Cimpress - Earnings Call - Q3 2025

Executive Summary

• Q3 FY2025 revenue was $789.47M (+1% reported, +3% organic CC), GAAP diluted EPS was -$0.33; both were below S&P consensus (revenue $798.02M*, EPS $0.55*) as Vista growth was offset by legacy product and U.S. SEO headwinds.
• Adjusted EBITDA was $90.70M (down $3.46M YoY), gross margin contracted to 47.2% on mix shift away from higher-margin business cards and pre-production/impairment items; consolidated advertising held flat at 13.1% of revenue.
• Management withdrew FY2025 and longer-term guidance due to tariff uncertainty; mitigation includes alternative sourcing, price increases, and reducing China-origin PPAG exposure to <$20M annual COGS over several months.
• Stock catalysts: tariff implementation path and price elasticity, U.S. organic search recovery, Q4 seasonally higher cash inflows, and potential buybacks balanced against leverage target (2.5x) and liquidity priorities.

What Went Well and What Went Wrong

What Went Well

• Elevated product categories delivered double-digit growth (promotional products, apparel & gifts, signage, packaging/labels) at Vista; segment EBITDA rose to $78.1M (+2% YoY).
• Cross-Cimpress fulfillment accelerated, including Pixartprinting’s U.S. facility going live in March, initially fulfilling for other units and enabling new product introductions.
• Management reiterates confidence in long-term per-share cash flow growth despite near-term volatility: “we can deliver attractive growth in per-share cash flow over the coming years”.

What Went Wrong

• Legacy categories weighed on margins: business cards & stationery declined 3%, contributing to 130 bps Vista gross margin contraction; consolidated gross margin fell 100 bps YoY to 47.2%.
• GAAP net loss increased to -$8.0M (vs. -$5.2M YoY), driven by unrealized losses on currency hedges and higher tax, partly offset by lower interest expense.
• Adjusted free cash flow was a $30.75M outflow, driven by planned higher capex and timing of cash interest payments; operating cash flow was $9.70M.

Transcript

Operator (participant)

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Cimpress Third Quarter Fiscal Year 2025 Earnings Call. Now, I will introduce Meredith Burns, Vice President of Investor Relations and Sustainability. Please go ahead.

Meredith Burns (VP of Investor Relations and Sustainability)

Thank you, Carmen, and thank you, everyone, for joining us. With us today are Robert Keane, our Founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer, and Sean Quinn, our EVP and Chief Financial Officer. We appreciate the time that you've dedicated to understanding our results, our commentary, and our outlook. This live Q&A session will last about 45 minutes or so, and we'll answer both pre-submitted and live questions. You can submit questions via the questions and answers box at the bottom left of the screen. Before we start, I'll note that in this session, we will make statements about the future. Our actual results may differ materially from these statements due to risk factors that are outlined in detail in our SEC filings and the documents we published yesterday on our website.

We also have published non-GAAP reconciliations for our financial results on our IR website, and we invite you to read them. Now, I will turn things over to Robert.

Robert Keane (Founder, Chairman, and CEO)

Thanks, Meredith. Thank you to our investors for joining us today. I'm going to start with some overall remarks, then I'll pass it to Sean to cover our Q3 results and the tariff topic, then we will go to your questions. As I noted in the earnings document in the letter that was attached to that, which we published yesterday, in the third quarter, we remained focused on the exact same things we've been talking about throughout this year. That consistent focus and the operational progress which we've made gives me and gives us confidence that we can deliver attractive growth in per-share cash flow over the coming years, despite what is a pretty noisy backdrop right now. At the highest level, there were a few themes to the quarter. First, we continue to see strong growth in what we now refer to as elevated products.

Examples of these are promotional products, apparel, signage, packaging, and labels. Expanding into elevated products helps us serve customers with a higher lifetime value because it both increases our share of wallet with existing customers and helps us acquire new customers directly into these categories. For example, at Vista, the number of new customers acquired via signage, packaging, and labels in Q3 grew more than 10% over the prior year. We think these markets have a lot of opportunity ahead of them. Another bright spot is Cross-Cimpress Fulfillment, which continues to grow quickly. This is when one business unit in Cimpress produces for another, and Cross-Cimpress Fulfillment is both accelerating our rate of new product introductions and lowering our cost of goods. Likewise, at Pixartprinting, we have their new production facility live in the U.S. on schedule. That facility is already fulfilling for Vista.

That's allowing for new product introductions and access to lower-cost production, much of it which was outsourced in the U.S. market, and it's things we've honed in Europe in our upload and print businesses for quite some time. Likewise, Pixartprinting will soon be launching its U.S. website at pixartprinting.com over the coming month or two, and that's going to mark our entry into the U.S. upload and print market. We have a lot of strong progress throughout the company. On the other hand, as we've discussed over recent quarters, we do face headwinds in some of our legacy products and legacy channels that are reducing our consolidated growth rate. Of course, a lot of our time this past quarter was spent dealing with tariffs and the threat of future tariffs, the uncertainty of what that market, those tariffs are going to be.

Teams across Cimpress have responded with impressive velocity and are focusing on how to assess an ever-changing situation, to develop action plans, action scenarios depending on what happens, and to reduce our impact on our customers and our shareholders. Based on what we know today, we have a good handle on that impact for tariffs. We have a relatively strong position, and we're confident in our plans. To help you understand where we stand as of now, in an 8-K filing in early March, we provided a framework for how tariffs impact our business, and we have updated that information in last night's earnings document. We certainly do not enjoy the volatility that tariffs are imposing on us or on our market. That being said, it's often in times of volatility that we've shown that our competitive advantages can become even clearer.

We have always strived to build a transformational, enduring business. We value customer focus, innovation, learning from mistakes, data-driven decision-making, attracting and retaining great talent, driving for greater scale, and all of that is in service of disrupting a market so that we can profitably serve the world's small, medium businesses, which power so much of the economy. Now, those traits which we have pursued for decades have served us well over our history, including in multiple periods of adversity. That could be startup challenges long ago. It could be the global financial crisis. It could be the challenges of staying nimble as we get big, the COVID pandemic, the post-COVID supply chain challenges. Through all of that, we have not only navigated those periods of adversity, but we have extended our industry leadership. We have leveraged our scale-based advantages, and we have taken market share.

We're focused on doing the same thing here, and we look forward to the longer term because of that response we're able to bring to this period of challenge and adversity from tariffs. Let me now turn things over to Sean to go through our financial results and our tariff response, as well as some outlook commentary.

Sean Quinn (EVP and CFO)

Great. Thanks a lot, Robert, for that overview, and thanks, everyone, for joining us today. I'll just start with a brief overview of our financial results. First, on the revenue side, our consolidated revenue grew 1% on a reported basis and 3% on an organic constant currency basis. In Vista, we had 3% organic constant currency growth, and there, as Robert alluded to, key growth categories of promotional products, signage, packaging, and labels, those all grew at double-digit rates, which is a continuation of the strength that we've seen there for some time, being able to serve higher-value customers. We also returned to 5% growth in the consumer products category after a disappointing decline in the holiday-focused Q2. Vista's performance remained strong in Europe despite some macro headwinds there, which is good to see, and that's been the consistent trend as well.

In the U.S., Vista's revenue and profitability continue to be affected by the organic search algorithm changes that we discussed during Q2 earnings. Those changes have had a more significant impact on the business cards and stationery product category, which in total, that category declined 3% year-over-year, a slight improvement from the 4% decline last quarter. The work that we've been doing there to optimize organic search for those changes did start to show improvement, particularly in March relative to the first two months of the quarter, and you could see that that was evident in the Vista U.S. results in the month of March. Turning to profitability, consolidated adjusted EBITDA declined by $3.5 million year over year. A few things to point out from a profitability perspective.

Gross profit was impacted by a $2.6 million impairment charge related to the planned sale of a National Pen facility, which is backed out of EBITDA but impacts gross profit. That planned sale has been in progress for some time, but we met the conditions from an accounting perspective to write down the book value this quarter. We also had around $1.1 million in pre-production startup cost and our cost of goods sold related to our new Pixartprinting facility in the United States, which began taking orders in March. If you exclude those two items, gross profit would have increased modestly during the quarter. Ad spend was flat as a percentage of revenue year-over-year, and we do continue to expect ad spend to be lower year-over-year in Q4.

Just as a reminder, that's due to the elevated mid and upper funnel spend that we had for Vista in Q4 of last year. Finally, operating expenses that impact adjusted EBITDA were up about $3 million year-over-year, and we do expect to continue to drive efficiencies in OPEX over time, and we've constrained OPEX in the current environment over the last quarter or so as well. On the tariff front, in the earnings document, as Robert mentioned, we updated our overview of impact. On the call last quarter, there were a lot of questions on this topic, and most of those questions related to our production in Canada or Mexico and how that was going to be impacted.

We estimate that the USMCA and the informational products exclusions that we've outlined cover about 90% of the relevant cost for products that have a country of origin, Canada and Mexico. We also still benefit from the de minimis exemption for individual orders below $800 for those two countries, and that's applicable for much of the remaining 10%. The impact for Canada and Mexico at this time remains minimal. Our primary exposure, as we outlined in last night's document, relates to the increased tariffs on Chinese-sourced raw materials, particularly in the PPAG category. Here we've been hard at work as well, identifying alternative sourcing and other mitigation actions.

It will take a few months for that to be fully implemented, but through the supply chain actions that we plan to take, we do expect to substantially reduce our exposure to less than $20 million annually for direct-sourced PPAG materials from China. We do plan to increase prices as well to at least partially offset increased costs where that's applicable, and then we can adjust that approach quickly if things change. Given the uncertainty of the tariff and trade environment and how that may or may not continue to change, and also any impact on demand where price increases are implemented, we have withdrawn, as you would have seen last night, our guidance for FY 2025 and beyond. Generally speaking, our fourth quarter that we're now in is seasonally a higher profit and a higher cash flow quarter.

While we do expect some near-term impact from tariffs, we do expect also to finish the year with increased liquidity from where we ended Q3. That puts us in a position to be able to take advantage of opportunities as we approach our next fiscal year, fiscal 2026. We will continue to balance capital deployment between organic growth investments, reducing leverage, and then also taking advantage of what we believe is today an exceptional opportunity to repurchase our shares at attractive prices. I am sure we will talk about that some more in the questions. With that, Meredith, why do we not turn it over to the questions?

Meredith Burns (VP of Investor Relations and Sustainability)

Great. Thank you, Sean. As a reminder, you can submit questions during this webcast via the questions and answers box at the bottom left of the screen. We did receive a number of pre-submitted questions, some in overlapping areas, and we will combine some of these to make sure that we are thoroughly addressing what is on people's minds. We look forward to your live questions as well, which are coming in as I speak. I am going to start with the tariff topic. I think we should start there. My first question I am going to throw to Robert, which customer verticals do you consider most exposed to tariff impacts in their businesses, and what percentage of revenue do they each represent?

Robert Keane (Founder, Chairman, and CEO)

Okay. We serve millions, tens of millions of customers across an extremely diverse range of industries, and we have very little concentration by end customer vertical. If you take a broad grouping of customer verticals, something like healthcare, that's not our biggest vertical, but as an example, a broad vertical like that represents no more than 7-8% of our revenue. Even within that, there are many dozens of sub-verticals, and so we do not regularly track this on a consolidated level. I think it is more helpful to think of it from a category perspective. As we have outlined in the earnings document, the largest exposure from tariffs right now is for promotional products, apparel, and gifts, what we call PPAG. Just given traditionally, some of the product substrates that we have there have come from China.

PPAG has been one of our faster-growing product categories globally in the U.S. for some time. It's also a large category. It's over 20% of consolidated revenue. The U.S. portion itself is about 11% of global revenues. Now, remember, the gross margin there is lower than overall, so it's less than that from a gross profit perspective. Within that, only a subset of that has sourcing from China. Much of the products that are in apparel come from Southeast Asia or Central and South America. Again, those countries, of course, could be seeing tariffs imposed on them as well, but China is only a subset of that, and China is where the biggest tariffs are as of now. As we mentioned in our earnings document, the U.S. tariffs are affecting and will affect the whole of the promotional products and apparel industries, not just Cimpress.

That being said, many of these products are seen as important cost-effective marketing mechanisms for companies of all different sizes. For the products that do see increases to prices due to tariffs, we do believe there's some substitution that could happen. If someone wants to give a promotional product, they don't necessarily need to give, as an example, drinkware with their logo on it. They could give a product that also has their logo on it to their customers. That substitution may help us move from the highest tariff countries, places like China, to other areas. That replacement of lower tariff country products replacing something with a higher tariff rate is something we also could be pretty purposeful about in our customer experience and our merchandising experience.

It's also possible that there might be some trade-down in quantity size, number of items ordered for products that have significant price increases. We have actually always been very focused on having minimum order quantities of one or very low quantities. Compared to the competition, we think we'll be very well positioned to serve those needs.

Meredith Burns (VP of Investor Relations and Sustainability)

Great. Thank you, Robert. Okay. A couple of questions in a similar area. Sean, this is going to be for you. It's going to take me a bit to get through the question, so stick with me, guys. The letter indicates that after supply chain changes that will take several months, there will be $20 million remaining in China COGS subject to tariffs. Is it reasonable to expect that based on a 145% tariff rate, the associated tariff expense on the remaining $20 million will be about $30 million? How much of this China tariff expense was included in the disclosure in the March 8K that tariff impacts would be less than $10 million? In other words, how much is incremental relative to your expectations before the Liberation Day tariffs?

What is the current annualized level of China COGS that is planned to be shifted to other countries, and what level of charges do you expect to incur in the interim? In areas where you've already raised prices in response to tariffs, what has been the impact on order volumes? We had a similar live question that covers most of those same topics. The one that gets added with the live question, does the $20 million of exposure to China post-mitigation efforts account for exposures from third-party suppliers? If not, what is that total exposure to China, including third-party suppliers?

Sean Quinn (EVP and CFO)

Okay. Yeah. Let me do my best, Meredith. Keep me honest if I have not picked up on some part of that. For China sourcing, the math that was in the question is correct, broadly correct, but I need to give a few caveats. For the $20 million of COGS that is connected to our direct sourcing in China, after we make changes to our supply chain, that is the number that was referenced in the document last night. Yeah, $29 million would be the additional cost. That is just 145% times 20. That is not necessarily the net impact on us, though. We have to be careful about that. One, we expect to have pricing changes to at least partially offset the tariffs. That is one.

Two, I mean, that could lead to lower volume on those particular products, but we also would not accept losses on the sale of any of our goods. The net impact would not be the $20 million. We also will have, and I think Robert alluded to this, we will have alternative products available. We believe that there is opportunity to reduce exposure either through being able to provide our customers with different products that solve that particular use case or continuing to evolve our supply chain. We think that $20 million is not the end state. That is just where we can get to over the next month, and then we can continue to optimize after that. Of course, the environment will be changing. Those things will just take a little bit more time.

I think keep in mind that where we are after our changes, still sourcing product from China, it's likely that competitors are for the same reasons, because of availability of those particular products or other reasons. This represents a really small portion of our products. Our overall COGS for the last 12 months through March was about $1.7 billion. To put it in perspective, it's a very small portion of our product portfolio. In terms of trying to figure out how much of this is incremental to what we outlined in the 8K, in the 8K, we talked about impact of $10 million or less. In that, there was a small amount of impact from the Chinese tariffs. The two things that have moved here to combine and drive a larger impact than that is, one, of course, the tariff rate increase for China to 145%.

The second one is the elimination of the de minimis exemption for Chinese-sourced goods. We are not in that yet. That is planned to take effect on May 2. Those are not finished products that are imported from China, but the materials that we import from China where that is relevant are still impacted by the de minimis exemption because these particular products maintain their country of origin, China designation, even though they may be decorated in North America. That is why de minimis is still relevant for us on the China part of it. We have not disclosed the current amount of the annual cost in terms of our prior sourcing from China. The reason that we did not do that is because we have already begun to take action, and so that number would no longer be relevant.

I think it's fair to say that that number would have been substantially higher than the $20 million that we referenced. Finally, just for pricing actions, there was a question about what are we seeing in terms of impact on demand. We've so far only had to do this for a very limited set of products as of today. That's because the de minimis exemption, the removal of the de minimis exemption for China has not happened yet. We don't really have any data to share there in terms of what we're seeing on impact on demand from those price changes. On the live question, there was reference to a question on fill rates and availability, and we're not seeing any impact there in terms of availability as yet. We don't expect material impact there from everything that we can see today.

From a 3PF perspective, it is correct that we will have some exposure from 3PF as well. That is not part of the $20 million number. The reason that we did not specifically quantify that is that is a bit tougher because we do not have full visibility to changes that our 3PFs are making in their supply chain as well, which is a very active topic. It is impossible to fully quantify that, but there will be some impact there too. I would categorize that piece of it similarly in terms of that is primarily PPAG where those 3PFs are impacted. We will also address any increases there with price to at least partially mitigate any impact. We also there too will address with alternative sourcing, and those conversations are very much active today.

The last thing I'd say is just what we can see from many of our 3PFs in that space. Generally, there was a forward buying of inventory prior to tariffs going into place. We are in a period where that inventory is still being run out. Generally, there has been postponement of new buys. We are in a period now where that impact of any increased cost has not been felt yet. It is probably unlikely until June in most cases that that would start. We will go from there with all the other actions that we have outlined.

Meredith Burns (VP of Investor Relations and Sustainability)

Thanks, Sean. Super helpful. I'm going to stick with you for this next question. Post-Liberation Day, April 2nd, have you given any thought to offsetting tariff and demand-related impacts by cutting costs? At what point would you do so?

Sean Quinn (EVP and CFO)

Yeah. Certainly. As a general response, I would say yes, we've given it thought. We could and would reduce costs as needed. I mentioned in the earlier remarks today, we have put some constraints in place. If we were not able to mitigate increased costs or we saw a drop in demand, then we would make adjustments. I think that we've shown our ability to do that in the past. Hopefully, that's been clear over the last many years. As we disclose each quarter in the spreadsheet that we publish on our IR site, we do have a significant amount of cost that's either variable or semi-variable in nature. We can flex that to the extent that we're seeing impact on demand for certain products. Again, we've done that in the past.

As it relates to growth investments, and we've indicated this in the release as well, we are maintaining a high bar there, but we have not made any significant changes there. We think it's important to maintain consistency there where we have conviction. Given the fact that we're in the depths of our FY2026 planning right now, just cost awareness is certainly an important topic that we're focused on.

Meredith Burns (VP of Investor Relations and Sustainability)

Great. Thanks, Sean. One more for you here as we shift away from the tariff topic, at least for now. Can you please give an update on revenue growth in April to the extent that you're seeing revenue softness thus far in the quarter? Is it limited to U.S.-based customers or not? A related question, can you comment on each segment's revenue performance for the month of April versus last year and what trends have you noticed?

Sean Quinn (EVP and CFO)

Yeah. We try to stay away from that generally, but I understand the importance of that question in the current environment. We certainly do not get into segment by segment on an interim basis. Maybe just a few things that I can provide. We are not going to provide a specific update on April. I mean, actually, just to start, it is a little bit complicated by the fact that there has been a shift in timing of holidays with the Easter holiday relative to last year. That has an impact on bookings and how backlog moves and so on. By the way, I should mention that last year was a leap year, so that was actually a negative in Q3, which we did not necessarily call out.

If you were to normalize for the holiday timing, I would describe April as stable to the trends that we were seeing in March. I would say that across regions. I think that would be the way I would characterize April.

Meredith Burns (VP of Investor Relations and Sustainability)

Thank you, Sean. Okay, Robert, this next question is for you. This is the second quarter in a row where we have been surprised by the very low growth at National Pen. Beyond what you shared in the earnings release about the reductions of mail order advertising, what else is driving the lackluster growth here?

Robert Keane (Founder, Chairman, and CEO)

There really is not much to add beyond what we published last night. Where the growth is happening is in the e-commerce channel and in Cross-Cimpress Fulfillment, especially, I would say, fulfilling for both Vista and our upload and print businesses. You can see in our disclosures that excluding Cross-Cimpress Fulfillment, Europe is growing, and it is North America where the headwinds at National Pen are leading to the low overall growth. That is in the mail order channel, and we are just not seeing enough returns here to justify the past levels of direct mail advertising. We have reduced that, and that has been a drag on revenues this year.

Meredith Burns (VP of Investor Relations and Sustainability)

Thanks, Robert. I'm going to stick with you for the next couple of questions here. Historically, your business has held up well during economic downturns as people turn to side hustles and in doing so need the products that our businesses provide. Is there any reason to believe that this time it's different?

Robert Keane (Founder, Chairman, and CEO)

The specific circumstances of each downturn that we've seen over the past decades have been, of course, different from each other. Generally speaking, Cimpress has outperformed the overall market for printing and similar products during those downturns for the reasons you bring up: the rise of self-employment that comes out of necessity, as well as larger companies moving to lower quantities than they had previously. Print mass customization players like us are very well suited to address that shift. As we enter a downturn, or I say, if we enter a downturn here, we would expect to see some of this play out again. That doesn't mean that we're immune to some economic slowdown or muted profitability.

As a company with global operations, with scale advantages, a diverse product and customer set, as well as a strong balance sheet and liquidity, we are able to navigate that quite well. There are some, as Sean alluded to in one of the prior questions, cost levers, which we could pull, and we have done that in the past when needed.

Meredith Burns (VP of Investor Relations and Sustainability)

Thanks, Robert. Could you please provide any noteworthy observations on demand trends for our largest submarkets, namely small format, signage, promotional products and apparel, and packaging and labels?

Robert Keane (Founder, Chairman, and CEO)

As I mentioned in my prepared remarks, the overall observation is that these products, which we now call elevated products, are products that customers typically consider to be more sophisticated. They're newer to the mass customization paradigm, which we master so well. They typically have more complex production operations and more complex design processes. They are all growing rapidly across Cimpress's different businesses. These are products that often have higher order values. They have very often replenishment needs that are higher than average. They include products that our customers see as part of simply delivering their own products to our customers' customers as opposed to being a discretionary expense. For example, once we become part of a customer's packaging, that requires ongoing purchases for the customer to ship their product. Customers of these elevated products typically have higher lifetime value than Cimpress's average and higher retention rates.

They're desirable for us to continue to crack the code on building both supply chain manufacturing capabilities that are competitive at all quantities our customers want. That ranges from very small quantities to pretty large quantities. Importantly, for us to help our customers with the more complicated graphic design needs, which we refer to as design enablement. There's a clear need for these products. Offering them alongside our more legacy products helps us capture more wallet share of the highest value customers and does help us drive leverage of our advertising and our operating expense. Now, the products we're talking about fall into the categories you just mentioned: signage, promotional products, apparel, packaging, labels.

Even within some of the small format marketing materials, there are pockets of fast-growing products for us, like books, catalogs, and magazines that are elevated compared to simple rectangles on paper, like a flyer or a holiday card or a business card. There are some parts of these categories that are growing slower and decline. We consider those largely to be legacy products like business cards, of course, but holiday cards and the mail order channel at National Pen for writing instruments.

Meredith Burns (VP of Investor Relations and Sustainability)

Thank you, Robert. Next question. Can you please describe the competitive landscape in the complex products, which, as we're talking about on this call, the elevated products area versus the legacy products, for example, business card segments? What is the specific gross margin differential between the two broader product lines? Why can't Cimpress price the complex products higher to get higher margins?

Robert Keane (Founder, Chairman, and CEO)

Okay. There's a lot of similarity, I will say here, with the last question. Yes, there's often a gross margin difference on the various product categories, but it's not always. For example, signage, packaging, and labels, depending on the type of subcategory, are often having gross margins that can be similar to some of our legacy materials. Promotional products and apparel do tend to have a lower gross margin, but they also rank among some of our most valuable product categories in terms of how much absolute gross profit we generate per customer, which is very distinct from the percentage gross margin. When you think about gross margin, which you can think of describing a percentage but not an absolute monetary value, I would give you a very simple example.

If we make 40% a relatively low gross margin for us on a $200 promotional product order, we earn $80 in gross profit. If we make 70% gross margin on a $50 business card order, we earn $35 in gross profit. They have different gross margin rates, but the cash flows from the PPAG products are actually quite attractive. We are not solving for our gross margin percentage. We are solving to improve, first and foremost, the value we deliver to customers, which then translates to the gross profit per customer. Of course, a high percentage gross margin improves our gross profit. If volume drops because of high pricing, that does not necessarily help. It is the total revenue times the gross margin that matters.

Growing gross profit dollars in a way that delights customers and strengthens their loyalty, increases their lifetime value, can be great at driving leverage elsewhere in the P&L, for example, in advertising costs if we have higher value across our customers or in technology costs in other areas. Our businesses look at pricing. There's a question you had about why not price higher based on what competitors are pricing. We test around the elasticity of demand to figure out where to price a product at any given quantity. There have been no recent changes of any significance in the competitive landscape to either traditional local printers who still serve the majority of this market or with online players. It is a competitive space, and we certainly want to ensure we never become complacent.

Just because we're the largest online mass customization player in print and the only one with international operations like we have, doesn't mean that we are in any way taking this for granted. We constantly look at pricing and the overall value proposition. That's why you will hear us talking about strengthening our scale advantages, why we're excited about the years of investment we've made in the replatforming investments we're making, as an example right now, to bring our upload and print production capabilities into the North American market. All of that should help make it easier to further grow our scale advantages and deliver ever better customer value. Going back to competitors, there are great competitors out there. They're nimble. They're focused. We have to constantly strive every day to serve our customers better. That's the way to win. It's a big market.

We're never going to have the market to ourselves.

Meredith Burns (VP of Investor Relations and Sustainability)

Thanks, Robert. Okay, Sean, this next question is for you, and it's along a similar vein. I think people can incorporate what they've heard from Robert answering the last few questions for part of the answer to this one. What gives management confidence that there's not a fundamentally negative change to the long-term gross margin profile of the business? Some new places to add some commentary. How would Cimpress fail in executing on the transformation to higher lifetime value products? What specific guardrails are in place to avoid such pitfalls?

Sean Quinn (EVP and CFO)

Sure. Yeah, I'd say there's some similarities there to what Robert just outlined. I think, I mean, in general, and this question comes up with some frequency. In general, as Robert said too, we don't focus on gross margin. We focus on gross profit. I mean, interestingly, and I'll kind of get back to some of the more recent evolution, but if you take a step back, we used to get this question oftentimes when we started to acquire into what is now our upload and print portfolio. And our upload and print portfolio, for a variety of reasons, has structurally different gross margins. They're lower than what our, at least at the time when we started to acquire into those businesses, what our gross margins were at the time. They were kind of gross margin dilutive. We got a lot of questions about that.

Those businesses have grown their gross profit very significantly. They have grown their profit dollars very significantly, and they have grown their cash flow very significantly. If you look at it in terms of the return on invested capital, as we have outlined in some of our annual letters, those businesses that we acquired in upload and print have generated more cash than the invested capital we put in. They are still growing very nicely. They still have very attractive profit generation and cash flow generation. It would be difficult to argue that just because there was gross margin dilution, that that was not a good thing. It was definitively a good use of capital, and those are great businesses. They are just different.

I think if everything was held constant, coming back to the more recent product mix evolution, if you had constant order size, you had constant repeat rate, constant cost of customer acquisition, constant growth opportunity, and so on, of course, then you would not pursue lower gross margins, right? It would be better to have higher gross margins. The reality is everything is not constant. Robert just did some math too on different differences by category. I think the upload and print example is another example. The reality is that where we started, at least in Vista, was small format products, and those are relatively simple design, relatively low order values. Once they got to scale, they also had high gross margins for a variety of reasons, and that is a great thing.

As things evolved, technology evolved, design capabilities evolved, production equipment evolved, all parts of the value chain, more complex products from a production and design standpoint started to become possible and be possible to be done in small quantities. As that has happened, many of those markets are very large and are still newer to come into an online marketplace. There is a nice growth opportunity there. Those products just have some characteristics that are different. The order sizes tend to be larger. As Robert noted, they tend to serve customers that oftentimes have a larger amount of annual spend. The repeat patterns are different. Things like packaging, the repeat patterns are different. That is where the growth opportunity is. We are focused on growing gross profit and contribution profit dollars in those categories. We think that is a good thing.

How would we fail was part of the question. There are certainly plenty of ways that we could fail. I think fundamentally it would be if we're not serving these high-value customers really well in a way that makes them customers for life. I don't know what specific guardrails I would call out to avoid pitfalls. Frankly, I think that in terms of guardrails, that goes back to how we run the business every day. In these categories, especially as we've pushed deeper into them, we have very clear objectives laid out, key results laid out around those initiatives. We have KPIs that we track so we can establish how we're making progress and where we need to get better. We have clear areas that we've been investing in to attract and retain those customers.

That can range from things like expanding our expert services, which we've talked about in various investor days, providing more assurance. How do we take friction out of the experience? How do we have more dedicated customer care to handle high-value use cases? All the things that we're doing from a CapEx perspective as well to have both new product introduction, but also to be the low-cost producer in some of these categories that are newer. Of course, we list a number of other things. I think really it comes down to the mechanisms that we use to run the business every day and monitor performance, and then making sure that we're talking to customers and getting feedback that informs our progress.

Robert Keane (Founder, Chairman, and CEO)

Hey, Meredith, I just want to check.

Hi, Steven.

Meredith Burns (VP of Investor Relations and Sustainability)

Sorry about that. Thank you very much. I was on mute.

Robert Keane (Founder, Chairman, and CEO)

A lot of questions coming in today.

Meredith Burns (VP of Investor Relations and Sustainability)

Yeah. No, I was talking. I was reading the next question, and I was on mute. Sorry about that, guys. We are going to shift to a question on CapEx for you, Sean. CapEx is higher this year, which is what you told us to expect at the beginning of the year. How long do you think this investment cycle will take? A few more quarters, or is this a multi-year affair?

Sean Quinn (EVP and CFO)

Yeah. The vast majority of the increase that we've had is in our Vista business and then in the print group segment. For the print group, we were just talking about the new US facility. That includes the initial build-out of that new facility and then also, of course, the equipment for that facility. I would characterize that as very much a multi-year plan. We'll be increasing the capacity of that facility. We'll be increasing the capabilities that that facility has for the next years. We'll be doing that as our trajectory of volumes and revenue are also ramping. I think that over time, as we continue to put more CapEx into that facility, that will be while that revenue is increasing, given that the facility has been live.

So far, the CapEx that we've had there has not been generating revenue and gross profits. You don't see that flowing through yet. That is one that I would say is overall a multi-year effort. For the rest, I would characterize the CapEx as primarily ongoing choices that we have rather than a multi-year investment cycle that's preordained in any way. There is maintenance CapEx that we have. There is replacement CapEx for efficiency. Over our history, you can see that that can have some waves to it. We do have some larger pieces of equipment that are being replaced with new technology this year. On the growth investment side of things, I think as an example, we have some sizable CapEx for expansion of our packaging range, which is something that we're excited about. We see starting to impact our results.

We think there's more opportunities like that if we're seeing success. Those are all decisions that we'll be able to evaluate over time based on the returns that we're generating on similar investments. It is not necessarily a multi-year investment. We'll take those one at a time as we go and can evaluate progress. We're still right now in the process of finalizing our fiscal 2026 plans. Each year we go through, especially on the CapEx side, very much a bottoms-up assessment of where we're investing in CapEx. We evaluate that each year, both on individual products, but then also taking a step back in the aggregate and making sure that that total number makes sense relative to other opportunities. I would say just generally that these CapEx projects, in general, have high and predictable returns.

We'd want to do them if we're confident that it's a high-probability outcome.

Meredith Burns (VP of Investor Relations and Sustainability)

Great. Thank you, Sean. I'm going to move on to a question sort of related in thinking about capital allocation and different types of capital allocation that we can make. Given the current stock price of $40-$45 a share, how does the company think about share buybacks versus internal investments and debt paydown? We note from prior calls that the company targets 12+% for OpEx and CapEx. Given where Cimpress is trading from a cash flow yield perspective, will CapEx in fiscal year 2026 be more muted to capitalize on the opportunity to repurchase shares? What's management's expectation regarding timing to resume repurchasing shares, assuming no appreciation in share price?

Sean Quinn (EVP and CFO)

Yeah, sure. First of all, it's absolutely a trade-off that we think about frequently. It features in our discussions with the board, with our across the management team. It's absolutely a regular feature of our discussions. Specifically on FY26 CapEx, we're still, as I said on the prior question, we're still working through our plans there. As I said too there, we do this bottoms-up, and we're evaluating individual projects and returns on those. We also look at that in the aggregate too and are looking at the returns on those things versus share repurchases. That is something that will be factored in, but we're still finalizing the plans on FY26 CapEx. I'd say just generally, we'll evaluate the relative returns on all this stuff. We do have a bias to internal investments like CapEx.

Some of the examples I mentioned, like expansion of packaging or the expansion of upload and print into the United States, if we think that those are high-probability outcomes, then those are things that we're going to want to do. They're beneficial from a growth perspective. They have attractive returns on the capital that we're investing there. We are looking at all this stuff also with kind of a wrapper around it of a view towards our net leverage target as well, right? That is a balance. We've been actively managing that over the last years. I think I've managed that in a good direction. The fact that we didn't buy shares in February and March was largely a function of just making sure that we had a handle on the tariff situation. It was a situation that was constantly evolving.

Frankly, it was one that was quite complex. Once we felt like we had established sufficient clarity, we updated that AK in early March. These things take time, and we want to make sure that we have a handle on things. That is where our focus was. We also, of course, have our stated plans to continue to lever. That was in the back of our mind as well. Those are trade-offs that we are going to continue to actively consider, including in Q4, but also as we move into FY2026. We are in a situation where we have a strong balance sheet. We have strong liquidity.

We're in a quarter where, as we said in the earnings document last night, we expect to be increasing that liquidity in Q4 because it's seasonally a quarter where we have higher profitability and cash flow. We will be prepared to seize opportunities, and we'll stay nimble there. We will be considering that across the spectrum of these capital allocation choices.

Meredith Burns (VP of Investor Relations and Sustainability)

Thanks, Sean. Okay. We've had a couple of questions come in about our decision to withdraw guidance. Sean, I'll stick with you on this one. Please provide color on the rationale for pulling the long-term guidance. Is it solely due to the tariff uncertainty, or has something else fundamentally changed about management's view of the go-forward business opportunity? Another very similar question, but more like thinking about, hey, there's only one more quarter left in the year. Considering that we're already one month in, is there really that little visibility over the next few months?

Sean Quinn (EVP and CFO)

Sure. Yeah. I mean, as I said in my prepared remarks, and I can completely get the focus on this topic and the question. As I said, it was given the uncertainty of tariff and trade environment and then any potential continued changes on that front, which we have seen on a pretty regular basis. Also, any impact on demand where that might be relevant that we withdrew our guidance. Yes, it is specifically related to the uncertainty of the tariff and trade environment and any related impacts. Now, I completely get it. Like, hey, we're sitting here on May 1st, and there's only two months left. We're just trying to forecast and then communicate to all of you what the next two months are going to be. We just do not think it's that helpful of an exercise given the uncertainties that do exist.

We feel like we have a good handle on the impact in terms of what's in our control. We've attempted to lay that out. We hope quite clearly, including in the 8-K that we provided in early March, but then also the updates that we provided last night. We had long-term guidance in place, including over the last three months, frankly. I'm not so sure that that long-term guidance over the last three months provided anyone more certainty when the tariff discussion became the focus. We are going to continue to operate the business as we have. We've communicated a lot on where our long-term focus is, what our objectives are. Hopefully that's been clear. None of that changes. That's where we're going to continue to focus.

We will have an opportunity three months from now to update you on our progress.

Meredith Burns (VP of Investor Relations and Sustainability)

Thanks, Sean. Robert, going to switch to you on this next one. Did you reevaluate your leverage target during the quarter? What's driving the net two and a half times leverage target? Seems unusually low. Is the target independent of where the stock price is trading at?

Robert Keane (Founder, Chairman, and CEO)

No, we've not changed the net leverage target. We've talked in the past about why we came up with that target, and everyone's going to have different views on this. We have shown our ability to delever, but also to flex the variability of our cost structure in the past. We could argue that we could handle higher leverage, but we've discussed this extensively. The main reason is that when there's volatility, we want to be able to stay focused on doing the right things and not have to do anything unnatural because of leverage. That target is independent of where the share price is because the policy does provide flexibility to increase for the right opportunities. That very much includes share repurchases, which, as we said today and last night, we consider to be very attractive right now.

The reality is it will take us longer than we originally envisioned to get to that 2.5 because of the opportunities you're alluding to and others. We still view this as an appropriate destination, again, for the reasons I just discussed.

Meredith Burns (VP of Investor Relations and Sustainability)

Thanks, Robert. Related topic, because you mentioned leverage as a guardrail, share repurchases and their other capital allocation. We have had a couple of questions on share repurchases from different angles. One of them, what drove the halt in stock purchases? If you loved it at $69 a share, why not $59 or $49? The other side of that coin that just came in live, to be able to cope with potentially really bad economic conditions, for example, a deep recession without raising expensive new capital. Given your negative working capital, should you not be cautious with the buybacks and avoid a rerun of pre-COVID buybacks, which with hindsight were too aggressive? Sean, if you want to take that one.

Sean Quinn (EVP and CFO)

Yeah. Seeing the live questions come in like that, there's obviously different perspectives on this and depending on kind of where you sit in the market. We mentioned in the earnings stock, we purchased a little under $4 million in January, and then we did not do anything in February or March. As I previously mentioned as well, the reason for that was because we wanted to make sure we had a good handle on what was a pretty complex and dynamic topic, still is. We did not do any share repurchases. Maybe going to the second question first, I think that behavior indicates that we are being thoughtful about when uncertainty increases, making sure that we are not putting ourselves in a position where we are tying up liquidity that might be needed and we end up having to raise expensive capital or something like that.

We were far, far, far, far away from that, but we, of course, have learned from what we experienced in the pandemic. That led us to not act in February and March. To that question, I think you can see our behavior factoring those things in. On the other side of it, in terms of we bought at $69, why not at the lower levels? We bought just under $4 million in January, not a particularly huge sum. Once the executive actions, sorry, executive orders came across that first weekend in February, which happened to be just after our last earnings release, we did not do anything further after that. Again, we felt it was important to first prioritize making sure that we have an appropriate handle on the situation.

From what we've outlined, we think that we do, and we'll go forward from there.

Meredith Burns (VP of Investor Relations and Sustainability)

Thanks, Sean. All right. We've got time for one more question and a sign-off from Robert. Robert, other than stock repurchases, what other factors are you focused on to increase the likelihood that the price of Cimpress's shares will better reflect our true intrinsic value?

Robert Keane (Founder, Chairman, and CEO)

Okay. First and foremost, and way ahead of share repurchases, is constantly improving the value we deliver to our customers. Markets change, customer needs change, they evolve. Improving that customer value on an ongoing basis is absolutely the most important driver of a great future. That is where we are focused. In the end, success there will drive free cash flow per share, and that is what matters. Now, really, that is what we are focused on. Next, we do recognize the consistency of results and leverage levels are aspects that we think have an impact on the stock price. We certainly want to be aware of that, and we have spoken about it in the past.

In the end, what it really comes down to is how we allocate capital where we can invest it or pay down debt or use it in the different uses of capital deployment that we can control. We do try to be transparent and consistently communicate with all of our shareholders, all of our debt holders about where we are focused, where we're investing, what we're getting in return for that, and how those things can impact, again, our share value over time. Share value, for me, is really the underlying ability to generate cash per share after everything, after taxes, after interest, etc. Our share price will move around that. We don't like where it is right now, but we just have to keep growing the core cash flow capabilities of the business.

If that's not appropriately reflected in our share price, we certainly will look to take advantage of that ourselves. With that, let me wrap up the call. Thank you very much for your time today. We continue to execute on exactly the same strategy we've talked about with you last September and the investor day. We've talked about with you before that. To navigate this very strange environment of tariffs that we are all across the economy trying to deal with, there are a lot of good signs of strategic progress happening across Cimpress. I'm very confident that we're going to continue to strengthen how we deliver value to our customers. We are facing, as we've talked about in the past, some headwinds and some legacy products, but there are huge markets where we're growing fast.

Despite the current period of tariff adversity, we feel very comfortable that that transition is going to continue to be a success. Let me wrap up by saying thank you to all of you for joining the call. Thank you for continuing to entrust your capital with us, and have a great day.

Operator (participant)

This concludes the program, and you may now disconnect.