S4 Capital plc (SFOR) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Okay. Good afternoon or good morning, everybody. Most of the viewers or listeners on this are in the U.S. So I'm joined by Peter Rademaker, our CFO, who is in Amsterdam with Victor Knaap, who heads our Content business; and Scott Spirit, our Chief Growth Officer, who is in Singapore. And Pete Kim who's in New York. So it's still early in New York, not as early as it was on the earlier call. So thank you again, Pete, for joining us at the beginning. I think you've seen the presentation that we have up on our site, and we'll kick off with a trading update with Peter. And then Victor will talk about Content. Pete will talk about Data & Digital Media. Scott will talk about clients' mergers, and I'll just do a brief summary, and then we'll take Q&A. So thanks very much. Peter?

Yes. Thank you, Sir. Martin. And a very good morning from Amsterdam. To summarize our first quarter of 2021, a very strong growth in top line following, as you have seen, a very strong Q3 and Q4 in 2020. So basically, we maintained the momentum or even accelerated. And what we saw was a very strong client momentum with our larger clients, such as Google and Facebook and Amazon, Procter & Gamble, AB InBev and Netflix. And Scott will further elaborate on that later in this presentation. And next to that, strong client momentum, which is also clients where the -- our 2 opera wins from last year, BMW Mini and Mondelez, that started to have a significant positive impact, especially in March, what we saw. January, February, a little bit slow, but really gearing up in March. And all in all, this resulted in Q1 reported revenue of GBP 121.6 million, which was 71% up from reported last year. A gross profit of GBP 104 million, which was also 71% up compared to Q1 last year. But more importantly, on a like-for-like basis, and pro forma, which is in this particular case, the same, revenue grew with 35% and gross profit had a growth base of 33% in the first quarter. And all regions showed a very strong growth. I'll come back to that in a few slides. Our cash flow remained very strong with net cash balances in the first quarter, averaging around GBP 15 million net cash on our balance sheet. And although we have that net cash position on our balance sheet, we are considering a near-term bond issue to further enhance our merging transaction firepower. As most of you probably remember, last year, in July, we did an equity raise of GBP 130 million, also to have a war chest of which, at the end of April, we have spent around GBP 95 million, and that doesn't include our recent announcements with Jam3 and Raccoon per today. So basically, we spent that whole money. So we continue to examine merger opportunities in high-growth functional areas of both practices, and we are prepared to leverage the group up to around 2x EBITDA, which in practice would mean that we would be looking for a bond or a term loan B structure of around GBP 250 million, GBP 275 million, or so let's say, $350 million, $400 million. And finally, on this first slide, 2021 full year expectation, as you remember, earlier we indicated a 25% growth rate on a like-for-like basis for revenue and gross profit. But as a result of our first quarter performance, our strong pipeline and our outlook economic circumstances, we have up that expectation to 30%. If I go to the next slide on Slide 5. You see what I just mentioned. It's 5 quarters, but I wanted to show the development of our quarterly like-for-like growth performance on gross profit. Q1 last year was 19%. Q2, when COVID really hit hard in -- especially at that moment in time in Europe and in the U.S., we kept on growing in every individual month, but Q2 was at 7%. And then in Q3, we immediately picked up to 23% and Q4 even stronger at 27%. And now, as I just mentioned in the previous slide, we are at a growth rate of 33%. And in the next slide, you see our contribution on revenue and gross profit by practice. So Content contributed 76% of our total revenue and 72% of gross profit. And as a result, Data & Digital Media contributed 24% in revenue and 28% in gross profit in the first quarter. And if you look at the numbers, Content grew to GBP 92.2 million, which was on a reported basis, 64% up. Data & digital media grew to $29.4 million, which was 100% up, delivering that 71% growth on a reported basis. And on a like-for-like, Content grew with 35%, Data & Digital Media also with 35%, delivering that 35%, of course, for the full group. And on gross profit, Content grew to GBP 74.6 million, which was 62% up. Data & Digital Media, 101% up on a reported basis to GBP 29.4 million. And then again, on a like-for-like basis, 31% growth and a very strong growth for Data & Digital Media, especially in the first 2 months, maintaining that momentum that we had in the Q4. And with Content, like I just mentioned, with Mondelez and BMW Mini that really kicked off or took off in March with slower months in January and February. On Slide 7, you will see the gross profit comparison by practice for the first quarter for last year as well as the first quarter for this year. So Content was on a like-for-like growth at that moment in time for 19%, now at 31%. And Data & Digital Media last year at 17%. And in Q1 2021 at 36%. And then my last slide, Slide 8, by geographies. Americas, still the most important region for us, it's North and South America. It's 70% out of total. Last year, it was 72%. EMEA to 21% compared to last year at 19%. And APAC, both in the first quarter of this year as in last year contributed 9% for total. And I'll just refer to the numbers on a like-for-like basis. What we saw is that the Americas grew with 30% on a like-for-like basis in the first quarter. EMEA was 44% also as a result of strong growth in BMW Mini, amongst others. But that contributed more significantly to the EMEA increase. And Asia-Pacific grew with 34% compared to the Q1 last year. So this was my last slide in relation to the trading update and the financials. So I will now hand over to Victor, who will take you through some of the developments in the content practice. Victor?

Thanks, Peter, and welcome, everyone. Thanks for joining the call today. And we're at Sheet 9. So before I will start talking about the state of the Content business in Q1, I'd like to share the summary of the Forrester report you see the image of at this page of February 11. Since it describe perfectly what the biggest challenges this brand needs to solve today. CMOs of global brands need to pivot to become truly multi-local operations. That means that on a technological, cultural and behavioral level, brands need to create a global brand message while meeting local customers' expectations. And this article with contributions of Sir. Martin, Wesley and Bruno, is exactly in line with RFIs, the RFPs and the briefings we are working on today from BMW, Mondelez and recently, the one from Allianz. So with that in mind, I would like to start with what have we have been up to in Q1 on the next page. So our main focus in Q1 was building integrated client teams across Content, DDM, countries for our 42 Tier 1 and Tier 2 brands. Next to that, we freed up teams for integration of the labels, in tooling, brand, finance and HR. And besides that, we invested in client corporates and categories like governmental, PR, virtual events and social and beefing up our APAC presence. The main focus of the presentation today is the state of the whoppers. We identified 5 clients that spend more than USD 20 million of revenue with us. Google, the brands under NDA, Facebook, BMW and Mondelez. For BMW and Mondelez, we started scaling up the teams in markets and hubs, approximately 120 FTE per brand. While the revenue in January and February was slightly behind, we saw better numbers in March, and we see serious traction in the coming months. So what's next? We've never seen this type of new business activity. And it feels like a once in a decade opportunity to get that new business across our Tier 1 and Tier 2 clients and by adding new logos and adding -- and we see more opportunities globally. We still need to scale 25% of the BMW and Mondelez teams, while we're also ramping up for new business like Allianz. We will do a continuous push on reporting, tooling, branding and integration, and we will have a rigorous focus on Tier 1 and Tier 2 client growth. If we go to the next page, I can give you a quick peek under the hood on our clients' team process. So every single Tier 1 client we've done this year, we kicked it off with the integrating reporting and forecasting for all of our Tier 1 and some of our Tier 2 clients across Content and DDM. We run monthly forecast and accounts updates by the designated client leads. We reviewed strategic account events with the senior leadership by our newly appointed Head of Clients, Amy Michael. She was previously Chief Client Officer at Firewood. And this process will be repeated quarterly with an addition to add our client margin reporting in our reforecast, too. And just to give you a glance of what's happening at BMW and Mondelez. So in BMW, we saw a significant reduction in our forecast uncertainty since the start of it because it's a big number we need to hit. Because we increased our revenue across photo and film. We expanded our retained teams, and there are many integration opportunities. We are currently underway of planning for 29 European markets. And we're seeing the first effects of cost efficiency through our upscaling of near and offshore hubs. Next to that, we see integration opportunities, so we go from content to technology by scaling up in Ad tech, social and DAM implementation. If we look at Mondelez, we see some additional upside from August onwards, where our client teams are actively engaged in the client 2022 planning process. And our main focus there is unlocking the web work in Europe and moving our stream in campaign planning, personalized content and customer decision journey planning. And if we look at a bit of our work, and there's a lot we can't show you because they're all under NDA and new cars coming out. The marketing engine, that's the business we set up -- the name of the business we set up for BMW, is providing a wide range of different content elements. So all the way from landing pages to print ads to how-to videos to social ads are all being delivered from the marketing engine we built together with our partners and our clients. And as said, there's way more to come. So to end the Content section, I want to tell you a little bit what we're working on in the coming 3 months. So first of all, in general, we are very positive on our clients' outlook. There's a lot of optimism in market. And we see definite budget growth, especially around our Tier 1 and Tier 2 clients, with social and fashion being the fastest-growing part of the business. We will spend more time to expand our -- and further integrate the Decoded, Jam3, TOMORROW and Staud Studios, our latest additions to the Content labels. And the growth will also be fueled by the expansion of the S4 capabilities due to that integration, especially tech and data cross-sell into our Content clients. Global client teams will realize additional regional growth opportunities outside of the client HQ regions. And last but not least, we see a big uptick in experiential coming back, especially for hybrid events, in-person and virtual, in parts of the U.S. and APAC. So this is for me. This is from the Content side. I would like to hand it over to Pete, and please ask me all the questions after this presentation.

Thanks, Vic. Good morning, everybody, and I will be covering the Data & Digital Media practice update today. In the background of this first slide, you can see a recent headline discussing some of the ongoing travails of the privacy escapades that are going on right now and the so-called death of the cookie and the ongoing moves by Google and Apple, among others. We'll be talking about 2 topics today, including the privacy topic. And so with that, let's get started. We'll move ahead one slide, please. So the first thing that we'll talk about is the demand for performance marketing services has accelerated. And we see a number of reasons for this as well as have listed some moves over on the left that we've made in anticipation and in response to this. This year, some recent mergers that we have accomplished, include Metric Theory, Decoded Advertising. And just this morning, we have announced the merger with Raccoon, which is a performance marketing firm based in LatAm and Brazil. And the performance budgets we see are lifting across the board, and they are really due -- that's due to several factors that are listed here, including the acceleration of digital transformation and the fourth transition of traditional marketing dollars to digital. That's really been pushed by COVID. The -- we're seeing more cases of digital branding and awareness budgets being combined with or even shifting to performance teams. In my opinion, this is something that's been needed for a while. I think in the eyes of most investors, all advertising should be performance-based in the sense that it's ROI positive and should be measured that way. Digital ad spend, of course, has been growing year-over-year for a while now, and we see the latest updates on that front there, which just continues to show the strong growth as consumers' attention move from traditional media to more digital means. Some of the opportunities and trends that we see. As advertisers start to see third-party data, targeting diminish. And again, that's due to the privacy changes that are happening, which I'll cover on the next slide. We believe that S4 is uniquely positioned to steward this performance marketing in terms of its transition to the first-party audience data and reliance upon that. So we also see diminishing audience-based targeting and increased automation within these added platforms -- within ad platforms, and that's creating an opportunity to further marry the creative and content excellence of S4 with the performance marketing execution -- sorry, the creative and content excellence of MediaMonks with the performance marketing execution of MightyHive the data and digital media practice. And all of this is directly in line with our long-term ambition to create a truly differentiated unitary offering. We also note in passing that the privacy changes that have been discussed will potentially favor the walled gardens, including Google, Facebook, Amazon, et cetera, and likely push even more budget to the platforms where our performance teams operate. Moving on a slide. It seems we, in our little corner of the business world, you can't go a day without having yet another update around privacy. And we do think that this is all -- sorry for the background noise. We do see that privacy is disrupting the digital marketing landscape. And S4 is uniquely positioned to help advertisers adaptiveness in this way. We do believe that digital marketing is in the midst of a decade-long state of upheaval. And that this will all basically kind of end in a very confusing Game of Thrones like tension between the industry competitors, the public opinion and the government scrutiny and regulation across many of the concerns listed here. So with that -- with all the background noise, I'll actually turn it over to Scott and see if I can investigate what's going on in the background here. Scott, please go ahead.

Thanks, Pete. Appreciate it. Good evening from Singapore, everyone. So I'm going to cover what's been going on with our clients. If we move on to Slide 19. It's been a fantastic quarter for us for new business. We've seen excellent progress in our traditional way of winning new business, which is land and expand. So we've seen great new business from our major clients, like Google, Facebook, Mondelez, BMW, et cetera, Amazon, Netflix and some of our newer ones as well. So clients like Robin Hood and PayPal have expanded their remits with us in this quarter. It's been a great quarter for new clients as well. So you can see some of the logos here. We have got some great tech companies on there like Shopify and Instacart, a large win for us in Germany, which is a relatively new market for us in winning the Allianz business there. And some other great names on there. And then in terms of pictures, we mentioned in the release that new business activity is pretty frenetic. We're involved in several major pictures across categories like FMCG, tech, consumer electronics, pharma. And as Vic said, it's really a massive uptick in activity there and a huge opportunity for us to do a bit of a land grab when it comes to new logos and expanding our existing ones. Move on to the next slide. You'll be familiar with this one. This is our client portfolio across the different industries that we work in. So you'll see that technology is still the dominant industry by far. Dipped slightly below 50%, and that's mainly due to growth we've seen from some of our newer wins like Mondelez, BMW, Allianz and others in different categories. But we are very confident that will remain going forward around half of our business. And we continue to see great opportunities with existing and new technology clients. Moving on to Slide 21. These are a couple of charts that you might be familiar with from our FY 2020 full year results presentation. So they really just show the growth and scale of our client relationships. So the one on the left shows our top 10, 20 and 50 average client sizes, and you can see significant growth year-on-year for them. And then the chart on the right and table really speaks to our offer strategy. So you'll see this time last year, we had 8 clients above GBP 1 million in revenue. And this year, we've got 18 in that segment, representing almost half of our revenue. And you'll see significant growth in the other categories as well. So this really speaks to the larger sort of converted-at-scale client relationships we have. And the 5 whoppers that we're forecasting for this year plus the list of others that we're targeting over time to get to that status. So very strong and large client relationships. Moving on to the next section, which is our mergers. We've been very busy in this first quarter with mergers and adding capabilities and clients and talent to the group. We announced Decoded, a metric theory, right at the beginning of January. They were actually signed on the year's eves. So they're technically 2020 mergers. But in January, we also did TOMORROW, which is a creative business in Shanghai, which is now fully integrated, so that's already merged with MediaMonks there. And Roger, who's the CEO, is now in charge of that combined business. And then Staud Studios, which is our automotive specialist based in Stuttgart, and they've got off the ground running and the sort of backbone of what Victor was describing as the engine for BMW. So doing very well there. In February, we did the Datalicious deal. So that was in Australia and New Zealand, expanding our Google Analytics capabilities. And then in March, more recently, we announced Jam3, which is a highly awarded and highly creative -- digital creative and production agency based in Canada, but with a significant footprint in the U.S. and offices in Uruguay and Amsterdam, too. And then finally, today, we're very proud to announce the merger with Raccoon Digital Marketing and excited to expand our performance marketing capabilities in Latin America, as Pete described. It's a substantial business, 450 people, 2 ex Googlers who founded it around 9, 10 years ago, I think. And yes, an exciting one for us to really expand our capabilities there and really become much more aggressive and they will go-to-market alongside their colleagues on the programmatic side at MightyHive and look forward to some great progress there very soon. We have a strong pipeline of deals. We -- as Peter said, we're in the process of issuing a bond that will give us a new war chest to go to market and complete that pipeline. So looking forward to more activity in the rest of the year. And with that, I will pass you back to Martin.

Thanks, Scott. Thanks, Peter. Thanks Victor. Thanks, Pete. So just to summarize on our last slide, but most importantly, most of our people are safer, up to about 5,000 people now in 31 countries. And mostly -- most of them are working from home, although where Scott is in Asia Pacific, we're seeing more return to the office. It's much more varied in EMEA and in the Americas. And the hotspot sadly are still Brazil where Scott mentioned and Pete mentioned, we're expanding our operations with Raccoon, which we're delighted with. But Brazil remains a hotspot in our world as does India, and we're trying to help our colleagues there and their families as much as possible in very difficult circumstances. Despite that, we lead the industry in terms of growth rates, significantly greater than we've seen from the ad holding companies in Q1. Even though our comparisons last year, remind you, we're 19% up. But so we're up a further 33% this year. So well over the target necessary to double our size over 3 years. We're growing at a significantly greater rate. And because our margins, as Peter said, remains strong -- stronger in the first quarter than they have been in the last couple of years. But with the same pattern with margin expansion as we invest heavily in people increases, talent increases in the first half of the year to accommodate the growth rate. We remain having a strong balance sheet. We paid out something like GBP 95 million in merger payments since we raised GBP 113 million in July of last year, but our liquidity remains stronger than that would indicate. So we're generating significant cash with operations. And we have a very healthy new business record pipeline, both of the pitch variety and land and expand, and we've made significant progress on our 20-squared whopper strategy. This gives Scott heart failure when I say this, that in addition to the 5 that Victor mentioned of whoppers that we're confident of achieving this year, we think there's another 3, which are tech and telecom's base. So out of 8, if we were to achieve 8 this year, 6 would be in tech and telecommunication. So we retain that very strong tech focus. We have a robust merger pipeline, as Scott laid out with a bond issue, around GBP 250 million, GBP 275 million imminent, a straight bond, as Peter indicated. And on the ESG front, we remain in the forefront of that with a net 0 target by 2024, which I think is significantly of anybody -- ahead of anybody else in the industry. Our big emission points are travel and office. And of course, those patterns being changed, as we indicated in the statement by the pandemic. Our unitary structure is very much about achieving conversion at scale. We had brand awareness in 2018. Brand trial in '19. And in '20, we started to get some real momentum on conversion at scale, and that's continued into 2021, and we're involved in a number of what we would call land and expand relationship pictures and big pictures themselves. If you think about S4 conceptually, to our mind, it really benefits from -- if there was a marketing VIX Index from the marketing VIX index increasing, which with Google and Apple's decisions, I think Prescient decisions around privacy in anticipation of regulation. Those Prescient decisions have raised the volatility index, the marketing VIX, if you -- you could put it like that, similar to the investments there. And that really has increased the demand for our services, particularly in data and analytics and digital media. But at its heart, we believe that S4 is a royalty on the growth of technology and digital transformation not dissimilar, it was one of buffets Woodstock this week -- last weekend. And some of you may recall in the 1980s, he said buying into the global ad holding companies was like buying into a royalty on the growth of globalization S4 as a royalty on the growth of digital transformation. So with that as background, we can now open it up if there are any questions. Operator, Holly, please.

[Operator Instructions]

Sounds as though, Holly, we've answered every question. So if that's the case, we're all here on our email. Peter, thanks again. Victor, thanks again. Pete, thanks again. Scott, thanks again. We're all here on our e-mails for any questions from anybody on Q1 or anything else. And we look forward to seeing and talking to you again in Q2 when we're pretty confident we'll have even better news for you. So thank you very much.