Cimpress plc (CMPR) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Thank you for joining us. My name is Marlane Pereiro. I'm the high-yield cable and media analyst at Bank of America. I'm pleased to have with us from Cimpress, Jonathan Chevalier, Senior Vice President, Treasurer and Vista Finance; and Meredith Burns, Vice President, Investor Relations and Sustainability. Thank you for joining us.

Thanks so much. Thanks for hosting us. We're happy to be here.

Always a pleasure, Meredith. So we'll start out with the presentation.

Yes. So I'm going to go at a pretty quick clip through a few slides here, and then we'll leave lots of time for a fireside chat Q&A. So I'd like to say thank you to everybody who's here in the room, also the people that are on our webcast. Today, we will talk about the future and our thoughts about the future. There are risks to investing in our stock, which you can see listed on this slide, but also in much more detail in our SEC filings, so you should check those out. One thing that we will not be doing today is we won't be providing an intra-quarter update on the December quarter. So sorry, but that's not what we're here for, but happy to talk about the longer-term future for sure. And then there are some non-GAAP measures in this presentation, which you can find a reconciliation to on our website at ir.cimpress.com. So at Cimpress, we help millions of businesses build brands, stand out and grow via custom print and promotional products like the ones that you see here on this slide. This is something that we excel at, and we've been doing for a very long time, which you can see on this next slide. This just shows our revenue over the course of the last 21 years. And the bars that are stacked, the blue part of the bar is our Vista business, which you'll know as Vistaprint. That is our organic business during this period of time. The gray bars actually represent the companies that we have acquired over time and then subsequently grown through this period. You can see the CAGRs. And during this period of time -- not this period of time, during the last 10 years, we've had $2.3 billion of unlevered free cash flow and over $1.5 billion of adjusted free cash flow. So very cash generative. So what we do is web-to-print mass customization. What that is, is being able to deliver custom products even in small quantities with the reliability, quality and affordability of mass production. Customers care about this and love this because it helps them build their brands. It provides a fast turnaround, broad choice, low prices, high quality, e-commerce convenient and quantities that are right for them even if they're a very small business. And it is very hard to do. How we do it is we combine scaled talent across multiple organizations like manufacturing, software, design, advertising, service operations and product development. We have -- we operate in a very large and fragmented market. It's about $100 billion in North America, Europe and Australia. And that market represents a range of different types of products. We have products that came to the mass customization paradigm relatively early, like paper-based products like business cards, postcards and flyers. For us, we call those legacy products. We've been in that market for a very long time, and they're more mature. The end markets have been shrinking over time. We have been growing over time until very recently that has matured and that is a little bit of a drag on our revenue growth. However, we have this long history and track record of bringing more and more product categories into the mass customization paradigm. Some examples of recent places where we've been focusing are on this slide -- on this slide, paper bags, corrugated boxes, paper cups, drinkware, flexible packaging, sophisticated signage, roll labels, stickers, multipage booklets, you get the idea. We also have expanded our capabilities in being able to offer these massive explosion of SKUs in the promotional products industry, partnering with suppliers for just-in-time inventory like type of inventory management. We've also expanded into faster shipping speeds for our customers as well. And so -- and we've done that through the combination of capabilities that I talked about on the last slide. So I will say that there is a lot that we have been investing in on the product front, on the manufacturing front. We went into that in a ton of detail in our September Investor Day. So if anybody is interested in that, you can find on ir.cimpress.com, the video recording of the Investor Day presentation and the slides and the transcript. And I would highly encourage you to go there because we really talked a lot about how getting into those more elevated products, those newer product categories where we've been able to bring the mass customization paradigm is helping us to grow our wallet share with higher-value customers. That's across our businesses. And in particular, in our Vista business, that's really been very helpful for us over the course of the last several years, and it's fueling the growth in both revenue and profitability.

Okay.

Sorry. Moving on. We have a strong capital structure. We've got no near-term maturities. We had a senior notes refinancing in September of 2024. That's an 8-year term. So those are 2032. Our Term Loan B was repriced twice in calendar year 2024, and that is a 2028 maturity date. And we've also had over the past couple of years, a couple of upgrades from our rating agencies. Currently, our credit ratings for the family are BB- and Ba3. Okay. So we'll go into some outlook here. This is for the current year that we're in. We just finished our first quarter. We're a June 30 fiscal year-end. And so for fiscal '26, which ends this coming June of 2026, we have guided to revenue growth of 5% to 6% or organic constant currency growth of 2% to 3%. We're getting some help from currency this year. Profitability from an adjusted EBITDA perspective of $450 million, up a bit from where we ended in fiscal '25 and operating cash flow of $310 million and adjusted free cash flow of about $140 million. We are investing this year, particularly in capital expenditures, in new equipment and also fitting out some manufacturing locations that we are doing in order to bring these new products to market and also to optimize our network in terms of where we produce things and make sure that we're producing products in the most efficient place to produce them. That will help us lower cost. In some cases, it will help us get product to customer faster, et cetera. And so there is, from a cash flow perspective, CapEx included in this guidance of about $100 million this year. Our maintenance-oriented CapEx is about 1.5% of revenue, and this will be about 3% of revenue or so. We also recently, at our Investor Day in September, introduced a framework for thinking about FY '28 a few years out. The reason why we are talking about FY '28 is because that is going to be the first year that we expect to be benefiting fully on an annualized basis from a lot of these improvements that we're making on the manufacturing side that we talked about, also other improvements and efficiency gains that we can get throughout the P&L in advertising and also in our operating expense. Overall, we expect about $70 million to $80 million of annual EBITDA improvement through the combination, so all up and down the P&L, with a big part of that coming from COGS, but not only COGS. So in FY '28, which would be the first year that we get the full benefit of that, we would expect our constant currency revenue to be growing 4% to 6%. We would expect our adjusted EBITDA to be at least $600 million and our adjusted free cash flow conversion to be about 45% of that adjusted EBITDA. So what that would yield if we are successful or when we are successful in achieving these plans, it would drive our EBITDA margins from a little under 13% in FY '25 to about 15% in FY '28. Now I'm not going to go through this in super detail, but we did provide along with this framework for FY '28, a bridge to help people understand like what goes into getting to that at least $600 million. That is something that for us is we're going to strive to do better than that, to do better than the $600 million. But the way that the math works out to get to the $600 million coming from where we were in FY '25 to FY '26, which is the guidance I just talked about. You've got the cost savings. We have some plant start-up costs in FY '26 that are going to run off in future years. We do expect some tuck-in M&A contribution. We expect some currency benefit just based on the way that we do our hedging. And then what you have to believe in order to get to $600 million is at least $40 million of profit -- contribution profit growth from our organic growth. The contribution margin on that is that's implied with that at least $40 million is not very high. We would hope to and expect to do better than that, but we wanted to sort of help people see what the components were of getting to that at least $600 million. And then finally, what would that yield? That would yield significant delevering for us. We -- as of Q1, we're at about 3.1x trailing 12-month EBITDA as defined by our credit facility definitions, based on getting to that minimum level of profitability and cash flow in FY '28. That means that we would be meaningfully below 2x net leverage by the end of FY '28, subject to capital allocation choices that we may make. And along that path, we expect to be at approximately 2.5x trailing 12-month EBITDA by the end of FY '27, which would still allow some room for share repurchases or other capital allocation that we may want to do along the way. All right. With that...

Great. Meredith, I have a few to start off and then, of course, happily turn it to the audience. Obviously, AI is a big topic. So how do you see AI impacting the business, both in terms of opportunities of optimization, but also what segments could be at risk from some level of disintermediation?

Great. Great question. Thank you. So AI is a very important topic for us across our businesses. I would say that on the opportunity side, we are pushing ourselves to uncover those opportunities across the P&L. And we see that in the software space, we see that in regular G&A and marketing, we're already getting some good successes there in terms of automating advertising decisions or automating creative content in advertising, getting more efficient in software engineering and documentation, things like that. We have been very successful, I would say, but still pretty early in the type of thing that you would normally expect every e-commerce company to be doing in terms of customer service and automating there in terms of chatbots and also just making our representatives more efficient. So I'd say from an opportunity perspective, you've got like sort of the bucket of things we can do, we use AI for to get more efficient ourselves. There's another place that I think the AI is going to be disruptive, but could yield opportunity for us, and that is in the design space, obviously. People are really experimenting and in some cases, successful using AI to design different things. And I think our view there, even though we offer design services, that's not where we make our money. We make our money on the sale of the physical products, the production and the sale of the physical products, and nobody does that better than us. And so to the extent that AI is going to further democratize design, further make designs more accessible to more people, we would expect that those people would want to put the designs on more physical things. And so that, that could ultimately benefit us. But we do need to manage that as we go because we have folks in our business that focus on either creating templates for our customers to use from a design perspective, creating AI tools themselves for our customers to use from a design perspective and also design support or do-it-for-you type of design. So right now, we can use AI to help make those people more effective, more efficient. And over time, we just sort of need to manage like how does this go over that period of time. And then the one other place that I would say there is likely to be disruption, and we also need to manage it is on the advertising side in terms of making sure that we are ahead of -- or keeping pace with at least where the market goes in terms of currently paid search advertising and organic search in terms of the benefits that we get there and bringing customers into our businesses through to, okay, what do you have to do in order to make sure that you're coming up with great results in these AI agents and LLMs and things like that. We think we just really have to focus on customer satisfaction, making sure that we continue to delight people and that we are generating strong reviews, strong ratings from those folks, and that will help us continue on that front. And then, of course, we're investing from a team perspective in making sure that, that transition goes as smoothly as we can as we go through, I would say, the next several years where things are going to be changing quite a bit from an advertising perspective.

And when we think about revenue growth, is that driven more by customer retention and/or better customer like retention rates, new customers or [ repeat ] customers?

I think it can come from both, but very clearly, what we are experiencing right now is wallet share gains and improvements with higher-value customers within our customer base. And so we have a situation where, okay, even the new customers are higher-value customers, the repeat customers, we're gaining more traction because we're gaining more wallet share and people are sort of -- the average is sort of moving up in terms of what that looks like from a variable gross profit perspective coming from our highest value customers. So that's probably -- and that's in the Vista business, but also in our other businesses, that has already been a feature. And so I would expect a little bit more on the revenue from existing customers than just pure new customers.

I mean our customer data shows that a lot of our customers are buying similar products that we offer, just not from us. So I think there's a huge opportunity as we gain kind of awareness of our assortment and get better at serving high-value customers that people will start buying a broader set of our products, and that's good. And in terms of like thinking about high-value customers then and advertising as a percent of revenue, there should be opportunity there to capture as we are more successful in just getting more money from customers that really we can serve the best.

Great. And as we think about capital allocation, obviously, you've laid out kind of the leverage trajectory. How should we think about your capital allocation priorities, especially once you get to that leverage target? And in terms of acquisitions, do you think Cimpress could be in a position to be an acquirer, possibly a seller of assets in '26? Any color there would be helpful.

Yes. I mean I think we've stated recently that, I mean, we're focused on the path that we've laid out. We could see a role for small tuck-in acquisitions that can really help us in different areas, let's say, new product, new technology. But yes, we don't expect any kind of major shift to what we've laid out in our guidance there. And I think we are just committed to the delevering path that we've laid out, subject to our financial policy and then opportunities that arise.

Great. Any questions from the audience? I shall continue. All right. Great. Obviously, tariffs were a big topic this year. So any impact in the recent quarter, any lingering impacts as we go into next year?

Great. Great question. So yes, a little bit, but it's actually been pretty good. We've been able in this last quarter to really limit the tariff impact to less than $500,000 in the quarter. And that's been a lot of hard work behind the scenes in terms of shifting our supply where we can to places that have lower tariffs or no tariffs and also raising prices where we can't in order to offset that. I should say for everybody that the tariff concept really only impacts Cimpress in our promotional products and apparel space for things like paper-based products, signage, packaging, labels, that is either covered by USMCA compliance or it is -- their informational products that can't be tariffed under IEEPA because it would be taxing free speech. And so it's really confined to the type of products that aren't substantially transformed when we decorate them. So like on this table right here, Colin has a beautiful Cimpress water bottle, and that is something like that. It was a water bottle when it came to us, it was a water bottle after we decorated it with the Cimpress logo that doesn't change the function of it. And so that retains its country of origin. And so that -- those are the products where we have that impact. We did build in, in this fiscal year, about $5 million of potential downside risk. So we're tracking ahead of that right now in Q1, but it's a volatile environment. There have been changes that have happened already during this fiscal year, and they may continue to sort of rapidly evolve. And so that's why we built that downside risk into -- and that's factored into our guidance.

And then turning to the cost side. You expect to generate about $60 million of cost saves this year. Can you remind us or how should we think about the cost to achieve those savings? Are there further cost saving opportunities as well?

Yes. So the $70 million to $80 million of cost savings, as I mentioned in the presentation, comes across the P&L. The COGS piece of that is going to be material, and that is the thing that we're investing in right now. So in FY '25, we had elevated CapEx. In FY '26, we have elevated CapEx. That is actually helping us to improve the amount of what we call cross Cimpress fulfillment. It's when we can take a product that maybe we outsourced before to a third-party fulfiller and bring that in-house to a sister company or it also allows us to combine volumes from 2 different companies into a focused production hub. And -- but that does take some moving around. It takes a little bit of investment. And so we're making that investment this year. That actually is weighing on our profitability this year a bit. I mentioned in the presentation, there's going to be about $15 million or so of start-up costs in FY '26 that will run off as the volumes grow in those production areas. So that's one of the ones where there's the biggest amount of investment. Jonathan also mentioned the advertising, which is the better we can get at these elevated products and penetrating into the customer wallet share for high-value customers, the more efficient our advertising spend can be. And so that can be a source for those cost savings as well or at least for margin leverage as we go. And then as I mentioned before, AI is something that we are investing our time in and in some cases, our expense in terms of making sure that we are as efficient as we can be, and we're uncovering opportunities there.

Great. And from a cost structure perspective, how much would you say is variable?

So variable cost structure is actually quite high at Cimpress. It's about 65% of our costs are either variable, like truly variable like raw material shipping of our products or third-party fulfillers, things like that, or they're what we would call semi-variable, which is we have proven that we can keep those costs in line with demand. So think about customer service costs or advertising spend. These are things that we can affect relatively quickly. We've demonstrated our ability to do that, especially during the pandemic in a big way. And so that's something that we're very comfortable sort of viewing as a variable cost, even though in some cases, it would take an action to affect it.

Great. And then obviously, the longer-term target of $600 million driven by revenue growth, COGS perspective, et cetera, what is potential upside?

I'm going to decline to quantify the potential upside there. I will just reiterate, though, that our own internal plans will be to chart a better course than the $600 million. We see that as a minimum. And frankly, we see that as a minimum in terms of delivering returns on the investments that we've been making organically in this business. And so we do hope to do better, but I'm going to decline to size it.

Okay. And there was news or kind of a little while ago around Spruce House activist, can you discuss that relationship? Do you speak with them? Any context or color you can provide would be helpful.

Yes. So I'm not able to share a lot of detail there. We have spoken to them. They have been a shareholder for a long time, and we really appreciate their feedback and their constructive ideas. But beyond that, I can't share any details. I will say that there was an amendment to the 13D last night that came out. And they -- in that reserve the right to have all of the strategic conversations that they want to have to either buy shares or sell shares. But the reason why they updated was it looks like they have been a recent seller.

And then it seems that at least anecdotally, there appears to be some digital saturation with consumers wanting more tangible products and experiences. Are you kind of seeing any sign of this? Is it -- how would you characterize that? Or -- because I said at this point, it seems somewhat anecdotal, but...

Yes. I mean we've been in markets that have been in secular decline for years, and we've been able to grow for -- Meredith had a slide here where we've been growing for the past 20 years. So I think we do believe that there's always going to be relevance for physical products. And you think about the a lot of our products really represent a person and who they are, whether it's their small business and like it's their livelihood or it's their family and friends on the consumer products. So yes, we do think that there's going to be constant relevancy there. Now we've been transparent that some of our legacy products like business cards have started to decline a bit. We do think there's a long runway there as well just because the kind of the use cases of those types of products aren't necessarily what you and I would envision in terms of like passing a business card across the table. It's like, hey, leaving a card for their -- at a restaurant so that they can be relevant physically because otherwise, they're not going to be seen. So yes, whether it's business products or consumer products, there's still going to be relevancy and it's for us, it's where do we meet those customers. And again, we do think a lot of our growth is going to be from the elevator products that there aren't digital substitutes for in terms of packaging, promotional products, signage, things like that.

Great. And then just a few quick free cash flow items. From a CapEx perspective, you mentioned 1.5% of revenue as maintenance. As a more normalized total CapEx number, how should we think about that?

Yes. So we -- I would say that if you look at CapEx plus the value of capitalized leases as a percentage of revenue over the course of the last 5 years or so, there were a few years where we were actually sub-2%. And so that maybe felt like we were a little underinvested just from a normalized perspective, there were reasons for that because that was at the period of time that we were completely migrating our technology stack in our largest business in the Vista business. And because of that migration, we were very inwardly focused. We weren't actually at that point in time, launching new products through our own manufacturing capabilities. And so now that we're out from under that technology migration, and that's been several years now, we're coming back to it, but I think we're playing catch up a little bit. And so the amount that we're spending in '25 and '26 is probably a little bit more than a normalized level and the sort of 1.8% or 1.9% of revenue is probably a little bit less. So I'd say around 2% or a little more than 2% feels right as long as we're -- we have these opportunities to be investing in these new product categories or in efficiency gains within manufacturing.

Great. And can you remind us, are you a cash taxpayer?

We are a cash taxpayer. That is true. We -- last year, our cash taxes were about $33 million. That was low for us because we received over $10 million of refunds last year from prior year cash taxes. This year, our guidance is for $55 million to $60 million in cash taxes.

Should we think about that as a somewhat more normalized run rate reasonably.

Yes. I mean cash taxes is definitely a better thing to look at than GAAP taxes because there's a lot of volatility in our GAAP tax rate. On the cash tax side, you can sort of think of it in 2 different chunks. If you look at our Vista business, the way that generally works is the more profitable Vista gets the lower the effective cash tax rate is because of some tax planning that we've done there and have had been able to take advantage of for a while. In our Upload & Print businesses, however, that behaves like much more like sort of a normal situation where as profitability grows, the taxes grow as well. And those Upload & Print businesses happen to be in some pretty heavy tax rate jurisdictions like Germany, Italy. And so that's sort of the piece where if that's growing faster, we would expect absolute dollars of cash taxes to be growing up faster as well.

Great. Well, we're out of time. Jonathan, Meredith, thank you so much for joining us.

Thanks a lot, Marlane.

Thank you.