Townsquare Media, Inc. (NYSE:TSQ) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript
Townsquare Media, Inc. (NYSE:TSQ) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript March 15, 2024
Townsquare Media, Inc. beats earnings expectations. Reported EPS is $0.34, expectations were $0.26. TSQ 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 Townsquare Media's Fourth Quarter 2023 Conference Call. As a reminder, today's call is being recorded and your participation implies consent to such recording. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A brief question-and-answer will follow the formal presentation. [Operator Instructions] With that, I would like to introduce the first speaker for today's call, Claire Yenicay, Executive Vice President.
Claire Yenicay: Thank you, operator, and good morning to everyone. Thank you for joining us today for Townsquare's fourth quarter and year-end financial update. With me on the call today are Bill Wilson, our CEO; and Stuart Rosenstein, our CFO and Executive Vice President. Please note that during this call, we may make statements that provide information other than historical information, including statements relating to the company's future expectations, plans and prospects. These statements are considered forward-looking statements under the Safe Harbor provision of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from these statements.
These statements reflect the company's beliefs based on current conditions that are subject to certain risks and uncertainties, including those that are detailed in the company's annual report on Form 10-K filed with the SEC. We may also discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures including adjusted EBITDA, adjusted net income and adjusted operating income, which we may refer to as profit in our remarks. Such non-GAAP financial measures should be used in conjunction with all the information contained in the quarterly, year-end and current reports available on our website. I would also encourage all participants to go to our corporate website and download our investor presentation as Bill will reference some of those slides during our discussion this morning.
In addition, we also issued our annual shareholder letter today, also available on our website, which we encourage you all to read. At this time, I would like to turn the call over to Bill Wilson.
Bill Wilson: Thank you, Claire, and thank you all for joining us this morning. It's great to reconnect with everybody today. We're very pleased to share with you that Townsquare's fourth quarter results met or exceeded our previously issued guidance and that our full year results met the guidance that we issued at the start of 2023. Although 2023 was a challenging year, I am proud of how the Townsquare team navigated the progressively challenging economic landscape. Macroeconomic headwinds were fierce. As rising interest rates, inflation and wage pressures weighed on consumer mindsets, and advertising budgets, causing an advertising recession. However, despite these challenges, we outperformed competitors and gained market share, primarily due to our local focus and our digital platform.
We carefully manage the business as our cash flow from operations increased plus $18 million year-over-year or plus 35% to $68 million, and we initiated a high-yielding dividend due to our strong cash flow generation. I believe that our performance over the past several years has demonstrated the efficacy of our digital-first local media strategy validating our focus on local markets outside of the top 50 US cities and reinvigorating my confidence in our business model and our path forward. In fact, our confidence in our current capitalization, the strength of our balance sheet, our free cash flow generation and our business strategy has led us and the board to increase our dividend by plus 5.3% year-over-year, which we just announced this morning.
In 2023, net revenue, excluding political, decreased just under 1% year-over-year and just under 2% in total to $454.2 million, the second highest revenue amount in Townsquare's history. Adjusted EBITDA, excluding political, decreased 9.1% year-over-year and negative 12.1% in total to $100 million. Impressively and worth noting, Townsquare is one of the only media companies that issued and met guidance for full year 2023 as macro conditions caused many others to either recent guidance or not even issue annual and at times even quarterly guidance. Townsquare is also among the only broadcasters with net revenue levels above 2019. We are at 105% of 2019 net revenue levels and very close to 2019 adjusted EBITDA levels at 98%. Our digital performance drives this differentiation as Townsquare's total 2023 digital net revenue is plus 47% above 2019's digital net revenue even with the recent setbacks we are overcoming in our digital marketing solutions business.
Our digital business is a true differentiator for Townsquare. As highlighted on Slide 11, in 2023, approximately 51% of our company's total net revenue and 55% of our total adjusted operating income came from our digital solutions. This highlights the point we often make. Townsquare is no longer the radio broadcast company it was when it was founded in 2010. Townsquare has evolved into a digital-first local media company that is truly distinguished from other local media peers with a world-class team and a unique and differentiated strategy, assets, platforms and solutions. I'd like to take a brief moment to highlight one of the members of our world-class digital team. I'm proud to share with you this morning that Sun Sachs, our Senior Vice President of Products and Engineering was part of the Townsquare team from the beginning, a true Townsquare OG, will be receiving the NAB's Digital Leadership Award, a significant and well-deserved recognition.
One of the numerous initiatives Sun and the team are working on is leveraging AI in numerous aspects of our business. Congratulations Sun and our entire tech and product team, he leads and inspires each day. Historically, for Townsquare in the overall advertising industry, digital advertising outperforms other forms of advertising during a downturn, and that was true for us again last year. In 2023, many agree that the advertising market was in a recession which had a larger impact on broadcast and digital, particularly in the national marketplace. Thankfully, our national exposure is limited, with less than 10% of our total revenue coming from the broadcast national marketplace. That, combined with the fact that we enjoy strong often long-term relationships with our local advertising clients, contributed to our broadcast advertising segment outperforming the industry.
However, despite our outperformance, Townsquare's broadcast advertising net revenue, excluding political, still declined negative 3.6% year-over-year, in large part due to national, which declined last year negative 18% year-over-year. It is worth noting that national continues to put downward pressure on broadcast and is currently pacing down negative 7% in Q1, while local spot continues to outperform national, so that broadcast overall in Q1 is pacing down just a couple of points for us right now. But while broadcast remains significantly below 2019 levels, we have gained broadcast market share since 2019. I'm proud to say again, we did it in 2023. I am very proud of our team for achieving this market share growth as it demonstrates the benefits and importance of differentiated local content on our local radio broadcast.
No better team of content contributors and sales teams. Where we really shined unsurprisingly was digital advertising. In a year of macro uncertainty, digital advertising was once again the fastest-growing segment of our company, differentiating Townsquare from local media peers and even national digital players at times. We owe our digital advertising success to our sophisticated digital products and solutions, which are entirely in-house, giving us 100% control of the client relationship, starting with the client pitch, then campaign design, media buying and optimization and ongoing reporting and insights, which we believe translates to a better customer experience and higher client retention rates. In addition, we have the unique ability to collect and analyze first-party data from our audience of over 75 million monthly unique visitors to our portfolio of over 400 local news and entertainment websites, 400 mobile apps and 10 leading national music and entertainment websites.
Our large first-party data set allows us to provide detailed and unique insights about consumer behaviors, audience interest and purchase intent that drives real results with strong ROI for our clients, giving us a true strategic advantage over our local competition. Another key factor that drives our strong digital advertising success is our focus on markets outside the top 50 US cities, a significant, significant differentiator for our broadcast business and most importantly, for our digital businesses. Because we are not in large top 50 markets, we face significantly less competition from large media players, digital marketing solutions players and digital programmatic providers. And importantly, the competitors we do face rarely have in-house solutions and instead utilize out-of-house third-party vendors.
Owning our own tech platforms in-house, combined with the breadth of our digital solutions, is a competitive advantage in any sized market. Yet in cities outside the top 50, it is a significant difference maker, driving our digital advertising to be the strongest growth engine in the company. In 2023, Townsquare's digital advertising net revenue and digital advertising profit each increased plus 7% year-over-year. S&P Global Market Intelligence latest forecast project that digital advertising in the United States will increase at a plus 8.5% CAGR through 2028, as digital advertising grows from 69% of all to advertising spend in 2023 to approximately 76% of all advertising spend in 2028. We are confident that these favorable industry trends, together with our in-house full suite of marketing solutions, investment in our original content strategy and our first-party data advantage will continue to drive strong digital advertising growth during that same period.
Conversely, as I shared previously, 2023 was a reset year at Townsquare Interactive. Rising interest rates, inflation and wage pressures drove elevated churn rates and slower sales velocity. In addition, we started the year with higher customer attrition driven by internal customer service turnover that was a result of our return-to-work mandate at our Townsquare Interactive headquarters. We have been asked if we still believe in the growth strategy and addressable market of Townsquare Interactive given last year's challenge. And the answer is yes, without a doubt, unquestionably so. We are seeing numerous early signs of improvement. Customer churn peaked in Q2 2023, although still above historical levels today, the spike in employee attrition and the related customer churn is behind us and ARPU for new sales is increasing.
The changes we made to our customer service model in response to the challenges we faced last year allowed us to capture cost efficiencies and importantly, set us up to scale more efficiently going forward. In 2023, Townsquare Interactive's net subscription revenue declined negative 9.1% compared to the prior year. However, we managed expenses such that Townsquare Interactive adjusted operating income margin only contracted 60 basis points to 28.3%. However, given the loss of over 6,500 subscribers in 2023, even though we are currently experiencing many positive signs at Townsquare Interactive, including improving subscriber trends, which I'll outline in a few moments, the impact of losing over 6,500 subscribers in 2023 put significant negative pressure on both revenue and profit year-over-year growth in 2024.
For example, even with meaningfully lower subscriber losses in Q1 2024 versus Q4 2023, first quarter revenue for Townsquare Interactive will still be down 15% to 16%, which is a decline of over $3 million from Q1 2023. In the long-term, we are confident that we have a long sustainable runway ahead of us. With 24,000 subscribers at the end of 2023, which approximately 58% are outside of our local media footprint, and an addressable market of nearly 9 million target customers, we are only scratching the surface. With our existing subscriber base, superior product offering and a huge market opportunity of nearly 9 million target customers, as outlined on Slide 14, I am confident that Townsquare Interactive is geared up for long-term profitable growth and success.
To that end, the first sign of the rebound in Townsquare Interactive will be the return to subscriber growth. The second sign of the rebound will be month-over-month revenue growth. And given our continued ongoing aggressive investment in Townsquare Interactive, the third sign of returning to strength will be month-over-month profit growth. In Q1 2024, I expect net subscriber losses to be materially improved over the rate we experienced in both Q3 and Q4 of 2023. My current expectation is we could return to net subscriber adds in Q2 and no later than Q3 2024. My expectation for month-over-month revenue growth is also in Q2 and no later than Q3 2024. And my expectation for month-over-month profit growth is dependent on how aggressive we can continue to invest in the business in Charlotte and Phoenix.
Yet with that context provided, I do expect to return to month-over-month profit growth in Q3 or Q4 of 2024. As I already stated, I am very confident that Townsquare Interactive is back on track and set up a long-term profitable growth and success again. Thankfully, we strategically built a diverse product and service platform and the strength of digital advertising offset a difficult year in subscription digital marketing solutions. In total, our digital revenue grew approximately 1% year-over-year to $232.5 million, and importantly, generated $69.1 million of adjusted operating income representing a very strong 30% profit margin, a margin much higher than most local media competitors. We believe Townsquare's ability to drive profitable, sustainable digital growth is a key differentiator for our company.
Digital is and will continue to be our growth engine, and we will continue to invest in our digital business to fuel further profitable growth. We view local radio as an extremely valuable asset with significant cash flow properties, unparalleled consumer reach and important local connection to our audience. In fact, we would have never achieved the success we have had in building an at-scale digital audience and the resulting digital advertising and digital marketing solutions businesses, if not for our continued strong local radio presence and performance. Our traditional AM/FM over-the-air broadcast continues to reach, on average, one out of every two adults in our markets where we operate radio stations, very, very powerful and very, very important.
And because of the powerful connection and combination of Townsquare's digital plus radio plus live events plus local investment, we believe that our flywheel will continue to blaze forward and gain momentum. One very important characteristic of our business model that we like to highlight as often as possible is our significant cash flow generation. Although net revenue and adjusted EBITDA declined in 2023, we generated $68 million of cash flow from operations, up an impressive plus 35% year-over-year. We ended the year with $61 million of cash on hand and net leverage of 4.4 times. We remain very confident in our current capitalization and the strength of our balance sheet and are pleased that we can continue to deliver attractive current cash returns for our equity shareholders.
And now I'd like to turn the call over to Stu, who will go through our results in even more detail as well as provide you our first quarter and full year guidance. Stu take it away.
Stuart Rosenstein: Thank you, Bill, and good morning, everyone. It's great to speak to you all today. We're pleased to report that our fourth quarter results met our revenue and profit guidance and more importantly, that our full year results met the guidance that we set out at the beginning of this year, something that not many others managed to achieve given the difficult operating environment. Fourth quarter net revenue declined 4.6% year-over-year to $114.8 million, which exceeded our guidance range of $110.6 million to $112.6 million. Excluding political, fourth quarter net revenue declined 2.7%. Full year net revenue declined 0.9% year-over-year, excluding political, and 1.9% year-over-year in total to $454.2 million, which was within our guidance set at the beginning of the year.
In addition, this was our second highest revenue year in the company's history with these assets and was achieved in a nonpolitical year. Fourth quarter adjusted EBITDA declined 6.5% year-over-year, excluding political and 12.7% in total to $24.8 million, also within our guidance range of $24.8 million to $25.8 million. Full year adjusted EBITDA declined 9.1% versus prior year, excluding political, and 12.1% year-over-year in total to $100 million, also within our guidance range. Fourth quarter broadcast advertising net revenue decreased 2.5% and increased 1.3%, excluding political revenue, which was a sequential improvement from third quarter declines. For the year, broadcast advertising net revenue declined in line with expectations at 3.6%, excluding political and 5.4% in total.
Fourth quarter broadcast profit margins contracted slightly on a year-over-year basis when excluding political from 26% in Q4 of 2022 to 25% in Q4 of 2023. As we've outlined on previous calls, 2023 was a reset year for Townsquare Interactive, our subscription Digital Marketing Solutions segment. In the fourth quarter, net revenue decreased 14.5% as compared to the prior year and profit decreased 11.3% year-over-year. For the full year, net revenue decreased 9.1% and profit decreased 11%. Margins were strong at approximately 28% in 2023, only a slight decline from 2022's 29% profit margin. This was despite our continued investment in the business, including the ongoing ramp-up of our newly opened Phoenix location. Townsquare Ignite, our digital advertising segment was the largest growth driver of the company in 2023 with revenue and profit increasing 7.1% and 7.5% year-over-year, respectively.
Fourth quarter digital advertising net revenue contracted slightly by approximately $500,000 or 1.5%. The main driver of the decline, which was our national digital business was down double-digits in revenue in the fourth quarter, offsetting growth in our programmatic in our local owned and operated digital advertising business lines. We're experiencing similar trends in Q1 of 2024 with national digital down double-digits, offset by solid programmatic growth. Additionally, our current pacing in Q2 digital advertising is stronger overall than in Q1 of 2024. In 2023, this segment's profit margin was approximately 31%. The other category, which is comprised of live events activity, generated $1.3 million of revenue in the fourth quarter, a decline of 15.7% year-over-year and a small loss of approximately $400,000.
In the full year period, other revenue increased 18.6% to $10 million and was slightly profitable with $222,000 adjusted operating income. In 2024, we are focusing on refining the live event schedule to eliminate unprofitable or barely profitable events, so we expect to see a small revenue decline in 2024, but with profit and margin expansion. As a reminder, a lot of events activity should not be viewed as a growth driver or a revenue center for Townsquare or rather a marketing arm of our company. In the fourth quarter of 2023, we had noncash impairment charges of $24.9 million and $90.6 million for the full year. The majority of these charges were related to our FCC licenses. As I covered on previous calls, given the way these noncash impairments are mathematically determined, we expect the value of our FCC licenses to continue to be written down regularly over time.
The 2023 impairments were caused by rising interest rates which caused a discount rate in our calculations to increase by approximately 190 basis points over the course of 2023 as well as decreases in third-party broadcast revenue forecast and a higher initial capital cost due to rising prices, all of which are inputs in our valuations. These write-downs of a decade-old purchase price calculations have no bearing on our cash position, our operating revenue, operating expenses, profitability or the company's future prospects. There are nothing more than noncash accounting charges affecting only the historical recorded purchase price allocations that we made when we bought these radio station assets roughly a decade or more ago. Our fourth quarter net income declined from $3.9 million in 2022 to a net loss of $1.9 million or $0.14 per share.
The decline was largely due to the noncash impairment charges and the decline in revenue. Fourth quarter adjusted net income per share, which adds back certain items, including noncash impairments and adjustments for a normalized tax rate was $0.34 per diluted share. We'd like to remind you that any benefit or provision for income taxes included on the face of the income statement is for GAAP financial statement purposes only. We maintain significant tax attributes, including more than $100 million of federal NOL carryforwards and other substantial tax shields related to the tax amortization of our intangible assets. We continue to believe that we will not be a material cash taxpayer until approximately 2026. As Bill highlighted, and I'd like to again emphasize, we consistently have strong cash flow generation.
We generated $68 million of cash flow from operations in 2023, that's up 35% year-over-year or $18 million and ended the year with $61 million of cash. At the end of the year, our net leverage was 4.43 times, down slightly from the third quarter. We repurchased $27.1 million of bonds below par during the year at an average price of $94, bringing our total bond repurchases to $46 million since issuance. In addition, we repurchased approximately 1.7 million shares in 2023 at an average price of $9.88 per share. As always, our number one priority is to invest in a local business through organic internal investments that support our revenue and profit growth, particularly our digital growth engine. We plan to continue to invest in our digital product technology, sales, content and support teams, specifically in our Townsquare Interactive and Townsquare Ignite businesses in order to maintain our strong competitive advantages in our markets outside the top 50 cities.
In addition, we are highly focused on our balance sheet and feel extremely confident that we will be well positioned to refinance our February 2026 notes before they come due. As Bill mentioned earlier, our Board has approved a 5% increase in our dividend. The dividend of $0.1975 per share, which equates to $0.79 per share on an annualized basis implies an annual payment of approximately $13 million based on our current share plan and a dividend yield of approximately 7.5% based on our current share price. This higher dividend will be payable on May 1st to shareholders of record as of April 5th. We believe our strong cash flow characteristics will allow us to continue to invest in our business support our newly increased dividend and give us flexibility to opportunistically pursue debt and share repurchases as market circumstances allow.
Turning to our first quarter and full year outlook. We expect first quarter net revenue to be between $98.5 million and $100 million. As Bill already detailed, baked into our revenue guide is a decline of over $3 million year-over-year at Townsquare Interactive. We expect first quarter adjusted EBITDA to be between $17.5 million and $18.5 million. For the full year, we currently expect that our revenue will be between $440 million and $460 million. This represents a year-over-year growth rate of 1% at the high end of the range and minus 3% at the low end of the range. Embedded in this guidance is a political revenue estimate of $14 million to $16 million as compared to our all-time high political revenue of $16 million in 2020. In addition, although as Bill outlined, we expect to return to month-over-month revenue growth at Townsquare Interactive.
On a full year basis, we expect year-over-year revenue declines of over $8 million at Townsquare Interactive. We expect that our 2024 adjusted EBITDA will be between $100 million and $110 million. And with that, I will now turn the call back over to Bill.
Bill Wilson: Thank you, Stu, and thank you to everyone who joined us this morning. We greatly appreciate it. In closing, I want to highlight a few key takeaways. Number one, 2023 net revenue and adjusted EBITDA both met the guidance that we initiated at the start of last year. And importantly, net revenue represented the second highest that Townsquare has ever achieved with these assets. Number two, net revenue remains above 2019 levels and adjusted EBITDA is at 98% of 2019 levels, a rare achievement in our industry. Number three, approximately 51% of our company's total net revenue and 55% of our total adjusted operating income now come from our digital solutions. Number four, we're very well positioned for our upcoming refinancing with net leverage at 4.4 times.
Number five, we generated $68 million of operating cash flow in 2023. And finally, number six, given our confidence in the long-term growth and success of Townsquare, we are raising our high-yielding dividend that will continue to deliver current cash returns for our shareholders. I am very proud of what our business model delivered in the face of rising interest rates and inflation and extreme and persistent national advertising weakness in 2023. Our differentiated digital advertising platform delivered high single-digit revenue and profit growth. And our mature cash cow broadcast advertising platform has and continues to generate a solid profit contributing to our strong cash generation. Our performance this year has reinforced our confidence in our digital-first local media strategy, our deliberate focus on markets outside the top 50 cities in the United States and the long-term profitable growth potential of our digital platform.
And our success is owed to the Townsquare team focusing on what we do best, creating high-quality local original content for our audiences online and on air as well as delivering creative and cost-effective marketing and advertising solutions for our local clients with strong return on investment. If we continue to do this each day, we will achieve success and ultimately achieve our mission of becoming the number one local media company in the markets outside the top 50 in the United States and consequently drive long-term sustainable shareholder value. And again, thanks to each of you for taking the time to be updated on Townsquare's Q4 results this morning. We greatly appreciate it. Operator, at this time, please open the line for any and all questions.
Operator: Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from Michael Kupinski with Noble Capital Markets. Please go ahead.
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