Exact Sciences Corporation (NASDAQ:EXAS) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Operator: We’ll take our next question from Vijay Kumar with Evercore ISI.

Vijay Kumar: Hey guys, thanks for taking my question. Jeff, maybe, I’ll just limit one to the profitability question. You did adjusted EBITDA of $130 million in the first-half, you second half revenues on a dollar basis really don’t change a whole lot. I think the guide implies like $70 million-ish of EBITDA for the back half. Maybe talk about your incremental margins, incremental leverage here. You did mention G&A had some noise on earn-outs. When can we actually see G&A leverage similar to what we’re seeing on the sales and marketing side? Thank you.

Jeff Elliott: Thanks, Vijay. A lot there. I think we feel really good about the state of the business, especially the foundation we’ve talked so much about. The foundation was built to scale, built to scale the top-line and drive margin improvement and cash flow improvement for years to come in. That foundation allowed us to pull into profitability late last year and accelerate time to free cash flow positivity this quarter. So we feel good about the long-term prospects there. Take a step back here, what we’re guiding to for the year now is a $320 million rough improvement year-on-year in adjusted EBITDA that, when you compare that to the level of growth, it implies very strong adjusted EBITDA margins that we feel good about.

When you look at the guidance raise, specifically, the midpoint of adjusted EBITDA, is coming up by more at $63 million to the midpoint of revenue. So we are driving that leverage. To your question around G&A. In the quarter, there were a couple of one-timers. A legal settlement of $17 million that’s in the press release and also I mentioned before, the Thrive acquisition earn-out against the non-cash accretion line that, that can flip back-and-forth between a gain and an expense quarter-to-quarter. If you strip those two things out, G&A grew 2% in the quarter. So I think the team did a good job managing that relative to the 19% year-on-year growth in revenue. Still some work to be done in G&A, but with this foundation we have in place, we expect that number to come down as a percent of revenue nicely over time.

Operator: We’ll take our next question is from Dan Brennan with TD Cowen.

Dan Brennan: Great, thanks for — thanks for taking the questions, guys. Congrats. Maybe just on Cologuard. I guess, could you walk through some color on some of the notable drivers there, the rescreen in the 45 to 49? Did you see any impact from that three-year look-back where you had the COVID quarter three years ago on the rescreen? Just wondering how those two played out in the quarter. And then as well, obviously, you talked about only 10% penetration, but momentum has been really strong on clearing the backlog of colonoscopies and kind of the health systems electronic orders. So just get a little flavor for how a lot of those key drivers played out in the quarter and kind of what’s assumed for the back-half of the year? Thank you.

Jeff Elliott: Hey. Dan. This is Jeff. I’ll start, then Everett can jump in with some color. The beauty of this business is that there is a broad-based set of drivers here. So there’s not just one or two, it is broad. Rescreens is a big one we’ve talked about. Rescreens are growing nicely. We do have that headwind the team is managing through and the headwind here is because Cologuard is recommended by the guidelines to be done every three years. Three years ago, obviously was the onset of COVID and Cologuard orders were negatively impacted, especially in the early days of COVID. So you think back to April, May, June of 2020, Cologuard orders were actually down, they did recover nicely. What that means now three years later, when people are coming up to that rescreen, there is an impact on the business.

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