Stagwell Inc. (NASDAQ:STGW) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Stagwell Inc. (NASDAQ:STGW) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript May 1, 2024

Stagwell Inc. reports earnings inline with expectations. Reported EPS is $0.16 EPS, expectations were $0.16. Stagwell Inc. isn’t one of the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds at the end of the third quarter (see the details here).

Ben Allanson: Good morning from Stagwell’s office in Washington D.C. and welcome to Stagwell Inc.’s Earnings Webcast for the First Quarter of 2024. My name is Ben Allanson, I lead the Investor Relations function here at Stagwell. With me today are Mark Penn, Stagwell’s Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; and Frank Lanuto, the Chief Financial Officer. Mark will provide a business update and Frank will share our financial review. After the prepared remarks, we will open the floor for Q&A. You are welcome to submit questions through the chat function. Before we begin, I’d like to remind you that the following remarks include forward-looking statements and non-GAAP financial data. Forward-looking statements about the company, including those related to earnings guidance are subject to uncertainties and risk factors addressed in our earnings release, slide presentation, and the company’s SEC filings.

Please refer to our website, stagwellglobal.com/investors, for an investor presentation and additional resources. This morning’s press release and slide deck provide definitions, explanations, and reconciliations of non-GAAP financial data. And with that, I’d like to turn the call over to our Chairman and CEO, Mark Penn.

Mark Penn: Thank you, Ben, and thank you to everyone for joining us for our first quarter earnings call. On our Q4 call in February, I talked about our excitement and confidence in 2024, highlighting that we expect to return to growth in the first half of this year. Several factors give us confidence, including the abatement of industry headwinds, such as tech restructuring activities, strong business trends, a record-breaking political cycle, and our continued investments in digital innovation beginning to contribute to growth. Today, I’m pleased to share that these trends are beginning to play out exactly as we anticipated. Stagwell delivered $670 million of revenue in the first quarter. These figures represent an encouraging growth in revenue of 8%.

Additionally, we continue to post record net new business figures for both the first quarter and last 12 months. Importantly, we delivered these growth figures while effectively managing our costs. Actions we took in 2023, helped us grow our adjusted EBITDA by 25% year-over-year to $90 million. These results are highly encouraging and give us the confidence to reiterate our full year guidance today. We also drove confidence in gathering tailwinds. Advertising is once again growing. Our reputation is expanding and we are participating in record new business pitches. AI will within the year create vast digital transformation opportunities. International work is proving a fertile area for expansion and the advocacy season promises to be historic.

This quarter’s performance was driven by two double-digit growing capabilities. Performance Media & Data grew 13% in revenue and 12% in net revenue. Advocacy showed 80% revenue growth to 54% net revenue increase. Digital Transformation is a double-digit growing gap, return to revenue growth, but it’s still building up their expanded pipeline as tech companies are beginning to come back online and research is still overcoming the impact of last year’s [Indiscernible]. Continuing the trend from last year, we saw outsized year-over-year growth in our relationships with our largest, most impactful customers. In the first quarter, our top 100 customers now representing 50% of our total net revenue, grew 25%. Geographically, we saw a return to growth in the United States, our largest market, with total revenue growth of 9% year-over-year.

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Q&A Session

Our international businesses also continued their momentum with revenue growth of 7% in the quarter. Europe has been a major area of focus for us recently, and we opened our new regional headquarters in London just a few weeks ago. This focus is translating into strong revenue momentum with the EMEA region growing 14% year-over-year. Turning to cost and profitability, as I mentioned previously, we delivered $90 million of adjusted EBITDA in the first quarter, 25% higher than the first quarter of last year, and representing a 17% margin, an improvement of 320 basis points year-over-year. This impressive figure is a direct consequence of the proactive steps we took last year to manage our costs. In 2023, we took staffing actions that resulted in $98 million of annualized savings.

As a result, our labor costs are 2% lower in the first quarter of 2024, helping to deliver a staffing-to-net-revenue ratio of 64.3%, an improvement of 270 basis points over the first quarter of last year. Also driving this margin improvement is a laser focus on managing our G&A expenses. Despite our growing net revenue in the quarter, our total G&A expenses were almost exactly the same as in the same period last year. We’re installing modern systems for back office, utilizing offshoring and adding AI capabilities to streamline operations. We’ve seen particularly strong growth in adjusted EBITDA from our performance, media and data capability growing 212%, and creativity in communications growing 42%, a testament to the focus that all of Stagwell is placing on controlling our costs.

Net new business continues to break company records, giving us increased confidence in our full-year guidance. In the quarter, we delivered $66 million of net new business, a record for the first quarter for Stagwell. This brings our last 12-month net new business figure to $284 million, also a company record. Quarter after quarter, we’ve increased the LCM net new business figure to $212 million a year ago. Importantly, the size of our wins has grown impressively. We continue to be invited to larger global pitches. In the first quarter, the average win size increased 13% year-over-year. These net new business numbers were driven by some important wins, including Fogo de Chao, the Star Tribune, Basel and Wilson, as well as expansions with Target and L’Oreal.

In Q1, Stagwell agencies captured over 70 of the top awards across major industry shows, including an array of agency of the year designations. Maybe 1% to 2% of the market, we are far exceeding that in terms of industry recognition. These include four agencies featuring on the NHA list, including Code and Theory being recognized as business transformation agency of the year, Yale winning US advertising agency of the year by campaign, Assembly being named media agency of the year and Exponent PR, a pecan shop within Golden Thoil, took home the disruptive agency of the year crown. Our M&A program was active. We might not have gotten every deal we sought, but the net revenue and adjusted EBITDA from companies acquired in the fourth and first quarters exceeded the net revenue and adjusted EBITDA lost from consensual life debt disposition.

We achieved this despite the initial outlay in acquisitions being only about 15% of the disposition’s gross proceeds. This is concrete evidence that our M&A machine can be a major driver of value for investors moving forward. As I’ve discussed previously, we’re exploring a further non-core disposition. Hope to have more color on that later in the year. In the first months of 2024, we made strong progress in expanding our global presence through acquisitions. We had a UK digital collective sidekick and our first French-created agency was Next Partners. Just last month, shortly after the end of the first quarter, we announced the acquisition of Pros, a digital-focused brand and marketing consultancy in Brazil, which significantly expands our Latin American presence.

We’re looking to become more competitive internationally by doubling our business outside of North America, which is 40% of net revenues over the coming years. Our current focus is in Western Europe, the Middle East. This quarter, we took steps to sharpen our capabilities in data, media and AI through a combination of internal initiatives and external partnerships. In the first quarter, we maintained strong investment of $14 million into the Stagwell Marketing Cloud, our AI-enabled suite of products for modern marketers. We’re now working to bring our research products under the Harris Quest brand to market and expect to see sales growth in the back half of the year. SMC orchestrated its first software launch with Google Cloud as we deepened the partnership on GenAI announced last year.

At Google Cloud Next, we launched a data cleanroom solution on Google’s platform that will provide our clients with a private and secure space to mix and match their first-party data with Stagwell’s vast row of payment solutions. We’re also focused on growing AI leadership across our agencies. One focus will be scaled on best-in-class use cases such as GALE’s Enterprise Alchemy Ai platform announced this quarter, which reduces the time spent on critical tasks across all disciplines in the agency of GALE’s almost 800 people work smarter, better and faster. Left Field Labs is incubating customer — solutions to elevate their customer experience and our largest performance media agency assembly, except to announce a new AI solution player this month.

We are making significant progress on our media unit on building the last mile of the media chain from planning, targeting and audience creation down to placement and media supply. On our last call, I announced new building at Stagwell IT solution. Today, we are partnering with Nexxen, a global unified advertising technology platform. We’ll have more to share on that partnership in the coming weeks as we grow out our new offerings in data and media. In other parts of our business, we’re preparing for Sports Beach this June at the Cannes Lions Festival, where we’ll return for a second year with more brand sponsors and more athletes, including Joe Burrow, JuJu Watkins, Mikaela Shiffrin. Sport Beach continues to benefit the company increased our exposure worldwide and leading to new business opportunities.

Finally, we’re excited later this month to host our definitive future of new summit and partnership with the top publishers across the US, including Axios, Business Insider, New York Times, POLITICO, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, The Trade Desk, and Ad Fontes Media. Recognize that fears around brand safety have made advertisers more cautious about advertising across business opinion sites, we released a first of its kind study for advertisers to better understand where an candidate should advertise across business industry. It’s been a busy quarter. We are never standing still. We are marching forward to achieve our goal of offering everything from global full-service platform self service. Wherever you look, Stagwell is evolving and bringing our partners along with us to the cutting edge of marketing services.

We’re on the forefront of AI, a global performance market, culturally relevant events of advancing online advocacy campaigns of the move to more social media and content and the combination once again of media and entertainment. These efforts and solid quarter of revenue growth gives us confidence about the year ahead. Now, I will hand things over to Frank Lanuto, our Chief Financial Officer, to walk you through some of our financial results in more detail. Frank?

Frank Lanuto: Thank you, Mark. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us to discuss our first quarter results. As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question after the prepared remarks conclude, please feel free to submit them through the chat function. The company returned to revenue growth during Q1 driven by strong performance in our media advocacy businesses, improving market conditions in the US and continued momentum in the international markets in which we operate. For the quarter, we reported revenue of $670 million, an increase of 8% as compared to the same period in the prior year. Net revenue, excluding pass-through costs, increased 2% for the same period to $532 million. Building on the trend from 2023, our largest customers continue to invest in their relationship with our agencies.

In the first quarter of 2024, our top 100 customers now representing 50% of our consolidated net revenue grew 25% versus the prior period, our largest improvement in the last five quarters. The number of relationships also expanded, but the number of customers in our Top100 being serviced by more than one of our agencies, increasing 12% year-over-year, providing further evidence that our strategy of delivering integrated services is working. Another positive signal was the occurrence of an inflection plan where period-over-period revenues with existing customers from growing relationships exceeded those from declining relationships. Our net new business performance for the quarter represented the fifth consecutive quarter of increasing trailing 12-month performance and set another high [indiscernible] of $284 million.

We are tangibly benefiting from being invited to participate in larger global fishes as the average size of our wins increased 13% year-over-year. The combined impact of net new business and improving performance of existing clients leads us to reaffirm our guidance for the year. Turning to revenue by capability. The first quarter saw revenue growth in four of our five principal capabilities. Performance Media & Data delivered $77 million in revenue, an increase of 13% over the prior year period. This performance was driven by a combination of new business wins and growth from existing customers. Particular areas of strength included transportation and logic, consumer products and the financial services sectors. Creativity & Communications delivered $292 million of revenue, an increase of 11% over the prior period.

We had strong growth from a number of consumer products customers as well as clients in technology, media and communication sectors, which grew about 2% over the prior period. Digital transformation returned to growth in the first quarter with revenue increasing to $196 million, a 6% improvement over the prior period, driven by strong performance in food and beverage, efficacy and technology-based clients, which grew 20% period-over-period. This growth was partially offset by softness in financials as we anniversared the regional [indiscernible] prices for early 2023. Consumer insights and strategy reported $46 million of revenue, a decline of 7% year-over-year. This is largely a consequence of customers within the entertainment sector, increasing spending more slowly subsequent to Hollywood actors and writer strike late last year.

Stagwell Marketing Cloud totaled $60 million in revenue, an increase of 7% year-over-year. The suite assortment products continues to be an investment priority for us. In the first quarter, we maintained our investments spending of approximately $14 million into the cloud, as we continue to build an industry-leading suite of tech products for a modern marketing. Finally, advocacy is a significant contributor to the business mix in election years, as we benefit from increased political fund raising and the spending running up to the elections in November. In the first quarter, efficacy revenue grew $65 million, an increase of 80% over the prior period. Now turning to geographical breakdown. We saw continued strong revenue growth in our international businesses of 7%.

This was led by exceptionally strong growth of 14% in the United Kingdom. In the US, our largest market, revenue increased 9% over the prior year. Turning to costs. Management took decisive actions in 2023 to rightsize our cost structure to better align with trailing revenue. The results of these actions can clearly be seen in our first quarter results. In the first quarter, the company delivered $90 million in adjusted EBITDA, an increase of 25% over the prior period, and it also increased the related margin to 73% [ph], an improvement of nearly 320 basis points over the prior quarter. Staffing is our largest cost. And in 2023, we took actions that reduced annualized salaries and headcount by $198 million and 4%, respectively. We benefited from the full effect of these successive actions during Q1, as labor costs were lower by more than 2% or $7 million, and the staffing cost to net revenue ratio was lower to 64.3%, an improvement of 270 basis points versus the prior year and the lowest first quarter ratio since our merger.

In addition to staffing, we also focus on efficiently managing our G&A costs. For our first quarter, our G&A expenses were just under $100 million, in line with the same period in 2023. This results in G&A as a percentage of net revenue ratio of 18.8%, an improvement of nearly 30 basis points versus the prior period. Our G&A costs, all inclusive of certain unbillable expenses. These costs tend to grow in line with our net revenues for both the first quarters of 2023 and 2024, our unbillable customer expenses as a percentage of net revenue remained stable at 6%. Adjusted G&A expenses to account for these unbillables, our G&A actually decreased by slightly more than $1 million year-over-year, representing a 2% decline excluding unbillables. The cumulative impact of our revenue growth and cost actions contributed to the strong adjusted EBITDA performance during the quarter and allow us to maintain our strong investment in the Stagwell Marketing Cloud.

Excluding the $14 million of cloud investment in Q1, our first quarter adjusted EBITDA margin would have been approximately 19.9%. Now moving to the balance sheet. We continue to make efficient allocation of capital to maintain a strong financial position. Starting with deferred acquisition consideration, we reduced obligations of approximately $65 million from the end of the first quarter last year to $101 million at the end of the first quarter in 2024. We remain on track to reduce our guide obligations to approximately $40 million by the end of the year. We also acquired 4 million shares during the quarter, at an average price of $6.11 per share for approximately $25 million. Our existing buyback authorization, as of quarter end, that has $114 million in remaining availability.

CapEx to capitalized software for the quarter was $14 million, broadly in line with our targets. As a result, we ended the quarter with cash of $130 million and drawings under our revolver of $182 million. Our leverage ratio, at quarter end, was three times. And finally, as highlighted by Mark in his remarks, we are reaffirming our full year 2024 guidance as follows. Organic net revenue growth is expected to be between 5% to 7%. Organic net revenue, excluding Advocacy growth is expected to be 4% to 5%. Adjusted EBITDA is expected to be between $400 million to $450 million. We expect to deliver approximately 50% free cash flow conversion and adjusted earnings per share, is expected to be between $0.75 and $0.88. That concludes our prepared remarks this morning.

I will now turn the call back over to Ben Allanson to open the Q&A portion of the call.

A – Ben Allanson: Thank you, Frank. Just a reminder, if you have any questions, please submit them via the chat buttion on the top of the screen. We will start with a question here from Barton Crockett at Rosenblatt. So can you please walk us through what you see as the drivers of acceleration of organic net revenue growth over the balance of 2024 from the 2% reported in Q1 to 5% to 7% you guide today? How much visibility do you have into this acceleration? Do you think it’s going to be steady ground or is that going to be one of alteration which they’re really going to tick up?

Mark Penn: Sure. Thank you, Barton for that question. Look, I think as you analyze it, you can see international would be along nicely. Advocacy is going would be along nicely. Media is moving along nicely. And then next to really come up and continue to, I think, grow is digital transformation has room for growth. Look, Media aspiring on all cylinders already with double-digit growth. Our pipeline, when I look at our pipeline, it’s 50% higher than it was at this time last year. We are in the record number of some new pitches of enhanced size given the enhanced reputation. Also, AI is beginning, I think, to — customers are beginning to get over the — let’s take a look at it and start to implement the base. So I think that you’re going to really see a good second quarter and things will build to the third and fourth quarters, because that’s when Advocacy and Media in the holiday season tend to crescendo.

So, I look at it, as you’re going to really kind of have see strength building through the year, as I think digital transformation will strengthen, and Media and Advocacy will really take off in the second half of the year. So that’s how I see it developing in meeting the goals.

Ben Allanson: How just on digital transformation? A question here from Jason Kreyer at Craig-Hallum. He is asking about green shoots we’re seeing in digital transformation that kind of gives us confidence to growth there?

Mark Penn: Yes. We’re seeing, I think, some of the companies that have cut back last year, beginning to come back. We’re seeing growth and that’s again, really AI. I mean if you make the chips and then you have all the cloud, you need the applications. And I think the people are discovering the applications and we are in the AI application building business. That is what we’re doing. I think first customers have to be assured that their data would not go into the worldwide global data pot. And I think that’s why we put together the clean rooms for both internally and for our clients in order to provide that kind of confidence. And I think as customers get confidence that AI can be used safely and securely, you’re just going to see this take off.

We’re going to go back to the biggest problem being finding engineers as opposed to the biggest problem finding work. And I think that really shook it in the second half of the year. I think you can see that building in all of the tech companies in terms of what they’re reporting.

Ben Allanson: Maybe some of the tech customers as well. And if that’s the question here, just talking about tech coming back, some of the key trends we’re seeing with technology customers and then sort of rebounding in this year?

Mark Penn: Yeah, I mean, we’re seeing them slowly. They’re not back to full throttle yet. I think they still have more to go. It is shaping up to be a year of competition. We chose some increase. Again, our list of top clients would be a list of large-sized tech companies. In many ways, we’re a tech company’s tech company, helping to develop AI front ends, consumer interactions, as well as to build new applications for our clients. But I think you’re still seeing some caution on the side of those companies, but again, they are building out their programs, how to bring AI to the masses. That is where we’re going to benefit. And I think at a certain point the floodgates will open here and that that can’t be too far away.

Ben Allanson: Changing gears a little bit just onto the international side of things. A question from Mark, he says a Western Benchmark. He says, with just about 12% of net revenue outside the US and the UK, how should we think about growth by geography being factored into our guidance or growth by geography moving forward? And he asks, is expansion to Asia Pacific still a meaningful initiative for you to unlock the biggest global contracts on the opportunities?

Mark Penn: I think you can see when you go through our acquisitions, you can see clearly our strategy. A group of those acquisitions are frontiers of marketing, people like Movers and Shakers, people like Leftfield Labs and AI. And the other group of acquisitions is clearly Brazil, UK. And you’re going to see really more focus in Asia and the Mid-East in the next few months. I think that you’re going to see us to build in the global network that we need to win. Look, for the first time we’re in a $40 to $60 million pitch. People are looking at Stagwell and seeing us as the logical company taking on the majors at a growing scale. So we’re going to complete the global network. We also think that, you know, we put together Blue Fin, which is an office where we brought together 17 European agencies in London, and we can see the benefits, 14% growth, just beginning, frankly, because they used to get very small pitches because their services were fragmented.