Quad/Graphics at 17th Annual Southwest IDEAS Conference: Strategic Transformation

On Wednesday, 19 November 2025, at the 17th Annual Southwest IDEAS Conference, Quad/Graphics (NYSE:QUAD) unveiled its strategic transformation from a traditional commercial print company to a marketing experience (MX) provider. This shift, marked by strategic acquisitions and AI integration, aims to enhance customer solutions. While the company is optimistic about growth, it acknowledges the challenges of transitioning in a competitive market.

Key Takeaways

• Quad/Graphics is transforming into a marketing experience company, leveraging AI and data analytics.
• The company targets a revenue growth inflection point by 2028, focusing on higher-margin integrated solutions.
• Quad/Graphics aims to raise its adjusted EBITDA margin to 9.4% by 2028.
• The company emphasizes the enduring value of print, especially among younger generations.
• Quad/Graphics is reducing debt and focusing on balanced capital allocation, including dividends and growth investments.

Financial Results

• Quad/Graphics is working towards reversing a revenue decline by 2028, aiming for growth through integrated marketing solutions and targeted print offerings.
• The company has significantly reduced its debt over the past five years, allowing for a balanced approach to capital allocation.
• Plans include shareholder returns via dividends and reinvestment in growth initiatives like In-Store Connect.

Operational Updates

• The company is leveraging its MX Intelligence, which accesses data from 92% of U.S. households, to enhance marketing effectiveness and ROI.
• Quad/Graphics is focusing on initiatives such as In-Store Connect, a retail media network strategy that targets regional mid-tier grocers and has shown significant sales lifts for brands.

Future Outlook

• The company aims to increase its adjusted EBITDA margin to 9.4% and improve free cash flow conversion to 35% by 2028.
• Quad/Graphics believes its market valuation does not reflect its diversified marketing capabilities, trading instead at a multiple typical for a core commercial printer.
• The company emphasizes the continued relevance of print, highlighting its appeal among younger demographics alongside digital strategies.

Q&A Highlights

• During the conference call, Quad/Graphics' leadership expressed confidence in the company's strategic direction and its ability to deliver value to customers and shareholders.
• The importance of adapting to market changes and leveraging unique assets, such as the household data stack, was underscored as a differentiator in the competitive marketing landscape.

In conclusion, Quad/Graphics is positioning itself for a future of growth and transformation. For more details, readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript.

Full transcript - 17th Annual Southwest IDEAS Conference:

Sandy Martin, Host, Three-Part Advisors: Good afternoon. Thank you for attending the Three-Part Advisors Ideas Conference. I'm Sandy Martin. The next one up is Quad/Graphics, traded on the NYSE under Quad. We've got Tony Staniak, CFO, and Don Potts, Executive Director of IR. I'll hand it over.

Don Potts, Executive Director of IR, Quad/Graphics: Thank you so much. The clicker is just right there. Excellent. All right. All right. Hello, everyone. As you said, Don Potts, Executive Director of Investor Relations for Quad. Good to see so many of you in the room. End of day. I was a little worried about people running out of gas. Let's jump right into it. I figure it might be helpful just to provide a little bit of background, a little bit of history of Quad, help you understand how we've arrived at our current market position, because it has been really a transformational story. It's important to have a little history. Taking a look at the timeline, you can see 1971. Quad's a 54-year-old company, actually founded by a gentleman named Harry Quadracci, who's the father of our current CEO, Joel Quadracci.

The company started with a single printing press, 20 employees, and a customer base that consisted of Milwaukee area magazines and catalogs, but really grew quickly from that local presence in the Milwaukee area to a regional player. Shortly after that, a really nationally prominent commercial printer. In its second decade, it had a client roster that consisted of names like Sports Illustrated, Time Magazine, Newsweek, and also was responsible for printing most of the nation's largest circulation catalogs. Quad then leveraged that momentum, the market share gain, to go public in 2010 as part of its WorldColor acquisition. Now, it is important to think back in this timeline to 2010. This was right after the advent, shortly after the advent of the iPhone. You are talking about massive digital disruption of the media industry, the print industry in particular.

A critical decision, a strategic decision was made at the point of going public. That was to go public under a dual-class share structure, to maintain voting control as the company was heading into what was sure to be a tumultuous period of time. Sure enough, within the next couple of years after that, most direct print peers of Quad's either went bankrupt or were acquired by private equity, fully liquidated, or massively transformed. It proved out to be a very prescient decision to be able to survive the tumultuous period. What it really also enabled Quad to do was make some key acquisitions during that time to become really a key consolidator of print during this time. Increasing cost effectiveness, cost efficiencies, footprint in the print space, and also stay on target with regard to its long-term goal of transforming the company.

The goal was to transform Quad from a core commercial print company into a company that could actually benefit from this new market dynamic, this new kind of multi-channel media or omni-media structure that was forming in the marketplace. In order to do so, Quad went out and acquired a few key acquisitions to bring things in-house, like creation, so strategy design for marketing campaigns, the creative side of things, digital media, and all of the other components that would be necessary to leverage our core history as a printer, but be able to offer customers that end-to-end marketing solution. Everything from the design and creation of a marketing strategy through the media development, multi-channel media development, digital, online, offline, as well as the effective placement of that media. The pieces were brought in, as you can see here, 28-plus.

Fast forward to today, Quad is effectively a marketing experience or MX company, last year generating $2.7 billion in revenue with over 11,000 employees located worldwide and a client roster north of 2,100 that includes really most of the most reputable or well-known household names and brands. Now, we're across all verticals as far as our customer base, but this is probably, I would say, the focus verticals for the company. You can see some of the prominent names, as I mentioned, that make up our customer roster. The other thing that's really important to highlight when thinking of our customer base is the diverse nature of the makeup of those relationships.

What I mean by that is you've got everything from a company that is purely looking to Quad for print, probably been with us for quite some time, and is still to this day just a print relationship. On the other end of that, you've got companies that work with Quad that have no print functionality in their relationship. They've come to us for our digital media capabilities. They've come to us for our campaign creation. Maybe we're actually their AOR, their agency of record, and we oversee their entire marketing campaign. A combination there is probably the faster-growing and more exciting component. That is the customer that looks to Quad for all of our breadth of services.

Everything from creation all the way through media development, media placement, leveraging us for all the products and services, or many of them, that we currently offer. When thinking about that offering, that MX solution suite, this is a great visual that shows those components going from left to right, the creative piece, the strategy design, the media production. This, of course, leverages Quad's history and core business of print, where we have tons of production efficiencies that have been gained over five decades as a commercial printer, but that also extends into the online space with media development on the digital space as well. Finally, effective media placement. The key here is not just to have this functionality, because a customer can go get this functionality as it stands anywhere across multiple relationships. The goal is to have it fully integrated.

We want to have an integrated, holistic offering. If you think about it, the goal there being, let's help a CMO solve all of his problems under one roof. Right? It is key that this is an integrated offering and not a bunch of standalone individual functions that Quad offers. After buying the necessary pieces to the puzzle, if you will, in the last six, seven years, it was also critical that we brought in industry talent, the key industry talent to lead these functions and help integrate them into this holistic offering. For us to not only have this offering, but to effectively be able to offer it to customers, one of the key areas we've been increasing focus is integrating artificial intelligence into the entire process. If you think about AI integration, the logical one would be content development, right?

Creative development, creative content. That's an area where we've been using AI for some time, and it's pretty much an industry standard in large part. The other area would be our internal work streams, where we've applied AI in order to improve efficiencies, drive continued cost savings. That's been one as well. I would have to say, I think the most impactful application of AI that we have across our entire offering is on the far left of this visual, and that's MX Intelligence. What MX Intelligence is for Quad, it's our data and analytics.

You can develop the most effective campaign and the most impressive campaign, but if you're not putting it in front of the right target audience, it's not going to have the effectiveness for the customer, and it's not going to drive the ROI results that they're ultimately looking to us for. By being able to target a specific audience that's going to resonate most with the messaging that we're putting out there for a customer, that's critical. What this MX Intelligence consists of is, if you think of Quad as five-plus decades as one of the dominant commercial printers in the U.S., delivering direct mail, catalogs, and magazines into your mailbox for 50-plus years, we touch 92% of U.S. households. We generate 10% of the U.S. Postal Service's daily volume.

10% of what goes in your mailbox, and not all of it's junk mail, 10% of what goes into your mailbox is generated by Quad. We have a long history of what you subscribe to, your purchase patterns, and other personal interests that can help drive accuracy in terms of targeting audiences when developing these campaigns. For us to be effective with this, though, it's a lot of data. For our internal team to be able to pull that data and extract it effectively to develop customized messages for our marketing campaigns and develop those target audiences, we've got to be quick and effective in terms of being able to utilize that data. We've leaned towards Snowflake and their Cortex AI functionality, which has really helped us efficiently pull from this data to drive these campaign results.

We've seen increased ROI as a result for our end customer, which is the objective. In my opinion, this is the secret sauce for Quad's offering, because nobody else has been delivering physical mail to these homes for five-plus decades. Nobody else has the purchasing or individual characteristics or individual interests that we've developed by having that connection with 92% of U.S. households. This is a critical difference maker in really putting together the most effective targeting for our campaigns that we provide customers. A great example of it recently is a company called Spirit of Gallo. I'm from California, so I'm very familiar with the name Gallo. If you're not familiar, Spirit of Gallo is the number four spirits distributor in the United States. Brands, as you can see here, like High Noon, but also Rum Chata, New Amsterdam Vodka. A well-known name, well-respected in the industry.

A new customer, new potential customer, I should say, for Quad. The pitch to Gallo was based entirely on the household data stack. We identified key characteristics and traits of the ideal target audience for various products under the Spirit of Gallo umbrella. We then pulled target audiences as a result of those key characteristics and applied them to a multi-channel or multimedia strategy that, interestingly, did not include print. It included out-of-home, it included social, and it included connected TV as the digital platforms for this campaign. In applying those target audiences to that multi-channel strategy, Spirit of Gallo was really able to differentiate itself from the peers, and it drove the win of the business for Quad to a multi-year contract with Spirit of Gallo, one of the preeminent names in the industry, as I mentioned.

A real success story, and it's one that we actually look to continue to replicate as we apply the use of this proprietary, very unique data stack in our product offering going forward. I'll jump ahead a couple of slides just to share another relatively new initiative that's had some early-stage success. That's our In-Store Connect by Quad platform. If you think about one of the big areas that Quad has focused on over the years are retail inserts. Think of the coupons that used to come in your newspaper. You don't get, most of us don't get newspapers to our door any longer, so therefore you're not getting the coupon book that you used to get. The stores still want that connection. They still want to drive traffic into their shop or into their stores.

They still want to have that connection with their individual consumers. What we've been working on for the last year-plus is developing our own retail media network by connecting both the brick-and-mortar store with CPGs, because the in-store, we have these digital display screens within the stores that are interactive, engaging, tied to the product nearby, directing customers to various points of interest within the store. The point being, still 80% of retail purchase decisions are made in-store. This interaction is critical because it is at a time that they are ready to spend and ready to purchase, and it is extremely attractive to both the stores that we're dealing with as well as the CPGs.

Our objective here with this retail media network strategy is to go out and attract regional mid-tier grocers, so smaller players who on their own could not compete in generating or developing a retail media network with the Walmarts and Krogers of the U.S. By culling and aggregating enough of these regional smaller players, we're going to be able to get the scale to compete, one with the CPGs, but also with their immediate peers who have more of a national prominence and certainly greater spend. This is the objective for us, to go out and get more of these mid-tier grocers to where we get to a number that's meaningful and impactful and competitive. We also want to show to the CPGs that this is impactful and beneficial on their side as well.

This study, which was just recently, demonstrates the effectiveness. This was a control study where we had two sets of stores, one that actually deployed the In-Store Connect screens and the other that did not deploy the screens. We did a compare between the two, and you can see pretty tremendous sales lifts. These are prominent brands with Nestlé, PepsiCo, and Procter & Gamble, but 23% sales lift on DiGiorno Pizza, 25% on Rockstar Beverage. This is displaying ads or possibly discounts within a store versus stores that had no screen presence and no In-Store Connect presence. Finally, the one that I like to call out, I do not know much about laundry detergent purchases. My wife takes care of that, but I am guessing, and from what I understand, a very stable category, not a lot of turn, pretty high loyalty.

To get an eight-point sales lift by having this engagement interaction, I think, is a pretty telling response. Again, another early-stage initiative for us, a year-plus in, where we've seen some really positive early results. Before I hand it over to Tony Staniak, our CFO, to walk through our financials, I want to highlight one last thing. We recently conducted, or I should say, contacted the Harris Poll for a study that we called the Return of Touch Report. I think the results were pretty counterintuitive for a lot of people, but also pretty fascinating and pretty compelling when you think about how they tie to a story like Quad's. The results of the study, and I've got hard copies here if you want to take a look, showed that print experience, in this case, catalogs and in-store shopping still matter.

In fact, they're still preferred by consumers. The most, I think, surprising statistic, it's even more so by the younger generations, by millennials and Gen Zs. They prefer that tactile, tangible experience even more so. These results are emphasized going into the holidays, as you would imagine, where in-store experience flipping through catalogs has probably a lot more impact and a lot more meaning. I think it's counterintuitive in the sense that if you think everything is going digital and everything is going online, if you talk to the consumer, even the youngest consumers, that's absolutely not the case. Feel free to grab one of those reports on your way out if you have interest in digging in. Other than that, I'll turn things over to Tony to walk through financials.

Tony Staniak, CFO, Quad/Graphics: Hi, everybody. Let's move into some financial data. Don's talked a lot about our transformation as a company. This shows the revenue mix. To put some numbers behind that, 2018, we show that year because that was right before we started doing some of these agency acquisitions, like the Betty Agency that we have, as well as Rise Interactive in Chicago, the digital marketing agency. From 2018 to 2024, you see growth in kind of that dark blue and then the royal blue that comes around the side, integrated solutions. That's the agency offerings that Don's talked a lot about, along with logistics. Then targeted print, catalogs, direct marketing, packaging, in-store, and special interest publications. Packaging, we do folding carton work.

In-store, think like in a Target, if you're going in, it's back to school time, and you see a gigantic pencil sign above the temporary back to school area, that'd be something that we would do. Direct mail, 20% off this weekend at Kohl's shows up in your mailbox. All three of those areas, direct mail, packaging, and in-store, are growing from 2024 to 2025. We think that'll be a key generator of growth as we look out to 2028. The reason we provide that year is because we call that the flip year. That's the year that we are projecting to go from revenue decline to revenue growth. Because of the large-scale print at the bottom, primarily magazines and retail inserts, with those areas declining at a low double-digit percentage every year, that large-scale print is decreasing from 31%, 23%, and in 2028, 13%.

As it gets smaller, it's less of a dollar amount for us to overcome to flip to revenue growth from the service offerings and from the targeted print offerings. We'll talk more about growth here in a little bit. The other key thing, if I take that 2028 pie from this slide, and that's what we bring on to the next slide, as we see growth in integrated solutions, the services basket of agency and logistics, as well as targeted print, those are the highest margin profiles that we have on the engagements, right, along with internationals also at that 10%-15%, like targeted print. The integrated solutions, we average 15%-20% adjusted EBITDA margin. As this mix continues to change towards those categories and less in the commoditized printing of magazines and coupons, we're going to see an adjusted EBITDA lift over time.

We're also a strong cash generator. This shows going back to the beginning of the decade, so basically from COVID, we've generated almost $800 million of cash through 2024. It doesn't include what we've generated this year yet, from a mixture of free cash flow as well as cash from asset sales. As we have to rationalize our print platform, primarily in those large-scale areas, we own the vast majority of that real estate. We can sell those buildings, and that proceeds is part of what's reflected here, generating the almost $800 million in cash. We still have about 12 million sq ft of space, of which 70% is owned. Still a significant asset in real estate values that's within our balance sheet. Here, you see almost $800 million of cash generation. Over the past years, we've used that to reduce debt.

We had done some acquisitions, which drove our debt up to a little over a billion dollars entering the decade, or three times leverage. Now, where we were at the end of last year was $350 million of debt, a 66% reduction, and down to 1.6 times leverage, which is near the low end of our target range of one and a half to two. That is where we are going to end, according to the midpoint of our guidance again this year, at about 1.6 leverage with $312 million of debt. A lot of good debt work done over the past five years. That debt is with kind of a who's who of banks, I'll say, J.P. Morgan as our lead bank, but also household names in the banking industry, with Flagstar most recently joining our syndicate. They did that in August.

The maturities are out till 2029, the term loan A and the revolver that we have. Nothing here in the amortizations, nothing of significance. We employ, in our fixed to floating mix, we employ interest rate collars and swaps. The swaps convert what's floating rate debt on the term loan A and revolver to fixed. We also use collars so that as the interest rate decreases, we benefit from that. Over 70% of our debt, which is currently at about a 7% average interest rate, that will continue if interest rates come down. Our interest rates on 70% of the debt will continue to come down. That's been a significant story, all of that debt reduction in our free cash flow generation.

Now that we're at 1.6 times leverage, this year we've been doing more of a balanced capital allocation strategy, not putting every dollar to debt. We still are focused on maintaining low net debt leverage, but also we're looking at shareholder returns. We resumed a dividend last year of $0.05 per quarter per share. We raised it at the beginning of this year to $0.075 per quarter per share, which is a little over a 5% yield. We're paying our shareholders that yield while we're building our story towards revenue growth. From a growth investment standpoint, we're investing in the In-Store Connect space, the screens in stores that Don showed earlier. We also did a small acquisition of a company called Honor, which helps us with logistics savings.

In print, if someone's going to print a piece and get it to your house, 70% of that cost is the mailing cost with the United States Postal Service. Anything we can do that reduces that cost of mailing helps our customers generate higher print volumes and savings that we share in with our clients. This Honor acquisition has brought our density, what we call high-density mailings, to a higher level so that when the mailman walks his route, more of the mail is sorted in the order that he walks the route, which brings it to the lowest level of cost from the United States Postal Service. An important acquisition for us to do also again provided growth in top line. We'll continue to look for opportunities both on share buybacks and on M&A.

Long-term financial goals, we had an investor day last year. These numbers in the 2028 outlook column are the same, so we feel we're on track. From a revenue perspective, if you exclude divestitures, which at the beginning of this year, at the end of February, we divested of our European print operations. If you pull that out to be apples to apples, this year we're at a 4% revenue decline. Last year, from 2023 to 2024, it was a 10% revenue decline. 10% down to 4, making traction towards what we call the net sales inflection point in 2028, where full-year revenue we expect to grow from 2027 to 2028 on our way to longer-term sales growth.

From an adjusted EBITDA perspective, we're also going to see margin increase because, as I showed on the pie chart earlier, the areas that our revenue is migrating towards are higher margin, more targeted. They drive a higher response rate from customers. We think we can get to 9.4% EBITDA margin in 2028, significant improvement from where we are now, which is at roughly about 8% on our way to what we think can be a low double-digit margin company. From a free cash flow conversion, this year we're on track for 28%. Of that EBITDA, 28% dropping through to free cash flow. We plan to increase that by 2028 to 35%, decreasing interest costs, a big component of that, as well as decreased restructuring costs with less facilities that we anticipate to close going forward.

We can hang on to more of that dollars while we're maintaining low debt leverage. This is kind of the financial picture and plan that we're executing to over the next few years. With that, we are up for questions, if any questions. Yes.

At the front end of that presentation, you implied that you own the subscription data on 92% of the U.S. households. Is that correct? You have hard data that you own on 92% of the U.S. households that people might find useful.

Sandy Martin, Host, Three-Part Advisors: Do you want to take that one?

Don Potts, Executive Director of IR, Quad/Graphics: Yeah. That comes from, I would not say specific subscription data. It comes from the receipt of those subscriptions, right? What is ultimately mailed to a home, to a mailbox, whether it is that magazine, that catalog, that individual order, we have histories of that. We work closely with the retailers to actually track that information. They want to know exactly what is being purchased and where, and certainly it is additive to our household data stack as well.

Tony Staniak, CFO, Quad/Graphics: Yeah. I'll go just a little further with that. We cannot sell directly like that data list, right? What we can do is we can use that data to make conclusions about where marketing should be and provide that to our clients to better inform their marketing decisions.

Don Potts, Executive Director of IR, Quad/Graphics: Yeah. One of the common questions we get is monetizing that data stack because it is so powerful. How we monetize it, exactly that. Not third party. We're not looking to distribute it. We're looking to truly leverage it in the campaign offering that we develop for our customers.

I'm not sure how to ask this question, but in the in-store advertising network, it sounds like you're intent on growing fairly significantly. That is sort of small to mid-size retail operation that ultimately you want to get to a size such that it's an attractive distribution point for the major CPGs, just like your in-store advertising network for Walmart or whoever else. Is that fair?

Sandy Martin, Host, Three-Part Advisors: Yeah. That's exactly right.

Tony Staniak, CFO, Quad/Graphics: That's exactly right.

You own the kiosks or the equipment, but then does that have to move around? Do you lease that space in a store for a long term? How does that all work?

Sandy Martin, Host, Three-Part Advisors: Yeah. I can step in on that one. We work hand in hand with the retailer to place the screens in stores. It's our screens. We install the screens. The retailer gets a split of the revenue for allowing us to put the screens in stores. CPGs are the ones who pay for that. I think on the example that we showed is like Rice Krispies, right? They'll pay to have their ad right there. The retailer gets a minority split. We get majority split for putting up the cat back. For the retailer, it's a way to monetize their foot traffic that they don't do today by people walking past that image. Oh, yeah.

Can you walk us through some of the assumptions and improvements with free cash flow generation?

The assumptions in free cash flow generation.

Yeah. Because I think you showed the slide earlier about the conversion improving over the next three to four months of that year. What's behind that?

Yeah. Right now, when we walk from adjusted EBITDA down to free cash flow, three main pieces are interest expense, restructuring expense, and capital expenditures, right? Tax is a pretty minor component for us in that walk. From a capital expenditures perspective, we're expecting to put roughly 2% of revenue every year into CapEx. That's been our historical trend. That CapEx is changing in its composition more towards tech and even those screens in stores that we were just talking about, less towards the heavy iron of printing presses. That will be $50 million-$60 million, about 2% of our revenue will be on that. That'll hold relatively steady. Again, the restructuring expense, we expect less plant closures in the future, and so less severance, less tear-down costs of the equipment, etc.

On interest expense, with decreasing that debt, which was $1 billion, down to $350 million, $312 million by the end of this year, we're going to continue to walk that down as well at the same point that the adjusted EBITDA itself is increasing and covering more of our fixed costs, dropping more of that through to the bottom line as well.

You're moving that more into that fixed income so that it makes more cash flow?

It is. It is. Okay. Other questions?

Don Potts, Executive Director of IR, Quad/Graphics: I think the last thing I would highlight is just purely a valuation story. I mean, we've talked about the story of the transformation of Quad, right? Core commercial printer into this end-to-end diversified marketing offering. The market still values us as a core commercial printer. Three- to four-times EBITDA multiple is where we've traded. It's historically where print companies have traded. If you look at those who offer more of that creative and digital media side, it's more like seven- to eight-times EBITDA. While we're not going to be a pure play to take on the agencies and command an 8% multiple, there's some hybrid or combination that I think would be fair value in the marketplace, and that gives a lot of upside in terms of future trading.

Tony Staniak, CFO, Quad/Graphics: Yeah. For now, I mean, just to add on to that, we're paying a pretty strong dividend yield to reward our investors while they're waiting for us to hit the flip in revenue in 2028. We believe upon achieving revenue growth, that will kind of unlock the key to higher EBITDA multiples. That right now, why our stock is at a depressed price. Okay. Thanks, everybody.

Sandy Martin, Host, Three-Part Advisors: Thank you for coming in.

Tony Staniak, CFO, Quad/Graphics: Appreciate so many people joining.

Sandy Martin, Host, Three-Part Advisors: Appreciate it.

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