Peoplein Limited (PPE) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the PeopleIN Limited FY '24 Full Year Results Briefing. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Ross Thomson, Chief Executive Officer. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to PeopleIN financial year '24 results presentation, and I'm joined by PeopleIN CFO, Adam Leake. After record highs in FY '23, we've responded swiftly to difficult economic conditions by focusing on sales, operational efficiencies and ensuring a clear client-centric approach to service delivery. Whilst this year's results isn't where we want it to be, positively, our revenues have remained stable, and our performance is above our major industry peers, which shows that we have the team, sales culture and sector diversity to compete and win. We've reduced overheads and costs to ensure the business is fighting fit going into financial year '25. Our on hire margins have improved steadily throughout the year, which is pleasing. Our systems transformation initiative program, UNITE, will successfully finalize before Christmas. And we're already benefiting from operational efficiencies, improved AI functionality and data analytics, all of which are enabling us to win more work. We have a resilient balance sheet, and we're operating well within covenant and risk levels. We have a focused sales culture with strong staff engagement, generating new business wins and enabling us to take market share even during challenging economic conditions, especially in key defensive sectors like food services, infrastructure construction, public health and community care. We've reset our leadership structure and consolidated brands to ensure we have an efficient client-centric growth platform to deliver long-term shareholder value. We have several new shareholders on the call, and we've also got some potential shareholders. So we thought it would be worthwhile to provide a quick overview of the business. The key takeaways from this slide is our scale and diversity. We're the largest Australian-led workforce solutions company and the second largest overall. We're payrolling around 15,000 people every week. We have geographic and sector diversification like no other staffing business in Australia. Over 95% of contractor revenue with the majority now in long-term, highly operational defensive sectors. We have a large and divest client base of over 4,000 to support our cross-selling growth initiatives. We have over 1 million candidates in our consolidated database and our new systems are enabling us to leverage this pool better through automation, AI and improved data analytics. Over the past 3 years, we've transformed the group from a roll-up of multiple independent staffing businesses to a centralized client-centric growth platform that has specialist national brands that are supported by PeopleIN. This transformation included the consolidation of several brands, especially in health and aged care, where we are moving from 5 to 1 brand in financial year '25, and that one brand is First Choice Care. This provides a clearer sales message to our clients and will enable us to secure large national contracts. We've also refined our cross-selling offering to the services that all our clients require. And these are on the left-hand side of the slide under Universal Solutions, and they include finance, HR and tech recruitment via Perigon and Halcyon Knights businesses and our First Nation staffing solution by our Partners On Country. Now to our results. Our leadership team have delivered a focused business response to tough economic conditions, which has allowed us to hold our revenue by winning and expanding our market share, and we've driven operational efficiencies across the business. Revenue was 1% lower at $1.17 billion. Margins, while lower than last year, did stabilize and start to grow across the year. Normalized EBITDA of $37 million, down 39.5% on strong market conditions in financial year '23. This result was heavily impacted by lower permanent recruitment revenue due to low business confidence as well as a mix shift towards lower margin but highly operational food services work. Efficiency gains continued, leveraging our scale and streamlining systems and processes to achieve an ongoing cost reduction of $7.8 million in FY '24. This includes a 10% reduction in head count, so we're fighting fit going into financial year '25. Strong cash conversion in the second half with 105% EBITDA, our net debt to EBITDA 2.15, maintaining plenty of covenant headroom. We're pausing full year dividend to strengthen our balance sheet and ensure we're agile to capitalize on market opportunities. While we expect tough trading conditions for at least the next 6 months, we're resilient and we're set up well for growth when the economy turns. Now I'd like to hand over to Adam to go through the results in more detail.

Thank you, Ross. The financial results across the year have shown that we are a resilient company in difficult conditions. As such, we have responded positively. While earnings disappointingly are lower than the highs we experienced in FY '23, the group remains in a strong profit position, stable revenues, consistent trading across the year and adequate covenant headroom in our facilities. Revenues were $1.17 billion for the year, down 1% from FY '23. Our normalized EBITDA was $37 million, down 39%. This is consistent with the trends we disclosed at the half year. This impacted both our NPATA and our earnings per share accordingly. While certainly not the result we had hoped for, the business has responded to ensure it can capitalize when conditions improve. Looking at our results in more detail. As has been said, our business has been incredibly resilient, underpinned by these defensive sectors that we operate in. Revenue remained steady, falling just 1%. We've been able to maintain revenue during the hardest labor market since 2014 and at a time when our competitors are showing significant reductions in their revenues. This continues to show that we are gaining market share, particularly in the labor hire market. While on hire margins were lower than the FY '23 levels, they have shown steady improvement across the year. Total billed hours were 2.3% lower at 21.5 million hours. This is a better result than our peers across the ANZ region. The challenges in the permanent recruitment market continued across the year. Permanent placement revenue was down $14 million from the highs in FY '23. Net revenue was $156.2 million. The business has responded positively reducing costs. Efficiency programs that started in late FY '23 continued throughout FY '24. Further, the benefits of Project UNITE started to be realized. This resulted in costs being down 5.5% on the prior year. Underlying EBITDA was $37 million for FY '24. A breakdown of our statutory to normalized EBITDA is included in the appendix. Impacting the amortization charge for the first time is Project UNITE, which was an amortization charge of $3.4 million for the year. While trading is down on last year, the business has been stable across the year. On hire margins are lower than the prior year. But since July 2023, on hire margins have increased 8% per hour. We are continuing to see that trend in early in July '24. Recent ABS employment data showing labor hours growing at the lowest rate since 2014, excluding the COVID closures. We have not been immune to this and with PeopleIN's billed labor hours falling 2.3% against last year. The second half was heavily impacted by extended shutdowns over the Christmas and New Year period being much longer than previously seen and weather events in the January period. Billed hours did record a 4% improvement in the last quarter, providing momentum into the new year. Permanent recruitment has also been steady. The low business confidence levels and extended time to hire decisions by clients resulted in a sharp drop late in FY '23. Activity in FY '24, though, has been constant and remains a profitable part of the group. We have seen some late activity pick up in Q4 and in July, but it does remain steady. We are seeing a pick up of new sales activity in recent months and are cautiously optimistic around FY '25 activity. Turning to an overview of our key operating factors in Industrial & Specialist Services billed hours were steady against FY '23, reflecting the defensive nature of our clients in this area. This area includes our fruit processing brands, industrial and trades. These areas have all grown hours during the year but have been offset lower hours in hospitality clients, which are more directly exposed to cost of living pressures. Our competitors in these areas have recorded declining revenues and hours showing we continue to obtain market share from customers -- from competitors, apologies. With our strong brands and exposure to higher growth Queensland and WA regions, we expect this to continue. While our lowest-margin division due to the long-term stable nature of our PALM work, on hire margins have increased since July '23. The services businesses of Vision, Mobilise, Timberwolf are all performing strongly. Vision is a standout with activity at record levels, particularly in the Queensland regional areas. The high activity in this division is an early indicator of upcoming construction and large-scale infrastructure activity in the next 2 years. In Professional Services, the prevailing economic conditions have impacted activity and returns compared to FY '23. Both temp and permanent placements have been slower in IT, finance and executive sectors with companies delaying hiring decisions and increasing this time to hire. Activity has remained constant, though, across the year with no additional slowdown occurring. There was some increased activity in perm placements in Q4 and into July, but conditions remain challenging and likely to be so into FY '25. In Healthcare & Community, we've seen a growth in our disability and child protection sectors. This growth is offsetting weaker performance in private and public health placements. Financial pressures in the private health sector has impacted hours. We've been able to deploy resources into other areas across the public sector as well as aged care and child protection. This shift, though, has reduced margins in the division. Activity has been positive in Q4 with positive responses to state government tenders as well as national service providers expecting to provide growth into FY '25. Part of this success has been the consolidation of healthcare brands under a simplified national brand. This is generating operational efficiencies and a stronger market presence. Our financial results for the year contain the impact of Project UNITE. To recap, Project UNITE commenced in FY '22 as a program to replace and upgrade legacy systems that are required across different acquisitions and areas, many of which were approaching end of life and were not fit for purpose to drive effective and efficient operating models. This program is fast approaching completion, which is expected in December 2024. These earlier stages are now completed and in use. They are now being utilized by the group and are in the early stages of driving efficiency gains using data and early-stage AI testing. This now lays the foundation for an efficient and streamlined operations on a harmonized technology across platforms and brands. The group is winning new work as a result. As they are now in utilization, an amortization charge of $3.4 million has been taken this year. This charge will reduce in FY '25 and FY '26 to approximately $2.5 million per year. We've also incurred $3.1 million of one-off program costs to bring these last stages to completion. We now expect a final $1.1 million of costs in FY '25 to finalize and return to business as usual activity. On to our cash flow. The significant cash outflows experienced due to timing of payments and the abnormal receipts on 30 June '23 have reversed in early '24. This impacted cash flow significantly early in '24. In the second half of '24, though, cash flow returned to its normal operating profile with cash collections to normalized EBITDA at 101% of EBITDA. We continue to target a full year cash collection target of above 85% for normalized EBITDA. Our debtor days remained constant at 31 days. The economic environment has ensured that the group has maintained a prudent approach to capital management and our debt. There has been a small reduction in debt levels, benefiting from the improved cash collections. The total net debt ratio has increased to 2.15x last 12 months earnings. This has been caused by a drop in earnings and not an increase in debt levels. At these levels, we still remain well within our covenant levels and hold adequate covenant headroom in facilities. While we still consider the balance sheet to be strong and leverage adequate, the decision has been made to pause the full year dividend to maintain a strong balance sheet and ensure agility for future market opportunities. With this temporary pause to the dividend, improved earnings and continued positive cash collections, we anticipate that the net debt levels will reduce over the coming 12 months. And with that, I'll turn it back to Ross.

Thanks very much, Adam. So before we conclude, I wanted to cover off on a couple of strategic growth initiatives because even though it's been a tough year. And as we said earlier, we expect that to continue for at least the next 6 months. We are continuing with our transformation plan and focused on those growth initiatives. And at the macro level, the staffing industry in Australia will consolidate driven by an increase in regulation and compliance, like we've seen with the recent industrial relations reform and the harmonized national labor hire license and also long-term skill shortages in Australia. And over the past few years, we've done the hard yards to move the business from a roll-up of small staffing companies to a maturing corporate business that is the second largest staffing company in Australia with a 3% market share. We're well positioned to capitalize on the industry consolidation, especially given our strong exposure to sectors that have a long-term high demand for talent resources, including public health, community care, early learning, food services and infrastructure construction and also the fact that we continue to demonstrate our ability to take market share. Our goal over the next 3 years is to be the largest and most efficient workforce solutions business in Australia. To put this in context, the current largest staffing business generates over $2 billion in revenue and has a net revenue to EBITDA margin of 8%. As Adam mentioned earlier, our current net revenue margin is over 20%. And this should increase as we add more volume without significantly increasing our internal cost base over the coming years. So in addition to day-to-day sales activity, we're currently focused on a number of growth initiatives that include selling our Tier 1 complete workforce solution to major facilities. As an example, the business can now provide a complete workforce solution as PeopleIN to a hospital that includes the provision of health workers as well as cleaners, chefs and facility management. Such a solution centralizes the point of contact for the client and provides a cost-effective solution for clients, which is desirable given the cost challenges many businesses are currently facing. And we're one of the few organizations that can provide this given our diversity. Another key focus for us will be cross-selling. We'll continue to cross-sell our universal services across a 4,000 client base. And we'll also look to implement incentive schemes to drive sales harder across the business. On defense, we'll look to secure defense and defense industry staffing opportunities, leveraging our scale, sovereignty and veteran-led status. We've already secured some good wins in FY '24, but we expect the opportunities to increase, especially as defense spending significantly grows in Australia over the coming years. We'll continue to grow and diversify our involvement in the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility scheme. Since acquiring FIP in June 2022, we have grown our number of PALM workers from 4,700 to over 6,000, and we recently placed our first aged care workers, which is a fantastic result. We'll continue to leverage our scale as the largest employer in the scheme. The scheme is low margin but provides revenue annuity and solid cash conversion. Also Olympics, everyone have watched the Olympics over the past couple of weeks. Now it's the 2032 Olympics, it's a great opportunity for PeopleIN as one of the largest Queensland head office businesses. We've already secured some temporary labor work, and we hope this will significantly grow as we get closer to the event. We'll also continue to leverage our scale, centralized shared services and new technology solutions to drive cost efficiencies across the business, especially as we add volume organically and via targeted acquisitions in industrial and health divisions when the markets start to turn. So in summary, while we expect tough trading conditions to continue for at least the next 6 months, we're resilient and we're set up well for growth when the economy turns. Thank you very much indeed. Now we'll take some questions.

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from Ian Munro with Ord Minnett.

Just firstly, just on the working capital position, can you perhaps give us a sense of whether that has normalized post balance date? And I guess as I look forward, how should we be thinking about that sort of operating cash over EBITDA conversion? Second one, just with respect to the cost outs achieved during the second half. Just trying to get a sense of how much of that kind of sticks into FY '25 and is incremental to earnings? And then thirdly, just interested in your sense more broadly on kind of where we're at in the recruitment cycle? Obviously, you pointed out some ongoing challenges in permanent recruitment, and that's a key margin driver. Just interested in whether this is kind of mid-cycle or low cycle? Where is the kind of blue sky, I guess, potential looking ahead?

Thank you, Ian. I'll answer the first few and then I'll turn to Ross to give a bit of an update on the market position. So our cash and working capital, look, the second half was a very good half for us, as we'd flagged to you before. There are a lot of timing differences that had run through in the first half and the second half sort of returned more to normal. I do believe that we should be on a consistent 85% to 90% cash conversion target across both halves. I think that is a more realistic number for us going forward. On the cost-out, look, the program has been highly successful, taking out $7.7 million in this year, taking out over $9 million when you look backwards going forward. Most of that, i.e., all but $1 million of that is probably -- will stick with us. That $1 million is probably more due to additional commissions and sales based sort of incentives that are likely to come back in the business if sales pick up, but really, all of it is quite sticky into the new year.

Yes. Most of the action was taken in the last quarter FY '23 in the first quarter of FY '24. And then to the -- your outlook to the market. As we stated, we expect the next 6 months to be -- continue to be challenging and a lot of that is tied back to business confidence. We're not seeing any of the metrics that assess business confidence, whether it be NABs, monthly survey and others. None of them are showing a tick up. Actually, most are showing a decline. So until we see that confidence pick up, then we won't see that return to perm recruitment and some other sort of higher-margin areas. And as flagged, we expect that to be tough for at least the next 6 months.

And is that -- does that translate to tough and not getting worse or tough and seeing incremental drops in demand just across the business. I know there's pockets of strength and pockets that are underperforming. But on, I guess, a business mix basis, I think it's stabilizing.

Yes. Look, all we can do is look at what we're seeing now, and as highlighted in the presentation, it's an element of stability there, which is good. But conditions are tough out there and there's a lot of macro factors there affecting the economy as well. So apart from our expectation, it will continue to be tougher at least for 6 months, then we're not going to go into that in any more detail and call a bottom. But what we are doing is reacting. And I think the presentation, I hope, clearly demonstrates that we're not sitting on our hands. We're actually out there taking the appropriate action on sales as well as cost efficiencies and really managing the business appropriately for the economic conditions, and we will continue to do that.

[Operator Instructions] The next question comes from Liam Schofield with Morgans.

Just interested in the second half segmental margin for Professional Services, just looking at note 1 on the operating segments, and it's -- I can sort of see that EBITDA has gone from 3.2 in the first half up to 6.1 it looks like. What's sort of going on there in terms of Professional Services' margins?

Yes, Liam. Professional services margins, so break that into 2. Our labor hire side is improving somewhat. There is some small uptick in our -- in that area. We'll seen a little bit more in the finance and executive area. Although IT has sort of shown some positive signs, but overall, a little bit of mix of financing proving the margins in labor hire. There's been reasonably good activity in the permanent side, a little bit patchy early, but the last quarter was quite good. But it's also benefiting [ of course ] the whole year benefit or the whole half benefit, if you like, of the cost-outs that have come through the business, too. So overall, it's improved a little bit, still performing our Perigon business is still performing ahead of where we purchased that. So yes, some good signs, but that's the reason for the margin.

There are no further questions at this time. I'll now hand back to Mr. Thompson for closing remarks.

Great. Well, thank you very much, everyone, for your time, much appreciated. And as I said, while we expect tough trading conditions to continue for at least the next 6 months, we're a resilient business, and we're set up well for growth when the economy turns. So thank you, and have a great day. Cheers.

That does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.