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Thryv Holdings, Inc. (THRY)

Q3 2016 Earnings Call· Wed, Nov 9, 2016

$3.72

-3.63%

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good morning, and welcome to Dex Media's Third Quarter 2016 Conference Call. With me today are Joe Walsh, President and Chief Executive Officer; and Paul Rouse, Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer. Some statements made by the company today during this call are forward-looking statements. These statements include the company's beliefs and expectations as to future events and trends affecting the company's business and are subject to risks and uncertainties. Actual results may vary materially from these forward-looking statements. The company advises you not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements as you consider them in light of the factors that they cause actual results to differ materially from those in forward-looking statements. These factors can be found in our press release dated October 17, 2016. The company has no obligation to update any forward-looking statements. I would now like to turn the call over to Joe Walsh.

Joe Walsh

President

Good morning, everyone. Paul will lead the majority of this call, detailing our quarterly financial results, but I wanted to make several remarks. As this is our first call since emergence, please note the format moving forward is to review our prior quarter's performance and release the data a few weeks before the call. During the call, we will present the data and then take a few questions. As you know -- as you all know, we emerged from our financial restructuring earlier this quarter with a strengthen capital structure. We're spending our time and energy to simplify our platforms and systems and align our practices, allowing us to remove cost from the business. We're facing headwinds in the marketplace, and we're behind where we want to be. Year-to-date, we've met our EBITDA, but we did not make our revenue numbers. We delivered it through cost reductions. We're moving toward a new direction with an achievable, but challenging plan. We're focused on creating a simpler company that's easier for our clients to do business with. I will now turn the call over to Paul, who can provide the detail about our financial results for the third quarter.

Paul Rouse

Chief Financial Officer

Thank you, Joe, and good morning, everyone. As Joe briefly described earlier, while it is not a requirement of our credit agreement until our first full quarter after emergence from bankruptcy, we decided it would be useful to our investors and bondholders to discuss our results reported for the third -- for our third quarter flash release, which we issued on October 17, 2016. We will begin releasing quarterly results after the issuance of our 2015 and 2016 audited financial statements. As you are probably aware, our 2015 audited financial statements were delayed pending resolution of a tax error discovered late in 2015 related to our -- for the year 2010 for Dex One, which was prior to our merger and creation of Dex Media in 2013. This is a complicated process, but we expect resolution some time during the first quarter of 2017. Due to this error, we will likely issue our 2015 and 2016 audit reports on the same date in 2017. It's important to note that I will primarily discuss adjusted pro forma non-GAAP results. Dex Media believes that the use of non-GAAP financial measures provide a useful information to our investors to gain an overall understanding of its current financial performance. Specifically, Dex Media believes that non-GAAP results provide useful information to management and investors by excluding certain nonrecurring items that Dex Media believes to be non-indicative of its core operating results. In addition, non-GAAP financial measures are used by management for budgeting and forecasting as well as subsequently measuring Dex Media's performance, and Dex Media believes that non-GAAP results provide investors with financial measures that most closely align with this internal financial measurement processes. Now onto Page 3 in third quarter results, client counts. Client counts have declined 13.2% for the third quarter of 2016…

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] And we do have a question from Marla Cannon of Fortress Investment.

Marla Cannon

Analyst · Fortress Investment

Just wanted to see if you can give us a little color, additional color, on the multiproduct customer decline.

Joe Walsh

President

You want to take that [indiscernible].

Paul Rouse

Chief Financial Officer

Yes, the decline in multiproduct really is related -- the majority of our customers have dual customers, and so its print declines. They also take along some of our digital customers. So it's really related to that, the decline in our print product -- print product customers.

Marla Cannon

Analyst · Fortress Investment

Okay. And then with regards to the debt repurchases that you made, do you plan to continue doing that just depending on where the debt is trading or what's -- can you maybe give us some detail on the strategy behind that?

Paul Rouse

Chief Financial Officer

Well, where will -- it's beneficial to the company, right? If we're able to buy back our debt below par, so we'll be opportunistic as we proceed in the future.

Marla Cannon

Analyst · Fortress Investment

Okay. And are you able to shed any color on whether or not you've made additional repurchases since the end of the quarter aside from what's pending?

Paul Rouse

Chief Financial Officer

No. No, I'm sorry. I can't.

Operator

Operator

There are no further questions at this time. We do have a question from Chris Mathewson of Ares Management.

Christopher Mathewson

Analyst · Ares Management

Hopefully, I didn't miss this at the beginning of the call. But could you -- Joe, could you maybe kind of talk us through how you're thinking about 2017? There's obviously disclosure statement with the plan and that sort of stuff, so maybe kind of shed some light on how you're thinking about that for us.

Joe Walsh

President

Okay. Yes, I mean, I think we're working really hard to be easier to do business with as a company. And part of the process is just continuing to simplify everything that goes on around here, and that allows us to take costs out. We're faced with declines in a lot of the major product lines. So variabilizing the cost space of the business has been job one, and we're just working our way through that process. And we've taken a lot of costs out so far, and we think there's some more that we can take out going forward and continue to variabilize that cost base. I've spoken before about our efforts to try to kind of move beyond just leads. The local digital marketplace has over 3,000 participants in it and 2 are growing: Google and Facebook. Everybody else is struggling basically. It's a very tough environment, and so we're trying to kind of move beyond leads. We're getting much more deeply involved in the business operations of the local businesses that we serve. We've got our DexHub product, addresses a lot of their needs to try to help them keep up with the big national and regional enterprise plays that are rolling up a lot of industries across the country, helping them be more competitive. So we're working hard to continue to improve and develop that strategy, that playbook. And that's our area that we intend to put focus on and grow. So Chris, I guess as a wind-up, we've got obviously a print business that's been declining. The search engine marketing part of our business is a business that had been running unprofitably for the company. We've really radically restructured the way we offer that. It's more of a boutique service going forward. We expect it to be a smaller revenue contributor next year and smaller still the year after. We're sort of reducing our reliance on SEM and putting more focus on our kind of beyond leads direction.

Christopher Mathewson

Analyst · Ares Management

Okay. And then any color on kind of initial thoughts on EBITDA for next year maybe? I mean, we are in November, and there should, in theory, be pretty good visibility in this business given -- particularly on the print side.

Joe Walsh

President

Yes. I mean, there's obviously -- as a part of the restructuring there was a long-time plan put out, and we're working hard to deliver against that. I don't have any guidance for you at the moment, but you'll know that plan. And we've had lots of other conversations about the work that we're doing to streamline and take costs out of the business, and we're not done. There's a lot more to do.

Operator

Operator

There are no further questions.

Joe Walsh

President

Thank you, operator. I think that's a wrap.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. That does conclude today's conference call. You may now disconnect.

Joe Walsh

President

Thank you very much.