OUTFRONT Media Inc. Q4 FY2021 Earnings Call

Good day, and welcome to the Fourth Quarter 2021 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Mr. Stephan Bisson. Please go ahead, sir.

Good afternoon and thank you for joining our 2021 fourth quarter earnings call. With me on the call today are Jeremy Male, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; and Matthew Siegel, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. After a discussion of our financial results, we'll open up the lines for a question-and-answer session. Our comments today will refer to the earnings release and a slide presentation that you can find on the Investor Relations section of our website. After today's call has concluded, an audio archive will be available there as well. This conference call may include forward-looking statements. Relevant factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from these forward-looking statements are listed in our earnings materials and in our SEC filings, including our 2020 Form 10-K and our 2021 quarterly reports, as well as our 2021 Form 10-K, which we expect to file this week. We will refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures on this call. Any references to OIBDA made today will be on an adjusted basis. Reconciliations of OIBDA and other non-GAAP financial measures are in the appendix of the slide presentation, the earnings release, and on our website, which also includes presentations with prior period reconciliations. Let me now turn the call over to Jeremy.

Thanks, Stephan, and thank you everyone for joining us today. We just heard from Stephan Bisson, our new Vice President of Investor Relations, who we are delighted to have joined us in mid-November from sell-side research covering out of home. It seems like Stephan has chosen a good time to join OUTFRONT, and indeed our industry. It's great to be here today and to share my enthusiasm for our recent results and optimism and confidence for 2022. Our fourth quarter was even stronger than we expected and communicated on our call in November as momentum continued right through the end of the year, and indeed into 2022. Billboard and transit were sharply ahead again, and our diversified portfolio of clients enabled us to keep demand high, even as certain parts of the economy reacted to short-term changes in consumer behavior and municipal guidelines. You can see the highlights on slide 3. Total revenue grew 38%, above our low 30s expectation. Business continues to book later within each quarter in particular, due to the flexibility of digital inventory that enables us to write business on very short notice. Once again, this growth was seen on all products across our company with US billboard up 27% from 2020 and transit and other revenue doubling year-on-year. We are seeing strong performance in almost all of our geographies, large and small, in both billboard and transit. We were especially encouraged by gradual ridership gains in various transit franchises during the fourth quarter prior to mid-December, when the Omicron variant concerns quite reasonably put a short-term pause on that trend. We are pleased to see audience improvement resuming again, as more companies and employees return to their offices. This strong revenue performance further demonstrates our attractive operating leverage with OIBDA and AFFO growth rates, more than double and triple respectively that of our revenue growth. We also far surpassed our full year AFFO guidance, about which Matt will go into in more detail and also provide our outlook for 2022 AFFO. And I also want to make sure everyone noticed our earlier press release announcing that our Board of Directors has raised our quarterly common dividend to $0.30 per share starting this quarter. Our performance and outlook for 2022 encourage us to bring the dividend closer to our pre-pandemic level, and this is a major step towards that goal. Slide 4 highlights that our revenue growth was driven by our US Media segment which grew 39% for the quarter. Other, which consists almost entirely of OUTFRONT Canada, grew almost 24% despite some continued lockdowns. On slide 5, you can see a more detailed look at our US Media revenues. Billboard grew by 27% from last year. But even more impressively, it was up around 11% versus the same quarter in 2019, a significant widening compared to the 2% achieved in the third quarter. Transit also accelerated its year-over-year performance, more than doubling prior year revenue which was obviously impacted by lower ridership in 2020. In New York, our largest transit market, daily subway ridership eclipsed three million people again, and we're also pleased to see transit revenue recovery outpace the ridership recovery when both are measured against the same periods in 2019. Turning to slide six where we can see US Media sources of revenue. You'll notice that national business growth again led our overall growth and was up almost 47% from last year. This represents larger advertiser interest in our billboard inventory with national transit revenue almost more than double 2020's level. Our local US business, which has been less volatile through the pandemic, also performed extremely well, growing 34% this quarter with impressive growth in both billboard and transit. Notably, our mix returned to our more typical 55%-45% local-national split in Q4. Another really positive indicator for our company is the large increase in yield that you can see on slide seven. $2,750 represents a 29% increase from last year and almost 15% above the comparable quarter in 2019. Strong demand for our billboards is helping us push both occupancy and price higher, and we think there's further room for improvement in both. Focusing further on digital on slide eight. Digital revenue grew more than 70% in the quarter to above 31% of total revenue as a result of increased yield, new inventory, and the opportunity for later incremental bookings. Billboard digital grew an impressive 46% and transit digital continued its acceleration from last quarter and more than tripled its pandemic-impacted level from last year. Transit was led by the New York MTA performance with improving demand and more digital inventory above and below ground. Our digital opportunity is hugely exciting and a great indicator for our future. To complete the revenue picture, on slide nine, is other primarily Canada where we had good growth in the quarter that was again somewhat impacted by government restrictions. Let me now hand it over to Matt to review the rest of our financials.

Thanks, Jeremy, and good afternoon everyone. Thank you for joining our call today. For a deeper dive into our P&L, please turn to slide 10 for a look at our expenses. Overall, our total expenses were up $61 million year-over-year. This has been our trend for most of the year following the first quarter. Strong revenue growth across the whole company has led to increases in variable and performance-related costs. Our largest cost component, billboard lease expense, is primarily a fixed cost with some revenue-sharing component in certain geographies. This is demonstrated this quarter by our lease costs which only increased 9.5% versus a 27% increase in billboard revenue that Jeremy noted, demonstrating very strong operating leverage in the business. Most of our transit franchises were operating under revenue-share arrangements in 2021. And you can see our franchise expenses increased by approximately 85% as revenue went up 101%. The exception to this in 2021 has been the New York MTA franchise, which has been under its minimum annual guarantee or MAG level all year. However, during the fourth quarter, stronger revenue performance moved the MTA franchise to a positive gross margin and mitigated some of the full year cost impact of the minimum annual guarantee. For 2022, we expect New York MTA revenue to improve but likely still remain under its MAG level which requires around $230 million of revenue to reach. Posting maintenance and other expenses were up nearly 15%, given additional activity related to higher revenues. And lastly, corporate and SG&A expense combined were up almost 26% over last year. This reflects higher revenue and OIBDA driving increases in performance-based compensation costs, partially offset by a reduction in bad debt expense. Once again, this quarter you can see the operating leverage inherent in our business model. On Slide 11, you can see our OIBDA for the quarter is up 82% from last year or more than twice as high as our revenue growth of 38%. This was our highest quarterly OIBDA figure since our inception, higher than $140 million in the fourth quarter of 2019. Our OIBDA margin of 32.5% was 120 basis points higher than 2019 and a year-over-year increase of almost eight full percentage points. Our higher margins were driven by greater billboard yields, higher MTA revenue, and a favorable mix of business. Lots of moving parts going our way this quarter. Slide 12 has more detail on the sources and growth of OIBDA. Looking at the breakdown of OIBDA, you can see 49% growth in U.S. Media billboard to $139 million, comfortably above our 2019 fourth quarter level. Billboard OIBDA margin was 41.7%, up more than six percentage points from a year ago and higher than our peak revenue performance of 2019. This improvement is driven by general yield growth, increased digital share of billboard revenue, and a favorable geographic mix of revenue. Transit OIBDA turned more positive this quarter and margin returned to a more typical 21%, as seasonally strong MTA performance lifted that franchise and our total transit business. 2021 full-year MTA revenue remained below the minimum annual guarantee. As previously mentioned, we expect this will likely be true for 2022 also. As a reminder, quarterly transit revenue has seasonal fluctuations and the MAG is accounted for on a straight-line basis. So while Q1 OIBDA will reflect this over the full year, we expect the MTA revenue gap to the MAG to narrow and annual transit OIBDA to significantly improve versus 2021. Let's now turn to capital expenditures on slide 13. As we expected, we had a large quarter in both growth and maintenance spend, as some supply chain restrictions opened up and we received various screens, equipment, and other tools that we had waited for to meet our digital targets and general operational needs. We finished the year with a CapEx spend of $74 million, in line with our previously communicated expectation. We added 188 digital billboards this year through a combination of conversion and acquisition with all but 15 of those in the U.S. market. We spent $136 million on acquisitions in 2021, more than half of that in the fourth quarter. The largest transaction was $30 million and all of them were tuck-ins to existing OUTFRONT markets. Our pipeline of digital conversion locations and acquisition discussions remains very active. So we again have a target of 150 to 200 new large-format digitals for 2022. We have seen some improvement in the supply chain for screens, but we still intend to order earlier in the year to hold some inventory and manage expected demand. We expect annual CapEx to bounce back to a familiar level of $85 million, including around $25 million identified as maintenance spend. Slide 14 is an attractive chart that shows AFFO this quarter of more than double last year. Full-year AFFO growth was 113%, sharply above our recently raised guidance of around 80%, reflecting late booking revenue flowing straight through to AFFO. For 2022, we currently expect AFFO growth around 60% from 2021's $205 million, as we look forward to another strong year. We see continued billboard strength and transit improving throughout 2022, but transit not yet back to pre-pandemic full-year revenue of 2019 until next year. Our cash tax expectation remains low, around $5 million as our REIT structure retains its efficiency for our revenue growth. Slide 15 has our quarterly MTA deployment update and you can see we picked up our pace of subway deployments from the third quarter and almost doubled our spend from last quarter. In 2022, we expect to spend approximately $150 million on MTA deployment, and it is unlikely we will recoup deployment costs during the year. The pace and spend will partially depend on the supply chain availability of various parts and tools used for rolling stock attachments. We were pleased with MTA performance at the end of the year with a strong fourth quarter, maintaining momentum through the Omicron variant surge and we look forward to further improvement. Please turn to Slide 16 for an update on our balance sheet. Committed liquidity is over $900 million, down from $1 billion in the last quarter. We were very active in the acquisition market during the quarter, closing six separate deals with a value of approximately $80 million. Our teams continue to look for more opportunities for growth, so we are excited about the prospect of additive inventory to our existing geographies. Our net total leverage declined to under six times, as our OIBDA continues to climb back toward pre-pandemic levels. We are watching interest rate movements but we feel very comfortable as our next maturity is over three years away and only 21% of total debt is subject to floating rates. As Jeremy mentioned, our Board of Directors approved a substantial increase in our quarterly common dividend to $0.30 a share payable in March. This reflects our confidence in the current outlook for our business this year and is an appropriate increase to manage our potential REIT dividend requirement and also our desire to further grow our dividend as we move forward. We are really pleased about our strong finish to 2021 and we are excited about 2022. I look forward to talking with many of you in the next few weeks increasingly in person to share our enthusiasm and answer your questions. With that, let me turn the call back to Jeremy.

Thanks, Matt. The fourth quarter was certainly markedly above our expectations. And as excited as we are to share these results today, we are even more excited about the future. Our industry is in a great place with people on the move again and growing audiences seeing our displays every day. Further, demand for digital billboards has never been hotter, as marketers enjoy the flexibility to display eye-catching messages at the right time in the right place. Given our diverse set of assets, we believe OUTFRONT is in a great position to capitalize on some of the challenges currently facing other media and once again capture incremental share of the advertising pie. More specifically, looking to Q1, while geopolitical and pandemic-related uncertainties obviously remain, it is shaping up to be a great quarter. The Omicron surge has passed, restrictions are loosening and attitudes towards COVID are changing. The economy remains vibrant, and we are seeing this in the pace of our business. So specifically, we currently anticipate that Q1 revenues will further strengthen from Q4 and be up in the low 40s range from last year. Billboard will again further widen its performance versus 2019's levels, and transit will likely again be more than double last year. This strong performance is rooted in the strength of historically active out-of-home users, technology, and various forms of entertainment like movies and television but also helped by newer categories of advertisers such as online sports betting. We're also pleased to see retail strength return to our book. We feel our diversified portfolio of categories and advertisers will continue to serve us well as the economy shifts and constantly yields opportunities for a broad range of advertisers to communicate with our audiences. I look forward to seeing many of you at various conferences and events in the coming months. It will be a pleasure to be meeting so many of you again in person. And for those of you that we don't, we'll hopefully see you on the train, right in the subway, or indeed stuck in traffic in front of some of our great signs. We feel really, really positive about our business and are looking forward to talking about it and sharing updates on our continued growth and progress. So operator, with that, if we can now open the line for questions.

We will take the first question from Ben Swinburne from Morgan Stanley. Your line is open. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you. Good afternoon, Jeremy. In your prepared remarks, you mentioned that the geographic mix is positively impacting revenue. Could you elaborate on the comparison between large and small markets and whether major markets like New York and LA, which have been somewhat of a challenge for you, are now leading in revenue growth? I also noticed your outlook slide included a sports betting advertisement, which has gained attention recently due to comments from Caesars about potentially reducing spending. Can you discuss the scale of the sports betting market and whether you're observing any slowdown in its growth? Lastly, Matt, could you provide some guidance on expenses for 2022, particularly regarding SG&A and corporate expenses under your control, in relation to the Q4 run rate? Thanks, everyone.

Thanks, Ben. I’ll address the first couple of points. When we examine different regions, we noticed a few factors last year. Firstly, larger cities tended to hold us back compared to rural markets. Additionally, transit issues affected performance. Looking back to Q4, we found that markets still lagging behind 2019 levels included New York, which was heavily impacted by transit issues, as well as Los Angeles. However, as we move forward in our billboard business, it appears that nearly all billboard markets are now performing above previous levels. We believe there's a good chance that larger markets, which experienced a slower recovery last year, may have the potential to outperform as we progress. Regarding sports betting, we anticipate this could be around a $5 million category in Q1, an increase from about $1 million in Q1 2021. This highlights a significant growth difference and serves as a favorable trend for us.

Ben, on expenses, it's Matt. First, we expect billboard margins to continue improving next year as revenue growth persists and digitization continues to have an impact. We also anticipate improvements in transit as the MTA approaches its MAG level and reduces the gap. Regarding SG&A, we believe it will remain elevated compared to our pre-pandemic levels as all compensation-related costs, including commissions and bonuses tied to performance, are expected to stay high. It doesn't seem like the right time to scale back on that just yet. And with our performance, we feel it's appropriate to reward those achievements again.

Thank you Matt. Thanks Jeremy.

Thanks Ben.

We will take the next question from Anna Lizzul from JPMorgan. Your line is open. Please go ahead, ma’am.

Hi. Thank you so much for the question. I was wondering if we can also talk more about the verticals of strength or weakness now that we're coming out of the pandemic. Are you seeing any various verticals allocating more of their ad spend to outdoor advertising? And then on the other hand, are you seeing any verticals that have pulled back on ad spend due to inflation or supply chain issues? Thanks.

Thanks Anna. So I think as we look forward, I think time will tell across the year rather than just in a quarter in terms of percentage allocations of some of the larger clients. But I did remark that I would hope and expect that out-of-home might again start capturing more share of the media pie as indeed it was doing prior to the pandemic. So I think generally the trends are good, but that will come more apparent as we go through the year and we see how the broader market does also. But as I sit here today and look at Q1, we're seeing good strength in tech which is obviously one of our sort of core categories. Movies, entertainment, television and streaming, live entertainment, so venue-based entertainment, fashion, and even travel is starting to show some signs of life. So as I say broadly based with some of the outdoor advertising of favorite advertisers and then with the fresh blood of sports betting and others.

Thank you.

The next question comes from Mr. Jim Goss from Barrington Research. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Thanks. I was wondering about the dividend issue. Are you intending to try to create more of a regular quarterly flow for dependability and then potentially return to a true-up at year-end if need be to meet the requirements?

Hey Jim, it's Matt. Thanks for the question. Yes. We're increasing our dividend to $0.30 starting this quarter and we expect to carry that quarterly through the year until we increase it again or our business changes. So we think people can annualize it at $1.20. We think it meets our outlook and REIT requirements. We think it's generally great news all around reflective of performance and outlook.

Okay. As you mentioned, there are several factors at play with the current situation. Traffic is returning, your yield is improving, and you are gaining market share, likely with a favorable mix. Could you share insights on how the pricing negotiations are progressing? Have you noticed a shift that gives you more control over your pricing power, particularly as you have managed to maintain your position and showcase the value of your medium?

Yes, I believe that out-of-home advertising has increasingly shown its worth to advertisers. Currently, our CPMs are significantly lower than most other media. We've been achieving price increases across the board, both nationally and locally, and demand has played a significant role in this. Another interesting trend is that we have secured more long-term billboard contracts, specifically for 12 months. This has removed some desirable inventory from the market, which has positively influenced the rates for many of our other signs.

Okay. Where do you think you are gaining market share? Which of the competing media do you believe are losing ground to you?

It's still early in the year, and we will need to evaluate media trends over the entire year. However, I anticipate that linear TV will continue to face challenges. I also believe that we will outperform in radio. Regarding digital media, it will remain a significant part of our media strategy and contribute to store growth. I think we may also be capturing additional revenue from that sector.

Okay, very fair. Thank you.

Thank you.

The media trends for the year indicate that linear TV is likely still facing challenges. I anticipate that we will outperform in radio. When it comes to digital media as a whole, it will undoubtedly remain a significant component of our media strategy and growth. I believe that we may also be capturing some additional revenue from that sector. Thank you.

Okay. Well, if there are no more questions, thank you for joining us today. I am really looking forward to speaking with many of you in the coming weeks and months. Thank you very much.

This concludes today's call. Everyone can now disconnect. Thank you.