Universal Technical Institute, Inc. (NYSE:UTI) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Troy Anderson: Sure. Yeah. Thanks, Raj. It’s Troy. Well, as we mentioned, so at an overall, call it, 3% growth rate in €˜22 with really all of that being driven by the addition of MIAT and then the new campuses, new welding program. So same-store, we were down measurably, again driven heavily by adult, but still down nonetheless. And with the leverage that we get on the upside, on our margin, we unfortunately had to reverse that happens as well. So we start the year, we have some bridges in our investor materials that have spent some time looking at with you as well, but we see the opposite on the way down. We had a very, very strong Q1 of ’22 because of that same effect, we had very strong student growth in ’21. The costs had not yet caught up with all the student inflows and so we had $20 million in adjusted EBITDA in Q1 of last year, which was frankly a bit of a windfall.

So as we move through the year, though, we also had the new camp is ramping, Miramar just had its first class in August of last year, so that will be operating at a loss for the first half of the year. We have the program expansions that will be in the fourth quarter. We’ll have the pre-marketing costs and we’ll adjust out some of the startup costs. So there’s just a number of factors in the first part of the year that will weigh us down on the UTI business and then reverse as we get into the fourth quarter and into €˜24, which to the latter part of your question is then the momentum that we carry into €˜24 with both the base business, as well as with the growth initiatives in the full year of Concorde, which give us confidence in the $700 million and approaching $100 million in €˜24.

Raj Sharma: Great. Thanks. Thanks for that clarification. And then just one other question on your draw of $90 million on the revolver. Can you talk about how much of that is the working capital sort of how do we think about working capital needs for the year in the first half, some more color on that? And then how much is it being used for corporate purposes entirely?

Troy Anderson: Sure. Yeah. We wanted to make sure we had a stronger balance sheet as we could going into the closing, there’s various activities that occur around the closing that we just wanted to make sure we had ample liquidity. We have no concerns about working capital. We have — we will be carrying excess cash probably through most of the year. So as we mentioned in our prepared remarks, we’ll continue now looking at the next leg of our growth and diversification strategy, both organic and inorganic opportunities don’t know that anything incremental would be delivered in €˜23 necessarily, but certainly we’ll be doing planning in looking at those next opportunities and where to deploy capital, which we have plenty of.

Raj Sharma: Right. And Concorde two came in with a cash balance, correct?

Troy Anderson: Correct. They had a very good way. drone cash balance as well and of course, there was a working capital element to the closing settlement and all that came relatively aligned to our expectations.

Raj Sharma: And just exactly on Concorde, what growth — what are the growth expectations for ’23? I know they ended the year with $200 million and $17 million in EBITDA. Any sort of indication on how Concorde is expected to do?