Jim Head
Analyst · Barclays
Thanks, Dale, and good morning, everyone. Before I begin, let me just say that I share the enthusiasm about the steps that we're taking to reposition this business and share the enthusiasm that we have an opportunity to drive growth going forward. I'm going to walk through today the financial results and the balance sheet for the fourth quarter and full year '22. I'll then turn to our outlook for 23, and I'll close by commenting on our plans for capital allocation. As shown on Page 5 of the supplemental deck, fourth quarter revenue was $241.1 million, a decline of 19.2% over Q4 '21 and a decline of 3.7% from the prior quarter. The quarter was characterized by consecutive monthly improvements in our volumes of identified potential savings as October was the nadir for the year, November showed improvement and December was our strongest month for savings since May of 2022. Our total revenues for the full year were $109.7 million, down 3.4% from the prior year. As shown on Page 6 of the supplemental deck, relative to Q3 '22, network-based revenues declined 7.6%, analytics-based revenues declined 2.2% and payment and revenue Integrity revenues declined 4.8%. In aggregate, these revenue trends were in line with our Q4 '22 guidance, which was largely informed by the run rates we were experiencing as we exited the third quarter. Versus the prior year quarter, fourth quarter revenues were about 20% declines for each of our service lines, reflecting a more challenging environment for utilization in the second half of '22. The customer shifts disclosed in our third quarter earnings call and difficult comparisons with our record fourth quarter of 2021. For full year 2022, network-based revenues declined 11.9%, analytics-based revenues grew 0.6% and payment and revenue integrity revenues declined 7%. Turning to expenses. Fourth quarter adjusted EBITDA expenses were $79.6 million, up $5.2 million from $74.4 million in the prior year quarter and up $1.3 million from Q3 2022. The increase of $5.2 million over Q4 '21 was driven by structural cost increases and investments in our business. Our adjusted EBITDA expenses for the year were $311 million. As discussed in our last earnings call, in the fourth quarter, we took action to reduce costs. We expect the benefit of those cost reductions to be fully realized in 2023 as we seek to contain adjusted EBITDA expense growth while funding our investments in our platform and our growth plan. Adjusted EBITDA was $161.5 million in Q4 '22, down $27.8 million from $223.6 million in Q4 of '21 and down 6% from $172.2 million in Q3 '22. Full year adjusted EBITDA was $768.7 million, down 8.3% from $838.3 million in '21. Turning to our margins. Adjusted EBITDA margin was 67.0% in Q4, 22% versus 75.0% in Q4 '21 and 68.7% in the prior quarter. Our full year '22 adjusted EBITDA margin was 71.2%, down from 75% for the full year '21, driven largely by the combination of lower revenues and high incremental margin, structural cost increases and investments in the business. As you are aware from our press release, we conducted our annual impairment test in the fourth quarter of 2022, which incorporates current financial market conditions, including the recent performance of our share price, market discount rates and other factors. Based on this test, the estimated fair values of our goodwill and indefinite-lived assets were less than their carrying values. As a result, noncash impairment charges of $657.9 million for our goodwill and $4.3 million for our indefinite life intangibles were recorded and recognized in our GAAP earnings results. As Dale reported, our operating cash flow totaled $372 million for full year '22. Our full year '22 free cash flow was $283 million. As shown on Page 14 of the supplemental deck, we ended the year with $334 million of unrestricted cash, which is net of the $100 million we used for debt repurchase in the fourth quarter. Net of cash, our total and operating leverage ratios were 5.8% and 4.1%, respectively. As you will see from our press release and earnings deck, we've also made some changes to our disclosures. First, we are breaking out medical charges processed and identified potential savings slide into 2 categories, which reflects the performance of 2 distinct claim flows on our platform, commercial health plans and the remainder of our business, including payment integrity. Second, based on feedback from investors, we are providing more detail on our share of savings slide, which shows performance of our PSAV and PEPM models. We hope these changes will provide additional clarity into our business performance. Separately, the estimated COVID-related impact on our results were de minimis in the second half of '22 and, therefore, we plan to eliminate the disclosure of the COVID-related impacts on our revenue and adjusted EBITDA going forward. Moving on to 2023 outlook, our guidance is presented on Page 10 of the supplemental deck. We anticipate 2023 revenues of $925 million to $975 million, down 10% to 14% from 2022. The revenue bridge on Page 11 of the supplemental deck illustrates the key components and assumptions in our guidance. First, we are entering 2023 at a lower run rate of revenues versus full year '22, driven by the dynamics discussed in our third quarter earnings calls, including weaker utilization of health care services, unfavorable mix shift of claims volume and some customer shifts. The lower run rate accounts for a gross contribution of 11 percentage points of the expected revenue decline in 2023. Importantly, our guidance does not assume a meaningful recovery in health care utilization during 2023. Instead, we are assuming volumes of claims flows remain largely flattish from the Q4 run rate. Second, as Dale noted earlier, we have now renewed multiyear contracts with 2 of our larger customers. We expect these renewals and other renewals with larger customers slated for this year to pose a headwind to revenues of about 8% in '23. Despite this impact, these renewals improve our competitive positioning, increase the visibility of our core business and provide a more stable base of revenue from which we can grow in the coming years. Partially offsetting the volume run rate and contract-related headwinds, we expect the combination of core business growth and early returns from our new growth initiatives to contribute 4 percentage points to 9 percentage points of growth to our revenues in 2023. Within that, we expect 3% to 7% core business growth, driven mostly by net new sales and some medical cost inflation. As shown on the adjusted EBITDA bridge on Page 12 of the supplemental deck, we expect to continue delivering best-in-class adjusted EBITDA margins in 2023, albeit lower than those in prior years. This largely reflects the combination of our lower revenue run rate and lean, relatively fixed expense base and is captured in the Q4 '22 exit rate of our adjusted EBITDA margin. Bridging from Q4 '22 to our 2023 margin guidance, we expect about 100 basis points of total margin contraction. Within that annual amount, we anticipate 50 basis points of investments to support our new Growth Plan, a100 basis points of margin pressure from structural cost increases and 100 basis points of platform investments, including additional NSA-related costs we are absorbing to support a substantial increase in IDR volumes. These additional costs are expected to be offset by 150 basis points of cost reductions we have already identified. These reductions are in flight as we follow through on the -- with the action plan that we laid out on our third quarter earnings call. Returning to Page 10, our revenue cost expectations imply a forecast of $600 million to $650 million for adjusted EBITDA in '23. Page 10 also shows other guidance items related to our P&L and cash flow to help you gauge free cash flow generation for 2023. We expect interest expense of $325 million to $340 million in 2023, up from about $300 million in 2022, driven by higher floating rates associated with our Term Loan B. We are forecasting CapEx of $100 million to $115 million in 2023, up from about $90 million in '22, as we deepen our investment in our platform and new products identified by our Growth Plan. We expect depreciation of $70 million to $75 million and a tax rate between 25% and 28%. Finally, we anticipate operating cash flow to be between $175 million and $215 million in 2023 versus $372 million for full year '22, driven primarily by lower adjusted EBITDA, higher interest expense and capital expenditures and a onetime shareholder litigation settlement of $24 million. As outlined on Page 13 of the supplemental deck and the press release this morning, for Q1 '23, we anticipate revenues of $225 million to $240 million and adjusted EBITDA of $145 million to $160 million. These projections are flat to $15 million lower versus Q4 '22, assuming a stable volume environment and the impact of our 2 contract renewals. The full impact of the contract renewals will have flowed through our results starting in the second quarter of 2023. Therefore, we expect our first 2 quarters will be similar, while we expect third and fourth quarters of '23 to be higher as we realize new business growth and some early gains from the growth initiatives we plan to launch this year. Turning to capital allocation. We maintain significant flexibility to pursue our growth initiatives and opportunistically deploy our capital. As we've indicated in the past, our highest priority is investing in the business, both organically and through M&A, to drive growth and long-term value. Our guidance implies that we plan to make roughly $20 million to $30 million of incremental investment through the P&L and capital expenditures to support the core platform and fund our new growth initiatives. We think these investments have an attractive return on investment and encompass a series of modest investments rather than larger bets. On the M&A front, we continue to target small to midsized acquisitions comparable in size to the HST and Discovery Health Partners transactions we've done in the past that allow us to expand and diversify our products and service lines. And you heard Dale say that we're particularly focused on launching a new data and analytics service line in '23, and M&A could be a useful tool to accelerate that progress. Also high on our list of capital priorities is reducing our debt. As noted, we repurchased $136 million of face value of our 5.75% senior notes during the fourth quarter with approximately $100 million cash from our balance sheet. Even as we use our capital to fund our planned organic and inorganic investments, we expect to have flexibility to use additional balance sheet and free cash flow to continue reducing our debt over the next few years. Of note, we have no maturities on our funded debt until Q4 2027. Finally, share buybacks. We've been consistent that this is not our highest priority or our largest allocation of capital. However, we are reinstating our authorization, which expired December '22, in the amount of $100 million through December 2023. We believe our shares are undervalued, and repurchasing our stock could be an attractive component of our overall strategy. In fact, we believe the prices of all of our securities seem dislocated from the fundamentals of our business as we know it, and we will continue to be opportunistic regarding the repurchase of our securities. That brings me to the end of my comments. I'll turn it back over to Dale.