Q4 2024 Spok Holdings Inc Earnings Call

In This Article:

Participants

Al Galgano; Investor Relations; Spok Holdings Inc

Vincent Kelly; President, Chief Executive Officer, Director; Spok Holdings Inc

Mike Wallace; President, Spok Inc & Chief Operating Officer; Spok Holdings Inc

Calvin Rice; Chief Financial Officer; Spok Holdings Inc

Kyle Bauser; Analyst; B. Riley

John Dixon; Analyst; Artemis Investment management

George Milla; Analyst; MJH management

Presentation

Operator

Greetings and welcome to Spoke Holding Inc. fourth quarter 2024 earnings results conference call. (Operator Instructions) As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Mr. Lalgano.
Thank you, Mr. Galano. You may begin.

Al Galgano

Hello everyone and welcome. I am joined today by Vincent Kelly, Chief Executive Officer; Michael Wallace, Chief Operating Officer; and Calvin Rice, Chief Financial Officer; After a brief presentation by management, we will open up the call to your questions.
I want to remind everyone that today's conference call may include forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties relating to Spokes' future financial and business performance. Such statements may include estimates of revenue, expenses and income, as well as other predictive statements or plans which are dependent upon future events or conditions.
These statements represent the company's estimates only on the date of this conference call and are not intended to give any assurance as to actual future results. Spokes, actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements.
Although these statements are based upon assumptions that the company believes to be reasonable, they are subject to risks and uncertainties.
Please review the risk factor section relating to our operations and the business environment which are contained in our Form 10-K for 2024 and related documents, which will be filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission after this call.
Please note that Spoke assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements from past or present filings and conference calls. With that, I'll turn the call over to Vince. Vince.

Vincent Kelly

Thank you, Al, and good afternoon. Thank you for joining us for our fourth quarter 2024 earnings call. Let me preface my comments by saying how proud I am of our spoke team and our ability to end the year strong, generating a very impressive performance in 2024 while staying true to our mission.
I'm very pleased with the momentum that this team has created, and we are excited by our prospects and outlook.
Since the strategic pivot we announced about three years ago now, our focus has not changed, that is to grow our software revenue, generate cash, and return capital to stockholders.
In 2024, for the third consecutive year, we again accomplished that mission. We returned $26.4 million of cash to our stockholders while generating in excess of $29 million of adjusted EBITDA.
We were also successful in our stated goal to grow software revenue driven by double digit growth in our professional services business and our software operations bookings coupled with the continued focus on expense management. Spoke generated $15 million or $0.73 per deleted share of net income, and we accomplished this while responsibly investing in our product and service offerings.
Spoke struck an excellent balance between making the necessary investments to fuel future growth while continuing to generate cash flow and returning capital to our stockholders.
Today we'll share with you an update on how our strategic business plan is progressing in support of our goals as well as our financial results for the quarter and full year.
I'll start by reviewing the agenda for today's call. The order will be as follows. First, a review of our strategic focus and goals, reporting our progress against those goals.
Next, Michael Wallis, our COO, will provide a review of our sales performance. Then Calvin Rice, our CFO; will review our fourth quarter and full year 2024 financial highlights, as well as a more detailed look at our financial expectations for 2025, and I will then conclude our prepared remarks with a brief wrap up. And finally, we will open the call up to your questions.
In 2024, our team achieved numerous operational and financial milestones. Significant accomplishment accomplishments were made regarding software revenue growth, particularly in our professional services business and specifically as it relates to our managed services offering, reduced wireless net unit turn, maintaining solid profitability levels, continued expense management.
Cash flow generation, progress on our product roadmap and development.
Augmenting our sales team, generating record level 6 and 7 figure customer contracts and multi-year engagements, Gen A page replacements.
Maintenance contract bookings and retention and enhancing our industry reputation with continued high customer satisfaction scores. In 2024, Spoke generated over $34 million of software operations bookings. This was more than a 13% increase from the prior year. This annual growth was particularly impressive given that the prior year software operations bookings levels had included our largest single customer contract ever signed and our largest ever quarterly bookings level in the second quarter.
Well, we were very happy with our bookings level last year and believe that we will continue growing our total bookings this year. Our focus will be on accelerating our license sales while maintaining momentum in our professional services.
Switching to operating expenses while driving our top line, we also continued to focus on expense management as operating expense levels for the year were virtually unchanged from 2023.
However, our focus on expense management is one of the key drivers to generate increased cash flow does not come at the expense of our product platform as we continue to make the necessary investments in product development, sales and marketing, customer support, and professional services to support the growth of Spok Care Connect and our wireless solutions.
In 2024, Spoke invested more than $11.5 million in product research and development, a nearly 10% increase in 2023. Investments such as these are critical to creating a best of breed product platform and to maintaining our solid industry reputation.
In 2024, Spoke continued to build upon its premier industry reputation. We started the year with our participation at the (inaudible) 24 conference where we showcased our top-rated clinical communications platform.
There Spoke experts demonstrated the power of the new Spok Care Connect hosted solution and the new reporting dashboards and user capabilities of Spoke Messenger. At the (inaudible) 24 conference, attendees learned about the Spok Care Connect hosted solution.
Which enables hospitals and clinics to access the power of spoke applications remotely with a simple recurring subscription plan. Additionally, spoke experts discussed how spokes messenger, new reporting and dashboard capabilities provide a user-friendly way to showcase operational metrics for enterprise communications.
This is an intelligent. FDA 510K cleared software solution designed to send critical information and updates from an organization's various alert systems such as a nurse call and patient monitoring to mobile staff on their communications devices.
The conference was a true success both in terms of the excitement level generated by Spos products and the number of new sales leads we were able to add to our pipeline, and we look forward to the 2025 hymns conference next month.
But don't just take my word on how Spok continues to improve its reputation. In 2024, I believe that there were two key proof points that underscore our premier market position, as evidenced by number 1, receiving top honors for the seventh consecutive year in Black Book Market Research's survey of clinical communication Solutions, acute care hospitals.
And number two, having 18 of the 20 adult hospitals and nine of the 10 children's hospitals named to the 2024 US News and World Report Best Hospital on roll as our customers.
Accolades such as these did not come if you don't have the best in class product offering and solid reputation with your customers. Spoke has an amazing blue chip customer base, and many of those customers have been with us for decades and continue to buy from us. And in July, Spoke surpassed a very important milestone as the company marked our 10 year anniversary, branded as Spoke.
In 2011, USA Mobility Inc acquired Acom software. In 2014, the company completed its integration, creating a single cohesive business, and the Spoke brand was born. Spoke expanded on the strong legacy of those companies to solve critical communications challenges that help hospitals and health systems improve patient outcomes and support public safety when seconds count and lives are at stake. This is our mission and this is our passion.
In short, we executed at a high level and we are confident about the future as we start 2025. Based on our performance in 2024, we are providing our guidance estimates for revenue and adjusted even theA generation in 2025. This guidance reflects the team's confidence in being able to continue our strong performance since the pivot in 2022.
Calvin will go into more detail regarding their expectations later in the call. Of course, like last year, we'll review our guidance with you on a quarterly basis and update as appropriate.
Before I turn the call over to Mike to review our sales performance, let me briefly summarize the goals that support our critical and important mission. Our strategic goal is simple run the business profitably, generate cash flow, and return that capital to our stockholders.
Spok as a proud legacy of creating stockholder value for free cash flow generation, and we intend to continue this track record. Since the beginning of our strategic pivot, which started about three years ago, Stoke has returned approximately $77 million or $3.75 per share to our stockholders in the form of our regular quarterly dividend. In fact, since we created this company way back in 2004, Spok returned nearly $700 million to our stockholders either through our regular quarterly dividends, special dividends or share repurchases.
In the fourth quarter of 2024, our history of returning cash to our stockholders continued as we returned $6.3 million in dividends. This continues our legacy of returning capital to shareholders since becoming a public company, and we again expect to pay dividends in excess of $27 million in 2025.
Spok means committed to our dividend policy and returning capital to our stockholders. When you take into consideration our current cash balance, distribution to stockholders, share repurchases, debt repayments, and acquisitions, has now generated more than $1 billion of free cash flow since our creation in 2004.
Our focus on maximizing cash over the long term supports the four major tenets of our strategy. Those are one, continued investment in our wireless and software solutions. Number 2, growing our revenue base.
Number 3, disciplined expense management, and number 4, a stockholder friendly capital allocation plan.
Going forward, we believe our extensive experience operating our established communications solutions and world class customer base will continue to generate significant value for our stockholders. Now I will turn the call over to our President and Chief Operating Officer Michael Wallace. We'll talk about our operating accomplishments, Mike.