Sterling Check Corp. (NASDAQ:STER) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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So when I’m providing those 2023 revenue drivers I’m speaking to the full year, where we’re going to see negative organic constant currency revenue growth in Q1. Improving in Q2, moving into positive organic constant currency revenue growth 3Q and 4Q. So hopefully that’s helpful.

Alex Hassan: And then as a follow-up on pricing, have you had any success pushing through price beyond the pass through of rising third-party data costs like for like are you taking more price and how should we think about your ability to maybe take price in 2023?

Joshua Peirez: Sure. As we’ve shared on previous calls, we do have the ability to take pricing increases through on our contracts, we typically take an annual price increase every year, which we did this year about mid-year. Think of that price increase as CPI-type levels, albeit we muted it this year given CPI was so out of control. So we’re a little bit more reasonable and call that adding $3 million to $5 million in terms of revenue for the current year. We’ll look to do a similar type of price increase in 2023.

Operator: The next question is from Manav Patnaik from Barclays. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Ronan Kennedy: Hi. Good morning. This is Ronan Kennedy on for Manav. Thank you for taking the question. May I just confirm, could you rather could you unpack 4Q margins in terms of the benefit from the low growth playbook articulated on the 3Q call, Project Nucleus and also the hit from the moderation of base growth that you saw? And then kind of the puts and takes to margins for ’23?

Peter Walker: Sure. So, we’ll focus first on Q4. So, at the low end of our guide, we were below on margin dollars by about $4 million and you can think about the main driver of that being the revenue moderation that we saw hit around Thanksgiving, that we didn’t expect and I covered the reasons for that in the prepared remarks. What we were thrilled about is that we were able to get out the majority of the savings that we had planned for Q4. We were carrying higher fulfillment headcount, because we expected obviously higher revenue in call it December. So it does take us, call it 30 days to remove that headcounts we were carrying slightly more cost related to that are now out of the system and we did have higher non-class settlements during the Q4 than we expected.

Ronan Kennedy: Okay. And sorry for ’23 the puts and takes for margins, please?

Peter Walker: Yeah. So for ’23. Our overall view is that margin expansion of north of 100 basis points less about 30 for the acquisitions that we’re bringing on board. Right. So you’re looking at, call it, a 26.7% margin for the full year, also indicating that we expect margins to be down year-over-year in Q1, following revenue being down, call it 8% to 10% in Q1. And we expect margin improvement throughout the year. We do expect that to be more pronounced in the back half of the year, as we see revenue acceleration in Q3 and Q4, and we expect significant savings from our Project Nucleus to come online in Q3 and Q4.

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