Cimpress plc (CMPR) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

My name is Marlane Pereiro. I'm the high-yield cable and media analyst at Bank of America. We're very happy to have with us this morning from Cimpress, Sean Quinn, Executive Vice President and CFO. Sean, thank you for joining us.

Great. Well, thanks a lot for having us, and welcome, everyone, and thanks for those that are joining on the webcast as well. As was just said, my name is Sean Quinn, Executive Vice President and CFO of Cimpress. And I want to also thank the Bank of America team for hosting us today. Always a great event, and I'm here to discuss Cimpress, the leader in mass customization for print. Before we get started, as usual, today, we'll talk about our expectations for the future. We might be wrong about that. So I just point you to our risk factors, which are in our most recently filed Q and 10-K available on our website. Also, we have some non-GAAP measures in this presentation. You can find reconciliations to that on our IR site as well in our financial and operating metric spreadsheet that we publish every quarter. So let's get started. Cimpress has a long track record of profitable growth. On the slide here, you can see the last roughly 2 decades of our history from a revenue perspective. In the blue there is our Vista segment. You would know that as our Vistaprint business which has grown primarily organically over this time period. And then the gray bars there, all of our other businesses, which originated by way of acquisition and then have subsequently grown quite a bit since then. The compounded annual growth rate over that last 20 years overall was 22%. For Vista, it's 18%. So significant growth. And our consolidated revenue for our last completed fiscal year was $3.3 billion just as a point of reference. That growth, importantly, has been highly profitable growth, highly cash-generative growth. Over the last 10 fiscal years, we've generated over $2.2 billion in unlevered free cash flow. We take a long-term approach on capital allocation. We have roughly 30% of our equity value that's represented on our Board of Directors. That includes our founder, who's also our Chairman and the current CEO. And so there's great alignment between our decision-making and our long-term investor interest, including our debt holders. In terms of our offerings, just to give you a little perspective on that. Our businesses serve millions of customers every year with custom marketing materials, signage, logo, apparel, promotional products, packaging, labels. We also serve consumers with products like canvas prints, invitations and announcements, photo books. You can see on the slide here, our businesses offer 23,000 unique products and over 300 million product variants. So significant product breadth and depth. And you can see just some examples of that tangibly represented on the slide here. The unparalleled breadth and depth of products that we have, but also product attributes and options are all with the convenience of online ordering, and that's enabled by our focus on mass customization. We'll talk about that a little bit more in a bit. We're selling to customers which have a relatively -- a need for relatively small order quantities and who have historically been underserved by traditional suppliers. And I think you can see that in the number of customers we serve and the average size of the orders. On the next slide here, let me just spend a moment talking about mass customization as it relates to our business. And we've really been leading this multi-decade shift from that traditional business model to mass customization. As you can see here on the slide, the blue dot, if you look at the chart on the left, the blue dot on the bottom left shows we produce small quantity orders at a cost per unit, which is well below the cost quantity trade-off of the traditional printing industry. Beyond providing us with substantial cost advantages, there's a lot of other advantages relative to traditional print business models as well. And that comes through convenience for customers, the breadth and depth of choice, fast production and delivery times, reduced obsolescence as well. Since customers are coming to us and able to order in small quantities that are right for their needs. [ Print mass ] customization also leverages, if you can see on the right here, 3 core capabilities. The first 2 are required for the entirety of our business, which are e-commerce and software-driven order aggregation and production systems. And then the third one, democratized design is required to be able to serve customers who don't have graphic design skills. Vista is really where that has been most represented in our history. And in that business, we've been making pretty sizable investments to expand the design capabilities that we offer there to provide our millions of customers in Vista with opportunities with a broader set of design services and capabilities, but also our Upload and Print businesses have started to offer up design services and tools to expand their customer offering and be able to appeal to a wider variety of customers. Over time, we've been able to drive continued growth, and I'll show this a little bit later as well by bringing this mass customization paradigm to new and more complex products and product categories. And that pattern very much continues today, including by enabling customers to design in these more complex products. Even as some of the end markets that we operate in mature like business cards, we do have a history of creating new S curves and new product categories, and that's enabled by the investments that we've been making and have continued to make over time in customer experience and also the advancements in production technology more and more digital technology that we can use in different ways to drive into these new categories. And our growth today is largely driven by those new categories. From an overall market perspective, we operate in a very large market. Total addressable market exceeds $100 billion across North America, Europe and Australia. And that's just the part of the market that's relevant for what we would target in small and medium print runs. And again, that's kind of ripe for disruption in this mass customization model. In our history, we started in small format marketing materials, and you can see that represented as one of the main 4 categories on the left. But today, we have a very broad and deep offering across the other categories that you see represented on this slide as well. The market is not only large, but it's also highly fragmented. There's thousands of traditional print businesses that account for over 60% of the market in aggregate. And those traditional providers are largely subscale print providers that overall have been a decline for decades in terms of the number of those providers as they see chair to scale of mass customization players like ourselves. And we believe we have a long runway of future growth opportunity from share gains that we can continue to have given those market dynamics in our space. Just in terms of the -- some of the capabilities that make this possible. This is a slide that we've used many times in the past. I'm not going to try and present every bit of it, but I just want to highlight a few things, which is that there's a unique combination of capabilities that we have and they are represented in the boxes on the left here that each individually have scale-based advantages that are quite significant and it is really collectively this group of capabilities and advantages that drive our success. Our scale is unmatched in our industry. In this last completed fiscal year, we produced and delivered about $30 million custom orders. Each one of those orders oftentimes having multiple custom products in that order. So just think about the scale of that, and these are individually small orders, but a lot of them and across the globe. Delivering that many small custom orders in a way that also delights the customers that we serve and also doing that profitably requires the orchestration of all the differentiated scale-based capabilities that you see on the left-hand side of the slide. And as you see on the right, we're continuously increasing customer value through those. And that creates a flywheel where we're able to drive more customer value and that allows us to drive greater market share gains. That's really been the key to our long history of profitable growth that I showed in the first slide and our continued market disruption. I just wanted to drill down on one particular aspect of that, which is I mentioned the orchestration of a variety of different capabilities and how important that is. But I really want to emphasize the technology behind what we do. That's really been core to our value creation over the entirety of our history. But over the last 5 years or so, we've made significant investments, including just if you think about it from an opportunity cost perspective and replatforming our technology, modernizing our technology across all of our businesses and that's enabled our businesses to not only be more flexible, move more quickly to serve customers, but also to better leverage what we call our mass customization platform, which is a central platform that we've invested in over the last 8 or so years, that's been a significant area of investment for the benefit of all of our businesses. It's really hard to overstate the importance of the modernization of our technology platforms. These investments are now squarely in our rearview mirror, and we see now with those in the rearview mirror that we're able to benefit from just having all of our resources, our team members that are focused on technology development, user experience, data, all focused on improving customer experiences in ways that improved conversion, improved loyalty and increase profitability. You very much see that represented in our results, especially over the last 6 quarters or so, including further adoption of our mass customization platform, which has also enabled us to accelerate new product introduction. And that's really shown in the financial results recently. Just to give you a brief overview on our kind of our segments and geographic distribution. You can see on the left here that Vista, again, you would know that as our Vistaprint business, that's our largest segment from both a revenue and profitability perspective. It's a little over half of our revenue. But our other businesses collectively are significant drive meaningful profits and also have strong free cash flow conversion as does the Vista segment. And just as maybe a point of reference because people are oftentimes most familiar with our Vista business or Vistaprint. The next 2 boxes there, PrintBrothers and Print Group, together, those segments represent what we call our Upload and Print portfolio. Those are all businesses that we acquired starting in 2014, collectively represents about 30% of our revenue. We invested about EUR 600 million of capital to acquire into those businesses plus some subsequent tuck-ins. And those businesses since the time of acquisition have now generated free cash flow that's well above the amount of invested capital that it took to buy those businesses. They were all debt funded at the time of purchase. The free cash flow yield on those businesses relative to the invested capital was 18% last year. So just an example of our ability to acquire into other parts of the market and do that successfully. Just on the right here in terms of our geographic distribution of our revenue, mostly split evenly between North America and Europe, as you can see there. There's a small sliver of about 4%, which is Australia, Brazil and India. Just getting into some financial metrics. Again, there's no real update here from an interim perspective, but just to give you an overview, especially for those newer to the story. On the top here is just our historical adjusted EBITDA. And on the bottom is our historical net leverage ratio. One of the things you can see here on the top is that our capital allocation and also when we've done acquisitions, that's had an influence on our profitability, in particular, where we've had periods of relative intensity in our level of organic investment. You can see in fiscal 2022 and into the first part of fiscal '23, where in particular, that had an impact. I mentioned before, the technology replatform that we were doing. As we were starting to come out of that, we were starting to invest more heavily in the talent to also leverage that new technology and improve customer experience and offerings. And that you can see impacted profitability at that time. It did take about 3.5 years to go through that replatforming effort in our largest business, in Vista. And as I mentioned before, now that we're through that, clearly in the rearview mirror that new modern architecture is really benefiting us from the perspective of increased flexibility, moving much more quickly, introducing new products and that's really had a significant impact on also the last bar you see there in terms of the improved results. In last fiscal year, as you see on the far right, we delivered an all-time high of $469 million of adjusted EBITDA on a consolidated basis. We also had record adjusted free cash flow, and we had mid-single-digit revenue growth. That financial performance, as you can see on the bottom, brought our net leverage down to about 3.0x our trailing 12-month EBITDA. Important to note that, that was the case while we're still investing quite significantly from an organic investment perspective and that continues today. We feel good about those levels. We also did allocate some capital to share repurchases as we were going through that delevering as well. In terms of the capital structure, I'll just show here the components of our capital structure. On the left here, you can see our net debt over time back to 2011 when we were in a net cash position. And that goes all the way through the September quarter there on the right, the TTM period. And then on the right-hand part of the slide, you can just see the components of our debt stack as well. We continue to delever on the back of the improved financial performance that I showed on the last slide. We also, in September, issued new 8-year senior notes at a favorable rate in order to extend the maturity there of our previous notes. So again, 8-year notes there. And then on the back of also credit rating upgrades from both S&P and Moody's, we had 2 from each over the last year. We've also just this week launched the repricing of our Term Loan B as well. In terms of leverage policy, this is something that we've updated over the last -- I think the first time we put this out was in the March quarter of last year, and we've consistently communicated since then. I'll go through that. I know that's important for this group, but also some expectations from a capital allocation perspective for the current fiscal year. During this fiscal year, fiscal '25, we do plan to continue to delever. As I said before, we do have significant organic investments kind of in the run rate. We expect to continue those, but we don't see any sort of inflection point upwards there. And we do plan to continue to take advantage opportunistically of some share repurchases, but do that with constraints I'll outline in a moment. From a leverage policy perspective, we target net leverage at or below about 2.5x trailing 12 months EBITDA. That's as defined by our credit agreement. And then as we say here, we may, from time to time, increase leverage to as high as approximately 3.0x for investments that we believe have a good return, but with the ability to clearly delever back down to the target of approximately 2.5x or below. In FY '25, the -- and we're a June 30 fiscal year-end, just as a point of reference, we believe that we could reach this leverage target of 2.5x by the end of this fiscal year. And it's pretty easy math to do and you just look at our free cash flow generation. But we have left some room there to do some share repurchases just given where our equity is trading. We believe that's a very attractive use of capital. But we're doing that within constraints. So we've said that we would exit the year at or below approximately 2.75x. So leaving that quarter turn there for share repurchase this year. And then we would continue to delever beyond that. Just in terms of other capital allocation in this fiscal year, as I said, in terms of organic investments, basically similar levels to what we had as we exited last fiscal year. We do expect some increase in CapEx to take advantage of opportunity for growth, but also productivity enhancing production equipment, which there's some interesting innovation that we're taking advantage of there. And then in this current fiscal year, we don't expect to deploy significant capital to M&A, although that remains an avenue for capital allocation in the future. And then lastly, and then I'll turn it over to Q&A. Just in terms of guidance and as we look forward, so we're not updating the guidance that we've more recently provided in our last earnings release, which was reiterated on October 30. But just to take a moment, especially for folks that are newer to give an overview of the multiyear outlook that we provided. We provide this multiyear outlook in combination with our leverage policy, we think, together, that provides a good road map for what we expect on average over the next few years. And that is for consolidated constant currency organic revenue to grow annually at mid-single-digit rates, possibly a little bit higher for adjusted EBITDA to grow slightly faster than revenue, implying margin expansion. And then from a free cash flow conversion perspective, we expect that the multiyear conversion rate of our adjusted EBITDA to adjusted free cash flow will be approximately 45% to 50%. That will fluctuate from year-to-year depending on working capital timing and things like that, but that's the average that you can expect. The optimism that we have, that's also expressed here in terms of our continued growth is really rooted in the advantages that we have and the capabilities that we've built over the last 2 decades. And in particular, all the investment that we have made and the replatforming of our technology as well over the last 5 or so years that have allowed us to be at a point now where we can really just focus on execution, continuing to deliver for customers and as an outcome of that, delivering for long-term investors. And so with that, why don't we turn it over to Q&A.

Thank you, Sean, for that overview. My first question is, any thoughts or update on a possible impact from tariffs?

Yes. I think the brief answer is there's a lot of unknowns there. The way I would think about it for us is that there's kind of 2 categories of potential impact. I don't think that in terms of volume or on the demand side that there we don't expect significant impact. In terms of raw material inputs, there could be some impact there. We have -- part of our supply chain starts in China, but that's definitely the minority piece. So there could be some impact there. The way I think about that portion is that, that is likely to impact most of the industry, not unique to us. We have a very diversified supply chain that's been more and more the case over the last 5 years, especially in the wake of the pandemic, where we further diversified that. So we feel good about our ability to navigate that, especially on a relative basis relative to competitors. So that's one. The other one is just where we produce. We do have, for our North America market, significant production, our largest production facilities in Windsor, Ontario, just over the border from Detroit. And so we do produce a lot of the goods ultimately for North America customers there and bring them into the United States. So there's some question marks there. And then we also have some production in Mexico as well, and we bring product in from Mexico for U.S. customers. In both cases there, we benefit from de minimis exemptions, which in general, allow for importation of those goods. If they have a value of below $800, then they're not subjected to tariffs and duties. I think there are some questions on exactly what the future is for those de minimis exemptions. But for now, that would mean that there's largely no impact, but it would be subject to whatever happens with the de minimis rules as well. So I would say some question marks there, but that would be probably the biggest one to focus on is just the Canadian production.

And is there anything from a regulatory perspective that you're watching or that could impact the business that we should be mindful of?

Not really. I think in terms of tax reform, given our tax structure and the global nature of our business, that's not really overly significant topic for us. It's one we watch. But that globally is probably more of a topic. Otherwise, I think really tariffs is probably the biggest one post-election cycle to keep an eye on, but otherwise, nothing to note.

Great. And then do you see Cimpress in a position to be an acquirer or possibly seller of assets in the next year or 2?

Yes. We're certainly in a position to, I guess, technically speaking, to do both, but I don't see us as a seller. We -- over time, there's been a couple of situations where we've divested the businesses, but we're happy with the portfolio we have today. So I think on that side, I don't see this as a seller. On the buyer, we're pretty regularly doing some acquisitions. But like even in the last year, we've done a few smaller ones. But we've said pretty consistently is that we don't expect any material M&A in the next year, probably in the next year or 2. And that's really a function of 2 things. One is focus. And after a period of quite a bit of change in the business and investment and replatforming, we think the single biggest opportunity we have is to continue to focus on what we have today, continue to improve experience for customers, do that every day, every week, and we think that's the biggest source of value creation that we can do. So that's the primary driver. The other thing is that there's not any sort of burning need for capabilities that we don't have. And so I think over time, M&A will be an area of capital allocation that we'll certainly be looking at. For now, it will be smaller, kind of tuck-in in nature. These are smaller acquisitions that tend to be at a very, very low multiple of earnings and cash flow, very obvious. And we have a track record of executing on those as well.

Great. And obviously, it's a very competitive and also fragmented print market. So what differentiates Cimpress from competitors?

Sure. Yes. It's interesting we come to these conferences in front of this investor base. Print, I think means something different just given some of the folks that have been in the credit markets over time. And I was in the back of the prior presentation, you could just see how different some of these businesses are. So in terms of us relative to our direct competitors, I think there's 3 main things that I would highlight. One is just the breadth and depth of selection. And if you go on to vistaprint.com and just have a look around and you go to some of our other competitors, yes, there's just significant breadth and availability of offering. So that's one. Two is for all of our businesses, what we've been very focused on is being able to offer that product breadth and depth in very low minimum order quantities, oftentimes minimum order quantity of one. And that's very differentiating. And if you think about some of the products that I showed earlier and what it takes to be able to produce those at a great unit cost with great quality and service and so on in those low order quantities, it takes the orchestration of a lot of things and it takes a lot of focus to do that. And so that's one of the other things that's very differentiating. And then the third one I would probably mention is just ease of use and design capabilities and service. We have invested significantly over the years and design capabilities, but also a service layer around that. And again, we're serving over 15 million customers a year with over 30 million custom orders and each individually small, they're custom by definition. And oftentimes, customers need a little bit of help. It could be just navigating things, understanding what products might be available, a little bit of help with design, doing that at scale in an efficient way is also very differentiating and has a big customer impact. So those are the 3 things that I would highlight.

Great. And what do you see as the biggest opportunities for Cimpress over the next few years?

Yes. I think the biggest opportunities, we like where we're at right now. We've -- it's been -- frankly, the last 5 years have not been all easy, navigating a pandemic, navigating a transformation in our largest business, Vista, navigating the complete restacking of a technology platform like those are not easy things to do, especially when you're doing them at the same time. That's all in the rearview mirror. And now we have the ability to, every day, focus on execution, focus on improving the experience for our customers and leverage all the hard work that we've put in over the last few years. And so I think the biggest opportunity, frankly, is our opportunity now to be able to focus, continue to put one foot in front of the other and execute on the plan that we have. And there's significant opportunity ahead, both from a market perspective but also the ways that we can help customers and what they do. The other thing that we're very happy with the progress that we've made from a balance sheet perspective over the last couple of years, and I think that also affords us the opportunity to make sure we can continue to focus. We've delevered very significantly. So that profile is in a very good place that gives us the opportunity to think about investments in different ways, have dry powder, if there's interesting opportunities but also with the refinancing of the bonds back in September, our nearest maturities in 2028 with our term loan and the bonds are now out 8 years. So the balance sheet is in a great spot.

Great. Those are all the questions that I have.

Great. Thanks. Do we want to open it up to the room for questions? Yes. Go ahead.

[indiscernible] seen in fiscal year '25. Can you just comment in terms of where the product suite is, if there is any...

Sure. Yes, the question just for those on the webcast was really about M&A and surprised that there's not maybe more M&A planned in FY '25. And I think that question comes up, especially given where the balance sheet is now because there's certainly opportunity for us to do that from a financial perspective. . You're going back to some of the comments I made earlier. I think the biggest thing there, there's no shortage of opportunities, Carl. Like the -- we get things that come across our desk multiple times a week. And so there's no shortage of opportunities. Then the question is relative value of focus, in particular, not just where we -- capital dollars, but focus. And right now, our belief is that the most value-creating thing that we can do is focus on our existing business, not to distract that with large M&A. But we're continually doing. I mean, even in the last 2 quarters, we've done a couple of tuck-in acquisitions. So to that point, Carl, like we're still doing that. I expect we'll continue to do that. Those tend to be very obvious, like if you look at it on a pro forma basis, the multiple of cash flow that we're able to acquire those businesses that is kind of a no-brainer. A lot of it is just vertical integration, people we already work with and are comfortable with. And so we'll continue to do that. I think anything material right now, we would just be concerned that, that might be a distraction right now, and we want to make sure that we continue to build off of the last -- if you look at the last 6, 7 quarters have been really strong, but we need to make sure that we continue to build on that. So I think the opportunities will be there. And at some point, that might make sense. But for now, we're trying to stay disciplined there. We also want to make sure that we deliver on the leverage guidance that we provided. And anything significant would probably require taking that up, which is okay, but we want to make sure we get there. It's not a leverage policy or a target unless you actually get there at some point, and we want to make sure we deliver on the commitments that we've been communicating consistently. And I think, hopefully, this community, especially you can see that we've been saying things over the last 2 years and doing them and more, and we want to make sure that we continue with that track record.

Would you mind talking a bit about what you're seeing in the consumer environment for print products and sort of how demand is trending? And just how to think about demand in the current inflationary environment?

Yes, sure. So the question was just about kind of consumer trends relative to our products, and what we're seeing in the broader environment. I missed that. The last part was did I catch everything or...

Basically, just talking about how much like consumer wallets are being pinched by inflation.

Yes, sure. Okay. So -- and specifically about whether consumer wallets are being pinched by inflation. I would say that in large part, we do not see that in our business, and I'll come back to an exception to that. And I think part of the reason for that is that we're providing oftentimes very basic kind of brand identity, marketing products, that small businesses need to be relevant or to grow their business. And so some of what we do is discretionary for sure, but oftentimes, it's a necessity, and we're providing it in smaller order quantities. And so it's less likely to be impacted. . The one -- probably the one main exception I would call out to that is in the German market where our largest business there, serving slightly larger customers than what you would think of for the Vistaprint business in the United States, which most of you are most familiar with. And there, we're continuing to see strong order growth, strong customer growth. But you do see average order values coming down, basically a trade down in the quantity because of some of that economic sensitivity. That's a specific thing in the German market. Otherwise, it's been pretty healthy. But again, because of our focus on very small order quantities, oftentimes actually that economic sensitivity drives customers to us as opposed to away from us because they're attracted to the availability of smaller order quantities than maybe they were ordering in the past with a more traditional supplier. And we've seen that over our history as a trend.

What about like the canvas print, photo book, invitation side of the business?

Sure. That's been -- that's had its ups and downs, frankly. And the question was specific to canvas prints, photo books and the like. It's been really getting at specifically consumer products. Those products, unlike some other categories, really, really accelerated in the pandemic. All of a sudden, everyone needed to kit out their home office and so needed to canvas prints and so on. And so there was kind of a pull forward of demand and then that's cooled off. In our businesses, there's 2 main businesses that serve those categories or those customers with more consumer focused. And in Vista in our Vista business, that's been kind of a low single-digit grower. So it's been healthy, stable but more of it coming from new product introduction and some of the gifting, some promotional products, drinkware and so on, probably less from the -- some of the products you mentioned. And then in our BuildASign business, we have -- there's roughly half of that business that is consumer-oriented, namely canvas prints. And that's been a little bit more challenged over the last probably 6 or so quarters, partly because of the pull forward of demand partly because of -- which I think just cooled demand a bit overall and partly is just some of the channels that are used for those products have gotten a little bit tougher the very transactional affiliate, e-mail and the need to kind of find other ways to access customers. So I would say it's been moderate overall. I think canvas print has a specific dynamic to it just because of that pull forward during the pandemic. Otherwise, it's been pretty stable. Great. I think we're out of time unless -- sorry, is there a question there? Okay. Cool. All right. We'll leave it there. Thank you, everyone, for your time today.

Thank you, Sean.