Climb Global Solutions, Inc.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for participating in today's conference call to discuss CLIMB Global Solutions Financial Results for the fourth quarter and full year ended December 31, 2024. Joining us today are CLIMB's CEO, Mr. Dale Foster, the company's CFO, Mr. Matthew Sullivan, and the company's investor relations advisor, Mr. Aaron D'Souza with Elevate IR. By now, everyone should have access to the fourth quarter and full year 2024 earnings press release, which was issued yesterday afternoon at approximately 4 or 5 p.m. Eastern time. The release is available in the investor relations section of CLIMB Global Solutions website at .climbglobalsolutions.com. This call will also be available for webcast replay on the company's website. Following managements remarks will be open to call for your questions. I'd now like to turn the call over to Mr. D'Souza for introductory comments.

Thank you, operator. Before I introduce Dale, I'd like to remind listeners that certain comments made on this conference call and webcast are considered forward-looking statements under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements are subject to certain known and unknown risks and uncertainties, as well as assumptions that could cause actual results to differ materially from those reflected in these forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are also subject to other risks and uncertainties that are described from time to time in the company's filings with the SEC. Do not place undue reliance on any forward-looking statements, which are being made only as of the date of this call. Except as required by law, the company undertakes no obligation to revise or publicly release the results of any revision to any forward-looking statements. Our presentation also includes certain key operational metrics and non-GAAP financial measures, including gross billings, adjusted EBITDA, adjusted net income and EPS, and effective margin as supplemental measures of performance of our business. All non-GAAP measures have been reconciled to the most directly comparable GAAP measures in accordance with SEC rules. You'll find reconciliation charts and other important information in the earnings press release in Form 8K we furnished at the SEC yesterday. I would now like to turn the call over to CLIMB CEO Dale Foster.

Thank you, Aaron, and good morning, everyone. Our fourth quarter performance capped off an exceptional 2024, marking another year of record results across all key financial metrics. These achievements underscore our team's execution of our core initiatives. We continue to focus on organic growth by deepening relationships with existing vendors and customers while sending new emerging vendors to our line card and delivering on our acquisition goals. Throughout the year, we evaluated over 120 vendors and signed agreements with only 13 of them, focusing on the most innovative technologies in our market segments. In Q4, we evaluated 34 brands but only partnered with two of them. I'd like to quickly highlight a couple of these wins. First, we launched a partnership with Scality, a global leader in cyber-resilient storage software for AI environments. This strategic collaboration aims to expand Scality's reach across North America, enabling organizations to access scalable, secure, and high-performance storage solutions for their growing data needs. Next, we signed an agreement with Smartsheet, a dynamic work management platform that empowers teams to collaborate, automate workflows, and drive innovation and scale with flexibility and security. We are excited to collaborate with each of these vendors and bring their products to market, building a mutually beneficial relationship along the way. We continue to make progress with the implementation of our new ERP system, a critical step in streamlining processes and enhancing real-time data accessibility across the global operations. While we still are in the early stages, we are already seeing improvements in transactional efficiency. As we continue optimizing our systems, we anticipate unlocking additional benefits, driving greater agility, visibility, and operational effectiveness across the organization. In January, we announced several changes to our executive leadership team. To start, we appointed Matt Sullivan, our chief financial officer following the retirement of Drew Clark. I'd like to thank Drew for his invaluable contributions to CLIMB over the years and congratulate Matt on his well-earned promotion to CFO. Since joining us in 2019 as Vice President and Corporate Controller, Matt has risen internally to his most recent role as chief accounting officer, overseeing our global accounting functions, including external internal reporting, compliance, and planning. He has also played a pivotal role in advancing CLIMB's growth strategy and helping drive our financial due diligence for five accredited acquisitions since 2020. Shortly after Matt's appointment, we announced the promotion of two leaders who have played a pivotal role also in driving CLIMB's growth and success. First, Kim Stevens has been appointed to our chief marketing officer. Kim's proven track record of success and commitment to excellence is a testament to her talent and dedication as we nurture within CLIMB. Next, Charles Bass was promoted to our newly created role of chief alliance officer for CLIMB Global Solutions. Charles has taken on the global responsibility in identifying, vetting, and onboarding our most innovative technologies in the marketplace into our ecosystem, positioning CLIMB as a trusted partner for growth. I'm proud of the achievements of these two individuals and I look forward to seeing the impact that they will continue to make in their new roles. At the end of January, we announced the appointment of John McCarthy as our new chairman of the board. John has over 30 years of experience in the technology sector, the sector of leadership. He is also a board member, board director of CLIMB since 2019 and currently serves as the compensation committee chair. We're proud to have John lead our board and CLIMB's executive team looks forward to working with him to drive our strategic vision forward. We're excited about the year ahead and while we have some holes to fill due to the public exit of Citrix leaving the channel, we view this as an opportunity to strengthen our mix and further diversify our offerings. Looking ahead, we will continue building on a foundation to generate strong organic growth while further improving operating leverage. We will continue to also evaluate M&A opportunities that will enhance our services and solutions offerings as well as expand our geographic footprint in the US and overseas. These initiatives coupled with our demonstrated track record of execution and a robust balance sheet will enable us to deliver on organic and inorganic initiatives in 2025. With that, I will turn the call over to our CFO, Matt Sullivan, to take you through the financial results.

Thank you, Dale. And good morning, everyone. I'm pleased to address you for the first time as CLIMB's new CFO. A quick reminder as we review the financial results for our fourth quarter, all comparisons and variance commentary refer to the prior year quarter unless otherwise specified. As reported in our earnings press release, gross billings increased 52% to $605 million compared to $397 million in the year ago quarter. Distribution segment gross billings increased 57% to $582 million and solution segment gross billings decreased 9% to $23 million. Net sales in the fourth quarter of 2024 increased 51% to $161.8 million compared to $106.8 million, which primarily reflects organic growth from new and existing vendors as well as contribution from our acquisition of DSS in July of last year. Gross profit in the fourth quarter increased 48% to $31.2 million compared to $21.1 million. Again, the increase was driven by organic growth from new and existing vendors in both North America and Europe as well as the contributions from DSS. Gross profit as a percentage of gross billings was .2% compared to .3% in the year ago period. SGA expenses in the fourth quarter were $17.1 million compared to $12.4 million for the same period in 2023. SG&A from DSS accounted for $2.2 million of the increase. SG&A as a percentage of gross billings decreased to .8% compared to .1% in the year ago period. Net income in the fourth quarter of 2024 increased 33% to $7 million or $1.52 per diluted share compared to $5.2 million or $1.15 per diluted share for the comparable period in 2023. As referenced in our press release, net income was impacted by a $2.5 million charge related to a change in fair value of acquisition contingent consideration associated with Spinnaker Limited. Adjusted net income increased 87% to $10.3 million or $2.26 per diluted share compared to $5.5 million or $1.21 per diluted share for the year ago period. Adjusted EBITDA in the fourth quarter increased 75% to $16.1 million compared to $9.2 million in the prior year quarter. The increase was driven by the aforementioned organic growth from both new and existing vendors as well as contribution from DSS. Adjusted EBITDA as a percentage of gross profit or effective margin increased 780 basis points to .5% compared to .7% in the year ago period. Turning to our balance sheet, cash and cash equivalents were $29.8 million as of December 31, 2024 compared to $36.3 million on December 31, 2023, while working capital decreased by about $9.3 million during this period. The decrease in cash was primarily attributed to the cash paid at closing for acquisition of DSS of $20.4 million as well as the timing of receivable collections and vendor payments. As of December 31, 2024, we had $800,000 of outstanding debt with no borrowings outstanding under our $50 million revolving credit facility with JPMorgan Chase. On February 28, 2025, our Board of Directors declared a quarterly dividend of $0.17 per share of our common stock to shareholders of record as of March 17, 2025 and payable on March 21, 2025. Looking ahead, our strong liquidity position continues to provide us with the flexibility to pursue both organic and inorganic growth opportunities while expanding our relationships with vendors and customers worldwide. We will continue to be active on the M&A front as we evaluate the creative targets in both North America and overseas. With a disciplined approach to expansion and a focus on execution, we believe we are well positioned to deliver another year of growth and enhanced profitability in 2025. This concludes our prepared remarks. We will now open it up for questions from those participating in the call. Operator, back to you.

Thank you. And at this time, if you would like to ask a question, please press the star and one on your telephone keypad. You may remove yourself from the queue at any time by pressing star two. Once again, that is star and one to ask a question. And we will pause for a moment to allow questions to queue. And we will take our first question from Vincent Calico with Barrington Research. Please go ahead.

Yeah, good morning, Dale. Nice job in the quarter. You're welcome. Did you have any large unexpected deals in the quarter because it was, you know, quite a result?

Yeah, so, you know, and we've said this, I think it's coming up in a couple of years, you know, goes to that quarter, but, you know, we acquired Spinnaker, you know, we acquired the vast vendor relationship with that. And, you know, it's been, you know, if you listen to our strategic plans, you know, as far as technology starting here and taking it to, you know, really Western Europe, that's our plan. This is a vendor that came back to the US. So we started with a relationship there and then to the US. So we have some good things for 2025. But yes, we have some lumpy quarters. We had a large vast deal that came in the end of Q4 that helped numbers. But we also just looking outside of that just had a great growth across, you know, all of our divisions in Q4. And Q4 typically are a larger one. So, you know, if you're selling software applications and stats and you keep hammering in that same quarter that's big, you should get that recurring revenue the next year. So we're taking advantage of that as well.

Did security continue to lead growth amongst your segments?

It did. It did. You know, it is still making up, you know, between 55 and 65 percent of our portfolio. And a lot of vendors, you know, put this word security and now we're seeing, you know, new money flow into our vendors from their investors, you know, to build out AI components just to make their products better. So we'll see that really in 2025. We'll talk about that as the announcements come out.

And how did DSS perform versus your expectations?

You know, they do good. I mean, Q4 is not, you know, their biggest quarter, you know, because they're heavy in the education market. So it's really, you know, Q, you know, the end of Q2 and Q3. And then but they were, you know, up year over year, but nothing, you know, it isn't one of their bigger quarters. They kick off as you're going into the buying seasons of, you know, the state and local governments.

Of the number of vendors, I'm forgetting the number offhand that you added for the year, were all of them productive? How would you characterize that?

Yeah, so, you know, it's like I say, you kiss on a lot of frogs and, you know, vetting as much as you can up front before you sign a vendor. Because when you think a lot of the hard work is building that relationship, getting the vendors to, hey, you know, this is a good fit for us. As soon as we say yes, that's when all the energy gets consumed inside the client, because we have to onboard them, you know, goes from ops to finance, you know, before it goes back to the sales team to start selling. So, you know, if I look at the, you know, of those 13 that we signed, you know, they're all up. Then again, we're still pushing the ones that we signed, you know, could be quarters ago or years ago, and we're pushing them to our client elevate team because they didn't perform. We'll still transact with them. But, you know, we just highlight a couple in Q4 that we've already, you know, some of the chair shift that starts off as they're moving from a direct to an indirect model. And I know, you know, just on scale of the alone, we picked up, you know, probably two or three million dollars as we've launched that brand. So I'd have to go into individual ones, but, you know, we don't we try to get to a fast. No. And we also tried to get to a quick move if they don't launch or, you know, run at the rate that we believe that they were when we find them.

Okay, I'll go back in the queue. Thanks. Thanks, Vince.

Thank you. And as a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press the star and one on your telephone keypad now. And it appears that we have no further questions at this time. I will now turn the program back to Dale for any additional or closing remarks.

Thank you, operator. And again, thank you to our shareholders supporting us in 2024. You know, just a great year for climb. Also, you know, I never want to miss thanking our teams. We have our sales kickoff kickoffs at the beginning of the year. We did one in North America, which we usually do. We did our first ever one in Europe for our media teams to finally get them together from all the different countries. We pulled into Bristol, UK, and had a great couple days of planning and celebrating. But I want to thank our team members, you know, tremendous job in 2024. We have a work cut out for us in 2025, but, you know, just weren't a good, good market space as we've always talked about. So thank you again. Thank you.

Thank you. This does conclude today's presentation. Thank you for your participation. You may disconnect at any time.