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Advantage Solutions – Advantage Solutions and Conyers Park II Update Call, October 19, 2020 |
Safety protocols are critical and we have spent considerable time and effort against safety measures to protect our associates and those shopping in-store. Where we have resumed in-store sampling, we have received positive feedback from our retail partners, from shoppers and from the brands that participate in these programs.
Sampling event volume has increased from approximately 20,000 events in April to approximately 120,000 in September. This is still below the nearly 400,000 events of September last year; but this represents a significant rebound and we expect this trend to continue to improve.
In summary, we are pleased that we saw momentum in the Sales and Marketing segments in both the in-store and online components of the business.
While our results are still preliminary, we’re also happy that we continue to be able to manage costs with discipline during this difficult operating environment as the business recovers nicely from the Q2 COVID lows. We expect that this momentum will continue.
Dave?
Dave West
Thanks Tanya.
The company’s preliminary third quarter results are consistent with the financial expectations we had for the business and continue to reinforce our investment thesis. Our modeling of the business reflected the assumption that COVID-related restrictions would remain in place during the summer and would likely not abate in the near term. We assumed some moderate return to sampling, which we saw resume in the third quarter and expect will continue to return into 2021.
As COVID-related restrictions ease and/or a vaccine becomes available, we expect to see shifts back to more normalized patterns of consumer behavior. In this scenario, we would expect the U.S. Sampling, U.S. Foodservice, and European joint venture businesses to accelerate. The U.S. center-store business would likely moderate.
Finally, we believe the management team will capture learnings and ultimately see upside from COVID, benefiting the business in the future. For example, the team has used COVID as a catalyst to rationalize the cost structure, implementing a plan to realize meaningful real estate savings. They’ve also done a good job of serving clients during this difficult operating environment and, as a result, have seen adoption and traction in the online grocery pick-up and e-commerce businesses.
We at Conyers Park remain excited about our potential investment and the value creation opportunities at hand. We believe this is a unique and compelling situation where there are multiple vectors available to us for shareholder value creation.
First is a highly visible path to organic growth. There’s a significant whitespace opportunity to sell new services to existing clients who often enter the business looking for sales services but then add marketing services over time. There’s an opportunity for incremental growth via share gains as well.
The second vector is an attractive reinvestment opportunities in M&A. The team has completed over 60 acquisitions since 2014 at attractive prices and believes there are additional opportunities to grow through M&A, either in new market areas in sales or via additional capabilities in technology.
Third, we believe that we are entering at an opportunistic time with an attractive valuation. We are paying 10x Adjusted EBITDA for Advantage, a meaningful discount to U.S. CPG companies at over 16x, and the 12x to 20x multiples for business services companies.
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