Dave Gardella
Analyst · D.A. Davidson
Thank you, Dan, and good morning everyone. Before we discuss our fourth quarter financial performance, I'd like to recap a significant item in the quarter that impacts our year-over-year comparability. As we announced on the last earnings call, we completed the sale of our Language Solutions business in the third quarter of 2018. Our fourth quarter 2018 results exclude Language Solutions while the fourth quarter of 2017 includes Language Solutions for the entire quarter. As I mentioned on our third quarter call, the sale negatively impacted our reported revenue comparison by $21.2 million and negatively impacted our non-GAAP adjusted EBITDA comparison by approximately $3.9 million in the quarter, inclusive of net stranded cost. Keeping this in mind, let's review our fourth quarter financial results. On a consolidated basis, net sales for the fourth quarter of 2018 were $200.3 million, a decrease of $24.5 million or 10.9% from the fourth quarter of 2017, primarily due to sales of Language Solutions. After adjusting for the sale of Language Solutions changes and foreign exchange rates and the impact of the adoption of the new revenue recognition standard, organic net sales decreased 1.4%. Continued strong growth in our SaaS offerings, led by FundSuite Arc, combined with a rebound in activity within the balance of our Investment Markets business nearly offset the decline in U.S. capital markets transaction activity that Dan mentioned earlier. Adjusted for the sale of Language Solutions, services net sales in the fourth quarter decreased by $7.4 million or 5.3% as compared to the fourth quarter of 2017, driven by lower U.S. capital markets transactional activity, partially offset by continuing growth in our SaaS offerings. Products net sales increased by $4.1 million or 6.4% due to a rebound in investment markets, mutual fund and healthcare volumes in the quarter. Fourth quarter gross margin was 35.2% or 310 basis points lower than the fourth quarter of 2017, primarily driven by an unfavorable mix between higher-margin services including transactional revenue and lower margin products net sales. Non-GAAP SG&A expense in the quarter was $51.1 million, $2.9 million lower than the fourth quarter of 2017. As a percentage of revenue, non-GAAP SG&A was 25.5% or 150 basis points higher than the fourth quarter of 2017, primarily due to the sale of Language Solutions and the associated stranded costs as well as investments in our strategic priorities. Our fourth quarter non-GAAP adjusted EBITDA was $19.4 million, a decrease of $12.7 million from the fourth quarter of 2017, primarily driven by the weak U.S. capital markets transactional activity and the sale of Language Solutions which as I noted earlier negatively impacted the fourth quarter comparison by $3.9 million. Weakness in the U.S. capital markets transactional activity also negatively impacted our non-GAAP adjusted EBITDA margin in the quarter. Turning now to our segment results, net sales on our U.S. segment were $170.7 million in the fourth quarter of 2018, a decrease of 10% from last year's fourth quarter. On an organic basis, after adjusting for the sale of Language Solutions and the impact of the new revenue recognition standard, net sales were down 5.6%. Net sales in U.S. capital markets decreased 13.1% on an organic basis, primarily due to weak transactional activity, again driven by a significant reduction in IPOs and debt deals in the later part of the quarter. This was partially offset by net sales in U.S. investment markets, which increased 4.1% on organic basis, driven by growth in our SaaS offerings along with a rebound in mutual fund and healthcare volumes. Non-GAAP adjusted EBITDA margin for this segment of 14.2% decreased 490 basis points from the fourth quarter of 2017, primarily due to lower capital markets transactional activity. Net sales in our international segment were $29.6 million in the fourth quarter of 2018, a decrease of 15.7% from the fourth quarter of last year. On an organic basis, excluding the impact of the Language Solutions disposition and unfavorable impact of changes in foreign exchange rates and the new revenue recognition standard, net sales in the fourth quarter were up 21.7%, driven by growth in our SaaS offerings and continued strong transactional activity in Asia. Non-GAAP adjusted EBITDA margin for this segment of 6.8% decreased 60 basis points from the fourth quarter of 2017, due to increased technology expenses offset by more favorable mix of business due to the sale of Language Solutions. Our fourth quarter 2018, non-GAAP unallocated corporate expenses excluding depreciation and amortization were $6.8 million and were flat with the fourth quarter of 2017. Consolidated free cash flow in the quarter was $41.6 million, $8.3 million lower than the fourth quarter of 2017, primarily due to lower EBITDA, increased capital expenditures, primarily related to capitalized software development costs related to our growth initiatives, along with less cash generated by working capital. Our controllable working capital rate, which we define as accounts receivable plus inventory less accounts payable, as a percent of our trailing 3-month annualized net sales increased approximately 60 basis points from 13.4% at year end 2017 to just over 14% at year end 2018, primarily due to higher accounts receivable balances. We are targeting improvement in this area in 2019. We ended the quarter with $362.7 million of total debt, and $315.4 million of net debt with nothing drawn on our revolver, and we had net available liquidity of $302 million. As of December 31, 2018, our net leverage ratio was 2.0 times down 0.4 times from a year ago Lastly, at year end 2018, our pension and other post-retirement plans were $52.5 million under-funded, an improvement in funding levels of $2.2 million compared to year end 2017. Before I turn it back to Dan, I again want to mention the impact to our year-over-year comparability in 2019 related to the sale of Language Solutions which we sold in the third quarter of 2018. The Language Solutions -- the sale of Language Solutions negatively impacts over 2019 year-over-year comparisons by approximately $42 million in revenue and approximately $3 million in EBITDA over the first three quarters of the year. The year-over-year revenue impacts for Q1, Q2 and Q3 are $19 million, $20 million and $3 million, respectively. The corresponding year-over-year EBITDA impacts inclusive of stranded costs are $1 million in Q1, $1.5 million in Q2, and $0.5 million in Q3. With that covered, let me now provide some color on the full year 2019 guidance summarized in this morning's press release. We remain excited about the growth we're seeing in our SaaS solutions. However, given the state of this transactional market that Dan described earlier, we're taking a cautious approach to our initial guidance. We are seeing high levels of activity in our current transactional pipeline, but deal completion is ramping up as companies receive feedback from the SEC. As a reminder, we recognized revenue on transactions when our work on the deal is complete. We do expect these deals to ultimately come to market, but the way is effectively shortening our transactions year. This results in our expectation for less overall transactional net sales in 2019 with the first quarter being down year-over-year followed by growth in the last three quarters. To mitigate the expected decrease in transactional net sales and profits, we are making the necessary adjustments to our operating plan to achieve modest non-GAAP EBITDA margin growth for the year, while also continuing to invest in the SaaS solutions and technology enabled services that will drive the future organic growth outlined in our long-term financial model. Specifically, we expect 2019 total net sales to be in the range of $910 million to $940 million, representing organic growth of approximately 0.4% at the mid-point, as SaaS growth is projected to continue to grow in the mid-teens and more than offsets any year-over-year declines in transactional and print-related net sales. We expect our non-GAAP adjusted EBITDA to be in the range of $145 million to $155 million. Depreciation and amortization is expected to be approximately $48 million. We expect interest expense of approximately $35 million. Our full year non-GAAP tax rate is expected to be in the range of 29% to 31%. We project the full year fully diluted weighted average share count to be approximately 35 million shares. And lastly, we expect capital expenditures in the range of $40 million to $45 million, with free cash flow also in the range of $40 million to $45 million. Regarding timing and seasonality, we expect the first quarter to have a difficult year-over-year comparison due to the sale of Language Solutions, which as I mentioned negatively impact first quarter net sales and EBITDA comparisons by $19 million and $1.5 million respectively, along with the headwinds facing U.S. capital markets transaction. In total, we're expecting first quarter net sales to be in the range of $220 million to $230 million, down approximately 5% year-over-year when excluding the impact of Language Solutions as SaaS growth is expected to be strong and should partially offset the delays in completing transactions. While we expect to see the pace of transactional deals pickup starting in March, our assumption for the full year is that transactional net sales will be down approximately 4% versus full year 2018. We'll continue to keep you updated on how transactional activity levels and deal completions are progressing as the year goes on. Also from a seasonality perspective our normal timing of cash flow has us a net user of cash in the first half of the year generating more than all of our annual cash flow in the back half of the year driven by the peak proxy season in the second quarter. Given the transactional headwind that we will face certainly in the year, we expect our seasonality of cash flow in 2019 to be even more heavily weighted for the back half of the year compared to a more difficult year. In summary, we're pleased with the continued success we're seeing in SaaS and believe that the fourth quarter growth of 19.3% provides additional proof that our strategy to continue to invest in these offerings is sound. As we've seen transactions will continue to be variable. So we will closely monitor the relative strength of our end markets adjusting our plans as needed to drive long-term growth while also achieving improvements in our non-GAAP adjusted EBITDA margin and free cash flow. And with that, I'll turn it back to Dan.