ARC Document Solutions, Inc. (NYSE:ARC) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

ARC Document Solutions, Inc. (NYSE:ARC) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript February 22, 2023

Operator: Good day, everyone, and welcome to the ARC Document Solutions 2022 Year-End and Q4 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, I would like to hand things over to Mr. David Stickney. Please go ahead sir.

David Stickney: Thank you, Lisa, and welcome everyone. On the call with me today are Suri Suriyakumar, our CEO and Chairman; our President and Chief Operating Officer, Dilo Wijesuriya; and Jorge Avalos, our Chief Financial Officer. Our fourth quarter and full year results for 2022 were publicized earlier today in a press release. This press release and other company materials are available from our Investor Relations pages on ARC Document Solutions’ website at ir.e-arc.com. Please note that today’s call will contain forward-looking statements and they’re only predictions based on information as of today February 22, 2023 and actual results may differ materially as a result of risks and uncertainties that we highlight in our quarterly and annual SEC filings. Any non-GAAP measures discussed today are reconciled in our press release and Form 8-K filing. I’ll now turn the call over to our Chairman and CEO, Suri Suriyakumar. Suri?

Suri Suriyakumar: Thank you, David, and welcome everyone. Today we reported strong results for the full year of 2022 and significant advancements in meeting our strategic goals. Our annual sales grew. We improved nearly all of our key operation metrics. And as I have reported in the past three quarters, our earnings are impressive. Our balance sheet is solid. Our debt is low and our cash generation remains high. Best of all, we will continue growing in 2023. Our sales are not the only thing growing. The number of industry verticals we serve are growing. The number of services we sell into each of these verticals is growing. The revenue in each vertical is growing. And of the more than 50 industry verticals we serve, 30 of them purchased more than $1 million of products and services from us in 2022.

I should also make another point about the diversification of our customer base. We grew year-over-year sales in every single one of our design and construction customer verticals in 2022. Architects, engineers, general contractors, subcontractors, homebuilders and property developers all purchased multiple services from us. Far from buying blueprints alone, these customers purchased environmental graphics, safety signage, on-site print services, scanning services, as well as equipment and supplies. This is a tremendous achievement by itself, but taken together with diversifying sales in all markets we serve, it represents a great progress in transforming our business. To give you an idea of what we went — or what went into our success in 2022 and what the future holds, I’ll now turn the call over to Dilo and Jorge for a review.

Dilo?

Dilo Wijesuriya: Thank you, Suri. Our domestic sales momentum from earlier in the year continued through the fourth quarter though low sales from our joint venture in China hit some of our progress. COVID lockdowns constrained spending there and lasted well into December. This dragged down overall sales for the period. North American and UK sales were on track throughout most of the quarter and then softened with the holidays as expected. Retail, office, education and construction segments drove sales for digital color graphics. Document scanning services were also in high demand from many of the industry verticals we serve irrespective of their size. Revenue from our print services at our customers’ locations was flat during the quarter.

We think similar levels of revenue will continue through the coming year. If more customers return to their offices, we will like to see a moderate increase in print volumes. As for the year, the results speak for themselves. We grew significantly in every business line except equipment and supply sales. Our annual sales for 2022 increased 5% year-over-year and our margin expansion and profitability were outstanding. The strategy we have put in place will help us continue to grow in 2023. Our go-to-market plan for winning new customers and expanding the annual spend of existing customers, continue to focus on three actions. First, our demand generation programs have been designed to drive more qualified sales leads to our sales teams. Second, we focus on communicating and educating our customers regarding our new innovative products such as sensory graphics, flex graphics and Scan by the Box programs.

Third, we focus on account-based marketing programs to expand our reach to different buyers within our customer companies. These actions all support ARC’s overall growth strategy I outlined in August of last year, with the primary focus being on selling into more industry verticals. Everything we do gets better when we diversify our market. As Suri mentioned earlier, we service around 50 business verticals now and we continue to increase the types of customers we do business with us. Should economic conditions soften, the diversification of our market will help us remain relevant and continue to maintain our sales momentum. ARC is prepared to aggressively win new business and continue to increase our market share. Improving customer service is also a wider component of our growth strategy.

Delighting customers helps us win repeat business and assists us in capturing referrals for new business. It is why we incentivize excellent customer service in our employee profit share plans. Customers think of ARC as a high-service provider and we excel to deliver on those promises. This is evident with our near five-star rating from 20,000 online reviews. While Jorge will outline more details in a moment, I should also point out that our gross margins remained healthy in both the quarter and the year, thanks to our operational efficiency. Price escalation of print supplies has moderated, though we continue to pass on increases to our customers as a normal course of business. We have seen significant improvement in past supply chain difficulties.

And we are working with our suppliers closely for better management of supply in the new year. In all, our operations teams have been vigilant and proactive, contributing significantly to the results we have reported today. We are relying on their continuing efforts to help us grow in 2023. At this point, I’ll pass the call to Jorge for a discussion of our annual financial performance. Jorge?

Jorge Avalos: Thank you, Dilo. Our revenue increased three of the four quarters in 2022. If we adjust for the $800000 drop in our Chinese joint venture during the fourth quarter, we would have posted top line growth for the seventh consecutive quarter. Without the adjustment, we still posted annual growth of 5% or $13.8 million. More impressive than our moderate sales growth is how we were able to leverage our overhead cost to achieve exceptional gross margin growth. Overall, it expanded by 140 basis points. which speaks to the scalability and efficiency of our cost structure. If you need further proof while revenue grew 5% EPS grew nearly 25%. As we predicted we averaged more than $10 million per quarter in EBITDA despite inflation’s impact on wages and materials that led to a roughly $1 million drop in the fourth quarter and for the year.

Of note, we expect average EBITDA per quarter to be $10 million or more in 2023, as well. Cash flow from operations for 2022 grew by $1.5 million over 2021 coming in at $37.2 million and narrowed the gap between cash flow from operations and EBITDA. As we grow earnings in 2023, cash flow from operations will also continue to increase. With regard to investing and financing cash flows, payments on finance leases will decline by approximately $2.5 million in 2023 and our need for capital expenditures remains low. Our capital structure also continues to improve. Our debt, net of cash is $13.9 million which amounts to an $8.4 million reduction from prior year. At this pace debt net of cash will be close to 0 by the end of 2023. In 2022, we continue to honor our commitment to return shareholder value.

Shareholders’ return reached an all-time high as we paid more than $8 million in dividends at a 6% plus yield and purchased more than $2 million worth of our own shares. Taken together, we returned more than $10 million to shareholders in a single year, significantly more than we returned in 2021 or any other year in our history. Looking forward into 2023, we expect to do more of what we did last year. As I said in the beginning, with moderate sales growth, we could expand our margins, increase EBITDA, grow cash flow from operations and achieve a double-digit growth percentage in EPS. In closing, I want to assure you that we remain committed to returning shareholder value at a similar or possibly higher rate than we did in 2022. With that said, I’ll turn the call back to Suri.

Suri?

Q&A Session

Suri Suriyakumar: Thank you, Jorge. Operator, we are now available for our listeners’ questions.

Operator: Thank you, sir. We’ll go to Greg Burns, Sidoti & Company.

Greg Burns: Good afternoon. With the Chinese joint venture, how much revenue are you generating from that on a quarterly basis? And if we look back historically, like how far is it down from I guess, a more normal operating environment?

Suri Suriyakumar: Hey Jorge, would you like to take that?

Jorge Avalos: Yes. For the year, our Chinese operations are providing about $7 million in revenue on an annual basis. Obviously, you could just divide that by 4 to give you the quarterly amount. How it compares to the past, if we look back five years, they used to be $30 million plus. So they’re truly not a big part of our business or revenue and have not been for the last few years. And frankly, we expect that to be the case as we move forward here.

Greg Burns: Okay. So there’s no expectation for that to rebound meaningfully from here? This is just kind of a new normal level for that business?

Jorge Avalos: Correct.

Greg Burns: Okay. And then you mentioned, you’re still expecting growth in the top line in your guidance for 2023 or your commentary around 2023. Can you just give us maybe a little bit more color by operating segments on your thoughts on each of those for next year?

Suri Suriyakumar: Dilo, would you like to take that?

Dilo Wijesuriya: Yes. So as we mentioned in our earnings release, if you take the primary segments of — if you take a look at the outsource print that comes to our printing shops, especially for digital printing, we see most of our customers are continuing to stay strong. Yes, there will be some slowdown in certain customer segments as the industry makes its adjustments and so forth. However, we — with our diversification program that we’ve embarked over the last three years or so we feel confident that many other customer segments will continue to grow in their marketing activities and so forth. There are many segments in the market that are continuing to grow, especially in the manufacturing, education, higher education, travel and leisure industry, the trade show — trade show industry.

Lots of companies are continuing to take part in marketing activities, trade shows, regional activities, large corporate meetings and so forth. So we will — we are continuing to focus on those segments for specialized digital graphics and so forth. The second area is the off-site services that we provide our customers, where we provide multiple types of services, where we provide all our hardware. We sell hardware. We provide supplies. We provide labor. Though that segment will continue to grow as more customers come back to the offices and change their business habit and so forth, we should see continued — maybe a small growth will come from that segment. Document scanning segment has been fairly strong, because many of the companies are continuing to digitize their documents and bring their digital content into a workflow, that is — that can support employees from remote places, as well as focusing on capabilities using mobile as a platform to access the information.

So overall, we feel good about what we see for 2023, as the market — there are certain markets which are a little volatile, certain industries which are volatile these days. But however, the transformation that we’ve embarked in the last two, three years is continuing to take place at ARC. We are focusing on different verticals. We are focusing on multiple verticals, that are continuing to grow. We are focusing on growing those customers within those each vertical and also communicating and educating different services that we have to the same customers as well. So, 2023 should be a good year. That’s €“ today, we have outlined in our earnings release.

Greg Burns: Okay. And then to the outlook for double-digit earnings growth, is that coming from improvements in the gross margin, or are you going to get operating leverage? Like where is that earnings leverage coming from? And then, if it is on the gross margin line, is there a target that you have on where the gross margin can go, as you continue to scale the business?

Suri Suriyakumar: Jorge?

Jorge Avalos: So, yes, it will be twofold. As I mentioned on the script, with moderate sales growth, we feel we could achieve growth on most of our key — or all our key metrics including, our gross margins and EPS. So we think with moderate sales growth, we will be able to better leverage our overhead, depreciation costs as it relates to equipment. And frankly, we also don’t think we’re going to be hampered like we were in 2022, with high inflationary increases. We’ve seen some of that in 2022, but a lot of that benefit or leveraging was taken away by higher labor or higher material costs. We’re at a new cost structure now. We don’t anticipate that going up in 2023. So when you look at those dynamics, then with moderate sales growth, you should be able to leverage your cost if you will, your cost structure hence, seen an improvement in gross margins.

Now, will we be able to achieve 140 basis points increase like we did in 2022? I don’t think, we’ll be at that level. But can we be 50 basis points plus in gross margin expansion? We think, that’s very doable.

Dilo Wijesuriya: Maybe, just another point to add is that, we have enough capacity in our stores. We have 140 stores and we have quite a bit of capacity to accommodate all that extra revenue, that we plan to bring in this year. So, that should definitely support our margin expansion.

Greg Burns: Perfect. I’ll hop back in the queue. Thanks.

Operator: We’ll go to David Marsh Singular Research.

Q €“ Unidentified Analyst: Hi, guys. Could you speak to the pace of business activity that you’ve realized so far in 2023, relative to prior year?

Suri Suriyakumar: Dilo, you want to take that?

Dilo Wijesuriya: Yes. So, obviously, we’ve had a nice 5% growth year-over-year and we’ve seen the COVID-related activities that we had in 2020, right, and there was a slight repeat of that work in 2021. But however, 2022 was a very clean year of all traditional digital printing and services that we provide normally to the customers. So, the sales growth for last year primarily, came from two specific areas. First, was our expansion of customer verticals, because we were able to expand our services to multiple verticals. Second, we were able to grow the number of customers using us in these verticals. And the third one, was we were able to sell additional services to the same customer as well. So the trend in 2023 obviously, it was — it started very strong in the first quarter, the second quarter because we were comparing from the previous year’s quarter.

But going into 2023, we feel that we may not have the same amount of growth as 2022, but we should still have a nominal growth in 2023.

Jorge Avalos: And at the end of the day, it’s too early to tell. I mean, we’re still in January and February. December is typically our slowest month. January is our second slowest month coming out of it. From our company, we start seeing the activity flow increase in February and March is really the month that makes the quarter. So, still too early to give any meaningful comment on Q1 at this point.

Unidentified Analyst: Okay. And obviously, there’s a lot of talk in the market about direction of the economy. I mean, could you just talk about how the business holds up relatively in a recessionary environment as opposed to some other businesses or other competitors?

Suri Suriyakumar: Do you want to give it a shot, Dilo?

Dilo Wijesuriya: Yeah. So obviously, when the economy is a little weak, dictation is spending from customers do slow down. We have seen that in the past couple of recessions that we went through. But unlike in the past couple of recessions that went through, this time one of the key changes that we have done in the company is that, we have transformed our revenue line and the customer base, right? So in 2008 recession and so forth, we were very heavily onto construction-related activities and construction-related plain paper client printing that we used €“ we did for the customer, but however today that segment is very, very small. So therefore, we feel very bullish about our transformation that we have €“ that has happened over the last couple of years.

And we feel that, even if there’s a slowdown in certain segments in the industry, there are other certain industries that are going to be €“ continue to do well. And also in a down market every company is going to market, right? They want to market. They want to get their products out. They are going to have lots of trade shows. So we want to capitalize on those markets and we want to focus on those markets to continue to grow our business.

Unidentified Analyst: Okay. That sounds pretty promising. With regard €“ obviously, you guys have done a great job with cash flow and managing your working capital. In terms of as we roll forward into 2023, can you just tell us how much capacity you guys have remaining on your share repurchase program and what other potential uses of your positive free cash flow you would expect to employ?

Suri Suriyakumar: Jorge?

Jorge Avalos: Yeah, we still have $10 million available in our stock repurchase program that extends out a couple more years. So there’s definitely plenty of availability there. The second part is in regards to dividends, we kind of made that commitment. We’re giving a $0.20 dividend a year. Obviously, that’s about $8 million. We fully plan obviously with Board approval to continue those quarterly dividends as we move forward into 2023. So, overall as I said in my script those two combined we returned shareholder value of over $10 million in 2022, which was an all-time high for our company and we expect to meet that or beat that in 2023. So hopefully that answers your question.

Unidentified Analyst: Yeah. That’s really helpful. Thanks, guys. I’ll hop back in the queue.

Operator: We’ll go back to Greg Burns.

Greg Burns: Just had a couple of follow-ups. You’re talking about the diversification of your business within the AEC verticals. Can you just give us like what the revenue mix is there? Like, what percent of revenues is that kind of legacy traditional document reproduction versus maybe some of the other newer services you’re providing to that €“ those customers?

Suri Suriyakumar: Yes. Go ahead, Dilo.

Dilo Wijesuriya: Yes. So if you take the AEC architects engineers construction and subcontractor verticals the type of work that we do for those key verticals has completely changed over the last five years. I would say in the past probably about a good 80% of that work came from traditional plain client printing. But today probably that’s about almost 20%, 30%. Rest of it comes from signage and other services that we provide; scanning, document scanning, on-site services, supplies that we provide them and digital color graphic services that we provide.

Greg Burns : Okay. Great. And then to the commentary you made around expanding into new vertical markets, how does that happen? Is it just you’re casting a wide marketing net and companies from new verticals find you, or do you have specific programs in place like dedicated programs to go target-specific vertical markets? Like how does that expansion happen?

Dilo Wijesuriya: So a couple of strategies that we held up. The first thing is that we have a very strong demand gen marketing engine that we focus on really through our website and the SCO programs. We drive different customers into our sites right? And due to — since we are able to see the types of customers that get busy in certain parts we have national data or we have centralized data available to look at and say, look at the types of customers that are getting busier in a certain period types of customers that visit our website, types of customers who ask for quotes right, when we have that data from our central marketing team, we realize okay there is this particular vertical or these three verticals that are getting stronger — or busier or more active during a certain period of time, then we have good visibility as to what are they buying from us, right?

Why are they buying? Who the decision makers are? Who ask for the quotes? So we have that data centrally available now, because we have a centralized marketing and a data management program within our organization here. So by looking at that then we know, okay, these are specific targets that or vertical that we want to focus. So we then do a little bit more research as to the buyers, the buyers’ personas, what do they buy, price points and so forth, and we interview the customers, because we have this national presence, we are able to understand what did the — why the manufacturing company in Michigan buy from us and compare it to why did somebody buy from Arizona, right. So we are able to get that information and then build marketing programs and really target that specific customer vertical.

We also have strategies where we purchase a certain amount of customer list. We market to that customer list. And we continue to churn customers that — churn the data that is available and we keep on marketing to those customers. So that’s how we try and select different verticals and continue to market and expand that opportunities within that vertical.

Greg Burns: Okay. So I mean at this point you’re completely vertical or industry agnostic right at this point? I mean it’s not like it used to be where the business was really levered to the construction verticals. Like at this point you’ve kind of divorced — or you’ve cut that tie and now it’s more open-ended?

Dilo Wijesuriya : Absolutely. Because when we train our salespeople when we onboard and train our salespeople, there’s nothing called specific training for construction anymore, because even within the construction customers, they buy different services from us than they purchased before. So our training is completely different now. So we show them opportunities, because we have — unlike in the past we have multiple buyers within the same office as well. So the IT staff versus the HR staff, the project managers, they buy different services from us. So the idea is to continue to train how to look for multiple miles in the same markets and that’s where the diversification has been very, very helpful to us.

Greg Burns : Okay. Great. Thanks to ARC.

Operator: There appear to be no further questions. I’ll hand things back to David Stickney for any additional or closing remarks.

David Stickney : Thanks Lisa. And thanks everyone for your attention this evening. We appreciate your continued interest in ARC Document Solutions and we’ll talk with you next quarter. Take care. Good night.

Operator: That does conclude today’s conference. Thank you all for your participation today. You may now disconnect.