Tricia Chiodo
Analyst · William Blair. Please proceed with your question
Thanks, David, and good morning, everyone. I will provide a more detailed overview of our third quarter 2019 financial performance and then I will open up the call for questions. We have provided a short earnings deck on our website that has reconciliations from the GAAP to non-GAAP results we will be discussing today. If you are following along in the earnings deck, I am on slide five, which outlines revenue and adjusted EBITDA performance by business segment.Let’s start with our Commercial Services segment, which delivers violation processing, title and registration services to rental car companies and fleet management companies in the U.S. and processes violations in Europe.Total revenue grew 8% to $77.6 million in the third quarter of 2019, up from $72 million in the same quarter of the prior year. Billable days across our three largest rental car companies were flat, but we saw higher levels of tolling activity across our entire product portfolio, and a shift from -- shift in product mix that positively impacted revenue.The flatness of billable days was not unexpected. If you recall a computer system change within a large tolling authority in Florida delayed receipts of tolls from Q2 to Q3 of 2018, creating a very difficult comp. We believe a growth in this segments to continue to be strong and land somewhere in the low teens throughout the year.Adjusted EBITDA of $61.1 million in the quarter of 2019 grew $1.7 million or 3% year-over-year from $49.4 million in Q3 of 2018. Last year our EBITDA performance was benesided -- benefited by the one-time shift of revenues from Q2 into Q3, which fell directly to the bottomline.Adjusted EBITDA margins of commercial Services showed continued strength at 66%. Keep in mind that these margins are net of investments we are making to accelerate our expansion into RAC tolling into Europe.Moving to our Government Solutions segment, which operates photo enforcement programs for municipalities and school districts with an end-to-end solution. Their total revenue of $50.6 million in the third quarter grew 42% year-over-year from $35.6 million in the third quarter of 2018.Total revenue was comprised of service revenue. That’s the monthly fee we generate from the operation of photo enforcement program and product revenue, which results from the selling and installation of camera system. Service revenue for the quarter was $33.1 million, roughly flat on a year-over-year basis.If you recall, Texas banned red light photo enforcement earlier in the year, resulting in an $11 million annual reduction of revenue, which will impact us for the next three quarters. As a result, red light service revenue was down approximately $2.8 million for the quarter, an additional decline of $750,000 came from the sunset of our Street Light Maintenance program earlier this year.Conversely, our speed program continues to gain momentum, more than offsetting the red light cameras service revenue losses in the quarter. Moreover, the speed camera installations in 2019 will add more than $13 million to our annual recurring service revenue.Product revenue of $17.5 million for the quarter was up from $2.4 million from the same period last year. The increase was primarily driven by the installation of 176 school zone speed cameras for the city of New York. As David mentioned, we continue to execute against the existing order of 300 camera systems and expect to fulfill that order by the end of the year.Q3 2019 adjusted EBITDA of $19.8 million increased approximately $7.2 million or 58% from $12.5 million for the same period in the prior year. Adjusted EBITDA margins for this business segment were 39% up from 35% in the prior year. The large increase in product sales is benefiting both the top and the bottomline of this business segment.Turning to the next slide, we show our consolidated results for the quarter. The combined results of the business segment that we just discussed generated total revenue of $128.2 million for the third quarter and grew $20.6 million or 19% from $107.6 million for the prior year, based primarily on product revenues.Adjusted EBITDA of $70.8 million increased by $8.9 million or 14% from adjusted EBITDA of $61.9 million in the prior year. The third quarter adjusted EBITDA margins remained strong at 55.2%, improved from 54.5% margin reported in the second quarter of this year.The company reported net income of $17.8 million in the quarter, compared to $6.5 million in the same period in the prior year. EPS for the current quarter was $0.11 per share, compared to $0.09 per share in the same quarter of 2018.Tax expense for the quarter was $6.7 million, representing an effective tax rate of 27.4%, which is in line with where we believe it will be for the full year.The company generated $95.6 million in cash flow from operating activities during the nine months ended September 30, 2019, compared to generating $46.1 million for the same period in the prior year. The improvement is directly related to improved net income.We spent $17.5 million on CapEx in 2019 year-to-date period, compared to $19.6 million in the prior year. Free cash flow, which we defined as cash flow from operations less CapEx was $78.1 million in the year-to-date period. Cash flow from the third quarter benefited from higher net income and the flattening out of the accounts receivable balances.As of September 30, we had total debt of $897 million and cash on hand of $136 million, for a net debt of $762 million, which was 3.3 times trailing 12 months adjusted EBITDA of $228.6 million.With these positive results, in summary, we continue to execute well, delivering strong top and bottomline results, and we believe that Verra Mobility remains well-positioned to maintain this momentum and operating discipline throughout 2019.Based on our performance year-to-date, we are raising our revenue guidance to the range of $440 million to $448 million. This is a $7 million improvement over our recently increased guidance. Our guidance for adjusted EBITDA is unchanged at $235 million to $240 million.As we stated last quarter, we made the decision not to cut cost in the Government Solutions segment with the immediate loss of Texas revenue, understanding that school zone speed revenue will ramp up over the back half of the year.This decision put short-term pressure on margins, but insures quality of product delivery and service to our clients. We are -- we have installed 237 schools zone speed cameras to-date and anticipate installing the remaining 63 in the fourth quarter.Thank you for taking the time for joining us on the call today. And with that, we would be happy to take your questions now.