DATA Communications Management Corp. (TSX:DCM)
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Earnings Call: Q2 2022

Aug 10, 2022

James Lorimer
CFO and Corporate Secretary, DATA Communications Management

Morning, ladies and gentlemen, and again, apologies for the delay. Thanks for standing by, and welcome to our second quarter 2022 financial results conference call. I'm James Lorimer, and you've previously met Richard Kellam, who will be doing most of the presentation today. 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 would 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'll 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 SEDAR.

We have posted a brief message from Richard, along with a summary of our results and key initiatives for the past quarter on our website in the form of an infographic and a video. Our detailed information is also available on our website in SEDAR. You can also follow us live on LinkedIn to keep up with some of our exciting commercial insights on relevant market trends and customer case studies. I will now turn the call over to Richard.

Richard Kellam
President, CEO, and Director, DATA Communications Management

Thank you, James. The deck I'm gonna review today is up on our website, including an infographic as well that gives the full kind of color and results on the quarter. We'll talk about how we're continuing to build a better and bigger business here, and we certainly have fantastic momentum in our business right now. I've used this word over the last three or four quarters that momentum builds momentum, and we're certainly building momentum, as you'll see in our quarter two results. I'm gonna start off with talking about how we're building a bigger business and the results around bigger.

First, from a revenue standpoint, we are very pleased on our revenue performance this quarter, up 23.4% versus quarter two last year, certainly one of our best quarters in many years. That brings us out to CAD 68.1 million on the quarter versus CAD 55 million a year ago, so up close to CAD 13 million versus prior year. A very good revenue performance on the quarter and some great client momentum that's delivering that revenue performance. From a gross profit standpoint, you can see that our gross profit actually grew faster than revenue, which means that our gross margin has improved, and that's despite some of the raw material inflation we're experiencing.

The team has done a fantastic job to manage that inflation and continue to drive, you know, value for the product that we're bringing to our clients. Our total gross profit was CAD 20.4 million for the quarter versus CAD 15.8 million a year ago. As I said, 30% of revenue, so exactly on target. We're well north. You know, we're CAD 4.6 million up versus prior year. Again, despite some of the raw material inflation and headwinds we've experienced, the team has done a great job to ensure that we're getting fair value for that inflation. We've had some very good new business wins on a year-to-date basis. I think last quarter we reported CAD 10 million or CAD 11 million in new business growth.

Year to date, we're north of CAD 22 million across multiple verticals, and 100% of that new business is what we call tech-enabled. We're winning, not because we're great printers, of course, we do that well, but we're winning from the technology and the value we bring to clients in terms of helping them simplify complex workflows. Some great success in terms of new business, and we expect that new business win, or new business momentum rather, to continue through the balance of the year. The team has done a fantastic job continuing to build a growth muscle. Very pleased with the new business wins. Very happy to report as well that our tech-enabled subscription service fees are at CAD 2.4 million on the quarter, about CAD 3.5 million year to date.

You can see we had big acceleration in the quarter at 112% growth versus a year ago. This is really just as a result of getting very intentional and accelerating our monetization of our digital services with clients. We expect this to continue, obviously, as we continue to focus on this area. Really good progress from a digital acceleration and subscription service perspective. On the B2B side, James?

James Lorimer
CFO and Corporate Secretary, DATA Communications Management

Thanks, Richard.

Richard Kellam
President, CEO, and Director, DATA Communications Management

No. The better business side. It's me. I just wanted to advance the slide. James is driving the slides. Our SG&A is down 3.8%, so very good, continued kind of focus in cost control, at CAD 13.8 million versus CAD 14.3 million a year ago. We're exactly at 20.2% of revenue, so we're right in the range we put to the street, you know, several months ago. Our SG&A, you know, despite the higher revenues, as I said, you know, the team's done a fantastic job at controlling costs and maximizing productivity per associate, as you'll see in a minute. Which is this slide here. If you look at our employee productivity, our employee count is 919 on the quarter.

If you look at the slide on the right-hand side, our productivity or revenue per employee is now at CAD 277.6. Our plan is to get that north of CAD 300,000. That's well up over the last five years, up 35%. Certainly we're doing a lot more with less, and the team's done a fantastic job to deliver this growth with the reduced headcount and more productivity and efficiency. Real good progress on employee productivity. Restructuring. We made a commitment at the beginning of the year, very clear to the street that we will have zero restructuring in 2022. Restructuring is behind us. We have absolutely the perfect footprint.

We've got the perfect size of organization to grow off of, and we're happy to say that we still have zero restructuring in the quarter and zero restructuring year to date. We had about CAD 900,000 in restructuring a year ago, so that's a net favorable. We will continue to commit to zero restructuring in the year. As I said, we've got a perfect footprint, and we've got the perfect size organization for us to accelerate growth. You saw that growth delivery, that revenue delivery in the second quarter, as well as the first quarter. 11% of the first quarter, 23.4% in the second quarter.

Very happy to report that our EBITDA, now this is clean EBITDA, not adjusted, 'cause we have zero restructuring, is up 48.7% versus a year ago, and that's a full CAD 9.5 million versus CAD 6.4 million a year ago. Really good progress as we focus on building a bigger and a better business and delivering this through to EBITDA. Good, solid EBITDA delivery. Looking at net income, you know, what can I say? Very, very positive results on net income as a result of how we're deploying our resources and how we're focusing those resources. 490% growth in net income, CAD 3.8 million this year on quarter two versus CAD 600,000 a year ago.

Our year-to-date net income is about CAD 7.5 million. Good, very good progress on net income as well. Just finally, progress we're making on ESG. We have a very active program for our entire enterprise. 16 ESG committee members. A lot of activity on environmental, social, and governance. A couple highlights on the environmental side. We committed to replant 100% of our paper use. Since we entered into this program in November of last year, we've used 27 million pounds of paper, which equates to 332,000 trees, and we have replanted 332,796 trees. Full reforestation for every bit of paper that we use. Real happy with that progress.

Lots of progress on the social side and governance side as well. Okay? Over to James for a little bit more detail on our financials.

James Lorimer
CFO and Corporate Secretary, DATA Communications Management

Thanks, Richard. Richard spoke mostly about our kind of second quarter comparison to second quarter last year. I'm gonna talk a little bit more about the first half comparison to last year. As you can see here, our revenues of CAD 137.4 million are up almost CAD 20 million compared to the same period last year. If you recall from our year-end report, we talked about how we had kind of three halves of revenue that were flattish around CAD 118 million. If you look at the last half of 2020 and then the first half of 2021 and the second half of 2021, all three of those periods were about CAD 118 million, so really showing kind of accelerated growth here.

We're also pleased with gross profit. As Richard mentioned, despite headwinds, year to date, we're sitting at about 29.7% gross margin, and that's crept up a little bit from the end of the first quarter, and that's really as we're getting pricing passed through to our clients, we're starting to creep that margin up. You know, we continue to be optimistic that we can continue to grow gross margin through the balance of the year. SG&A, again, good story here, CAD 27.4 million, which is improved by almost CAD 2 million compared to last year. Year to date, we had CAD 4.3 million of restructuring expenses last year, and you know, we're committed to continuing to have zero expenses through the balance of the year.

EBITDA year to date is CAD 18.9. You know, really pleased that again, we can report clean EBITDA results. Getting close to 14% of revenue. We've set out kind of long-term objectives, which I think most of our shareholders are familiar with, growing ultimately EBITDA into the kind of 18%-22% range over the next five years. Starting to, you know, kind of continue to kind of work that way. I think important to say, we also had significant wage subsidy expenses or income last year, and we of course have not received any this year. A couple charts here just to kind of put this into perspective on a quarterly basis. Just this chart here shows comparable strength compared to last year.

I think what's also important to point out is that Q2 is typically our weakest kind of seasonally adjusted period. As you can see graphically, we're only off about CAD 1.2 million compared to the first quarter. You know, we think our momentum is gonna continue through the balance of the year and we should be able to continue to pace ahead of what we did last year. Gross profit is kind of mirroring that trend and certainly pleased on lower levels of revenue in the second quarter compared to the first quarter that our gross profit is actually marginally ahead. Positive trend there again. Here's a chart that shows EBITDA. You know, we actually had kind of decent Q3, Q4 last year on an adjusted basis.

If you strip out the restructuring expenses, you know, we really had CAD 6.4 and 5 million of clean EBITDA. We are certainly pacing ahead of where we did last year, as you can see for the first two quarters. Here's a chart that shows adjusted EBITDA and, you know, most analysts and others kind of look at us on an adjusted basis. We're about CAD 35.5 million of adjusted EBITDA on a trailing basis. We think that certainly will as we kind of get the benefit of lower restructuring expenses going forward, that'll certainly help free up some free cash flow to continue our efforts to pay down debt.

This chart is just a brief summary to kind of separate out our term debt and our revolving credit facility. Term debt is down 17.4% from the end of the year, so we continue to advance that. We're about halfway through the year, and we've told shareholders that our fixed-term debt is gonna be in the kind of CAD 12.5 million-CAD 13 million in aggregate. It'll be repaid through the balance of the year, so you know, but we're about halfway through that. Our revolving credit facility did grow. As we've talked about, that's because of the you know, really you know, kind of unusual markets we're in.

We've got significant safety stock to meet our anticipated production needs through the balance of the year. We do see that coming down by the end of the year.

Richard Kellam
President, CEO, and Director, DATA Communications Management

All right, looking at all those numbers, for those that are looking at the screen and those not, we've got a chart here that looks at performance on quarter two, year-to-date performance and trailing twelve months. First, on a revenue side, as I mentioned, 23.4% growth in revenue on the quarter, so fantastic growth and great success. As said, you know, fantastic client momentum. 16.8% on the year so far, halfway through the year, and 8.4% on a TTM, a trailing twelve months basis. That puts us at CAD 255 million on trailing twelve months, so up from CAD 235 million and change at the end of the year. Great progress on revenue.

On the earnings or gross profit side rather, we talked about 29% growth in gross profit. Love seeing where gross profit is actually ahead of revenue growth. That obviously leads to a higher gross margin. Our gross profit on a year-to-date basis, 17.4% growth versus an annualized from a TTM perspective, 8.7% growth. Okay. All those kind of ahead of revenue growth. Net income I already referenced, 490%, 212% on a year-to-date basis, and up 324% on a TTM. Finally, EBITDA. I already referenced the 48.7% growth in EBITDA on the quarter, so very solid growth. As I said, that's clean EBITDA.

That's what we're committed to this year. 38% growth. Hold on, we just lost the slide. 38.1% growth on a year-to-date basis and just north of 20%, 20.8%, from a trailing twelve months. Very positive momentum through the first half of 2022, and we are expecting that momentum to continue for the balance of the year, just given the client momentum that we've got, and the excellence we're delivering through the entire enterprise. Big thanks to the entire DCM team for delivering these results. We look forward to the second half of the year.

James Lorimer
CFO and Corporate Secretary, DATA Communications Management

Thanks everyone for your patience today. We will now turn it over for questions. If anyone has a question and you're accessing the call directly through Teams, you can use the Raise Your Hand feature in Teams and we'll queue up questions. Alternatively, we can use the chat feature in Teams, and we'll respond to any chat questions. If you have dialed in, the old-fashioned way through the phone, you may press star five to raise or lower your hand, and star six will mute or unmute your microphone. Please introduce yourself once you're introduced to the session. Just pause for a minute here as we stop sharing screen. Make sure I'm not.

Operator

There's one hand up, James, from a dial-in.

James Lorimer
CFO and Corporate Secretary, DATA Communications Management

Yes, thanks. I have a question from phone number ending 2793.

George Tsakalakis
Associate, Equity Research, Acumen Capital Partners

Good morning, guys.

Richard Kellam
President, CEO, and Director, DATA Communications Management

Good morning.

James Lorimer
CFO and Corporate Secretary, DATA Communications Management

Good morning.

George Tsakalakis
Associate, Equity Research, Acumen Capital Partners

This is George dialing in on behalf of Mo. Thanks for taking our questions and congrats on another great quarter, guys.

Richard Kellam
President, CEO, and Director, DATA Communications Management

Thank you. Appreciate it.

George Tsakalakis
Associate, Equity Research, Acumen Capital Partners

Just a few questions here. In relation to raw materials and supply chain challenges, to what extent were you guys able to pass through the input cost increases to customers in the second quarter? How do you expect this dynamic to evolve in the second half of the year?

Richard Kellam
President, CEO, and Director, DATA Communications Management

Yeah, no, great question. You know, just given the competitive nature of the industry, I'm not gonna talk too much about pricing, but if you look at our gross margin growth or gross profit growth relative to our revenue growth, you can see that actually it was quite favorable. Given the significant increases in raw materials, obviously we've had to push hard to get pricing through. Majority of our contracts or a high percentage of our contracts actually have raw material index pricing built into them. Now, you know, some of that pricing obviously lags the increase in raw materials. You know, I can tell you the team has done a remarkable job ensuring we're getting a return on the value we're bringing to clients.

That kind of implies that we are, and we have been very successful in ensuring that we're, you know, getting pricing through. Yeah, look, we, you know, it's a volatile and dynamic market, and I can tell you that our commercial team knows how to, you know, manage well and navigate well through this dynamic market. You're seeing that in the results. We're expecting, you know, and super confident that if there is more pricing that needs to be taken, we can certainly achieve that. Now, I think the second bit of your question, when are we expecting some normalization in the market?

George Tsakalakis
Associate, Equity Research, Acumen Capital Partners

Yes.

Richard Kellam
President, CEO, and Director, DATA Communications Management

We're actually forecasting that in kinda into the early part of 2023. We expect the market to still be pretty challenged in 2022. You know the supply curve or the demand curve will kinda, you know, equalize, we believe, kinda in the early part of next year. End of this year, but probably likely into the early part of next year.

George Tsakalakis
Associate, Equity Research, Acumen Capital Partners

Okay. Got it.

Richard Kellam
President, CEO, and Director, DATA Communications Management

Okay.

George Tsakalakis
Associate, Equity Research, Acumen Capital Partners

Are you guys seeing any major changes or trends in size or velocity of customer orders due to concerns about inflation and general economic conditions at all?

Richard Kellam
President, CEO, and Director, DATA Communications Management

Go ahead, James.

James Lorimer
CFO and Corporate Secretary, DATA Communications Management

Yeah. I think we've seen some customers advancing their orders, but it's not just, you know, Q3 into Q2. It's Q4 into Q3. It's Q1 into Q4. We are certainly seeing some customers that are trying to get ahead of some of the price increases. That being said, you know, I think in aggregate, we are seeing really good volume and kind of, you know, new business wins. As Richard talked about earlier, you know, we have more than CAD 22 million of new wins, and that's from new logos and new opportunities within clients, existing clients that we hadn't been previously serving. You know, we're seeing, you know, good, strong client momentum all around.

Richard Kellam
President, CEO, and Director, DATA Communications Management

Yeah, I'll just build on that. If you look at the 23.4% growth in the quarter, clearly some of that is obviously pricing growth. But a significant part is what we call expansion revenue, so getting more revenue out of existing clients as well as, you know, I referenced the CAD 22 million in new business development, new business that we've been bringing in. We've got a pretty kinda healthy balance between, you know, what I call kind of volume mix and pricing.

James Lorimer
CFO and Corporate Secretary, DATA Communications Management

I might add.

George Tsakalakis
Associate, Equity Research, Acumen Capital Partners

Understood.

James Lorimer
CFO and Corporate Secretary, DATA Communications Management

Yeah. George, I might add just a little bit to that, you know, with our kind of position in the market as really one of the leading players in certainly in the Canadian market, we are seeing some competitive wins where our competitors haven't been maybe as forward-thinking or as creative in terms of building up and accessing supply. We are seeing some competitive wins where some of our smaller competitors that don't have the same resources as us are challenged in this environment.

George Tsakalakis
Associate, Equity Research, Acumen Capital Partners

Understood. Thanks for that. Maybe just one last question from me. Your revenue growth in the last two quarters continues to trend well above your long-term target of 5%. Is there potential for revenue growth to remain above that level for an extended period? If so, what do you think would drive that?

Richard Kellam
President, CEO, and Director, DATA Communications Management

Yeah. I think we've kind of modified the five-year plan and put those numbers out to the street. Our range is now between 5% and 10%, 5% at the low end, you know, kind of 10% at the high end. I'd say the one thing we've done as an organization, you know, over the last kind of 6 or 8 months is we've really leaned in hard to develop an accelerated growth muscle. I can tell you, there's a lot of opportunities in the marketplace that we're chasing right now, and we've got a pretty, you know, probably one of the fuller funnels that we've had in a number of years.

We're pretty optimistic that we'll, you know, we'll be at the high end of that range, you know, kind of over the next few years.

George Tsakalakis
Associate, Equity Research, Acumen Capital Partners

Got it. Great. That's it from me. Thank you very much.

Richard Kellam
President, CEO, and Director, DATA Communications Management

Thank you.

James Lorimer
CFO and Corporate Secretary, DATA Communications Management

Thanks. If anyone has any further questions, please raise your hand.

Operator

James, there's one question from Raymond Williams. He is saying that working capital looks to be one of the weak areas of this earnings report, which in turn affected outstanding debt. How are you projecting out with respect to working capital for the rest of the year?

James Lorimer
CFO and Corporate Secretary, DATA Communications Management

Sure. Do you wanna?

Richard Kellam
President, CEO, and Director, DATA Communications Management

Yeah. I mean, I'll just say, James, to give you the numbers. I mean, our working capital, that's the only, you know, if there's a challenge in our business, that would be the only challenge. Historically, you know, when we procured raw materials, you know, it's almost like, you know, auto manufacturing, right? We could purchase the materials, they'd arrive in the morning, and we'd have them on the press in the afternoon. That's changed dramatically given the supply chain challenges. Now we're having to order raw materials, you know, kind of 3 or 4 months in advance. We've also had to go much further out to buy those raw materials as well, so into the European market, into the Asian market.

We've got a lot of raw materials that come from China now. Obviously, that's affected, you know, to deliver 23.4% growth, we obviously needed to lean into our revolver. Obviously, we wouldn't have been able to deliver that growth if we didn't have the raw materials, so it's kind of a catch-22, right? We are expecting that to normalize. James can talk about what our expectations are as we progress through the rest of the year.

James Lorimer
CFO and Corporate Secretary, DATA Communications Management

Yeah. Through the balance of the year, you know, we expect our revolving line to come down by, you know, probably CAD 4 million-CAD 5 million, a little bit dependent again on, you know, continued kind of growth and outlook there. Folks should also recognize that, as I mentioned earlier, Q2 is normally our quietest quarter, and so we normally have a bit of a catch-up in our working capital in the second quarter. Given the strength that we saw this year, you know, with our revenue growth, we didn't get that catch-up. Our aging is all in very good shape on our receivables and everyone's current.

You know, if you look at that kinda six-month trailing growth that we've had, up considerably from the last six months of the prior year, you know, it's pretty much in line from kind of an AR perspective in terms of growth rates. We certainly see that coming or our revolver coming down a little bit through the balance of the year.

Richard Kellam
President, CEO, and Director, DATA Communications Management

Yeah. You know, the good news is that, you know, you saw the numbers paying off our long-term debt. That's the more expensive debt. We're down 17% of that in the first half, and you can see that, you know, our plan second half is to pay down a significant amount more. Yeah, our revolver's up. We're not really worried about it too much. It will come down, as James said, over, you know, over the course of the second half of the year. I think we're in a pretty good place from a raw material perspective right now. You know, you called it out rightly.

You know, if there's any challenge in our business, that would be the only challenge right now, just kind of managing the raw material supply chain.

James Lorimer
CFO and Corporate Secretary, DATA Communications Management

All right, any further questions?

Richard Kellam
President, CEO, and Director, DATA Communications Management

Oh, if there's no further questions, I'd just like to start and apologize again for the late start, given the technical difficulties we experienced here in Boston. Thank all of our investors for continuing to support DCM. Finally, thank the DCM team for an outstanding quarter. This is a team effort and, you know, super pleased with how we're working as a team and the results the team is delivering. Congratulations, and thank you everybody for joining the call today. Thanks, everyone.

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