter end now has $114 million in remaining availability.

CapEx and capitalized software for the quarter was $14 million, broadly in line with our targets. As a result, we ended the quarter with cash of $130 million and drawings under our revolver of $182 million. Our leverage ratio at quarter-end was three times. And finally, as highlighted by Mark in his remarks, we are reaffirming our full year '24 guidance as follows.

Organic net revenue growth is expected to be between 5% to 7%. Organic net revenue, excluding Advocacy growth is expected to be 4% to 5%. Adjusted EBITDA is expected to be between $400 million to $450 million. We expect to deliver approximately 50% free cash flow conversion and adjusted earnings per share is expected to be between $0.75 and $0.88

That concludes our prepared remarks this morning. I will now turn the call back over to Ben Allanson to open the Q&A portion of the call.

Thanks Frank. And just a reminder, if you have any questions, please submit them via the chat button at the top of the screen. We have another question here from Barton Crockett at Rosenblatt. So can you please walk us through what you see the drivers of acceleration of organic net revenue growth over the balance of 2024 from the 2% reported in Q1 to 5% to 7% you guide today ?

How much visibility do you have into this acceleration ? Do you think it's going to be steady around or is that going to be one of the alteration which they're really going to tick up?

Sure. Thank you Barton for that question. I think as you analyze it, you can see international would be along nicely, advocacy is moving on nicely, media is moving along nicely and then next to really come up and continue to grow is digital transformation has room for growth. Look, Media aspiring on all cylinders already with double digit growth.

Our pipeline when I look at our pipeline is 50% higher than it was at this time last year, we are in a record number of some new pitches of enhanced size given the enhanced reputation. Also AI is beginning, I think to customers are beginning to get over the -- let's take a look at it and start to implement the base.

So I think that you're going to really see a good second quarter and things will build to the third and fourth quarters, because that's when Advocacy and Media in the holiday season tend to crescendo. So, I look at it, as you're going to really kind of have see strength building through the year, as I think digital transformation will strengthen, and Media and Advocacy will really take off in the second half of the year. So that's how I see it developing in meeting the goals.

How just on digital transformation ? Question here from Jason Kreyer at Craig-Hallum. He's asking about green shoots we're seeing in digital transformation that kind of gives us confidence to growth there ?

Yes. We're seeing, I think, some of the companies that have cut back last year, beginning to come back. We're seeing growth and that's again, really AI. I mean if you make the chips and then you have all the cloud, you need the applications and I think the people are discovering the applications and we are in the AI application building business. That is what we're doing.

I think first customers have to be assured that their data would not go into the worldwide global data pot and I think that's why we put together the clean rooms for both internally and for our clients in order to provide that kind of confidence.

And I think as customers get confidence that AI can be used safely and securely, you're just going to see this take off. We're going to go back to the biggest problem being finding engineers as opposed to the biggest problem finding work and I think that really shook it in the second half of the year. I think you can see that building in all of the tech companies in terms of what they're reporting.

May be some of the tech customers as well. And if that's the question here, just talking about tech coming back some of the key trends we're seeing with technology customers and then rebounding in this year ?

Yeah, I mean, we're seeing them slowly. They're not back to full throttle yet. I think they still have more to go. It is shaping up to be a year of competition. We chose some increase. Again, our list of top clients would be a list of large-sized tech companies.

In many ways, we're a tech company's tech company, helping to develop AI front ends, consumer interactions, as well as to build new applications for our clients. But I think you're still seeing some caution on the side of those companies, but again, they are building out their programs, how to bring AI to the masses. That is where we're going to benefit and I think at a certain point the floodgates will open here and that that can't be too far away.

And shifting gears a little bit, just on the international side of things. A question from Mark Schorr which benchmark. He says with just about 12% of net revenue outside the US and UK, how should we think about by geography being factored into our guidance of growth by geography moving forward. And he asks is expansion to Asia Pacific still a meaningful initiative for you to unlock the biggest global contracts on the opportunities.

I think you can see when you go through our acquisitions, you can see clearly our strategy. A group of those acquisitions are frontiers of marketing, people like Movers and Shakers, people like Leftfield Labs and AI and the other group of acquisitions is clearly Brazil, UK and you're going to see really more focus in Asia and the Middle East in the next few months. I think that you see us to build in the global network that we need to win.

Look, for the first time we're in a $40 to $60 million pitch. People are looking at Stagwell and seeing us as the logical company taking on the majors at a growing scale. So we're going to complete the global network. We also think that we put together Blue Fin, which is an office where we brought together 17 European agencies in London, and we can see the benefits, 14% growth, just beginning, frankly, because they used to get very small pitches because their services were fragmented.

And we can see the benefits, 14% growth just beginning, frankly, because they used to get very small pitches because their services were fragmented. Now it's almost like a shopping mall. You can see advertising, research, media, a set of coordinated services, and they're getting more than million-dollar opportunities.

So while the European marketplace may not be a high-grower, our ability to grow market share in Europe, I think having put together our agencies and having added a structure with James Townsend, a CEO, having brought in a whole marketing team, I think we have very good prospects and that's what we're going to do region by region until we have a complete functioning scale global network here.

Great. We'll just have a question on net new business first and then we'll shift the advocacy number of questions on that topic. But Laura Martin over at Needham, she goes, $66 million of net new business wins in Q1, very impressive, up to 284.5 for the training 12 months. What do you think is the normalized revenue growth like in the mid-single digits or high-single digits currently?

Well, look, I think that we'll see a little bit what the Fed does today with our economy. But I think we're building back to our targets prior to getting to the 10% year-over-year growth. We know that we have 15% and in 2022, 2023 for a number of factors was not the year we had planned, but a lot of those factors were exiting to us.

There were period of recession, there were media slowdowns, there were strikes across the border and in other industries there were tech products. We're striving to get back to those numbers and I think this is a big transition year.

By the end of the year, we'll have an expanded global network. We have our Stagwell Marketing Cloud. Products, at least to the Research. I think about the Prophet. We'll have our Media and in our ID graph that will extend our capabilities.

I think, into Deeper Media Services that will also open up. We got more revenue opportunities. Digital Transformation will be in the sector of AI. So to me, this is a transition year back to that kind of growth that we believe is the long-term target that the firm is capable of.

Advocacy. A couple of questions on this, first up from Steve Cahall of Wells Fargo. Did Advocacy out for your expectations on the revenue -- net revenue and adjusted EBITDA side in Q1, we obviously did adjusted guidance today, but does that strengthen our Advocacy as well as the new business talent discussed. Give me some more confidence in terms of your guidance.

I think the strength of advocacy obviously gives us -- it's one of the elements that could give us certain confidence. I think advocacy was a little stronger than expected, particularly since there were no real primaries on each side.

And so when you see that kind of strength and advocacy and you look at it well, 2028, they'll probably be -- I thought at 2024 will be the record, but now I realize it will to 2028 because there will be a matter who wins, open presences on both sides, and it will be double primary.

So I think the building strength of this given the fact that there are no primary, essentially shows that this is going to be a record year. You can see it forming people are really going to intensively focus on those rates, particularly once the conventions get kicked off.

And even though there's a little bit of a lull now, advocacy is the comp people are planning on an incredible rates and I think the services we provide will continue to diversify in the year.

Just sort of following up on efficacy another question from Laura, she's asking, there's obviously some press speculation that some legal fees we might capitalize media spend and focus from the top campaign. Do you think that those legal structures might lowly be spending and advocacy revenue in '24 versus expectations and how many might that impact all businesses?

We don't do fundraising for the (inaudible) . So it's not our focus is really on house and senate races and super packs that are not directly that can make. So, that factor would come into us, really either way. Look, I think Americas poised for very big rate and people -- there used to be kind of no tradition of people getting involved and active. It used to be about only 1% that we contributed. Now, it hits around 10% to 12% and I think you're going to see really strong participation and those factors are not going to influence us one way.

Right. One question on growth rates, and then we're going to talk about AI a little bit, but a question from Cameron McVeigh from Morgan Stanley. Can you discuss what drove some of the -- and this may be for Frank as well? What drove some of the divergence in growth rates between gross and net revenue in the quarter and how much of an impact might performance needed to do that?

It's less about Performance Media. We have now acquired a number of companies that have more -- that recognize more GAAP revenue versus net revenue when you look at kind of we acquired Team Epiphany, Left Field Labs, some of these new companies are more oriented.

Some of the digital online fundraising also generates higher levels of GAAP revenue. So I think those two or three factors for this divergence. We showed that -- we talked about the GAAP revenue because after it is evidence of economic activity. We're looking at how we're going to make money in fact that those kinds of revenues changed are part of showing kind of the building secrets of events here. I think it's going to be quite favorable to Stagwell through the year.

Shifting gears, AI. A question from Jeff Van Sinderen. So two parts. One, can you talk about latest customer projects in evolving AI and then the other part of it is, it needs to be more of how we using AI in our shared services platform and internally to improve efficiency ?

Sure. We have about 300 to 400 people internally. Well, just to go back to see -- remember that we have the Stagwell market cloud and we have a central innovation group. And that, that was one of the key principles in building Stagwell and as Frank pointed out, our EBITDA would be another $14 million higher if we were not investing heavily in AI and other tech products, as a central innovation function.

We've got 300 to 400 employees who are signed on to the central kind of AI experimental. Right now, we're actually completing our survey of what everybody is looking for AI. Obviously, on the word side, people are looking for lots of the ability to summarize information and the ability to help the right things more clearly.

And I think there's a lot of interest in text to video, give me a picture of a dog its now kind of thing and I think on the client end, clients want to make sure that before they dive into AI, they can be safe and secure, and that's why we are working on safety security first and then I want to understand, we're seeing applications where shopping box will make it is far easier due to safe ends like I'm having an office party tell me, what to buy.

The whole ability for you to look through data sets and say, Hey, can you bring up all the polling on the presidential approval for the last five years. These are unprecedented ways in which people can interact with technology and get -- other response that would have taken hours and hours and so we think there's going to be an enormous amount of work in redoing virtually every website to be AI-enabled in order to provide that kind of confidence.

That's where I think we're focusing a lot of our work with clients is exactly there. How does AI change your brand, if you're going to effectively interact with the brand's AI as much as you're going to see advertisements that becomes the absolute critical part of how you market and establish our brand image. And that's why particularly benefits of us as we're used to really engineering and designing the last mile, that connection between the company and the customer and if you're going to see that work explode.

I just have one final question on us, I think this one’s for Frank. Between your appetite to grow your media business and digital capabilities internationally at potential divestitures, the DAC, what should we expect in terms of deleveraging by the end of 2024 I mean 3 times is that what (inaudible)

Yes, we're at 3 times now. We expect to be somewhere in the mid-2s by the end of the year, I would say. That comes from the stronger cash flows that we'll experience in the back half of the year. It’s steadily ramps up Q3 and then Q4 really drives a lot of cash and that will drive down the leverage ratio, right?

Well, that brings us to a close day on our first quarter earnings call. Thank you very much for joining us. And I hope you'll be able to join us in a few months’ time for our second quarter.