Q4 2023 PC Connection Inc Earnings Call

Presentation

Operator

Good afternoon and welcome to the Fourth Quarter 2023 Connections earnings conference. My name is Justin, and I will be the coordinator for at this time. All participants are in a listen only following the prepared remarks, there will be a question and answer session. As a reminder, this conference call is the property of Connection and may not be recorded or rebroadcast think commission.
On the call today are Tim McGrath, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Tom Baker, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer are now Tom. What's the Thank you.

Operator, and good afternoon, everyone. I will now read our cautionary note regarding forward-looking statements. Any statements or references made during the conference call that are not statements of historical fact may be deemed to be forward-looking statements and various remarks that management may make about the Company's future expectations, plans and prospects constitute forward-looking statements for purposes of the Safe Harbor provisions under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by these forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors, including those discussed in the Risk Factors section of the Company's annual report on Form 10 K for the year ended December 31st, 2022, which is on file with the Securities and Exchange Commission as well as in other documents that the Company files with the Commission from time to time. In addition, any forward-looking statements represent management's views as of today and should not be relied upon as representing views as of any subsequent date. While the Company may elect to update forward-looking statements at some point in the future, the Company specifically disclaims any obligation to do so other than as required by law, even if estimates change. And therefore, you should not rely on these forward-looking statements as representing management's views as of any date subsequent to today. During this call, non-GAAP financial measures will be discussed. The reconciliation between any non-GAAP financial measure discussed and its most directly comparable GAAP measure is available in today's earnings release and on the Company's website at www.connection.com. Please note that unless otherwise stated, all references to Full Year and Fourth Quarter 2023 comparisons are being made against the year ended December 31st, 2022 and the fourth quarter thereof. Today's call is being webcast and will be available on Connection's website. The earnings release will be available on the SEC website at www.SEC.gov and in the Investor Relations section of our website at www.ir.connection.com.
I'd now like to turn the call over to our host, Tim McGrath, President and CEO. Tim?

Thank you, Samantha, and good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today for connection's Q4 2023 conference call.
I'll begin this afternoon with an overview of our fourth quarter results and highlights of our performance. Tom will then walk us through a more detailed look at our Q4 financials in 2023, we achieved several milestones. In spite of the macroeconomic backdrop. We prioritized and then execute on a number of strategic initiatives to grow our solution categories within advanced technologies and to shore up our AI readiness. In fact, our advanced technology sales, which includes sales of software servers, storage, Netcom and services grew by 15% in 2023. Furthermore, the sales of advanced technologies drove an increase in gross margins of 111 basis points to a record 18%. The improvement in sales of advanced technologies is a result of continued investment in technical resources, a journey that started over two years ago and will continue for the foreseeable future. In addition to our sales performance, we continued to improve operationally. And as a result, we generated over 197 million of cash flow from operating activities.
Now looking specifically at Q4, sales of advanced technology products were up 21%, but that growth was more than offset by the decline of 50% in the sale of endpoint devices which includes notebook, desktop displays and accessories. From a linearity perspective, Q4 was different from historical trends. Generally, December tends to be the strongest month of the quarter for us from a sales perspective, this Q4 was just the opposite. October and November were stronger than last year, but December was significantly softer than last year as we experienced very little budget flush and customers pushed out their buying decisions. We continue to believe that gross profit is a better measurement of our performance, and we grew gross profit in the quarter.
Now let's discuss our Q4 performance in a little more detail. Consolidated net sales were 696.5 million, 4.9% below last year. Solid execution and strong growth in operating margins helped to minimize the impact of a softer top line.
Gross profit increased 4.4% to 129.8 million, and gross margins were up 166 basis points to 18.6% in Q4 compared to Q4 2022. Customer demand for software, which includes cloud and SaaS solutions helped to fuel the improvement in our gross margin.
Operating income in Q4 was $27.9 million, an increase of 16.9% compared to Q4 2022 operating income as a percentage of sales was 4% compared to 3.3% of net sales in the prior year quarter. Net income in Q4 was $23.8 million, an increase of 26.3% compared to 18.8 million in the prior year quarter. In Q4 2023, our diluted earnings per share was $0.9, an increase of 26.3% from $0.71 in Q4 2022.
Now I look a little deeper into our segment performance in our Business Solutions segment, our Q4 net sales were 272.4 million, 2.9% lower than a year ago. The decline in revenue was largely a result of the reduction in demand for endpoint devices.
Gross profit for the Business Solutions segment was 63.2 million, an increase of 5.2% from a year ago, gross margin increased 180 basis points to 23.2% in the quarter compared to the prior year. This increase was in large part the result of our successful execution in growing the sales of integrated solutions and advanced technologies contributed primarily by services and software that are recorded on a net basis in our Public Sector Solutions business. Q4 net sales were $100.6 million, 14.2% lower than a year ago. We experienced a decrease in sales of endpoint devices, consistent with our industry, partially offset by an increase in sales of advanced technology solution categories, primarily driven by software and server. Sales to state and local government and educational institutions were lower by 5.2% compared to last year. Sales to the federal government were lower by 33.3% compared to the prior year quarter. Gross profit for the public sector segment was 17 million, which was consistent with the prior year. Gross margin increased by 246 basis points to 16.9% in the quarter compared to the prior year. The increase in gross margin percentage was due to a higher mix of software and services.
In our Enterprise Solutions segment, Q4 net sales were 323.5 million, 3.3% lower than a year ago. The decline in revenue was primarily due to a decrease in endpoint device sales compared to the prior year gross profit for the enterprise segment was 49.6 million, 4.8% lower than the prior year quarter. Gross margin increased by 118 basis points to 15.3% due to growth of advanced technology solutions.
I'll now turn the call over to Tom to discuss additional financial highlights.

Operator

Tom?

Thanks, Tim.

Sg&a increased $1.4 million compared to the prior year quarter. The increase in SG&A was due to an increase in investments in our IT Solutions business and marketing expenses on a percentage of sales basis, SG&A increased 91 basis points to 14.6% of net sales in the quarter compared to 13.7% in the prior year quarter, driven by lower revenues as a result of more revenue. Netting Q4 operating income was $27.9 million, an increase of 16.9% this quarter from $23.9 million a year ago. Our Q4 effective tax rate was 25.8%, up from 23.7% due to changes in state income tax rates we anticipate a tax rate in the low 27% range moving forward, net income for the quarter was $23.8 million, an increase of 26.3% from $18.8 million last year. Diluted earnings per share was $0.9, an increase of 26.3%. Our trailing 12 months earnings before income taxes, depreciation and amortization or adjusted EBITDA was 135.5 million compared to 139.3 million a year ago.
In terms of returning cash to shareholders. We paid an $0.08 per share quarterly dividend in December. As of December 31st, 2023, we had 32.3 million remaining for stock repurchases under our existing stock repurchase program. Today, we announced that our Board of Directors has increased our quarterly dividend by 25% to $0.1 per share. The dividend is payable to shareholders of record on February 27th, 2024 and payable on March 15th, 2024. Cash flow generated from operations for the year ended 2023 was a record $198 million, an improvement of $163.1 million from the same period a year ago. Our accounts receivable balance decreased to $1.6 million for the year ended 2023. Our DSO increased to 73 days from 70 days for the same period a year ago due to increased net product sales, which reduced the revenue but not the receivable balance.
Our inventory balance decreased $84.5 million for the year ended 2023 improvements in the supply chain have enabled us to complete and deliver orders for which we were holding a portion of the inventory last year. Our accounts payable balance increased $31.1 million for the year ended 2023, largely due to the time of supplier payments. Our net cash used in investing activities was $160.2 million for the year end 2023 was the result of $150.6 million of investment purchases in $9.6 million of IT equipment purchases. The Company used 15.7 million of cash for financing activities to year-end 2023, consisting primarily of payments of $8.4 million of dividends to shareholders and 5.4 million of stock repurchases. We ended Q4 with 207 million of cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments.
I will now turn the call back over to Tim to discuss current market trends.

Thanks, Tom. As we enter 2020 for customers continue to be cautious about where they deploy capital. However, we do expect customer spending to increase throughout the year. There are a number of factors that we believe will affect the timing of our revenue growth in 2020 for many customers are taking a wait-and-see attitude with respect to the economic climate. And while we see favorable spending trends with some early adopters, we're uncertain as to the timing of device refresh and large project rollouts for our customers. As we said last quarter, we remain very optimistic about the IT landscape. There are several factors that we expect will drive significant IoT growth in a number of areas, for example, edge workloads and high-speed connectivity through five and six g but consistent and persistent challenges in cyber security, hyperconverged and composable infrastructure solutions that combine server, storage and intelligent software into flexible building blocks that replaces legacy infrastructure to enable AI adoption, better flexibility, better security and reduce costs. And of course, AI. and it's wide encompassing impact on our entire IT ecosystem towards data and our customers are continuing to evaluate artificial intelligence solutions as they look to improve productivity and increase operational efficiencies. We believe that the adoption of artificial intelligence solutions will be a catalyst that drives demand for additional infrastructure, storage, compute and security solutions. The demands of AI, enhanced collaboration tools, improve security and the adoption of new operating systems will require more powerful devices. These factors are also expected to drive a device refresh cycle as AI adoption increases. Security threats are expected to drive customer demand for hardware software and services necessary to properly secure IT environments for the foreseeable future.
To address these trends, we are taking the following actions for AI. We're seeing early adoption of AI endpoint applications such as copilot. We're continuing to tailor our solutions to better assist our customers with their AI journey. As we stated previously, we're also experiencing an increase in demand for our advanced technology solutions, which are required to power customers, AI initiatives. In addition, we recently announced the Helix Center for Applied AI and robotics. Helix brings together industry leading experts, resources and support designed to help organizations of all sizes realize the benefits of artificial intelligence and automation. The Helix Center for Applied AI and robotics is designed to provide the guidance tools and support customers' need to unravel the complexity and the confusion around AI and properly identify understand and access its true potential for their unique environments and business needs for endpoint device. We're working with our customers on readiness assessments to help them evaluate their current environment and identify upgrade opportunities to take advantage of new hardware and software that will facilitate improved security, enhance collaboration and provide a platform to run AI applications. We have service offerings to assess design, deploy and secure systems and operating systems, which we believe will promote adoption for customers for security. We're continuing to develop our security catalog of offerings, including four key areas, modern firewall with analytics and security integration, automated network fabric provisioning, network virtualization and managed networks to accomplish all of these, we've enhanced our pre-sales engagement model with new tools, capabilities and expertise. We've also made significant investments to modernize our service product offerings and capabilities. All of these activities are designed to improve our ability to deliver these complex solutions on behalf of our customers, our customers know they can count on connections to help them standardize, simplify and optimize their end to end IT environments and deliver their business outcomes through technology. We believe our focus and our business strategy remain well aligned with the shifting dynamics of how customers deploy utilize and consume technology. We continue to connect our customers with technology that enhances growth, elevates productivity and empowers innovation. We help our customers expertly navigate through a complex set of choices within the technology landscape, we help calm the confusion of IT for our customers. We continue to believe that IT spend will improve with the refresh of endpoint devices in 2024 and beyond. We expect that will happen after the release of the AI enabled chipsets, which are scheduled to occur during the Q2 and Q3 timeframe. The timing of our customer adoption of these new technologies is uncertain, but we are optimistic that by the second half of 2024 will return to more normalized growth rates. We expect the growth rates for the US IT market will continue to be challenging in the near term. However, we're encouraged by the number of new customers we're acquiring, and we believe we can still outperform the market and take market share, notwithstanding the challenges with the macro economic environment.
On that note, I'd like to take a moment to thank our extremely dedicated and valued employees for their continued and extraordinary effort during this rapidly changing environment, and we'll now entertain your questions.

Question and Answer Session

Operator

Operator, as a reminder, to ask a question, please press star one one on your telephone and wait for your name to be in. To withdraw your question, please press star one one again, please wait while we compile the Q&A. One moment for our first question and our first question comes from Anthony Lebiedzinski from Sidoti & Company. Your line is now.

Thank you and good afternoon and again, thanks for taking the questions. So, Tim, it was great that you provided color about the trends throughout the quarter. You talked about a lack of a budget flush in December. Is that was that mostly come through certain pockets of your business or was it kind of more spread out as far as like what you just were curious as to like the of the customers that were now saying to you, we were not doing the typical budget flush. And then if you can comment on the early trends so far in the first quarter.

Operator

Sure.
So thanks, Anthony. That's good to hear from you so that likewise during two During Q4, we did we did see, as mentioned, a real pull back toward the end of the quarter. And we think our Q1 is going to be very similar in terms of our key rates of growth. That said, in the month of December, our Business Solutions team did a little better, I think enterprise and public sector had more significant pullbacks. And that really is largely because our customers are trying to evaluate the effects of inflation, interest rates and up what all of the economic backdrop means for their businesses. So I think that's kind of consistent across our technology landscape. But that really is what we saw, Tanya and things.
What I would tell you is kind of the softness we saw in December ended December did in fact, starting to leak into the first part of this quarter. And so net-net, we're kind of looking into Q1 this quarter is probably going to look a lot like Q1 of last year overall, still early to tell. That's kind of what we're thinking.

Okay. And so when you say that the move for similar, you mean like more on the gross profit or more the revenue side? Because I know there has been this constantly this seemingly constant that a trend towards more netting. So I know you in your prepared remarks, you said that it's better to evaluate your business more on a gross profit level. So just to clarify, Tom did should be light as far as similar Q1 from a gross profit standpoint?

Yes.
So I think what you're going to see, Anthony, Q1's going to be roughly the same as last year on the gross profit line and that's kind of implied. Would you continue to see revenue pressure just from the mix of products we're selling. But yes, we are talking about the gross profit. The G&A, you know, kind of the whole picture.

Okay. That's helpful.
Okay.
Got you. Okay. And then just as far as the endpoint devices, obviously those were down, but the are you seeing any green shoots with respect to endpoint devices? Or is it just too early to say? Or is it just really more of a back half recovery you think?

Well, there's certainly a lot of discussion.
I think as you might guess, A., I and the related ecosystem is on everybody's minds and our customers are engaging us for lots of discussion. Our technical services and solutions capabilities have been ramped up and our customers are using us more in that AI readiness, the kind of regime overall for their business. But the green shoots really haven't yet started. We are there's a lot of discussion about projects, but I really wouldn't want to say that we're seeing that business. It start to take off.

Okay. Understood. Certainly.
And then just switching gears now your cash and investments is now close to 300 million. So I did see the increase the dividend. But other than that, I mean, what are your thoughts as far as deploying that cash?
It's I think it's more than you need as far as a run to run the business. But so what are your top of that cash flow a priority is now.

Well, thanks, Anthony. So M&A, of course, is a strategic driver and a priority for us.
Over the years. We've had really good history with M&A.
We've had a lot of success there.
And you know, our balance sheet is in a good place to take on M&A. So we're looking at a number of opportunities, but at this point, obviously has to be accretive. It has to be opportunistic. And so while we are looking, we are seeing valuations start to come down slightly, but nothing further at this point, other than it's important, it's strategic and we'll continue to evaluate it.

Got you. Okay. Well, thank you and best of luck and I'll pass it on to others, frankly, the same thing.

Operator

And thank you and one moment partner questions.
And our next question comes from Adam Tindle from Raymond James. Your line is now.

Okay, thanks. I just wanted to start on the comment that Q1 this year would look a lot like the year-ago quarter. I think if I just ran the quick numbers here, it would be flat or maybe down a little bit sequentially on a gross profit dollar basis, if that's the case. And I'm wondering either Tim or Tom, if you could comment on that because it sounds like we just had sort of a weak finish to the Q4 there. And I think a lot of us would hope for some level of bounce back then in Q1 if that was the case, but it sounds like that's not what you're seeing right now that informs the way that you're thinking about the business. So I just wonder if you might comment on what you're seeing here in mid-February with half the quarter done and why we wouldn't see a bounce back from that to that Q4 finish at this point and also the categories or end markets that would be?

Yes.
So I'll tell you, I'm so your conclusion, I think is correct based upon what we see now about sequentially gross profit probably is down a little bit in terms of demand. You know that the falloff was just on December kind of continued through. And what we're seeing is the categories that are strong for us or feel this software software as a service. You know, we've done very well with Netcom in the category that continues to just push and push the endpoint devices we're just not we're just not seeing buying patterns start to reemerge there.
Yes, yes, I would echo that.
We continue to see growth in advanced technologies. Ai is a driver of additional infrastructure, as you know. And so really storage server hybrid solutions, there's still a lot of discussion there. Software has been very strong and Netcom for us continues to be strong we know that's not necessarily the case across the landscape, but the question really becomes when will the device refresh start to kick in and we know that it will we just don't know that starting point.

Okay. That's fair. And I guess maybe that will be a hard follow-up question to ask, but I'll ask it anyway. Tom, as you think about the rest of the year and the shape of 2024. Based on that Q1 outlook, it's kind of flat ish on a gross profit dollar basis year over year. And I don't see a meaningful improvement in the year-over-year comparisons. I just wonder how you might think about gross profit dollar growth and in earnings growth or EBIT growth, whichever one you are most focused on for the rest of the year and for full year of 2024, do you think this can be sort of a low to mid-single-digit gross profit dollar growth and a little bit higher on earnings or what are you thinking for 2024?
I'm trying to get myself into trouble here. I think probably what we're going to see, Adam, is a gross profit dollar growth in the low to mid single digits. You know, that's kind of what we're thinking about looking out for the balance of the year we remain focused on the operating and on the up operating expenses and SG&A. So hopefully, we'll hope some of that more than that gross profit increase should flow to the bottom line at this point. We just had our sales meeting last week and had a lot of talk to a lot of partners and everybody is still a little bit fuzzy about the last half of the year, it seems. So it's hard to go too prescriptive when the whole industry, I think is kind of feeling the same way.
Yes, that's that's fair. And then grow kind of in the same boat.
Just I guess maybe lastly, Kim, any notable trends that you would highlight by segment? I mean, which kind of look at like the public sector growth, for example, I'm a little bit challenged in Q4, but I know that can be very project oriented, not sure if that's more of a trend. So any trends that you're seeing by segment in Q4 as you think about 2024, if you want to parse out enterprise versus smaller business versus public sector and the trends that you're seeing broadly would be helpful.

Sure. Great question.
So when you think about the business, you're absolutely right with public sector, our federal business was down and that is large project dependent and we're confident that that will come back just based on the large projects that are in the final in the forecast. And we are seeing a little more consistency with BSG., our business solutions group. But we do predict that a number of our large enterprise customers will be bringing back on their large project rollouts. Again, the timing as we have said is a little uncertain, but we are we are thinking that enterprise growth will return probably more toward the second half, but we think exit the year that could be the growth leader for the Company.
Got it.

Thank you.

Thank give him day in June.

Operator

And I'm showing no further questions. I would now like to turn the call back over to Tim McGrath for closing.

Thanks, Jeff. And I'd like to thank all of our customers, vendor partners and shareholders for their continued support. And once again, our coworkers for their efforts and extraordinary dedication and have a great evening.

Operator

Concludes today's conference call and thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.