Kenneth Tuchman
Analyst · SunTrust
Thank you, Karen, and good morning to everyone joining us today. I'd like to review our results for the fourth quarter and full year 2011 and discuss our strategic priorities for 2012. After that, Regina Paolillo, our CFO, will discuss our financial results in more detail.
Our full year 2011 revenue increased 7.7% to $1.2 billion compared to $1.1 billion in 2010. Excluding $81 million of revenue from the U.S. Census program in 2010, full year revenue grew 16.3%. Our fourth quarter 2011 revenue increased 7.2% to $301 million compared to $280 million in the year-ago period. Sequentially, fourth quarter revenue reflects a negative foreign currency impact of $6 million due to the strengthening of the U.S. dollar.
During the fourth quarter 2011, we signed an incremental $85 million of annualized business from both new and existing clients. This brings our total signings for the year to $355 million, which represents the addition of 41 new clients. This was an 18% increase over the amount of new business signed during 2010. We saw particularly strong growth in our transportation, technology and retail verticals, all of which grew more than 20%. Importantly, our 2011 new business wins represented a solid mix of solutions across our expanding portfolio. The near doubling of our global client base to 175 of the world's leading brands creates tremendous opportunities to drive new business going forward.
Turning now to our operating performance. Full year 2011 non-GAAP operating margin was 8.3%. Full year 2011 non-GAAP earnings per share grew 22.3% to $1.26. Fourth quarter operating margin excluding restructuring charges was 7.4% of revenue. Our margin was impacted by increased severance and other related costs during the quarter. This was attributable to our decision to exit certain non-profitable programs and geographies late in the fourth quarter. As a result, our non-GAAP earnings per share was $0.29, a 3.6% increase over the year-ago quarter.
Moving to the balance sheet. We ended the year in a strong financial position, with $156 million in cash and $282 million of additional borrowing capacity. This will enable us to fund ongoing investments in our next-generation platform, as well as select acquisitions and share repurchases, supporting our commitment to further enhancing shareholder value.
As we begin 2012, our mission remains steadfast: to be the global leader in helping companies design, build and deliver the next-generation customer experience. As we discussed at our Investor Day last April, demanding customers, social networking, disruptive technologies and a challenging global economy are forcing companies to redefine both their business models and their growth strategies. In my meetings with CEOs, there is one thing that is constant: The customer experience is at the forefront of their agendas. They recognize that it is a critical path to growth and brand differentiation. Companies that were born in the new economy have designed and built their businesses around the customer. They're easy to do business with, and as a result, are realizing significant growth. Facebook is a great example. Unfortunately, most companies were not born in this era. They're hampered by legacy systems, product silos and the inability to turn data into actionable insight.
As a 30-year pioneer in the industry, TeleTech has successfully grown and innovated through multiple business cycles. We attribute that success to having remained at the forefront of evolving market trends. We were the first to expand offshore, the first to offer a work-from-home solution, the first to migrate to cloud-based platform nearly 10 years ago, et cetera. As we look to the next 30 years, I'm more convinced than ever that our vision of delivering this next-generation customer experience is a winning strategy.
The keystone of this vision is our proprietary scalable technology-enabled platform that is multichannel, tightly integrated and seamless to our client's customers. The key elements of this holistic solution are the following: First, we help our clients better understand their customers' behaviors, preferences and economic value. Using data-driven strategies, we help companies build the business process to chart a profitable course to customer centricity. Secondly, we help our clients ignite sales by delivering timely, targeted and personalized communications that motivate their customers, as well as help tap highly-fragmented markets. Third, we help our clients communicate with their customers anytime, anywhere from any channel via our hosted offerings. In addition, we help our clients deliver a personalized, consistent and high-quality customer experience via our 42,000 strong global workforce.
This fully integrated platform is exactly what clients want. Clients are seeking a strategic partner that can transform outcomes, not a tactical provider that can simply offer a onetime cost reduction by offshoring work. The ability to deliver this holistic outcome is increasingly out of reach for many in the industry. We have been investing in our proprietary IT and technology for decades, whereas our competitors do not have the financial wherewithal to innovate or invest in this revolutionary model. Furthermore, our platform enables us to deliver a better customer experience and drive greater returns than our clients can deliver on their own.
With this platform solidly in place, we're more ready than ever to address our clients' need for the 21st century. Going forward, we will continue to further leverage our platform for the benefit of both our clients and our shareholders. To that end, one of our top priorities is to continue to build deeper relationships with our existing global clients by being a stronger strategic partner. At the same time, we'll actively pursue a highly targeted list of new clients. We are intentionally focused on companies, view service as a brand differentiator, to reinforce our commitment, to being a strategic growth partner. We've announced an exclusive relationship with Satmetrix, the coinventor of the Net Promoter Score. It has become the industry standard for measuring brand advocacy and a singular focus of well-run companies. Through this exclusive partnership, we plan to integrate NPS, or Net Promoter Score training, and realtime measurement into our delivery platform. Additionally, we're incorporating greater outcome base pricing into our contracts given our past performance, which gives us the confidence in our ability to deliver superior customer experiences that drive results.
Further demonstrating our commitment to being a value-added partner is our announcement yesterday of the acquisition of Boston-based iKnowtion. iKnowtion's 12-year history and proprietary analytics platforms helps clients improve performance in 3 critical areas including: One, demand generation; two, increased share of wallet; and three, optimization strategies. Companies view the ability to harness big data as a new strategic asset. They are acting on the insight to influence consumer behaviors, to more intelligently target new customers and to increase wallet share and retention. iKnowtion's team of seasoned PhDs and statisticians and recurring revenue model will further strengthen our analytics-driven platform while adding some of the world's largest companies to our existing client base. With our recently hired head of M&A, we'll continue to target additional accretive acquisitions that further complement and expand our suite of capabilities.
Let me now review the performance of certain businesses that power our next-generation customer experience platform. Direct Alliance grew organically more than 21% to $96 million in 2011. This business is at the epicenter of what every CEO needs in today's market, more revenue. Direct Alliance has ignited sales for some of the world's largest and most prestigious brands, utilizing its highly-complex technology-driven platform. Direct Alliance delivered more than $1.6 billion of new revenue for clients in 2011 alone, much of which is reoccurring.
Our managed technology solution business grew to $66 million in 2011, complemented by the acquisition of certain assets of eLoyalty corporation. We're very pleased with the performance of this business and expect it to crest to $100 million mark in 2012. Given the solid growth in Direct Alliance and managed technology solutions, as well as in our other high-growth businesses, we believe as a collective group they remain on track to reach 25% of revenue by 2014. We plan to introduce new segment reporting beginning in the first quarter of 2012 to provide greater clarity and enable shareholders to properly value these higher growth businesses.
Turning to our outlook. We remain sharply focused on achieving our longer-term 2014 goals and plan to take the necessary steps in 2012 to continue to build the foundation to achieve these objectives. As we begin the year, we are underway with exiting certain non-profitable programs and geographies. We estimate these actions will reduce 2012 revenue by approximately $100 million to $115 million while positively impacting our operating income by $10 million to $12 million on an annualized basis when fully realized. These revenue reductions are expected to be offset by growth in both new and existing client relationships. Given these factors, we expect 2012 revenue will range between $1.15 billion and $1.2 billion excluding the benefit of any future acquisitions. We expect 2012 operating margin will approximate 2011 and range between 8.5% and 9% before any unusual charges. Regarding our longer-term financial outlook, we are reiterating the objectives we first outlined at our Investor Day last April. We are excited about our strategic roadmap given the strength of our reputation, the breadth of our offering, the depth of our client relationships. This gives me confidence in our ability to reach $1.6 billion in revenue and operating margin between 11% and 12% by the end of 2014 excluding any unusual items.
In closing, I want to reemphasize a few points. Our path forward is intentional and deliberate. Over the last 3 decades, we have led the market and set new standards for technological innovation around the customer experience. We are now accelerating that strategy and increasing our investment in our next-generation customer experience platform. With our highly seasoned leadership team and deepened executive bench, we're better positioned than ever to deliver. I am excited by our future, and I look forward to sharing our progress with you as it unfolds. With that, I'll turn the call over to Regina.