Cimpress plc
Q4 2011 Earnings Call Transcript

Published: 29 Jul 2011

[Meredith Mendola:]

Welcome to the Vistaprint Fourth Quarter Fiscal Year 2011 Earnings Presentation. This is Meredith Mendola, Vice President of Investor Relations. With us today are Robert Keane, our President and Chief Executive Officer; and Ernst Teunissen, our Chief Financial Officer. Before we start, please note that our comments include forward-looking statements, including statements regarding revenue and earnings guidance and our long-term goals and actual results may differ materially. Risks that could cause actual results to differ materially from those statements are described in the documents that we periodically file with the Securities and Exchange Commission including our Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2010, our Form 10-Q for the quarter ended March 31, 2011, and our other recent SEC filings, which are available on the Investor Relations page at vistaprint.com. As a reminder, a detailed reconciliation of GAAP and non-GAAP measures is posted in the appendix of the Q4 fiscal 2011 earnings presentation that accompanies these remarks. Now I'd like to turn the presentation over to Robert Keane. Robert?

[Robert Keane:]

Thank you, Meredith, and welcome to everyone joining us. As you've all seen in the press release issued this afternoon, we have a lot to talk about today. Therefore, we'll just spend a small amount of time in the quarter and the year just completed. Bypassing the typical detailed commentary and metrics on this call. Of all our metrics -- all of our metrics are available on our website and we'll be happy to answer any questions you have about them subsequent to this webcast. We'll spend the bulk of this time during the prepared remarks discussing our long-term growth strategy and investment approach. After that, Ernst will review our financial guidance for 2012. Later at 5

[Ernst Teunissen:]

Thanks, Robert. I'd like to describe how we will publicly report progress to our shareholders, relative to the objectives of our strategy. We are looking to continue to grow our unique customer count, which is influenced by the number of new Customers we acquire, as well as our success at retaining them. In the past, investors have been able to subtract new customers from total unique customers in a given year and derive an assumption for customers retained from past periods. Internally, we look beneath that derived retention metric at more detailed cohort level retention information. We are currently determining 1 or 2 retention metrics that we believe will be useful to our shareholders, and we'll begin to provide you with more information this fiscal year. We expect to achieve multi-year improvements in customer value delivery. We currently provide a proxy for this on an annual basis, which is annual spend per unique customer. As we invest in new marketing channels to reach new customers, we expect our cost of customer acquisition to increase, both in absolute dollars, and as a percentage of the NPV of anticipated customer cash flows. We also expect a multi-year gross margin improvement through the combination of our manufacturing efforts, pricing optimization and the mix shift towards products such as digital marketing services that have higher gross margins. We will continue to provide the ability to understand our quarterly performance in the Home & Family market and in Asia Pacific. Asia Pacific is currently our only non-North American or European geography. In addition, we will begin to provide quarterly updates on our digital marketing services business as well. Over time, as we ramp up our efforts to target higher value small businesses, we will consider adding metrics in this area. But since these initiatives will take several years before they are material, we are not currently doing so. Finally, we will also provide color commentary on our strategy execution and the impact of our investments. All of these are metrics that we are tracking and actively using internally. On the other hand, the metrics of session counts and conversion rate will no longer be provided externally because we have found that taken in isolation, these are not the best indicators of the trends in our business. [Audio Gap] We'd like to describe our expectations by P&L line item in more detail. In comparison to the fiscal year just ended, we would expect to see the following results

[Robert Keane:]

Thanks, Ernst. I'd like to take a moment to acknowledge that this strategy asks our shareholders to believe in a growth-oriented path that we've chosen. I'm a large shareholder myself and I've concerted this path very carefully. I and the rest of our team believe that this is the right thing to do to drive long-term shareholder value. This strategy aims to deliver high organic growth rates for years to come, enabling Vistaprint to grow much faster than we would have in the absence of this strategy. There are multiple supporting efforts we'll pursue in order to convert higher growth into higher long-term shareholder value. First, we'll capitalize on a large market opportunity ahead of us to strengthen our already formidable scale based competitive advantages. Second, we'll make only disciplined ROI attractive investments. And third, we're targeting high, multi-year EPS CAGRs. Fourth, we'll utilize our balance sheet and cash flows as a tool to support our strategy. We're also committing to provide you with meaningful metrics and commentary to help you understand how we are executing against our exciting strategy. In summary, FY 2011 was the latest in a 15-year history of success. We have an exciting and a credible strategy to continue this growth rate well into the future. Specifically, we believe we can grow both revenue and EPS at/or above 20% CAGR over the next 5 years. We're confident in our ability to achieve this, as we have strong market positions and a significant amount of runway in front of us in this market. Our incredibly dedicated and talented management team and our employee base have created this success and are excited about continuing this history. We have a significant technology and competitive advantage, which we can build upon in the future. And we have exciting and clear new long-term strategy and investment approaches. We strongly believe that this is the path that will deliver the greatest shareholder value.