Iron Mountain Incorporated (NYSE:IRM) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript
Iron Mountain Incorporated (NYSE:IRM) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript February 22, 2024
Iron Mountain Incorporated misses on earnings expectations. Reported EPS is $0.52 EPS, expectations were $1.05. Iron Mountain Incorporated isn’t one of the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds at the end of the third quarter (see the details here).
Operator: Good morning, and welcome to the Iron Mountain Fourth Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. [Operator Instructions] After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. [Operator Instructions] Please note, today's event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Gillian Tiltman, Senior Vice President and Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Gillian Tiltman: Thanks, Rocco. Good morning and welcome to our fourth quarter 2023 earnings conference call. On today's call, we will refer to materials available on our Investor Relations website. We are joined here today by Bill Meaney, President and Chief Executive Officer; and Barry Hytinen, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. After prepared remarks, we'll open up the lines for Q&A. Today's earnings materials contain forward-looking statements, including statements regarding our expectations. All forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties. Please refer to today's earnings materials, the Safe Harbor Language on Slide 2, and our annual report on Form 10-K for a discussion of the major risk factors that could cause our actual results to differ from those in our forward-looking statements.
In addition, we use several non-GAAP measures when presenting our financial results. We have included the reconciliations to these measures in our supplemental financial information. And with that, I'll turn the call over to Bill.
William Meaney: Thank you, Gillian. And thank you all for joining us today. We are pleased to report another outstanding year for Iron Mountain. We achieved record revenue and adjusted EBITDA in both the fourth quarter and the full year. Our record results are a testament to the devotion and hard work of our team and our resilient and growing business model. In the fourth quarter we achieved revenue of 1.4 -- $1.42 billion, yielding 8.7% total organic revenue growth and record adjusted EBITDA of $525 million up 11%. For the full year we delivered record results across the board, revenue of $5.5 billion, adjusted EBITDA of $2 billion, and AFFO of $1.2 billion. I'll now discuss some ways in which we have been working with our customers, which has led to this growth.
Let's begin with our records management business. A win of note was with one of the largest health systems in the US awarding Iron Mountain a contract to significantly enhance its management of records across 140 hospitals and 2,600 care sites. Building on a strong long-term relationship with the customer, we are now implementing a rigorous compliance program that will reduce the cost and meet records retention requirements leading to a more efficient service. This win is particularly representative of our focus on cross-selling through Matterhorn as this customer is utilizing a variety of our products and services across our business lines, including digital services along with traditional records management and shredding. Another win showing Iron Mountain's cross-selling power occurred with a Hungarian industrial gas supplier.
We are helping this customer to create space at its facilities by storing and then digitizing its records. We are also exploring opportunities to deploy our digital mailroom solution as our partnerships develop, thereby expanding this relationship across our product suite. The last win to highlight in our records management business is a new contract with the Swiss Division of a British multinational asset management company to relocate its physical records to one site and digitize them over time. In addition to freeing up physical space, our solution will ensure our customers' records are stored safely and compliantly, and enables more efficient access to the digitized information. Moving now to some wins in our digital solutions business, we won a contract from a large aerospace customer to deploy our InSight platform to manage and translate invoices from 22 languages into English.
The customer chose our solution ahead of competing proposals, thanks to InSight's embedded AI engine, which gives it the ability to not only store, but to automatically classify a range of documents in a highly secure manner. Another win this quarter was with a Canadian government agency. This agency, which manages workplace compensation claims has been a customer of our records management services for more than 15 years. Our successful delivery of digital mailroom and imaging on demand solutions during the COVID pandemic has led to a new Master Services Agreement for digitizing services worth more than $10 million over the contract length. We will preserve, scan around 47,000 rolls of microfilm to produce 240 million images on our InSight platform, helping the agency to process compensation claims faster than ever and delivering a solid recurring revenue stream to drive our growth.
In Brazil, a major television network that has been a records management customer for almost 25 years has asked us to manage the indexing and digitization of 50,000 boxes of records stored at its locations in Iron Mountain's facilities in the country. Our InSight platform is at the heart of our solution, enabling the customer to manage requests to digitize from all parts of the business in one place effectively and efficiently. Finally, the Hong Kong division of a major multinational bank has chosen Iron Mountain to be its partner in a major transformation of its finance operations. This customer manages a large volume of finance documents and has outsourced this work to Iron Mountain with a goal of streamlining the process of checking and scanning these files.
We see the potential to scale the solution for the bank in other locations including Singapore, India, the US, United Kingdom, and the United Arab Emirates. Now let's turn to our data center business. We continue to be pleased with the growth trajectory of our data center business, which has only accelerated with the rapid adoption of AI-enabled services. We are pleased to have signed 124 megawatts well ahead of our initial plan for the year. We continue to see tremendous opportunity in serving both hyperscale and co-location customers and significant growth potential for our footprint. An example in the quarter, we signed a seven-year agreement to provide capacity at our New Jersey data center for an automated trading technology company that is expanding in the US.
Our reputation for compliance and sustainability were key to winning this business and it was important for our customer to receive 100% traceable and verifiable energy and carbon records in support of its sustainability goals. Also in the U.S., we were pleased to win a data center deal with a secure cloud storage company that is growing rapidly across North America. Our reliability and close relationships since first doing business with this customer a year ago helped to seal this new deal as did the strategic location of our facility in Northern Virginia. Moving to India, we continue to see strong demand for capacity. We closed a data center contract with a major bank in the country in the fourth quarter. This customer chose our Mumbai facility specifically and Iron Mountain more broadly for our ability to provide a secure data center for its large domestic branch platform close to its headquarters.
Turning to our Asset Lifecycle Management business, or ALM, we secured a significant contract with a global financial services company. Our ability to integrate our secure ALM services with the customer’s existing business management platform was critical and has enabled them to streamline how they order, complete and report on their IT asset disposition activities. Our solution was an excellent demonstration of how deeply we understand the needs of our customers, especially in the highly regulated world of financial services. Staying with ALM business, in the quarter we won a contract with a U.S. vehicle insurance company that has been an existing customer of ours for many years. Having shifted its employees to a remote working model, our customer needed to partner with the capacity to retrieve over 37,000 devices from more than 240 locations nationwide, then process, refurbish, and return them for distribution.
Our solution provides our customer with better visibility of its IT assets and enables them to manage this activity more efficiently. I should also highlight the synergy between our ALM and data center business when it comes to data center renewal and decommissioning. We are now in a position to not only provide co-location and cloud migration services, but we can also securely and responsibly dispose of obsolete IT equipment. An example of such an opportunity in this quarter was a major win with one of the world's leading producers of business process management software. We managed the secure decommissioning of over 40 data centers globally, sanitized the IT assets and remarketed them to deliver a significant return in value. Also in the quarter, we were awarded a contract by one of the oldest financial institutions in the US for a similar data center decommissioning project.
Both wins demonstrate that Iron Mountain is uniquely positioned to minimize risk and maximize savings as a single source partner for these activities. Finally, let me take a moment to highlight our acquisition of Regency Technologies. Regency's team makes a great addition to the leadership of our rapidly growing ALM business and gives us additional capabilities to serve this fast growing sector at the heart of the circular economy. Furthermore, this acquisition together with the momentum we have been building in ALM through the strengthening of component pricing and cross selling sets us up well for continued success. To conclude, I would like to thank our team for their resilience, hard work and dedication as we continue our Matterhorn clime and continue to serve over 225,000 customers.
We are thrilled to progress ahead of expectations and it is due to the commitment of our Mountaineers. As we look to 2024 and beyond, the momentum we have built will continue to drive the opportunities ahead with another year of double digit top line growth expected. Barry will speak in detail about our financial guidance for the year ahead. With that, I'll turn the call over to Barry.
Barry Hytinen: Thanks, Bill. And thank you all for joining us today to discuss our fourth quarter and full year 2023 results and our outlook for 2024. Turning to our financials, in the fourth quarter our team continued the trend of delivering record performance on all of our key financial metrics. On a reported basis, revenue of $1.42 billion grew 11% year-on-year or 10% on a constant currency basis, reflecting a new quarterly record. On an organic basis, total organic revenue grew 8.7%. A key highlight in the quarter is our organic storage revenue, which grew 10.4% as a result of strong performance in both our records management and our data center businesses. Total service revenue increased 8% to $549 million. This was driven by Global RIM at 10% on a reported basis and 9% on an organic basis.
Project Matterhorn's focus on selling our entire range of products and services has driven these strong results and are a testament to our commercial team's efforts. Adjusted EBITDA was $525 million, a new record, up 11% on a reported basis and 10% year-on-year on a constant currency basis. Adjusted EBITDA margin was better than we projected at 37% and improved 100 basis points sequentially, driven by strong mix and cost productivity across all of our businesses. As we've stated in our earnings press release, effective in the fourth quarter of 2023, our AFFO definition has been updated to exclude amortization of capitalized commissions. In light of the growth of our data center business, we conducted a benchmarking analysis of other companies in the industry and as such, have aligned our AFFO reporting accordingly, which provides investors better insight into the funds available to support the growth of our business.
AFFO was $328 million or $1.11 on a per share basis, up $29 million and $0.09 respectively from the fourth quarter of last year. To allow for comparison to our guidance and consensus, we are reporting our prior methodology as well. On our previous calculation, AFFO was $317 million or $1.07 on a per share basis. This was $7 million better than our AFFO guidance and $0.02 better than our guidance on a per share basis. Now, let me briefly summarize the full year. Revenue of $5.5 billion increased 7% on a reported basis and 8% on a constant currency basis. Adjusted EBITDA increased 7% year-on-year to $1.96 billion, an increase of $135 million. AFFO increased over 5% to $1.2 billion or $4.12 on a per share basis. On our previous calculation, AFFO was $1.168 billion or $3.97 on a per share basis.
And now turning to segment performance for the quarter. Our global RIM business delivered revenue of $1.19 billion, an increase of $108 million from last year or 10% on a reported basis. On an organic constant currency basis, revenue increased 8.5%. Global RIM adjusted EBITDA was $534 million, an increase of $48 million year-on-year. Global RIM adjusted EBITDA margin was 44.7%, up 100 basis points sequentially, driven by strong services mix and productivity. Our data center business continues to grow and deliver strong performance. From a total revenue perspective, we delivered 32% year-on-year growth on a reported basis and 30% year-on-year growth on a constant currency basis. Our data center storage revenue grew 34% year-on-year or 32% on a constant currency basis, driven by new development coming online.
Data center EBITDA was up approximately $10 million year-on-year and EBITDA margin was up 80 basis points sequentially. Moreover, pricing trends have continued to be strong and we have seen returns expanding 100 basis points to 150 basis points in advance of higher interest rates. Turning to new and expansion leasing, we completed 4 megawatts in the Q4. For the full year, we leased 124 megawatts, exceeding the projection we provided on our last call. Nearly 100% of those leases resulted from cross selling, which you know is a key initiative in our Project Matterhorn plan. Our pipeline is at record levels. We are expanding our relationships with key hyperscale clients and our team is executing well. So we are pleased to project new and expansion leasing of 100 megawatts for 2024.
Incidentally, that represents a 25% increase from our initial 2023 projection at this time last year. Turning to our Asset Lifecycle Management business. In the fourth quarter, we delivered improved performance for both revenue and EBITDA, achieving the expectations we set on our last call. Our team drove strong operating productivity and we saw component pricing beginning to trend up modestly on a sequential basis. Similar to data center, cross selling activity has been particularly strong in our ALM business with nearly all deals coming in as a result of it. We completed our acquisition of Regency Technologies early in January. This acquisition strengthens our ability to serve an expanding ALM customer base and broadens our capability in the category, especially in the enterprise segment.
Regency brings robust remarketing and recycling capabilities to better serve our customers and help them achieve their environmental and data security goals. We have long admired the leadership at Regency and are thrilled to welcome their entire organization to our team. Turning to capital, for the full year 2023, we invested $1.2 billion of growth $140 million of recurring, consistent with the expectation we shared on our last call. For 2024, we are planning for capital expenditure to be approximately $1.35 billion of growth and approaching $150 billion of recurring. Given our strong pre lease activity, the vast majority of our growth capital will be dedicated to data center development. Turning to the balance sheet, with strong adjusted EBITDA performance, we ended the quarter with net lease adjusted leverage of 5.1 times and our leverage remains at its lowest level in a decade.
For 2024, we expect to exit the year at similar levels to year end 2023. Our Board of Directors declared a quarterly dividend of $0.65 per share to be paid in early April. And on a trailing four quarter basis, our payout ratio is now 62%, in line with our long term target range of low to mid-60s percent. Now, let me provide an update on our progress as to the Project Matterhorn growth objectives we shared at our Investor Day in September of 2022. You will recall that we introduced [tighter] (ph) targets for growth between the period of 2021 through 2026 of approximately 10% for revenue, approximately 10% for adjusted EBITDA and approximately 8% for AFFO. Two years into our Matterhorn journey, we are well on track, even ahead of those commitments, having achieved 13% annual revenue growth from 2021 to the end of 2023 on a constant currency basis.
We have achieved 11% annual adjusted EBITDA growth and in excess of 10% annual AFFO growth. The dollar has been particularly strong over this period and despite this, we have been delivering on our commitments on a reported basis as well. Now let me share our projections for the full year 2024. We expect total revenue to be within the range of $6 billion to $6.15 billion, which represents year-on-year growth of 11% at the midpoint. We expect adjusted EBITDA to be within the range of $2.175 billion to $2.225 billion, which represents year-on-year growth of 12% at the midpoint. We expect AFFO to be within the range of $1.3 billion to $1.335 billion, which represents year-on-year growth of 9% at the midpoint. And we expect AFFO per share for the full year to be $4.39 to $4.51 and this represents year-on-year growth of 8% at the midpoint.
In terms of foreign exchange, we are using a forecast based on those of several major financial institutions. Compared to 2023, this results in a full year FX headwind of $25 million to revenue and approximately $10 billion to EBITDA and AFFO. Turning to the first quarter, we expect revenue of approximately $1.45 billion, adjusted EBITDA in excess of $510 billion and AFFO of approximately $310 billion and AFFO per share of approximately $1.05. To conclude, we are pleased to have delivered a strong year in 2023. I am confident that we will build on our momentum and continue to drive strong growth in 2024. We are well on track to achieve our Project Matterhorn goals. I'd like to take this opportunity to express my thanks to our entire team for delivering a successful year and their continued dedication to serving our clients.
And with that, operator, will you please open the line for Q&A?
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