Earnings Labs

Shift4 Payments, Inc. (FOUR)

Q4 2024 Earnings Call· Tue, Feb 18, 2025

$46.40

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Greetings, and welcome to the Shift4 Fourth Quarter 2024 Earnings Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. And it is now my pleasure to introduce to you Tom McCrohan with Shift4. Thank you, Tom. You may begin.

Tom McCrohan

Analyst

Thank you, operator. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Shift4's Fourth Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call. With me on the call today are Jared Isaacman, Shift4's Chief Executive Officer; Taylor Lauber, President; and Nancy Disman, our Chief Financial Officer. This call is being webcast on the Investor Relations section of our website, which can be found at investors.shift4.com. Today's call is also being simulcast on X Spaces, formerly known as Twitter, which can be accessed through our corporate Twitter account at Shift4. Our quarterly shareholder letter, quarterly financial results and other materials related to our quarterly results have all been posted to our IR website. Our call and earnings materials today include forward-looking statements. These statements are not guarantees of future performance, and our actual results could differ materially as a result of certain risks, uncertainties and many important factors. Additional information concerning those factors is available in our most recent reports on Forms 10-K and 10-Q, which you can find on the SEC's website and the Investor Relations section of our corporate website. For any non-GAAP financial information discussed on this call, the related GAAP measures and reconciliations are available in today's quarterly shareholder letter. We are hosting our Investor Day event today in Las Vegas. And as a result, we unfortunately do not have time to entertain any questions at the conclusion of our prepared remarks. With that, let me turn the call over to Jared. Jared?

Jared Isaacman

Analyst

Thanks, Tom. So we clearly have a lot of exciting things to discuss today, and we have an afternoon Investor Day to go through it. So despite my past tendencies, and this likely being my last earnings call, I'm going to endeavor to keep this as brief as possible. So as such, we plan to cover a summary of Q4 results, highlights from the quarter, our acquisition announcement of Global Blue, and finally, expectations for 2025. So regarding Q4 results, we once again delivered reasonably strong results that represented records across all of our major KPIs, including end-to-end volumes, gross revenue less network fees, adjusted EBITDA and especially adjusted free cash flow. So with that, our end-to-end payment volumes increased 49% year-over-year to $47.9 billion. Our gross revenue less network fees increased 50% to $405 million. Our adjusted EBITDA increased 51% to $205.9 million, and our adjusted free cash flow increased 78% to $134 million. So all of these results represented quarterly records, as I mentioned before. And despite the doubters, we delivered on the promise of a back half ramp. The back half represented 57% of our full year gross revenue less network fees with the fourth quarter alone contributing 30% of full year gross revenue less network fees. We also delivered positive operating leverage for the year with adjusted EBITDA and adjusted free cash flow both growing faster than revenue growth. We accomplished all of this, while completing several acquisitions and deleveraging with the year-end net leverage of 2.5 times. So when we zoom out and look at the multiyear picture, we ended the year surpassing our midterm -- our medium-term guidance, which, as you know, called for 50% three-year CAGR growth in volumes and a corresponding 30% CAGR growth in gross revenue less network fees. Our actual…

Taylor Lauber

Analyst

Thanks, Jared. As Jared mentioned in his remarks, it's been our strategy for some time now to build a one integration one platform to power payments all over the world. Today, we're announcing the acquisition of Global Blue for approximately $2.5 billion in an all-cash transaction which further builds upon our capabilities in this area. Global Blue is a market-leading payment platform supporting tens of thousands of luxury brands worldwide including LOUIS VUITTON, Hermès, Valentino, Fendi, Prada, Burberry, Cartier and many, many more. They operate a 2-sided network offering over 15 million consumers, quick and efficient VAT tax refunds when shopping abroad through one of their through their one-of-a-kind mobile application and advanced dynamic currency conversion capabilities. To be clear, we spent many years admiring this business. The combination of their latest capabilities, our growing geographic coverage, Global Blue's existing scale and 2-sided network were all factors in helping us underwrite this transaction with a high level of confidence. Simply put, the business standalone is exceptional before revenue synergies and yet we estimate over $80 million of revenue synergies will be unlocked by the end of '27 due to the material embedded cross-sell opportunity associated with the 400000-plus merchants that are current Global Blue customers. We estimate the aggregate embedded payment opportunity to be over $500 billion. As a reminder, our cumulative cross-sell funnel is over $800 billion today. And with this transaction, it increases our unique advantage across this customer base to over $1.4 trillion. The opportunity Global Blue affords us within unified commerce has also attracted two of the world's largest fintech companies, Ant International and Tencent. Ant International and Tencent have historically collaborated with Global Blue to enable a seamless shopping and refund experience via their mobile applications and wallets. Both these valuable partners have committed to…

Nancy Disman

Analyst

Thank you, Taylor. Jared provided a summary review of the quarterly financial results so I will just expand on a few additional items. Organic gross revenue less network fee growth for the full quarter 2024 was 26%. This reflects the ongoing strength and momentum across all of our verticals and the monetization and conversion of gateway and software-only customers. Our Q4 blended net spreads were 60 basis points or 61 based on the average blended spreads for the full year in line with our guidance. Spreads across our core business remained stable. Our Q4 adjusted EBITDA margins were 51% and 50% for the full year. Excluding a nearly 270 basis point drag from recent acquisitions full year adjusted EBITDA margins were 53% and we expect to synergize these acquisitions over the next 12 to 18 months. Subscription and other revenue was $115 million in Q4 up 100% compared to the same period last year. The growth was once again driven by our success across SMB, SkyTab and further penetration of the sports and entertainment vertical as well as the contribution from acquisitions completed during the quarter. Our adjusted free cash flow in the quarter was $134 million bringing full year adjusted free cash flow to $399 million up 46% compared to a year ago. Q4 adjusted free cash flow conversion was 65% bringing full year to 59%. We are very pleased with our free cash flow generation as we are one of the few companies that are extremely expense-disciplined and laser-focused on efficiency gains which allows us to generate exceptional cash flow without sacrificing growth. During the fourth quarter, we repurchased over one million shares for $110 million leaving approximately $350 million of capacity available as of December 31 under our current program. You can find a complete reconciliation of…

Jared Isaacman

Analyst

Thank you, Nancy. We will be saving questions until after our Investor Day. But since this is likely my last earnings call, please know I leave Shift4 in the very capable hands of Taylor Lauber, alongside a great leadership team those who I have the utmost confidence in and who have been key architects in the firm's growth strategy and overall success over the years. While, I can't predict how the process will go, I hope to be able to offer input to Taylor whenever it is requested. And to the extent it's permissible, I intend to remain Shift4's largest shareholder. As the founder of Shift4 from my parents' basement to the multi-billion dollar public company it is today, I'm incredibly proud of the team and what we've accomplished over the last 26 years. I'm really thankful to my family, friends, the incredible team, our advisers and investors who believed in us and really in this incredible nation that makes stories like this possible. I will always be grateful. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. This does conclude today's teleconference. We thank you for your participation. You may disconnect your lines at this time. End of Q&A: