Surgery Partners, Inc. (NASDAQ:SGRY) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Wayne DeVeydt: It doesn’t necessarily change our outlook. One of the things we like about these minority investments today and will probably continue not only into 2023, but in the 2024, is that many of these are in very attractive specialties and generally very large facilities. And as a reminder, we do not take a minority investment unless we become the managers of the facilities, right, the operators of the facilities. So we basically get to bring our synergies to these. We get to bring our processes towards quality and clinical procedurals. And more importantly, we have buy-up opportunities over time to move these into a majority position potentially. So I would say we view these as highly attractive. We view them as not necessarily mutually exclusive from our broader M&A. But really just another tool in the toolbox that gives us real flexibility on attractive multiples and opportunities to penetrate new markets.

Tao Qiu: Great. Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. The next question comes from Ben Hendrix from RBC Capital Markets. Please go ahead with your question, Ben.

Ben Hendrix: Great. Thank you. I was wondering if you could give us a little more detail about the CapEx outlook for the year. You’ve talked in the past about investments in robotics and other capabilities to support recruiting. And I’m wondering kind of how you’re viewing that for 2023?

Eric Evans: Ben thanks for the question. I’ll start, and then I’ll hand it to Dave. Our general CapEx across kind of the existing portfolio is really capital light. And even if you think about the robotics programs, most of those are funded locally or on a lease basis with really strong ROI. So I don’t see any difference in kind of the core capital. We will occasionally look, if we can add a service line and expand and add a couple of ORs where it makes sense in the near term, we do that all the time. But that’s kind of normal course for us outside of the de novos that we talk about. So if you think about just general CapEx, pretty CapEx-light compared to health care services in the industry. But certainly, we continue to be very opportunistic on adding technology or adding ORs where we have capacity constraints. And Dave, maybe you can talk a bit about kind of how that plays out in specifics.

Dave Doherty: Yes, sure. Thanks, Eric. So as we ended the year, we ended the year with just under $81 million of CapEx over the course of the year. And what we like to think is — and we’ll update this number as we go into next year, that roughly $40 million to $50 million of that is normal maintenance CapEx, and the remaining portion of that is growth CapEx. Growth CapEx for us includes robotics, but it also includes kind of almost like the easiest form of de novos: An existing facility for which we know the market really well; we know all of the physicians. We know the growth trajectory. If we if we have the opportunity to expand our existing footprint, either with the building that we have or adjacent properties to it, we’ll make that investment, again applying the normal disciplined approach to any investment dollars going out the door that you have known us to do.

And in the coming year, I think we will have a couple of those that are a little bit more noteworthy that we’ll talk about going forward. So, we’ll split that out as we head into 2023, just so we have good visibility to that. But the way you would normally think about this in a steady-state portfolio, somewhere between $40 million and $50 million of maintenance CapEx. That’s it.

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