Mike Thomson
Analyst · CJS Securities. Please go ahead
Thank you, Peter. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today to discuss our second quarter results. In my comments, I’ll discuss both GAAP and non-GAAP results and provide color for our key business drivers. Reconciliations of GAAP to non-GAAP measures can be found within our earnings presentation. We’re very pleased with the progress we have made in our financial results during the second quarter. Please turn to Slide 4, which shows some of the key metrics, each of which exceed a consensus estimates where they were available. [Technical Difficulty] improvements that Peter mentioned earlier. As we’ve discussed on recent calls, our focus on security continues to differentiate us in the market and along with our new cloud offerings and digital workspace services, has driven increased contract signings in recent periods. This helped to continue drive revenue growth and strong results overall for the quarter. We have also discussed our sharp focus on reducing our cost of delivery. We’ve implemented additional cost-cutting actions during recent periods as we’ve discussed, and we’ve worked hard to manage expenses. As a result of these efforts, we are starting to see improvements in profitability, which flow through the cash flow, resulting in the company being a free cash flow-positive for the quarter. With respect to specific results, non-GAAP revenue grew 12% year-over-year to $747.3 million in the second quarter or 15.5% on a constant currency basis. We have seen levels of growth in recent quarters that the company has not experienced in many years and the second quarter represents the highest quarterly growth rate we’ve seen in over 20 years. Non-GAAP operating profit margin expanded 370 basis points year-over-year to 12%, reflecting a solid growth quarter for both Services and Technology businesses, with strong margins coming out of our U.S. Federal sector as well. Although there were no consensus estimates for non-GAAP operating profit margin available this quarter, the metric exceeded our internal expectations. Adjusted EBITDA was up 29.8% year-over-year, and adjusted EBITDA margin expanded 240 basis points year-over-year to 17.2%. Non-GAAP EPS was up 123% year-over-year to $0.87. Please turn to Slide 5 for more detail on our segment results. As we’ve discussed, it was a strong quarter for both Services and Technology segments. Second quarter Services non-GAAP adjusted revenue growth of 10.3% year-over-year was the strongest we’ve seen since 2003. While we continue to see the transactional impact of new business signings, we saw improved Services margins overall in the second quarter. The Services GAAP adjusted gross profit margin was up 40 basis points year-over-year at 16.9% and Services non-GAAP adjusted operating margin was 5.1%, the highest we’ve seen since 2014. This represented a year-over-year expansion of 190 basis points. We maintain our focus on continuing to expand our margins over the longer term, including through the use of third-party labor, where efficient, further implementing automation, exiting operations in countries where there are structural impediments to profitability and continued right-shoring of labor, some of these actions may require restructuring charges but would roughly be consistent with the size and scope or the restructuring we announced in Q4 of last year. Services backlog ended the quarter at $4.3 billion, which we view as a solid level that supports our near-term revenue growth expectations. Although we’ve seen significant growth in this metric in recent periods, we have consistently noted that such growth or backlog levels were not necessarily sustainable, nor were they expected or necessary to meet our growth goals. Our Services renewal schedule in the second quarter was lighter than it was in the prior year period and as a result, Services backlog was down 6.8% year-over. However, based on our visibility into the rest of the year at this point, including a renewal schedule that is more weighted to the second half of 2019, this does not impact our near-term expectations for revenue. Of the $4.3 billion of Services backlog, we expect approximately $600 million to convert to Services revenue in the third quarter of this year. With respect to Technology, we had a strong renewal quarter for ClearPath Forward, with several contracts being signed sooner than expected. This resulted in higher revenue for this segment than we had anticipated going into the quarter. As we have frequently discussed, while we have good visibility into renewals coming into the year, there can be variability in terms of the exact timing of the renewal within a year. The profitability for the Technology segment was up year-over-year in part as a result of higher software revenue. Technology gross profit margin was up 640 basis points year-over-year to 73.5%. Technology operating profit margin was up 870 basis points year-over-year to 53.8%. As we look at the rest of the year, we’re still expecting 2019 Technology revenue to be consistent with last year’s non-GAAP adjusted Technology revenue. Given our first half results, this would imply a first half, second half revenue split of approximately 48% and 52%. We expect the second half Technology revenue split to be approximately 55% and 45% between the third and fourth quarters, based on anticipated timing of scheduled renewals. With respect to our current expectations around Technology and considering our performance in the second quarter, street estimates look a bit high for the third quarter margins. So we wanted to provide some additional color. Given the timing and mix of Technology revenue for the rest of the year, we expect total company adjusted gross profit margin for the third quarter to be approximately 300 to 325 basis points lower in the third quarter than it was in the second quarter and we expect total company adjusted EBITDA margin for the third quarter to be approximately 350 to 375 basis points lower than it was in the second quarter. I’ll now turn to Slide 6, which provides more detail on EBITDA and cash flow. We’ve already discussed adjusted EBITDA, which benefited from the same trends that drove non-GAAP operating profit this quarter. We’re very pleased to see the company produce positive free cash flow in the second quarter. The positive profitability results achieved this quarter helped drive operating cash flow to $50.9 million, up $62.6 million year-over-year relative to a use of cash of $11.7 million in the prior-year period. This was also supported by the timing of collections on Technology contracts. Free cash flow for the quarter was $11.3 million, up $67.9 million year-over-year from a use of cash of $56.6 million in the prior-year period. Adjusted free cash flow was up $52.9 million year-over-year to $48.3 million versus a use of cash of $4.6 million in the prior-year period. Lower year-over-year CapEx help drive improvements in free cash flow and adjusted free cash flow. CapEx for the quarter was $39.6 million versus $44.9 million in the prior-year period. As we we’ve previously discussed, our CapEx target is between 5.5% and 6.5% of revenue. Our current expectation is to be at the high end of that range for 2019, as we expect our full year CapEx to be approximately $180 million, as a result of slightly higher spending than initially anticipated on certain new contracts. Additionally, we saw that opportunities for third-party financing of CapEx were available to help mitigate the impact on cash. As a result of this, we expect full year cash usage for CapEx to be lower than our original expectations of $170 million, despite the higher CapEx expectation overall. We have consistently discussed that security has become one of our key differentiators as we go to market, and we wanted to provide a little bit of more insight into this. In the second quarter, approximately 20% of total revenue was security related. In that number, we are including a specific security solution such as Stealth, manage security services, work such as border security or identification processing and revenue from clients whose mission is security-driven and where the majority of the work we provide is security related. This by no means covers all instances in which security is relevant at Unisys, but it allows us to look at a discreet subset of our overall business for insight into the most tangible way security is driving results. With respect to our pension obligations, we continue to actively assess potential options for proactively managing these obligations, including potential capital market alternatives. In the interim, as we did last quarter, we wanted to provide some informal color as it pertains to pension asset market values and how they’ve changed since year-end. The slides in the appendix of our earnings presentations have not been updated to reflect these changes as we only formally update those slides once a year. It’s important to keep in mind that movements in Fed funds rates or the 10-year treasury note do not necessarily translate into impacts on our GAAP deficit as we use a basket of high-rated corporate bonds to calculate our discount rate. In addition, the movement of interest rates have very little impact on our contribution schedule as those rates are averaged over a 25-year period. This is why we focus more on asset returns as they can have a more meaningful impact on the contribution schedule from period to period. Keeping these considerations in mind, adjusting for asset returns and interest rates based on market conditions at June 30, 2019, the improvement in cash required for contributions remains similar to what we reported at the end of the first quarter at over $225 million improvement versus the year-end numbers. Now, let’s turn the discussion to our GAAP underfunded liability. Unlike with pension contributions, both interest rates and asset returns can have a meaningful impact on deficit calculations in any given period. Since the beginning of the year, we have seen interest rates decrease, but we’ve had asset returns strong enough to offset that. As a result, although we do not officially update our calculations until year-end, we’ve seen a limited change in the pension deficit relative to our year-end position, based on conditions as of June 30, 2019. As a rough approximation for purposes of gap deficit calculation for our U.S. pension plans, a 3% incremental return on U.S. assets offsets the impact on the gap pension deficit calculation of a 25 basis point reduction in interest rate. Similarly, for purposes of our deficit calculation, for the bulk of our non-U.S. pension plans, a 4.5% incremental return on non-U.S. assets offsets the same 25 basis point rate reduction. So, we remind you to consider both asset returns and interest rates as you observe market trends. Overall, we’re pleased with our first half results with strong revenue growth and improved profitability. Given these results and our expectations for the rest of the year, we’re reaffirming guidance for the full year 2019 on all metrics previously provided. As a reminder, we increased our non-GAAP adjusted revenue guidance in the first quarter and our increased guidance range remains positive 2% to positive 5% year-over-year growth or $2.82 billion to $2.9 billion. For non-GAAP operating profit margin, we’re reaffirming our range of 8.25% to 9.25% and for adjusted EBITDA margin, we’re reaffirming our range of 14.4% to 16.0%. As we look through the remainder of the year, we maintain our sharp focus on cost controls and operational efficiency. We also plan to continue our active approach to managing the pension obligations and look forward to discussing more on this front in the coming quarters. With that, I’ll turn the call back over to Peter.