Data Communications Management Corp.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for standing by and welcome to the Data Communications Management Corp. Fiscal 2024 Financial Results Conference Call. My name is James Lorimer, CFO of DCM, and I'm pleased to be hosting today's call. Joining me today is Richard Kellam, our President and Chief Executive Officer. Following our prepared remarks, we will be moderating a Q&A session. As a reminder, this conference call is being broadcast live and recorded. We'd also like to remind everyone that Richard and I can be available after the call for any follow-up questions that you may have. Before we begin, I will remind everyone that we will be referring to forward-looking information on today's call. This information is subject to certain risks and uncertainties as outlined in the forward-looking information disclosure in our press release and more fully within our public disclosure filings on CDAR+. We have posted a brief video message from Richard along with a summary of our results and key achievements in 2024 on our website in the form of an infographic. Our detailed information is also available on our website and CDAR+. Please also follow us on LinkedIn to keep up to date with other business developments. And I'll now turn the call over to Richard.

Thank you, James. So here's what we want to accomplish in the next half hour. I want to talk about our special and recurring dividend, have a look at the achievements and highlights of 2024, our financial results, talk about the platform we've built for profitable growth, and we'll turn it over to Q&A. Okay, James. Kicking off with our returning capitalist shareholders, I want to say that the hard work on integration is behind us and happy to report that we are about a half a year ahead of schedule and we're on budget from a restructuring perspective and we're on the 30 to 35 million synergy capture as we'll see a little later on in the presentation. I also want to thank all of our shareholders who have stuck with us through this journey. 2024 was a big year for us in terms of bringing these two sizable businesses together. So thank you for sticking with us. And we are very confident in our plans for future as we move into 2025 and onward. And as such, you saw the announcement we put out to the street a couple of weeks ago, as such, We have put the special dividend in place at 20 cents per share and committed to quarterly dividends of two and a half cents a share in cash. And that would imply a dividend yield of about four and a half percent at the current share price. We're very pleased with where we are. As I said, the heavy work and the restructuring is behind us, and now is the opportunity to move forward and grow this business, and we're happy to return this capital to the shareholders. So having a look at our achievements or accomplishments in 2024, I'm going to spend a little bit of time on this page because I think it's important that we unpack the results. The first pillar here, anybody look at the slides, Our 2024 results, record levels of revenue, as you'll see in a minute, gross profit and adjusted EBITDA, and positive outlook provides opportunities, as I said, to return capital to shareholders. On the integration side, the integration of Moore Canada Corp or RR Donnelly Canada, the plan consolidation is complete. We went from 14 facilities to 10. That all was complete by the end of 2024, as I said, about a half a year ahead of schedule and on budget. We have now moved all of our clients on to the the uh dcm client workflow client digital platform so a lot of client migration hundreds of clients need to be moved between legacy mcc systems to the dcm system so that is all complete Our technology infrastructure migration, and I'm sure a lot of shareholders have been through this in your own companies where you've had to take ERP systems and move from two or three to one. That is complete. We moved SAP, which was a legacy MCC system, into D365, and that is complete. It was completed by end of year, so we now have one invoice for all clients, all customers. Finally, as we think about stepping into 2025, there will be little to no adjustment between EBITDA and adjusted EBITDA because all of our restructuring and integration charges are behind us. So happy that that is all done, as I said, about a half a year ahead of schedule. We've had profitability improvements. We've reduced fixed cost overhead. We exited all of our low-margin businesses that came through the acquisition. We leaned in hard to strategic revenue management process, looking at all of our lines of business and all of our clients, and we reduced outsourcing significantly. This is a product that was put up to third parties, most of it through the acquired company, and we've moved all of that production into our own facilities. And finally, pleased with the capital investments that we've made, new state-of-the-art equipment with very high ROI. I'll give you an example. Our label business, we used to have seven label presses in the Trenton facility. Obviously that was one of the facilities that was closed. We replaced that with three new state-of-the-art presses in Brampton, our Torbram facilities, who went from seven to three. And our production capability and capacity is much higher than these seven originals. So there's one example. There's several I could provide. We've also put some new product and some new market activities into the market. Significant facility improvements in Brampton. know we'll talk a little bit later as well we introduced two new ai enabled sas offerings uh assemble as well as the acquired xavi platform so lots accomplished and achieved in 2024 and uh and built a platform for success for 2025. okay having a look at our results in 2024 i'm going to start off with revenues and then james will take you through gross margin and ebitda revenues up 7.2 percent versus 2023 And if you look at this chart, you go back to 2021, our revenues are actually double what they were in 2021. You see 2021, we were 235, now we're 480. Now, I will say that if you look at that 480, the pro forma or underlying or organic underlying growth certainly was impacted. We expected a number slightly higher than the 480, and it was impacted for a few reasons. One is We exited some lower margin, unprofitable businesses, probably a little bit more than we expected through due diligence. But that is all behind us and those are exited businesses now. We obviously closed facilities and we closed them faster than we planned. And that certainly had some impact on workflow, which is fine because I'd rather have the impact captured so we have a clean year in 2025. Obviously, the consolidation of ERP impacted some of that underlying organic growth as well. And then, of course, we got hit by a postal strike. Canada Post is a large client of ours. We service and provide services to 5,900 post offices across Canada. So that went on longer than we expected and obviously some cancellation of direct mail. So you take that all into consideration. Obviously, it affected our underlying performance a little bit more than we expected, but i'm happy to say that we're still 7.2 percent growth and we built a nice clean and clear platform for growth moving forward into 2025 and onward and i do want to point to this chart as well because i don't think you know shareholders have a lot of opportunities to study this but we do of course uh if you look back to 21 and 22 21 20 21 and 2022 this is when we were a standalone business pre-acquisition and you can see we added 38 million dollars of organic growth into our business between 21 and 2022 so we know how to grow the business and as i said for all the reasons i already said um you know uh it obviously interrupted some of that underlying performance in 2024 uh but we're now back to kind of where we were in 2020 uh 2022 and we've built a great growth muscle so we will see that uh uh performance improve um now that the uh now that the the hard work is behind us if you will okay so moving on to uh gross profit James?

Thanks, Richard. Gross profit hit record levels in 2024 of $130 million, and that was up 9.4% from the prior year. As we say, we like to see gross profit growing at a faster rate than revenue, and that compares to the 7.2% revenue growth we saw. Gross margin also improved over last year, and that was as we completed a lot of the facility integration. I remind shareholders that the two largest facility consolidations happened in the kind of the end of the third quarter and really were fully completed in the fourth quarter. So with those facility closures behind us, you know, we're optimistic in terms of continued margin growth going into 2025. You'll see the 30.8% gross margin that we achieved in 2022. We believe we're well on track to getting back to north of 30% gross margins as we continue to grow the business. Adjusted EBITDA hit also a record $63.9 million in the year and that was up 19%, almost 20% compared to the prior year. And again, the accelerated growth there, you know, higher than the growth rate in revenue and also higher than the growth rate in gross profit. And that was because of a lot of the synergy realization that we achieved in the SG&A line. Again, you'll see that prior to the acquisition, we were in the 15% gross EBITDA margin range. We believe we're tracking north back to that kind of 14% to 15% EBITDA target over the next near term.

Having a look at our revenue by reported segment on this chart, you can see I'll point to three things here. One is our product sales are up 5.6% over a year ago. Number two is our warehousing is up significantly. We've done a lot more kitting and fulfillment and providing services out to retailers as well as large FIs that have branch locations. So that's a new service or an extended or a fast-growing service for us. And then the third thing I'll point to is our technology services. You can see that we're now at $20 million in revenue from technology services. That includes programming, project management, SAS, and software licenses. So very, very good growth there. And you can see that on the next slide, James, if you jump to the next slide. On our software solutions or our technology solutions, we've gone from 5.3 million in 2022 up to 20 million in 2024. And that is certainly a higher margin revenue for us. So our tech enabled in SaaS solutions and the technology we bring to clients is certainly being recognized. And it's about 4.2% of revenue up from 1.9% in 2022. And lots of room to continue to grow that as we move through 25 and onward. Thanks. Also, we continue to have a lot of diversity between verticals and between clients. You can see on the chart on the left, lots of 10 key verticals that we focus on. From a client perspective, not a single client that is more than 6% of revenue, but 250 clients represent 89% of total revenue. um and uh you know beyond the 250 we've got a large lot of large enterprise clients where we can we call it expand revenue so deliver expansion revenue opportunities um so again lots of diversity and this diversity sets us up well for growth in 2025 and onward

We've also delivered record levels of productivity. A measure that we use is revenue per employee. That grew to $337,000 per employee in 2024. I think what's really important to call out here is the total headcount reductions since the acquisition. We've taken out over 435 individuals. as we've consolidated our footprint and streamlined the organization. So you can see considerable growth even from our pre-acquisition levels where we're at about $300,000 per employee, but particularly from 2021 when we're about $255,000 per employee. In terms of synergies, we're pleased to announce that we did achieve our targeted $30 to $35 million in annualized synergies. So as we exited 2024, all those synergy achievements are now behind us, and we expect to realize the full benefit in 2025 and going forwards.

Okay, thank you, James. So we have built a solid base for profitable growth. Our integration initiatives, as I've already mentioned a few times, are fully complete and behind us. Large market opportunities exist within our product portfolio. We've got a great platform for MarTech and AI-enabled digital capabilities, in fact. All the new business that we secure starts with some type of technology. And that's certainly our unique selling proposition in the marketplace. So really pleased with the progress we're making there. We've got targeted new market opportunities and upsized growth opportunities as well, especially with some new verticals that we're penetrating. We're well capitalized, as you'll see in a minute, and positioned to deliver shareholder returns and execute M&A. We certainly have a track record of execution. You know, we've proved that we can consolidate and deliver efficiency and productivity and deliver synergies. And we've certainly proved that we can grow as well. And you'll see that delivered in 2025. And we've got a very growth obsessed, not just senior leadership team, but growth obsessed organization throughout the organization. So very, I'd say we've got a great, a great platform for profitable growth as we move forward here.

We wanted to call out our strong balance sheet. As you can see, we've improved significantly from a total leverage perspective when we made the acquisition about two years ago. And we've declined from about 2.7 times net debt EBITDA on a pro forma basis to about 1.8 times. And so that net debt number has come down nicely. We also have significant opportunities within our balance sheet to grow. At the end of the year, we had almost $6 million in cash net of our bank overdraft. We had excess availability on our revolving line of credit of almost $35 million. And we have an undrawn accordion revolving line of credit that is there should we have the opportunity to draw upon that. So at the end of the year, we had a little over $60 million of kind of total credit availability. So we believe we've got a strong balance sheet to execute on our growth plans. This also was behind our rationale to initiate the special dividend and the recurring quarterly dividend.

OK, turning to our 2025 priorities, I'll just close out on this slide before we get into Q&A. You know, you've heard me say many a times that our number one priority is to drive profitable organic growth. And we will do that by leveraging our expanded suite of tech enabled offerings and really strengthening our presence in key verticals and securing new business wins. And lots of great, you know, lots of great activity in our funnel right now. The second is to deliver return on new capital investments focused on enhancing our production capabilities. You know, the capital investment we made last year, you know, I used to reference on our label presses. We've also made some large format investments and investments in Litho as well. So we're going to sweat those assets hard and deliver great growth and efficiency off those new assets. Third is to continue to drive gross margin. We've been very growth margin obsessed. I like to say gross margin is your best friend and can need to drive improvements through top line revenue, operating efficiencies, as well as our strategic revenue management initiatives that we put in place last year. And then number four, I think really important in today's world is to demonstrate the agility and adaptability to be able to navigate some of the uncertain economic conditions and geopolitical environment that we're in today. and i'm sure we'll get some of those in the q a but uh we're certainly well prepared and and uh adaptability is one of our core values here and we're certainly uh agile and we'll uh we'll live that value very strongly in these uncertain times those are our priorities for for this year super clear well distributed through the organization okay and then our long-term uh financial objectives we're just uh now that restructuring is complete we're reconfirming our long-term objectives those being a kegar of of five percent uh gross profit improvements north of 30 and adjusted evida of over 14 on an annual basis we're just reconfirming those we haven't talked to them in a while But now that 24 is behind us and we've got this platform for a successful profitable growth, we're reconfirming that growth agenda and the gross profit and earnings agenda. Okay, so over to Q&A.

Hey, Pritchard. We'd now like to take questions from the audience. If you have a question and are accessing the call directly through Teams, you can use the raise your hand feature in Teams and we will queue up questions. Alternatively, please also use the chat feature and we will respond to chat questions as well. We have a couple of questions teed up already. Martin, we have looks like Max Ingram, if you could let him into the call, please.

Hey, guys, can you hear me?

Yes. Hi, Matt. Yeah.

Nice morning. Hey, James. Hey, Richard. Thanks for taking my questions. My first one, Richard, you sort of predicted is going to be on tariffs. I was wondering if you could just expand a bit on where the biggest risks would be. I assume it's on raw input costs, but any color you could provide would be helpful.

Yeah, sure. OK, great. Yeah, two things, right? One is just for clarity, but 96% of our revenue is generated in Canada. Sorry, 94% of our revenue is generated in Canada and 6% is generated in the US. So call that about 30 million max of revenue that we generate in the US. About 50% of that revenue is generated is we call large format lithography so think of large you know sheets of paper that are printed in canada and shipped to the us and converted into large format packaging um and the other 50 percent is a mix of a whole bunch of stuff uh kidding fulfillment that we do for some large fis uh and uh and some some labels that we ship south the border as well um of that 30 million about Fifty percent of it calls call it 15 million is somewhat protected, even even if tariffs are are are initiated because we add a lot of value to that to that 15 mil. So that's hard to kind of lift and shift elsewhere. And we'd be able to in most cases be able to price for that. The $15 million on the large format top sheet business, that is a little bit more commoditized, Max. So we're going to have to compete and we're going to have to take some concessions on pricing if we got hit by a tariff. But we've already got that forecasted into our model for this year. So not a lot of exposure on the product that flows, you know, kind of north to south. I think your question is a good one. What about raw material input? the the the the paper market is kind of like the auto market okay it's been optimized for uh for free trade so you got pulp that flows south and you've got paper finished paper that flows north so uh a large percentage of our finished paper actually comes from the us today Now, there's a few things happening in preparation, you know, to prepare for any uncertainty. One is the paper mills in Canada are load balancing. So, you know, they may be producing paper here in Canada and shipping it south or shipping it overseas. They're load balancing to keep that paper in Canada. Obviously, that's a benefit for us because there's going to be no tariff. The second would be... And we learned this during the pandemic as we looked at alternative supply chains, given the interruption in supply. We've got an incredible procurement team that's scouring the world right now for alternative paper sources, looking out to Europe, to Southeast Asia, to China, etc. So I don't think we'll be able to offset 100% of it, to be clear. There's still a lot of people we're going to need from the South. um and uh and we'll have the opportunity obviously to price that up in canada if everybody's facing the same headwind um so yeah uh we're well prepared we've got a team on it we meet every day and uh you know you heard you saw my fourth point about adaptability and we're certainly agile and adaptable and staying on top of it but um we're working to mitigate any uh any headwinds or any risks so hopefully that answers your question maybe a little bit more detail than you even needed but uh but hopefully that gives you clarity

Yeah, no, that's great. The detail is appreciated. And then my last question would be, given that we're almost at the end of Q1, can you just talk a bit generally about the Devan environment, how conversations with customers are going? You know, any color would be great. Thanks.

Okay. Yeah, you want to talk customers? Yeah, you go ahead. Yeah, you know, we're, yeah, as you said, Max, we're I guess almost two months into the end of the quarter, good discussions with clients on some of the enhanced capabilities we have. And that's kind of a function of some of the new equipment that we put into place, particularly in the end of the third and fourth quarter, as well as the label presses that Richard talked about. One of them was installed in December, the other two in January. Those are up and running and operational. So we're seeing some new opportunities in markets like prime labels for example that we haven't had a lot of exposure to historically we're also seeing some markets other market opportunities opening up because of kind of a combination of our two capabilities that we've kind of put together from the integration results and so we're seeing some some positive discussions and opportunities in the pipeline

Great. Thanks, James. I'll pass the line. Yep. Thanks so much.

Martin, we have a question from Noel Atkinson. Do you want to let him in?

Hi, Richard and James. Thanks for taking my call. Hello. Hi. Great to see that I can actually talk this time. It's perfect. Technology works. Yeah. OK, a few for me, just a couple of follow ons to Max's questions here. So in terms of the tariff considerations, do you see that impacting your consumer, your customers outlook on marketing projects so far this year? Have they been saying, you know, we want to throttle back at all?

No, there's nothing yet. The only questions we have are the clients that we're supplying. The $15 million that I said that we supply south of the border, that's a north-south flow. But the domestic clients, there's been no comments that they may be cutting back on marketing investment as a result of tariffs, not at this point. Okay. Okay.

And then the second one related to tariffs, have you been building up inventories of paper so far or other inputs so far in Q1?

Yeah. We have not been building up inventories of paper. We're in very close dialogue with, as Richard mentioned, with our key paper suppliers, and they're doing their best to kind of load balance production so that as tariffs potentially accelerate here, we'll be able to kind of source more domestically. And our sense from kind of the first round of Canadian retaliatory tariffs that's been implemented should have a very modest impact on our sourcing. And it's not just paper, it might also be some of the technology hardware, for example, that we sell. And some of that isn't coming from the US. It might be coming from Asia through the US. But on balance, we think we've got a pretty diversified supply chain.

Okay. And you still are having that ability to pass through with some lag, any increased costs and inputs?

Yes. We did see early in the year some raw material price increases just even before the talk of tariffs. uh and some of those started in in january and february uh you know nothing uh nothing material but um some price increases but um you know we've we've gotten pretty um pretty uh we've got a pretty well oiled machine in terms of how to manage that okay and just a couple quick more uh could you kind of quantify the size of the impact of the canada post strike on your q4 revenues Yeah, sure. I'd say kind of broadly, probably in the $3 to $4 million range in kind of direct business that we can kind of attribute it to that. There's probably a little bit of direct mail and a few other things that got delayed as well in the quarter. We think some of that will kind of push into Q1. There were some campaigns that had been printed with

know a delivery or a kind of a target date on them and some of that's had to be reprinted but um you know there's probably in that kind of magnitude you know the low end three high end four four to five okay yeah and our i mean as i said earlier our impact would have been higher say than competitive impact because of the fact that canada post is a client of ours right and uh with post office being post offices being closed we obviously couldn't service those post offices

Okay, and then just the last one in terms of M&A outlook. So you tucked in Xavi last year. Are you focused entirely on organic sales growth for 2025? Are you also looking at more tuck-ins?

Our priority is to drive organic growth, profitable organic growth in 2025. That's not to say that we don't look at opportunities at all if there's attractive opportunities, but our main focus right now is to deliver organic growth and organic profit growth in twenty five. That's where we're at. That's where all of our energy is focused on.

OK, great. Thank you very much.

OK, thanks.

Thanks. So we have a we have a question in the chat from Alan. How come 30 percent is our gross margin target, which is about three percent higher than in twenty twenty four? But EBITDA target margin of 14% is only 1% higher than 24 adjusted number, especially given the cost reductions and synergies. What? Yeah, I think we're being prudent on our overall kind of margin assumptions there. We're trending nicely towards the 30% level on the top line. And we think that both that and our 14% adjusted EBITDA margin will be achievable in the near term. At such time, we'll kind of assess and revise our targets.

Yeah. And you'll you'll note on that chart there was a plus in front of the 14. Right. So we're certainly not going to stop at 14. But 30 percent is gross margin is a margin need to be successful, sustainable and profitable in this industry. And that's what we need to achieve.

Excellent. We have a caller on the line, Martin Thomas. Great.

Hey, Richard and James. Thank you for taking my question. Can you hear me okay? Yes. Yeah, we got it. Okay, great. My question is just on the 5% KGAR long-term growth rate that you guys are communicating here. To my knowledge, that's a little bit faster than the industry growth rate. I was just wondering if you guys can touch on what gives you guys the confidence to drive those results in the long term. Thank you.

Yeah, and a great question. Depends on how you look at the industry or what kind of, we call them profit pools, what segments of the industry you look at. Some are flat, slightly declining, and some are growing at 7%, 8%, 9%. So we certainly are a structure of business to play in the high margin growth pools. And if you look at those on average, kind of 2%, maybe 3%. At the high end, so call it two, so the delta is three, and that 3% delta is going to come from securing business from some of our competitors out there. We're bringing technology solutions to help simplify complexity and bring a much more integrated and effective solution through to our client base. We feel there's opportunities for us to win a lot of new business away from our competitors as a result of, call it our our model, our business model, which, again, is supported with technology-enabled solutions. So, yeah, great question. Hopefully that answers it for you. We certainly will have to secure some revenue from some of our competitors that are out there.

Okay, and it looks like we don't have any further questions. So I'd like to thank everyone for joining our call and your interest in DCM. As a reminder, Richard and I can be available after the call for any follow-up questions.

That's great. Thank you, James, and thank you all of our shareholders for all your support. As I said, really kind of appreciate the ongoing support. We're all glad that 2024 is behind us and the restructuring and integration is now complete and we can focus on our organic growth agenda. And I can tell you that that is our priority for this year. I also want to thank all of our associates for the hard work and the heavy lifting that went into getting to where we got to the successful exit in 2024 and completing all of our heavy restructuring a half a year ahead of schedule on budget and on synergy targets. So thank you to the entire team and look forward to reporting our results in quarter one a couple of months from now. Good. Thank you. Thanks, everyone.