Cimpress plc

full-year 2026 earnings follow-up. I would like now to turn the conference over to Meredith Burns, Vice President of Investor Relations and Sustainability. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Michelle, and thank you, everyone, for joining us. With us today are Robert Keene, our Founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer, and Sean Quinn, our EVP and Chief Financial Officer. We appreciate the time that you've dedicated to understand our results, commentary, and outlook. This live Q&A session will last about 45 minutes or so and will answer both pre-submitted and live questions. You can submit questions live via the questions and answers box at the bottom left of the screen. Before we start, I'll note that in this session, we will make statements about our future. The actual results may differ materially from these statements due to risk factors that are outlined in detail in our SEC filings and the earnings document we published yesterday on our website. We also have published non-GAAP reconciliations for our financial results on our IR website. We invite you to read them. All right, and now I will turn things over to Robert.

Thanks, Meredith. Thank you to our investors for joining us today. Before Sean goes into his review of the Q2 financial results, I will discuss the progress we've made on the strategic and the operational themes that we covered in detail in my annual letter to you of July 29th and at our September meeting. investor days so i spoke about the following four themes last quarter first elevated products are driving a step function improvement in our per customer lifetime value in other words the wallet share we have with small business customers for example variable gross profit per customer at reported uh currency rates grew nine percent year over year a continuation of a long trend that Vista keeps putting up in terms of or earning in terms of increased wallet share with especially higher value customers. Second, MCP enabled us to pursue cross-SIMPRESS fulfillment or XCF and that's helping us drive manufacturing efficiencies and accelerate new product introduction. In Q2, we continue to make significant progress as we continue to optimize our production footprint, building up focused production hubs, and drive innovation in new product introductions in elevated categories. Doing so does involve a period of elevated capital expenditures, largely for manufacturing equipment, which we gave examples of at Investor Day. There are many aspects of the work we're doing across Sympress that is exciting, But this particular area of focus of manufacturing competitiveness is really core to our competitive advantage. So I'm very proud of the innovation, the sophistication, and the velocity at which our teams are moving forward to drive manufacturing excellence and advantage for the benefit of our customers and our shareholders. The third area I'll bring up is shared technology. That means organizational de-layering the artificial intelligence that our tech is allowing us to do. And that's constraining operating expenses and opening up for future efficiencies, even as we improve customer value. For example, we recently announced that we are deepening the collaboration between Vista, National Pen, and Build-A-Sign to share product development, sourcing, performance marketing, telesales, direct mail, and manufacturing, while maintaining separate focused brands. We expect this is going to drive meaningful efficiencies while also enabling growth. These same capabilities also support the customer experience when something beyond our operational control impacts our operations. As an example of that is in the past quarter, there was a devastating hurricane that hit Jamaica. We have had huge challenges for our care team members in that location. But we were able to mitigate the impact by quickly shifting call volumes to care teams in other regions and within Jamaica because each of Nashville Penn, Build a Sign, and Vistaprint had facilities to shift people to the facilities that were least impacted by the facility. And finally, we've been able to increase use of AI chatbots through increasingly sophisticated uses with shared technology. Fourth, we do have a strong financial future. As noted in last night's earnings document, we're increasingly confident on our path to fiscal 28 EBITDA of at least $600 million, coupled with very significant de-levering of our balance sheet. All of the efforts I just mentioned and more are part of our roadmap to that FY28 financial target. We expect significant efficiencies across our profit and loss statement with the most meaningful benefits in cost of goods, technology, and marketing. Additionally, the advancements we've made over the last couple of years and the investments we've made, including technology modernization, product expansion, manufacturing supply chain, have positioned us to evaluate a healthy pipeline of tuck-in M&A and potential partnership opportunities that we believe in the aggregate positively impact our results in future years as part of our roadmap to delivering those FY28 targets. So to sum up, halfway into fiscal 28, we remain confident in our multi-year plans. Our past investments have enabled us to increase the pace at which we improve customer value, and it helps us increase our competitive advantage, our innovation, and increase our efficiency. So now I'll turn it over to Sean to discuss financial results for the quarter and our outlook.

Thanks a lot, Robert, and thanks, everyone, for joining us on the call today. Q2 marked a milestone for Sympress. We exceeded a billion dollars in quarterly revenue for the first time ever. With organic currency growth of 4% through the first half of the year, which was ahead of the annual guidance range that we had previously provided of 2% to 3%, and year-over-year adjusted EBITDA growth in the first half of the year that was equal to the full-year dollar growth that was in our prior guidance, We are raising our annual guidance for revenue, for adjusted EBITDA, and for free cash flow, and I'll go through those all in a moment. For the quarter in Q2, revenue grew 11% on a reported basis and 4% on an organic constant currency basis, with revenue growth across all of our segments. Reported revenue was aided by a tuck-in acquisition in our print brother segment, as well as the benefits from currency. In Vista, organic constant currency growth of 5% was up from 3% in the prior year quarter, and that continued to be supported by growth in promotional products, apparel and gifts, and packaging and labels, which each grew double digits. We've covered this before, but just as a reminder, and Robert alluded to this as well, our elevated product categories help us to serve and retain high-value customers that make up our most profitable customer deciles. In terms of our legacy products, business cards and stationary declined 1% for the quarter. That's consistent with Q1 and also an improvement from last year's decay rate. Geographically, while we had growth across all markets in Vista, strong performance in North America was the main driver of the acceleration and growth versus the prior year quarter. Turning to our other segments, upload and print customer and order count increased and fueled combined organic constant currency revenue growth there of 6%. The tuck-in acquisition that we completed in the quarter contributed $18 million to the Print Brothers segment reported revenue, which grew 26% this quarter and 6% if you exclude that tuck-in and also currency benefits. The print group, National Pen, and Build-A-Sign continue to increase their cross-impress fulfillment volumes as they act as a fulfillment partner on behalf of Vista. And National Pen revenue also benefited from some tariff-related price increases. Turning to profitability, adjusted EBITDA increased by $6.6 billion year over year. Q2 profit dollars increased 8% on a consolidated basis from growth in our higher value elevated product categories and also supported by favorable currency movements. Gross margins declined 110 basis points, and most of that was from the tariff impacts at National Penn, both the tariff costs but also the offset of tariff pricing. In Vista, segment EBITDA improved 10% or approximately $10 million, resulting from revenue strength, but also stable gross profit margins and currency benefits. Robert referred to this earlier, but I'll say it again. Vista's variable gross profit per customer grew 9% year over year, a continuation of a trend that we've seen for some time and a strong indication of our continued strategic progress. Profitability at Vista was negatively impacted by about $2 million associated with the hurricane that hit Jamaica at the end of October that Robert talked about, a portion of which may be recoverable through insurance in future periods. Profitability was also dampened by $1.5 million of production startup costs for expansion of our North American production network, and also $1 million of tariffs net of pricing increases. We do expect that that impact of tariffs should lessen in future quarters as supply chain remediation continues to ramp up. And lastly, currency provided a $4.1 million benefit to EBITDA this quarter. That should be a source of some continued year-over-year favorability in the second half and also as we look ahead to next year as well. Adjusted free cash flow declined $9.2 million to an inflow of $124 million. We had lower net working capital inflows this year versus last year. That's just normal timing. And as we've guided, capital expenditures were higher as we invest in the expansion of our North America production network, but also we invest behind efficiency and the expansion of our production capabilities for elevated products. From a balance sheet perspective, net leverage at the end of Q2 was 2.97 times trailing 12 months EBITDA. That's as calculated under our credit agreement. That's down sequentially from last quarter, despite allocating over $25 million to share repurchases in Q2. Our cash position ended the quarter at $258 million, and we continue to have $250 million remaining on our credit facility that is undrawn at the end of the quarter. Turning to our guidance, as I said before, we've raised our expectations for fiscal 26 based on the strong results from the first half of the year. We now expect revenue growth of 7% to 8%, and 3% to 4% organic constant currency revenue growth. We expect net income of at least $79 million and adjusted EBITDA of at least $460 million, up from the previous $450 million. We expect operating cash flow of approximately $313 million and adjusted free cash flow of approximately $145 million. That's up from previously $140 million. And we continue to expect net leverage to decrease slightly by the end of fiscal 26 from the FY25 level of 3.1 times. We also, as Robert said, we remain confident in our ability to deliver on our fiscal 28 targets, which again, I'll reiterate as four to 6% organic constant currency growth in fiscal 28, $200 million in net income, adjusted EBITDA of at least 600 million, adjusted EBITDA to free cashflow conversion of approximately 45%. And from a leverage perspective, we expect to exit fiscal 27 with net leverage of approximately two and a half times as we begin to expand profitability more significantly, and then exit fiscal 28 with net leverage below 2.0 times subject to capital allocation choices such as share repurchases. With that, Meredith, why don't we open it up for questions?

Thanks, Sean. As a reminder, you can submit questions during this webcast via the questions and answers box at the bottom left of the screen. We had a good number of pre-submitted questions on a range of topics. Where there are thematic overlaps, I will combine some questions to make sure that we're addressing what's on people's minds. So let's take our first question. Sean, this one's going to be for you. How would you characterize the holiday season that just concluded for Vista? Did it go as planned, better or worse? What worked and what did not? And are there any trends within holiday cards worth mentioning, either regarding the industry, your market share or anything else? And what was the percentage change in cost per click in U.S. consumer this year?

Okay. Overall, it was a strong quarter for Vista. And I said this in my earlier remarks, but I would highlight North America as the source of strength compared to last year. I think on the Q1 call, I talked a little bit about, you know, our approach for the holiday season and what gave me optimism. And one of the things is that we had an evolved approach to the holiday season this year. with just a more balanced approach, leaning into the things that have been working for us, including elevated product growth, and being intentional about not shifting as much resource to consumer-specific messaging. And I would say we're happy with how that was executed. The team did a great job, and it was a strong result overall. In the release, we didn't get into too many specifics on consumer growth, et cetera, but I'll give you a few data points. And the question, I think, was quite focused on the U.S. and also holiday cards. Volume in holiday cards and calendars in the U.S. was flat year over year. And in Canada, it grew double digits. So I think those are good data points. And I think some of that's because of what we're comping, especially in Canada. There were a few things last year. But I think that data point, coupled actually with the improved decay rate in business cards from last year, I think that shows that these legacy products are still relevant, but also that we can continue to influence these trends through our experience, selection, merchandising, other things in our control. In Europe, we had a tougher comp. Last year was quite a strong holiday quarter for consumer in Europe. And in Europe, consumer was down a little bit year over year in Q2. So I'd say that was the weak spot if I was going to name one. But again, it was a tough comp. As we look at things like data on Google search volumes and such, it would suggest that we took share this quarter. Some of that data is a little fuzzy in terms of how precise that is with market share, but directionally, I think that would be the case. Year to date, just from a consumer perspective, consumers flat year to date in constant currencies in Vista with a little bit of gross profit growth. We do continue to expect to see a little bit of consumer growth outside of the holiday peak, in particular from elevated products we've launched with consumer use cases. With respect to the question on cost per click, those aren't details that we get into in any specific markets. But I would say just in general, in terms of certainly on the performance marketing side of things, I would just say that we're being bold in our testing agenda. Our channel mix continues to evolve. And that was the case in Q2. It has evolved quite a bit. And that won't be the case just for Q2. I would say that kind of in general, it's an exciting area, and we're looking forward to continued progress there.

Thank you, Sean. I'm going to stick with you for the next question. So strong Q2 results represent a continuation of trends observed from Q1 and led you to raising your guidance. Can you talk about the biggest areas of outperformance versus your initial FY26 guidance?

Yeah, sure. There weren't really any, you know, big areas of outperformance. It was really a solid quarter of execution really across the board. I mean, yeah, that was the case in Q1, too. And, yeah, there was, of course, a few unexpected things as well. You know, Robert talked about the, and I mentioned in my remarks, the hurricane in Jamaica. There were a few others, but we were able to overcome those operationally. And then we did have some help from currency too. On the revenue side, I think in terms of how we're tracking to our plans, I would say we're basically on track. When we set our guidance, if you go back to the words we put around that, we did note that we factored in potential uncertainty. And I think for revenue, We're now confident increasing because of what we've been able to deliver in the first half of the year. The reported growth also factors in now about 100 basis points of growth from the acquisition that we did in Q2. And then you can see currency continues to be a tailwind. And so that's factored in, but pretty consistent with the impact that we had included for the original annual guidance. From an EBITDA perspective, again, I would say we're delivering to our plan, almost exactly on our plan for H1. And now we've already attained the full year EBITDA dollar growth that was implied in our original annual guidance. And so we've updated that. You may recall Q1 was a record Q1 for us from an EBITDA perspective. And Q2 is always a seasonally really important quarter. So with the solid Q2 now behind us, And having had a record Q1, we now feel comfortable raising our EBITDA guidance for the year. And through the first half of the year, I would say Vista's on track. Upload and print overall has been strong. Those are our two biggest sources of EBITDA. And the operational teams that are driving those results are all very consistent with what we shared at our investor day and Robert started the call with today. One other thing that has helped to support adjusted EBITDA growth is currency. I mentioned this in my remarks as well. With the euro and the pound strengthening, that's favorable for our results, both from a revenue and EBITDA perspective. And that has been a little bit ahead of our plan. That should continue to be the case with some of the year-over-year benefit in H2. And then as we lock in our hedges looking out past FY26, we have visibility to continue to beat the favorability from currency as well. So that was one of the bridge items that we had in our path to our fiscal 28 targets, if you can recall the slide that we used in our investor day. And I would say there, you know, we feel good about where we're at based on what we've contracted and then also, you know, recent further strengthening in the euro and the pound.

Thank you, Sean. All right, we're going to move along to a question for Robert. At Vista, you called out that promotional products, apparel, gifts, and packaging, along with labels, all grew at double-digit clip during the quarter. How are the underlying trends progressing for these customer cohorts? Robert?

Sorry, I had put myself on mute. So the strong growth you're talking about really does demonstrate how we've been driving our wallet share, SMBs, thanks to the past and the ongoing investments. So those investments, especially in elevated products and manufacturing capabilities that allow us to be very competitive in elevated products, have really played a part. Now, in our investor day, we had a slide and we showed that the top 2% of our customers at Vista contribute just about as much total variable gross profit as the bottom 80% combined. it's really that top two and the top 10, 20% of our customers in that level of spend, which represents our future. So they play a big role in our results and in the trends that we see in those portions of our new cohorts are very, very healthy. To your question more specifically, the underlying trends we're seeing are progressing very well. Starting last quarter, we began discussing the variable gross profit per customer as a way that you as an investor can evaluate our progress in serving these higher value customers and growing wallet share. So that includes everything I've just talked about for your question. Just to recall, in Q1, that growth was 7%, and in Q2, it was 9%. So we like what we see there. It's very consistent with our strategy. There's still a lot of opportunity in elevated categories of months. all customers who are in markets that are less penetrated from an e-commerce perspective, and there are large addressable markets that we are addressing that we have not done so much so in the past. We're investing behind this with CapEx, with expanded capabilities, and fundamentally lowering the cost of production, for example, through focused production hubs so that we can push further into these categories, like packaging, like apparel, et cetera, serving customers with great products that they need at great prices with beautiful quality and delivery times. So that's where cross-SIMPRESS collaboration is playing a role and an increasing role. XCF, cross-SIMPRESS fulfillment, is already something we're doing to lead new product introductions, lower costs, The increased collaboration we just announced between Vista, Build Asylum, and National Pen, it's going to accelerate XCF, but also other types of collaboration in promotional products, in packaging, as well as in signage, which all get back to the drivers of the underlying trends in your question.

Thank you, Robert. Let's stick with you here for the next question. Can you talk about the North American business for the print group? How have things trended versus your initial expectations? And how do you view the opportunity ahead for the business? Can you quantify its contribution in the quarter? And how do you think about its growth going forward?

Great. We're on track. As planned, we're focusing on building out the production capabilities. We have revenues in this unit, but they're still small. I think it was about $3 million for the first half, but growing quarter over quarter to a fast clip. That being said, from a revenue perspective, we're just getting started, and we have fixed costs that are weighing down on our overall EBITDA and CapEx, but that is very consistent with our plans and how we think about this. We've not yet started putting any ad spend against PixarPrinting.com or U.S. site other than small tests. We like the opportunity ahead, but we want to make sure we have everything right from a production and delivery perspective. In the near term, the bigger opportunity is really growing volumes as a fulfiller through cross-interest fulfillment for Vistaprint in multi-page small formats and labels and other products. Now, Pixar printing has always been very strong in manufacturing innovation around those areas amongst other areas. So we've taken the investments that we've made in Europe in the past multiple years and exporting that capability into North America for these products where we really don't today have focused production hubs like we do in Europe for those particular product lines. And we are coming, we believe in doing so we're gonna be the low cost producer in North America that we can scale those categories through Vistaprint as well as the Pixar printing brand. But a little bit analogous to what we're doing with National Pen and Build-A-Sign, we see that a big part of that production operation can be volume that goes to the Vistaprint brand in North America. Again, we're excited about Pixar printing in North America as a brand, but it will be part and parcel of a broader entry that we're planning.

Thank you, Robert. So you just mentioned the closer collaboration between Vista, National Pen, and Build a Sign. So we do have a question on that. It seems that in bringing National Pen and Build-A-Sign closer together, there will be a lot of capability sharing. Product development, sourcing, performance marketing, direct mail, and manufacturing were all quoted in the January 13th release as part of the collaboration. What will remain separate and why?

So we're going to keep the brand separate and focus on integrating what I'll call the back-end capabilities of National Pen and Build-A-Sign to drive growth and drive profitability at Vistaprint in North America. Actually in Europe as well with Penn, National Penn is strong in Europe and is doing great collaboration already with Vistaprint and our upload and print businesses. So it's really the brands that will stay separate and more and more collaboration will happen on the back end. We're doing that because we continue to believe that it is advantageous to have multiple brands in the market both from a search perspective, what shows up in front of the customers, but also be able to vary our value propositions into different brands. But on the backend operations, all of these investments we've been making over the past years in technology platforms, manufacturing, talent, and other areas are allowing us to take synergies or drive synergies and importantly drive customer value by sharing those capabilities. I'll give you a couple examples of that. We talk a lot about cross-impress fulfillment. We accelerate the benefit of focused production hubs, which still remain decentralized because teams who are very close to that market focus on not only what the customer needs are, but how to best produce the product. But we are incentivizing volume to flow to the most efficient, highest quality production operations we have. And over time, there's a lot of benefits to that. It increases profitability, increases product introduction, we get better capacity utilization, and so on. On the tech replatforming, that creates opportunities, obviously, in our technology investments to do two things. First of all, take the best in class, and certainly at a very minimum, the best in SimPress capabilities, and share that across different brands. But secondly, to share the cost, and therefore drive efficiencies in our software development and other technology investments. So that recent announcement about VISTA National Pen and Build sign, we expect to extend this to other areas. Now why, what's the reason that these businesses are doing this is generally speaking, they're serving similar types of customers and customer use cases. The other thing that is common between these is they have a higher spend in advertising as a percentage of revenue if you were to compare them to our upload and print businesses. So with access to the same product catalogs via MCP and across in-person fulfillment, that makes the sharing possible. And we can optimize our advertising spend across those different brands that all may show up in the same Google search or other areas. and make sure we're getting the best ROI across the board for all of Sempress, not an individual brand. So there's things that will still be unique about these businesses, and they will remain with their respective specializations, but we do believe, as I just described, there's a lot that we can share.

Thanks, Robert. I'm going to stick with you for one more question for now. How do you view the opportunity ahead for cross-Sempress fulfillment? to continue to drive down COGS, and how much headroom do you think there is ahead? Is there a certain level of cross-interest fulfillment activity per business that you would like to achieve?

Okay, I've already mentioned a lot of this in today's call, but in summary, cross-interest fulfillment is a big opportunity. It's another example of past and current investments that are driving both top-line and bottom-line growth. It's part of our execution plan to achieve the EBITDA expansion to at least $600 million by fiscal 28. So that's how we view it. Now, we're still early in the opportunity for cross-interest fulfillment, but it's growing fast. It was a little over $40 million in the first half of fiscal 25, and now it was over $80 million in the first half of this year, so it basically doubled within a year. We believe that last year that delivered about $15 million of gross profit increase as a result of that. Again, that was for fiscal 25 ending June. Our scale-based manufacturing advantages that we've always talked about for decades in mass customization typically happen on a product-by-product basis. So we have, through these focused production hubs, the opportunity to lower cost, improve quality, improve speed, expand our product lines. increased utilization of invested capital by aggregating all this volume into these focused production hubs. And I'd say beyond that, but very closely related to cross-interest fulfillment with the announcements we've mentioned with National Penn and Build-A-Sign, but similar things that we're doing in Europe with our upload and print businesses. We have great, very strong teams who are experienced in the product category launch process, the new product introduction process for specific areas, just like we do at Vistaprint. And we're able to have teams specialize in the areas they're strongest at. So as to what level of cross-impress fulfillment we'd like to achieve, we don't disclose that specifically. But we do expect this to grow strongly for some time. To your question, there's a lot of headroom ahead.

Thank you, Robert. All right, Sean. Let's take a technical question. In the quarter, it looks like the company allocated $22.6 million for the purchase of non-controlling interests. What position did the company buy? Any details you can share would be appreciated. What non-controlling interests remain outstanding?

There are two transactions that make up that little bit more than $22 million. Both of them were in our Print Brothers segment. 11 million of that was a mandatory redemption that required us to purchase the remaining shares from minority holders that sold a portion of their equity interest to us in fiscal 23. And then the other one was the remaining $12 million of that 22 million or so that relates to minority equity holders in a smaller business with Imprint Brothers that exercised the put option to sell their shares. In terms of other non-controlling interests that remain outstanding, there's nothing material. You can see this on the face of the balance sheet. We have $6 million of redeemable non-controlling interest outstanding at the end of the quarter. We don't have anything in terms of anything mandatorily redeemable. And I'll just maybe add that those two transactions in the quarter were contractual. all of the minority shareholders that were part of these transactions remain active in our business. And we are in active discussions with them on buying back into the respective businesses with a long-term horizon. And so we look forward to concluding those conversations.

Thank you. All right, next question on M&A. We got some live questions on M&A too. We'll definitely cover the answer to those in the next couple of questions. Robert, the company did a tuck-in acquisition for $10.4 million in the quarter, and you noted in your earnings document that the company has a healthy pipeline of potential tuck-in M&A opportunities. How much capital is the company willing to allocate here? Also, I believe in the past, the company used a 15% hurdle rate for any tuck-in M&A deals. I assume the fiscal Q2 tuck-in deal clears this hurdle? But any financial details you can provide would be interesting.

Your assumption is absolutely right. It very easily clears the hurdle. But let me give you a little more detail about this particular tuck-in. We purchased an Austrian printing group with annual revenues of about $70 million and annualized EBITDA of about $5 million prior to synergies. And we have very significant synergy opportunities ahead. The enterprise value we paid wasn't just the 10 million or 10.4 million. It included debt. But if you take the equity plus debt, that enterprise relative to the pre-synergy EBITDA we paid was comfortably below five. Now, inclusive of synergies, we expect that multiple to be much lower. And we expect the return on this investment to be very comfortably higher than 15%. The purchase price was also done at a very attractive multiple of cash flow, after-tax cash flows relative to the cash we're deploying there. Strategically, it really positions us in Austria to grow faster in elevated products like multi-page products, but also importantly to, through cross-interest fulfillment, use that Austrian production capabilities, especially in Germany, and use some of our German production operations to expand products into the acquisition. That is one of many examples of the synergies we see before us that will lower our post-synergy multiple. Now, this is a tuck-in acquisition, which brings both customer relationships but vertical integration. It has fast payback, very clear paths to deliver profitability and cash flow now and in over the coming years. Importantly, we have a strong leadership team in Austria who's doing very well at Druk.at. That's part of Print Brothers. They've been with us for years. They sourced the deal. They proposed the deal. Once it was approved, they led it. They're taking full accountability for it. And they're managing this. And so I'd say all those things I just talked about exemplifies what we're looking for in tuck-ins. strategic fit against our goals of elevated products, manufacturing supply chain. Importantly, also with strong SimPress leaders on the front lines who sponsor and lead the deal with strong cash on cash returns to the capital we put there with high IRR and capabilities that either complement or accelerate our existing capabilities. Now, your question, I think, was how much capital we'd be putting into Other talking M&A, that frankly is going to be depending on other capital allocation opportunities. We'll be looking at the relative return and risk versus buying back our own shares by the investments we're making internally. We've been talking about a lot in this call that are driving cash flows through production operations, our commitment to deliver our balance sheet, and then, of course, these types of deals. what it will be specifically. We don't see this as a fundamental singular or even top three driver of how we're going to get to our FY28 goals, but as I think we've talked about since the September investor day, we do see it as a part that's consistent with our strategy, which has good returns to capital and will be part of that overall path.

Thanks, Robert. So there is a follow-up question here that I think you can touch on pretty quickly because you've already talked a little bit about this. But the question is, my understanding is that the company measures any potential M&A deals or any capital allocation decisions against the returns from repurchasing shares. With the stock trading at a low valuation, especially if the company achieves its fiscal 2028 target, does this imply that tuck-in M&A deals in the pipeline potentially exceed a 15% hurdle rate?

Absolutely. Yes.

I love it. Shortest answer ever. All right. We're going to move on to Sean. Another capital allocation question. On capital allocation, share repurchases stepped up during the quarter and net leverage fell below three times. How should investors be thinking about the magnitude of repurchases in the back half of the year? And Sean, one thing that I want to add to this, just because we got a live question earlier, somebody asking us basically what our position is on our valuation at this time.

Okay. Yeah, well, there's still some level of repurchases that we can do in the second half of the year within the net leverage guidance that we gave. So, you know, we left some room for that. Of course, you know, and Robert just touched on this too, but, you know, any of our capital allocation is always, you know, dependent on a lot of factors. including other opportunities. But in this case, share repurchases are always price dependent. But yeah, I would say, listen, we were really happy to allocate a little over $25 million to repurchases in Q2. We did that at an average price that was below $70. We still believe it's a very good use of capital at recent price levels. So I still would expect some in the second half of the year, probably a bit less in terms of intensity overall in the second half of the year, certainly relative to where we're at in Q2, but again, always price dependent. I guess I kind of implicitly covered the other one. I mean, listen, we just ramped up the repurchases that we did in Q2. As I just said, we feel that that was a very good use of capital buying back below 70. And as I just said too, we would still view that as very attractive. at current price levels, and we have room to do repurchases in H2, and so we would put dollars behind us. Great.

So this next question is basically getting at the math behind what we might do in the back half of the year. What's left in terms of capital allocation for the remainder of the year? The leverage guidance for the end of the year is to be slightly below 3.1 times, which is essentially where the leverage level is currently. EBITDA will be increasing by at least $10 million, and the business is expected to generate incremental adjusted free cash flow, which includes working capital for the remainder of the year. Is there specific plan share repurchases or M&A that's driving the guidance?

Yeah, all that math is right. Our free cash flow, as you can see, we reported in the first half of the year was $107 million. So, you know, versus $145 million in the guidance, that implies $38 million of free cash flow in the second half of the year. That does already include the higher CapEx that we've also assumed in our guidance. And then, yeah, we have $10 million of EBITDA growth implied in the guidance in the second half of the year as well. You know, we don't provide specific guidance on other capital allocation that we do in the normal course because, again, as I just said, it depends on a lot of factors, including price, but also relative opportunities, et cetera. But with the free cash flow and the EBITDA that just outlined and you've outlined in the question, yes, there is some room for other capital allocation on top of any organic investments that were already included in the plan. That includes for repurchases and still allowing us to end the year slightly below 3.1 times. So we have provided some room for that.

Thanks, Sean. All right, we're going to take a break for a second from financial questions. Can you talk a bit about how you view the opportunity for you in agentic commerce? How are you in talks with any LLM providers today? How far away are you from being able to integrate into ChatGPT or Gemini?

So it's something that I think the entire world will move towards, and we certainly have been investing in that at the highest levels. Myself and our CTO, the entire CIFRS executive team are spending time specifically on these subjects. I won't go into very specific discussions, but yes, agentic commerce is coming. We are working on that and we feel comfortable that we will be, if not in the lead, baton thrower, but very much at the front of the parade.

So, next question for Sean. Could you please help us bridge or provide color around the difference between the all-time high trailing 12-month EBITDA of $469 million from Q4 of FY24 to the trailing 12-month EBITDA today of $451 million? TTM gross profit has increased by 79 million over the same period, and contribution profit has increased by 52, while EBITDA has decreased by 18 million.

This is some heavy math on the fly here, so I'll cover this high level, and I do think it's a good question, and I think, you know, stepping back, like, we've actually used a similar framing as we look to architect what we need to hit in fiscal 28, looking back two years and saying what needs to be true for us to make sure that we're having more EBITDA flow through. And we have a large cost efficiency component that we've talked about in our targets going out to FY28. And part of it is we'll address kind of what is in the end this bridge between what was our prior PR highest ever EBITDA in fiscal 24, which is the base that you referenced in the question, and where we're at today. So there's a few things. Again, I'm going to go high level because I don't have all the math in front of me. But I think that one of the big things is that if you look at Q2 of FY24, we had about $12 million of non-recurring benefits in that quarter, which supported the full year. So that's relevant for your question, but it's also kind of, you know, a good data point as you look back just for Q2 that we just reported versus two years ago. So that didn't repeat. So that's a bigger one in the math. You know, in fiscal 24, that was the year where we were coming off of, we were basically, supply chains were normalizing, input costs were kind of normalizing as well and coming down. So we had pretty sizable reductions in input costs that year. but still, you know, kind of favorable pricing. There's some net benefit to that in gross profit, which is kind of already covered in your math. We also it was it was after that that we had starting in FY25 started to see some overall declines in business cards and holiday cards. Those are more stable this year, but that has some impact on the math, too. We do also have startup costs this year for plant expansion, and we didn't have that before. And then really the remainder, and other than the non-recurring items, probably the biggest impact is just the remainders in OpEx with technology costs being the largest driver. And again, I connect that back to where and why we need to drive efficiency as we march to the FY28 targets. One of the things that offsets that in the other direction is currency is a little bit more favorable in the current TTM versus where we were at back in fiscal 24. So- So that's high level, but hopefully that hits on the key drivers.

I'll stick with you for the next one as well. On FY28 targets. So should we be thinking about the bridge to FY28 a bit differently than what was communicated at the investor day? Is $40 million of organic incremental benefits still the target? And is 10 million from tuck-in M&A still a target?

Okay. This is a great question. Thank you. The question of reference is this bridge that we did at Investor Day. And in that bridge, the objective of that bridge was to show what we needed to get to at least $600 million in EBITDA in fiscal 2018. So it wasn't necessarily for each of the pillars in there. It wasn't a target per se. Importantly, the last pillar was what organic growth, what EBITDA contribution we needed from organic growth to get to 600 million, and that was the 40 million plus. So that wasn't to say that that was necessarily the target, but that was the math you needed. And the whole point of that bridge is what you need to believe, especially from organic growth. We'll update that bridge at the end of the year. I think it's a helpful framing and hopefully, you know, gives all of you confidence as well. But the pillars in that bridge, they're still the right ones. And maybe I'll just run through them quickly just to give you a little bit of commentary because, you know, it is a really important topic. So the first one, the first thing in that bridge I'm just looking at on my screen here was our fiscal 28 growth. And now we've increased that by $10 million based on our guidance update today. We still feel good about the next.

Just fiscal 26, not fiscal 26.

Sorry, fiscal 26. Yeah, fiscal 26, that's been updated. That's been increased by $10 million. And so, yeah, that's an improvement relative to the original bridge. We still feel good about the $78 to $80 million of cost savings. And we used the midpoint there in the bridge, $75 million. And you heard today about some of the areas that we're focused on to drive that. The next one is the runoff of plant startup costs. That is frankly, that is just massive. So we feel good about that. Talking M&A has been a source of some questions today. That was the next one in the bridge. And again, we feel good about that as well. We've covered that. The next one was currency benefits. I touched on that earlier too. We have good visibility to what's in that bridge. based on what we're already contracted. So feel good about that. And then the remainder is the organic growth needed to bridge to the at least 600 million. And that 40 million plus, because that represents two years, right? That's 40 million of organic growth flow through for two years. And again, that's just what you have to believe to get there. So as we're able to provide all of you with increased confidence on the other pillars, uh and make that more tangible you know that will serve to also make that last element of the bridge you know more uh tangible and and likely lessen uh over time in terms of what we need to believe so um so that's how i think about it and like i said we'll we'll update more specifically on that bridge you know as we get to the end of the year um but hopefully that's helpful in terms of you know kind of overall commentary it's super important and i and i just would add um you know the the These FY28 targets, they have all the attention of the management team, all the focus of the board, and so we're laser-focused on this, and it's driving a lot in terms of our day-to-day focus of the management team.

Thanks, Sean. We have one more live question that came in just asking for a comment on the current state of our operations in Jamaica following the hurricane. I don't know which one of you wants to answer it. Any of you could?

I'll jump in and say that I wouldn't say we're back at 100% of what we have. We are doing some renovations, but the teams are back at their desks. And where we don't have full capacity, we definitely have capacity in our service centers in Tunisia and the Philippines, which all stepped up big time. in terms of helping out in the moment of the hurricane. So we're fine. I'd overlay that with, unfortunately, the hurricane hit right in a week or two before our peak period, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, kind of the worst time of year to hit in terms of a peak season capacity. Besides having built back capacity, the volumes we have going through service centers in all parts of our business are lower now than they are in the peak period at the end of November, early December. So we're fine.

And maybe I could just add two things. One is, I mean, this hurricane devastated Montego Bay. And so like, you know, our team members suffered devastating impact, you know, and we've done a lot to try and help them. But frankly, I mean, these, I said this multiple times internally, you know, made me proud to be part of this team. seeing the response to help them, but also the response to help make sure that, you know, our operations were running smoothly to support customers too. And I just want to make sure it's clear that in terms of the impact financially, from an operational standpoint, things are stable and we don't expect continued impact in terms of higher cost or lost gross profit in terms of how we support customers. Operationally, we're back to a stable place. Now, they continue to improve a little bit, but we're stable. We will continue to have some cost of just getting the office back to where it needs to be. The normal kind of remediation, that's where we do expect to have coverage from an insurance perspective. And so I would not expect this to be of any significance in terms of any drag on results in the second half of the year. And in fact, as we noted, yeah, we'll pursue opportunities to recover some of the costs we've already incurred in the second half of the year. It's unknown when exactly we would recover that. That could stem into next fiscal year, but that process is very active.

Thank you so much, both of you. So that's it for the live and pre-submitted questions that came in. So I'm going to turn things over to Robert to wrap up the call.

Thank you, Meredith. So the critical takeaways from the announcement we made last night, the conversation today, are that halfway through fiscal 26, we are on track to deliver better financial results compared to our initial guidance for the year. The reason that's the case is because we are consistently increasing Executing and progressing in all the key areas that I've discussed today that are very consistent with what we talked about in July, in September, and I would say even in the years before that. These are elevated products that drive a step function improvement to our per customer LTV, measured as gross profit per customer, MCP in the manufacturing capabilities that reduce cost of goods, and OPEX by sharing overhead. increasing the velocity of new product introductions and user experience improvements, leveraging AI and other technologies to drive efficiencies, and as someone just alluded to in the last question, I would say also revenue opportunities as we get into things like agentic commerce in the future, increasing cross-sympathetic collaboration via XCF, but also via broader collaborations as exemplified by the announcements we made with Vistaprint national pen and bill to sign. All of those factors reinforce our confidence in our path to fiscal 28 EBITDA of at least $600 million and approximately 45% free cash flow conversion, coupled with, as we've said many times, significant reductions in our net leverage. So I'll wrap up by saying thank you to our investors for joining the call, and thank you for continuing to entrust your capital with us. Have a great day.

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating, and you may now disconnect.