Black Diamond Group Limited (BDI) Earnings Call Transcript

Thank you for standing by. This is the conference operator. Welcome to Black Diamond's Fourth Quarter Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] The conference is being recorded. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to turn the conference over to Mr. Sean McPherson, Investor Relations Specialist. Please go ahead.

Good morning. Thank you for joining Black Diamond Group's Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2024 Results Conference Call. On the line with us today is Chief Executive Officer, Trevor Haynes; and Chief Financial Officer, Toby LaBrie; as well as Chief Operating Officer of Modular Space Solutions, Ted Redmond; and Chief Operating Officer of Workforce Solutions, Mike Ridley. Please be reminded that our discussions today may include forward-looking statements regarding Black Diamond's future results and that such statements are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties. Actual financial and operational results may differ materially from these forward-looking expectations. Management may also make reference to various non-GAAP financial measures in today's call, such as adjusted EBITDA or net debt. For more information on these terms and others, please review the sections of Black Diamond's Fourth Quarter 2024 Management's Discussion and Analysis entitled Forward-Looking Statements, Risks and Uncertainties and non-GAAP Financial measures. This quarter's MD&A, financial statements and press release may be found on the company's website at www.blackdiamondgroup.com and also on the SEDAR+ website at www.sedarplus.ca. Dollar amounts discussed in today's call are expressed in Canadian dollars unless noted and may be rounded. I will now turn the call over to Trevor Haynes to review the operational highlights.

Thank you, Sean, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us this morning. Management is pleased to report continued progress with another strong quarter and full year of growth across the platform with signs of momentum continuing into 2025. We ended the year on solid footing, reflective of the good work of our teams. Black Diamond generated $132.7 million of revenue in Q4, up 28% from the comparative quarter; $37.2 million of adjusted EBITDA, up 43% from the comparative quarter; and consolidated rental revenue of $38.5 million, up 7% from the comparative quarter. I will leave the balance of the quarterly commentary to Toby LaBrie in a minute here and move on to full year. Our full year consolidated rental revenue was up 1% to $146.8 million over the prior year, and adjusted EBITDA rose 6% to $113.3 million. This results in a 5-year annual compounding growth rate for revenue of 17% of 18% for rental revenue and 24% for adjusted EBITDA and 8% for return on assets or ROA. Capital expenditures in 2024 were $109.2 million, the bulk of which was for rental revenue -- rental fleet growth. And of that, the majority is with customer contracts in place. This growth is evident in our contracted rental -- our contracted revenue outstanding of $159.4 million at year-end, which is up 17% or $23 million from the prior period. This robust rental investment and growth informs our confidence in the business' performance heading into 2025. All areas of the business produced strong results in 2024. MSS generated record rental revenue of $94.1 million, up 10% from the prior year, while continuing to grow its contracted future rental revenue by 26% to $128.7 million at year-end. Adjusted EBITDA in 2024 for the business unit of $77.8 million increased 7% from the prior period. WFS delivered total revenue of $179 million and adjusted EBITDA of $58.1 million, down 4% and 2%, respectively, from the prior year. Contracted future revenue of $30.7 million was down 11% or $3.9 million from the comparative quarter. As a reminder, these marginal decreases were primarily due to the completion of 2 large-scale pipeline camp projects, but highlight the resilience of the segment's ability to redeploy assets and continue to generate a strong return on assets. Finally, LodgeLink continued its strong growth trajectory with gross bookings up 21% year-over-year to $94.8 million. Total room nights sold increased by 23%, 517,382 and net revenue reached a record $11.4 million, up 16% from the prior year. These results highlight the effectiveness of our operational strategies in a dynamic marketplace and underscore the importance of our approach to disciplined execution. We continue to reinvest cash flow back into the business, primarily with contract-backed opportunities. This resulted in a capital investment program in 2024 that was up 58% on a gross basis and up 59% on a net basis, resulting in full year capital expenditures of $109.2 million. Looking ahead to 2025, we continue to believe there is ample opportunity for reinvestment, but also expect to be active through our NCIB share buyback program. Further, the company remains in a strong financial position with stable free cash flow generation, a strong balance sheet and available liquidity of $103.1 million at year-end. This is prior to the recent extension and expansion of our asset-based lending facility, which was increased by $100 million to $425 million, and termed out to February 20, 2030. This will support the company's sustained growth trajectory, both organic and inorganic not only in 2025, but well beyond. While macroeconomic uncertainty related to tariffs is very topical, let me address this from a Black Diamond perspective. We believe Black Diamond with its diversified geographic and industry exposure remains well positioned in such a backdrop as we anticipate ongoing growth in a number of our verticals. As many of you would be aware, the company does not manufacture, import or export product between Canada and the United States. Our businesses operate locally and at scale in both countries. As such, we do not expect direct impacts from tariffs. Areas that could be impacted include rising input costs for procurement of new fleet assets or a second derivative impact from lower customer activity in certain sectors. However, we are seeing continued steady demand in our local markets, which leads us to believe our business will have opportunities for ongoing growth and performance. The asset management basis of our business has been and continues to be a beneficiary of inflation. Should the current macro backdrop result in accelerated inflationary pressures, we expect our existing assets will continue to benefit through higher rents, while we maintain our capital allocation discipline on new investments and we will only look to add new fleet assets should we be successful in ensuring continued strong return on asset characteristics, consistent with our trailing performance. With continued strong demand across our end markets and, therefore, opportunities for growth investment, we are seeing continued demand in education and major infrastructure as well as humanitarian disaster recovery and military-related projects, coupled with an already healthy amount of contracted rental revenue in place. In summary, 2024 was another very successful year for Black Diamond. We continue to focus on the ongoing compounding profitable growth, diversification and scale of our portfolio of specialty rental accommodation and workforce travel management businesses, resulting in robust 5-year compounding annual growth rates across the business with MSS rental revenue CAGR of 23% over the 5 years, WFS rental revenue CAGR of 10%, LodgeLink gross bookings compounding annual growth rate over the 5 years of 44%, consolidated rental revenue CAGR of 18% and consolidated EBITDA for the whole company growing at a compounding rate of 24% through the 5 years. Our growth strategies are firmly rooted in disciplined, prudent and return on asset capital allocation and operating excellence. We have the financial flexibility and strength in our best-in-class team to capitalize on the opportunities that lie ahead. With a substantial amount of future contract back rental revenue, strong free cash flow characteristics and ample liquidity, Black Diamond has all the necessary tools required to continue to compound long-term growth and shareholder value. I will now turn the call over to our CFO, Toby LaBrie, for a more in-depth look at the quarter and overall financial condition of the company. Toby?

Thanks, Trevor, and good morning, everyone. Building on what Trevor just covered, I'll provide some specifics around our fourth quarter, our fleet utilization and performance, our balance sheet as well as give a quick ERP update. With respect to the fourth quarter results, adjusted EBITDA rose 43% to $37.2 million with balanced performance and contribution from all business units. Consolidated revenue grew 28% from the comparative quarter to $132.7 million, with consolidated rental revenue increasing by 7% to $38.5 million. The 7% increase in consolidated rental revenue from the comparative quarter was primarily driven by MSS achieving record quarterly rental revenue of $25.9 million, up 18% from the comparative quarter. During the quarter, we also had very strong sales performance from projects in both MSS and WFS, resulting in sales revenue of $53.2 million, up 126% from the comparative quarter. Nonrental revenues of $30.9 million were down 18%, primarily due to lower ancillary activity in WFS, while lodge services revenue was robust at $10.1 million, which is a 60% increase from the comparative quarter. WFS continues to deliver strong return on assets amidst an improving rate environment and demand for remote accommodation assets. The WFS sales pipeline remains strong and is backstopped by $30.7 million of contracted future rental revenue. LodgeLink, our innovative platform for workforce travel, continues to scale with total room nights sold increasing 23% from the comparative quarter, growing to 125,022 room nights, resulting in a fourth quarter record. Gross bookings grew 11% from the comparative quarter to $21.7 million. Growth of the platform is expected to continue in 2025, specifically as the company accelerates investment into product development to generate further opportunity and to increase market share. We remain focused on our core goals of generating strong returns and stable cash flows, in particular, by efficiently and optimally managing our long-lived rental asset fleet to drive these compounding returns over time. For the fourth quarter, MSS utilization was 82.4% and WFS was 60.6%. MSS utilization was down 80 basis points year-over-year as we added fleet to meet strong demand. MSS utilization remains healthy relative to long-term industry trends and moved higher on a sequential basis while we continue to deploy contract-backed assets across our platform. WFS overall utilization was relatively consistent with the comparative quarter. In WFS Canada, utilization remains above 50%, and we continue to see opportunities to drive incremental utilization improvements into 2025. WFS utilization in the U.S. of 75.9% in the quarter remained at healthy levels as we remain active in various resource, infrastructure and social housing initiatives. WFS Australia, utilization of 67.3% was below management expectations as we have continued to see certain project delays from customers. That said, we believe there is good upside in our Australian utilization into 2025 based on the current pipeline of opportunities. The balance sheet remains solid. Long-term debt of $235.7 million and $223.6 million are up compared to the prior year, but down since Q3 2024. Despite the increase in debt from the prior year, our net debt to trailing 12-month adjusted leverage EBITDA ratio of 2.0x is down from 2.2x at the end of Q3 2024 and is at the low end of our targeted range of 2 to 3x, leaving plenty of dry powder. The average effective interest rate in the quarter was 5.36%, down from 6.11% in the comparative quarter and continues to decrease in line with broader interest rate movement. Subsequent to the end of the quarter, we expanded and extended our asset-based credit facility. Facility was upsized $100 million to $425 million with a $75 million accordion feature and provides advanced rates against categories of rental assets that were previously excluded from the borrowing base. The interest rate pricing grid remains unchanged and the term of the facility has been extended until February 2030, giving us certainty of borrowing capacity to pursue our strategic growth initiatives. All other major terms and conditions of the facility, including financial covenants, are carried forward and not materially affected by the extension and expansion. As listeners may recall, Black Diamond has undertaken an ERP systems upgrade as part of our focus on operational excellence and cost efficiency. The transition for the MSS and corporate business units is well underway and total ERP implementation expenses for this quarter were $1.4 million. Management expects this phase of the new system to go live in the first half of 2026 with total budgeted investment of $11.9 million, including all third-party, internal costs and software licensing for the implementation. We remain confident that the company is well positioned to sustain its trajectory of compounded returns demonstrated over the last 5-plus years. With a solid foundation of strong contracted rental revenue, flexible balance sheet with ample liquidity and recently expanded credit facility, we continue to have all the tools in our toolbox to methodically drive organic and inorganic growth initiatives. Altogether, this reinforces our confidence in our optimistic outlook for sustained growth into 2025 and beyond. With that, operator, I'd like to open the call up for questions and answers.

[Operator Instructions] And the first question will come from Kyle McPhee with Cormark Securities.

First one for me, for the MSS rental business, can you give us a feel for what's happening in the spot market for rental pricing? Are they still on stable footing after the big inflation wave in trailing years? Or is there a trend change starting to emerge? And part of the reason I ask here is to figure out whether or not anything is going to get in the way of your remaining rental price conversion tailwind that I think you still have in front of you. It seems like you're still set up for 8%, 9%, 10% pricing gains for MSS over the next couple of years. So any color on that would help.

Yes. Thanks, Kyle. As you can see from the results last year, MSS saw 10% average rental rate increase in constant currency, 9% in common currency. So what we're seeing is that continued trend as our contracts renew and renew at higher rates based on the inflation of new assets. Ted, in terms of specifics Canada versus U.S., can you add a bit more color?

Sure. Yes. We -- the rental rate momentum as our prices have gone up due to inflation, as the contracts are coming off rent, we have some long-term contracts, 3, 4, 5 years. So although our current rental rates are maybe flat to up slightly like month-over-month kind of thing, as contracts are coming off rent, we're still seeing a lot of rental rate momentum especially in our markets that have these longer-term contracts. We're still seeing that rental rate momentum across Canada and the U.S., probably a little bit stronger in the U.S. where we have a lot of longer-term contracts and strong markets, but our Canadian markets are still relatively strong, and we're seeing those increases across the board still.

I think, Kyle, we would expect the average rental rate increase last year to be applicable this year or somewhere within reason of that rate, perhaps slightly lower, but still that characteristic or dynamic is active throughout our platform.

Got it. Okay. So flat to slightly up spot and still the big convergence tailwind. One more for me on growth CapEx spend. Your filings indicate and your comments indicate similar growth spend intensity versus what we just saw in 2024 as a percentage of your free cash flow is how you quoted it. Should we expect any weighting changes on where you're spending the growth dollars? Or is it still largely MSS North America, MSS Australia and LodgeLink intangibles?

The cadence of CapEx, our allocation of CapEx is typically 4 to 6 months before the assets and the revenue stream come into our system. So we have good visibility on the quantum of CapEx coming into our system in the first half of the year. And I would characterize that as being sort of a continuation of the cadence or quantum that we saw through 2024. And again, the bulk of that has contracts in place. So we have forward visibility of that capital generating a return for us, very little speculative capital in our system. And so that also characterizes what I would say is a constructive view from management of continued growth in '25 when you couple the increase in contracted rental revenue off of our CapEx from last year, coupled with what we already have visibility on in our system this year. With regard to the mix of CapEx, I would say, for MSS, fairly consistent. We're seeing really strong utilization and demand characteristics in our U.S. markets, Gulf Coast from Texas all the way across to the U.S. Southeast, really good strong demand characteristics in our Southeast markets, if you think about Georgia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, et cetera, and even up into the Mid-Atlantic states. So that's been consistent for a few years for us, and we see that growth continuing into '25. In Canada, education continues to be very strong for us. And so we're investing there. We expect another reasonably strong growth year for increased capacity for education and recontracting as well in certain provinces within Canada. Western Canada seems to have some strength around some larger industrial projects, somewhat downstream from the resource sector. And so that's driving some good characteristics with investment in fleet. I would say change from last year to this year would be more strength around our WFS business. Yes, the MSS aspect of WFS in our Australian market continues to see investment, but we've got some strength around certain types of accommodation assets, small format in Canada and the U.S. as well as in Australia, where we're seeing slight uptick in investment cadence. And that's with demand in place, contracts in place typically. So slightly different complexion this year to last year, but still the majority of the weighting around our MSS business.

Got it. And when you say cadence is kind of similar versus last year, is that including the impact of the BC asset acquisition in Q2 last year that flowed through as CapEx?

Yes. That's a good point, Kyle. What we're thinking about cadence is the organic aspect of our fleet allocation. So you took the $109 million and netted off the $20 million, our organic CapEx actually would be slightly stronger than that if you were to leave aside the inorganic growth of that asset over that fleet purchase.

Got it. Okay. And then just to confirm, like the spend you're talking about similar cadence ex the BC asset acquisition, that's excluding what may happen with growth capital deployment for M&A, like you're just talking about organic investment, correct?

Just entirely talking about M&A -- or sorry, entirely talking about organic growth, leaving out any M&A that we might do. It's very difficult to forecast or plan for M&A. However, in that topic category, we continue to be active looking at good businesses or good fleets that would fit. So there is a chance that there would be some inorganic growth added this year, but we're primarily focused on organic.

The next question will come from Matthew Lee with Canaccord Genuity.

This is Betty on for Matt Lee. Can you guys hear me?

Yes.

Congrats on the really strong Q4. My first question is on sales and nonrental revenues, which significantly exceeded our estimates. It looks like there was -- that was driven by some onetime sales opportunities. So was there any element of revenue pull forward in the results? And if so, should we anticipate a normalization in sales over the next couple of quarters?

Yes. Thanks, Betty. Generally, as you know, the sales, especially sales revenue is not really consistent from quarter-to-quarter. On an annual basis, we get a fairly consistent trend, but we do see higher sales quarters. As you would have seen earlier in 2024, we had relatively low sales quarters. And so we had some deferrals of projects, especially in MSS. And so we saw that catch up primarily in the fourth quarter. With respect to WFS, we saw some larger new manufactured sales, especially. We have some used sales as well, but much more significant new manufactured sales, custom sales than we've seen in many years. And so that is kind of opportunistically -- opportunistic timing dependent. And so those things can fluctuate and don't have a really specific seasonality to them or cadence to them. So that can be a little bit lumpy. As we did mention in our comments, we do see continued strength in our pipeline for sales. So on a full year basis in 2025, we currently don't expect to see any major changes from what we saw in 2024.

I want to point out the contribution from rental revenue with regard to EBITDA and EBIT is significantly higher. And so the growth in EBITDA is much more driven by the growth in our rental revenues. And so our baseline, even if sales does fluctuate somewhat over top of the platform, our baseline continues to grow and strengthen.

My other question is on the WFS side. The utilization rate was flat year-over-year, but there is a slight sequential decline. So I just want to hear more color on the utilization level that you're seeing in Q1 so far.

It's a good question. And before I pass it to Mike, I'll just remind investors that in -- up to 2023, we had 2 large pipeline construction projects that were generating significant amount of rental revenue and contribution. Those came to an end as was expected late in '23. And so '24 is the first year where we see the performance of our WFS business in backfilling those revenues by positioning -- repositioning those assets as well as others on our platform. And why we characterize the performance of WFS as being very strong for the year was how well the business unit did, Mike, in terms of repositioning. So in terms of our current state and stability of utilization, et cetera, what color can you provide?

Yes. Thanks for the question, Betty. As Trevor touched on, we had the 2 big projects that came off at the end of '23. I mean the business is much more diverse than it has ever been in all of our markets. There is a lack of major projects, in particular, in Canada, when I look at big pipelines that are going to require 1,000, 2,000-person camps, they just don't exist. That being said, we worked really hard to provide geographic and industry diversification, pursuing disaster housing, for example. We have camps going in at Jasper as we speak, which helps with that utilization. We're tracking the fires down in Los Angeles, for example, which may take a few months for it to sort of unfold. Over in Australia, our education business remains strong, which helps with improved utilization. And down in the U.S., where our utilization is quite strong down there, we're adding capital into that market for project-specific opportunities. So I think the business is more balanced. It's more diverse than it's ever been and the reliance on major projects to drive utilization is far less than it was many years ago.