Agiliti, Inc. (NYSE:AGTI) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript May 13, 2023

Operator: Good afternoon, and welcome to Agiliti’s First Quarter 2023 Earnings Call. Today’s call is being recorded, and we have allocated 1 hour for prepared remarks and Q&A. At this time, I’d like to turn the conference over to Kate Kaiser, Senior Vice President of Corporate Communications and Investor Relations at Agiliti.

Kate Kaiser: Thank you. You may begin. Thank you, operator, and hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us on today’s call as we provide an overview of Agiliti’s results for the quarter ending March 31, 2023. Before we begin, I’ll remind you that during today’s call, we’ll be making statements that are forward-looking and consequently are subject to risks and uncertainties. Certain factors may affect us in the future and could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed in these forward-looking statements. Specific risk factors are detailed in our press release and in our most recent SEC filings, which can be found in the Investors section of our corporate website at agilitihealth.com. We will also be referring to certain measures that are not calculated and presented in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles during this call.

You can find a reconciliation of those measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures and a description of why we use these measures in our press release. To download a copy of the presentation that we’ll use to facilitate today’s discussion, please visit our website at agilitihealth.com, select the Investors section at the top of the screen and then Events and Presentations. Finally, selected presentation titled Agiliti Q1 2023 Earnings Slides. I’ll now turn the call over to our CEO, Tom Boehning.

Tom Boehning: Good afternoon, and thanks for making time to join us today as we review our results from the first quarter of 2023. On the call with me is our CFO, Jim Pekarek, and we’re coming to you from Las Vegas where tomorrow, Agiliti will participate in the Annual Bank of America Healthcare Conference. We look forward to this opportunity to meet face-to-face with many of our shareholders and with those who have expressed ongoing interest in Agiliti. Turning now to our results. Our financial results for the first quarter were in line with our expectations. Being just 1 quarter in and with 3 quarters of work still ahead of us, we’re reaffirming our full year guidance for 2023. And Jim will review our Q1 results in more detail and provide additional color on our performance in a few minutes.

I’ll first offer some brief observations on our progress. Agiliti entered 2023 well positioned to execute our growth strategy and our results in the first quarter reflect our positive momentum. As we’ve described on prior calls, we’re taking a balanced view on the year as we lap both the favorable contributions from COVID-19 in the prior year and the impact of the timing and revised scope of the HHS contract renewal. As we turn towards the second half of this year, we expect the underlying organic growth engine of the business to come more clearly into focus driven by our consistent new business momentum and steady customer demand for our connected solutions. As we’ve shared, our relationships with many of our customers has evolved from meeting their immediate transactional needs to more strategic partnerships.

And with the support of our GPO partners, we’re seeing our customers’ purchasing commitments elevate from individual facilities to system-wide commitments. The steady rate of hospital consolidation has further elevated the demand for more system-wide partnerships. And for the past several years, Agiliti has been at the forefront of these discussions with our customers. Accordingly, and as we’ve shared, we’re now signing more 7- and 8-figure annual value contracts than ever before in our company’s 80-plus year history. On prior calls, we’ve mentioned that these larger deals require somewhat longer and more complex implementations as we embed ourselves deeply into our customers’ operations to unlock value in their medical device value chain. This results in a longer ramp to profitability with implementation costs front-loaded in the process.

As we’ve shared, we expect that this dynamic will yield some near-term lumpiness in our financial results. As we enter the back half of the year, we expect these multiyear contracts will once again support a more visible and predictable financial outlook consistent with our long history as a company. In preparation for today’s call, I have found myself reflecting on the state of the health care industry from this time last year to now and in particular, on the evolution of Agiliti’s important role and responsibility in supporting our broad network of customers across the nation. While our collective outlook has certainly improved post pandemic, many of the challenges facing our health care system remain unchanged, the burdens of capital constraints, labor and supply chain shortages and broad-based inflationary cost pressures.

The continued uncertainty surrounding the financial and operational environment is causing health care executives to seek partnerships with vendors who can help to meaningfully reduce costs while enabling better patient care and outcomes. Agiliti is uniquely positioned to help them accomplish both. We believe Agiliti stands alone when it comes to the manufacturing, management maintenance and mobilization of medical devices. Our goal for our customers is simple to ensure clinicians have round-the-clock access to the patient-ready medical devices they need delivered to the point of care with the confidence that they are maintained to the highest industry standards. Let me share a few examples of these capabilities in action and quantify the benefits to our customers.

On the labor front, our unique ability to supplement a hospital’s biomed team with Agiliti technicians can compensate for our customers’ short-term staffing shortages, minimizing employee burnout and reducing or eliminating overtime expense. By helping our customers return their own devices back into circulation more quickly, we can also help reduce or eliminate other operational impacts caused by a lack of equipment availability and excess rental expense. Similarly, improving medical device utilization and reducing the cost of device ownership is another area where Agiliti makes a difference. Even prior to the pandemic, health systems generally owned too much capital medical equipment. Yet as we know, many health systems subsequently acquired even more equipment during the pandemic, which has had a near-term negative impact on our equipment rental volumes as we previously stated.

That said, many of these health systems now bear the financial and operational strain of expenses and increasingly idle assets that still require ongoing preventative maintenance and repair. Agiliti’s supplemental clinical engineering offering and our on-site management programs can address this challenge, helping customers free up both the capital and related operating expenses, resulting from having made long-term capital investments to meet the short-term demands of COVID. On top of the broad benefits of our product and service offerings, we’re also implementing solutions that help improve the customer experience and ease the process of doing business with Agiliti. One such example is our recent order intake integration with each of the major EMR vendors, which speeds and simplifies customer ordering by enabling them to execute an order within their existing EMR workflow.

Among customers who have implemented our EMR ordering, we’re now fulfilling 60% to 80% of customer requests via that channel. As we continue to onboard a higher portion of larger customer contracts, more system-wide in nature, we will continue to optimize our systems with features that enable us to embed ourselves more deeply within our customers’ value chain. Staying true to our name, our ability to rapidly evolve and bring meaningful and measurable solutions that improve care delivery has underscored our growth throughout our history as a company, and this work remains critical today as we help our customers navigate the ongoing challenges of this post-pandemic era and simultaneously planned for the future. As we progress in 2023, our teams remain focused on the disciplined execution of our strategy and on fostering strong and collaborative partnerships with our customers.

Looking forward, we’re even more enthusiastic about the momentum in our business and the opportunities ahead of us. I’ll now pass the call to Jim for detail on our first quarter results.

James Pekarek: Thank you, Tom. I’ll start with an overview of our Q1 2023 financials and later offer some comments on our outlook for the year. For the first quarter, total company revenue was $300 million, representing a 2% increase over the prior year. Excluding the favorable impact from COVID in the prior year, which was estimated at $5 million to $7 million and primarily impacted our Equipment Solutions business, revenue increased approximately 4% in Q1 year-over-year. Adjusted EBITDA totaled $72 million, a 19% decline compared to Q1 last year, and adjusted EBITDA margins totaled 24%. Adjusted EBITDA margins compared to the prior year were affected by the revised scope of the new HHS contract renewal as well as a lower mix of medical device rental placements in the quarter.

In addition, adjusted EBITDA margins were negatively impacted by the onboarding of larger customer contracts, which tend to have lower upfront profitability with more front-loaded costs during the implementation phase, as Tom mentioned. Adjusted earnings per share of $0.20 in the quarter compares to $0.29 in the year ago period, driven by both a decline in adjusted net income and an increase in the effective interest rate on our debt, which amounted to approximately $0.03 a share for the quarter. Taking a closer look at the first quarter across each of our service lines. Equipment Solutions revenue totaled $121 million, down 1% year-over-year. The decline was primarily attributable to lower customer utilization of our Peak need rental equipment fleet in the quarter.

Excluding the prior year excess COVID benefit, Equipment Solutions was up approximately 4%. Moving to Clinical Engineering. Q1 revenue was $113 million, representing a year-over-year increase of 10% for the quarter. New customer organic growth was the primary driver for the increase versus the prior year as we continue to advance our solutions, including within our surgical equipment repair portions of the business. Finally, on-site managed services revenue totaled $66 million, representing a year-over-year decline of 6% for the quarter. This was primarily driven by the renewal pricing and scope of our HHS agreement, which was reset to a longer-term pricing model for managing and maintaining the stockpile devices. Continuing down the P&L. Gross margin dollars for Q1 totaled $109 million, a decline of 12% year-over-year.

Our gross margin rate was 36.5% compared to 42% in the prior year period. The decline in margin rate was primarily due to a lower mix of peak need rental placements post COVID as well as the factors related to the HHS agreement as previously described. SG&A costs for Q1 totaled $89 million, an increase of $3 million year-over-year. The increase was primarily due to costs associated with our Q4 2022 acquisitions and costs with our CEO transition. Moving to the balance sheet. We closed Q1 with net debt of $1.09 billion. Our cash flow from operations for the first quarter was $55 million. Our reported leverage ratio at the end of Q1 approximated 3.9 turns. Excluding the impact of the late Q4 2022 acquisitions and the associated purchase price paid for the businesses, our leverage ratio would have approximated 3.7 turns as of March 2023.

Looking forward, we will remain diligent in determining the optimal uses of our cash generation. Agiliti maintains a position of solid liquidity with $222 million available and is comprised of $14 million of cash on hand and $208 million available under our revolving credit facility as of March 2023. In addition, in April 2023, we expanded our revolving credit agreement by $50 million and extended the term to Q2 2028. On a pro forma basis, our total availability at the end of Q1 totaled $272 million. Further, in early May, we completed a modification and extension of our term loan, which transitioned our key underlying benchmark rate from LIBOR to SOFR and extended the maturity date to Q2 of 2030. A reminder on the terms of our debt given the macro view on near-term interest rates.

Of our $1.09 billion in debt, we maintain an interest rate swap agreement on $500 million, which is swap floating rate terms for fixed rate terms. This provides a partial hedge for any anticipated market rate increases in the short term and will expire June 1, 2023. We Anticipating this expiration in Q2 in April 2023, we entered into a new interest rate swap agreement on $500 million of our debt with an effective date of July 1, 2023. This new swap is the effect of fixing our SOFR-based rate at 4.07% and the agreement has a 2-year duration. Turning now to our 2023 outlook. We are reaffirming our full year financial guidance. Specifically, we expect to deliver 2023 revenue in the range of $1.16 billion to $1.19 billion, representing top line growth of 4% to 6%.

We anticipate adjusted EBITDA in the range of $295 million to $305 million. Our net cash CapEx guidance reflects expected reinvestment into our business in the range of $85 million to $95 million. Finally, we continue to expect adjusted earnings per share in the range of $0.65 to $0.70 per share. A reminder that we estimate the negative impact of higher interest expense to be in the range of $0.15 per share to $0.20 per share. From a qualitative perspective, and as we have shared in each of our earnings calls, in 2023, our financial results will be comping against the favorable $5 million to $7 million impact of COVID in Q1 of 2022. In addition, as we have shared in our prior earnings calls, as of Q2 last year, we saw lower-than-expected utilization of our equipment rental fleet leveling out below 2019 pre-pandemic levels.

Our 2023 guidance assumes placements will remain at this new baseline level and that we will continue to benefit from normal seasonality throughout the year. Finally, our guidance implies a weighting of revenue growth towards the second half of the year as we continue to onboard new business. I’ll now turn the call over to our operator, to provide instructions for our Q&A.

Q&A Session

Operator: Thank you, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, at this time, we will be conducting a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] We request that you limit us off to one question please call for questions. Our first question is from Matthew Mishan of KeyBanc Capital Markets.

Operator: The next question is from Jason Cassorla of Citi.

Operator: The next question comes from Kevin Caliendo from UBS.

Operator: The next question is from Brian Tanquilut of Jefferies.

Operator: The next question is from Drew Ranieri of Morgan Stanley.

Operator: The next question is from Kevin Fischbeck of Bank of America. This is actually Navia [Indiscernible] on for Kevin.

Operator: Ladies and gentlemen, we have no further questions in the queue.

Tom Boehning: Well, thank you all for joining us today, and we look forward to sharing our continued progress on our next call. We’ll close the call here, operator. Thank you.

Operator: Thank you very much, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, you may now disconnect your lines, and thank you for your participation.