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EVERTEC, Inc. (EVTC)

Q2 2013 Earnings Call· Wed, Aug 7, 2013

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good day everyone. And welcome to the EVERTEC’s Second Quarter 2013 Earnings Conference Call. Today’s conference is being recorded. At this time I like to turn the conference over to Luis Cabrera, Senior Vice President, Head of Investors Relations. Please go ahead sir.

Luis Cabrera

Management

Thank you, operator. And good afternoon everyone. Welcome to EVERTEC’s second quarter 2013 earnings call. I’m Luis Cabrera, Senior Vice President, Treasurer, Head of Investors Relations & Corporate Development for EVERTEC. With me today is Peter Harrington, our President and Chief Executive Officer, Juan José Román, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. A replay of this call will be available until next week August 14, 2013. Access information for the replay is listed in today’s financial press release which is available in our website under the Investor Relations tab. As a reminder, this call may not be taped or otherwise reproduce without EVERTEC’s prior consent. For those listening to replay, this call was held and recorded on August 7, 2013. Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone that this call may contains forward-looking statements as they are defined under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. This forward-looking statements of our expectations for future performance are subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties. EVERTEC cautions that this statements are not guarantees of future performance. All forward-looking statements made today reflects our current expectations only and we undertake no obligations to update any statements to reflect the events that appear after this call. Please refer to the final perspectives for our initial public offering on Form 424(b)(4) filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission for factors that could cause our actual future results to differ materially from any forward-looking statements. During today’s call, management will provide certain information that will constitute non-GAAP financial measures under our SEC rules such as adjusted EBITDA, adjusted net income and adjusted net income per share. Reconciliations to GAAP measures and certain additional information are also included into today’s earning press release. With that, we’ll begin by turning the call over to Peter Harrington, our President and Chief Executive Officer. Peter?

Peter Harrington

Management

Thank you, Luis. And thanks to everyone for joining us today. I am very pleased with our second quarter results and remain excited about the breadth of opportunities available to us to continue to build shareholder value. Of course our success would not be possible without our great management team and all of EVERTEC’s 1700 employees. I want to thank each of them personally for their dedication and continued hard work towards making EVERTEC a leading full service transaction processor in Latin America and the Caribbean. For the second quarter, our revenue and adjusted EBITDA grew 6%. Our adjusted EBITDA margin increased to 48.7% and adjusted net income grew at a very strong 39%. Overall, our solid results for the second quarter of 2013 demonstrate both the value of our business model and the continued execution of our strategic growth plan. We continue to expand the depth and breadth of our customer partnerships across our broad Latin American footprint. And are happy to report significant progress on a number of strategic initiatives some of which I will discuss with you in just a moment. I am also pleased to announce that our Board of Directors has approved a regular quarterly tax dividend of $0.10 per share. Our initiation of a quarterly dividend underscores EVERTEC’s significant free cash flow generation strong balance sheet and the ability to sustain predictable long term growth with low incremental capital requirements. It also reflects the confidence that our management team and Board have in our long term growth prospects as well as our commitment to maximize in total shareholder value. As you may have seen we have posted a supplemental slide to our Investor Relations website that further highlights our rational behind the initiation and some key figures that Juan will walk you through later…

Operator

Operator

Thank you. (Operator Instructions). We’ll take our first question from Julio Quinteros with Goldman Sachs. Julio Quinteros – Goldman Sachs: [Foreign Language] Juan José Román: Yes, yes. Thanks. Julio Quinteros – Goldman Sachs: Hey, guys seriously. Congratulations, good start here. Wanted to just kind of go back to the contribution from some of the international segments outside of Puerto Rico itself. You talked a little bit about the mid-teens growth. What is the actual contribution right now and then maybe help us prioritize which countries you would expect to come online first if you think about the next couple of quarters here?

Peter Harrington

Management

Well, I think what’s driving the growth is predominantly our QLS and our POS and our card processing side of the business. And we’re seeing that in most of the markets but as we’ve said before that relates of the business that we saw last year that’s continuing to drive it as well as, as we said before just the cash to card conversion on the current footprint that we have. As far as we’re still focused on Colombia and until we get Colombia kind of up and running and fully driving revenue, then we’ll focus on what the next market we’ll go into. But like we said in the Road Show our analysis would say that it’s probably going to be either Chile or Peru next. Julio Quinteros – Goldman Sachs: Okay. And then in terms of contribution, I think you said it was mid-teens in terms of growth, what is the percentage of revenue contribution this quarter?

Peter Harrington

Management

I’ll turn that over to Juan. Juan José Román: Yeah. We said relative to same last year we had almost 15 85, Puerto Rico 85, outside 15. Julio Quinteros – Goldman Sachs: Okay, got it. Great. Thank you.

Peter Harrington

Management

Thanks Julio.

Operator

Operator

We’ll move next to George Mihalos with Credit Suisse.

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst

Hi, this is (Allison Jordan) in for George. I have a question on your opportunity to launch the Dynamic Currency Conversion services in Costa Rica. Can you just let us know maybe how big you think that opportunity can be and what are the countries you’re looking to implement that in?

Peter Harrington

Management

Well it will – we think it’s a business that obviously depends on the market, it’s really tailored towards the T&E business because where you really get the value is from the foreign card holders in country. So, there is some decent kind of T&E or tourist related business in Costa Rica, that’s what we’re going to be focused on first where it’s of the ATM in the POS. I don’t have an specific number for what the – what we’d see it as. And then you’d have to look at the countries where it’s not US dollar and where there is a sizeable kind of tourist industry that’s where the best benefit will come from. So, probably a market like potentially the Dominican Republic make sense, not so much Panama because they’re US dollar obviously but some of the other Caribbean markets where there is high level of tourist.

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst

Great. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

We’ll move next to Sara Gubins with Bank of America/Merrill Lynch. Sara Gubins – Bank of America/Merrill: Hi, thanks. Good afternoon. Question about the dividend, is the thinking that you would raise the payout ratio over time or you thinking about 30% as a longer term target? Juan José Román: Our dividend basically today is an – the amount that we decided is a process dynamic process that management under worked went through to determine how much it will be, we don’t have a fixed ratio. So, as I said it will be dynamic process where we will continue with our Board discussing our growth strategies and any dividends going forward. Sara Gubins – Bank of America/Merrill: Okay. And then separately, could you talk about the factors that would drive accelerating EBITDA growth adjusted EBITDA growth in the second half in order to get to the 8% to 10% growth targets for the year?

Peter Harrington

Management

Sure. So, we certainly expect obviously the payment businesses to continue to accelerate their growth and obviously those were at higher margins as we said before. And then on top of that clearly in the fourth quarter with the holidays we’re going to see considerable growth in that in the payment related businesses again which we believe will continue to drive higher EBITDA growth. So, we certainly feel very comfortable that we’ll end up for the year within the 8 to 10 range that we gave you. Sara Gubins – Bank of America/Merrill: Great. And then just last question. Could you provide some more color on the revenue growth that you’re seeing in Business Solutions, we generally think as this is slower in the (inaudible) segment business but it’s actually been growing faster in some of the other segments this year.

Peter Harrington

Management

Yes. And we’ve been very happy about that. The – I think when you look at Business Solutions as we’ve said a lot – now the significant amount of the revenue is project related revenue and it’s technology spend. And what we’ve seen is the timing of that changes every year and what we see in this year is we saw more of that in the first half of the year. Right now we expect the business to operate more in line with our expectations for the remainder of the year but again the qualification would be these types of projects the timing is sometimes hard to estimate as to what quarter that will fall into. I think we’ve been very fortunate that we’ve seen increased technology spend by corporates and the financial institutions in the first half, we hope that continues obviously into the second half but we’re comfortable that it will probably exceed what we expected it for the year but I don’t – we don’t see today that it will continue to run at the current leverage. Sara Gubins – Bank of America/Merrill: Great. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

We’ll next take Bryan Keane with Deutsche Bank. Ashish Sabadra – Deutsche Bank: Hi, this is Ashish, calling on behalf of Bryan Keane. Peter, congratulations on being nominated as a Director. Quick question around the recent judge ruling on the fund implementation of Durbin Amendment. Obviously, it’s going to be a long run process, it could be a long run process. But I was just wondering, if the ruling does hold will that benefit your Merchant Acquiring business if you had any initial thoughts on it. And what could be any impact if any to your ATH network.

Peter Harrington

Management

Okay. First, I would yes it’s – my first thought would be it will have no impact in 2013, I don’t think they will get this sorted out that quickly. And it’s early days to understand what will actually come out of it but I would say it’s going to have any impact I would suspect it’s going to have some positive impact in the Merchant Acquiring business for a short period as obviously the interchange would go down and in that business we’ll eventually pass it on but certainly there may be some short-term positive benefit. But other than that from an ATH perspective we would see a neutral at the end of the day. When (inaudible) talking about the sink of it to us it’s going to definitely be neutral it doesn’t matter which we pass it to either one and our revenue doesn’t get affected, these are MasterCard. Ashish Sabadra – Deutsche Bank: Okay, that’s great. And just on the Merchant segment, so that segment definitely the revenue accelerated from the first quarter. In addition to lapping of the – or anniversarying of those merchant contracts, can you also talk about how your partnership or alliance with Oriental is coming along and how that helping growth in that particular segment?

Peter Harrington

Management

Yeah, in the second quarter it had a small impact from a growth perspective, we expect it to have a bigger impact as we go forward in the year as we continue to bring those merchants that were (PPTA) merchants to (inaudible) acquired by Oriental on to our platform. Today we’re running Oriental part of the business and that’s working fine and it’s helping but we expect it will continue to add value to us as we go through the rest of the year. Ashish Sabadra – Deutsche Bank: Okay, that’s great. So, we could expect revenue growth to improve both in the payment pace till a Payment Processing as that one-time headwind, well as you anniversary that one-time non-recurring headwind. And then on the merchant side you expect some initial – additional contribution from the Alliance. Could that be fair?. Okay. Thanks.

Peter Harrington

Management

That would be very helpful. Ashish Sabadra – Deutsche Bank: Thanks.

Operator

Operator

Next, we’ll take (inaudible) with Morgan Stanley.

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst

Yeah. Thank you. Regarding the third-party processing license and you just received in the three countries that you talk about. Can you talk about when you’ll be able to start generating revenues in the countries into those countries?

Peter Harrington

Management

Yes. Well we generate revenue obviously in those countries today. As we’ve said we’ve always been focused on the Tier 2 and Tier 3 banks. And what I’m excited about with this was since we’re able to use that we continue to bring value to that segment of the business. And so we’ll be able to sponsor them where they will have to get their own kind of principle license to MasterCard. And so, we have banks who – we have couple of banks already that we know we can use that license for. Now, again we’re going to have to implement them on to the platform and like any other card or POS business that will take some time, we’ll see the revenue in 2014.

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst

Got it. And are there any other source that might have to license us that you’re currently applying for whether inside or outside of the three countries that you talked about?

Peter Harrington

Management

Well, I think – I think the obvious question would be we’re going to go knock on the guys on the other side of the street next. And we’re going to look to expand that license to be able to acquire directly acquire.

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst

Right. Okay.

Peter Harrington

Management

But this one I think was the right first step and we’re very excited to get the first step done. And so now want to try to expand it beyond just those three countries and second we’d add to it.

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

(Operator Instructions). We’ll move next to John Williams with UBS. John Williams – UBS: Hey, good evening. Thanks for taking my question. Couple of quick ones, first, as we look at the margin seasonality within the three businesses I guess it looks like you’re back towards starting what look like a 2011 cadence through the year. And I just wanted to make sure that’s the right way to think about it really for the three segments as we go forward. I guess secondly on the transaction growth within the segment to the extent that you can give us volume or transaction these sort of growth rates or numbers that would be helpful just for modeling purposes. Thanks. Juan José Román: In terms of our business you’re right. In the second half we will see an increase in our transaction in our Payment businesses in both Merchant Acquiring and Payment. That incremental revenue bring incremental or non-incremental cost. So, in the second half we will see not only higher revenues, it will accelerate our revenues but most important it will accelerate our margins even faster because in those two businesses as a reminder it’s where we have the most significant margins. Business Solutions is also – grows it accelerated the margins especially as Peter mentioned we have certain projects there we complete you will see not only the accelerated revenue growth but also it will at lower margins. John Williams – UBS: Okay. And to the extent, that you can give us Merchant Acquiring volume growth and transaction within Payment Processing, I know it’s a driver in a lot of our models so whether it’s a percentage or an actual numbers you could give that, that would be helpful. Thanks.

Peter Harrington

Management

Okay. Yeah, we’re still working on that. John Williams – UBS: Okay.

Operator

Operator

And now that’s conclude our question and answer session. At this time I’ll turn the call back over to Peter Harrington, President and CEO for any final or concluding remarks.

Peter Harrington

Management

Okay. Just want to finish by saying thank you very much for your support. And we are very excited first and foremost about implementing the dividend and secondly about things that we’re doing today that’s continuing to drive momentum in the business. And we look forward to speaking to you after the third quarter.

Operator

Operator

And everyone, that does conclude our conference call for today. Thank you all for your participation.