Greetings, and welcome to the FLEETCOR Technologies 4th Quarter 2020 Earnings Conference Call. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. I would like to turn the call over to our host, Mr. Jim Eglestetter, Head of Investor Relations for Fleet Core Technologies. Thank you.
You may begin.
Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today for our Q4 full year 2020 earnings call. With me today are Ron Clarke, our Chairman and CEO and Charles Freund, our CFO. Following the prepared comments, the operator will announce that the queue will open for the Q and A session. It is only then that you can get in line for questions. Please note, our earnings release and supplement can be found under the Investor Relations section of our website at fleetcor.com.
Now throughout this call, we will be presenting non GAAP financial information, including adjusted revenues, adjusted net income and adjusted net income per diluted share. This information is not calculated in accordance with GAAP and may be calculated differently than non GAAP information at other companies. Reconciliations of historical non GAAP financial information to the most directly comparable GAAP information appear in today's press release and on our website as previously described. Now before we begin our formal remarks, I need to remind everybody that part of our discussion today may include forward looking statements. These statements reflect the best information we have as of today.
All statements about our recovery, outlook, new products and acquisitions and expectations regarding business development and future acquisitions are based on that information. They are not guarantees of future performance and you should not put undue reliance upon them. These expected results are subject to numerous risks and uncertainties, which could cause actual results to differ materially from what we expect. Some of those risks are mentioned in today's press release on Form 8 ks and in our annual report on Form 10 ks filed with the SEC and available at sec.gov. With that out of the way, I would like to turn the call over to Ron Clark, our Chairman and CEO.
Ron?
Okay. Good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for joining our Q4 earnings call. Upfront here, I'll plan to cover 4 subjects. First, I'll provide my take on our Q4 finish. 2nd, I'll put a bow on full year 2020.
3rd, I'll share our 2021 outlook. And lastly, provide a bit of an update on our transformation plan, which is intended to accelerate the company's growth. Okay. Let me turn to our Q4 results. So today we reported revenue of $617,000,000 that's down 12% and cash EPS of $3.01 that's down 5% versus last year.
These results are both better than anticipated. Volume recovered a bit more in the quarter than we forecasted, and we did manage operating expenses down 14% against the prior year. Organic revenue growth overall minus 8%. But most importantly are the trends in Q4 really quite good. Sales strengthened to over 90% of last year's level.
Same store sales or client volume softness improved to minus 6%. Credit loss is 6,000,000 dollars although helped by a reserve release and retention continued steady at 92%. We did have a fantastic beyond highlight in Brazil in the quarter. We added 175,000 new urban or city users in Q4. That represents 30% of all the new tags we sold in the quarter.
So demonstrates there's real demand among the non toll segment in Brazil for this RFID purchasing network, including fueling, parking and now even fast food locations. So look, the conclusion of Q4 is really in the sequential trends of the business. If you look at Page 7 of our earnings supplement, you can see that every Q4 metric is improving from the Q2 low. Revenue up from $525,000,000 to 6.17 dollars Cash EPS up $2.28 to $3.01 sales up from 55% to now over 90 credit
losses
from 21,000,000 to 6%, credit losses from $21,000,000 to $6,000,000 And then lastly, retention holding steady at 92%. So to us, evidence that the business continues to recover from the earlier year lows. Okay, over to 2020. So from a financial perspective, 2020 not our best year. Revenue finished at approximately $2,400,000,000 that's down 10% versus 2019 and cash EPS finishing at $11.09 down 6% against 2019.
COVID and the shutdowns did manage to vanquish over $400,000,000 of revenue that we planned in 2020 really in three ways. So first client softness, we had a number of COVID impacted we had a number of COVID impacted clients that use less of our services. COVID reset the macro environment in Q2, driving down fuel prices and weakening international currencies. And then 3rd, for a while, COVID reduced our 2020 new sales, mostly due to the market being distracted. The good news is despite the fact that COVID is going on, that we're still living with COVID is the financial impacts on us appear to be lessening.
So we've now recovered in Q4 about half of the client softness revenue loss that we experienced in Q2, so half of it back already. Post the macro reset, we've seen relative stability in fuel prices and FX rates. And lastly, the demand for our services clearly recovering as sales reached 90% of prior year levels. So despite not having the greatest financial performance in 2020, we did manage to accomplish a few things. So credit, I'm just delighted with our credit performance in 2020.
Expenses, tough times, but we did manage expenses down over 10% in Q2, Q3 and Q4. We signed 4 acquisitions in 2020. Our guys ran IT exceptionally well, had the best overall system uptime in the history of the company. And lastly, we were able to replan the business in the second half. We conducted a replanning exercise in the summer, and the actuals came in a smidge better than the replan.
So reminds us again that fleet is a business you can plan. I really do want to give a shout out to all fleet core people who hung in there and kept the company going through very unsettling times. Okay. Let me make the turn to 2021 and outline our initial guidance for the year, along with the assumptions behind it. Clearly, a higher beta in our 2021 numbers, but we'd say that our setup is generally positive.
So first, volume and revenue trends strengthening through 2020. So with the potential to continue that into 2021, sales production improving, thus the amount we expect to get of India revenue from new business. And as I mentioned a bit ago, very solid client retention and credit trends. We're also hopeful that we'll get additional client softness recovery in 2021, although we're the first to admit that that's hard to forecast. So in our guidance, we're planning to recover about 1 third of our Q4 exit revenue softness that's still outstanding now.
So if we get that, that recovery would provide about 4% to 5% of incremental revenue lift in the second half. So with that, our guidance for 2021 would be as follows: revenue of $2,650,100,000 at the midpoint, that reflects an 11% increase. Overall organic revenue in the same range, kind of 9% to 13%. But I do want to emphasize that, that assumes 3% to 4% of softness recovery from today's level. We're anticipating significant sales growth over 30% this year, which would be a record level of sales for the company.
And profit guide, at the midpoint, dollars 12.40 of cash EPS for the core business. We are planning about $0.10 of dilution from the Roger acquisition. So that would put our consolidated number at twelvethirty at the midpoint. Lastly, assuming now a May 1 close for the AFIX acquisition, accretion could be approximately $0.20 for the year. So if that happens on time, that could take consolidated cash EPS to $12.50 Chuck will speak further about how the guidance rolls out across the quarters, but I do want to point out that, our guidance outlooks Q2, 3 and 4 revenue and profit growth to be back into the high teens.
Okay. Let me transition now to my last subjects, which is the company's transformation plan. So really our transformation plan is intended to accelerate growth by doing 2 things. So first, the portfolio, deciding what businesses we want to be in and not be in and constantly reworking that to have a more diverse set of faster growing businesses. But the second way we transform the Beyond strategy, we're really trying to do 2 So in this Beyond strategy, we're really trying to do 2 things.
First, identify new segments of the market that we can extend the business into. So we ask, who else can we serve? And then second, we identify additional or adjacent services that we can cross sell back to the client base. So if you look at Page 11 of our earnings supplement, you'll see the current Beyond initiatives for each of our 4 businesses. We do continue to make progress against our Beyond strategy.
Just an example to call out in our lodging business in 2020, we now settled 25% of all proprietary hotel payments with our virtual card in which we go. But today, we begin implementation of maybe our most exciting beyond initiative of all, with the acquisition of Roger. So this begins the move of our corporate payments business down market into the SMB space, along with the opportunity to offer full online bill pay to our global SMB fuel car base. You can see that on Pages 11 12 of our supplement. So this single bill pay initiative has the potential to dramatically accelerate growth rates in both our corporate pay and fuel car businesses.
We feel like it's a pretty unique position that we're in because of the special set of assets that we have. So a large global SMB client base numbering in the 100 of 1000. We've got working SMB sales channels that historically have acquired 30,000 new clients per quarter. We've got scaled virtual card processing capability. We generated over $30,000,000,000 in annualized spend last year.
We've got a very large merchant database that allows us to monetize virtual card. And now we've got some modern cloud software to provide the bill pay functionality along with a pretty cool user interface. So look, in conclusion today, I'm hoping to provide just a few takeaways. So Q4, again, not our best quarter from an absolute perspective, but clear evidence of improving trends in the business. 2020, we did manage to perform better as the year went on and certainly learned some new tricks around how to manage credits, expenses, IT, even sales in a remote environment.
2021, again, our setup, we think, looks pretty good, only a slightly unfavorable macro to deal with, but improving trends coming into the year and certainly the wildcard that I mentioned of what happens with the incremental softness recovery. And lastly, transformation, our Beyond strategy now progressing, providing some traction, but today's online SMB bill pay initiative may be the biggest of them all. So with that, let me turn the call back over to Chuck to provide some additional details on the quarter and our outlook. Chuck?
Thanks, Ron. For the Q4 of 2020, we reported revenue of $617,000,000 down 12%, GAAP net income down 11% to $210,000,000 and GAAP net income per diluted share down 6% to $2.44 The quarter was again affected by COVID related business slowdowns, although we showed improvement over last quarter in most of our businesses. Adjusted net income for the Q4 of 2020 decreased 10% to $258,000,000 and adjusted net income per diluted share decreased 5% to $3.01 We continue to manage expenses in line with revenue performance. Please see Exhibit 1 of our press release for a reconciliation of all non GAAP financial metrics. Organic revenue in the quarter was down 8% overall, primarily due to same store sales being down 6% year over year.
Organic revenue neutralizes the impact of year over year changes in foreign exchange rates, fuel prices and fuel spreads and includes pro form a results for acquisitions closed mid period. Our fuel category was down organically about 10% versus Q4 last year. Our domestic fuel businesses were stable to improving in the quarter, whereas the international fuel businesses were affected by the renewed COVID related closures, especially in Western Europe. The corporate payments category was down approximately 6% in the 4th quarter. Approximately 6 points of decline was again driven by the 100 most affected customers we discussed last quarter.
Lower spending on our T and E product drove another 2 points of organic drag. Virtual card volumes were up 12% for the quarter, was an improvement from flat last quarter as continued political spend and the benefit of new customers offset the drag from the highly affected customers. Cross border or FX related volumes were down 1% as payment volumes are still being affected by lower invoice levels, specifically in manufacturing and wholesale trade. Full AP continued to perform very well with volume up 14%. New sales of full AP were very strong as full year 2020 sales were more than double 20 nineteen's results.
We continue to invest here and have enabled 10 new ERP integrations in 2020 with plans for another 10 or so in 2021. Tolles continued to be our most resilient business and grew organically 7% in the 4th quarter, up 4% from last quarter. Active toll tags were up 6% in the quarter, with urban tags accounting for 25% of all new tags sold during 2020. The lodging category was down 25% organically in the 4th quarter with 20 points of drag caused by the inclusion of acquired airline lodging businesses in the year ago period. Our workforce lodging business has improved with volumes down in the mid single digits.
Airline lodging volumes have also improved in line with flight activity, but still remain well below last year's levels. Looking further down the income statement, our total operating expenses were down 14% for the Q4 of 2020 to $323,000,000 We performed in line with the high end of our target reduction compared with the Q4 of 2019. The decrease was primarily due to lower volume related costs, lower employee related costs, including headcount, sales commissions, bonuses and stock compensation. We also saw lower T and E expenses, in addition to the impact of foreign exchange rates. As a percentage of total revenues, operating expenses were approximately 52.4%, a roughly 240 basis point improvement from last quarter.
Bad debt expense in the Q4 of 2020 was $6,000,000 or 2 basis points, which includes a reserve release of $5,000,000 Bad debt was only 4 basis points excluding the reserve release. Our bad debt levels continue to be good and our aging roll rates remain very favorable. There is still uncertainty around the timing, level and duration of government stimulus and various responses to increasing COVID cases around the world. So that's still a consideration on our reserve. Interest expense decreased 13% to $30,300,000 driven primarily by decreases in LIBOR related to the unhedged portion of our debt.
This was partially offset by the impact of additional borrowing for share buybacks earlier in the year. Our effective tax rate for the Q4 of 2020 was 20.3%, with the reduction from last year driven primarily by incremental excess tax benefit on stock option exercises. Now turning to the balance sheet. As of December 31, 2020, we have approximately $1,900,000,000 of total liquidity consisting of available cash on the balance sheet and our undrawn revolver at quarterend. We ended the quarter just shy of $1,500,000,000 in total cash, of which approximately $542,000,000 is restricted and consists primarily of customer deposits.
We had $3,600,000,000 outstanding on our credit facilities and $700,000,000 borrowed in our securitization facility. We remain committed to a consistent program of capital allocation using our free cash flow for acquisitions and buybacks. In the quarter, we repurchased roughly 181,000 shares in connection with employee sales. In total for 2020, we spent $850,000,000 on share buybacks. We believe that we have ample liquidity to pursue any near term M and A opportunities, while still opportunistically buying back shares when it makes sense.
For the quarter, we had approximately $23,400,000 of capital expenditures
and we finished with a
leverage ratio of 2.6 7 times trailing 12 month EBITDA as of December 31. Now let me share some thoughts on our outlook. Looking ahead, we expect $1.60 $2.80 which at the midpoint is approximately $0.31 or 10% lower than what we reported in Q4 of 2020. About half of the difference is attributable to revenue seasonality. You see, while some of our businesses like Gift had seasonally strong 4th quarters, most of our businesses have seasonally weak 1st quarters.
Of course, volume related expenses will slightly offset this revenue seasonality impact. Roughly a third of the difference is due to the normalization of certain expenses. For example, in Q4 of 2020, we released $5,000,000 of our bad debt reserve, which we do not expect to repeat in Q1. As sales performance has continued to recover throughout 2020, we expect bad debt to gradually increase sequentially as those customers' balances age. Additionally, when the impact of the COVID related shutdowns became clearer in 2020, we proactively reduced our annual incentive target payouts by 50% and accrued to those lower targets for the remainder of the year.
As our business has recovered meaningfully, we plan to return incentive targets to 2021 to normal levels. We also expect our effective tax rate in Q1 of 2021 to be about 80 basis points to 100 basis points higher than the rate we reported in Q4 of 2020. Lastly, the acquisition of Roger and incremental sales and marketing investments slightly dilutive to the quarter sequentially. Now looking beyond Q1 to full year 2021, we feel it's important to help you understand how we're thinking about the outlook and providing some ranges around possible outcomes even though those ranges are a bit wider than what they have been in the past. For 2021, we're guiding revenues to be between $2,600,000,000 $2,700,000,000 and adjusted net income per diluted share to be between $11.90 $12.70 inclusive of the Roger acquisition.
We're still faced with substantial uncertainty regarding the pace of economic recovery and the impact it will have on our financial performance. That said, we've developed a 2021 budget, which incorporates everything we know now, including revenue and expense run rates, current macro environmental factors, planned sales contributions and expected attrition impacts. In addition, our guidance assumes a continued rollout of the vaccines that will allow gradual volume and revenue improvement in the first half of the year with an acceleration in the back half of the year as client softness and new sales performance improve sequentially. As I mentioned earlier, we expect several expense lines to normalize higher in 2021 compared with 2020. As our business recovers, stock and bonus accruals as well as sales commission expenses will be higher.
T and E will rise as our salespeople get back on the road and volume related expenses will also rise with increased business activity. Bad debt expense is expected to normalize as we've reopened credit and our sales performance continues to improve. We're also making incremental investments in sales, marketing and IT to support our growth aspirations and to deliver a 2021 sales production plan that's more than 30% higher than 20 twenty's results. We're extremely excited with the Roger acquisition and a disproportionate share of our incremental sales and marketing investments will be directed towards that business. As such, the fully loaded acquisition will be an estimated $0.10 drag to adjusted net income per diluted share in 2021.
As we've demonstrated time and again, we do take a balanced approach on expenses and we'll adjust accordingly if we see revenues begin to deviate from our expectations. And lastly, we continue to work through the approvals on Apex, which have been slowed by Brexit and virus related shutdowns. While we still expect the deal to be accretive in 2021, we now believe it is more likely to close in Q2 versus our original expectation of Q1. And just for clarity, Apex is not included in the guidance ranges I provided earlier. And now, operator, we'd like to open the line for questions.
Thank Our first question is from Sanjay Sakhrani with KBW. Please proceed.
Thanks. Good evening. Thanks for all the color on the trends and the guidance. But just to drill down on the guidance a little bit, when I think about the ranges on the extreme ends, could you maybe Charles just talk about sort of what's baked into one end versus the other? Thanks.
Yes. So I appreciate you joining and thanks for the question. So in terms of the high end, I'd say that, that would be a perfect scenario, right? So as Ron mentioned, we are assuming recovery in terms of the COVID softness that we've experienced. The timing and the magnitude of that is super hard to suggest.
If it all came roaring back, if our sales were perfect, we maybe could get there. So it's a pretty broad range as you can see. On the downside, I mean, who knows what's going to happen with COVID, right? So if things weren't to come back, it could be a problem, we think. We think that we're being reasonably optimistic in that regard given everything that the news says, the economy, the vaccines, the Biden administration mentioning things will be back in Q3.
So we're optimistic in that regard, but I'd say that the range is broad because we just really don't know.
Got it. Hey Sanjay, it's Ron. Let me just add on to Chuck's comment, which the second thing would be the sales. So we've got a pretty steep sales plan increase for 2021. And so the amount of that that we get in year in revenue, both the backlog and the pace at which that comes in, that will also have a pretty big swing on the range we gave.
Got it. And then Ron, you guys are flush with quite a bit of liquidity. I mean, as you sit here and you think about the next year, how do you envision utilizing it?
Thanks. Yes. I think our philosophy, Sanjay, is kind of steady as she goes, right? Our first use is accretive acquisitions, and we're sitting here today with 3 or 4 interesting active deals in the pipeline. So that's always our first and highest use.
And then to your point, given the leverage ratio and stuff, if our stock doesn't trade where we think it should, obviously, we've indicated we'll buy stock back. So acquisition is 1 and stock buybacks depending on the price too.
Thank you.
Our next question is from Tim Tsing Hung with JPMorgan. Please proceed.
Thank you so much. Good to catch up. I want to say, I guess, the new sales were encouraging. You're reinstating guidance. That's also encouraging.
Any way to think about the level of conservatism in the outlook, like what Sanjay was asking about the range? I think I understand it, but just I
think if it could
be some pent up demand on new sales. The trends are clearly improving. You're excited about this SMB bill pay, which makes some sense. I'm just trying to understand conservatism versus maybe excitement about the chance to get back to double digit plus growth here.
Hey, Tien Tsin, it's Ron. I'd say that we try to build these plans to what we call the most likely, right, and then figure out how wide a range around it. And so I think the confidence part comes from looking at the trends Q2, Q3 and Q4. I don't know if you picked it up in my remarks, but we've literally gotten half of it back between Q2 and Q4, which is possibly quite significant. And it's still a pretty big number, right, when you look at the total softness we had for all of 2020.
So I'd say that there's no precision in this. I think we caveated this as many ways as we could about the wildcard of softness recovery. So I'd say that we provide ranges to try to keep people from the midpoint. So we don't know, but I'd say kind of midpoint kind of our most likely.
Okay. And you talked about with Roger Bill Pay being potentially pretty big from an What steps need to take place? What should we be tracking? What steps need to take place? What should we be tracking?
Yes, I mean, it's a great question. I'd say we'll probably they're obviously in the market on a standalone the first two things that we're on is 1, cross selling that product back to our North America base. And then I'd say in 90 days, we should be launched with our own channels, our own digital, our own deals and phone people selling it to new prospects. So by the time we talk, next time, we'll hopefully have some news for you.
All right, good. Thanks for the update.
Our next question is from Stephen Walt with Morgan Stanley. Please proceed.
Great. Thanks for taking my question. Good evening. Maybe just following up on Tien Tsin's question on Roger and thinking about the investment. I was just curious if you could speak to the timing for the investment.
It sounds like it might be somewhat front loaded and how you're thinking about that dilution as it's planned over, I guess relative to 1Q guide versus the full year and then what that envisions for 2022 if you're able to sort of frame out the potential contribution from Roger?
Yes. So, some of it is just obviously deal related, right? We picked up that there are people 50. So we've got some dilution happening immediately. We are investing even in advance now at the corporate level to support that acquisition as well as building out those sales channels.
So we'll see that ramp up. In terms of the contribution for next year, I'd say we haven't fully modeled it yet, but it's probably going to be still a little dilutive to of flat until we fully scale the channels. So we want to obviously see what works before we pour too much in. But nonetheless, I'd say that the things about it's a very small acquisition, dollars 1,000,000 some odd, dollars couple of million in terms of revenue. So it's got a long way to go.
But we're pouring a lot of sales and marketing kind of upfront to get it going. It's a real bet for us. It was a real deal. We're investing to retain the people that are there because they've helped to build this product and we're going to need their help to continue. So we've built some extra cost in there as well.
So in terms of the magnitude of what it could be next year, it's really going to depend on how much more we pour into the investments.
I appreciate that. And then maybe just switching gears towards some of the things you outlined on Slide 11 and 12 with the beyond strategies. I know you talked through a few of the main the key areas that you're directing investment. But clearly, it seems like the corporate payments and then layering that into the fuel business are a couple of the main areas beyond the toll business that has its own growth plan. I'm curious how you're thinking about the lodging business and investment dollar priorities coming out of the pandemic.
Clearly, there are going to be some dollar priorities coming out of the pandemic. Clearly, there are going to be some permanent behavior shifts. I guess that one strikes me as probably the most obvious area, but I'm curious if you could sort of stack rank for us how you're thinking about beyond as it relates to investment priorities. You've got a lot of liquidity as has been pointed out, but certainly there's got to be some level of priority that you guys are thinking of.
Yes, Stephen. Hey, it's Ron again. So yes, I think you call that right. Clearly, corporate pay would be 1 and fuel would be 2 because of the size of the business, but it's still 40% 50% of the company. In lodging, the one thing I would say is, remember, our fleet core lodging business is workforce, translation, blue collar, utility guys going to a new city, tree cutters cleaning up.
And so that thing is way back. I mean, I looked at the January volume numbers earlier today and I believe month to month, the thing is down 3% to 5% now year over year. And so that lodging business looks completely different than the kind of lodging business we people on this call are thinking about. So the airline part of that is a completely different call to your point that things were running kind of 50% of volumes of a year ago, but that's the one I'd say has the snap bounce back possibility. So we've cut it took a ton of money out of that business, particularly out of the airline portion of the business to kind of wait here to see if it's going to snap back.
But it would be number 3, but we still like it. I think we lay it on that Page 11. There's a couple of interesting verticals beyond workforce and beyond airline that we're looking at that we like a lot that leverage everything we have, the systems and network and stuff. So I want to be clear, we like that business and we will keep investing and we may buy some additional things in the business. Let me be clear, it's not white collar T and E kind of lodging business.
Of course. Appreciate all that. Thanks.
Our next question is from Ramsey Alaceli with Barclays. Please proceed.
Hi, gentlemen. Thanks for taking my question this evening. I wanted to ask about Brazil and that was pretty impressive statistic in terms of how many new users you're signing up. Wanted to ask about the merchant acceptance side of that equation. Do you kind of have what you need now to basically continue building out that product?
Or is there a pipeline of new merchants or verticals in Brazil that you could see yourselves kind of getting involved with along the lines of McDonald's or Petrobras or these other merchants you have great partnerships with?
Yes, Ramsey, that's a good question. I think we're mostly focused on the 3 or 4 city locations that we mentioned, fueling, parking, fast food and then condos effectively access right for people back in the city. And so the plan we put a fair amount of capital actually in the 2021 plan to build out particularly the fueling footprint there because it's the biggest TAM, right? The dollar spent on fuel are massive. And so the bit of the delay was not only COVID, but our guys tinkered and came up with 2 or 3 different hardware, software configurations for the fueling locations that improve reliability like super high.
So if a car gets in, the thing knows it's the right car and doesn't make mistakes and to dramatically reduce the cost. And so that business is going to be on a super duper hurry up drill even now, even in the first half of the year trying to add stations across the board. So we should see those transaction counts usage of the thing grow a lot as we move into the second half.
Okay. And then on a separate topic, I wanted to ask generally about the kind of credit aperture across your business and whether it's sort of open back up again. I mean, obviously, it has to some degree. But was there a revenue headwind in the quarter from sort of tighter credit standards given we're still in a challenging kind of macro environment? And how should we think about that in terms of maybe potentially even opening further as we go forward?
Or is that largely kind of narrative largely sort of played out?
Yes, another good question. So I'll start the answer to that one. We overreacted, right? So when the thing happened, we kind of pulled pretty far back, which clearly reduced revenue. We even pulled back on existing accounts, right, trimming lines, accelerating payment terms and stuff.
So we went at it pretty hard. And now we've reported out for the year, and I think Chuck even mentioned the forward roll rates. So we've got the I think the lowest credit loss as low as I can remember. And certainly it's the basis against spend. And so we rotated back.
I'd say in the fuel card business, we are 100% back. So whatever credit policies we had pre COVID, I'd say if you went and looked at our fuel card businesses, we are right back to fully open, still balanced but fully open. I'd say the one place where we're still being a little cautious is in the corporate pay. And the reason is the spend per client there is so significant, if you think about it. And so we're still being careful.
There are certain industries sitting in the corporate pay space that have been pretty impacted. So I'd say we've moved that one back, but still not all the way back because it's more high line, what we call internally high line risk of a couple of BKs for some significant amount of money. So I think there's still upside as we roll through 2021 as those 3 or 4 industries were cautious on kind of come back.
Our next question is from David Tugo with Evercore ISI. Please proceed.
Thank you. Good evening. Just following up Ron on your comments on corporate pay. Can you give us some sense of the ranges you're thinking about for the T and E card for 2021? That seems to be the biggest swing factor within that business since most of the other categories are holding up reasonably well.
Yes, David. Hey, good question. So the overall corporate pay business sitting inside the guidance we gave is high teens. If you take the entire line of business sitting in our plans, we're out looking high teens for that. I think inside of that, the T and E, which has now shrunk down, is probably in the mid to high single digits.
And if you remember what we call kind of the multi car kind of walk around plastics there that buy supplies, P cards as a form of vendor payables. That line of business, that plastics or multi card, I think the last time I looked is down to about 20% of it now being white collar TD like us. And so fortunately, kind of 80% of that business is kind of okay. It's buying fuels, it's buying supplies, it's paying vendors. And so, it's not going to decline, if you will.
It's not going to drag down really the growth rate as much because it shrunk down in 2020. So fortunately, it will have less impact on the total corporate pay business this year.
Got it. Thanks for that. And then just a final question on the gift card business. Is the view that you're going to hang on to that for quite some time just given the cash that you generate from it even though it appears to be a declining business?
Yes. I'd say the short answer to that is yes. So obviously, retail as a category was super impacted in 2020 brought our gift card business pretty far down at the opening kind of in Q2. Surprisingly, the thing has come back quite well. People still obviously, you listen to the word gift cards, still ordering gift cards and the digital portion of those, David, has gone way crazy high.
And we bought a business a year ago to help our retailers manage online pretty timely as they've rotated over to more online sales. So surprisingly, that business is getting healthier from some of those new digital initiatives. And so what I say is we'll kind of see how this year goes. Their plan is actually up, obviously off of the softness for 2021. So I think we'll probably take another peek at the business as we get late into this
year.
Our next question is from Pete Christiansen with Citigroup. Please proceed.
Thank you. Good evening, gentlemen. Thanks for the question. I'm just thinking through the incremental investment on some of the IT initiatives here. Can you give us some of the timetables for your key goals here?
And have you considered whether or not, given that we are in a recovery year, that possibly accelerating some of those investments?
Yes, Pete, it's Ron. I'm not sure that accelerating for the recovery here. I think we're doing 2 things. 1, we're trying to invest in projects that drive growth. So we've kept the capital plan kind of up a bit, dollars 15,000,000, dollars 20,000,000 Chuck, I think over the prior year.
And then second, we made a decision, Pete, to pour more money into what we call IT transformation or modernization, whatever the word is. So we're pretty hard on the trail of consolidating some of the apps, updating, obviously some of the hardware and software and stuff. And so we're pouring money into simplifying kind of our technology footprint, while we're obviously still making investments in digital and things like Roger, new analytics packages, new mobile interfaces. So we're spending money on things that we should be, but also on the transformation side.
Thanks. That's helpful. And then, Ron, a little bit of a longer term question here. The drumbeat on EVs has kind of picked up recently with Porta GM making some announcements and the Biden administration looking to switch over the federal fleet. Does this change how you think about the fuel card business longer term and perhaps on how FLEETCOR intends to manage any broader changes industry wise there?
Yes. I mean, I think, Pete, a bit, I think we've been on for all kinds of reasons, not only EV, but just TAM and growth rate and long term potential of the company of diversifying things that we do that share the same model. And so I know we're at 60 percent now, I guess. So we're moving anyway. But I said a little bit in the call the last time on the EV thing that our perspective on the thing is, A, it's way farther out even if the acceleration of EV sales is pretty dramatic because the size of the installed base and the useful life.
Our models show the same number of commercial vehicles, the combustion engine vehicles in 10 years here in the U. S. And in the UK, our 2 biggest markets in 10 years as today because of the growth rate of sales and again on the light. But the more important point I mentioned last time is, it's less about the fuel cars buying fuel or the
fleet cars buying electricity. I think what we're learning, particularly
in Europe and in the UK is we're getting paid by our clients as they move to some EV. They're paying us car fees, for example, for the EV vehicle the same way. And there's this new opportunity of we're going from, call it, 150,000 gas stations in the United States to having 1,000,000 of charging points at employees' homes. And so the employers look like they want us to play a role in the hardware measuring of all of those new charge points and all the reimbursement. And so it's early days, but I'd say to you guys that doing what we do of measuring and helping pay and reimburse employee expenditures in and around vehicles, we think we're still going to get paid a fair amount of money, both in the transition to mix fleets and even when people get over to EV.
So we're going to have a little bit of a teach in maybe in 90 days on this subject with the takeaway hopefully being, A, it's way longer out there for the old combustion engine and B, what fleet course economics may look like even in a pure EV world.
Thanks, Ron. Very thoughtful answer. Thank you.
Our next question is from Ashish Sabadra with Deutsche Bank. Please proceed.
Thanks for taking my question and congrats on pretty good results considering the difficult macro environment we are in. My question was on the sales front, pretty good acceleration there going back to 92%. You called out full AP sales doubled. I was wondering if you can also talk about the sales growth in other segments. And also as we think about next year and a 30% expectation for a 30% higher sales compared to this year, areas where we can see more strength?
I guess SMB will definitely be one of the areas, but any incremental color will be helpful. Thanks.
Ashish, this is Charles. So yes, in terms of the sales performance, as Ron had mentioned, we exited Q4 at over 90% of the prior year. It is mixed. So I'd say Brazil had an unbelievable sales year. Overall, in the 4th quarter really outperformed versus prior year.
So they were well above, call it 15% or so above last year. There are still a couple of the businesses that are lagging a bit, and particularly our North America fuel business is still catching up. It's on an upward swing, but it just hasn't recovered quite as quickly. Our lodging business has actually come in kind of right around last year, so that's performed okay. So it's mixed, I'd say.
But nonetheless, they've all kind of come back from Q2 through Q3 and exiting Q4 at a better place. Looking forward to next year, we've got pretty robust ambitions and plans. We're going to have the biggest sales plan in the company's history and we're planning to be up 30% versus where we finished this year. So we've got a lot to do. We're pretty excited about the possibility there.
Hey, Ashish, it's Raj. Just to jump on to what Chuck said, one of the things helping us is the market is kind of coming back, right? We study searches of the categories. And so some of the results we report in Q4 is the world is kind of getting used to this and kind of getting on with things. And so we think if that keeps moving our way where businesses are interested in the kind of things we do that, that helps.
And then, B, of course, we're going to invest more, right, relevant to more FTEs, more digital spend, we've got some new products we've talked about. So we're super excited. I mean, 1st of all, we've got super soft comps in Q2 when sales almost closed down. And so to Chuck's point, this is a super big deal for 2022. I know most people on the call are interested in this year and 2021, but my headline to you guys is that if we make the sales plan, which is super big, both against the prior year and absolute, it's that'll pour all kinds of revenue into 2022, which is part of the softness that we're dealing with here in 2021, right, that we basically took a quarter and a half out of selling and so you don't get the same wave of
comment that when COVID hits and we took our foot off the accelerator in certain areas, right, because we weren't going to pour incremental sales investment when the market wasn't listening and they were distracted. So we slowed down some of those incremental investments. We're shifting gears now in preparation for a big year next year and the reopening of the economy, fingers crossed. And so we're investing ahead of that. And I think that's also putting a little pressure on our forward guidance in terms of earnings, right, because we're making sales investments again in a big way.
So I think we should be mindful of that.
Yes. No, that's very helpful color. Sorry, just maybe a follow-up question on the SMB Bill Pay opportunity. Obviously, it's a large opportunity, a lot of players are going after it. And congrats on the Roger AI acquisition.
So I was just maybe a follow-up question to earlier questions there. You obviously have a very warm lead, which positions you much better. But can you just talk about how long are those sales cycles, implementation times and how do you plan to leverage your existing sales force and the warm leads that you have to maybe accelerate and double down on that opportunity? Thanks.
Yes, Ashish, another super good question. So one of the attractive things about the SMB bill pay is what you said, it's the Instamatic sale and sign up and get going. The current business that we have today, which is in the middle market, has a pretty prolonged kind of implementation cycle. It's almost like a project to get a $200,000,000 company to connect with you and get the merchants in place and all that kind of stuff. And so the first good news is that sales and revenue will be more connected in the SMB corporate paying business than they are in the middle market.
And I think the point that the question you asked, the point that we make is a super good one, which is the missing capability, I think, Napoli asked me this in the last call, but I couldn't tell him, hey, Ron, what are you missing to really be a gorilla here in corporate pay? And I didn't want to say the answer is an SMB killer software app that works for the little company because we have the rest of the stuff. We acquire tons of clients with our sales channels. We've got capital. We've got processing capability.
We've got the merchant networks to monetize. So we call the clients to sell a thing to that will listen to us. And so unlike Rogers, I met the principal there, who are kind of on the roll with a super good product kind of hanging out on the loan, you take their super good product and you embed it into these sets of things we have. I mean, we are I said it, you know, half typically in his remarks that this could be kind of the biggest deal of all, because finally we have a product that matches up with some of our capabilities. I mean, no one ever asked me before, but how funny that FLEETCOR built a corporate payments business in the middle market when the whole company was an SMB company.
And so it just took us a while to pair up the corporate payments business with the business that we built over the last 20 years. And so the headline is we've arrived, we haven't. So I think without getting way over the skis here that this is a super big deal directionally for the company over the next 3 to 5 years of just building this thing out where both walk around plastic and payables sit inside the same client where we stitch together effectively our fuel card business and our corporate payments business in the same client. It's not a small idea in our mind. It's a big idea.
Our next question is from Bob Napoli with William Blair. Please proceed.
Thank you. Good afternoon.
Appreciate the call out there, Ron.
Just speaking about you, Bob. Just speaking about you.
Just a quick question. I know we're getting at the end here, but the sales the increase in sales investment that you're making, is this something that is one time in nature? Or is the idea here in conjunction with your transformation to accelerate growth, increase investment in sales, to ramp up the sales growth rate over the long term and in line with the transformation focusing on the higher growth product lines?
Yes. The short answer, the increment is recurring. And if you looked at our 3 year plans, you'd see a similar kind of increase, 50% plus in sales in our 2022 plan. So yes, it's recurring. And I'd say the second part is, it does come in a couple of forms.
It comes in, a, the old fashioned form of just more scale, So more outbound phone callers, more field people, more digital Google search keywords. But I'd say the nuance that's different is we're going to make more investment kind of in digital kind of at the top of the funnel. So we're going to spend more money to create more engagement as we have this broader product set now. And so having more things to sell, I think, allows us to spend some money earlier in people's decision cycle than at the end. So we tested that in Q4 last year and it's working.
And so that's some decent part of the step up in 2021, kind of a different kind of spend for us than historically.
Great. Thank you. Appreciate it. Our
next question is from Trevor Williams with Jefferies.
I just wanted to ask on expenses. So just maybe for Charles, regardless of where you end up in the organic range, I mean, should we expect expense growth really to look similar to whatever you end up doing on the top line? Or could there be a level at which you might start to see a little bit more op leverage? So just trying to think about how much we could see flow through to earnings if you do get a big snap back in volumes in the second half? Thanks.
Yes. So I think when you look at our Q1 guidance, you see a bit of a reset of certain line items, whether it's the bad debt reserve or our anticipation of bad debt eking up through the quarters and commensurate with our sales performance. Some of the snapback in terms of T and E, right, when the world opens up, our people are going to travel like others do. Our bonus accruals and such, there's kind of like a re level set in this Q1 and then moving forward from there. So that's part of it.
To your point though, when the volume does come back, it's COVID related and that revenue does pour in, it'll come in at a higher margin level. But offsetting that are some of these incremental investments that Ron mentioned, right? We're layering in more sales and marketing for our core products. We're layering in a lot of sales and marketing for Roger and our cross sell efforts. So I'd say it's going to be pretty balanced in my view, as we go through the quarters of the year.
Okay, got it. That's really helpful. And then just a quick clarification on the guide. I mean, it looks like you're implying the share count to be roughly flat year over year, so really no buybacks baked in at least to the earnings guide. So just curious if there's any reason in particular why we shouldn't expect you to be buying back stock next year or if there's just some element of conservatism that's baked in there?
Thanks.
Yes. Hey, it's Ron. So clearly, we build plans in terms of our capital allocation as though we're going to basically retire debt, right, take the principal down. And so to your point, to the extent the capital allocation results in another transaction, another acquisition where we buy earnings or B, we buy back stock. To your point, the capital allocation can take up our earnings.
So the guidance that we have now assumes that the roughly $1,000,000,000 of cash flow would basically retire debt during the year, which I guess is that's I'm hoping to near a year from today, Trevor, that's not what we do to your point in the next 12 months. But since those two decisions are in the future, we plan what we know, which is to pay down debt.
Okay, got it.
Very helpful. Appreciate it, guys. Thank you.
Welcome. You're
welcome. I believe this concludes the question and answer session. I would like to turn it back over to management for closing remarks.
Yes. Thanks everybody. I apologize if we didn't get your question, but let us know if you have any incremental questions and we look forward to working together in the quarter. That's all.
Thank you. This does conclude today's conference. You may disconnect your lines at this time and thank you for your participation.