Earnings Labs

IBEX Limited (IBEX)

Q2 2025 Earnings Call· Thu, Feb 6, 2025

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Welcome to the IBEX Second Quarter FY 2025 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants, please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. After the speakers' presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To withdraw your question, please press star one one again. To note, there is an accompanying earnings deck presentation available on the IBEX Investor Relations website at investors.ibex.co. I will now turn this conference over to Mr. Michael Darwal, Head of Investor Relations for IBEX.

Michael Darwal

Management

Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us today. Before we begin, I want to remind you that matters discussed on today's call may include forward-looking statements related to our operating performance, financial goals, and business outlook, which are based on management's current beliefs and assumptions. Please note that these forward-looking statements reflect our opinion as of the date of this call, and we undertake no obligation to revise this information as a result of new developments, which may occur. Forward-looking statements are subject to various risks, uncertainties, and other factors that could cause our actual results to differ materially from those expected and described today. For a more detailed description of our risk factors, please review our annual report on Form 10-K filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on September 12, 2024. I will now turn the call over to IBEX CEO, Bob Dechant.

Bob Dechant

Management

Thanks, Mike. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you all for joining us today as we share our second quarter fiscal year 2025 results. I'd like to start by once again thanking my team for a tremendous quarter. They continue to show why they are the best in the industry. The second quarter was strong across the board. We achieved our highest growth in two years at 6.1%. This enabled us to post the highest revenue for a quarter in the history of IBEX. In addition, we had another great quarter on profitability and now have improved adjusted EBITDA margin over the prior year in ten out of the last eleven quarters. Our top-line growth starts with the success of our powerful new logo engine and our ability to highlight our differentiation, enabling us to win large enterprise deals with trophy brands. Our growth is then accelerated by our ability to take market share within our embedded base clients, driven by our ability to outperform the competition. This is our proven land and expand playbook. Also important to our success is our high client retention, where our revenue retention rates are some of the highest in the industry, highlighting our ability to be a strategic partner with our clients. We also had important wins with our WaveIX translate and automate Generative AI solutions that position us well into the future. These wins added to an extremely strong quarter. More on this later. These growth factors continue to be our margin expansion drivers. We continue to grow aggressively in both our highest margin regions, exemplified by 14% year-over-year growth in our offshore region in Q2, and in our highest margin services, highlighted by 8% year-over-year growth in omnichannel revenue in Q2. These vectors have enabled us to expand adjusted EBITDA margin consistently.…

Taylor Greenwald

Management

Thank you, Bob, and good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining the call today. In my discussion of our second quarter fiscal year 2025 financial results, references to revenue, net income, and net cash generated from operations were on a US GAAP basis, while adjusted net income, adjusted earnings per share, adjusted EBITDA, and free cash flow are on a non-GAAP basis. Reconciliations of our US GAAP to non-GAAP measures are included in the table attached to our earnings press release. Turning to our results. Our second quarter results are among the strongest in our history with record top-line results. Second quarter revenue was $140.7 million, an increase of 6.1% from $132.6 million in the prior year quarter. Revenue growth was driven by vertical growth in health tech of 31%, travel transportation and logistics of 17%, and retail and e-commerce of 4%, and was partially offset by a decline in the FinTech vertical of 15%. Our focused efforts to grow our higher margin offshore delivery locations are paying off. Offshore revenues now comprised 53% of total revenue versus 49% in the prior year quarter. Revenue mix in our higher margin digital and omnichannel services also continues to be strong. Digital and omnichannel delivery represented 80% of our total revenue, an increase from 79% in the prior year quarter. For context, digital omnichannel comprised roughly 65% at the time of our IPO in 2020. We expect that we will continue to be successful driving growth in these higher margin regions and services as new client wins and growth in our embedded base continue to be focused in these areas. Second quarter net income increased to $9.3 million compared to $6.1 million in the prior year quarter. The increase was primarily driven by the meaningful growth of work in higher margin offshore…

Operator

Operator

Thank you. As a reminder, to ask a question, please press star one one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. Our first question comes from David Koning with Baird. You may proceed.

David Koning

Analyst

Yeah. Hey, guys. Congrats on another great quarter. Really good to see.

Bob Dechant

Management

Thanks, David. Yep. We're really pleased with the results we posted.

David Koning

Analyst

Yeah. Yeah. And maybe to start, just on revenue, is it a combination? Is the backdrop getting better? You know, maybe a combination of a few kind of things. Is the backdrop getting better? Are you just winning against others? And how is Gen AI? I mean, you kinda talked a little bit about it. Is Gen AI actually a tailwind, headwind, a little of both? Like, you know, because all those three things seem to be driving revenue.

Bob Dechant

Management

Yeah, David. So appreciate the question. And, you know, maybe it's a little bit of all of the above. But I think probably the biggest drivers for us are our continued winning new logos that then drive a lot of, you know, a lot of revenue growth with them in, you know, kind of in their year twos and things like that. So, you know, and that's been a staple of IBEX, so our ability to win and then land and expand and get those, you know, those new clients growing. So that's, you know, that's I think, probably one of the biggest drivers. Actually, it is the biggest driver. The second driver that's going on is, for us, is our ability to win market share. And I will say a lot of the embedded base clients are looking and moving some of their business into the lower labor cost markets. That, as you know, over the years has been the game. You know, a lot of that's been taking place that puts pressure on, you know, on top-line revenue. What we've been able to do is manage through that but take market share. And so I think we're, if you look at our competitors, where those events are putting serious headwinds into their business, for us, it isn't because we're winning market share. And as both Taylor and I said, we're winning market share because we're out-executing our competitors. And so those are, I think, the two biggest variables. And then the third one, just around the macro and, you know, kind of demand, I would kind of sit and say that, you know, the demand has stabilized. I'm not sure the demand's come back. Right? And so but the good news is it's stabilized, and that's, you know, allowing us to, I think, continue to build the momentum. And as you see now, the last several quarters, our top-line growth continues to build and grow.

David Koning

Analyst

Yeah. Yep. No. That's great. And then, I guess, secondly, just on margins, I mean, you continue to put up really good margins. The way you're guiding the back half, though, it looks like margins might be down just a touch in the back half to get the, you know, the updated EBITDA guidance. I mean, you raised EBITDA, which is great. But Q2 is so good that it actually takes a little bit of margin, creates a margin headwind, it looks like, in the second half. Right? So just kinda wondering on that.

Bob Dechant

Management

Yeah. Hey, Taylor. I'll throw that over to you.

Taylor Greenwald

Management

Yeah. No. Absolutely. So, David, if you look at our gross margins, on the gross margin level, we improved at 140 basis points in Q1, 210 basis points in Q2, and we expect that improvement year over year to continue into Q3 and Q4. So we're feeling very good about the profitability of our business. What we're doing, and it's intentional, is we are investing in SG&A, in sales resources, in technology, both in the infrastructure as we recently implemented our new financial system and HR system, and then also in AI capabilities, to grow the business. But if you look at the back half of the year in terms of our guidance, you know, we're still at around, what, 14% adjusted EBITDA margin. So we still feel very good about that, and it's the fact that our gross margins are seeing such improvement that we're able to invest in growth and continue.

David Koning

Analyst

Gotcha. Well, great job, guys. Thank you.

Bob Dechant

Management

Great. David. Thanks. Good catching up.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. And as a reminder, to ask a question, please press star one one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. And I'm not showing any further questions. I'd now like to turn the call back over to Bob Dechant for any closing remarks.

Bob Dechant

Management

Josh, thank you, and thank you all for attending. We're really proud of what we continue to do as a team, what we do operationally, what we do financially, and then from a strategic standpoint, with our AI strategy. Put all those elements together, I love the trajectory of our business. And thank you all, and we'll talk to you next quarter. Good night.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. This concludes the conference. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.