FactSet Research Systems Inc. (NYSE:FDS) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

FactSet Research Systems Inc. (NYSE:FDS) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript September 21, 2023

FactSet Research Systems Inc. misses on earnings expectations. Reported EPS is $2.93 EPS, expectations were $3.49.

Operator: Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the FactSet Fourth Quarter Fiscal 2023 Earnings Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speakers’ presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today’s conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Kendra Brown, Senior Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Kendra Brown: Thank you, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to FactSet’s fourth fiscal quarter 2023 earnings call. Before we begin, the slides we will reference during this presentation can be accessed via the webcast on the Investor Relations section of our website at factset.com and are currently available on our website. A replay of today’s call will also be available on our website and via phone. After our prepared remarks, we will open the call to questions from investors. This call is scheduled to last for one hour. To be fair to everyone, please limit yourself to one question. You may re-enter the queue for additional follow-up questions, which we will take if time permits. Before we discuss our results, I encourage all listeners to review the legal notice on Slide 2, which explains the risk of forward-looking statements and the use of non-GAAP financial measures.

Additionally, please refer to our Forms 10-K and 10-Q for a discussion of risk factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from these forward-looking statements. Our slide presentation and discussions on this call will include certain non-GAAP financial measures. For such measures, reconciliation to the most directly comparable GAAP measures are in the appendix of the presentation and in our earnings release issued earlier today. Joining me today are Phil Snow, Chief Executive Officer; and Linda Huber, Chief Financial Officer. We will also be joined by Helen Shan, Chief Revenue Officer, for the Q&A portion of today’s call. I will now turn the discussion over to Phil Snow.

Phil Snow: Thank you, Kendra, and good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. I’m pleased to share our fourth quarter and full year results. We ended fiscal 2023 with organic ASV plus professional services growth of 7%, and we delivered annual revenue of $2.1 billion and adjusted EPS of $14.55. In 2023, we grew our business on the strength of our enterprise offerings that drove large strategic wins across several workflows. We expanded our presence with existing clients, while adding new logos and new users, both on and off platform. On the buy side, our industry-leading analytics and middle office solutions drove a significant performance deal, as asset managers and asset owners rely on FactSet to serve more of the portfolio lifecycle.

Additionally, a large real-time deployment at an institutional asset manager underscored growing demand for cloud-native market data services. On the sell side, deep sector drove a key banking deal in the fourth quarter and continue to be a deciding factor in renewals, situating us well to increase market share in banking. Our strategy to deliver the leading open content and analytics platform continues to resonate and drive growth. But the pace of change is accelerating. While we have been innovating with machine learning and AI for a long time, the recent advances in generative AI have made it possible for us to step up our development. In the second half of 2023, we began moving significant resources to GenAI in anticipation of directing further investment to this area in fiscal 2024, putting it among our top initiatives.

FactSet’s content refinery provides us with a real competitive advantage. We have one of the most extensive suites of proprietary and third-party data in the industry, and we continue to invest in new categories of data to further power the workflows of our clients. On top of our content refinery, we are reimagining the FactSet user experience and actively exploring innovative solutions. For example, a conversational user interface that allows bankers to ask questions, discover and source information, and initiate tasks. Generative AI will also help us evolve our productivity suite, further deepening our competitive moat. Second, on the buy side, we are enhancing our portfolio manager bot to answer questions in conversation with asset managers.

Thirdly, in the front office, we are harnessing generative AI to create code in FactSet’s programmatic environment, reducing the need to know Python. This will make the power of that programmatic environment available to more users. For wealth managers, we are developing solutions to drive the next best action and to create portfolio summaries for proposal generation and client engagement, and we are establishing GenAI-ready data bundles, allowing clients to augment their own large language models, or LLMs, with our connected auditable data. We also see significant opportunity for cost savings as a result of GenAI projects targeting our efficiency. In fiscal 2023, we began to pilot AI coding initiatives to improve the productivity of our technologists.

We also started using our agent assist bot to help with client queries and we are accelerating the collection of unstructured data across our content refinery with our recent acquisition of idaciti, giving us industry-leading expertise. As we enter fiscal 2024, we will build on our strategic investments in content, generative AI, and technology to drive growth and forge deeper client relationships. On the buy side, we intend to use our leading portfolio analytics and middle office solutions to grow our front office market share. We expect our new portfolio manager workstation and open programmatic environment to drive growth. We also see opportunities for FactSet to provide some targeted managed services based on our years of experience. On the sell side, we believe that deep sector and private markets offerings will drive workstation wins across banking, corporate, and private equity and venture capital clients.

We see an opportunity to capture additional seats in underpenetrated areas with solutions for senior bankers and investor relations professionals, and we expect increased adoption of Cobalt, an anchor product for private equity and venture capital funds. In wealth, we anticipate capturing more market share as we focus on portfolio management, proposal generation, and intelligent prospecting to expand our addressable market. Our open and flexible platform will power business development and reporting solutions to connect advisors with clients seeking new sources of insight. Finally, we expect the demand for our off-platform solutions to continue to drive growth across firm types. Turning now to our fourth quarter results. Growth was driven by Analytics & Trading and CTS, with improved expansion across most firm types.

Asset owners continue to have momentum with new logos, transactional revenue from Portware and data feeds. While macro uncertainty continue to contribute to elongated sales cycles and slower decision-making across all firm types, our sales team successfully executed on several large wins and renewals as we ended the fiscal year. And looking across our regions, organic ASV growth in the Americas was 7%. Performance was driven by asset owners and CTS wins among partners and hedge funds. This was offset by weakness among asset and wealth management clients where retention remained under pressure and expansion was lower. As expected, we also saw lower seasonal banking hiring, which was a common theme across all regions. In EMEA, our organic ASV growth was close to 8%.

We saw growth in asset owners, driven by analytics, middle office solutions. Wealth growth was also driven by Wealth Workstation and Advisor Dashboard wins. Gains were partially offset by softer expansion in banking and asset management. Finally, Asia Pacific delivered organic ASV growth of 8%, driven by strong growth in Japan, where we saw an increase in large deals, analytic wins, and strength in channel partners. However, muted expansion in Australia and India from fewer asset management wins and lower seasonal hire in banking were headwinds to growth. Turning now to our workflow solutions. Analytics & Trading organic ASV grew by 9%. Growth among asset owners accelerated the most, driven by middle office solutions, workstations, and feeds.

CTS, which is now part of Data Solutions, grew fastest, with organic ASV growth slightly over 9%. Performance was driven by channel partners and asset management clients, although partially offset by lower professional services and decreased retention in banking. Our data management solutions, company data, and real-time offering were the major contributors to growth. CGS also contributed to performance with healthy expansion and new business. Among asset managers, workstation erosion was offset by analytics and CTS wins, coupled with a higher price increase. Research & Advisory grew organic ASV by 5%. In banking, workstation and deep sector wins were offset by increased erosion. Private equity and venture capital clients continued their track record of double-digit growth despite market headwinds that offset improved pricing realization.

For corporates, reduced client budgets were an obstacle. Looking ahead, we are focused on diversifying our solutions for our corporate clients. And finally, in wealth, we saw strong execution on several renewals in the face of clients’ cost-cutting exercises. As discussed last quarter, we have reorganized our business by firm type to better align our operations with those of our clients. As of September 1, Analytics & Trading has become our institutional buy side organization, focusing on asset managers, asset owners, and hedge fund workflows. Also, as of September 1, Research & Advisory has become our dealmakers and wealth organization, focusing on banking and sell side research, wealth management, corporate and private equity and venture capital workflows.

And we’ve combined our Content and Content & Technology Solutions groups to create one Data Solutions organization. Going forward, we will also be aligning our partnerships in CUSIP Global Services organizations for the purposes of discussing ASV, as they are both key parts of our growth strategy. You can find ASV and ASV growth rates from the perspective of our realignment in the appendix of today’s presentation. As we look ahead to fiscal 2024, we expect the year will be a tale of two halves. Unlike previous years, where clients had higher budgets to spend before the calendar year-end, we expect continued caution for the rest of 2023. Starting in the new calendar year, we expect an improved operating environment to drive a strong second half.

As such, we are guiding to organic ASV growth of 7% for fiscal 2024. Linda will provide more detail on guidance shortly. Looking forward, we have started seeing green shoots of market recovery, particularly in new business. New logos in the fourth quarter showed an improvement over the reduced deal volumes seen earlier in the fiscal year. We expect this trend to continue as the new business pipeline and potential ASV for wealth management, private equity and venture capital clients and partners are all outpacing the pipeline at the same time last year. As client sentiment improves and markets stabilize, we believe we are in a great position. Our new structure, best-in-class solutions and content sets us apart as the partner of choice for our clients.

I’ll now turn it over to Linda to take you through the specifics of our fourth quarter and full year performance.

Linda Huber: Thanks, Phil, and hello to everyone. As you’ve seen from our press release this morning, we delivered Q4 organic ASV plus professional services growth of $145 million. With 43 consecutive years of top-line growth, FactSet has a proven history of stability during market volatility, which is clearly demonstrated in our performance. I’ll now share additional details on our fourth quarter and full year performance. As Kendra noted, a reconciliation of our adjusted metrics to comparable GAAP figures is included at the end of our press release. The 7% growth rate for organic ASV plus professional services was in line with our most recent guidance for the year. Our sales team executed well, building on a strong first half and a higher price increase across a larger client base.

However, during the second half of the fiscal year, the team had to deal with increased erosion, softer expansion, and a slight decrease in new business. Turning to revenue. Our full year revenue of $2.1 billion was also within our guidance range of $2.08 billion to $2.1 billion. To help offset the weaker top-line, we carefully and thoughtfully trimmed our headcount, which helped to expand our adjusted operating margin by 230 basis points to 36.2%. This increase exceeded the top end of our guidance range of 36% and our previous medium-term outlook goal of 36% by the end of FY ’25. Finally, both GAAP and adjusted EPS were impacted by a one-time charge of $6.8 million and an approximately $20 million provision for confirmed and expected unrealizable tax assets.

This higher tax rate provision had a $0.68 negative impact on fiscal ’23 adjusted EPS, resulting in an adjusted EPS growth of 8.3% to $14.55. Without this one-time adjustment, adjusted EPS would have been approximately $15.25, or 13.6% growth. I’ll provide more detail during the tax discussion later in the call. Turning now to our fourth quarter results, as Phil noted, we grew organic ASV plus professional services by 7% year-over-year, as higher price increases offset erosion and new business began to pick up. We also continue to improve pricing discipline, which is driving stronger price realization. For the quarter, GAAP revenue increased 7% to $536 million. Organic revenue, which excludes any impact from acquisitions and dispositions over the last 12 months and foreign exchange movements, increased 7% to $535 million, driven primarily by Analytics & Trading.

For our geographic segments, organic revenue grew by 6% in the Americas, 9% in EMEA, and 10% in Asia Pacific. Growth was primarily driven by Analytics & Trading and Research & Advisory in the Americas and Asia Pacific, and by Content & Technology Solutions and Analytics & Trading in EMEA. GAAP operating expenses increased 14% year-over-year to $419 million, driven by higher facilities impairment expense and restructuring costs. Compared to the previous year, GAAP operating margin decreased by 460 basis points to 22%, primarily due to those non-recurring charges and higher technology costs, partially offset by lower third-party content costs and lower FX impact. Excluding both non-recurring costs, GAAP operating margin was about 800 basis points higher than the prior year.

On an adjusted basis, operating expenses grew 4%, driven primarily by technology expense, which increased 26% year-over-year. This was mainly due to higher amortization of internal-use software, increased third-party software costs, and accelerated cloud spend as part of our hybrid cloud strategy. We also invested in our content refinery expansion and other strategic areas, such as generative AI. We have continued to invest in technology to drive growth, with technology costs now representing 9% of revenue, consistent with our medium-term outlook of these costs being 8.5% to 9.5% of revenue. People expense grew 3% year-over-year, primarily due to increased salaries for existing employees. As a percentage of revenue, our people expense was 168 basis points lower than the prior year, driven by a lower bonus accrual, partially offset by higher salary expenses.

We ended fiscal 2023 with a bonus pool of $105 million and with 67% of our employees operating in our Centers of Excellence. Adjusted operating expense growth was partially offset by a reduction in our third-party content costs, which decreased 4%. Our team continues to do a stellar job proactively managing and negotiating contracts. As a percentage of revenue, growth in third-party content costs was 57 basis points lower year-over-year. Finally, our efforts to right-size our real estate footprint resulted in a 7% decrease in facility expense year-over-year. As a percentage of revenue, this was 50 basis points lower than the previous year. Overall, adjusted operating margin improved by 210 basis points to 33.6%. You’ll find an expense walk from revenue to adjusted operating income in the appendix of today’s earnings presentation.

As a percentage of revenue, our cost of services was about 75 basis points lower than last year on a GAAP basis and 85 basis points lower on an adjusted basis, largely due to personnel costs, expenses related to CGS, and technology costs. And SG&A as a percentage of revenue was 385 basis points lower year-over-year on a GAAP basis and about 125 basis points lower on an adjusted basis, primarily due to decreases in professional services, partially offset by increased personnel costs. Facilities impairments as a percentage of revenue were around 440 basis points higher year-over-year on a GAAP basis. Turning now to tax. Our tax rate for the quarter was 39.9%, compared to last year’s rate of 10.3%. This increase was due to several factors. First, we had higher pre-tax income, which increases the overall tax rate, as credits related to R&D and foreign earned income are less impactful.

We also saw a diminishing benefit from tax incentives in our Centers of Excellence. Finally, the finalization of prior-year returns came into play. Our fourth quarter results include an out-of-period adjustment related to an ongoing review and analysis of certain tax positions, resulting in a one-time charge of $6.8 million and $20 million provision. We believe this $20 million provision represents the maximum remaining amount of net unrealizable tax assets. Upon completion of our review and prior to filing our Annual Report on Form 10-K, we plan to take a one-time charge with respect to this provision to reflect the confirmed actual amount of net unrealizable tax assets. The final amount of this charge is not expected to differ significantly from the current $20 million provision.

At this time, we’ve concluded that this adjustment is not material to the current period financial statements. The adjustment relates to the accounting of tax balance sheet accounts, including deferred tax assets and liabilities. All local, federal, and foreign taxes payable have been paid in a timely manner, subject to normal audits of open years. The increase in tax provision was partially offset by higher benefits from stock option exercises and refunds from amended returns. Looking ahead, we expect that higher pre-tax income will increase our overall tax rate. In addition, our foreign tax rate is expected to be higher due to the increase in the UK statutory rate. We’ve taken strategic measures intended to offset our overall rate and are guiding to 17% to 18% effective tax rate for fiscal ’24.

GAAP EPS decreased 37.5% to $1.68 this quarter versus $2.69 in the prior year, driven by non-recurring charges and the higher tax provision, which had a $0.68 impact. On an adjusted basis, EPS decreased 6.4% to $2.93. Adjusted EBITDA increased to $172 million, up 8.6% year-over-year, due to higher income tax add-backs and impairment charges, partially offset by lower net income. And finally, free cash flow, which we define as cash generated from operations less capital spending, was $156 million for the quarter, an increase of 15% over the same period last year. This was primarily driven by the timing of income tax payments, partially offset by higher capital expenditures. For the fourth quarter, ASV retention remained greater than 95% and client retention was 91%, which speaks to the stickiness of our solutions.

We ended the quarter with almost 8,000 clients with 383 new logos added year-over-year. And user count increased by about 10,000, primarily within banking, corporate and private equity and venture capital firms. For the quarter, we repurchased 264,400 shares for $109.6 million at an average price of $414.63. At the end of fiscal ’23, we had $4.5 million available for share repurchase. As a result, our Board authorized a new share repurchase program of up to $300 million, which became effective on September 1. We intend to continue our share repurchases in FY ’24 with a target to repurchase $250 million spread ratably throughout the year. We remain disciplined in our buyback program and committed to returning long-term value to our shareholders.

Combining our dividends and share repurchases, we returned $315.3 million to our shareholders over the last 12 months. As a reminder, we also increased our dividend by 10% in the third quarter, marking the 24 consecutive year of dividend increases. And finally, turning to our guidance for fiscal 2024, as Phil discussed earlier, we expect a weaker first half of fiscal ’24 and a stronger second half, driven by improved client sentiment. As client budgets reset at the turn of the calendar year. We expect to execute on our existing pipeline. Given these expectations, we are guiding to incremental organic ASV plus professional services of $130 million to $175 million, reflecting 7% growth at the midpoint. And with respect to modeling income and expenses for the year, please note that for the full year, we expect interest expense to be $60 million to $65 million and capital expenditures are expected to be in the range of $90 million to $95 million.

We expect adjusted operating margin of 36.3% to 36.7%. At the midpoint, this provides 30 basis points of continued margin expansion. While we have already met our adjusted operating margin medium-term outlook of 36%, we are committed to balancing continued sustainable margin expansion with investments to drive top-line growth. Finally, adjusted EPS is expected to range from $15.65 to $16.15, which represents 9% growth at the midpoint. In closing, we are encouraged by the opportunities before us. In 2024, we anticipate that our investments in generative AI, connected refined content and digital solutions will drive expanded market share and increased retention. We are equipping our teams to harness the rapid pace of innovation to remain the partner of choice for our clients.

We’re now ready for your questions. Operator?

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Q&A Session

Operator: Thank you. [Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Seth Weber with Wells Fargo. Your line is now open.

Seth Weber: Hi, good morning, and thanks for taking the question. I wanted to ask for a little bit more color on the wealth business, if you could. I saw the ASP was really strong, up 9%. But then I thought I heard in your comments some comments about some client cost cutting. So, I’m just trying to understand really what the message is there. And if you could just give any more detail on larger accounts versus smaller and the broader competitive environment? Thank you.

Phil Snow: Sure. Hey, Seth, it’s Phil. I’ll start, and I’m sure Helen has some additional comments. So, we’re very bullish on the wealth space. As we’ve talked about before, we think there’s a lot of opportunity and a lot of addressable market for us. We’ve been very successful with our core FactSet offering for advisors. We’ve layered on Advisor Dashboard. And we believe the bigger opportunity moving forward is to get into some adjacent workflows in the wealth space that traditionally we haven’t served. So, we view it as a good opportunity. I’ll start with that. I would say across most firm types this year we did see more pressure. Wealth was not excluded from that. So, I think we grew wealth probably close to 13% last year and maybe 9% this year.

So, we still grew well. We didn’t get as many new logos as we had. I don’t think there was as new — as much new firm creation in this environment. And we may not have had one of those mega deals that we might have had in previous years. But overall, we feel good about the space. And Helen, do you want to add on to that?

Helen Shan: Yeah. No, thank you for that. Phil is exactly right. I mean, we do have a pretty healthy pipeline, and it is a mix. We have some very large opportunities with full deployments and then we’ve got smaller ones, which may be more seat-driven. If you compare it to 2022, where there was a lot more hiring going on, that’s a bit of the difference. And as noted, we didn’t have a mega deal this year per se, but there’s a lot of opportunity in the pipeline that supports that. So, we feel very strongly about wealth. And quite frankly, if you look at where a lot of the clients are focused on, they’re all focused on their wealth businesses also.

Seth Weber: Okay. And do you feel like you’re gaining share there? Is that still the opportunity as well?

Phil Snow: Yeah, absolutely. We feel like we’re gaining market share, yeah. Most of the wins are displacements of other competitors, yeah.

Seth Weber: Perfect. Okay. Thank you very much.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Manav Patnaik with Barclays. Your line is now open.

Manav Patnaik: Thank you. Linda and Phil, I was hoping you’d just help with the ’24 guidance a bit, particularly your comment that you assume that budgets improve in the second half. Let’s just say they don’t improve, I guess, how much of the impact is that that you’ve assumed in guidance? And if you could just clarify within the 6% to 8%, the confidence level and what the pricing assumption is?

Phil Snow: Yeah, we feel good about the 6% to 8%, Manav, that’s why we put it out there. I think if we break it down by firm type, we anticipate doing about the same level of growth on the buy side as we did this year. And as you know, we’ve been evolving into more of a solutions provider for our clients. So, despite headcount pressure, which we certainly did see on the buy side, we still think there’s a great opportunity to take market share. We are anticipating slower growth within banking. There are some things in the pipeline that I think Helen might be able to speak to. But we’re not anticipating a blockbuster hiring here in banking as part of our algorithm. We just spoke about wealth, so we’re definitely anticipating some acceleration on the wealth side.

And then, in the partners part of our business, which we’re now separating out a bit, we’re expecting a more constructive environment there. We actually had — it wasn’t a great year for us in that part of the business. I’m not talking about CGS, CUSIP, I’m talking about the rest of the partners business. So, Helen, do you want to give some more commentary on the pipeline?

Helen Shan: Yeah. You made a — Manav, hi. You had a question around pricing. I mean, we continue to have and been making good progress on capturing the value that our clients are receiving for our solutions. In ’23, we actually improved our price realization across our workstation packages by over 100 basis points through the renewals in our new sales. So, we’re continuing to resonate well there. And as you know, our annual price increase takes place in January for Americas and April for outside of the Americas, with contractual base of higher CPI of 3%. So, with inflation moderating and a larger book, we would expect some impact from price increases to be less than ’23, but still a healthy contributor. So, we’ll report more on — out on that when we get to Q2 and Q3, as we’ve done in the past.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Jeff Silber with BMO Capital Markets. Your line is now open.

Jeff Silber: Thank you so much. In your prepared remarks, you mentioned that the adjusted operating margin guidance for ’24 is already ahead of where you thought you’d be in 2025. I’m not going to ask you about your 2025 numbers. But maybe just longer term, how do you get that margin expansion going forward? What kind of levers can you pull?

Linda Huber: Yeah. Hi, Jeff, it’s Linda. We have made very good progress and we’re quite proud of that. As we move forward, we feel that our workforce — our people is a big potential contributor to this. So, as we said for FY ’24, we think the growth in that bucket will be about 3% to 4%; real estate, probably 3%; and third-party growth — data growth of about 3% to 4%. So, all of those are pretty modest numbers and we feel like we’ve made really good progress. On technology, it’s a different story. We are a technology company. We’re driving harder for AI. And so, we had talked about a 24% increase in the technology budget for FY ’24. A lot of that is the increase in amortization for third-party — for our own software, increased third-party data purchases and, most importantly, increases in cloud expense as we have some facilities now on-prem and we’re getting ready for increased usage for GenAI.