Regina Paolillo
Analyst · Sidoti & Company. Your line is open
Thanks, Ken, and good morning. As Ken shared, we're having a record year on numerous fronts. Before I discuss our third quarter financial results and provide context on our guidance on a highlighted number of positive trends contributing to our growth in revenue and profitability. For the first 9 months of 2019, over the prior year period on a non-GAAP basis, our consolidated revenue grew 8.5% and operating income 46.4% year-over-year. Excluding the impact of FX and onetime adoption of ASC 606, revenue and operating income grew 10.5% and 66.9%, respectively. TTEC Digital's segment grew revenue 31.8% and operating income 43%. Our CX cloud subscription-based offering grew 197% and delivered a 44% gross margin. And our systems integration services grew 19.6% and delivered a gross margin of 43%. Our TTEC Engage segment grew revenue 4.2% and operating income 48.2%. Normalizing for foreign exchange and ASC 606, year-to-date revenue grew 6.5% and operating income grew 86.1%. A subset of higher-growth, higher-margin, technology-forward and analytics-rich offerings addressing some of our clients' most complex CX processes are contributing to TTEC Engage's improving financial performance. Our fraud detection and prevention, customer acquisition, agility and automotive offerings collectively comprise over $400 million of annualized revenue. Have a top line growth rate of 20% and are delivering a 12% operating income margin. We anticipate the recent acquisition of FCR, which will be included in our Engage segment to further advance this higher-growth, higher-margin set of offerings within our TTEC Engage portfolio. Turning towards third quarter 2019 results. We signed a number of strategic engagements with new and existing clients across multiple industries. New business signings were $114 million in the third quarter 2019 compared to $153 million in the prior year quarter. Year-to-date bookings were $368 million versus $393 million in the prior year period, and included 16 new clients, 34 deals with multiple offerings, increased recurring revenue engagements and significant growth in our European bookings. Lower comparative bookings are primarily a function of difficult year-over-year comps as well as timing. In our Digital segment, we had large product sales that occurred in the third quarter of 2018 related to clients with on-premise versus cloud solutions. As the market preference increases, the volume of upfront product sales is beginning, is being replaced with higher-margin, subscription-based revenue. In our engagement segment, the lower bookings are primarily related to the timing of pipeline conversion on larger deals. We estimate our 2019 total consolidated bookings at approximately $500 million. While lower than 2018, we also expect lower revenue churn. It's the combination of both bookings and churn that determine our future revenue growth. In 2019, churn declined from 15.6% to 13.4%. We expect a further reduction to 12.5% in 2020. With reduced churn and increased percentage of recurring revenue and expansion of our faster-growing offerings, we estimate 2019's forecasted bookings are sufficient to deliver high single-digit revenue growth into 2020. On a GAAP basis, we reported an 8.4% year-over-year increase in organic revenue to $395.5 million. Operating income was $26 million or 6.6% of revenue compared to 4% in the prior year. Restructuring charges were negligible in the quarter. FX impacted revenue by a positive $2.2 million and operating income by a positive $2.1 million, primarily impacting our Engage segment. Earnings per share was $0.43 in the third quarter, up from $0.15 in the prior year. My non-GAAP comments primarily exclude restructuring impairment expenses. A full reconciliation of our GAAP to non-GAAP numbers is included in the table attached to our press release. In the third quarter 2019 over the prior year period, adjusted EBITDA increased 20.8% to $46.2 million or 11.7% of revenue versus 10.5%. Operating income increased 50.6% to $26.2 million or 6.6% of revenue and increased from 4.8%, and earnings per share increased 82% to $0.40 in the third quarter compared to $0.22. These improvements are primarily attributable to the positive trends highlighted in my opening comments. Our reported tax rate in the third quarter 2019 was 20.6% versus 21.9% in the prior year period. The normalized tax rate decreased this quarter to 21.1% versus 26.8% last year. Capacity utilization was 70% in the third quarter of 2019 compared to 77% in the prior year, primarily a function of standing up dedicated sites for 3 significant long-standing clients with whom we are increasing our wallet share in existing and new lines of business. We expect our utilization to normalize by the end of second quarter 2020. While impacting our seat utilization, the underlying economic agreements with these clients adequately covers the cost of these unutilized seats. Capital expenditures were $16 million in the third quarter 2019, up from $15 million in the prior year, due primarily to the expansion of our facilities and technology assets supporting increased revenue. Our third quarter 2019 cash flow from operations was $63.1 million, up from $61.4 million in the prior year. Third quarter 2019 DSO was 73 days, down from 78 days last year and 70 days sequential, 75 days sequentially. The Board of Directors approved a $0.32 in the annual dividend per share or $14.9 million, which was paid on October 17, 2019. The dividend represented a 14.3% increase over the October 2018 dividends. Turning to our third quarter 2019 segment results, which are presented on a non-GAAP basis, TTEC Digital revenue was $78.6 million in the third quarter 2019, an increase of 17.9% over the prior year. Operating income was $11.8 million or 15% of revenue compared to 12.8%. Digital's operating income grew 38%. The performance improvement is primarily due to our subscription-based cloud offering, which grew 212% in the third quarter 2019 over the prior year, and systems integration services, which grew 30.8%, with both offerings delivering gross margins above 40%. Excluding the large short-term government contracts, our cloud business grew 60%. Several factors continue to drive the growth in our CX cloud solution, including a growing market for our CX technology solutions. Our differentiated turnkey approach for delivering fully integrated, feature-rich technology solutions to large commercial enterprises and government agencies, and increased recurring revenue for multiyear service agreements. TTEC Digital's operating margin improvement reflects the inherent scalability for our CX technology platform and optimization of our systems integration resources. We're pleased with the segments overall improved profitability, including absorbing additional investment and extending our partnership-based offerings and expanding our direct and indirect sales channels globally. TTEC Engage revenue increased 6.2% to $316.9 million in the third quarter 2019 and operating income increased 62.8% to $14.4 million or 4.5% of revenue, 150 basis point improvement over the prior year period. Our improved top line performance is due to pricing increases, higher volumes by, driven by new and expanding lines of work across multiple industries and our growing hypergrowth portfolio of clients. Bottom line improvement reflects increased contribution from higher-margin offerings as highlighted earlier. Lower operating and D&A expense to revenue ratios improved program and staffing optimization, and vertical mix also continued to aid our bottom line performance. Last, we are excited about the recent acquisition of FCR, and welcome the FCR management and associates to our TTEC family. We anticipate the acquisition to be immediately accretive. FCR furthers TTEC's continued focus on expanding our market share, partnering with born digital, hypergrowing brands, seeking an agile customer experience solution. We are executing against our strategic priorities in both TTEC Digital and TTEC Engage segments. Year-to-date, we significantly increased our revenue, probability and cash flow generation with a number of concurrent license users in our CX subscription-based cloud platform, expanded our geographic and vertical market, recently added an accretive acquisition and meaningfully deepened to highly strategic offerings with LivePerson and Cisco. Turning to our guidance, which includes both PRG Middle East and FCR, but excludes restructuring impairment charges, we estimate revenue between $1.622 billion and $1.630 billion. Operating income margins between 7.8% and 8%, and adjusted EBITDA margins between 12.8% and 13%. While FCR will be additive to fourth quarter's revenue and profit margin, it is offset by certain onshore volumes transitioning to nearshore and offshore. A delay in a client ramp postponed to 2020 and the negative impact of changes in foreign exchange rates. As a result, we are maintaining our previous guidance. We expect to follow our normal cadence of providing more formal 2020 guidance in conjunction with our fourth quarter reporting. However, with our current revenue backlog and the addition of FCR, we do expect to have another record year with similar top line growth rates and margin expansion. We currently estimate that Engage will comprise 83% of the Company's 2020 revenue, and Digital 17%. I'll now turn the call back to Paul.