Korn Ferry (NYSE:KFY) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Gary Burnison: Well, there’s a couple of places in the world where I’ve asked our team to quadruple our business. I mean I’m not going to point those out publicly. But clearly, it’s not one size fits all. There’s countries that are doing exceptionally well right now, and we have great businesses there, but we’re just scratching the surface of what that could be. I’m sure you could maybe guess at what those are. But we’ve got a very aggressive plan in two or three geographies that we see huge, huge opportunity. Look, the consulting business is a no-brainer. And we — despite where we’ve — where we are today, I continue to believe that we can use more colleagues and more resources in the consulting area. And I just — I don’t want to just say that’s the favorite child, because there’s a number of opportunities we could pursue.

But just broad base, we’ve just seen some enormous wins with our consulting and digital solutions working together. I just — that’s a multi-billion dollar opportunity for us over the medium to long-term. And so that’s the thing that would come screaming off the page. And then I think the fact that we have this incredible data, and how do we go about licensing that? How do we go about using that either stand-alone or with consulting, pushing, or pulling, and really helping to solve what I think are going to continue to be organizational challenges for clients. I mean, in a time of tremendous change in a labor market that’s really not moving. And I think that’s opportunity for Korn Ferry.

Marc Riddick: That’s very helpful. And then maybe you could touch a little bit on maybe what your thoughts are, expectations are on capex for this fiscal year and sort of how that might play into tech spend and maybe whether that is to some level tied to the AI commentary that you had earlier, maybe sort of — maybe tie some of that a little bit together to sort of give us a sense of sort of where we might be going there? Thanks.

Bob Rozek: Yes. I’ll take it. So our capital spending this year will be relatively consistent with what we saw last year in FY ’23. So figuring somewhere kind of $65 million to $70 million like — probably somewhere around $50 million of that going into the digital business, there will be some in the consulting business. And then the rest would go to kind of making sure that the fort protects all the assets and keep the bad guys out. But I would look at our capex this year very consistently with what we did last year.

Marc Riddick: Got it. Thank you very much.

Operator: Thank you. And our next question is from Mark Marcon from Baird. Please go ahead.

Andre Childress: Hello. This is Andre Childress on for Mark Marcon. Thank you for taking our questions. Could you go into some detail about what you’re seeing by geography and by vertical, I think it’s interesting how well EMEA has hold up on the search side, at least relative to North America. And then I know previously, you said industrial was holding up pretty well, but can you give an update on what verticals might be doing well, well, which ones may be struggling a little bit more?