NCR Corporation (NYSE:NCR) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Charles Nabhan: Hi. Good afternoon and thank you for taking my questions. Just wanted to drill into the segments a little more. First of all, within Payments, if you were to take out LibertyX what would the organic growth rate look like for the fourth quarter? And then secondly, as far as Digital Banking goes, I know in the past, you referred to it as a double-digit grower. Is it fair to still think of that as a trajectory for that business on the top line?

Mike Hayford: Yes. Let me start with Digital Banking. Absolutely, it was a little light in the fourth quarter. We €“ again, we had an extremely high renewal quarter, which drove extending our terms with our customers, which may be impacted revenue a little bit in the fourth quarter. But I don’t think that there is anything in the trends to cause us concern. I do think, as Tim referenced, high-single digit, low-double digit in 2023 based on what we are seeing for Digital Banking. I think the overall €“ without LibertyX, what do you get in mind.

Tim Oliver: LibertyX is about $15 million to $20 million a quarter.

Charles Nabhan: Got it. And then just as a quick follow-up, if I could refer back to some of your guidance from the prior quarter when you talked about $200 million in cost take-outs for €˜23 and $80 million to $100 million in dissynergies. Is that still a ballpark range of thinking about €˜23?

Tim Oliver: Yes. I think if you get your ruler out and that EBITDA, it’s supposed to say causal walk, it says casual walk. The casual walk in the deck on Page 16, I tried to kind of roll all of these different efforts at cost take-out as they played out across this year and next because they don’t necessarily calendarize to any one fiscal year. We did see $500 million or so of pressure from both the discrete items we called out, external forces and then inflation in aggregate. And we have got about $400 million of cost actions or permanent actions €“ total actions done in 2022. About 60% of those were more temporal in nature. So, the raining and discretionary spending hard not backfilling positions that have been opened, and we need to add back some costs there and about 40% of that cost-out was permanent.

Moving into €˜23 then, since we expect the external impacts and the inflation to moderate really considerably and in fact, a couple of the items turned around in our net benefits to us this year. We simply need to then cover the $100 million or so of wrap effect from the negative impacts last year and cover those temporal actions. So, if you add those together, it looks like in aggregate, about $350 million of permanent actions in 2023, which will then allow us to hit the numbers on this page. If there is €“ we have talked about $80 million to $100 million of let’s call it, negative synergies, dissynergies associated with the spin transaction. We have presumed across this model that it will be when we split, it will be $80 million, about $40 million on each side of the NewCo. We think as we €“ as the year plays out, we will be able to keep that cost down and offset it across the year.

So, we found several opportunities for efficiency beyond the actions that we have described here to help keep that from being a negative at the time of the launch of the two companies.

Operator: And we will take a question from Erik Woodring with Morgan Stanley.

Erik Woodring: Hey guys. Thanks for taking the question. You look at 2023, and it looks like you plan to do more with less, I guess. Meaning your revenue guide is flat to up 2%, and we talked through some of the factors there. EBITDA is up much nicer kind of around 9% at the midpoint. Can you maybe just talk us through, Tim, I know you have talked about kind of like high level, but maybe walk us through how you are thinking about gross margins and the puts and takes there in 2023 versus OpEx just to help us maybe where the leverage in the model comes from next year? And then I have a follow-up next.

Tim Oliver: Yes. That’s a good question because you will remember that this year, most of the savings came at OpEx, right. It came from indirect costs because that was we have more quickly act there. It’s going to be nearly entirely gross margin savings this year. The actions that we took to re-qualify parts and to diversify our supply chain, the efforts we have made to reduce our transportation costs and other direct cost efficiencies are going to help pay back nicely in 2023. So, I would expect most of the recovery to be in gross margin rather than at OpEx.

Erik Woodring: Okay. Super. That’s really helpful. And then as a follow-up, I just want to make sure I get some of these items, right? So, I am obviously guiding to some nice year-over-year improvements in EBITDA and free cash flow. EPS has held back a bit more regardless of the kind of change in disclosures. Is that mostly tax rate, interest rate €“ sorry, tax rate, interest expense and share count. Was there anything else that I am missing? I just want to make sure I kind of understand why that measure maybe as much as the others.