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Text: pb.com and by clicking on Investor Relations.
Additionally, we have provided slides that summarize many of the points we will discuss during the call.
These slides can also be found on our Investor Relations' website.
We delivered a solid quarter and first half of the year and continue to make progress against our overall objectives.
Every business grew revenue and improved EBIT from prior year.
Overall, revenue at constant currency grew 6% and EBIT grew 16%.
SendTech and Presort both grew revenue, albeit as expected, given the easier compare, and both businesses grew EBIT.
Presort continues to see a nice recovery in volumes from pandemic levels and EBIT margins remain in the double-digit range, moving back toward the long-term model.
SendTech's revenue growth was led by a strong performance in our SendPro product family in addition to continued double-digit growth in our SaaS-based shipping portfolio.
The business recorded its third consecutive quarter of year-over-year EBIT growth and continues to maintain its EBIT margin above 30%.
Global e-commerce grew revenue this quarter despite a tough prior year comparison, and importantly, also improved quarter-to-quarter.
EBITDA turned positive in the quarter, and both EBIT and EBITDA improved meaningfully over prior year and prior quarter.
The path to profitability for e-commerce is an integrated approach around talent, training, automation and execution.
We've made several important additions to our team and the new management talent, along with the maturation of our existing workforce are clearly yielding results.
We continue to work to optimize our shipping lanes and continue to focus our investments toward more automation.
We continue to make good progress with substantial opportunity still in front of us.
Entering the second half of 2021, I like where we sit.
The revenue comparisons will get more difficult in the second half of the year compared to the first half, but this quarter was a glimpse into what the business can look like when we hit on all cylinders and that improved profitable revenue growth is within our grasp.
Over the course of the last year or so, I have said that Pitney Bowes will come out of this pandemic, a bigger and better company.
And while we are not out of the woods with the pandemic, we're certainly on the trajectory of being a bigger company, and we are working every day at becoming a better company.
Our second quarter results reflect solid momentum across all of our businesses.
We continue to make good progress and are set up well for the second half of the year.
Revenue was $899 million and grew 6% over prior year.
Adjusted earnings per share was $0.11 and included a $0.03 tax benefit in the quarter.
Free cash flow was $87 million, and cash from operations was $79 million, which was a solid performance in the quarter and in line with our expectations.
Although down from prior year, it is important to remember that last year included $66 million contribution from the decline in our finance receivables, which was largely COVID related.
This was an item that we identified as a headwind to our free cash flow comparison earlier this year.
During the quarter, we paid $9 million in dividends and made $5 million in restructuring payments.
We spent $40 million in capex as we continue to invest in our network and productivity initiatives across the business.
We ended the quarter with $814 million in cash and short-term investments.
Total debt was $2.4 billion, which is down $289 million.
When you take our finance receivables and cash into account, our implied operating debt is $567 million.
Let me turn to the P&L.
Starting with revenue versus prior year.
Equipment sales grew 46%.
Supplies grew 14% and business services grew 6%.
We have decline in support services of 1%; rentals of 2%; and financing of 16%.
Gross profit of $301 million improved about $17 million over prior year on growth across all segments.
Gross margin was 33%, which was slightly down from the same period last year, but an improvement from the last two quarters.
SG&A was $236 million and approximately $3 million higher than prior year.
SG&A was 26% of revenue, which was nearly a two point improvement over prior year.
Within SG&A, corporate expenses were $56 million, which was up about $7 million from prior year, largely due to higher employee variable related costs.
R&D was $11 million or 1% of revenue, which was up approximately $4 million from prior year.
During the quarter, we received the remaining insurance proceeds of $3 million for the Ryuk Ransomware attack.
EBITDA was $96 million, an increase of $6 million over prior year, and EBITDA margin was 11%, which was flat to prior year.
EBIT was $56 million, an increase of $8 million over prior year, and EBIT margin was 6%, which was a slight increase over prior year.
Interest expense, including finance interest was $36 million.
Our tax provision was a benefit of about $300,000 and includes a benefit related to a U.K. tax legislation change, which also contributed about $0.03 to earnings per share in the quarter.
Shares outstanding were approximately 179 million.
Let me now turn to each segment's performance.
It is important to note that the year-over-year comparison includes the impact of COVID.
Prior year results saw a positive impact on e-commerce revenue and an adverse impact on SendTech and Presort.
As such, I will also provide growth rates from 2019 to 2021 for the larger transactional parts of our business.
Within e-commerce, revenue grew 3% to $418 million and also grew from first quarter levels.
The revenue growth over prior year was driven by our cross-border services and partially offset by lower domestic parcel and digital services.
Domestic parcel volumes were $44 million in the quarter.
Compared to the second quarter of 2019, e-commerce revenue grew 48%.
Demand for our services continues to be strong as new business signings accelerated from the first quarter as we're getting merchants onboarded for peak season while balancing demand from current clients.
We also continue to have success with bundling our services which now represents close to 50% of all new business.
EBITDA for the quarter was $8 million.
EBIT was a loss of $11 million.
Both EBIT and EBITDA were meaningful improvements from prior year.
We also made significant progress sequentially where second quarter's EBIT margins improved nearly 400 basis points as compared to first quarter, as we were able to improve our productivity and work through some of the residual impact from last year's peak that we saw earlier in the first quarter.
We continue to work to improve service levels and make progress against our productivity initiatives within our domestic parcel services.
While still dealing with industrywide concerns around high transportation costs and a competitive labor market.
We made progress on several unit economics as compared to the first quarter, with the greatest being around labor and transportation cost per piece.
We saw a reduction in our labor cost per piece in part due to the contribution of our new management talent, along with the maturation of our existing workforce.
Parcels processed per hour continued to improve from first quarter levels.
Transportation cost per piece also improved versus prior quarter as we continue to better optimize our shipping lanes.
Our improvement in execution, coupled with better network balancing are certainly yielding results.
We continue to invest in automation, including high-end sorters in our larger facilities and sort-to-light automation in our midsized facilities.
We also announced our partnership with Ambi Robotics last month, which we will be rolling out across our network over the next few years.
These initiatives take time to integrate, train our employees and produce results.
And while we're seeing some early benefits, we expect to yield additional benefits during the upcoming peak season.
Also, as mentioned last quarter, we are in the process of opening two new sites and upgrading another.
We expect to have this completed prior to the peak season, and it will allow us to handle volumes more efficiently.
Ultimately, we expect transportation and labor productivity, along with optimizing our final mile costs to be critical drivers in attaining our long-term e-commerce margins.
And as Marc mentioned, we have made some important additions to our e-commerce management team in order to execute this plan.
It is an exciting time, and our e-commerce business is moving in the right direction with substantial opportunities still in front of us.
Our Presort Services and SendTech businesses both turned in solid performances, which were in line with our expectations.
Within Presort, revenue was $135 million and grew 14% compared to the second quarter of 2019, Presort revenue grew 5%.
Average daily volumes grew 10% over prior year, largely driven by growth in first-class volumes of 4% and Marketing Mail volumes of 39%.
EBITDA was $23 million and EBITDA margin was 17%.
EBIT was $16 million and EBIT margin was 12%.
EBIT and EBITDA dollars improved from prior year due to revenue growth and margin expansion.
We remained focused on our productivity initiatives, having improved pieces fed per labor hour by 3%, resulting in 60,000 less processing hours versus prior year.
Within SendTech, revenue was $346 million and grew 6%.
We continue to differentiate ourselves in the market with a wide range of end-to-end mailing and shipping offerings that are attractive to businesses ranging from large enterprises to small offices.
SendTech's SaaS-based shipping products grew at a low double-digit rate over prior year to $31 million this quarter.
The number of labels printed through our shipping offering grew over 30% and paid subscriptions grew about 70% over prior year.
Additionally, shipping volumes that our U.S. clients finance grew nearly 70% over prior year.
Our end-to-end value proposition continues to resonate with clients as they adopt and use these new offerings, which bring value to their businesses.
Equipment sales grew 46% over prior year.
Compared to the second quarter 2019, equipment sales grew 1%, which is an important metric as this is a key indicator for future streams in the traditional side of the SendTech business.
This also points to how our new sending products are resonating with clients and helping to strengthen our portfolio.
We continue to see strong placement of our SendPro C and mailstation multipurpose devices.
Our international operations also saw strong equipment sales growth, and we continue to roll out new products in these markets.
Through the quarter, we, like many others, experienced some transportation challenges related to our supply chain.
We are proactively managing our inventory and are able to place a significant level of new equipment despite those challenges.
Looking ahead at the second half of the year, we continue to closely monitor the semiconductor industry and potential supply shortage concerns.
While it is still a bit too early to tell, we would expect the impacts, if any, to be more pronounced in the fourth quarter.
We will look to mitigate any potential supply shortages by working closely with our suppliers and repositioning our solutions with our clients as necessary.
EBITDA was $115 million and EBITDA margin was 33%.
EBIT was $107 million and EBIT margin was 31%.
EBIT and EBITDA dollars improved from prior year and was the third consecutive quarter of improvement for both metrics.
Let me now turn to our full year outlook, which is in line with what we have previously communicated.
As we all know, there is still a level of uncertainty in the macro environment, particularly as new COVID variants continue to ramp up and concerns around supply chain remain, and we will continue to monitor any potential impacts closely.
We still expect annual revenue at constant currency to grow over prior year in the low to mid-single-digit range.
We still expect adjusted earnings per share to grow over prior year and more specifically, to be in the $0.35 to $0.42 range.
We still expect free cash flow to be lower than prior year due to items that benefited 2020 and are not expected to continue at the same level this year.
Prior year included a lower level of capex and finance receivables and higher customer deposits.
We also expect our tax rate in the second half to be higher and return to more normal levels.
Looking at the timing, we expect third quarter revenue to be in line with second quarter and the fourth quarter to be larger than the third, given a strong holiday peak season.
Taking the midpoint of our adjusted earnings per share guidance into consideration, we currently expect our third quarter to represent nearly 20% of our full year attainment.
Let me conclude on this.
In the beginning of the year, we said that we expected revenue and adjusted earnings per share to grow, and we remain committed to this outlook.
Each segment has delivered a solid performance through the first half of the year, improving revenue, EBITDA and EBIT from prior year.
We continue to generate good free cash flow and remain focused on maintaining a strong balance sheet.
We also continue to make measurable progress and are confident in our ability to achieve our financial objectives.

user
q2 adjusted earnings per share $0.11.
q2 revenue $899 million versus refinitiv ibes estimate of $895.5 million.
q2 earnings per share $0.03.
full year 2021 expectations remain in-line with its previous communications.
fy 2021 adjusted earnings per share is expected to be in range of $0.35 to $0.42.

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