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spk05: Thank you for standing by and welcome to the Outfront third quarter 2023 earnings conference call. My name is Sam and I will be your moderator for today's call. All lines will be muted during the presentation portion of the call with an opportunity for questions and answers at the end. If you'd like to ask a question, you can do so by pressing star 1 on your telephone keypad. I'd now like to turn the call over to Stephan Bisson with Outfront. Stephan, please go ahead.
spk02: Thank you, Sam. Good afternoon and thank you for joining for 2023. third quarter earnings call. With me on the call today are Jeremy Mayle, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, and Matthew Siebel, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. After a discussion of our financial results, we'll open the lines for a question and answer session. Our comments today will refer to the earnings release and a slide presentation that you can find on the investor relations section of our website, outfront.com. After today's call has concluded, a replay will be available there as well. This conference call may include forward-looking statements. Relevant factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from these forward-looking statements are listed in our earnings materials and in our SEC filings, including but not limited to our 2022 Form 10-K and our September 30, 2023 Form 10-Q, which we expect to file tomorrow. We will refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures on this call. Any references to OIDA made today will be on an adjusted basis. Reconciliations avoidance and other non-GAAP financial measures are in the appendix of the slide presentation, the earnings release, and on our website, which also includes presentations on prior period reconciliation. Let me now turn the call over to Karen.
spk00: Thanks, Stefan, and thank you, everyone, for joining us today. We're pleased to be here today reporting our third quarter results, which came in pretty much as we indicated when we spoke three months ago. As you can see on slide three, which summarizes our headline numbers, total consolidated revenue was slightly up during the quarter. Adjusted EBITDA declined 5% year over year, principally due to weaker transit and other results. And AFFO was down primarily due to higher interest and lower EBITDA. Slide four shows our revenue results by segment. Total U.S. media revenues were slightly up on a reported basis year over year. Other, which consists mostly of Canada, was up 2% on an as reported basis and 4% on an organic constant dollar basis. While we're speaking of Canada, I want to briefly discuss the pending sale of our Canadian business, which you may have read about in our press release last week. On October 23rd, we announced that we entered into a share purchase agreement for the sale of our Canadian business with Bell Media. As previously disclosed in our NK, the purchase price is Canadian dollars 410, subject to adjustments, and we expect to close the transaction in the first half of 2024. This strategic transaction will provide our front with additional financial flexibility through the leveraging of our balance sheets. We look forward to continuing to work with our Canadian colleagues on the great business we've built together until the deal closes. So turning back to the quarter, you can see the components of our US media revenues in more detail on slide five. Billboard, which remains about 80% of revenues, grew 2.6%, with solid performance in most of our markets. Transit revenues were down 8.6% year-over-year, given lower national revenues, which I'll discuss in a bit more detail on slide six. Here you can see our local and national revenue performance. Our local business was strong, up 6% year-over-year, but this was largely offset by our national business. As we noted on the last call, national faced some headwinds during the quarter, with the writers' and actors' strikes curtailing entertainment ad spend and technology's year of efficiency pushing some advertisers to scale back their ad campaigns. As a result of the weaker national revenues, our local-national split was 58% to 42% on the quarter, more locally skewed than our typical 55-45 split. Slide seven illustrates our U.S. billboard yield, which grew nearly 3% year over year to $2,800. This improvement was driven primarily by an increased number of digital faces, which typically generate more dollars per board than our static inventory. Slide eight highlights our digital performance, with digital revenues growing 5.3% in the quarter and representing over 31% of our total revenue, up 150 basis points from last year. Digital billboard revenues were up nearly 7% versus the prior year, primarily because of new inventory. We added 57 digital billboards during the quarter, raising our total to 2,105. Digital transit was up 1%, again, due to an additional inventory compared to last year. On slide nine, you can see the results of our static revenues, which were down 2% year over year, with slight growth in billboard being offset by a decline in transit, which was largely driven by lower bus revenues, a result of the national headwinds we previously discussed. Though static billboard growth remains modest, the fact it continues to grow is notable given the challenging ad environment and the fact that we continue to convert many of our best static boards to digital. With that, let me now hand it over to Matt.
spk03: Thanks, Jeremy, and good afternoon, everyone. I appreciate you joining our call today. Please turn to slide 10 for a more detailed look at our expenses. Total expenses were up approximately $7 million, or 2% year-over-year, entirely driven by billboard lease expenses, which were up $10 million. Excluding lease expenses, costs were even lower versus the prior year period. As we've previously discussed, much of the lease expense growth continues to be associated with the new inventory we've added over the prior 12 months. This growth rate has moderated as we have moved through the year and will continue to do so in the fourth quarter and into 2024. Transit franchise expense went down slightly as the increase in the angle to the New York MTA from the inflation adjustment this year was offset by lower revenue share payments to our other transit franchise OSD maintenance and other expense was down 4%, principally driven by lower production expense and a property tax refund. SG&A expense was up less than 2% versus last year, driven primarily by a higher allowance for accounts, the federal fees and office rent, also partially by lower total compensation expenses. We remain focused on SG&A and expect these expenses to continue to be a lower percentage of revenue in 2024. Corporate expense was down just over $1 million versus last year. This decrease was driven by lower compensation-related expenses, offset slightly by the impact of market fluctuations on the unfunded equity index linked retirement plan. Two out of 11 was additional detail on the sources of OIVDA. U.S. billboard OIVDA was down about 1%, and billboard OIVDA margin was 36.7%, down versus a year ago, but slightly better versus a comparable period in 2019. As we've described in prior periods this year, the margin decline versus 22 is driven by new and acquired inventory, and this inventory is still ramping toward projected revenue levels. Looking forward to 2024, we expect billboard margins will improve versus 2023 as revenues on acquired inventory continue to grow. Transit oil has been up and down approximately $6 million versus the prior year, to lower revenue. While the Hollywood writer and actor strikes had an impact on all parts of our business, trend was disproportionately hurt given its greater exposure to the entertainment vertical and the fall television warrant season in particular. Turning to capital expenditures on slide 12, Q3 CapEx spend was $19 million, including $8 million of maintenance spending. The $6 million required in total CapEx per supplier year was primarily due to lower investments in new digital billboards. For the year, we continue to expect total capex of $80 to $85 million. We believe 2023 maintenance capex will be approximately $25 to $30 million higher than usual, having completed office moves in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. We spent about $12 million on NCA deployment cost per quarter. As we mentioned on our last earnings call, And as a result of our continued expectation of negative aggregate cash flows related to the MTA, we recorded an impairment charge for this amount in the third quarter of 2023. Looking at ASFO on slide 13, you can see our Q3 ASFO over approximately $76 million is down year over year, primarily given this lower EBITDA and higher interest expense. For the year, our ASFO guidance is unchanged from our last update. Please turn to slide 14 for an update on our balance sheet. Middle liquidity is nearly $540 million, including over $40 million of cash and almost $500 million available via our revolver. As of September 30th, our total net leverage was 5.4 times, up slightly from our Q2 level. We remain comfortable with our debt portfolio with our next maturity not being until mid-2025 and approximately a quarter of total debt set at the floating rates. I'd like to expand briefly on the sale of our Canadian business that Jeremy previously mentioned. The $410 million Canadian dollar sale price currently equates to approximately $300 million U.S. dollars at today's exchange rate. We currently expect its tax proceeds to be approximately $290 million. Our intention is to utilize these funds in a manner so that way we may pay down debt and de-web. We closed just $3 million of tuck-in acquisitions in the quarter, again, completing a number of small deals to be committed to in 2022. Given our current commitments, we expect to spend less than $10 million in the fourth quarter. And lastly, we also announced today that our board of directors has declared a 30-cent cash dividend payable on December 29th to shareholders of record and close of business on December 1st. This dividend fulfills our estimated re-obligation for 2023, is $60 million of dividend requirements carried forward for underpayments in 2022 and represents a small return of capital during the year. With that, let me turn the call back to Jeremy.
spk00: Thanks, Matt. The world has grown increasingly complicated over the last three months with various industry stripes, macroeconomic and geopolitical uncertainties permeating through the ad markets. Despite these headwinds, we expect the Q4 revenue growth will be broadly in the same range as Q3, with billboard again at low single digits and transit likely to decline. Before turning the call over to questions, I'd like to briefly reaffirm some of the strategic actions we've taken and continue to pursue. First, as we've discussed, we reached agreement to divest a Canadian business, the proceeds from the sale will allow us to deliver the company by around a third of a ton. Second, we continue to focus on our G&A expenses and are evaluating various initiatives to increase efficiency across business lines. And further, we remain engaged in conversations with some of our transit partners, including the MTA, and are hoping to find mutually agreeable approaches that reflect today's transit environment. At the same time, we remain fully focused on operating our business, which continues to grow despite the environment. In our view, and that of many ad industry forecasts, Adafone remains in the best position of all traditional media for long-term growth, given its increasing audience, increasing digitization, and improving data and analytics. We also believe that our growing automated selling channels provide an excellent opportunity to increase the pool of advertisers that utilize the medium. And with that, Operator, let's now open the lines for questions.
spk05: Great. Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. If you'd like to ask a question, you can do so by pressing star 1 on your telephone keypad. If you'd like to remove your question, you may press star 2. As a reminder, if you're using a speakerphone, please remember to pick up your handset before asking your question. We'll pause here for just a moment as questions begin to register. Our first question comes from the line of Ian Zafino with Oppenheimer. Ian, your line is now open.
spk07: Thank you very much. You know, can you guys just give us a sense of, I know you pointed to some pockets of weakness, maybe also help us understand some of the stronger categories, you know, and some of the other categories that kind of maybe come in as a surprise one way or the other. Thanks.
spk00: Thanks for the question. Yeah, in some ways, Q3 was a sort of an interesting and frustrating quarter for us. You know, our local business performed extremely well. You saw they're up 6%. And it's really our national business where we saw those categories that I mentioned. In fact, if you just look at the TV category and tech, just between those two categories, Our national revenues were down about $16 million, which equates to about eight points of revenue growth in our national capital. So you can see that, you know, the impact of those headwinds. But if we take a step back from that and just assume now that, you know, the difficult kind of reviews were tech and TV. Outside of that, real estate was a little bit down, probably worth calling out. Then on the positive side, We had a good dollar step up and percentage step up in legal. We had a good step up in alcohol, also CPG up, and also education. So actually fairly, you know, broadly based on the upside and really skewed towards those categories I mentioned on the downside.
spk07: Okay, great. Thank you. And then as a follow-up, you know, can you just give us some Maybe a philosophical discussion on the REIT status that you guys have. It just certainly doesn't seem like you're being valued in the market being a REIT. Either it's a dividend you're not being valued for. You're sitting here with some debt. So does it make sense or is it possible or is it feasible to maybe switch the structure? Then you could take your free cash flow and maybe delever with it, pursue some M&A. Maybe help us understand a little bit. from that perspective.
spk03: Thanks. I'll try to take that. First thing, obviously, we're a REIT. We don't control the dividend yield. We control the payout. I appreciate you pointing out that the market's not appreciating our current status. We think being a REIT has a lot of value in avoiding or minimizing our tax liability. We like the structure. works for us. As far as the balance sheet, clearly the B2 sale of Canada and other initiatives that we're working on will help improve that over the course of the next few months as it closes and as our EBITDA performance and some other things pick in. So we feel pretty good about where the balance sheet is. And with that, we think the REIT makes sense for us in our current situation.
spk07: All right, great. Thank you very much.
spk03: Thanks.
spk05: Our next question comes from the line of Cameron McVey with Morgan Stanley. Cameron, your line is now open.
spk04: Hey, thanks for taking my questions. I had a couple. I was wondering if you could give just a little more color on what's driving the elevated billboard lease expense growth recently and, you know, what the expectation for normal long-term the normal long-term growth rate.
spk03: Thanks. On the lease expense, as you know, we put a lot of new inventory in 2022. We look at things, we buy them at the second year, even top performance. So we're kind of in the middle, maybe toward the later half of the ramp up. The lease expense comes on immediately. So it's fully expensed and the revenue ramps up a little slower. you know, especially in such a large acquisition year in 22, we feel the impact still in 23. And again, as I mentioned, it should moderate over the course of, you know, into the next quarter and certainly in 2024.
spk04: Got it. Thanks. And then secondly, you know, last quarter you had mentioned a baseline assumption of around, you know, mid-single digits. I think it was 6.5 percent growth for the MTA contract revenue long term. Has your long-term growth rate assumption for the MTA changed at all, just given what we've seen with transit? Thanks.
spk00: No. As we mentioned on last call, we moderated our performance expectation at the MTA then. There's nothing to suggest that our current forecasts are anything other than absolutely achievable. we remain confident there. It's interesting because if you just think of the categories that we just talked about, I mean, both of those are very sort of disposed towards transit. So while they're a headwind for us this year, next year we would absolutely expect that they could become a tailwind. In fact, just this week it looks like there's quite a strong expectation We're keeping our fingers crossed that there will be resolutions in the actual strike. So that, I think, is good news. And I just wanted to come back to talking about lease expense. You know, this year is absolutely a one-off. If you look back historically, lease expense growth was probably more in the 2%, 3% range for the year, something like that.
spk01: Got it. Thank you.
spk05: Thank you. Our next question is from the line of Jim Goss with Barrington Research. Jim, your line is now open.
spk06: All right, thanks. A couple of questions. First, just to clarify, did you say the after-tax proceeds were $290 million U.S. dollars in terms of that sale to Canada? That was U.S.
spk03: dollars? Yeah, Jim, approximately the... It throws Canadian 410, U.S. 300, a little bit of tax leakage in Canada.
spk06: Yeah, I was surprised there wouldn't have been a little more leakage since you've owned that property for a long time. But that's how it counts.
spk03: Jim, going back to Ian's question, that's one of the benefits of being a REIT is giving capital gain as part of that restructuring.
spk06: Okay. And on the entertainment side, I think you also indicated transit had a bigger impact of somewhat softer entertainment dollars than the other area. What is the share of revenue that is assigned to transit or you're achieving in transit in the entertainment space?
spk03: It's really the focus of TV. Entertainment generally, movies are up for us where TV is down. And I don't know if we gave you the exact number, but more than half of the decline, almost two-thirds of the decline is in transit, about a third of the decline in billboards.
spk06: Okay. And entertainment on the film side, are you actually perhaps getting a little more uh revenue in that uh i think some one of the things that's been pointed out is the actor participation in promoting their films is absent when they're they're on strike and i thought some of that might have accrued to you but maybe not so or at least not sufficiently so yeah
spk00: You know, the number we called out was specifically for TV. You know, that's why we really, you know, in the third quarter really noticed it because there was essentially no full launch. But right now, I mean, the film category for us has been fine. No problems at all.
spk06: Okay. I think that's it for the moment. I appreciate it.
spk00: Thank you. Thank you.
spk05: Thank you. We have no additional questions waiting at this time, so as a final reminder, to ask a question, it is star 1 on your telephone keypad. We'll pause again here for just a moment. With that, I'd like to hand the call back over to Jeremy for any closing or additional remarks.
spk00: Thanks, Sam, and thanks, everyone, again, for joining our call today. I'm sure we'll be seeing many of you at various conferences over the next few months, but for this, I don't.
spk01: Please enjoy the upcoming holiday season that we're presenting and the results to you. Thanks very much.
spk05: That concludes the Outfront Third Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call. Thank you all for your participation. You may now disconnect your lines.
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