Earnings Labs

Thryv Holdings, Inc. (THRY)

Q4 2016 Earnings Call· Thu, Mar 2, 2017

$3.72

-3.63%

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good morning, and welcome to Dex Media's Fourth Quarter and Full Year 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 and to consider them in light of the factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements. These factors can be found in our press release dated February 15, 2017. 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

Thank you, Lori. So today, we'd like to review our solid results from Q4 and for 2016. I'd like to give a few highlighting statements, and then Paul is going to take us through the detailed numbers. I'll start with the directories area, both online and print directories. These are the key assets that you're investing in. And we're very proud of our industry best performance in managing these directories, both in variabilizing the cost structure of those as our decline continues, but most importantly, really meaningfully slowing the decline. And the changes that we've made in directories have improved directory usage. We're looking at better call counts for our customers. And we feel that, that aspect of our business is stable and really well run. And that's a key asset that you're investing in. The digital, other, if you will, search engine marketing, SEOs, some targeted display, the other digital areas, we missed the top line revenue in that area. But importantly, we meaningfully changed the mix of what we're selling and how we're selling it there. So that it was a much more profitable mix, and that's part of what enabled our good bottom line performance. It's early days still in our local business automation strategy, but we're really encouraged by the results. Our DexHub sales have been strong. Client retention has been strong. And we're very encouraged, early days, with what we're seeing with our DexHub business. So as Paul will share, we delivered $373 million of EBITDA on our $360 million objective, with 31% margins. So we're proud of that and feel good about what we were able to deliver there. And importantly, we're rapidly delevering. So if you look at where we were at the time we emerged, you roll forward to today, we're making really good progress in managing cash and delevering this whole process. So 2017 is off to a strong start. Our team is focused on delivering the $321 million in our long-range plan, albeit at a little lower digital revenue. But as I mentioned before, with a much more profitable mix. So I'd like to turn it over to Paul now and let him take you through some of the detailed numbers. Paul?

Paul Rouse

Chief Financial Officer

Thank you, Joe, and good morning, everyone. As Joe briefly described, we will now discuss in more detail our fourth quarter and full year financial results we released on our website in February 16. I am happy to report that our EBITDA results for the fourth quarter and full year came in ahead of our plan. Non-GAAP adjusted pro forma EBITDA was $100.5 million for the fourth quarter and $373 million for the full year. Due to our effective cost management and changes to our product mix, our EBITDA margins have shown continual improvement for each quarter of 2016, from 28.1% in the first quarter to 35.3% in the fourth quarter. I would like to point out that most of the financial measures presented and discussed are non-GAAP adjusted pro forma results. We believe that these non-GAAP metrics provide a more useful and meaningful information to management and investors relative to the underlying financial performance of the company. In addition, these non-GAAP financial measures are used internally by management for budgeting, forecasting and compensation. Slides 4, 5 and 6 provide reconciliations of GAAP results to non-GAAP pro forma results for EBITDA and free cash flow. The adjustments made to GAAP results removed the impact of noncash reorganization and fresh start accounting entries required upon emergence from bankruptcy, the nonrecurring costs associated with capital restructuring and business transformation costs, and noncash accounting entries associated with pension, stock warrants and long-term stock-based compensation. As previously disclosed, late in 2015, we detected an income tax accounting error related to our 2010 tax year for Dex One, which was prior to the merger and creation of Dex Media in 2013. To correct the error, we had to recreate all tax calculations from 2010 through 2015. And as a result, we delayed the issuance of…

Joe Walsh

President

Thank you, Paul. I appreciate that. So Dex Media is becoming a lean, entrepreneurial, operationally efficient company. We've worked really hard at variabilizing the cost and getting the company to basically -- good at what it does and provide services that really work to our end customers. And '16, we feel was a solid year, and we're off to a great start in '17 and very confident we'll be able to deliver on the plan for '17. So with that, I'd like to open it up for questions. Lori, can you help us?

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Colin Wilson-Murphy of Lyness [ph].

Colin Wilson-Murphy

Analyst

My first question is can you talk a little bit about the digital directory decline in 2016 versus your digital marketing? So just if you isolate the digital directory, how did that perform in '16?

Joe Walsh

President

Yes. Great. That's an excellent question. So one of the things we identified when we got here was a decision had been made previously to essentially not invest in the Internet Yellow Pages product. At one time, if we go back a dozen years, Superpages was by far the market leader in online directories, Internet Yellow Pages. And they sort of -- because the company was in, I guess, indebted and they were focused on trying to do cost reductions, they chose not to really carry on investing in that area. And we just didn't agree with that. Felt like that the Internet Yellow Pages played a really important role in the current ecosystem. And so we've been working at improving both DexKnows and Superpages.com. Unfortunately, there's a little bit of a lag when you're doing that. It takes a real time to rewrite some of the code, work on the user interface to overcome some of the latencies. And there were many search engine optimization errors made, many links broken that needed to be put back together. So that took some time. I'm happy to say that as we sit here today, we are making progress and those sites are more usable. They're coming up higher now in organic searches across the country in various headings. And we're making progress with our -- building our audience and building our traffic. In addition to that, we also, in an effort to try to speed this up, we went out and extended the distribution of our own IYPs by including a number of other sites. We've created something we call our ESS, our Extended Search Solutions. And that allows you, through us, to buy our Internet Yellow Pages and then an extended network of other ones. We're delivering a lot of traffic, and it becomes a really important and viable alternative to very expensive Google traffic. So that has worked out really well. And throughout last year, we were building momentum in that. And that's a growing part of our business today. So it's a bit of a mixed result for the year because of -- in the beginning of last year, all of that hadn't taken effect. But it was really kicking in, in Q3 and Q4 and carries through today.

Colin Wilson-Murphy

Analyst

Very good. Okay, I appreciate that color. And then, Joe, can you talk a little bit about the digital regions? One of the ways I look at the digital geos is you have markets where print media does not publish directories, right? Those are sort of your new markets that you're entering in and versus markets where print media is published or you could classify those as legacy markets. How are we doing in those respective markets?

Joe Walsh

President

Well, let me say that the way you just described that and the way you referred to it was really kind of through the goggles of the way our colleagues over at YP do it. They've got a pretty big business where they've gone outside of their footprint and built a business. Ours is much more modest. It's not a very big piece of our business. It's circa $15 million size business. It's not a very big deal. We had some folks that -- we've worked with before that followed us over here, that are working outside of our footprint. But it's not a very big initiative for us. So it's not really a needle mover. It's going pretty well, but we don't have a real big plan to accelerate that.

Colin Wilson-Murphy

Analyst

Okay. That's helpful. And the $15 million top line business for you now, roughly plus or minus, how does that compare to, let's just say, 24 months ago? Is it roughly the same? Or is it -- has it been growing a touch?

Joe Walsh

President

No, it was 0 24 months ago. So it was an initiative that when we first got here, we parked a few guys out there and tried to get that going. And it's challenging, honestly, when you're selling just digital only. I mean the print really provides a lot of brand cover. It provides a lot of support. And again, our colleagues over at YP have a big initiative, but they're working outside their footprint. We done it in a much, much smaller way. And we're continuing to do it, and that business is growing for us. But it's -- we're not willing to invest losses in it, honestly.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] At this time there are no further questions. Thank you for participating in Dex Media's Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2016 Conference Call. You may now disconnect your lines and have a wonderful day.

Joe Walsh

President

Is there one still sitting there?

Operator

Operator

Sir, you now have a question from Michael Phillips of Highland Capital. And actually, he just disconnected.

Joe Walsh

President

Yes, I think he thought he was too late. So thank you, Lori. I'm sure he'll call us if he has a question. All right. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Thank you and have a good day.