Participants
Barry Sievert; VP of IR; Global Business Travel Group, Inc.
Eric J. Bock; Chief Legal Officer, Global Head of Mergers & Acquisitions, Compliance & Corporate Secretary; Global Business Travel Group, Inc.
Karen Williams; CFO; Global Business Travel Group, Inc.
Paul Abbott; CEO & Director; Global Business Travel Group, Inc.
Hilary Lee; Research Associate; Morgan Stanley, Research Division
Jacob Gunning
Lee Horowitz; Research Analyst; Deutsche Bank AG, Research Division
Presentation
Operator
Good morning, and welcome to the American Express Global Business Travel Third Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call.
As a reminder, please note today’s call is being recorded.
I will now turn the call over to the Vice President of Investor Relations, Barry Sievert. Please go ahead.
Barry Sievert
Hello, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us for our third quarter earnings conference call.
This morning, we issued an earnings press release, which is available on sec.gov and on our website, at investors.amexglobalbusinesstravel.com. A slide presentation which accompanies today’s prepared remarks is also available on the Amex GBT Investor Relations web page.
We would like to advise you that our comments contain forward-looking statements that represent our beliefs or expectations about future events, including industry and macroeconomic trends, cost savings and acquisition synergies, among others. All forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from the statements made on today’s conference call. More information on these and other risks and uncertainties is contained in our earnings release issued this morning and in our other SEC filings.
Throughout today’s call, we will also be presenting certain non-GAAP financial measures, such as EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA margin, adjusted operating expenses, free cash flow and net debt. All references during today’s call to such non-GAAP financial measures have been adjusted to exclude certain items. Definitions of these terms and the most directly comparable GAAP measures and reconciliations for non-GAAP measures are available in the supplemental materials of this presentation and in the earnings release.
Participating with me today are Paul Abbott, our Chief Executive Officer; and Karen Williams, our Chief Financial Officer. Also joining for the Q&A session today is Eric Bock, our Chief Legal Officer and Head of Global M&A.
With that, I will now turn the call over to Paul. Paul?
Paul Abbott
Thank you, Barry, and welcome and thank you all for joining our third quarter earnings call.
In the third quarter, we once again delivered outstanding financial results, driven by our focus on margin expansion, cost savings, Egencia synergies and continued share gains. Our results are ahead of guidance, with revenue and adjusted EBITDA growth of 17% and 135%, respectively.
Importantly, we generated very strong free cash flow in the quarter that was ahead of expectations. I’m pleased to report we are now free cash flow positive on a year-to-date basis. This is an important milestone for the company and an inflection point that demonstrates our continued momentum.
Based on this, we have the confidence to reiterate our full year 2023 revenue and adjusted EBITDA guidance, and we are increasing our expectation for free cash flow for the full year.
Strong demand for our leading software and services in the quarter resulted in continued share gains. We reported new wins value of $3.3 billion over the last 12 months. We also have continued momentum in our product and our technology leadership, with 77% of transactions now coming through digital channels, further contributing to our cost savings.
SME customers represent the largest growth opportunity with the fastest growth and the highest margins in the industry, and our results continue to be very encouraging. We reported double-digit SME transaction growth and strong SME new wins value of $2.2 billion over the last 12 months, including a significant contribution from previously unmanaged customers.
Finally, our focus on delivering significant margin expansion is clearly evidenced in our third quarter results. Adjusted operating expenses increased just 7%, compared to 17% revenue growth. And our adjusted EBITDA margin was up 9 percentage points year-over-year and 2 percentage points over the third quarter of 2019. Adjusted operating expenses decreased quarter-over-quarter, and we expect this momentum to continue into the fourth quarter.
Turning to transaction growth. The industry is transitioning to more normalized growth rates, but our third quarter transaction and TTV growth remained strong. Third quarter transactions increased 7%, driven by demand for business travel and our ongoing share gains. The reported growth rate in the quarter was negatively impacted by approximately 1 less work day in the third quarter of 2023. So on a workday-adjusted basis, transactions actually increased 9% in the quarter versus 2022. TTV grew 8%, or 10% on a workday-adjusted basis.
Looking at our transaction trends in more detail. We’re going to focus here on the workday-adjusted growth rates. We continue to see relatively faster growth from SME customers. Our strategy and our focus on SME growth is clearly paying off, and SME transactions were up 10% in the quarter.
Global multinational transactions were up 7% in the quarter.
Growth in hotel transactions outpaced air by 5 percentage points; up 11% and 6%, respectively. This is driven by a continuation of the trends that we’ve seen over the last several quarters as well as our focus on increasing the volume of hotel bookings as we continue to strengthen our hotel content and our hotel display.
International air transactions continued to outperform domestic; up 7%.
Finally here, on a regional basis, growth in the Americas and EMEA were up 8% and 9%, respectively. Asia Pacific continued to outperform, but starting to show year-over-year signs of normalization, with growth of 12%.
So turning to the commercial highlights for the quarter. We continue to gain share, with a reported $3.3 billion of total new wins. And importantly, we maintained our strong customer retention rate of 95%.
Our biggest opportunity remains in the SME segment, and this represents a total opportunity of approximately $950 billion of travel spend. Within the SME segment, we are already the #1 player in managed travel, but 70% of this SME opportunity is not currently in a managed travel program. And with our leading software and services that are proven at scale globally, we are very well positioned to capture this significant opportunity.
And our results continue to prove this out. SME new wins value over the last 12 months totals $2.2 billion. Of this, approximately 30% has come from previously unmanaged customers, customers who are looking for the service and the savings and the control that our solutions provide.
In addition to the strong SME new wins, we continue to gain share across sectors in global and multinational. I’m very pleased to report our recent global multinational new wins include Blackstone, the world’s largest alternative asset manager; Fortescue, one of the world’s leading mining companies; Warner Bros. Discovery, of course one of the leading media and entertainment companies in the world; and finally, one of the world’s largest global financial services firms.
Our growth algorithm is driven by organic growth and net new wins and share gains. Although we can’t control the macro environment, we can control the share gains and net new wins. And we are very confident in the strength of our future sales pipeline and expect our strong new sales momentum to continue. As we head into 2024, even if macro events do result in a lower-growth environment, we expect new wins alone to provide a baseline of 4 to 5 percentage points of volume growth in 2024.
And finally here, we were recently awarded EcoVadis Platinum for the second year in a row. This places us in the top 1% of independently assessed companies across the world and demonstrates our commitment to the highest standards of sustainability.
Moving on to our product and technology highlights. We have the leading software platforms across all segments of business travel in Egencia and Neo. These solutions are proven at scale on a global basis, and they bring together the best people and the best technology in the industry. Owning our own software platforms enables us to improve the end-to-end customer experience, to increase automation and to reduce our operating costs.
77% of our transactions now come through digital channels. And over the last 4 years, we’ve seen an increase of approximately 12 percentage points in our share of digital transactions.
Transactions on Neo and Egencia increased 13% in the third quarter, which is well above our overall transaction growth of 7%, highlighting more and more share moving to our own software platforms as a direct result of customer demand that we’re seeing for our proprietary software solutions. Over 60% of our digital transactions now come through our own proprietary platforms, Egencia and Neo.
We are constantly working on new and innovative ways to meet and exceed customer needs. Recently, we expanded our live chat services to Microsoft Teams, and we now have 6 different chat channels so that customers can efficiently manage their travel in the enterprise solutions that they use every day. This increases customer satisfaction. It promotes more bookings through our marketplace. Year-to-date, our Amex GBT mobile app user growth has nearly doubled. Mobile interactions grew by more than 140%, and chat volumes are up almost 50%.
And this is important because it also unlocks a significant opportunity for us through AI-powered solutions for both improving the productivity of our people and improving the customer experience. 40% of our costs are people serving customers in the voice channel. Using AI and automation to drive efficiency is something we’ve been doing consistently for several years, including our acquisition of 30SecondsToFly, a company that specializes in travel artificial intelligence. But looking ahead, we have an even bigger opportunity. With generative AI and large language models, we have the opportunity to drive further efficiency at an accelerated pace.
Finally, we continue to ensure that our customers have access to the most comprehensive and the most competitive content in our marketplace, including NDC content. In the third quarter, we continued our expansion of NDC and are now working with 10 airlines on NDC initiatives.
So to sum up our third quarter performance, we again delivered outstanding financial results, with strong revenue growth and positive year-to-date free cash flow. We remain highly focused on driving margin expansion through cost savings and delivering on the Egencia synergies. This, combined with our strong new wins and the growing momentum we have in the SME segment, gives us the confidence to reiterate our full year 2023 revenue and adjusted EBITDA guidance and increase our expectation for full year 2023 free cash flow.
So that completes my review of the Q3 highlights. I would like to hand it over to Karen to discuss the financial results in more detail before moving on to our balance of year outlook.
Karen Williams
Thank you, Paul, and hello, everyone. So before I get into the details, let me give you the highlights. As you will recall, my 3 key priorities when it comes to managing our financial performance are: first, achieving outstanding financial results by growing revenues, growing adjusted EBITDA and increasing free cash flow; second, driving continued margin improvement; and third, creating capacity to invest and drive long-term sustained growth.
As you’ve heard from Paul, we delivered strong results in the third quarter, continuing to drive momentum and strong performance year-to-date. In the quarter, we grew revenue by 17% year-over-year. We increased our adjusted EBITDA margin 9 percentage points above prior year, reported positive free cash flow totaling $107 million in the quarter and, importantly, are now free cash flow positive for the year.
We approved incremental investments in the quarter. And so year-to-date, we have triggered just under $30 million of OpEx and CapEx investments on an annualized basis focused on driving our sales and marketing engine, investing in our own software platforms and AI.
Looking at the third quarter results in more detail. Revenue of $571 million increased 17%. This was ahead of our guidance. We had solid transaction growth of 9% on a workday-adjusted basis, and we saw continued outperformance on our yields. As a reminder, our revenue model is driven by volume, sales and recurring revenues.
And so as I said, our outperformance was primarily driven by our yield, which is measured as revenue over TTV and reached 8% in Q3. The strong revenue yield in the quarter was driven by our continued focus on revenue optimization and by the recovery momentum we have seen in 2023, particularly as a result of the stronger year-over-year international mix. Additionally, as we look at the demand for meetings and events we continue to see strong performance, with double-digit growth.
Now before we talk about adjusted EBITDA, let’s discuss expenses, which are a key area of focus for us. Our adjusted operating expenses increased 7% in the quarter, whilst revenues grew 17%. Whilst transaction growth drove increased cost of revenue and investments in the business resulted in higher sales and marketing spend, our drive to improve margins, realize the Egencia synergies, of which we are on track to exceed our $60 million of expectations this year, and our cost-saving initiatives resulted in a net $9 million reduction quarter-over-quarter.
And so this performance translates into delivering $95 million of adjusted EBITDA and significant margin expansion in the third quarter. Adjusted EBITDA margin reached 17%, up 9 percentage points year-over-year. And notably, this strong margin performance was also 2 percentage points ahead of third quarter 2019 pro forma adjusted EBITDA margin.
As I said in my opening comments, we achieved free cash flow generation of $107 million in the third quarter. This was driven primarily by net working capital actions. We have provided more details on free cash flow in the appendix of our earnings presentation, which I’m not going to walk through on this call, but would encourage you to review to provide more context.
On our last 2 calls, I discussed the Egencia working capital initiatives. Once again, on the things within our control we are delivering. On this critical initiative, we are realizing the benefits earlier than expected. Approximately $50 million of the positive free cash flow generation came from these initiatives, and I expect to see a similar level of benefit in Q4.
Additionally, it is important to remember the seasonality of our business, where cash usage decreases in H2 versus H1. And this is certainly reflected in our third quarter performance.
And so importantly, we are now free cash flow positive on a year-to-date basis. This is another pivotal moment for the company.
Our leverage ratio, or net debt divided by last 12 months adjusted EBITDA, is now 2.7x as of September 30. Our net debt is now $927 million. This is a very significant step-down for us as a company and a critical proof point in terms of the momentum and focus on the balance sheet.
We are now in our target range of 2x to 3x net leverage. This reduction in our leverage ratio will drive 75 basis points of interest rate reduction on our outstanding term loan beginning later in the fourth quarter. And just as an additional point to note, we expect a further step-down in our net leverage during Q1 2024, which will drive a further 75 basis points of interest rate reduction.
And so let’s discuss guidance. Turning to the fourth quarter in more detail we are maintaining Q4 guidance, with revenue expectations of $535 million to $550 million. As a reminder, revenue growth in Q4 is lower due to the outperformance of supplier yield in the fourth quarter of 2022. We saw a [different phasing] through last year, with the majority of performance payments paid in the fourth quarter, resulting in revenue yield of 8.9% in Q4 versus 7.4% in the prior 2 quarters of 2022.
As already discussed, we are very focused on margin expansion and cost reduction. We expect operating expenses to continue to trend down sequentially in the fourth quarter. This is driven by the changes we announced in January relating to our reorganization, Egencia synergies, increased digital adoption and our overall focus on productivity.
This results in fourth quarter expectations for $75 million to $85 million of adjusted EBITDA, with an adjusted EBITDA margin of 14% to 15%, representing year-over-year adjusted EBITDA margin expansion of 6 to 7 percentage points.
Turning to the full year. Given our outperformance particularly on revenue yield in the third quarter, we expect to be at the higher end of our revenue guidance range. This would represent 23% of revenue growth year-over-year.
But given the investments I previously mentioned, we expect to be closer to the midpoint of our adjusted EBITDA guidance range. This represents an adjusted EBITDA margin of 16% to 17%, with productivity gains and high operating leverage delivering 10 to 11 points of year-over-year margin expansion.
Looking beyond the end of this year, we are currently working through our 2024 planning process. We obviously recognize that the economic and political environment has become more uncertain, and it is difficult to predict the impact this may have on business travel demand in 2024. And while we aren’t ready to establish 2024 guidance at this point, I want to provide some insight into how we are thinking about next year.
Our top line growth is driven by organic growth and net new wins. As we have shared before, business travel demand has grown at or above GDP for decades. So it is logical to assume organic growth will track at or above GDP next year.
And there are a couple of data points externally that I want to draw your attention to. Our clients and GBTA Polling are supportive of continued growth in business travel. This is seen in our most recent customer survey, which shows that 88% of our top 100 customers expect their travel spend to be flat or up in 2024 versus 2023. And GBTA’s most recent poll result shows that 72% of buyers expect travel budgets to increase or hold steady in 2024.
So let’s turn to what is in our control. And quite frankly, we are delivering outstanding results. On top of organic growth, you have heard us talk about our share gains, and we expect our net new wins to contribute 4 to 5 percentage points of volume growth in 2024. This is a strong baseline going into next year.
Finally, we expect our continued focus on productivity and cost savings to drive further margin expansion in 2024. We will continue to benefit from our Egencia synergies and cost-saving initiatives and expect continued momentum in margin expansion.
So in summary, we delivered strong third quarter revenue growth, significant adjusted EBITDA margin expansion, are positive year-to-date free cash flow, reduced our net leverage ratio and created capacity to invest for the longer-term growth. We are delivering strong results. We feel confident in our full year 2023 guidance, and we are well positioned heading into 2024 and beyond.
So we can move into Q&A. Paul and I are joined by Eric Bock, who is our Chief Legal Officer, Global Head of M&A and Compliance and Corporate Secretary. Operator, please go ahead and open the line.
Question and Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Our first question for today comes from Duane Pfennigwerth, from Evercore.
Jacob Gunning
This is Jake on for Duane. Were there any surprises by region or customer type this quarter? If we were to segment contribution from new wins from recovery of existing customers that were in the baseline in 2019, what industries are you seeing recovery on, on a same-store sales basis?
Paul Abbott
Thanks, Jake. Nice to speak to you again. No, I wouldn’t say there are any real surprises. I mean, mostly it’s a continuation of the same trends. As you heard from me in the presentation, SME continues to outpace global multinational; hotel is outpacing air. Asia Pacific is, from a recovery standpoint, still a little bit ahead of EMEA, which is a little bit ahead of both the Americas. And those themes have been consistent now for a year. So I’d say there’s trends, but really no surprises at all.
But what we have seen in terms of change, the actual technology sector showed some actual improvement in Q3. And that was, I think, a sector that I’ve referenced before, where we — from a global multinational segment perspective, that industry had the sort of lowest recovery rate. And so I think we were encouraged to see some improvement in that sector specifically in Q3. But that is the only thing I would call out that is different from prior quarters.
Jacob Gunning
Okay. That’s helpful. And then just if I can get a follow-up here, could you explain the change in share count and how we should think about that, going forward?
Paul Abbott
Sure. Eric, do you want to take that one?
Eric J. Bock
Sure. You may be referring to we did a B-for-A exchange in the summer. So that took the Class As up from about 74 million shares to about 465 million shares as we consolidated into one class of stock. So really, when you look through the Bs and the As, we remain at 465 million shares. We’re up a little bit, to about 467 million shares, with some RSUs vesting in September, but the stock count really is pretty consistent. But you’re probably seeing the more Class A outstanding due to the exchange offer that we completed.
Operator
Our next question comes from Lee Horowitz, of Deutsche Bank.
Lee Horowitz
Can we talk a bit more about sort of the state of the macro environment? How have the most recent trends in your business informed how you may be thinking about industry growth rates next year? And is there any detail you may be able to share with us as it relates to sort of monthly trends to help us better understand the current state of the industry?
Paul Abbott
Thanks, Lee. Well, as it relates to Q3 initially, our workday-adjusted growth rate was 9%. That was pretty much in line with what we expected and what we put in our guidance.
You look out to Q4. You heard from me earlier in the call that we are confident of coming in at the high end of our revenue guidance. So that is the sort of most immediate outlook for us.
2024, specifically, as you mentioned, we’re not kind of ready to establish guidance for ’24, but I’ve given some sort of insights and how to think about ’24 in previous conversations. And there are 2 basic elements to 2024. The first one is what we directly control, which is what we are going to deliver in terms of continued share gains.
And the second one and the one that’s more difficult to predict is what is the overall broader industry growth going to be in 2024, what fuel is left in the tank on recovery and what kind of macroeconomic GDP environment are we going to be in 2024.
So those are the sort of the variables, as such. The one we directly control is share gains, and we see 4 to 5 points of growth in 2024 from our new wins as a baseline. And then you’re going to have to make a judgment about what you think is going to come in terms of additional recovery and what you think will come from the broader macroeconomic environment, and that is challenging.
I think there’s probably more uncertainty now than when we did this call 90 days ago. Macro political and economic conditions are pretty uncertain. And so I do think as you look out to 2024, it’s not clear yet how those headwinds and tailwinds are going to influence the overall market growth in 2024.
What we are doing, Lee, is making sure that we are prepared for different growth scenarios in 2024 and making sure that we have the flexibility in our model to adapt if we are in a higher- or lower-growth scenario. And I think we’ve proven in terms of the cost savings, the synergies, the margin expansion that they will serve us very well if we do find ourselves in a lower-growth environment in 2024. But obviously, I think we need a little bit more time to see exactly how the year ahead is going to play out.
Lee Horowitz
Helpful. And maybe just one follow-up, sort of on — can we spend some time maybe talking more about the sort of promise of generative AI technologies? Obviously, you guys have a big headcount organization. So presumably, there’s a lot of benefits that it can have across the P&L. I guess, how quickly do you think some of the cost savings that can be gained via digital agents and the like can be realized across the P&L? It seems like the technology moves very quickly and perhaps this could be a margin driver next year. Just any help there would be great.
Paul Abbott
Sure. 40% of our costs are people costs that are in the voice channel serving customers. And so that does present an opportunity for us to drive productivity gains and improve efficiency and also, at the same time, improve the customer experience.
Driving productivity gains with automation and AI is not new to us. We do that today with Egencia and with Neo. We analyze the demand that comes into the voice channel, and we look at what’s driving that demand and we build those features into our own software platforms. That’s why our digital adoption rate is now 77% of transactions coming through digital channels.
And so when you ask about the timeline associated with these things, some of it is already happening today. I think what is very interesting is the power of generative AI and the large language models just open up new possibilities for us to do some of these things at much, much greater scale.
And we are focused in 3 areas. One is the area I just mentioned, which is our travel counselor productivity environment. The second area is our finance function and looking at ways that we can use AI to automate more of our finance processing. And the third actually is product and tech, using AI to actually do more of our basic programming and engineering work. Those 3 areas for us are all interesting areas of focus that can deliver savings over the medium to long term. And we have a cost-savings plan that rolls out over multiple years, and we have savings against AI-driven automation in ’24 and ’25 and ’26.
So I hope that gives you a flavor for where’s it headed.
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Our next question comes from Toni Kaplan, of Morgan Stanley.
Hilary Lee
This is Hilary on for Tony. Just wanted to ask on transaction volume. I know you guys want to kind of move on beyond the 2019 benchmarks. But just based on our estimates, it looks like transaction volumes has kind of stayed around this mid- to high-70s of 2019 pro forma levels the past 3 quarters. So just wondering if you have any color on why the volume recovery may be slowing down a bit or, like, how do you see that, going forward? I know you expect a baseline of 4% to 5% growth for next year, but just wondering anything else that you could add to that?
Paul Abbott
I think we said earlier in the year that we’d probably see a couple of points’ additional recovery per quarter, and that’s pretty much what we’ve seen. I think the latest stats for kind of for Q3 is volume recovery on transaction and sales is around 77%, 78%; our revenue recovery is just up around roughly on a 80% level; and we have been seeing some sequential improvement quarter-over-quarter. You do have to normalize for some workday adjustments in order to get that view, but that’s basically the pattern. The pattern is actually very consistent with what we guided to at the beginning of the year.
I just want to come back to the 4%, 5% point to make sure it’s clear. I wasn’t guiding to 4% or 5% growth in total next year; I was guiding to 4% or 5% as a baseline of what we control, which is the impact of the net new wins and the share gains. So what we’ll have to do over time is make a judgment about what level of market growth is going to come in addition to that. And that’s what I was saying to Lee earlier, that that is a more difficult judgment to make in this environment because there clearly is a greater amount of economic and political uncertainty. So I just wanted to make sure that point was clear.
Hilary Lee
Great. Appreciate that. Great color. And just wanted to touch on margins, if I could. I know we kind of have a limited history here, but I was wondering if you could tell us, like, how we should kind of expect the cadence of margins, going forward. Like, should we expect kind of a step up from Q1 to Q2 and then subsequent step down in Q3 and Q4, going forward? Or it’s still kind of too early to tell?
Karen Williams
Hilary, it’s Karen here. And we have talked in the past about just the seasonality of our business. And so with the higher volumes in the first half, you would expect higher volumes. It’s best to look at this on an annual basis, where we’ve guided to around 16%, 17% on a full year basis.
We have also talked about, over time, the expectation around our margins of being between low 20s and mid-20s. And so an expectation that we will see productivity and efficiency gains, going forward. And so approximately a 1-point improvement.
But the reason why we guide to that range is because we will — one of our priorities is around investment. And so if there are investments that will drive the long-term growth of this business, then we will make those investments, as you have seen that we have done this year.
So hopefully, that gives you a bit more color in terms of how we’re thinking about it, but you should absolutely think about the seasonality as well, back to my first point.
Operator
Thank you. At this time, we currently have no further questions. So I’ll hand back to Paul Abbott for any further remarks.
Paul Abbott
Thank you to everyone for joining the call. Appreciate the questions and your interest in the company, and we look forward to speaking to all of you again soon. Thank you very much.
Operator
Thank you for joining today’s call. You may now disconnect your lines.
