Zebra Technologies Corporation (NASDAQ:ZBRA) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Zebra Technologies Corporation (NASDAQ:ZBRA) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript February 15, 2024

Zebra Technologies Corporation beats earnings expectations. Reported EPS is $1.71, expectations were $1.63. Zebra Technologies Corporation isn’t one of the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds at the end of the third quarter (see the details here).

Operator: Good day, and welcome to the Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2023 Zebra Technologies’ Earnings Conference Call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. [Operator Instructions] After today’s presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. Please note, this event is being recorded. I’d now like to turn the conference over to Mike Steele, Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Mike Steele: Good morning, and welcome to Zebra’s fourth quarter conference call. This presentation is being simulcast on our website at investors.zebra.com and will be archived there for at least one year. Our forward-looking statements are based on current expectations and assumptions and are subject to risks and uncertainties. Actual results could differ materially, and we refer you to the factors discussed in our SEC filings. During this call, we will reference non-GAAP financial measures as we describe our business performance. You can find reconciliations at the end of this slide presentation and in today’s earnings press release. Throughout this presentation, unless otherwise indicated, our references to sales performance are year-over-year on a constant currency basis and exclude results from acquired businesses for the 12 months following the acquisition.

This presentation will include prepared remarks from Bill Burns, our Chief Executive Officer; and Nathan Winters, our Chief Financial Officer. Bill will begin with our fourth quarter results and actions we are taking. Nathan will then provide additional detail on the financials and discuss our 2024 outlook. Bill will conclude with progress we are making on advancing our Enterprise Asset Intelligence vision. Following the prepared remarks, Bill and Nathan will take your questions. Now let’s turn to Slide 4 as I hand it over to Bill.

Bill Burns: Thank you, Mike. Good morning, and thank you for joining us. Today, we will discuss our results, the demand environment and progress and actions we are taking to optimize our cost structure and drive sales as demand recovers. As expected, our fourth quarter performance was impacted by continued broad-based softness across our end markets and regions, which resulted in a significant decline in sales and profitability. For the quarter, we realized sales of $1 billion, a 33% decline from the prior year, and adjusted EBITDA margin of 15.4%, a seven-point decrease and non-GAAP diluted earnings per share of $1.71 a 64% decrease from the prior year. Although we experienced declines across all product categories, services and software were a bright spot in the quarter.

From a sequential perspective, we realized Q4 sales growth from Q3 as demand trends stabilize. Overall profitability was primarily impacted by expense deleveraging on lower sales volumes, in a charge to renegotiate a supplier contract. However, as a result of our cost restructuring actions and inventory management initiatives, we realized a significant sequential improvement in profitability and free cash flow. Turning to Slide 5. I’d like to update you on our actions to address and mitigate the impacts of the current demand environment and position ourselves for long-term growth. As referenced in our earnings release, we have expanded the scope of our previously announced cost reduction plan and now expect $120 million of net annualized operating savings, an increase of $20 million from our last update which we expect to implement by mid-2024.

Our previously announced actions were substantially completed in the fourth quarter enabled us to realize approximately $50 million of savings in 2023. On the supply front, we continue to work with our contract manufacturers to draw down component inventories, and we are substantially complete with renegotiations of long-term supply commitments. In Q4, we renegotiated 2021 agreement with a key electronic component supplier, incurring a $10 million expense. The revised agreement cancels a portion of the multiyear volume commitment and increases purchasing flexibility. We have also reallocated resources to accelerate growth in underpenetrated markets, including Japan, along with government and manufacturing sectors and to address new automation use cases with RFID and machine vision.

We expect our actions to improve profitability and drive sales growth as our end markets recover. We saw double-digit declines across each of our end markets for both Q4 and full year as many customers navigate a challenging environment and absorb capacity they built out during the pandemic to address the spike in e-commerce activity. On Slide 6, we highlight secular trends that we expect to drive long-term growth including labor and resource constraints, real-time supply chain visibility, track and trace mandates and increased consumer expectations. These are all focused areas in my conversations with our customers. Entering 2024, distributor inventories are aligned with current demand. Although we are seeing some improvement in order activity, we are not yet seeing any signs of a broad market recovery and remain cautious in our planning.

Consequently, we continue to take an agile approach to navigating this uncertain environment and remain disciplined with respect to our cost structure and capital allocation. I will now turn the call over to Nathan to review our Q4 financial results and discuss our 2024 outlook.

Nathan Winters: Thank you, Bill. Let’s start with the P&L on Slide 8. In Q4, sales decreased 33% with distributor destocking accounting for more than one-quarter of the decline. We saw double-digit sales declines across our regions, major product categories and customers of all sizes. Our Asset Intelligence and Tracking segment declined 33.6%, primarily driven by printing. Enterprise Visibility & Mobility segment sales declined 32.7% led by data capture and mobile computing. On a positive note, we drove services growth with strong attach and renewal rates. From a sequential perspective, total Q4 sales were $53 million higher than Q3 despite a similar magnitude of distributor inventory destocking due to modest improvement in demand.

Adjusted gross margin decreased 100 basis points to 44.6% and primarily due to expense deleveraging from lower sales volumes and the $10 million charge mentioned earlier associated with the renegotiation of a supplier agreement, all of which were partially offset by higher services and software margin and cycling premium supply chain costs in the prior year. Adjusted operating expenses delevered 670 basis points as a percent of sales. The impact was mitigated by more than $20 million of net savings in the quarter from our restructuring actions. This resulted in fourth quarter adjusted EBITDA margin of 15.4%, a 710 basis point decrease. Non-GAAP diluted earnings per share was $1.71, a 64% year-over-year decrease. Increased interest expense contributed to the decline offset by a lower tax rate from executing on a global tax strategy.

Turning now to the balance sheet and cash flow on Slide 9. We ended the quarter at a 2.5x net debt to adjusted EBITDA leverage ratio which is at the top end of our target range. We generated $102 million of free cash flow in Q4 and had approximately $1.1 billion of capacity on our revolving credit facility as of year-end, providing ample flexibility. For the full year 2023, negative free cash flow of $91 million was unfavorable to the prior year, primarily due to lower operating profit, higher interest and tax payments restructuring actions and previously announced settlement payments, all of which were partially offset by lower incentive compensation payments. Let’s now turn to our outlook. We entered 2024 with distributor inventory levels aligned with recent demand trends and improved backlog driven by modest year-end budget spending into January from certain retailers.

For Q1, we expect a sales decrease between 17% and 20% compared to the prior year. This outlook assumes continued declines across our major product categories, particularly printing and a 50 basis point favorable impact from FX. We anticipate Q1 adjusted EBITDA margin to be approximately 18%, driven by expense deleveraging from lower sales volume, partially offset by lower premium supply chain costs. Non-GAAP diluted earnings per share are expected to be in the range of $2.30 to $2.60. Q1 sales and profitability are expected to sequentially increase from Q4 as distributor inventories and end market demand has stabilized, and we have realized incremental benefits from cost actions. For the full year 2024, we expect sales to be in the range of a 1% decline and 3% growth.

Although we are beginning to see signs of improvement in order activity, we are not yet seeing signs of a broad market recovery. Consequently, we are taking a cautious approach to our guide until we have increased visibility to a sustained recovery in demand. Adjusted EBITDA for the full year 2024 is expected to be approximately 19%. We expect our restructuring actions and other profitability initiatives to drive improvement through the year delivering EBITDA margin of 20% in the second half. We remain cautious in our spending and continue to take an agile approach to navigating the environment. We expect our free cash flow in 2024 and to be at least $550 million, including the impact of our final $45 million settlement payment in Q1. We remain focused on rightsizing inventory on our balance sheet, driving 100% cash conversion over a cycle and prioritizing debt pay-down in the near term.

Please reference additional modeling assumptions shown on Slide 10. With that, I will turn the call to Bill to discuss how we are advancing our Enterprise Asset Intelligence vision.

Bill Burns: Thank you, Nathan. As you look towards the long-term opportunity for Zebra, our future is bright. Our solutions remain essential to our customers’ operations, and we are well positioned to benefit from secular trends to digitize and automate workflows. We are focused on advancing our Enterprise Asset Intelligence vision by elevating Zebra as a premier solutions provider through a comprehensive portfolio of innovative solutions that demonstrate our industry leadership. We empower workers to execute tasks more effectively by navigating constant change in near real time, utilizing insights driven by advanced software capabilities such as intelligent automation, artificial intelligence, machine learning and prescriptive analytics.

By transforming workflows with our proven solutions, enterprises can improve the experience of frontline workers and customers. As you can see on Slide 13, customers leverage our technology to optimize workflows for the on-demand economy. Our solutions empower enterprises to increase collaboration and productivity and better serve their customers, shoppers and patients. I would like to highlight some recent wins by our team. A leading North American retailer selected 30,000 Zebra mobile computers and our device tracker solution for customer order fulfillment in fresh food inventory tracking. This competitive win was secured by our ability to deliver higher productivity along with superior data capture performance and network connectivity. A North American retailer refreshed 60,000 mobile printers and related accessories to enable frequent product pricing updates across various locations.

This retailer has a long history with Zebra across our broad portfolio, demonstrating the value they see in our hardware and software solutions coupled with our exceptional post-sale support. A European postal service purchased more than 10,000 Zebra mobile computers to facilitate proof of delivery and package tracking. This organization’s decision to replace a competitor was driven by superior product performance and enhanced cybersecurity features. A European field service organization, providing public housing repairs selected Zebra for both mobile computers and tablets to replace consumer devices that had been in place for three product generations. Zebra secured the win by demonstrating a customer-first strategy by addressing their unique facial recognition and authentication challenges.

And finally, a large retailer in our Asia Pacific region selected Zebra scheduling software to be utilized on Zebra mobile computers. Zebra solution was selected over our competitors based on the capabilities of our software and our trusted partnership. Slide 14 highlights Zebra’s value proposition for retailers which was showcased at the National Retail Federation trade show in January. Alongside our partners, we demonstrated how our innovative solutions help retailers solve their most pressing challenges and drive increased performance by optimizing inventory, engaging associates and elevating the customer experience. As retailers address e-commerce growth, the expansion of anywhere fulfillment and consumers’ demand for hyper convenience Zebra solutions provide a performance edge for retail associates.

Our demonstrations included next-generation checkout solutions with machine vision, loss detection with RFID, a mobile computing, AI assistant along with other innovative solutions. In our booth, Office Depot shared how our solutions address their workflow challenges. This includes Zebra’s workforce optimization software boosting operational efficiency of associates and delivering faster buy online, pick up in store, order fulfillment. The combination of Zebra software and mobile computers is driving associate productivity and engagement along with improved customer satisfaction. In closing, our long-term conviction and our strong business fundamentals remain unchanged, and we are well positioned to benefit from trends to digitize and automate workflows.

We are elevating our position with customers through our innovative portfolio of solutions, while our cost and go-to-market actions are positioning us well for profitable growth as our end markets recover. I will now hand it back to Mike.

Mike Steele: Thanks, Bill. We’ll now open the call to Q&A. We ask that you limit yourself to one question and one follow-up so that we can get to you as many as possible.

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Q&A Session

Operator: [Operator Instructions] And today’s first question comes from Tommy Moll with Stephens. Please go ahead.

Tommy Moll: I believe it was Bill who made the comment about the need to absorb some excess capacity in the e-commerce landscape and I’m curious, based on your discussions with end users in that ecosystem. Do you have any visibility into when most of that capacity will be absorbed? Is there any assumption in your 2024 outlook about a return to more normal levels of spending there?

Bill Burns: Yes, Tommy, I think that we’ve clearly seen that retail IT budgets have been under pressure and the retailers overall certainly sweating assets, but also this idea of customers absorbing capacity, not just in e-commerce but also in transportation logistics as well. And they built out significant capacity during the pandemic, believing that ultimately the growth trajectory would continue off those rates. And now, we’ve seen kind of a reset in both e-commerce continuing to grow, obviously, but — and parcel delivery both kind of resetting to pre-pandemic levels and growing from there. So we’ve seen some positive signs in the e-commerce side where some of that capacity has been used off and that we’re beginning to see orders for from those e-commerce providers that need and have continued demand now.

So we’re seeing that coming to an end on some of the e-commerce providers. We’re seeing across transportation logistics, still challenge in volumes of parcel delivery. And we’re seeing the T&L providers really taking this as an opportunity to kind of restructure their businesses and think about how to be more effective and more efficient in their delivery mechanisms. We saw the same in e-commerce over the last year plus, but I think we’re coming through it in e-commerce. Still P&L challenge there is we’re continuing to see is the results in the — around parcels being still remain challenged. So I would say, coming to an e-commerce but still challenging in the build-out across e-commerce — around, sorry, trends.

Tommy Moll: Yes. And one point I wanted to clarify, Nathan, I think in your comments, you talked to an improving backlog in January and that there were certain retail-related orders that drove that. But could you correct the record there, if I got it wrong and just give us any more detail there?

Nathan Winters: Yes. No, Tommy, I think if you look, we did in the quarter, I’d say, back at pre-pandemic levels entering the quarter from a backlog perspective, where it was a little bit more depressed as we went into Q3 and Q4. And that was primarily driven by some of the uptick we saw in year-end spend that we were able to ship here in the early part of Q1, driving some of the sequential improvement from Q4 to Q1. So, I think again, not to the backlog levels we were at a few years ago, during maybe peak of the supply chain challenges, but definitely a sequential improvement with some of the incremental volume as well as getting our inventory in the channel right-sized. So again, we feel good about the backlog we have entering the first quarter relative to the guide.

Operator: Thank you. And our next question comes from Brad Hewitt with Wolfe Research. Please go ahead.

Brad Hewitt: So, the Q1 guidance midpoint looks to imply a slight uptick sequentially on the top line, excluding the Q4 destock headwind. But then your full year guide seems to imply revenue remains relatively flat sequentially as we progress throughout the year. So just curious, if you could talk about how you see underlying demand progressing through the year? And do you see the potential for orders in the pipeline conversion rate to improve as we exit ’24 and into 2025.

Nathan Winters: Yes. Maybe I’ll start with just kind of the framework for the guidance. So yes, you’re right. If you look at our Q1 guide, down 17% to 20% sequentially, that does improve from Q4 as we are not assuming any additional distributor destocking. So that drives the vast majority of the sequential improvement, again, along with the some uptick in demand that we saw particularly around year-end spend. And then if you look at the full year guide of 1% at the midpoint as you noted, if you look we expect Q2 to look similar to Q1 with the modest sequential improvement as we move through the second half. And as we talked about in the prepared remarks, I think we’re cautious given the lack of visibility and the commitment to the pipeline in the second half.

So if you look kind of again at the balance of the year, as you noted, really the growth is entirely driven by the 2023 destocking with the market flat, maybe down a little bit in Q2, up a little bit in the second half. And we think that’s appropriate given the visibility we have around the demand environment.

Brad Hewitt: Okay. That’s helpful. And then you’ve talked in the past about how you typically tend to gain share coming out of downturns. Could you talk about how you see the opportunity for share gains as we turn the page to and kind of where you see the lowest hanging fruit in terms of potential share gains going forward?

Nathan Winters: I would say that overall, talking to our customers and spending a lot of time with our customers and partners through NRF that clearly, our customers see that there’s tremendous value in what we do for them each and every day to make their businesses more effective and more efficient and to literally run their businesses. So, we see the opportunities across each one of our vertical markets as we see really retail likely returning first is where continuing to work with them as they’ve been holding off and sweating assets within their environments and our engagements with NRF, certainly, we’ve seen optimism by our retail customers in the second half of the year. We marry our mobile devices there with our software solutions.

And what we talk about is really resonating with them around our modern store initiative. We see that in transportation logistics, our value proposition remains really to help our customers with things like labor constraints and additional supply chain visibility across their businesses and we’re excited about opportunities there within opportunities in technologies such as RFID as they look to get more to productivity across their businesses. We’ve got the MODEX trade show coming up in transportation logistics, Expo coming up next month here. And will showcase our solutions to across transportation logistics. We’ve talked about manufacturing has really been an opportunity for us is that we’re less penetrated in that market, and we’ve got new solutions around machine vision and robotic automation and our demand planning software offering inside manufacturing.

So we see that as an opportunity for us. And then lastly, health care, as we continue to see ways to automate workflows and digitally connect assets and patients and staff within the health care environment. We see home health care and telehealth being an opportunity. So, there’s lots of opportunities across each one of the vertical markets. We’d probably say that retail is a place that we’ve seen some of the positive year-end spending first. And then I think the other vertical markets will follow.

Operator: Thank you. And our next question today comes from Meta Marshall with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Meta Marshall: Great. Maybe first question. Just — you noted that the headwind from destocking was about the same in Q4 as in Q3. I think we had expected it to be slightly smaller understanding that’s largely behind us. But just was that amount of destocking kind of greater than expected in Q4? And then maybe as a second question, obviously, the interest rate environment is maybe a little bit friendlier now your balance sheet, your interest rate is relatively heavy on your interest expense. Just wondering, if you’ve looked at any opportunities to refinance that at more attractive rates?

Nathan Winters: Yes, Meta. So on the first question, you’re right. So it was about $20 million, $25 million more of incremental destocking versus the original guide and the balance of that was offset by higher demand to come in above our guidance midpoint for Q4. So, I think we thought that is a — I’ll get a positive trend that again, we would take a little bit more out of the channel to set us up here as we moved into 2024. Now as it relates to interest rates, I think we feel good about actually our position. What you’ll see in the cost of borrowing that includes all of our crediting and banking fees. But if you look at the overall cost of borrowing and where we trade at I think we feel good about the position, but we’re always looking at opportunities given the environment to whether it makes sense to refinance and take advantage of the market.

So that’s something we’re actively looking at. But today, we don’t feel like we’re at a disadvantage relative to the debt cost position.

Operator: Thank you. And our next question today comes from Joe Giordano with TD Cowen. Please go ahead.

Joe Giordano: I just wanted to — last year, when we initially started to see the real weakness and you guys had to adjust your guide, there was clearly like a change in methodology, and it was very stripped down. It was kind of discounting things that weren’t burden hand kind of orders and a change in how you were building up from the sales force commentary. So I’m just curious now as you look into ’24 and you give that kind of qualitative guide. How would you compare your buildup methodology to how you were a full year ago versus how you were like six months ago when it got much more conservative.

Bill Burns: Yes, Joe, I’d say that probably if you look back to January, we literally have met with thousands of our customers and partners across our channel partner summit in Asia Pacific and than in Europe and then North America, Latin America and then with the National Retail Federation show. And it’s clear that our solutions are essential to what our customers are doing in their business every day and they’re grateful to have gone honestly, Zebra is a strong partner along with them. And they’re excited about the innovation that we’re bringing to market and they’re optimistic. So our partners and our customers are optimistic. They’re happy to put 2023 behind them, quite honestly. And there’s optimism for 2024, especially in second half year.

However, I would say that from our perspective, and it’s prudent to remain cautious and that we haven’t seen a broader recovery. We’ve really seen some kind of green shoots here in the year-end of year-end spending across retail, mostly in North America. And we’d rather — we’d like to see first some orders, projects, deployments really move forward before we get ahead of ourselves kind of for the full year. So, I think optimism, happy to put ’23 behind us. I think we feel good about modest increases through the year as demand progresses throughout the year, but we’d like to get a little more confidence by having more orders, more projects, more deployments across our end customers move forward. And we think it’s prudent and reflect in our guide to be a bit conservative at the moment.