Brinks Company (The)

Hello, and welcome to the Brinks Company's second quarter 2023 earnings call. This morning, Brinks issued a press release detailing its second quarter 2023 results. The company also filed an 8K that includes the release and the slides that will be used in today's call. The release and slides are available in the investor relations section of the company's website at investors.brinks.com. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded and will be available for replay. This call and the Q&A session will contain forward-looking statements. Actual results could differ materially from projected or estimated results. Information regarding factors that could cause such differences are available in the footnotes of today's press release and in the company's most recent SEC filings. Information presented and discussed on this call is representative of today only. Brinks assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements. The call is copyrighted and may not be used without written permission from Brinks. I will now turn the call over to your host, Jesse Jenkins, Vice President of Investor Relations. Mr. Jenkins, you may begin.

Thanks and good morning. Joining me today are Brink CEO Mark Eubanks and CFO Kirk McMacken. This morning we reported second quarter 2023 results on a GAAP, non-GAAP and constant currency basis. Most of our comments today will be focused on our non-GAAP results. because we believe these results make it easier for investors to assess operating performance between periods. Reconciliations of non-GAAP results to their most comparable GAAP results are provided in the press release, the appendix of the presentation, and in this morning's 8K filing. I'll now turn the call over to Brink's CEO, Mark Eubanks.

Thanks, Jesse, and good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us. Starting on slide three, we delivered record revenue and operating profit in the second quarter. Total revenue was up 7%, including organic growth of 8%. Our cash and valuables management business grew organically by 5%, and the ATM managed services and digital retail solutions customer offerings were up 19% organically. Operating profit was up 6% in total and 13% organically for a margin of 10.8%. Adjusted EBITDA of $194 million was up 4%, with a margin of 16%. Cash generation remains a key focal point of the business and I'm pleased to report an improvement of 233% or $115 million in free cash flow year to date as we made meaningful progress this quarter towards our cash conversion target for the year. Looking at the performance drivers, we remained vigilant in our pricing efforts in our cash and valuables management business and delivered another quarter of strong price realization in excess of inflation across all of our segments. With inflation down from a year ago in most of our markets, pricing growth has moderated from the highs we saw in the previous periods, but remains a key part of our plans going forward as we drill down to a more strategic approach to pricing. The strategic growth engines of AMS and DRS continue to bolster our results with 44% growth year to date and positive momentum in the back half with good customer interest creating actionable pipelines. Our increased focus on free cash flow at the local level has generated strong results as we've ingrained these cash discussions into our normal operations with our country leaders and are starting to make real progress on cash conversion. As a reminder, 2023 was the first year we've added free cash flow targets to our annual management incentive plan, which applies to the roughly top 200 global leaders across Brinks. Working capital improvements, along with the EBITDA growth, has generated $115 million more cash than this time last year, well on our way to delivering the approximate $150 million year-on-year improvement that we laid out with our full-year guidance. On the operating margin side, we continue to drive costs out of our business with the rigorous implementation of lean through the Brinks business system the execution of our 2022 global restructuring plans, and the revenue mixed benefits of AMS and DRS growth. These gains were offset by a $12 million year-on-year increase in security losses, primarily from a single event in our global services line of business. Kurt will have more on the loss and its impact later in the presentation, but these large losses can be lumpy in nature quarter to quarter, but due to the way that we budget and the way that we manage risk, We do not expect this loss to have an impact on our full year guidance. Now, halfway through the year, we remain firmly on our plan and have affirmed the full year guidance for revenue and free cash flow and affirmed the guidance that we increased last quarter for operating profit, adjusted EBITDA, and earnings per share. Turning to slide four, I'd like to provide a few more details on the customer offerings that are driving our performance. The cash and valuables management line of our business grew 5% organically in a quarter. We remain focused on managing inflation in the business and are seeing positive results in our pricing initiatives. As expected, pricing growth is moderating to more historic levels from the peaks that we saw last year in several of our key markets as we lacked historically high inflation coming out of COVID last year. We continue to see pricing opportunities across all services, as we deliver a more consistent customer experience and shift our offerings to provide more additional value added services. The Brinks Business System is our framework for business excellence and operational improvements across all areas of the business. Commercially, we're focused on improving our customer experience with an increasing value proposition related to cash payment efficiency, accurate reconciliations, and working capital transparency. we're developing solutions for a broader set of customers by reducing our cost to serve while driving service and quality improvements. On the cost side of our business, we're driving meaningful productivity. By leveraging best practices, we've been able to drive efficiencies in labor management and fleet utilization in all of our segments. The results of our efforts are translating to the numbers, with year-to-date operating margins in North America improving by 190 basis points, European margins improved by 90 basis points and our rest of world segment improved by 110 basis points. I'm encouraged by the progress, but I'm confident that we're just scratching the surface on the potential we have for efficiency gains as we share best practices from the top performers across the globe within our business. Let's discuss some of the visible improvements specifically in our North American segment resulting from the Brinks business system. Year-to-date service metrics have improved to roughly 98% on-time delivery, and our quality and accuracy metrics, which is measured by our customer SLAs, have improved greater than 30% versus year-end 2022. Both service and quality improvements across the year are being recognized by the market as we complete our mid-year discussions and hear from our top customers. We also continue to make meaningful progress in employee relations as we focus on the health and safety of all Brinks colleagues. In the area of safety, we see a greater than 25% improvement in our recordable incident rate, and we're also seeing a continued reduction in frontline turnover. Our North America Human Resources team has done a great job understanding all of the drivers of employee turnover and have recently improved our training and interviewing procedures for our leaders to ensure that we're onboarding the right employees and training them effectively for their job. With longer-tenured employees, safety, customer service, quality, and efficiency metrics continue to improve. Now turning to digital retail solutions and ATM managed services. We delivered 25% organic growth and 44% total growth year to date. On a trailing 12 month basis, we now have 19% of our total revenue represented by these higher growth, higher margin businesses, up from 18% last quarter and 16% at the end of 2022. The conversion is also helping our impressive cash flow conversion, where we see meaningful DSO improvement, particularly in Europe, driven partially by the DRS AMS revenue growth we've seen across the segment. In DRS, our sales team is gaining momentum and customers are responding to our solutions-based sales approach. In the U.S., June was the best month that we've had this year for DRS contract bookings, And that momentum has carried into the early part of third quarter. As we continue to improve our operating cadence around DRS, we've increased our focus on shortening the period from contract signing to installation and the associated revenue recognition that comes with those agreements. This is a natural extension of our focus on customer loyalty as we work closely through the sales and onboarding process to collaboratively set rollout plans that align with our customer expectations. We continue to see demand for DRS across a wide range of retail verticals. In addition to the success in the quick serve restaurant vertical I mentioned last quarter, in Q2, we closed several significant deals representing hundreds of locations each. These customers were represented by a large arts and craft retailer, a publicly traded entertainment company, and a large multinational fashion retailer in Mexico. We continue to find success with our DRS offerings in these new verticals by targeting individual customers with application-specific value propositions. In AMS, we've completed the rollout of the BPCE network in France at the end of 2022. Recently, we signed two additional banks that will leverage the same infrastructure. We're currently in the project planning phases and expect to have these two networks online and integrated by the end of 2024. The team is working on optimizing routes around the new locations and integrating the new endpoints into our technology stack and workflows. We also continue to make progress integrating the capabilities of Note Machine into the broader business, but particularly in Europe. Having already developed the infrastructure and logistical footprint needed for a holistic AMS experience, we remain uniquely positioned to help our customers reduce their cost of ATM ownership. We're engaging with many financial institutions and independent ATM operators around the world who are interested in the AMS offering, as well as our expertise in the area. We recently added two additional banks to our AMS portfolio in Jordan and have initiated several new customer pilots in Latin America, as well as continue to work a robust global pipeline of AMS deals in all segments. Turning to slide five and starting on the left, Total revenue was up 7%. The organic growth of 8% I mentioned earlier was supplemented by 3% growth from acquisitions, primarily from the note machine acquisition in Europe we completed in Q4 of last year. And currency translation was a 4% headwind in the period. Looking at the segments, we drove continued AMS DRS growth in Europe and delivered 21% organic growth across the Latin America region. In North America, revenue was slightly down due to lapping a prior year equipment sale to a large DRS enterprise customer, as well as the continued optimization of our customer portfolio profitability. These results were in line with our expectations, and with good progress on DRS and another 90 basis points of margin expansion in the segment, we remain confident in our outlook for the year. Report operating profit was $132 million with a margin of 10.8% and adjusted EBITDA was 194 million with a margin of 16%. Excluding the timing related impact of the security losses from the reported numbers, we would have generated a $20 million increase in both operating profit and EBITDA year on year with operating margin expansion of 90 basis points and EBITDA expansion of 60 basis points. As I previously mentioned, The margin expansion was driven by strong productivity, the execution of our restructuring actions, and the revenue mixed benefits as we shift to higher margin AMS and DRS revenue. The Brinks business system continues to deliver results and consistency across our commercial, operations, and technology organizations. Earnings per share results include increased interest expense from higher year-on-year rates of our floating rate debt and would have been up an additional two cents versus 2022 excluding the impact of the one-time security loss. The growth in profits as well as the working capital lifts are driving improved cash conversion with adjusted EBITDA to free cash flow conversion up to 53% in the quarter. Despite the impact of the one-time revenue items in North America and the increased security losses in the period, we remain firmly on our plans for the year and continue to build momentum with DRS and AMS volume and 120 basis points of profit margin expansion versus last year. I remain encouraged by our progress and excited about the future as we shape the business around these two accretive services. I'll now hand it over to Kurt, who'll lead us through the revenue operating profit EBITDA and EPS bridge, in addition to providing some more details on our strong free cash flow performance, as well as our capital allocation plans. I'll return with guidance and a few closing comments.

Kurt? Thanks, Mark. Beginning on slide six, revenue was up $122 million, or 11%, on a constant currency basis, primarily from 8% organic growth, which benefited from AMS and DRS organic growth of 19%, and price realization across all segments. We achieved record revenues in the quarter, highlighted by 21% organic growth in Latin America and strong AMS DRS growth in Europe. As Mark mentioned, North America revenue was down 1% organically, which was in line with our expectations. The decline was driven by the impact of one-time items in the period, primarily from equipment sales in the prior period related to onboarding a large DRS enterprise customer. The decline also included the continued rationalization of our customer portfolio to optimize profitability. We remain confident in our progress in North America, supported by the strong DRS sales pipeline Mark mentioned earlier, and the 90 basis points of margin expansion we delivered in the quarter. Acquisitions added 3% to total company revenue, and FX translation was a headwind of $40 million, or 4%, versus the prior year, primarily due to the Argentine peso. Reported revenue was $1.2 billion, up 7% versus last year. Second quarter operating profit and constant currency was up $22 million, or 18% versus last year, primarily from organic growth of 13%. Organic profit growth across each of our segments was driven by profitable growth in higher margin lines of business, disciplined pricing that offset inflation, cost productivity leveraging the Brinks business system, and the execution of our 2022 global restructuring plans. Segment profit growth was partly offset by $6 million in higher unallocated corporate expenses, including a $12 million increase in security losses. primarily stemming from a large loss event in our global services line of business. As part of our normal budgeting process, we analyze years of historical information to create an estimate for the upcoming year that we budget to occur evenly over the course of the year. As we saw in the second quarter, occasionally large losses occur that extend beyond our budget and discrete quarters. Due to the way that we manage risk, we see the second quarter increase as a timing matter, that is not expected to have an impact on our full-year profit guidance. Excluding the impact of security losses, unallocated corporate expenses were down by $7 million, and our organic incremental margins were approximately 33%. Acquisitions added another 5% to operating profit, and foreign exchange was a 12% headwind, resulting in reported total operating profit of $132 million, up 6% versus last year. Next, we will turn to EBITDA and EPS on slide seven. Starting with our operating profit and walking left to right, second quarter interest expense was $51 million, up $19 million versus last year, primarily due to increased rates year over year, as well as increased debt from the note machine acquisition. Tax expense was $25 million, $4 million lower than last year from lower profit before taxes in the quarter. As a result of tax planning actions, we were able to lower our forecasted 2023 effective tax rate by 100 basis points to 30%, 30 basis points lower than last year's rate. In total, $132 million of operating profit, less interest expense, taxes, and non-controlling interest and other generated $56 million of income from continuing operations, which generated $1.18 of earnings per share. Excluding the impact of the $12 million increase in security losses, EPS would have been $1.36 per share. Depreciation and amortization were $54 million, up $6 million versus the prior year, due primarily to the note machine acquisition. As discussed, interest and taxes were $51 million and $25 million respectively. Non-cash stock-based compensation expense and other were $9 million, down $5 million versus last year. The reduction was in line with expectations, and the 9 million run rate is roughly the expectation for the remaining quarters of the year. Second quarter adjusted EBITDA of 194 million was up 8 million versus last year, primarily due to the flow through of higher operating profit. Now, turning to slide eight, I'd like to spend a few minutes on capital allocation. I'll start with a few highlights on free cash flow on the left-hand side of the slide. Year to date, we have generated 66 million of free cash flow, representing $115 million increase over last year, and a significant portion of the $147 million increase we're targeting for the full year at the midpoint of our guidance. The year to date increase was primarily from adjusted EBITDA growth and sustainable working capital improvements. The working capital result was driven by DSO improvements across the business, including continued accounts receivable recovery in Mexico, where our teams continue to make solid progress following last year's regulatory change to invoicing requirements. We are also starting to see working capital benefits from our shift to subscription-based DRS AMS offerings. Adjusted EBITDA and working capital improvements were partly offset by higher cash interest, primarily due to higher variable interest on our floating rate debt, as well as a one-time payment for the previously discussed security loss. As a reminder, our floating rate debt makes up about 40% of our total debt. Looking at our capital allocation priorities, our first priority remains organic investments in our business. We continue to make investments in the business that will drive growth, and as Mark discussed in detail, we're driving productivity gains through investments in the Brinks business system. These investments will largely be OPEX-related and managed within our operating profit and EBITDA guidance. Turning to leverage, our second quarter leverage ratio remained at 3.2 times. We're firmly on track to achieve our targeted leverage of between two and three times by year end. In capital returns, we have 180 million in remaining capacity on our existing share repurchase plan after purchasing approximately $18 million of shares year to date through June 30th. Coming up, the strong free cash flow performance we saw year to date and with better visibility into performance in the back half of the year, we expect to accelerate share repurchases in the third quarter and beyond. We remain focused on the capital allocation priorities in our business that drive profitable growth and compound cash generation and ultimately return excess cash to our shareholders. I'm encouraged by our start to the year and look forward to continued growth, margin expansion, and cash generation in the back half of the year. Now I'll hand it back over to Mark to discuss guidance.

Thanks, Kurt. The table on the left provides a summary of our firm full year guidance. We're off to a strong start so far in 2023 and on track to achieve revenue growth of six to 9% driven by organic growth of seven to 11%. We expect AMS DRS revenue to make up approximately 20% of our base by year end. We also expect operating profit and adjusted EBITDA to grow by approximately a hundred million dollars each with margin expansion of approximately 120 basis points and 90 basis points respectively. Free cash flow is expected to improve by approximately $150 million year on year to $350 million at the midpoint. With year-to-date improvement of $115 million in the first six months, we're well on our way to achieving this step change in cash conversion for the business. Earnings per share is still expected between $6.45 and $7.15 per share with 14% growth, approximately double the rate of our revenue growth. Given our strong performance in the first half and with line of sight to our leverage targets and accelerating free cash flow conversion, we plan to increase share repurchase activity starting in the third quarter, as Kirk mentioned. I'm pleased with our performance to this point, and we remain on track with our full year expectations. Our AMS and DRS growth strategy, underpinned by improving operating productivity through the Brinks business system, is generating margin expansion and compounding free cash flow. Through the hard work of our teams, we've made meaningful progress in these areas and continue to gain momentum for the future. I'm confident these sustainable improvements in the business will drive meaningful shareholder value as we move forward in the year and beyond. Now, let's open up for questions.

Operator? We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. If you're using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. And to withdraw your question, please press star, then two. At this time, we will take our first question, which will come from George Tong with Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.

Hi, thanks. Good morning. Cash and valuables grew 5% organically this quarter. What's a reasonable and sustainable rate of growth in this business, and how does that growth break down into pricing and volumes?

Yeah, George, as we talked about before, we can, you know, look back and sort of demonstrate this over the last 10, you know, 12 years of continued mid-single digit growth. And we expect that to continue in both the same framework of sort of a 50-50 price to volume as we think about that over time. As we talked about last year during this COVID recovery cycle and high inflation, we were closer to 60-40, more price to volume. But see that continuing to moderate. And I think you saw it in the quarter. We talked about it last quarter that looking forward, we thought pricing would moderate coming out of that unusual inflation period.

Got it. That's helpful. And then secondly, your DRS and AMS business, combined grew a strong 19% organically in terms of mix was 19% of total trailing 12-month revenue. Can you elaborate on how DRF and AMS individually are performing, basically trying to see if both are approximately equally contributing to the growth and mix, or if one has more of an impact than the other?

Sure. You know, George, we don't – you know, explicitly disclose those separately, but they're, they're largely in line with each other. They're both contributing. They're both, you know, similar of similar scale. And so we continue to see, um, the organic piece of that continuum, obviously a little bit of extra inorganic growth from the note machine acquisition we closed last year in Q4. We also though, you know, as we think about the customer's acquisition and the sales, A lot of times these AMS contracts could be larger, so they could be lumpier, just like we would see with the BPCE contract we brought on at the end of last year fully, where AMS might be a smoother ramp, let's say, but both are continuing to grow and both are not only contributing with new customers, but also converting customers that we already have from a traditional CIT solution to a DRS solution or a traditional ATM replenishment to an ATM managed services agreement.

Got it. Very helpful. Thank you.

Great. Thanks, George. And our next question will come from Toby Summer with Truist Securities. Please go ahead.

Thanks. I was wondering if you could give us a little bit more color on the the win in progress in the French market in AMS and how your existing customer and the new customers, how that's going to function? Sure.

Good morning, Toby. This is Mark. So the way that these contracts go, you know, we – we are taking on basically their ATM network and responsibility for operating their ATM network. And that's everything from monitoring to dispatch and dispatch of both first and second line mains as well as cash replenishment. And so as we bring on new customers and their networks, we are able to leverage all of the workflow tech stack that we've developed and invested in to build out the infrastructure to maintain. That also includes the ability to optimize our logistics network in a more optimized way around these new locations. And so that's really, you know, there's not a whole lot of interaction between the customers themselves. It's more us leveraging the investments in both technology and infrastructure that we've built. Okay, thank you.

I had a question about your incremental margin comment. I think you said it was in the 30s if you exclude the security loss. Is that a good... framework, or is the quarterly performance X, the security loss, sort of higher or lower than you would expect over time?

Yeah, I'd say it's about right, Toby, and that's largely in line with what we had expected and where we're seeing the improvements in the business that we're driving, not only from the restructuring that we've talked about explicitly, but also the ongoing performance both commercially and operationally. First on price, not just on inflationary pricing, but price optimization and strategic pricing we're doing across the portfolio to make sure that, we've talked about this in the past, where we've got some large disparity with common customers that we're making sure that we're driving a consistent pricing and equivalent to our value proposition. On the operational side, this is really the Brinks business system. continuing to drive productivity. And, you know, putting a wrapper and a name around a program doesn't do that. It's people, it's process, and it's continuing to have discipline around standard work and being able to deploy that standard work from branch to branch, from country to country, and region to region.

Yeah, hey, Toby, it's Kurt. I was going to add on to Mark's comment. I mean, traditionally, I think you'd see the business You know, somewhere between 25% and 28% incremental basis, if you want to look at it that way. And to Mark's point, we're really working to try to march that upward. Obviously, it can shift a little bit depending on mix of business, both geography and line of business. But that's exactly right. You know, we think that what we're trying to do between pricing and Brinks Business System operational improvements is continue to march that incremental rate up. towards 30 and lower 30s.

Yeah, and I'd say that maybe it ties back to the question a little bit, Toby, on the AMS side. Once we have a network deployed and we've made the initial investments around workflow integrations, technology deployment, and software, then the incremental adds of additional onto the network are very similar to, let's say, the traditional you know, CIT kind of marginal cost ads as we think about adding customers, you know, next door to each other. Density matters, and it matters, again, across the technology stack as well. And we would expect, frankly, that to continue to progress, certainly with volume as we leverage, you know, the seasonality as we think about, you know, volume into from first half to second half.

Thanks. And I wanted to get your perspective. You came out with your cash flow guidance and focused on that improving, spread out some incentive compensation within the organization. But you've now been in the throes of working that direction for a while. So I'm wondering if you've had new ideas and processes that can kind of further your goals that have percolated up from the 200 people who now have skin in the game. and are working towards that goal.

Yeah. Yeah, Toby, let me just try to address that. I mean, we are seeing a lot of good traction with what's coming up through the organization in terms of additional ideas around driving cash flow. So, you know, number one, we've talked about in the past is also just their understanding the importance of the DRS-AMS mix and how that actually improves the cash flow profile of the business. and because they tend to be recurring revenue contracts, and because those contracts tend to have much shorter payment terms on them, that's really resonated. And so that is an additional driver to the growth of those and improves cash flow. But I would say there's also more ideas just coming out throughout the balance sheet. So we mentioned accounts receivable, but we're also seeing it on the payable side. We're seeing it in other areas of the balance sheet coming up from from the business. So, you know, look, the awareness and the focus on is just getting people more aware of what really drives it. And then the final thing I'd say is, you know, the reality is that, you know, a lot of what gets into success around accounts receivable is just being rigorous around it and the discipline around it and the just working it day in and day out and staying on top of it. And we've definitely seen that in the business increase.

Thank you very much. And that concludes our question and answer session.

Great. Thanks for joining us today, everyone. We appreciate your support and look forward to speaking to all of you on our next earnings call in early November. Have a great day.

The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect your lines.