Getty Images Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:GETY) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript November 20, 2023
Operator: Good afternoon, and welcome to Getty Images Third Quarter of 2023 Earnings Call. Today’s call is being recorded. We have allocated one hour for prepared remarks and Q&A. At this time, I’d like to turn the call over to Steven Kanner, Vice President of Investor Relations and Treasury at Getty Images. Thank you. You may begin.
Steven Kanner: Good afternoon. And welcome to Getty Images third quarter 2023 earnings call. Joining me on today’s call are Craig Peters, Chief Executive Officer; and Jen Leyden, Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, we would like to remind you that this call will include forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements are subject to various risks, uncertainties and assumptions which could cause our actual results to differ materially from these statements. These risks, uncertainties and assumptions are highlighted in the forward-looking statements section of today’s press release and in our filings with the SEC. Links to these filings and today’s press release can be found on our Investor Relations website at investors.gettyimages.com.
During our call today, we will also reference certain non-GAAP financial information, including adjusted EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA margin, adjusted EBITDA less CapEx, free cash flow and currency neutral growth rates. We use non-GAAP measures in some of our financial discussions as we believe they assist investors in understanding the core operating results that management uses to evaluate the business. Reconciliations of GAAP to non-GAAP measures as well as the description, limitations and rationale for using each measure can be found in our filings with the SEC. After our prepared remarks, we will open the call for your questions. With that, I will hand the call over to our Chief Executive Officer, Craig Peters.
A closeup of a digital newsroom, highlighting the complexity of the modern media landscape.
Craig Peters: Thanks, Steven. And thanks to everyone for joining our Getty Images third quarter 2023 earnings call. I will start my remarks by addressing the recent court ruling with respect to claims by warrant holders following our days back. We disagree with the ruling. We believe Getty Images acted in line with our obligations under the warrant agreement and with federal securities laws. We are appealing the portion of the judgment in favor of the Plaintiffs. To proceed with their appeal, we are securing a surety bond totaling 111% of the damages award, limiting any impact to our day-to-day operations. We expect to begin amortizing the annual cost of the surety bond in Q4. Jen will take you through the company’s full third quarter financial results but as usual I will touch on our performance and progress at a high level.
Third quarter 2023 reported revenue was $229.3 million representing a year-on-year decline of 0.5% on a reported basis and a currency-neutral decline of 1.3%. Our adjusted EBITDA finished at $80.3 million for the quarter. This reflects a reported year-on-year increase of 3.4% and a currency-neutral increase with 2.5% with EBITDA benefiting from disciplined actions taken and maintained since earlier this year to manage costs in the current environment. While it was good to see the settlement of the Ryder strike, the actors’ strike continued to equate to significantly reduced content production and PR activities across our media and entertainment customers for the entirety of Q3. While difficult to predict how quickly business can ramp up following last week’s settlement with the actors’ strike, we expect to see an adverse impact related to the strike through at least the end of the year.
With increased global uncertainty, we saw the U.S. dollar strengthened relative to our expectations and we continue to see weakness across certain geographic and customer markets. As a result, our reported results lagged our estimates and we expect a strong dollar to persist through the fourth quarter. We are also facing a tougher Q4 compared due to the unique timing of the 2022 Men’s World Cup and the 2022 U.S. elections. As a result of these factors, Jen will take you through updates to our full-year guidance. As a company, we have previously seen and navigated similar challenges over our almost 30-year history. We remain focused on our customers, on our execution, and are investing in the long term, but being cost-disciplined in the short term in light of our near-term environment.
So with that as a backdrop, I’d like to highlight some of the progress we’ve made within the quarter. In partnership with NVIDIA, we launched our generative AI service at the end of the quarter. The service is truly unique and addresses fundamental customer needs. Our model is trained solely with Getty Images’ best-in-class content, addressing the legal risk that is pervasive in many other models that are trained with third-party intellectual property scraped from the web. We also believe this equates to higher quality outputs as a cake is only as good as its ingredients. With generative AI by Getty Images, users can be confident that the content they generate is safe to use in commercial settings and will not include any trademark brands, products, characters, or identifiable people.
It also does not produce deep takes or emulate the style of specific orders, which we believe is valued by our editorial and creative customers respectively. We are rewarding our contributors with an ongoing share of each and every dollar we earn from the service. Last but certainly not least, the service and all of its outputs come with Getty Images uncapped indemnification. In terms of the economics, customers pay to generate versus download, which better aligns to our costs and recognize the value of ideation. Initial customer feedback and engagement with the service has been really positive and we have already introduced new features to the service such as being able to prompt in over 70 languages. And we’re engaged with a limited set of customers to custom-train models to their IP and brand needs.
Alongside our amazing pre-shot offering in custom content, we’re excited to operate a complementary new service that helps our customers elevate their creativity, save them time, saving them money and does not expose them to legal risk. We continue to drive increases in our annual subscriber accounts primarily through iStock and Unsplash. We grew our annual subscribers by more than 88% and more than 35,000 of those subscribers were from our targeted growth markets outside of North America and Western Europe. We renewed our agreement at the authorized photographic agency with the Rugby World Cup to deliver an industry-leading service and the creation and distribution of world-class sports content. Getty Images is the official photographer or photographic partner to over 120 of the world’s leading sport’s governing bodies, leagues and clubs who come to us for our industry-leading expertise and editorial operations, award-winning photographic talent and unrivaled global distribution platform.
Also in the quarter, we are pleased to partner with BBC Studios to launch a platform accelerating our archival supply chain. The platform gives our customers the opportunity to search BBC archive content online and opens up access to more than 57,000 newly digitized programs. The platform is a significant breakthrough in making the BBC archival content more accessible for our customers around the world and the key progress within our overall video growth strategy. While it is a constant, I would be remiss if I did not call out the efforts of our world-class team and partners who risk and sacrifice to cover events around the globe. Whether these are events and atrocities in the Middle East, Ukraine, the drama in the U.S. capital and courts, the extreme weather events or natural disasters, humanitarian and wildlife crises, the list goes on.
I’m extremely proud of the work and the important role it plays to engage and inform the public. And with that, I’ll hand over to Jen to take you through the more detailed financials.
Jen Leyden: As Craig highlighted, during the third quarter, we continued to see pressure on our top line performance, increased FX volatility with overall stability in our adjusted EBITDA margin and strength across our underlying operating metrics. I’ll start by talking about some of our KPIs. Note, as always, today’s press release contains information on all seven of our KPIs, which are reported as of the trailing twelve months, or LTM period, ended September 30, 2023 with comparisons to the LTM period ended September 30, 2022. Total purchasing customers were 826,000 compared to 837,000 in the comparable LTM period. A slight pullback as we see some drop off in our a la carte purchaser volume as we continue to shift into subscriptions.
Our revenue per purchasing customer remains strong at approximately $1,100 per customer. We delivered another quarter of impressive growth in annual subscribers, adding 95,000 to reach 202,000, an increase of approximately 88% over the corresponding period in 2022 fueled primarily by our e-commerce subscriptions, including our iStock annual and our Unsplash plus subscription. This marks our fourth consecutive quarter of annual subscriber growth in excess of 50%. We continue to execute well against our geographic expansion efforts with approximately 35,000 new annual subscribers in our growth markets across LATAM, APAC, and EMEA. We also continue to see growth in our core markets, which includes the U.S., Canada, France, Germany, the U.K., Japan, and Australia, where we added approximately 60,000 new annual subscribers.
Annual subscriber growth continues to expand our mix of revenue from subscription products, which rose to 55.9% in the third quarter, up from 51.8% in Q2 and up from 49.4% as of Q3 2022. Our revenue retention rate for our annual subscribers was 94.5%, compared to 103% in the 2022 LTM period. The decline was primarily driven by lower revenue retention rates on some of our smaller e-commerce subscribers and a reduction in a la carte revenue from customers who previously exceeded their subscription download caps. Paid download volume was up approximately 1% at 95 million. Our video attachment rate continues to grow ending the quarter at 13.7%, up from 12.7% in Q3 2022. We continue to see opportunities to drive video adoption across our customer base and expect to see this metric continue to tick up.
Turning to our financial performance, with revenue results reflecting adverse impacts from the Hollywood strikes, ongoing macroeconomic pressures, and a still challenging agency business. Revenue results were also impacted by a more muted year-on-year benefit from FX than we expected due to a strengthening U.S. dollar with respect to the euro and the pound in the second half of the quarter. Assuming rates hold relatively steady to where we see them today, we now expect a more limited foreign currency tailwind in the fourth quarter than previously anticipated. Total revenue was down 0.5% year-on-year on a reported basis and 1.3% on a currency neutral basis. Included in these results are certain impacts of the timing of revenue recognition, which contributed approximately 440 basis points to the year-on-year revenue growth in the quarter.
With positive momentum in our subscription business, annual subscription revenue increased 12.6% on a reported basis and 11.8% on a currency-neutral basis, driven by further gains across our premium access and e-commerce subscription offerings. Creative revenue was $145.2 million flat year-on-year and down 0.8% on a currency neutral basis. Creative results reflect pressures in the agency segment, which was down double digits year-on-year as well as impacts from the Hollywood strike with production houses largely dormant in the quarter. Creative revenue from annual subscription products grew 16.9% year-on-year and 16% on a currency-neutral basis, led by Premium Access, our largest subscription product. Within our e-commerce business, our successful customer acquisition efforts drove growth in our annual iShock subscription products of 15.2% on a reported basis and 14.2% currency-neutral.
We also saw 8.1% year-on-year or 8.3% currency-neutral growth in our custom content subscription, which provides customers with cost-effective, customized, exclusive and project-specific content to meet their needs. Editorial revenue was $79.9 million in Q3, a decrease of 2.3% year-on-year and 3.3% on a currency-neutral basis. The decline was driven by archive and entertainment, which were negatively impacted by the Hollywood strike as well as a challenging year-on-year compare due to 2022 events such as Queen Elizabeth’s funeral and the U.S. midterm elections. However, we did see gains in sports, which benefited from our team’s extraordinary coverage of the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup. Geographically, we saw year-on-year currency-neutral growth, a 3.8% in EMEA, while the Americas and APAC were down 3.7% and 3.9%, respectively.
Revenue less our cost of revenue as a percentage of revenue remains a consistent metric for us, with Q3 at 73.4% compared with 72.2% in Q2 of 2022. Total SG&A expense was $97.3 million, up 5.7 million year-on-year with our expense rate increasing to 42.4% of our revenue, up from 39.7% last year. The higher year-on-year expense was due to higher staff costs, primarily $9.2 million of stock-based compensation related to the vesting of employee equity awards compared with $2.8 million of equity-based comp in Q3 of 2022. Excluding stock-based compensation, SG&A decreased year on year 0.8% to $88.1 million in the quarter. As a percentage of revenue, SG&A excluding stock-based comp was 38.4% of revenue, roughly flat to 38.5% of revenue in the prior year period.
The 0.8% year-on-year decline in spend is largely a result of the proactive cost actions executed earlier this year, which remain in place. The larger of these cost actions are across marketing reductions and a hiring freeze. We anticipate maintaining these actions at least through to the end of the year. Adjusted EBITDA was $80.3 million, up 3.4% year-over-year and up 2.5% on a currency neutral basis. Our adjusted EBITDA margin was 35%, an increase of 130 basis points from 33.7% in Q3 2022. This expansion in EBITDA margin is a testament to our fiscal discipline implementing cost actions earlier this year at the first indication of top line headwind. CapEx was $12.4 million, a decrease of 3.3 million from Q3 of last year. Prior year CapEx included costs for our London office relocation and acquisition of imagery related to the Q4 2022 launch of our Unsplash plus subscription, driving some of this year-on-year decrease.
CapEx as a percentage of revenue was 5.4% versus 6.8% in the prior year. Adjusted EBITDA less CapEx was $67.9 million compared to $62 million in Q3 last year. Adjusted EBITDA less CapEx margin was 29.6%, up from 26.9% in Q3 ’22. Free cash flow was $12.8 million, down from $33.2 million in Q3 2022. The decrease in free cash flow primarily reflects the impact of our year-to-date financial performance and working capital changes related to timing of receivable and payable. Free cash flow as stated net of cash interest expense of $38.3 million in Q3, an increase of $2.6 million over the prior year. Cash taxes for the quarter were $7.6 million, an increase from $4.7 million in Q3 of 2022. Our ending cash balance on September 30 was $113.5 million, down $7.8 million from Q2 2023, and an increase of $41.7 million from our ending cash balance in Q3 of 2022.
As of September 30, we had total outstanding debt of $1.383 billion, which included $300 million of 9.75% senior notes, $639.6 million USD term loan with an applicable interest rate of 9.99% and $443.6 million of euro term loans converted using exchange rates as of September 30, 2023, with an applicable interest rate of 9%. Year-to-date, we have applied $47.8 million towards debt paydown, including a voluntary $20 million payment in the third quarter. We ended the quarter with a net leverage of 4.2 times, down from 4.4 times at year end 2022. We will continue to remain disciplined deploying our capital to what we believe is its highest invest yield with a continued emphasis on our balance sheet optimization and further deleveraging. Based on the foreign exchange rates and applicable interest rates on our debt balance as of September 30 and taking into account $355 million of interest rate swap agreements, our 2023 cash interest expense is expected to be about $122.5 million.
Now, turning to our guidance. Based on our expectations that the fourth quarter will continue to see top-line and FX pressures, we are lowering our 2023 guidance as follows. We expect revenue of $900 million to $910 million, down 2.8% to 1.8% year-over-year and on a currency-neutral basis down 2.3% to 1.2%. Assuming current FX rates hold, the revenue guidance includes an overall FX headwind of about $5.4 million in the full year 2023. This includes the $8.5 million negative impact year to date and an estimated tailwind of approximately 3.1 million in the fourth quarter of 2023. We expect adjusted EBITDA of $287 million to $295 million, down 5.8% to 3.4% year-over-year on a reported basis, and down 5.4% to 2.9% on a currency-neutral basis. Included in the adjusted EBITDA expectation is an approximate $1.6 million adverse impact from FX, which includes the $2.9 million year-to-date impact and an estimated tailwind of approximately $1.3 million in the fourth quarter of 2023.
In addition, the revised adjusted EBITDA guidance reflects a change to how we are classifying legal fees associated with the warrant litigation. The $6.4 million in legal fees incurred year-to-date through Q3 and the $1.1 million incurred in the fourth quarter of 2022 were previously reported within SG&A. These expenses are now included in loss on litigation, which is a below-the-line item and is excluded from adjusted EBITDA. As I just mentioned, this guidance assumes continued macroeconomic pressures, adverse impact from the Hollywood strikes and pressures on our agency business through Q4. It also assumes costs related to other ongoing litigation and increased costs tied to operating as a public company. We believe that the proactive approach we have taken to control costs and our ability to stay nimble while focusing on improved execution will best position the company to deliver on the updated guidance in the current economic environment.
With that operator, please open the call for questions.
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Q&A Session
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Operator: [Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Ron Josey of Citi. Please go ahead.
Ron Josey: Great. Thanks for taking the questions. Maybe one for Craig and one for Jen. Craig on the Hollywood strikes now that they’re close to being done and understood, the impacts continue here into 4Q, help us understand a little bit more how this might play out into ’24 as things might normalize going forward. I think that’d be helpful. And then Jen on the cost side with gross margins expanding in the quarter and 35% EBITDA margins, talk to us about the outperformance maybe in gross margins, and whether this can continue going forward. Thank you.
Craig Peters: Great. Thanks, Ron, and appreciate you making time for the call and appreciate the questions. On the strike, first, let me start off by saying I think it was – the impacts have been a bit more severe than even Jen and I and the management team projected in our last call. So we’ve seen a softer part of the business within entertainment and in media and production side of things than even we forecast. I think that is a good starting point for context especially as we look into Q4. We’re not expecting any significant reversal of that in Q4. We do expect that we will start to see the reversal of that in Q1. Likely still some ramp as productions come back online. So we probably won’t be at full – kind of full back to business across those elements of the business until probably Q2.
So that’s our best current view based on the conversations that our teams are having across the industry. So I guess what we’re saying is it was a little bit more impactful in a full Q3 than what we projected at the end of Q2 or we’re seeing at the end of Q2. Q4, we expect that to continue. We could expect improvements over Q1, but not fully back to 100% until Q2.
Jen Leyden: Yes. And on the margin side, gross margin, you’re right, a slight tick-up to the 73% range. We’ve seen that number before. As you know, we’re pretty consistently around 72% that can, you know, swing up or down nearly entirely due to the product mix in the quarter. But you know, as we think about what we’d expect to see that land at, I would still think that’d be in the 72% range. Similar on the EBITDA side, 35%, that is higher. You know, we definitely have a history of north of 30%. 35% is a touch higher than certainly what we’ve been trending to. But as we spoke to in the prepared remarks, we did have a significant amount of very proactive cost measures that we took pretty early on in Q2 at the very first sign of what we thought was going to be some top line pressure.
So we’re seeing the benefits of that margin. But again, as we think about what we’d expect to see that stabilize at, I would you know, anchor ourselves down to that 32% give or take range as what we’d expect to see normally.
Ron Josey: Okay. Thank you, Craig. Thank you, Jen.
Craig Peters: Thank you.
Operator: Our next question comes from Danny Pfeiffer of JPMorgan. Please go ahead.
Danny Pfeiffer: Hi, thanks for the questions. I just have two. Can you maybe talk about what you’ve been seeing from your news or media customers since the start of the Middle East conflict? And then for the second – last quarter, you mentioned you saw a corporate customer deal timeline shift and slightly reduced inbounds. Can you maybe speak to what you saw from those customers in 3Q? Thanks.
Craig Peters: Yes. Thanks, Danny. Again, thanks for making time for the call. On the news media side of things, with respect to the Middle East, clearly, it’s a critical story for our clients to be covering. We are very grateful not only for the staff that we have in that market covering the crisis, but also for our partners that are investing and risking their staff in those markets. And I would call out specifically [indiscernible] and Anadolu as two critical partners to our coverage there. You know, so it an – it is something that is consuming a lot of cycles in the media. Therefore, it is something where we’re seeing a lot of our imagery be utilized to narrate that story and provide visibility into that story. And – but I wouldn’t expect it to have a financial benefit within the company, really.
It’s a shift in the news cycle into that consumption. And that consumption actually, from our perspective, can be quite costly to maintain the coverage in order to support it. So you know, operating in war zones is not something that is without cost. So certainly I think, you know, Getty is playing its normal important role within bringing visibility into those events. We don’t take that role lightly in any way, shape or form. And we’re very proud of our staff and we’re proud of our partners that take on that coverage. On the Corp. side of things, in terms of the corporate segment, I would say that we saw a continuation of what we saw and spoke to in Q2. Again, there were certain parts of the corporate market we mentioned technology, we mentioned some of the things like the crypto space where that softness, you know, carried over and continues.
