CDW Corporation (NASDAQ:CDW) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript
CDW Corporation (NASDAQ:CDW) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript February 7, 2024
CDW Corporation isn’t one of the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds at the end of the third quarter (see the details here).
Operator: Hello, and welcome to today's CDW Fourth Quarter 2023 Earnings Call. My name is Jordan, and I'll be coordinating your call. [Operator Instructions] I'm now going to hand you over to Steve O'Brien, Investor Relations to begin. Steven, please go ahead.
Steve O'Brien: Thank you, Taylor. Good morning, everyone. Joining me today to review our fourth quarter and full year 2023 results are Chris Leahy, our Chair and Chief Executive Officer; and Al Miralles, our Chief Financial Officer. Our fourth quarter and full year earnings release was distributed this morning and is available on our website, investor.cdw.com, along with the supplemental slides that you can use to follow along during the call. I'd like to remind you that certain comments made in this presentation are considered forward-looking statements under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Those statements are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially.
Additional information concerning these risks and uncertainties is contained in the earnings release and Form 8-K we furnished to the SEC today and in the company's other filings with the SEC. CDW assumes no obligation to update the information presented during this webcast. Our presentation also includes certain non-GAAP financial measures, including non-GAAP operating income, non-GAAP operating income margin, non-GAAP net income and non-GAAP earnings per share. All non-GAAP measures have been reconciled to the most directly comparable GAAP measures in accordance with SEC rules. You'll find reconciliation charts in the slides for today's webcast and in our earnings release and Form 8-K. Please note, all references to growth rates or dollar amount changes in our remarks today are versus the comparable period in 2022 unless otherwise indicated.
Replay of this webcast will be posted to our website later today. I want to remind you that this conference call is the property of CDW and may not be recorded or rebroadcast without specific written permission from the company. With that, let me turn the call over to Chris.
Chris Leahy: Thank you, Steve. Good morning, everyone. I'll begin our call with an overview of our fourth quarter and full year performance and share some thoughts on our strategic progress and expectations for 2024. Then I will hand it over to Al, who will take you through a more detailed review of the financials as well as our capital allocation strategy and outlook. We'll move quickly through our prepared remarks as always to ensure we have plenty of time for questions. Fourth quarter net sales were $5 billion, 7.7% below 2022. Strong growth and operating income margins mitigated the impact of top-line performance on profits, and we delivered gross profit of $1.15 billion, 2% lower year-over-year, non-GAAP operating income of $519 million, 1% below prior year, and non-GAAP net income per share of $2.50, up 3% year-over-year.
Our results reflect consistent, strong execution by the team, our financial rigor, and our ability to deliver solutions and services across the full life cycle, full stack. Results delivered under uneven commercial and international market conditions, which continue to drive cautious customer behavior. Customer priorities remained laser-focused on operating efficiency and expense elasticity. Priorities increasingly met by as-a-service and consumption-based solutions like cloud and SaaS, as well as nascent, ratable, on-premise solutions. The team's ability to pivot to address these priorities drove excellent performance across solutions, including categories that commonly net down on a revenue basis. The impact of this success, combined with ongoing softness in traditional hardware categories, resulted in further pressure on net sales.
When this happens, we experience what we saw this quarter, meaningfully dampened net sales growth with very strong gross margins. This phenomenon was not unique to the fourth quarter. Market dynamics drove hardware deprioritization and preference for solutions that net down throughout 2023, and our net sales of $21 billion were over $2 billion less than 2022. Notwithstanding our muted top lines, strong execution by the team underpinned by our full stack, full lifecycle, full outcomes, go-to-market approach delivered flat, non-GAAP operating income, a 1% increase in non-GAAP net income per share, and strong adjusted free cash flow of $1.4 billion. Outcomes driven by the strategic investments we have made over the past five years to increase the value we deliver to our customers.
That is the power of our strategy when combined with our resilient business model. 2023 was a year that truly pressure tested our strategy. The fourth quarter is an exemplary example of this inaction. There were three main drivers of results, our balanced portfolio of customer end markets, breadth of our product solutions and services portfolio, and relentless execution of our three-part strategy for growth. First, the balanced portfolio of our diverse customer end markets. As you know, we have five U.S. sales channels, corporate, small business, healthcare, government, and education. Each channel is a meaningful billion-dollar-plus business on its own. Within each channel, teams are further segmented to focus on customer end markets, including geographies and verticals.
We also have our U.K. and Canadian operations, which together deliver sales of US$2.6 billion. Often, our customer end markets perform differently given macroeconomic or industry-specific headwinds or tailwinds. This quarter, all but one customer end market experienced a decline in net sales. The profit story was very different, with gross margin increasing across all customer end markets. Let's take a look at the puts and takes of how each end market performed in the quarter. Corporate net sales decreased 8%. Top-line performance continued to reflect the impact of both netting down and hardware pressure. Momentum remained for projects focused on increasing productivity, as well as projects focused on enhanced customer and co-worker experiences.
The team's ability to meet customer demand for these priorities with as-a-service and ratable solutions drove strong cloud performance. Year-over-year client device declines moderated down mid-single digits compared to the double-digit declines of the first three quarters. For netcomm, while network modernization stayed a top priority, customers focused on digesting investments made over the past few years, leading to a long-expected backlog of normalization, and sales declined year-over-year. Small business net sales declined 13%. Market conditions were consistent with the first three quarters of the year, and customer behavior remained cautious. Priorities remained squarely focused on cost management and projects that need to get done. Once again, projects that were more launched than needs remained paused.
Customer demand for projects with shorter-term return on investment drove excellent performance in cloud and in total security -- total software, excuse me. Security remained a top priority, and the team delivered strong performance across our broad portfolio of hardware, software, and services security offerings. Similar to corporate, small business client device declines moderated in the quarter, down-high single digits compared to the prior three quarters double-digit decline. Public sales decreased 4% year-over-year as government's mid-single-digit net sales increase was more than offset by declines across our other public-ed markets. The federal team delivered a double-digit net sales increase as they continued their success helping agencies implement more efficient solutions to manage and protect data.
This drove excellent netcomm performance up strong double digits. The team continued its efforts to help agencies optimize their existing cloud environments as well as deliver new cloud solutions. The state and local team delivered a mid-single-digit increase. The team's success-enabling cloud-based solutions, especially with budget constrained cities, delivered a triple-digit increase in cloud performance. For the second quarter in a row, the team delivered sales growth in client devices. Healthcare net sales decreased by 5%, augmenting talent needs, modernizing data centers, driving cost savings and efficiency projects, all remained focus areas for our customers. The team drove a significant increase in cloud performance. Growth driven by their success-helping systems adopt deep cloud portfolio, which includes proprietary healthcare solutions.
Our broad portfolio of solutions also contributed to security growth as the team helped customers address heightened cybersecurity needs. Education net sales decreased by 12%, with K-12 posting a mid-single-digit decline and higher ed down mid-teens. For K-12, the team continued their success-helping schools and their efforts to sustain technology gains of the past several years. This delivered excellent growth in services and cloud, both posting double-digit gains, gains that were offset by the combined impact of a double-digit decline in netcomm and low-single-digit decline in client device sales. The high ed team's success-helping universities address business process transformation efforts contributed to double-digit growth in services and cloud.
Client devices showed stability. These encouraging trends were more than offset by declines in netcomm this quarter. Other are combined UK and Canada business, declined by 14%. While the teams continued to execute well, market conditions were as expected, and sales in both the UK and Canada decreased by double digits in local currency. Once again, our diverse end markets contributed to our performance amid an uncertain and uneven environment. The second driver of performance was our broad and deep portfolio. Let's take a look at how each category performed. The market did not experience the stabilization in hardware we expected, and net sales of our hardware portfolio declined by high-single digits. This was primarily driven by double-digit year-over-year declines in netcomm as the normalization of backlog adversely impacted year-over-year growth.
Client device performance improved sequentially with a low-single-digit decline. Software customer spend increased by high-single digits, but given the significant portion of the category that nets down, net sales declined. Strength was broad-based across software as we continued to help customers manage data, enhance productivity, and secure their IT environments. Growth was particularly strong across security, virtualization, and application suites. Cloud remained an important driver of performance across the business and was a meaningful contributor to growth's profit. Customer spend increased across all end markets, with roughly half a spend from commercial customers. Infrastructure as-a-service, productivity, and security were the top three cloud workloads during the period.
Security remains top of mind for our customers as cyber threats continue to emerge, evolve and increase, and customer spend increased by low-single digits. Our teams continue to conduct vulnerability assessments, implement identity and access management solutions, and provide training to our customers to help manage cloud deployments and enhance endpoint and application security. Services was a standout category this period, with double-digit increases in professional and managed services. Integral to today's complex technology solutions, customers continue to lean into CDW as an extension of their own teams and leverage our services capabilities as part of their strategies. Our portfolio performance leads to the third driver of our results this quarter, relentless execution of our growth strategy.
Core to our growth strategy, our objective is to expand and enhance our solutions and services capabilities. Over the past five years, investments both organic and non-organic, including 10 acquisitions, have bolstered our expertise and resources in these two key areas to support our full stack, full life cycle, full outcomes, go-to-market approach. Investments that have grown our capabilities in high-growth complex areas like cloud migration and cyber security, that have enhanced capabilities like full stack and cloud-native software development, DevOps engineering, robust consulting, and cloud-based workflow automation, expertise and resources, and investments that have expanded our services footprint across the U.S. and Canada. As you can see, each investment we made is purposeful and delivers a specific capability that furthers our strategy.
A strategy designed to ensure we evolve with the market and constantly fortify our leading position as trusted advisor to our customers and vendor partner of choice. Evolving with capabilities that underpin our relevance and ensure we are there for our customers today and as new technologies come to market. New technologies like artificial intelligence. With its extremely short high cycle, our customers are increasingly seeking opportunities to use AI to achieve their objectives. And while most customers are in the discovery phase, some are already adopting AI with our help. There's a great example. An industry-leading semiconductor and software designer needed training and development for a domain-specific large language model to support a range of internal use cases.
The data-intensive and highly proprietary nature of the company's designs and intellectual property made the use of a hyperscaler's LLM and cloud-based compute and storage resources less optimal. The CDW hybrid infrastructure team worked with the customer to build a custom platform that supports both training and inference workloads for generative AI. The team designed the underlying architecture, which included a best-in-class 16-node supercomputer, with a high-performance parallel file system storage solution. The successful installation and customer handoff resulted in a multi-million-dollar hardware and software engagement and service with opportunity. With both usage and use cases growing quickly, the company has engaged CDW to support further expansion of their existing infrastructure and to evaluate new solutions.
Clearly, investments in our customer-centric growth strategy have elevated our relevance to customers to the highest level it's ever been. Our focused and disciplined execution of our strategy continues to make us a vital technology partner, whether enabling customer priorities that require high complex or transactional solutions. And that leads us to our 2024 outlook. The uneven market conditions we experienced throughout 2023 have persisted into 2024. Customer decisions remain deliberate and restrained with ongoing projects scrutiny, pursuit of short-term ROIs, and continued buying hesitancy, particularly around hardware. With this backdrop, we currently look for the U.S. IT market to grow by low single digits in 2024 on a customer spend basis, including the expectation of a slow start to the year, a view that incorporates the potential impact of some of our recent wildcards, including upcoming elections and geopolitical issues.
For CDW, these conditions set up a year that thematically looks much like 2023, and our outlook assumes the growth of customer spend outpaces our net sales growth. Our customers face proliferating data and ever-expanding cybersecurity needs. They face expanding workloads and hardware obsolescence, and they face the potential and promise of exciting new technologies. With our broad and deep portfolio of solutions and services, we are there for our customers today and tomorrow, wherever their priorities lie. We are there for our customers as their trusted advisor to help them navigate increasingly complex technologies. Whether growth comes from consumption-based or as-a-service solutions, or from hardware sales, we are well-positioned to continue our track record of profitably outpacing U.S. IT market growth by 200 to 300 basis points.
As we always do, we will provide an updated perspective on business conditions and refine our view of the market as we move through the year. In the meantime, we'll continue to do what we do best, leverage our competitive advantages, and out-execute the competition. Now, let me turn it over to Al, who will provide more detail on our financials and outlook. Al?
Al Miralles: Thank you, Chris, and good morning, everyone. I'll start my preparatory remarks with detail on fourth quarter performance, briefly touch on full-year 2023 results, move to capital allocation priorities and then finish with our 2024 outlook. The team's strong execution and our financial discipline delivered very strong quarterly growth and operating margins, and growth in our fourth quarter earnings per share on a diluted basis. We achieved these results on consolidated net sales of $5 billion, which were 7.7% below 2022, on a reported and average daily sales basis. Fourth quarter net sales performance reflected both our ongoing success providing cloud and SaaS-based solutions that drove meaningful customer spend and profits, and the continued impact of uneven market conditions that we experienced throughout 2023.
On a sequential average daily sales basis, fourth quarter net sales decreased 10.8%. While historically fourth quarter net sales are lower than the third quarter, the sequential climb this quarter was more significant than we expected, reflecting a lack of hardware spending recovery, a continued mix shift into solutions that net down, and generally softer economic conditions impacting our international end markets. Fourth quarter gross profit was $1.2 billion, down 2.3% versus prior year, with our gross margin increasing 130 basis point year-over-year, and partially offsetting the impact of lower net sales volume. Gross margin of 23% was driven by one factor, a higher mix into netted down revenues, which while dampening net sales growth also enhanced gross profit margin.
Cloud and SaaS-based revenue streams once again outpaced overall net sales growth. For the quarter, this category represented a high 35.4% of our gross profit compared to 30.7% in the prior year fourth quarter, and was also up from the third quarter's 32.6% level. While we expect the mix of netted down revenues to be an important long-term durable trend within our business, it is important to recognize that this mix may fluctuate with customer priorities and product demand. Turning to expenses for the fourth quarter, non-GAAP SG&A totaled $635 million, down 3.5% year-over-year, prudent and diligent management of discretionary expenses and our overall fixed cost base helped to hold the line on profitability amid the challenging IT spending environment.
Co-worker counts at the end of the fourth quarter was approximately 15,100, up slightly from the third quarter and flat relative to year-end 2022. We continue to expand our solutions and services capabilities while concurrently driving efficiency and cost leverage from our broader operations. Following along on slide nine, our flexible business model and financial discipline helped to deliver non-GAAP operating income of $519 million, down 0.8% versus the prior year, despite our contraction on the top line. Non-GAAP operating income margin reached 10.3%, up 70 basis points from the prior year, and up 40 basis points from last year's 9.9%. As reflected on slide 10, our non-GAAP net income was $349 million in the quarter, up 1.7% on a year-over-year basis.
With fourth quarter weighted average diluted shares of approximately $136 million, non-GAAP net income per diluted share was up 2.8% year-over-year. Shifting gears briefly and moving to slide 11 to review full-year results, we experienced a persistently challenging environment in 2023. Uncertainty for our customers caused re-evaluation and optimization of their tech spending, which combined with a marked shift in spending mix led to a full-year decline in our net sales of 10% on both the reported and average daily sales basis. Despite the top-line decline, gross profit was approximately flat, down 0.7% for the year. This gross profit stability exemplifies the impact of our strategy over the last five years with both organic and inorganic investments underpinning the team's ability to pivot to our customers where customers need us, no matter the environment.
Enhanced gross margin combined with effective cost controls resulted in a full-year non-GAAP operating income margin of 9.5%, with non-GAAP operating profit dollars similarly down just 0.6% year-over-year. Moving down the P&L, our net interest expense was slightly below our full-year expectations driven by higher interest income earned on our cash balances. Our tax rate was within our expected range. As shown on slide 12, our non-GAAP net income was $1.3 billion, up 0.4%, and non-GAAP net income per diluted share was $9.88, up 0.9% from the prior year. Moving ahead to slide 13, at period end, net debt was $5.1 billion. Net debt declined by approximately $200 million from the third quarter, reflecting our increased cash position and modest debt repayment during the quarter.
Liquidity remained strong with cash plus revolver availability of approximately $1.8 billion. Moving to slide 14, the three-month average cash conversion cycle was 17 days, down four days from the prior year and within our targeted range of high teens to low 20s. Our cash conversion reflects our effective management of working capital, particularly with respect to our inventory levels. As we have mentioned in the past, timing and market dynamics can influence working capital on any given quarter or year. We continue to believe our target cash conversion range remains the best guidepost for modeling working capital longer term. Strong profits and effective working capital management drove a record full-year adjusted free cash flow of $1.4 billion, as shown on slide 15, representing 106% of non-GAAP net income and well above our stated rule of thumb at 6.7% in net sales.
For the quarter, we utilized cash consistent with our 2023 capital allocation objectives, including returning approximately $83 million to shareholders through dividends and $50 million in share repurchases. For the full year, this translated $322 million in dividends and $500 million in share repurchases. A combined $822 million return to shareholders for approximately 58% of adjusted free cash flow. This was within our initial target range for the year and slightly below our updated range through the stronger than expected cash flow in the fourth quarter. That brings me to our capital allocation priorities on slide 16. Our first capital priority is to increase the dividend in line with non-GAAP net income. Last November, we announced a 5% increase of our dividend to $2.48 annually, our tenth consecutive year of increasing the dividend.
In 2024 and beyond, we will continue to target a 25% target ratio, growing the dividend in line with earnings. Our second priority is to ensure we have the right capital structure in place with targeted net leverage ratio. We ended 2023 at 2.4 times, down from 2.6 times at the end of 2022, and within our targeted range of 2 to 3 times. We have rigorous processes in place to proactively manage liquidity while maintaining flexibility. Finally, our third and fourth capital allocation priorities of M&A and shared purchases remain important drivers of shareholder value. For 2024, we will target returning 50% to 75% of adjusted free cash flow to investors through dividends and share repurchases. In lockstep with this, we have announced the board's authorization for a $750 million increase to our share repurchase program.
Combining our prior authorization with this new additional authorization, we currently have approximately $1.1 million of availability under share repurchase program as we start 2024. And that leads to our outlook on slide 17. The uncertain market conditions we operated under 2023 have persisted into early 2024, and customer sentiment remains cautious and prudent. And while indicators suggest a compelling need to address workload and data growth, rising security threats, and eventual client device obsolescence, our current expectations for a slow start to the year for IT spending and full-year growth in the low single-digit range. With this customer spend scenario as our baseline, we additionally expect to profitably gain 200 to 300 basis points of share in 2024.
As you know, when we mix in the netted down solutions, the impact is fully reflected in our gross profit, but it is muted in our net sales growth. Conversely, when hardware volume is strong as we saw on 2021 and 2022, our net sales growth is stronger as these products are counted for on a full gross accounting basis. Given the impact of shifting customer priorities on our net sales and the inherent accounting differences that result from different business mix, we believe that gross profit has become a more effective barometer for gauging our growth expectations. As such, beginning with 2024 and go forward, we will align our outlook with a view on gross profit in lieu of net sales. Based on our current view of mix and margin rates across our portfolio, our expectation for 2024 is for low to mid single-digit gross profit growth.
This assumes a flat to modestly higher gross margin relative to full-year 2023. Finally, we expect our full-year non-GAAP earnings per diluted share to be up mid single-digit share of a year. Please remember that we hold ourselves accountable for delivering our financial outlook on a full-year constant currency basis. Additional modeling thoughts for annual depreciation and amortization, interest expense, and the non-GAAP effects tax rate can be found on slide 18. Moving to modeling thoughts for the first quarter, we anticipate gross margin comparable to 2023's level, albeit lower than 2024, and leading to low single-digit gross profit growth on a year-over-year basis. Moving down the P&L, we expect operating expenses to be higher to begin 2024 compared to Q4 as we accrue for a reset of compensation expense that was more muted at the end of 2023, along with other seasonal workforce expenses.
We expect operating expense leverage as a percentage of gross profit to gradually improve as the year progresses and expenses even out. Finally, we expect first quarter non-GAAP earnings per diluted share to be in the low-to-mid single-digit range year-over-year. As we start the New Year, we are also adjusting our approach on the outlook for adjusted free cash flow. Again, given the variability of mix of business and the corresponding impacts on net sales, we believe the relationship between adjusted free cash flow to non-GAAP net income will provide a more consistent metric go forward. For 2024, we expect adjusted free cash flow to be in the range of 80% to 90% of our non-GAAP net income. It is important to note that while we continue to operate in a cautious and uncertain environment, remain confident our ability to deliver profitability margins, and cash flow to our stakeholders just as we did in 2023.
That concludes the financial summary. As always, we will provide updated views on the macro environment and our business on our future earnings calls. And with that, I will ask the operator to open it for questions. We'd ask each of you to limit your questions to one for the brief follow-up. Thank you.
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