Bob Dechant
Analyst · Truist. You may proceed
Thank you, Brinlea. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you all for joining Karl and me today as we share our fourth quarter and fiscal year 2022 results. FY ‘22 was a record year across multiple fronts, including revenue, EBITDA, net income, EPS, free cash flow and new client revenue. We accomplished this in the face of continued pressures related to COVID-19 and an increasingly volatile market. We have demonstrated that we can execute and deliver results during the most difficult times, and our momentum continues to build. In the last three consecutive quarters, we accelerated revenue growth to 15%, which is well above our historical 10% rate, and we achieved our revenue guidance for the fiscal year 2022. Our EBITDA margins continue to expand over the same period and we are proud to report we achieved 15.1% EBITDA margin in the quarter, a record for the fourth quarter on a year-over-year basis. At the core of IBEX is our powerful new logo engine and our ability to land and expand these partnerships. FY ‘22 was a banner year, as we won 23 great new clients. IBEX has a unique ability to win new business with both large, digitally transforming blue-chip clients, and pureplay, new economy, digitally-first brands. We continue to successfully compete against both multi-billion dollar companies, as well as new economy only focused providers. These attributes are enabling us to navigate well through the current market conditions as our clients continue to look to outsource more. IBEX is winning because our differentiators are impactful. There are many elements to our BPO 2.0 capabilities that will continue to resonate well in the market. Our Wave X Technology stack is a key enabler for IBEX to consistently outperform our competitors. Our agent-first culture is simply the best in the markets where we operate. This allows us to attract and retain great brand ambassadors, which is another key ingredient for us to perform well for our clients. Our world-class contact centers are complemented by creative client branding on the production floor, creating a tight link between IBEX and the great brands of our clients. Additionally our current and prospective clients see an exceptional management team that is leaned into the business and one that is fast and flexible. These are the capabilities they are looking for; that’s who IBEX is. These traits enable our continued delivery of key client wins, rapid speed-to-green performance and market share gains away from our competitors. The result is a transformed business in terms of client diversification, key vertical growth and strategic geographic expansion that will continue to strengthen as our new logo engine gains even more speed. As it relates to geographic expansion, if you recall, we made a strategic decision to aggressively build out capacity throughout the pandemic, while operating in a socially distant environment. I am pleased to report that we now have resumed to a pre-pandemic operating model in all of our regions, and as a result we have over 10,000 seats to sell into. With this additional capacity and our sales pipeline at an all-time high, I’m very excited about our growth in margin trajectory as we head into FY ‘23. Q4 was a very strong quarter for IBEX. We delivered organic revenue growth of 13.6%, EBITDA margin of 15.1% and generated $25 million in free cash flow. Our revenue generated from new clients won since FY ‘16, our BPO 2.0 clients continue to grow at an impressive rate of 43% for the quarter. This powerful growth exemplifies not only our ability to attract and win with elite high-growth clients, but also our strategy to expand our solutions and become a trusted differentiated partner. I’m most excited that these new customers now make up 74% of our total company revenues as we exited Q4, up from 59% a year ago. Our revenue growth is driven primarily by the continued success of our new logo engine, which sells differentiated BPO 2.0 solutions to many of the world’s best brands. This quarter, we won four new clients across our key verticals for a total of 23 new clients for the fiscal year. This cohort of new clients generated approximately $50 million of in-year revenue, up 67% from our previous high in FY ‘21, and we expect these clients to generate well over 100 million in FY ‘23. We have done an amazing job in our strategic verticals of HealthTech and FinTech, which includes both, new economy brands, as well as traditional blue-chip companies. These two key verticals now represent over 30% of our business, up from approximately 20% in Q4 FY ‘21. If you recall, we began targeting these verticals in FY ‘20, and to build this organically to greater than 30% in three years is not only a remarkable accomplishment, but a testimony to our team and the new logo engine continues to run full throttle into FY ‘23. I am delighted to announce that we just signed a very exciting contract with one of the largest healthcare companies in the world for a sizeable launch scheduled for the Philippines in October where we will provide member services for Medicaid subscribers. We expect this client to grow into one of our largest clients over the next several years. Another key vector for our revenue growth is expansion with our embedded base clients, where we continue to land and expand, resulting in increased market share. As a representative example, we won and launched a major Fortune top-10 client in the beginning of FY ‘22. 12 months later we have displaced two multi-billion competitors and now have 100% market share to complement their captive centers. They are now one of our top 10 clients, demonstrating our ability to scale and outperform. As a result of our new client wins and expansion within key verticals, we have created a business where our client diversification is among the industry best. Compared to Q4 in fiscal year 2021, our top five customers now represent 37% of the revenue, down from 45%. Our top 10 customers represent 55% of total revenues versus 63%, and our top 25% now represent 83% of revenues, down from 89%. IBEX has a great brand with our employees and a very strong reputation with our clients. To this point, we recently completed net promoter surveys with both our employees and our clients. I am delighted to inform you that our employee NPS is among the industry best at 71. This is a testament to our unparalleled employee engagement and culture. As an example, in August we held our regional agent VIP event in Jamaica for over 500 of our best performers. We hosted them for a 2.5 day event at a local resort, where my leadership team and I together celebrated their successes. Social media was on fire with the IBEX brand as everyone witnessed the unique environment an agent-first culture of IBEX. As part of our IBEX Cares initiative, this group of 500 top performing IBEX-ers worked side-by-side with me in my leadership team painting an underprivileged school, donating books, toys and money, as well as cleaning up a local beach. I am and continue to be extremely proud of our team. The IBEX brand continues to get stronger in the markets where we operate. A prime example of this, we won best places to work in the Caribbean and Latin America three years in a row, and best places to work for women in back-to-back years. Additionally, I am proud of our deep client relationships, and our track record of becoming a trusted partner to the world’s best brands. Our recent client NPS survey results yielded a top quartile score of 65. This is a validation of the client partnerships we have built into our ability to deliver on our promises and outperform the competition. Moving on to profitability, adjusted EBITDA margins improved sequentially this quarter to a very healthy 15.1%. Our last three quarters have shown EBITDA margin expanding from 10.6% in Q1 to 13.5% in Q2, 14.6% in Q3 and now north of 15% in Q4. This was accomplished while we strategically exited the legacy relationship with our lowest margin client and replaced it with an exciting high growth HealthTech client, who we are now servicing in two geographies. This pivot which started and ended in the quarter had transition costs that impacted both revenue and margin in Q4, resulting in us narrowly missing the low end of EBITDA guidance. However, we believe this will result in a long term benefit to the company beginning this quarter in FY’ 23. We are also encouraged about the outlook of margin improvement. The majority of our growth continues to occur in our high margin regions with digitally focused BPO 2.0 clients, and now we have an enviable position of significant capacity to sell into as a result of the removal of social distancing requirements. With this in mind, we expect to realize meaningful margin improvement as we sell into this capacity. Over the last two years, through foresight and planning for expanded growth, we built out world class capacity to sell into for our clients, and we believe this capacity will accommodate accelerated growth from our both new and existing clients. As such, we believe we have reached our peak spending, and we expect to see significantly lower capital needs going forward to support our growth. As we foreshadowed in previous calls, this will result in a meaningful inflection in our free cash flow. In fact, our free cash flow for the fourth quarter was $25.1 million, up from negative $3.2 million a year ago last quarter. Karl will provide more details into free cash flow into his section. We ended the year with a strong balance sheet of $49 million of cash, which in a turbulent market is a desirable position to be in. We believe M&A can and will be an important part of our growth and differentiation strategy going forward. We continue to look at acquisitions that will be accretive to the business. We believe our strong balance sheet positions us well once we evaluate the right opportunities. Looking forward to FY ‘23, we are confident that we have built a business where revenues will accelerate beyond our historical rates and margins will continue to expand. Our success on client diversification and strategic vertical expansions has positioned us well in today’s market, as we have less exposure to any one client or any one vertical. Therefore, in FY ‘23 we expect revenue to be in the range of $545 million to $555 million, representing a year-over-year growth of 11.4% at the midpoint. We anticipate EBITDA to be in the range of $77 million to $79 million, representing a margin of 14.2% at the respective mid-points, up from 13.5% in FY ‘22. Additionally, we expect CapEx to be between $18 million and $22 million for the year. While we have not given quarterly guidance in the past, I believe with all the market turbulence that would be appropriate and helpful to discuss, Q1, FY ‘23. For Q1, we expect revenue to grow to a range of $124 million to $127 million with a mid-point growth of 15.6% versus prior year quarter, and adjusted EBITDA of $16.5 million to $18.5 million, resulting in an EBITDA margin of 13.9% at the respective midpoints. Our business has great momentum and we are very excited about the future of IBEX into FY ‘23 and beyond. I will now turn the call over to Karl to go into more details on the financials. Karl.