DATA Communications Management Corp. ($DCM)

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Data Communications Management Corp. Fiscal 2025 Financial Results Conference Call. I'm James Lorimer, CFO of DCM, and I'm pleased to be hosting today's call. Joining me on the call today is Richard Kellam, our President and Chief Executive Officer. Following our prepared remarks, we will be moderating a Q&A session. As a reminder, this conference call is being broadcast live and recorded. We'd also like to remind everyone that Richard and I could be available after the call for any follow-up questions that you might have. Before we begin, I will remind everyone that we will be referring to forward-looking information on today's call. This information is subject to certain risks and uncertainties as outlined in the forward-looking information disclosure in our press release and more fully within our public disclosure filings on SEDAR+. This presentation will be added to our website for your reference, along with the post-view recording and transcript. The detailed information is also available on our website and SEDAR+. Please follow us on LinkedIn to keep up to date with other business developments. And I'll now turn the call over to Richard.

Good morning, and good afternoon, good evening to anybody joining from other time zones. Our agenda this morning is very clear. We're going to hit the highlights of '25, talk about some capital allocation, look at our priorities and turn it over to Q&A. So thank you, James. First, I've got a summary of our highlights. And I'd say anybody look at this slide, our key theme on the year was controlling the controllables, and there was a lot of controllables we need to control. Looking at revenue results, you saw that our release -- read our release came out last night. The revenue decline was pretty much in line with consensus at minus [ 6.2% ] on the year. And that really was reflecting lower spend on several large enterprise accounts. As shareholders know, about 93%, 94% of our revenue comes from large enterprise. So a lot of those large enterprise accounts obviously had some headwinds, and we did not offset that with new customers given -- although we did bring in several new customers, just given time to revenue, which, as you know, is long in our business. With that said, we did a very good job controlling the controllables and our adjusted EBITDA came in at $60.4 million and 13.4% margin. And that was really due to the spending discipline mitigating the declines in some of the gross profit and obviously, the revenue headwinds we experienced. We also generated strong free cash flow, well up over a year ago, and you'll see that in a chart coming up shortly of $13.4 million. And we've done, I'd say, a very good job returning capital to shareholders. And again, you'll see a chart coming up, our capital return to shareholders is about $17.6 million in the year. On the uncertainty side, again, we worked hard to manage through some market uncertainty, and you saw that through the quarters. The tariff uncertainty and that impacting budgets in large enterprise accounts. We obviously had the uncertainty and the unpredicted or unexpected rather headwind from the Canada Post labor disruption. Canada Post is a large client of DCMs as well as the knock-on effect to all the other clients we service from a mailing perspective. So that certainly impacted our year. Thankfully, that's behind us as we'll talk about in the '26 outlook. And we did a very good job, as I said earlier, managing and mitigating some of the revenue headwinds with operational efficiencies and driving SG&A productivity. And you'll see in a chart coming up that we actually reduced SG&A by $7.8 million in the year. On the digital and AI activities that we're delivering to the business, we've had some very good success in the year. We actually grew our tech services revenues by 4.2%. So obviously well above what we experienced on our core print business. We're now about $21 million in tech services revenues, and that's almost 5% of total revenue. Shareholders may remember that we launched Content Cloud, our AI-powered digital asset management solution. So we're proud of getting that to market and the success we're delivering. We've got good momentum with several verticals, but one in particular are the government and municipal services. And we were just up against a pretty large RFP and pretty large competitive shoot at, and we secured a good piece of business there on government. So we're kind of coming -- we're finding our lane and securing some good wins there. And then from an operational perspective and from a commercial perspective, we're using a lot of AI in our workflows today to drive productivity improvements. So I'd say we're all in on AI from an operational perspective and from a commercial perspective as well. And finally, we've been building a good solid M&A pipeline now that all of our restructuring, integration, IT integration is behind us. We can now look to opportunities for M&A, and we've been building that pipeline. The market is good. Certainly, the macro uncertainty is creating some opportunities on the sell side, and we're well capitalized to consider any M&A as we work through 2026. So overall, we managed well through the market uncertainty we experienced. The team did an excellent job to kind of manage those headwinds and maintain profitability, while also returning significant cash to shareholders. It's kind of the overall highlights, and we'll get into a few details as we flip through the file here. James? Okay. From a revenue perspective, as I said, minus 6.2% for all the reasons I said. But if you do look at this chart and you look over 5 years, you can -- you do see despite the revenue headwinds we experienced in 2025, we're still managing a business that is twice the size, almost twice the size of what it was in 2023 and managing it quite successfully. So obviously, we'll see those revenue headwinds turn to tailwinds, and then we'll have a nice kind of virtuous circle over time as well. But business is still solid. We've -- there's been no material losses in clients. And again, you can see from this chart that we're still managing a very sizable business north of $450 million in revenue. Gross profit, obviously, with factory overhead recoveries and utilization was impacted. And you can see that just around $117 million in gross profit. Gross margin of around 26%. And again, we'll see that come back as revenue growth returns. We've built a perfect footprint -- operational footprint to now grow from, and we'll see that naturally kind of return to historical levels as we have revenue come back into our business or revenue growth come back into our business. Adjusted EBITDA, as I said earlier, we're happy with the delivery of $60 million. It's pretty much in line with consensus, still slightly down versus a year ago. Year ago was our high watermark, of course and down for all the reasons I said due to the headwinds. But again, if you look at over the course of the last 5 years, we're up 70% over that horizon. And as I said earlier, with the operational efficiencies, the consolidation of our network that we've completed and the return to revenue, you'll see that turn into a nice kind of virtuous circle as we call it, where margins will improve, not a lot of restructuring in our plans. So you'll see a natural improvement in EBITDA as that revenue comes back into our mix. James, free cash flow?

We had a solid year in terms of free cash flow. We delivered $13.4 million, up about 145% over last year. A lot of the CapEx that we invested in, particularly in 2024 to modernize and upgrade some facilities following the MCC acquisition and integration is largely behind us. So we see CapEx kind of being in similar levels to what we saw in 2025 going forward. Solid balance sheet. We continue to pay down debt. Our leverage just below 2x net debt to EBITDA at the end of the year, and that's down 2.2% on a net debt basis compared to last year and significantly almost 50% since the MCC acquisition. And this is despite the returns to shareholders that we -- or in addition, I guess, complementing the returns to shareholders that we completed last year. Credit facility, we have solid lines and certainly a good balance sheet to pursue M&A activity and continue our capital return plans. So supporting a comment that I made earlier about our productivity improvements and our headcount, kind of rigorous headcount management. You can see in this chart, productivity has improved considerably. Our headcount was down 4% this year, and our headcount is down 22% over the last 3 years. And you can see that our SG&A, as I mentioned earlier, down 9% or $7.8 million. So a good job controlling the controllables and continue to manage productivity, effectiveness and efficiency of our teams. So really pleased with the progress we made there as an organization. You can see that our percentage on SG&A is down below 18% now, which is -- so what we put in plan a couple of years ago. From a capital allocation perspective, we deployed a little over $21.8 million of capital last year. That included a special dividend that we announced in the first quarter of last year as well as regular recurring $0.025 per share dividend. You can see that the total capital deployed of $21.8 million is up over last year, but a big portion of that is dividends, and we commenced a normal course issuer bid last year in June. In aggregate, we did return approximately $17.6 million of capital through the special dividend and the quarterly dividend paid out last year as well as about $1 million worth of share repurchases. Current kind of trading levels, we're trading about a 6.8% dividend yield.

Okay. Moving on to 2026, which we're well into now, obviously, some of the outlook, early signs, certainly some early signs of market stabilization. Demand trends are beginning to stabilize. Obviously, the Canada post disruption is behind us, and we're starting to see clients now returning to some of the discretionary mailings that they were doing. Personalized direct mail as an example, we're starting to see that return into the business mix this year. And then we've got a lot of new business activity. Some of the work that we did last year that I said is longer term and longer time to revenue will start flowing through into our business this year as well as some good, what we call Horizon 1, so kind of in-year revenue opportunities that the team is working to deliver as well. We like to say that execution is a strategy. So we will stay relentlessly focused on execution. Still a little uncertainty around tariffs, but we know how to mitigate and manage through that. And then as James mentioned earlier, we do have a very strong balance sheet and cost discipline to provide us that resiliency and flexibility as we progress through the year. Our priorities for 2026, these are 4 key priorities for us throughout the business. One is to maintain high revenue retention, high revenue retention rate. I said there's no regrettable losses in our business and execute on new customer development initiatives as well as opportunities to kind of land and expand some new clients as well. Second is to improve gross margin through business mix through our operational efficiencies, which we've done a great job at, and there's still even more levers we can pull. And obviously, that gross margin will improve as we see revenue come back -- revenue growth come back into our mix as well as drive our digital acceleration. You saw the over 4% growth last year. We see a lot more growth opportunity in our business there. And that digital portfolio is at a higher margin as well. So that obviously improves our mix. The third is to generate strong cash flow and continue to deliver capital returns to shareholders and continue on our debt payment -- debt repayment. And then finally, as I mentioned earlier, leverage the current market environment to be opportunistic on M&A, and we've got a good pipeline that we're working through right now. So there's some interesting opportunities that we're certainly considering. And our key theme really focus on profitability, on cash flow generation and continue to work on leadership opportunities in the sector and obviously, business development and business growth and opportunistic M&A to summarize. So a lot of priorities. We're well positioned in the current environment. As James said, and I've said a couple of times, we've got strong operating performance, certainly in uncertain and unpredictable environments, seeing a little bit more predictability this year. We've got solid cash flow generation. We've got very good new business development activity levels and pleased with the Horizon 1 and Horizon 2 activities that are in the funnel right now. We certainly have a solid track record of execution. We know how to integrate, restructure, manage overheads, and we do know how to manage revenue acceleration in positive environments, of course, and we're certainly going to be seeing that this year. M&A, we already talked about. We've got a very good and experienced leadership team. It's been around for a while. I'm 5 years as of a couple of days ago. So certainly an experienced team around me as well with many more years and we're well capitalized for any excess available capital -- with excess available capital rather to pursue opportunities in the market. So that is -- that's where we're going in 2026 and the year '25 is behind us. We'll now turn it over to Q&A.

Thanks, Richard. We'll now take questions from the audience. [Operator Instructions] We have our first call from Noel Atkinson.

It's Noel Atkinson from Clarus. It's a good overview. Just in terms of your 2026 outlook, that sounds a little more rosy than perhaps what you were talking about 6 months ago for '25. We're most of the way through Q1. How is sort of business activity or sentiment been so far in Q1?

Yes. We can't talk specifically to Q1, Noel, just because we're pretty well advanced there. But overall, we are seeing a little bit of a stabilization. We are still seeing some headwinds in the economy. But a lot of the kind of key macro things that Richard talked about we're optimistic that as we kind of get through the year, we'll start to see a little bit of a bounce back. Canada Post, which Richard alluded to, there -- the unions are voting over the next short little while. So the kind of proposals have been set to the union. So we're optimistic that, that will be supported. And we certainly expect some kind of bounce back there as well as in some other sectors that were a little bit quieter last year.

We've also had some recent -- we've secured some recent RFP wins, Noel, that will come into our business later in the year, but we've been quite successful recently on securing some recent wins in the marketplace.

Okay. Great segue to my next question. So Transcontinental in their most recent quarter, they were talking about price concessions that they've had to eat in their sort of remaining print and publishing business. Are you guys also having to compete more aggressively on price? Or are you seeing existing clients being more price sensitive as we go into '26?

There was definitely a lot of price sensitivity in the market even in 2025, Noel, and especially on the commercial print side, where there's capacity and capability in the marketplace. So we had to compete more aggressively on commercial print. When I say commercial print, think of some of the low SKU long-run business. But certainly -- yes, certainly, there is some pressure on price, but more it's more acute, I'd say, on that commercial print area. Where we bring value, obviously, where there's digital solutions that manage workflow for a client or we're well embedded in tech-enabled solutions, that isn't under the same margin pressure, obviously.

Okay. Great. And then one more quick one. Just -- okay. So you mentioned AI and you're using it for productivity internally, and that's great. We've seen media reports of sort of dislocations in search engine marketing and like paid search and organic from having AI agents in which in the search engine results such as Google Gemini. So are you seeing any clients that are kind of responding to this by moving more budget back into print or other solutions that you guys offer?

Do you want to talk to that, James?

Yes. Look, we're not seeing that yet. Certainly on personalized, let's say, personalized loyalty or personalized direct mail. Certainly, there was a move to digital during the postal strike, but we know that digital doesn't convert at the same level as physical. Physical is tough to ignore. And we're now seeing clients kind of move some of their budget back into the physical. That isn't necessarily related to AI. So on the -- I think what you're referring to really is kind of on the search side, right, on the marketing automation side, look, we've learned a lot about marketing automation and search automation. If you go to our website right now, datacm.com, you can see we have a whole new site we put to market. That site was generated using AI. All the imagery is AI-generated imagery and all the copy was developed using AI. And we optimize that for search, Gemini search for AI search essentially. So we've actually delivered -- we're delivering a lot more natural leads as a result of the optimization we did on our site. So we've certainly learned a lot about how to optimize in AI. I know I'm not answering your question clearly because we're not experiencing what you're saying is if you're not getting notice in search, you start redirecting some of your budget back into print. Hard for us to account for that, Noel.

That's fine. I just wanted to see if there's any early indications on that. That's it for me.

Great. We have a question from Daniel Rosenberg, please.

Can you hear me?

Okay.

So the first one, I was just curious around your various revenue lines. Kind of what do you view as the opportunity set around these lines from a growth perspective? Like where are you allocating your resources from a segmented basis when you think about the potential returns you could garner for the overall business?

Yes. I guess if you look at our segments as we report them in our financial notes, Daniel, you'll see that the kind of declines we saw in -- overall in our business were kind of led by our product sales. So that's, for the most part, printed material. So that's certainly a big area, where we see opportunities to kind of stabilize and see some return to growth. Warehousing and freight were kind of directly kind of tied to lower volumes there and some of the larger client declines that we saw last year are also clients that use freight and warehousing services. So as we expect to see product sales decline improve, we should also see some declines there -- or sorry, as we see -- expect to see product sales improve, we should also see a little bit of an uptick in warehousing and freight as well. And there's a lot of kind of kitting and fulfillment type projects that are kind of using our warehousing space, and we're fulfilling products on a regular basis to most of our large clients. Another area, technology hardware, that's an area that can be a little bit lumpy. We have some interesting projects that are in the pipeline right now. So not always easy to predict that because they can be kind of lumpy in terms of when programs run. But we see opportunities there in kind of our tech hardware -- traditional hardware has been printers, scanners, different applications used primarily in the health care sector and distribution centers for our clients. So we see that market as having good opportunity. The new market that we've kind of included and had some success in that rolls into tech hardware would also be digital screens. And we've got a couple of interesting programs that we're working on in that area as well. And then I guess the other kind of big bucket, tech services, Richard talked about that earlier. That was up, I guess, about 4% year-over-year, while the product sales were down. So nice to see some kind of continued strength in that sector. Does that help?

Yes. That's great. So I guess in that answer to understand, like I'm just looking at your inventory levels, they came down quite a bit when we think about kind of multiyear view, but that's just tied to the macro product sales. And maybe could you talk through some of the working capital changes that may not repeat next year versus the '25?

Yes, sure. We had a very strong focus on inventory management throughout the year. Certainly, part of the decline was due to kind of lower sales. And -- but another part of it was due to kind of better management and our procurement team has done a great job kind of -- in a couple of cases, we've entered into some consignment type opportunity or consignment inventory relationships with some vendors, where we just have faster, better access to inventory kind of on hand, and it's not on our books. We've also done a pretty focused effort across all our plants in reducing inventory that's held there. So we'll probably see some continued tweaks to inventory over this year, but definitely some kind of intentional improvements there, not just the unintentional through the lower sales.

Okay. So then looking forward, a consequence of some of these moves you've made historically is the improving cash generation profile. So maybe, Richard, could you speak to kind of what excites you about when you think about the coming 12 months, having that added capital and where you could put it to use?

Yes. I mentioned M&A. There's some interesting opportunities in the marketplace that we're looking at or considering in the in-store marketing space and in the labeling space and packaging space as well, which all kind of play to our strengths. So that's where capital could go to good use. Obviously, we want to prove to the market, to ourselves that we can return this business organically to growth, but at the same time, obviously consider some strategic M&A opportunities to continue to accelerate our position in the marketplace.

We have a call from Chris Thompson. Can you let him in, please. Chris, I think you should be good now. Chris, do you want to try it.

Can you hear me now?

Good morning, Chris.

I just wanted to -- most of my questions have been answered -- sorry, it's Chris Thompson from eResearch. Just wanted to talk a little bit about your margin compression in relation to the content, your new AI platform to see how we should expect that sort of margin has come down a bit and how it will react to your new software, which should be a higher-margin business?

Yes. So the margin -- the gross margin compression that we experienced in 2025 was directly related to that revenue headwind. So as we see that revenue headwind turn into a tailwind, we see revenue come back into growth, we'll see that margin naturally increase. We've also done a very good job from a procurement perspective to look at and discover lower-cost raw materials globally. Tariffs kind of push us into that opportunity. So we'll see that -- those raw materials flow into our business as well. Depending on the vertical or the product type, raw materials can be anywhere from 20% to 80% of cost of goods, obviously. So improving and securing better and cheaper raw materials obviously have a direct impact. And then you're absolutely right. As we continue to expand our mix on digital, digital is a higher much higher-margin business than conventional print as well as -- when I say digital, pure-play digital, so some of our SaaS solutions as well as when we enable print workflow with technology, that print workflow is a higher-margin business because it's supported with technology. So that's our -- absolutely our strategy, tech-enabled solutions and pure-play kind of SaaS solutions for clients as well -- as well as driving that core margin with better raw material purchasing, operational efficiencies, and we've got kind of clear pricing methodology in the marketplace as well.

We have a question in the chat here from [ Sahil Jain ]. With the recent financial performance, is management considering any additional shareholder returns such as a potential special dividend? So Sahil, at the present time, no. The Board is always kind of open and assessing opportunities. But our kind of current dividend policy is you saw the $0.025 per share dividend that we declared last night and the plan would be to continue that on. And certainly, as we get through this year and next year, our Board will consider different capital alternatives. And certainly, in the mix, there is also M&A as possible opportunities for capital deployment. I believe that's the end of any questions. So thanks, everyone, for dialing in today and joining our call and for your continued interest in DCM. Richard and I are certainly available after the call for any follow-up questions that you might have. That concludes our call this morning, and I hope everyone enjoys the rest of your day. You may now disconnect your lines.

Thank you.