Linda Huber
Analyst · Faiza Alwy with Deutsche Bank. Your line is open
Thank you, Phil, and hello, everyone. I join Phil in congratulating FactSetters for an outstanding fiscal 2022. As I approach my one year anniversary as CFO, I am excited by everything we have been able to accomplish together. Our 9% organic ASV growth, adjusted operating margin expansion and 20% adjusted diluted EPS growth, not to mention our largest acquisition, investment grade ratings and successful financing, are a testament to the hard work of our talented teams. I look forward to continuing to work across the organization in fiscal 2023 to build on FactSet’s history of strong performance and returning value to shareholders. Our growth rate for organic ASV plus professional services beat the high end of our guidance range due to our investment in product and excellent execution by our sales team. Retention moved the needle here, with higher price increases across a larger base of clients, reduced erosion as demand for our products increased across client types and successful cross-selling opportunities. Full year revenue also exceeded the high end of our range with help from CUSIP Global Services. Adjusted operating margin was in line with the higher end of our range. Our margin increase was driven by effective expense control in the core business, as well as the addition of the CGS business, resulting in 500 basis points of margin expansion. Our decision was to reinvest about 360 basis points of this margin growth back in our people and products, while allowing the margin for shareholders to rise about 140 basis points. As Phil stated, we are committed to balancing investment at a similar pace for the next few years while delivering our commitment to margin expansion. Finally, we generated solid earnings, exceeding the top end of our guidance range, through strong revenue growth, disciplined expense management and operating leverage. Let me now walk you through the specifics of our fourth quarter performance. As you have seen from our press release this morning, we are pleased to report the acceleration of organic ASV plus professional services and revenue. Before we begin, I’d like to remind everyone that consistent with our definition of organic revenues and ASV, we will exclude any revenue and ASV associated with CGS when reporting organic-related metrics for the 12 months following the acquisition date. However, we will provide some specifics on CGS, so you can continue to track its performance. As Kendra noted, a reconciliation of our adjusted metrics to comparable GAAP figures is included at the end of our press release. We grew fourth quarter organic ASV plus professional services by 9%. This increase reflects momentum across our product portfolio. With current levels of market volatility, we see higher demand for our products as clients focus on driving alpha, as well as finding efficiencies. Fourth quarter GAAP revenue increased by 21% from the prior year period to $499 million, growth was driven by our Research & Advisory and Analytics & Trading solutions and CGS. Organic revenue, which excludes any impact from foreign exchange, acquisitions during the last 12 months and deferred revenue amortization increased 10% to $453 million over the prior year period. We saw organic ASV acceleration across all workflow solutions in each of our regions. For our geographic segments, organic revenue growth over the prior year period for the Americas was 9%, EMEA at -- was 8% and Asia-Pacific at 18%. Turning now to expenses, GAAP operating expenses grew 25% year-over-year to $367 million, impacted by several charges incurred during the period. First, this includes the recognition of $13 million in intangible asset amortization related to CGS in the fourth quarter. As we spoke about last quarter, this intangible asset amortization will be a recurring charge. Also, we saw a higher bonus pool in line with stronger than anticipated ASV performance. In the fourth quarter, our bonus accrual was $37 million, bringing the total bonus pool to $111 million for the fiscal year. As previously stated, we invested $40 million in people and product this year. This is also consistent with commitments we made at Investor Day to continue to grow these buckets to sustain growth. Looking ahead to fiscal 2023, we expect a similar level of investment. Given these expenses, our GAAP operating margin decreased by 240 basis points to 26.5% compared to the prior year period. Adjusted operating margin saw a slight decrease of 10 basis points year-over-year to 31.5%, driven by higher personnel expenses, increased technology expenses and transactional foreign currency impact. As a percentage of revenue, our cost of services was 50 basis points higher than last year on a GAAP basis and 130 basis points lower on an adjusted basis. Primary drivers include higher technology and content related expenses, including expenses related to our shift to the public cloud, as well as amortization of intangible assets and other costs associated with CGS. When expressed as a percentage of revenue, SG&A was 169 basis points higher year-over-year on a GAAP basis and 142 basis points higher on an adjusted basis. The increase is primarily driven by growth in compensation, comprised of higher salary expenses for existing employees, higher bonus accrual in line with stronger ASV performance and higher stock-based compensation expense as we distributed equity more broadly throughout the organization. Moving on to tax, our tax rate for the quarter was 10.3% compared to last year’s 14.7%. This was primarily due to lower pre-tax income and a tax benefit related to finalizing the prior year’s tax returns. GAAP EPS increased 2.3% to $2.69 this quarter versus $2.63 in the prior year, primarily due to higher revenue and lower taxes, partially offset by higher interest expense and margin compression. Adjusted diluted EPS grew 8.7% from the prior year to $3.13, largely driven by higher revenue, offset by the impact of higher interest expense from FactSet’s investment grade senior notes and outstanding term loan. Adjusted EBITDA in the fourth quarter increased to $158.5 million, up 16% year-over-year. And finally, free cash flow, which we define as cash generated from operations less capital spending, was $136 million for the quarter, a decrease of 20% over the same period last year, driven by higher working capital, which includes the timing of estimated tax payments and deferred revenue movements related to CGS. CUSIP Global Services exceeded expectations, adding $6 million in incremental ASV since the close of the acquisition on March 1, 2022. In Q4, CUSIP’s diverse asset class coverage partially offset a weaker issuance market with significant year-over-year gains in time deposit CDs and private placements. In the fourth quarter, our ASV retention remained above 95% and our client retention improved to 92%, highlighting the continued and stable demand for our solutions. Compared to the prior year, we grew our total number of clients by 17% to more than 7,500 clients, largely due to the addition of more wealth and corporate clients. Our user count grew 12% year-over-year, growing to almost 180,000, primarily driven by sales in our Research & Advisory solutions, particularly amongst wealth management users. And turning now to our balance sheet, we continue to progress on the prepayment of the term loan related to the acquisition of CGS. In the fourth quarter, we made a planned prepayment of $125 million, bringing our gross leverage ratio down to 3.1 times from the initial 3.9 times level when we financed the CGS acquisition. We expect to make two more payments of $125 million in each of the next two quarters, enabling us to reach our gross leverage target of 2 times to 2.5 times in the second half of fiscal 2023. As a reminder, while we may continue minor share repurchases to offset the dilutive impact of stock option grants during this time, we do not intend to resume our share repurchase program until at least mid-2023. Lastly, we would like to remind investors that we increased our regular quarterly cash dividend in the third quarter for the 23rd consecutive year. The increase was 8.5% for a per share dividend of $0.89. Turning now to our outlook for fiscal year 2023, we are guiding to incremental growth of $150 million to $180 million for organic ASV plus professional services. The midpoint of this range represents a 9% increase, reflecting continued momentum in our business and our commitment to our medium-term outlook. Please note that CGS is not included in our organic ASV guidance at this time, given that it will not impact organic ASV until the last two quarters of the 2023 fiscal year. We expect adjusted operating margin of 34% to 35%, with the midpoint providing 60 basis points of margin expansion, which aligns with our medium-term outlook of 50 basis points to 75 basis points of margin expansion each year. Finally, we expect adjusted EPS of $14.50 to $14.90, representing almost 10% growth at the midpoint. Given our outperformance in fiscal 2022, we are still on track to deliver 11% to 13% EPS growth over the medium-term. We are confident of our ability to continue to grow in the face of market uncertainty. Our subscription model, diverse product portfolio and enterprise solutions make us a stable long-term investment. Looking ahead to fiscal 2023, growth will be driven by improved retention. We expect two-thirds of our topline acceleration to come from existing clients with low double-digit expansion offset by normal erosion plus increases in price realization. In the past, the majority of our growth came from cross-selling. However, given the incremental improvement in pricing this year, we anticipate the split will be more even between the two. We expect the balance of growth will come from new business, with continued growth in wealth, private equity and venture capital firms, as well as corporates. Our continued investment in technology and content should drive growth in new markets and cross-selling opportunities for existing clients. Drivers include continued commitment to the digitization of our platform. Kate Stepp, our new CTO, is taking a fresh look at our digital strategy. Example areas of focus include scaling the use of cognitive technologies, expanding our API program and driving improved capabilities and productivity in our use of the public cloud. Next, continued evolution in our content refinery, as discussed previously, we plan to make direct investments toward deep sector, real-time, private markets and ESG, development of these content sets are intended to drive retention and expansion across firm types, and finally, workflow solutions for the front office, wealth manager and private equity and venture capital firms will be key. In closing, we are pleased with our performance in fiscal 2022, as we spoke about during Investor Day, we are seeing the benefit of our strategic investments and we feel we have a long runway ahead of us. We believe we are strategically placed to deliver on our targets for fiscal 2023, as well as our medium-term outlook. While we acknowledge the uncertainty in the macro environment, we believe that our focus on investing in our people, content and technology will continue to drive growth over the longer term. And with that, we are now ready for questions. Operator?