NYSE:ARC ARC Document Solutions Q1 2024 Earnings Report Earnings HistoryForecast ARC Document Solutions EPS ResultsActual EPS$0.06Consensus EPS $0.05Beat/MissBeat by +$0.01One Year Ago EPSN/AARC Document Solutions Revenue ResultsActual Revenue$70.79 millionExpected Revenue$69.70 millionBeat/MissBeat by +$1.09 millionYoY Revenue GrowthN/AARC Document Solutions Announcement DetailsQuarterQ1 2024Date5/7/2024TimeN/AConference Call DateTuesday, May 7, 2024Conference Call Time5:00PM ETConference Call ResourcesConference Call AudioConference Call TranscriptPress Release (8-K)Quarterly Report (10-Q)Earnings HistoryCompany ProfilePowered by ARC Document Solutions Q1 2024 Earnings Call TranscriptProvided by QuartrMay 7, 2024 ShareLink copied to clipboard.There are 8 speakers on the call. Operator00:00:00Thank you for standing by. My name is Pam, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Q1 2024 ARC Document Solutions Earnings Report. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers' remarks, there will be a question and answer session. Operator00:00:34Thank you. I would now like to turn the conference over to David Stickney, Vice President of Investor Relations. You may begin. Speaker 100:00:43Thank you, Pam, and welcome, everyone. On the call with me today are Suri Suryakumar, our CEO and Chairman our President and Chief Operating Officer, Dilo Widjasuria and George Avalos, our Chief Financial Officer. Our first quarter results for 20 24 were publicized earlier today in a press release. The press release and other company materials are available from our Investor Relations pages on Arc Document Solutions website at ir.earc.com. Please note that today's call will contain forward looking statements and are only predictions based on information as of today, May 7, 2024, and actual results may differ materially as a result of risks and uncertainties that we highlight in our quarterly and annual SEC filings. Speaker 100:01:34Any non GAAP measures discussed today are reconciled in our press release and Form 8 ks filing. I'll turn the call over to our Chairman and CEO, Suri Suriyakumar. Suri? Speaker 200:01:46Thank you, David. I'm happy to report that our business transformation remains on track with nearly 3% increase in overall sales in the Q1, along with an increase in earnings per share, we think the year is off to a good start, but the business conditions continue to remain tough. Our strategic sales focus drove top line growth, even while operating costs in the Q1 were pressurized due to increased material and labor expenses. We believe color and scanning and archiving will continue to drive our momentum this year. On-site services will provide a steady base with some potential upside and continuous cross selling. Speaker 200:02:30And planned printing and equipment and sales will continue to be pressurized by the high cost of capital. Despite some uncertainty percolating, up from macro events at home and around the world, many of our customers and markets are making their own way and not waiting for things to settle down. Whether it is a stronger trade show presence, a planned expansion of locations, a more aggressive local marketing at the store level or a new national campaign, our forward looking customers are engaging in creative and compelling marketing and we are in a perfect position to assist. As a document scanning and archiving and the desire to continue converting paper documents to digital files remains very high in nearly every market we serve. While the benefits of digital archives are obvious under any circumstances, any uncertainty in the economy, disruption in business or even natural disasters seem to increase the demand for scanning. Speaker 200:03:42We feel very strongly that we remain in the early stages of document conversion and retention and that there is a very long runway for this service line. As our performance for the quarter shows, we have potential to grow in 2024, but we have to work for it. That said, we are confident that we can continue to produce healthy margins and cash flows and remain committed to our 20% annual dividend and opportunistic share repurchases. To help explain some of the details about how we executed our plans during the Q1 of 2024, I'll turn the call over to Dilo and George for their comments. Dilo? Speaker 300:04:25Thank you, Suri. We are pleased with our Q1 results, especially in light of some of the economic uncertainty we experienced over the past few months. Our strategy of focusing on new key business lines and the efforts of our teams rewarded us with nearly 3% growth in net sales for the period. U. S, Canadian, U. Speaker 300:04:46K. And other international locations all had positive sales momentum. But every win we achieved was due to relentless focus and well orchestrated execution by our teams. Little of our work was simply handed to us. We stayed focused on what we could control and worked hard to win every opportunity that came our way. Speaker 300:05:09Everyone was focused on delighting our customers and we did so. Despite the decline we've seen in capital spending in construction and design, many of the new business segments were as we serve were resilient and continue to make sensible investments to fight for new business. Trade shows, sports and entertainment events, athletic programs in schools, retail and many other segments are pursuing growth initiatives with their marketing and we don't see any customers slowing down in this area. Visually compelling color graphics communicate brand promise and add value to their marketing programs, so demand for these services remains high. As a result, our position in the visual marketing industry is getting stronger. Speaker 300:06:02Unlike the past, we are selling into more and more customer verticals with services and production solutions that deliver outsized benefits in a marketing budget. When such customers spend with us, they know they are getting greater value whether they are spending a lot or a little. This is a true testament of our transformation. Our story is simple and defines our strategy. We help our clients grow their brands and marketing activities with customized color graphics and we help optimize their document related workflows with scanning and on-site print management services. Speaker 300:06:45As a result, our addressable market has grown tremendously. Looking at our individual business lines, digital print services grew 3.3% and color led the way. Our 140 digital print centers were well placed to help our clients to get what they want done wherever they need it at a competitive cost and with a single point of contact. In 2024, we improved our production capabilities and capacity with prudent investments in equipment and labor and those investments are already showing returns in new business. Meanwhile, we are taking market share from vendors who print and ship from one location, outsource key parts of production or require outside expertise to get a job done. Speaker 300:07:40Customers who work with us get everything they need in one place at a fair price and without having to manage multiple vendors. Planned printing that is directly tied to the construction and design verticals, however, continue to be pressured. While there is still activity, future planning has slowed significantly. The architectural billing index was down for all 3 months of the Q1 and we saw a billing decline of more than 10% from our architectural clients for the period. Until interest rates start to come down, we will not see growth in this revenue segment. Speaker 300:08:20That said, we are protecting our share of planned printing and expanding our customer base where possible. We fought back hard with color and scanning so that this business line did not drag us into a revenue loss. On-site Print Services sales continue to decline, but the offering remains attractive to many of our customers. We continue to add new customers as well and we expect to moderate the Q1's drop over the next few quarters. By contrast, our document scanning revenue segment increased significantly in the Q1, growing 23% year over year. Speaker 300:08:58The growth remains steady throughout all three months as we sped up clearing the backlog in our production centers with the new capacity we've added last year. Our contract backlog for future quarters is promising. There isn't a customer vertical that does not have intentions to improve access to their critical information. Whether that information is private or public, all clients are improving their digital workflows and getting paper converted to digital documents and the market remains robust. As a result, there are many scanning companies in the market, but we are continuing to create more and more distance between us and them. Speaker 300:09:41Document scanning is easy, but few companies are creating processes to capture information efficiently and at a scale as well as building technology to access information on demand the way ARC is. We use webinars and customer white papers to both educate customers on how to organize and prepare to digitize large volumes of documents and how to select a responsible vendor who will not abandon them in the middle of a project's complexity and size. Equipment and supply sales, a defensive revenue source for ARC, saw a drop of 3% year over year. Like construction printing, we will see moderation in the revenue segment as rates begin to ease. Our marketing activities are continuing to help us to secure new leads for our sales reps. Speaker 300:10:37Email marketing, online advertising, Google based SEO, keyword searches and positive online customer reviews are helping us to open more doors. Our focus has been on organic marketing results and creating long term opportunities. With regard to profitability, most of our investments in hardware have been completed. During the last two quarters, we've also filled most of our sales vacancies and upgraded key positions in our color production team. Our scanning operations also added additional headcount to get ahead of the production backlog and prepare for existing contract backlog. Speaker 300:11:17These moderate but important investments decreased our Q1 gross margin by a little more than 1% and may continue to put mild pressure on our profitability throughout the year. We are now focused on improving the skills of our new employees as we cross train them to perform in several departments. We are very focused on employee retention and building a better future for them so we can ensure a better future for ARC. These are very important strategy for our company as we continue to invest in training, community, diversity and wellness programs. At ARC, we know exactly where we are headed and how we will remain relevant to our customers while improving our long term performance. Speaker 300:12:03This past quarter, you witnessed several positive results of our strategic execution and foresight in an environment that certainly wasn't bad, but had its share of challenges. No matter what lies ahead, our management teams around the company continue to be focused on becoming the best digital print company in the U. S. While delivering significant value to the company's shareholders. I will now ask George to give you an update on our financial results. Speaker 300:12:33George? Thank you, Dilo. As we pointed Speaker 400:12:37out, we continue to transform the top line of the company. While things like interest rates, a slowdown in the economy and global events can mute general progress, none of that stopped us from maintaining our forward momentum. As Dilo outlined a moment ago, during the second half of last year, we began to make the prudent and necessary investments to drive future growth and secure a competitive position in the markets we serve. Equipment acquisitions were a part of that process, but hiring and ongoing inflationary labor costs were the driving force behind the 110 basis points decline in our gross margins. The nature of the investment is long term, but ultimately our increase in expertise, efficiency and productivity will pay dividends in the future. Speaker 400:13:33Looking ahead at the rest of the year, our current labor expenses will not rise in a dramatic way at all, but we don't expect to reduce them significantly either. As always, we will continuously look for ways to improve efficiencies and ways to reduce material and overhead costs. We may not be able to match last year's gross margins, but we do expect a decline in margins from the Q1 to moderate for the balance of the year. SG and A for the quarter fell slightly due to reduced professional service expenses, partially offset by labor cost increases. Even so, operating income increased by $300,000 or 8.6 percent, outpacing our growth in sales. Speaker 400:14:25Earnings per share were $0.01 higher than prior year and EBITDA was essentially flat. We continue to maintain a rock solid capital structure. Our cash balance is more than $50,000,000 Our net debt is less than $10,000,000 Our leverage ratio, net of cash, is under 0.5 times. Our cash flow from operations came in at $3,700,000 for the quarter, roughly in line with the prior year. Consistent with historical trends, Q1 is our lowest quarter as cash flows from operations ramp up as we progress through the year. Speaker 400:15:07For the 4th year in a row, we plan to issue an annual dividend of $0.20 and we will continue to purchase our own stock in the open market. Our commitment to returning shareholder value is firmly in place. To sum up the quarter, we are very happy with the start we had to 2024. Our strategic business lines are growing. Our pipeline is robust. Speaker 400:15:34We made the necessary investments to strengthen our operations and sales force and are taking steps to mitigate the impact of increased labor and material costs. At this point, I'll turn the call back to Suri. Suri? Speaker 200:15:50Thank you, George. Operator, now we are ready for any questions from our listeners. Operator00:15:57Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. And your first question comes from the line of Greg Burns of Sidoti and Company. Please go ahead. Speaker 500:16:33Good afternoon. In the color printing portion of the business, can you give us any color around customer types? Are you having more greater traction with enterprise type customers? Where are you seeing the growth in that market? And then maybe we could just start there? Speaker 300:16:59Peter, you would like to take it? Yes. Thanks, Greg. So basically the nice part about the color growth that we are seeing or we saw in the Q1 is that there is no one special category of customers. The good part is that virtually almost all the verticals are continuing to grow. Speaker 300:17:17But if I summarize outside of what they are doing, why these customers are doing, it's all related to market activities, marketing activities, the trade show business, sports stadiums, sports centers, events are continuing to flourish. And almost all of those events are all directly tied to large format color graphics, they're advertising and they're making those events lot more beautiful. We had so many opportunities in the sports arena stadiums as well during this quarter. So overall, there is no one specific segment. Obviously, there are some very high profile jobs that we did for sports stadiums and so forth. Speaker 300:18:00However, almost all the verticals are doing very well. Speaker 500:18:05Okay. And then can you just maybe give us an idea of why maybe a customer chooses you over someone else in the market? I know you highlighted, but it's definitely a competitive market, but why does ARC win? And then maybe can you talk about your pipeline of opportunities there and your win rates? Are you happy with how you've been performing? Speaker 500:18:32Thank you. Speaker 300:18:34Yes. So one of the things that while there is spending for marketing activities from various customers, one of the things that we clearly see is that every client is very focused on making sure that their spend is valued properly, that they get the best value unlike in the past, right. So one of the key benefits that we've seen the customers getting from ARC is the fact that our operating expenses, we keep it very, very low and that we are able to price it very, very competitively, especially when these customers have worked in multiple parts of the country, right, because they may be designing from one area, but the project or the trade show might be in another city completely far away from where they were. And many of them in the past used to print from their local print provider and they would ship it all across the country and get it installed by someone else. So there was a lot of cost built into those type of projects. Speaker 300:19:40So with ARC, we have been able to completely eliminate that shipping expenses and some of the project management times and cost as well. So we've been able to win some of those work by being very smart in the way we price and also adding value to their workflow. So therefore, we are able to win some of the newer projects, especially on the larger projects by being able to produce that work right close to where the event is. With regard to the pipeline, pipeline is continuing to grow and we have a very good mixture of local work, regional work and some of the projects are national. As you know, we've been always focusing on try to drive up our sales organization from very local business to more regional and then to go after some of the national work as well. Speaker 300:20:31So we are continuing, we are seeing some opportunities. Our sales reps are getting trained, marketing activities are bringing good opportunities at a regional and national level as well for sales team. So from a pipeline backlog, the visibility we see for the rest of the year is very, very good for the company. Speaker 500:20:53Okay. And then just lastly, you didn't buy back much stock in the quarter. What's I know you have an authorization, but what's holding you back and maybe how do you view your buyback and how you look to deploy that? Thank you. Speaker 400:21:11Yes. During the Q1, we ran into the same issue we ran into last year. If you see the numbers, we also didn't buy any back in the Q1, and it's a timing issue. We filed our 10 ks at the end of or in the beginning of March. Our window closes a week before the quarter end. Speaker 400:21:29It just doesn't give us any time to buy back shares. How do we look at it for a full year? We're still committed to it. We're committed to matching or exceeding what we did last year. It will just be back loaded in the second half of the year, same as it was last year. Speaker 600:21:47Okay. Thank you. Operator00:21:51Your next question comes from the line of Glenn Primack of Luzah Investment Group. Please go ahead. Speaker 700:21:59Hi, good afternoon, gang. 2 quick questions. First one, have you seen over the past, like, I don't know, 12 to 15 months, any jobs come through in relation to the Infrastructure Investment Jobs Act? Speaker 300:22:20Do you know anything? Yes. So we've been we haven't seen much work for color, digital color services. But when it comes to planned printing, some of the chip manufacturing plants that are getting built in the country. We are where we are close to them, we have been enjoying some of the construction related printing work. Speaker 700:22:44Okay, great. And I can't help but say this transformation has gone pretty well. So good job to you, Siri and Dilo and the whole team. As you look forward, do you have any, let's just call it, artificial intelligence tools or services that you can begin to offer to the customer base or use internally? Speaker 200:23:11We can use tools like that, Len, in, for example, scanning services and so on and so forth. We are exploring some of those. We, in fact, use some of the tools. But obviously, in anything related to printing, there is not a whole lot to do. But in terms of scanning and imaging and actually extracting information from there, there is some amount of activity there. Speaker 700:23:33Sure. So like you might not see it from that customer perspective, but they need this stuff scanned in order to like get the data to run models at their businesses. Is that fair? Speaker 200:23:46Yes, exactly. Yes. That's accurate. Speaker 700:23:50Okay. Go ahead and put the artificial intelligence on the website. I like that. Speaker 200:23:59Thank you. Operator00:24:13Your next question comes from the line of I apologize, he has withdrawn his question. Speaker 100:24:24So Pam, we're seeing Robert Waltzky on Yes. Operator00:24:31Okay. So he your next question comes from Robert Maltby from Singular Research. Please go ahead. Speaker 600:24:40Hi. I'm as you can tell, I'm substituting for Dave. Dave Marsh couldn't join us today. The functionality here is now I think I have it. So congrats on a solid quarter. Speaker 600:24:57It looks like you beat the estimates on the street. I know that's not the game short term, but it looks like a pretty good ramp. So congratulations to the team. Speaker 200:25:08Thank you. Speaker 600:25:11First question I have is gross margins were flat sequentially and down year over year. Can you explain why? And what can you do to expand them going forward? Speaker 400:25:23Yes. I mean, from a year over year perspective, I mean, we talked a lot about the investments we did in the second half of the year to bolster not only our operating capabilities, but our production area. Some of these investments are more long term. We're just trying to gain more expertise, getting more efficient over a period of time as we become more proficient, more knowledgeable in doing scanning and doing the color graphics. That coupled with inflationary pressures on material and labor costs drove our costs up. Speaker 400:26:06We were able to leverage our overhead with the increase in revenues, ultimately resulted in a decline year over year in margins. Now, Q1 is usually our softest quarter and we start out the year slower with our margins. So we fully expect on a sequential basis for our margins to increase. Additionally, we're doing other things to try to improve efficiencies internally, looking at various vendors to reduce material costs, looking at some other overhead costs. So just to name a few, there are some initiatives we have in place to hopefully mitigate the increase of inflationary pressures and see a year over year return in our margins. Speaker 400:26:49With that said, do we expect to match last year's gross margins when we look in the balance of 2024 year over year? Probably not, but we also expect to them for them to moderate. We do not expect them to be 100 basis points below prior year as we progress through the year. Hopefully, that answers your question. Speaker 600:27:12Yes. Thank you. And do you think the positive sales momentum realized in Q1 rather will continue throughout the year? Speaker 300:27:21Yes. We hope to continue that. Obviously, our legacy planned printing segment will always be challenged. It's very hard to predict during the year. But however, our strategic services that we've embarked on several years ago, As you've seen in the last quarter, we'll continue to do well for us for our company. Speaker 600:27:45Yes, great. And could you perhaps remind us a little bit about your, I guess, calculus on share repurchases as a capital cost of capital versus other opportunities? When would you choose to repurchase shares? Speaker 400:28:05I mean, we're opportunistic and we buy them on the open market. Well, we've kind of said since last year, we're holding the same. We spent about $12,000,000 last year on returning shareholder value. $8,000,000 of that roughly was coming from dividends and the other balance roughly $4,000,000 was on stock repurchase or repurchasing our own stock in the open market. And by and large, we plan to stick to that mantra coming into this year, 2024. Speaker 400:28:36If you look at that as a percentage of our adjusted free cash flows, we spent over 75% of our adjusted free cash flows and returning shareholder dollars in 2023, and we will be in that similar range as we look at 2024 for the full year. As I mentioned earlier, slow start to the year just because timing wise, we really didn't have an opportunity to repurchase shares when you look at the timing of when we filed the K and when our window closes. Thank you. And Speaker 600:29:09finally, I always talk about AI and the benefits therein from various perspectives. In terms of your operations, are you utilizing any AI or plan to and are realizing any strategic benefits? Speaker 200:29:29So like I said in the previous person who asked me the question about AI, where we use AI largely is basically in the scanning business, where we not only scan these documents in many of the customers when they want to extract information from these drawings, then we are able to do that using AI and really AI driven optical character recognition, that's what we do. So for our facilities customers, we do that quite a bit in order to really extract building information from drawings and then be able to deliver it to them. But that's all in the scanning and facilities related business. Obviously, in the printing business, we don't utilize a whole lot of AI. Speaker 400:30:15AI is part of the back office in trying to improve stuff. We use it in some of our Speaker 300:30:19marketing and Speaker 400:30:19so on. Marketing and so on. I'm exploring some ways to use it in the finance and accounting. So I guess a quick answer is, yes, we are using AI. And just like everybody else, we're exploring or we're analyzing it on a monthly, quarterly basis and see where we can utilize it to make ourselves more efficient. Operator00:30:51There are no more questions. I will now turn the conference back over to David for closing remarks. Speaker 100:30:57Thank you, Pam, and thank you, everyone, for joining us this evening. We appreciate your continued interest in AHRQ and encourage you to reach out with any questions or requests for information. We look forward to speaking with you here next quarter and anytime in between. Thanks so much. Have a great evening. Speaker 100:31:15Good night. Operator00:31:17Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes today's call. Thank you all for joining. You may now disconnect.Read morePowered by Conference Call Audio Live Call not available Earnings Conference CallARC Document Solutions Q1 202400:00 / 00:00Speed:1x1.25x1.5x2x Earnings DocumentsPress Release(8-K)Quarterly report(10-Q) ARC Document Solutions Earnings HeadlinesARC Resources: Double First Quarter Boost Thanks To The Attachie ProjectMay 2 at 6:15 PM | seekingalpha.comExploring AI in Healthcare Facilities: David Trask, National Director at ARC Facilities, to Present Educational Session at TAHFM ConferenceApril 4, 2025 | finance.yahoo.comTrump’s Bitcoin Reserve is No Accident…Bryce Paul believes this is the #1 coin to buy right now The catalyst behind this surge is a massive new blockchain development…May 3, 2025 | Crypto 101 Media (Ad)Exploring AI in Healthcare Facilities: David Trask, National Director at ARC Facilities, to ...April 3, 2025 | gurufocus.comARC Facilities Unveils Partner Program to Expand Facility Management Industry ReachMarch 26, 2025 | finance.yahoo.comONWARD Medical Announces First-in-Human Use of ARC-IM Lumbar Lead Designed to Restore Standing, Stepping, and Lower Limb MobilityMarch 26, 2025 | globenewswire.comSee More ARC Document Solutions Headlines Get Earnings Announcements in your inboxWant to stay updated on the latest earnings announcements and upcoming reports for companies like ARC Document Solutions? Sign up for Earnings360's daily newsletter to receive timely earnings updates on ARC Document Solutions and other key companies, straight to your email. Email Address About ARC Document SolutionsARC Document Solutions (NYSE:ARC), a digital printing company, provides digital printing and document-related services in the United States. It provides managed print services, that places, manages, and optimizes print and imaging equipment in customers' offices, job sites, and other facilities; and cloud-based document management software and other digital hosting services. The company also provides professional services and software services to re-produce and distribute large-format and small-format documents, and specialized graphic color printing. In addition, it engages in the sale and supply of equipment; and provides ancillary services. The company operates service centers in the United States, Canada, China, the United Kingdom, India, and the United Arab Emirates. It serves local restaurant owners, construction subcontractors, international retailers, regional energy companies, and largest school districts, as well as retail, technology, energy, education, hospitality, public utilities, and others. The company was formerly known as American Reprographics Company and changed its name to ARC Document Solutions, Inc. in 2012. ARC Document Solutions, Inc. was founded in 1988 is headquartered in San Ramon, California.View ARC Document Solutions ProfileRead more More Earnings Resources from MarketBeat Earnings Tools Today's Earnings Tomorrow's Earnings Next Week's Earnings Upcoming Earnings Calls Earnings Newsletter Earnings Call Transcripts Earnings Beats & Misses Corporate Guidance Earnings Screener Earnings By Country U.S. Earnings Reports Canadian Earnings Reports U.K. Earnings Reports Latest Articles Amazon Earnings: 2 Reasons to Love It, 1 Reason to Be CautiousMeta Takes A Bow With Q1 Earnings - Watch For Tariff Impact in Q2Palantir Earnings: 1 Bullish Signal and 1 Area of ConcernVisa Q2 Earnings Top Forecasts, Adds $30B Buyback PlanMicrosoft Crushes Earnings, What’s Next for MSFT Stock?Qualcomm's Earnings: 2 Reasons to Buy, 1 to Stay AwayAMD Stock Signals Strong Buy Ahead of Earnings Upcoming Earnings Palantir Technologies (5/5/2025)Vertex Pharmaceuticals (5/5/2025)Realty Income (5/5/2025)Williams Companies (5/5/2025)CRH (5/5/2025)Advanced Micro Devices (5/6/2025)American Electric Power (5/6/2025)Constellation Energy (5/6/2025)Marriott International (5/6/2025)Energy Transfer (5/6/2025) Get 30 Days of MarketBeat All Access for Free Sign up for MarketBeat All Access to gain access to MarketBeat's full suite of research tools. Start Your 30-Day Trial MarketBeat All Access Features Best-in-Class Portfolio Monitoring Get personalized stock ideas. Compare portfolio to indices. Check stock news, ratings, SEC filings, and more. Stock Ideas and Recommendations See daily stock ideas from top analysts. Receive short-term trading ideas from MarketBeat. Identify trending stocks on social media. Advanced Stock Screeners and Research Tools Use our seven stock screeners to find suitable stocks. Stay informed with MarketBeat's real-time news. Export data to Excel for personal analysis. Sign in to your free account to enjoy these benefits In-depth profiles and analysis for 20,000 public companies. Real-time analyst ratings, insider transactions, earnings data, and more. Our daily ratings and market update email newsletter. Sign in to your free account to enjoy all that MarketBeat has to offer. Sign In Create Account Your Email Address: Email Address Required Your Password: Password Required Log In or Sign in with Facebook Sign in with Google Forgot your password? Your Email Address: Please enter your email address. Please enter a valid email address Choose a Password: Please enter your password. Your password must be at least 8 characters long and contain at least 1 number, 1 letter, and 1 special character. Create My Account (Free) or Sign in with Facebook Sign in with Google By creating a free account, you agree to our terms of service. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
There are 8 speakers on the call. Operator00:00:00Thank you for standing by. My name is Pam, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Q1 2024 ARC Document Solutions Earnings Report. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers' remarks, there will be a question and answer session. Operator00:00:34Thank you. I would now like to turn the conference over to David Stickney, Vice President of Investor Relations. You may begin. Speaker 100:00:43Thank you, Pam, and welcome, everyone. On the call with me today are Suri Suryakumar, our CEO and Chairman our President and Chief Operating Officer, Dilo Widjasuria and George Avalos, our Chief Financial Officer. Our first quarter results for 20 24 were publicized earlier today in a press release. The press release and other company materials are available from our Investor Relations pages on Arc Document Solutions website at ir.earc.com. Please note that today's call will contain forward looking statements and are only predictions based on information as of today, May 7, 2024, and actual results may differ materially as a result of risks and uncertainties that we highlight in our quarterly and annual SEC filings. Speaker 100:01:34Any non GAAP measures discussed today are reconciled in our press release and Form 8 ks filing. I'll turn the call over to our Chairman and CEO, Suri Suriyakumar. Suri? Speaker 200:01:46Thank you, David. I'm happy to report that our business transformation remains on track with nearly 3% increase in overall sales in the Q1, along with an increase in earnings per share, we think the year is off to a good start, but the business conditions continue to remain tough. Our strategic sales focus drove top line growth, even while operating costs in the Q1 were pressurized due to increased material and labor expenses. We believe color and scanning and archiving will continue to drive our momentum this year. On-site services will provide a steady base with some potential upside and continuous cross selling. Speaker 200:02:30And planned printing and equipment and sales will continue to be pressurized by the high cost of capital. Despite some uncertainty percolating, up from macro events at home and around the world, many of our customers and markets are making their own way and not waiting for things to settle down. Whether it is a stronger trade show presence, a planned expansion of locations, a more aggressive local marketing at the store level or a new national campaign, our forward looking customers are engaging in creative and compelling marketing and we are in a perfect position to assist. As a document scanning and archiving and the desire to continue converting paper documents to digital files remains very high in nearly every market we serve. While the benefits of digital archives are obvious under any circumstances, any uncertainty in the economy, disruption in business or even natural disasters seem to increase the demand for scanning. Speaker 200:03:42We feel very strongly that we remain in the early stages of document conversion and retention and that there is a very long runway for this service line. As our performance for the quarter shows, we have potential to grow in 2024, but we have to work for it. That said, we are confident that we can continue to produce healthy margins and cash flows and remain committed to our 20% annual dividend and opportunistic share repurchases. To help explain some of the details about how we executed our plans during the Q1 of 2024, I'll turn the call over to Dilo and George for their comments. Dilo? Speaker 300:04:25Thank you, Suri. We are pleased with our Q1 results, especially in light of some of the economic uncertainty we experienced over the past few months. Our strategy of focusing on new key business lines and the efforts of our teams rewarded us with nearly 3% growth in net sales for the period. U. S, Canadian, U. Speaker 300:04:46K. And other international locations all had positive sales momentum. But every win we achieved was due to relentless focus and well orchestrated execution by our teams. Little of our work was simply handed to us. We stayed focused on what we could control and worked hard to win every opportunity that came our way. Speaker 300:05:09Everyone was focused on delighting our customers and we did so. Despite the decline we've seen in capital spending in construction and design, many of the new business segments were as we serve were resilient and continue to make sensible investments to fight for new business. Trade shows, sports and entertainment events, athletic programs in schools, retail and many other segments are pursuing growth initiatives with their marketing and we don't see any customers slowing down in this area. Visually compelling color graphics communicate brand promise and add value to their marketing programs, so demand for these services remains high. As a result, our position in the visual marketing industry is getting stronger. Speaker 300:06:02Unlike the past, we are selling into more and more customer verticals with services and production solutions that deliver outsized benefits in a marketing budget. When such customers spend with us, they know they are getting greater value whether they are spending a lot or a little. This is a true testament of our transformation. Our story is simple and defines our strategy. We help our clients grow their brands and marketing activities with customized color graphics and we help optimize their document related workflows with scanning and on-site print management services. Speaker 300:06:45As a result, our addressable market has grown tremendously. Looking at our individual business lines, digital print services grew 3.3% and color led the way. Our 140 digital print centers were well placed to help our clients to get what they want done wherever they need it at a competitive cost and with a single point of contact. In 2024, we improved our production capabilities and capacity with prudent investments in equipment and labor and those investments are already showing returns in new business. Meanwhile, we are taking market share from vendors who print and ship from one location, outsource key parts of production or require outside expertise to get a job done. Speaker 300:07:40Customers who work with us get everything they need in one place at a fair price and without having to manage multiple vendors. Planned printing that is directly tied to the construction and design verticals, however, continue to be pressured. While there is still activity, future planning has slowed significantly. The architectural billing index was down for all 3 months of the Q1 and we saw a billing decline of more than 10% from our architectural clients for the period. Until interest rates start to come down, we will not see growth in this revenue segment. Speaker 300:08:20That said, we are protecting our share of planned printing and expanding our customer base where possible. We fought back hard with color and scanning so that this business line did not drag us into a revenue loss. On-site Print Services sales continue to decline, but the offering remains attractive to many of our customers. We continue to add new customers as well and we expect to moderate the Q1's drop over the next few quarters. By contrast, our document scanning revenue segment increased significantly in the Q1, growing 23% year over year. Speaker 300:08:58The growth remains steady throughout all three months as we sped up clearing the backlog in our production centers with the new capacity we've added last year. Our contract backlog for future quarters is promising. There isn't a customer vertical that does not have intentions to improve access to their critical information. Whether that information is private or public, all clients are improving their digital workflows and getting paper converted to digital documents and the market remains robust. As a result, there are many scanning companies in the market, but we are continuing to create more and more distance between us and them. Speaker 300:09:41Document scanning is easy, but few companies are creating processes to capture information efficiently and at a scale as well as building technology to access information on demand the way ARC is. We use webinars and customer white papers to both educate customers on how to organize and prepare to digitize large volumes of documents and how to select a responsible vendor who will not abandon them in the middle of a project's complexity and size. Equipment and supply sales, a defensive revenue source for ARC, saw a drop of 3% year over year. Like construction printing, we will see moderation in the revenue segment as rates begin to ease. Our marketing activities are continuing to help us to secure new leads for our sales reps. Speaker 300:10:37Email marketing, online advertising, Google based SEO, keyword searches and positive online customer reviews are helping us to open more doors. Our focus has been on organic marketing results and creating long term opportunities. With regard to profitability, most of our investments in hardware have been completed. During the last two quarters, we've also filled most of our sales vacancies and upgraded key positions in our color production team. Our scanning operations also added additional headcount to get ahead of the production backlog and prepare for existing contract backlog. Speaker 300:11:17These moderate but important investments decreased our Q1 gross margin by a little more than 1% and may continue to put mild pressure on our profitability throughout the year. We are now focused on improving the skills of our new employees as we cross train them to perform in several departments. We are very focused on employee retention and building a better future for them so we can ensure a better future for ARC. These are very important strategy for our company as we continue to invest in training, community, diversity and wellness programs. At ARC, we know exactly where we are headed and how we will remain relevant to our customers while improving our long term performance. Speaker 300:12:03This past quarter, you witnessed several positive results of our strategic execution and foresight in an environment that certainly wasn't bad, but had its share of challenges. No matter what lies ahead, our management teams around the company continue to be focused on becoming the best digital print company in the U. S. While delivering significant value to the company's shareholders. I will now ask George to give you an update on our financial results. Speaker 300:12:33George? Thank you, Dilo. As we pointed Speaker 400:12:37out, we continue to transform the top line of the company. While things like interest rates, a slowdown in the economy and global events can mute general progress, none of that stopped us from maintaining our forward momentum. As Dilo outlined a moment ago, during the second half of last year, we began to make the prudent and necessary investments to drive future growth and secure a competitive position in the markets we serve. Equipment acquisitions were a part of that process, but hiring and ongoing inflationary labor costs were the driving force behind the 110 basis points decline in our gross margins. The nature of the investment is long term, but ultimately our increase in expertise, efficiency and productivity will pay dividends in the future. Speaker 400:13:33Looking ahead at the rest of the year, our current labor expenses will not rise in a dramatic way at all, but we don't expect to reduce them significantly either. As always, we will continuously look for ways to improve efficiencies and ways to reduce material and overhead costs. We may not be able to match last year's gross margins, but we do expect a decline in margins from the Q1 to moderate for the balance of the year. SG and A for the quarter fell slightly due to reduced professional service expenses, partially offset by labor cost increases. Even so, operating income increased by $300,000 or 8.6 percent, outpacing our growth in sales. Speaker 400:14:25Earnings per share were $0.01 higher than prior year and EBITDA was essentially flat. We continue to maintain a rock solid capital structure. Our cash balance is more than $50,000,000 Our net debt is less than $10,000,000 Our leverage ratio, net of cash, is under 0.5 times. Our cash flow from operations came in at $3,700,000 for the quarter, roughly in line with the prior year. Consistent with historical trends, Q1 is our lowest quarter as cash flows from operations ramp up as we progress through the year. Speaker 400:15:07For the 4th year in a row, we plan to issue an annual dividend of $0.20 and we will continue to purchase our own stock in the open market. Our commitment to returning shareholder value is firmly in place. To sum up the quarter, we are very happy with the start we had to 2024. Our strategic business lines are growing. Our pipeline is robust. Speaker 400:15:34We made the necessary investments to strengthen our operations and sales force and are taking steps to mitigate the impact of increased labor and material costs. At this point, I'll turn the call back to Suri. Suri? Speaker 200:15:50Thank you, George. Operator, now we are ready for any questions from our listeners. Operator00:15:57Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. And your first question comes from the line of Greg Burns of Sidoti and Company. Please go ahead. Speaker 500:16:33Good afternoon. In the color printing portion of the business, can you give us any color around customer types? Are you having more greater traction with enterprise type customers? Where are you seeing the growth in that market? And then maybe we could just start there? Speaker 300:16:59Peter, you would like to take it? Yes. Thanks, Greg. So basically the nice part about the color growth that we are seeing or we saw in the Q1 is that there is no one special category of customers. The good part is that virtually almost all the verticals are continuing to grow. Speaker 300:17:17But if I summarize outside of what they are doing, why these customers are doing, it's all related to market activities, marketing activities, the trade show business, sports stadiums, sports centers, events are continuing to flourish. And almost all of those events are all directly tied to large format color graphics, they're advertising and they're making those events lot more beautiful. We had so many opportunities in the sports arena stadiums as well during this quarter. So overall, there is no one specific segment. Obviously, there are some very high profile jobs that we did for sports stadiums and so forth. Speaker 300:18:00However, almost all the verticals are doing very well. Speaker 500:18:05Okay. And then can you just maybe give us an idea of why maybe a customer chooses you over someone else in the market? I know you highlighted, but it's definitely a competitive market, but why does ARC win? And then maybe can you talk about your pipeline of opportunities there and your win rates? Are you happy with how you've been performing? Speaker 500:18:32Thank you. Speaker 300:18:34Yes. So one of the things that while there is spending for marketing activities from various customers, one of the things that we clearly see is that every client is very focused on making sure that their spend is valued properly, that they get the best value unlike in the past, right. So one of the key benefits that we've seen the customers getting from ARC is the fact that our operating expenses, we keep it very, very low and that we are able to price it very, very competitively, especially when these customers have worked in multiple parts of the country, right, because they may be designing from one area, but the project or the trade show might be in another city completely far away from where they were. And many of them in the past used to print from their local print provider and they would ship it all across the country and get it installed by someone else. So there was a lot of cost built into those type of projects. Speaker 300:19:40So with ARC, we have been able to completely eliminate that shipping expenses and some of the project management times and cost as well. So we've been able to win some of those work by being very smart in the way we price and also adding value to their workflow. So therefore, we are able to win some of the newer projects, especially on the larger projects by being able to produce that work right close to where the event is. With regard to the pipeline, pipeline is continuing to grow and we have a very good mixture of local work, regional work and some of the projects are national. As you know, we've been always focusing on try to drive up our sales organization from very local business to more regional and then to go after some of the national work as well. Speaker 300:20:31So we are continuing, we are seeing some opportunities. Our sales reps are getting trained, marketing activities are bringing good opportunities at a regional and national level as well for sales team. So from a pipeline backlog, the visibility we see for the rest of the year is very, very good for the company. Speaker 500:20:53Okay. And then just lastly, you didn't buy back much stock in the quarter. What's I know you have an authorization, but what's holding you back and maybe how do you view your buyback and how you look to deploy that? Thank you. Speaker 400:21:11Yes. During the Q1, we ran into the same issue we ran into last year. If you see the numbers, we also didn't buy any back in the Q1, and it's a timing issue. We filed our 10 ks at the end of or in the beginning of March. Our window closes a week before the quarter end. Speaker 400:21:29It just doesn't give us any time to buy back shares. How do we look at it for a full year? We're still committed to it. We're committed to matching or exceeding what we did last year. It will just be back loaded in the second half of the year, same as it was last year. Speaker 600:21:47Okay. Thank you. Operator00:21:51Your next question comes from the line of Glenn Primack of Luzah Investment Group. Please go ahead. Speaker 700:21:59Hi, good afternoon, gang. 2 quick questions. First one, have you seen over the past, like, I don't know, 12 to 15 months, any jobs come through in relation to the Infrastructure Investment Jobs Act? Speaker 300:22:20Do you know anything? Yes. So we've been we haven't seen much work for color, digital color services. But when it comes to planned printing, some of the chip manufacturing plants that are getting built in the country. We are where we are close to them, we have been enjoying some of the construction related printing work. Speaker 700:22:44Okay, great. And I can't help but say this transformation has gone pretty well. So good job to you, Siri and Dilo and the whole team. As you look forward, do you have any, let's just call it, artificial intelligence tools or services that you can begin to offer to the customer base or use internally? Speaker 200:23:11We can use tools like that, Len, in, for example, scanning services and so on and so forth. We are exploring some of those. We, in fact, use some of the tools. But obviously, in anything related to printing, there is not a whole lot to do. But in terms of scanning and imaging and actually extracting information from there, there is some amount of activity there. Speaker 700:23:33Sure. So like you might not see it from that customer perspective, but they need this stuff scanned in order to like get the data to run models at their businesses. Is that fair? Speaker 200:23:46Yes, exactly. Yes. That's accurate. Speaker 700:23:50Okay. Go ahead and put the artificial intelligence on the website. I like that. Speaker 200:23:59Thank you. Operator00:24:13Your next question comes from the line of I apologize, he has withdrawn his question. Speaker 100:24:24So Pam, we're seeing Robert Waltzky on Yes. Operator00:24:31Okay. So he your next question comes from Robert Maltby from Singular Research. Please go ahead. Speaker 600:24:40Hi. I'm as you can tell, I'm substituting for Dave. Dave Marsh couldn't join us today. The functionality here is now I think I have it. So congrats on a solid quarter. Speaker 600:24:57It looks like you beat the estimates on the street. I know that's not the game short term, but it looks like a pretty good ramp. So congratulations to the team. Speaker 200:25:08Thank you. Speaker 600:25:11First question I have is gross margins were flat sequentially and down year over year. Can you explain why? And what can you do to expand them going forward? Speaker 400:25:23Yes. I mean, from a year over year perspective, I mean, we talked a lot about the investments we did in the second half of the year to bolster not only our operating capabilities, but our production area. Some of these investments are more long term. We're just trying to gain more expertise, getting more efficient over a period of time as we become more proficient, more knowledgeable in doing scanning and doing the color graphics. That coupled with inflationary pressures on material and labor costs drove our costs up. Speaker 400:26:06We were able to leverage our overhead with the increase in revenues, ultimately resulted in a decline year over year in margins. Now, Q1 is usually our softest quarter and we start out the year slower with our margins. So we fully expect on a sequential basis for our margins to increase. Additionally, we're doing other things to try to improve efficiencies internally, looking at various vendors to reduce material costs, looking at some other overhead costs. So just to name a few, there are some initiatives we have in place to hopefully mitigate the increase of inflationary pressures and see a year over year return in our margins. Speaker 400:26:49With that said, do we expect to match last year's gross margins when we look in the balance of 2024 year over year? Probably not, but we also expect to them for them to moderate. We do not expect them to be 100 basis points below prior year as we progress through the year. Hopefully, that answers your question. Speaker 600:27:12Yes. Thank you. And do you think the positive sales momentum realized in Q1 rather will continue throughout the year? Speaker 300:27:21Yes. We hope to continue that. Obviously, our legacy planned printing segment will always be challenged. It's very hard to predict during the year. But however, our strategic services that we've embarked on several years ago, As you've seen in the last quarter, we'll continue to do well for us for our company. Speaker 600:27:45Yes, great. And could you perhaps remind us a little bit about your, I guess, calculus on share repurchases as a capital cost of capital versus other opportunities? When would you choose to repurchase shares? Speaker 400:28:05I mean, we're opportunistic and we buy them on the open market. Well, we've kind of said since last year, we're holding the same. We spent about $12,000,000 last year on returning shareholder value. $8,000,000 of that roughly was coming from dividends and the other balance roughly $4,000,000 was on stock repurchase or repurchasing our own stock in the open market. And by and large, we plan to stick to that mantra coming into this year, 2024. Speaker 400:28:36If you look at that as a percentage of our adjusted free cash flows, we spent over 75% of our adjusted free cash flows and returning shareholder dollars in 2023, and we will be in that similar range as we look at 2024 for the full year. As I mentioned earlier, slow start to the year just because timing wise, we really didn't have an opportunity to repurchase shares when you look at the timing of when we filed the K and when our window closes. Thank you. And Speaker 600:29:09finally, I always talk about AI and the benefits therein from various perspectives. In terms of your operations, are you utilizing any AI or plan to and are realizing any strategic benefits? Speaker 200:29:29So like I said in the previous person who asked me the question about AI, where we use AI largely is basically in the scanning business, where we not only scan these documents in many of the customers when they want to extract information from these drawings, then we are able to do that using AI and really AI driven optical character recognition, that's what we do. So for our facilities customers, we do that quite a bit in order to really extract building information from drawings and then be able to deliver it to them. But that's all in the scanning and facilities related business. Obviously, in the printing business, we don't utilize a whole lot of AI. Speaker 400:30:15AI is part of the back office in trying to improve stuff. We use it in some of our Speaker 300:30:19marketing and Speaker 400:30:19so on. Marketing and so on. I'm exploring some ways to use it in the finance and accounting. So I guess a quick answer is, yes, we are using AI. And just like everybody else, we're exploring or we're analyzing it on a monthly, quarterly basis and see where we can utilize it to make ourselves more efficient. Operator00:30:51There are no more questions. I will now turn the conference back over to David for closing remarks. Speaker 100:30:57Thank you, Pam, and thank you, everyone, for joining us this evening. We appreciate your continued interest in AHRQ and encourage you to reach out with any questions or requests for information. We look forward to speaking with you here next quarter and anytime in between. Thanks so much. Have a great evening. Speaker 100:31:15Good night. Operator00:31:17Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes today's call. Thank you all for joining. You may now disconnect.Read morePowered by