Pitney Bowes Q1 2026 Earnings Call - Cash Flow Surge and Presort Turnaround Signal Strategic Shift

Unknown, Investor Relations / Legal, Pitney Bowes: Good morning, and thank you for joining us. Included in today’s presentation are forward-looking statements about our future business and financial performance. Forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to be materially different from our projections. More information about these items can be found in our earnings press release, our Form 10-K and other reports filed with the SEC that are located on our website at www.pb.com and by clicking on Investor Relations. Please keep in mind that we do not undertake any obligation to update forward-looking statements as a result of new information or developments. Also included in today’s presentation are non-GAAP measures, specifically EBIT, EBITDA, EPS, and free cash flow are all on an adjusted basis. You can find reconciliations for these items to the appropriate GAAP measures in the tables attached to our press release.

We have also provided a slide presentation and spreadsheet with historical segment information on our website. With that, I’d like to turn the call over to Kurt.

Kurt, Chief Executive Officer, Pitney Bowes: Good morning, and thank you for joining us today. As reflected in our earnings release, first quarter results were strong and broad-based. Our results and outlook reflects momentum in the business and supported the upping of our guidance. SendTech performed well in the quarter and is showing potential signs of turning the corner on sales. Presort continues to win business and build sales momentum. We continue to expect growth to return to the business in the third quarter. Turning to Pitney Bowes Bank, Steve and his team are making rapid progress with respect to operational improvements and in identifying value-driving opportunities. Additionally, we’ve delivered significant shareholder value through our capital allocation policy, including dividend increases and significant share repurchases. Finally, we have started interviewing advisors for the second stage of our strategic review. In summary, Pitney Bowes is extremely well-positioned for the long term.

In closing, I feel obliged to send out a special thank you to the over 6,000 Pitney Bowes team members. Our results are a direct reflection of their talent and dedication to the company. With that, let’s open the call for questions.

Operator: Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, if you have a question or comment at this time, please press star 11 on your telephone. If your question has been answered and you wish to remove yourself from the queue, please press star 11 again. We’ll pause for a moment while we compile our Q&A roster. Our first question comes from Jasper Bibb with Truist Securities. Your line is open.

Jasper Bibb, Analyst, Truist Securities: Good morning, guys. Can you talk about the consolidation opportunity in Presort? You know, whether this quarter mentioned hiring Greenhill to evaluate opportunities there. Historically, I think a lot of your acquisitions in that business has been pretty much mom and pops, which I imagine you can, you know, handle internally without having to have an investment bank involved. I guess does hiring Greenhill signal any change there? Did you potentially consider larger acquisitions in that segment? You’re approaching consolidation opportunity any differently than you have in the past?

Kurt, Chief Executive Officer, Pitney Bowes: Jasper, thanks for joining us and thanks for the question. With respect to the Presort acquisition, we’ve been talking about that for quite a bit in terms of being a, you know, a real strategy for us. As we’ve mentioned, there’s great opportunity to create value. Yes, we can go out and pursue these opportunities on our own. Just having an outside advisor really can help, you know, accelerate that. You know, we have a team that’s heavily dedicated on execution within the business, but having dedicated resources to really accelerate those discussions can only help. With respect to size of acquisition, you know, the sweet spot really is quite frequently the smaller mom-and-pop type Presort opportunities.

Again, you know, as we continue to progress, get better at running our business, we wanna look at all opportunities to really create value for the business. As we’ve said so many times before, these deals typically come at a pretty low multiple or, you know, immediately accretive to the business. You know, as our capital position gets better, as our balance sheet gets stronger, you know, it starts to open up additional opportunities. We’re primarily focused on trying to find some of these smaller tuck-in acquisitions that we can pursue.

Jasper Bibb, Analyst, Truist Securities: Thanks. You know, really nice quarter for SendTech. Can you maybe just talk about, you know, what worked this quarter, how you see that business trending over the balance of the year? You know, in your guidance scenario, do you think SendTech could potentially flatten out on the year-over-year revenue growth or maybe even grow by the end of the year and what gets you there?

Kurt, Chief Executive Officer, Pitney Bowes: Yeah. Jasper, we don’t wanna get ahead of ourselves, but I’ll just start by pointing out or answering the part of your question is of what’s working. Todd and his team are doing a fantastic job as you know, as re-reflected in our results. I’d highlight sort of 2 categories and then a few points under each. With respect to our meters business, I think there’s been a level of perhaps neglect in terms of focusing on slowing the rate of decline. We’re not delusional about the future of mail, but there’s still a lot we can be doing. There’s 3 areas of focus that Todd and his team have been really digging into that are helping us slow that rate of decline.

One, we’re starting to look, you know, historically, we’ve handled virtually all cancellations as a processing issue, not as a retention issue. Historically, if somebody asked to cancel their meter, we processed it, and that was the end of it. We’re now switching to, when those requests come in, doing outreach to try to figure out can we save that customer? What can we do to make sure they’re getting the most value out of the meter and make them hopefully reconsider the decision? Second of all, one of the things we’re looking is predictive analytics. What we’re doing now is trying to, you know, it’s one thing to try to save somebody when they’ve decided to leave.

We’re putting a lot of work into understanding what are the metrics, what are the signs that a customer is at risk, and trying to proactively get to those customers, figure out can we offer them a better solution in advance, figure out how they can get more value out of their meter, which we expect to, you know, reduce the rate of cancellations. Finally, we’re refocusing on customer acquisition. You know, historically, we’ve been so focused on GEC and other parts of the business that, you know, I don’t know that we put enough effort into our actual sales effort. We believe we have the best products, best services in the space. We’re proud of it. We should be out talking to the market more about it. Todd and his team are really focusing on go-to-market strategies there.

You know, the real opportunity for growth comes from the shipping software side. There again, there’s three things we’re really doing. One is we’re narrowing and simplifying our offerings. Right now, we offer a high number of shipping software solutions, which I think can create some confusion in the market. It also limits our ability to optimize those offerings. We’re putting a lot of effort into narrowing our product base and improving those products for our customers to help accelerate growth. Second of all, you know, Pitney Bowes has a proud tradition of product innovation and technology development, that’s somewhat driven our product development within shipping software. Often we would look at what’s a really cool technology we can implement in the shipping software space, then figure out what customers want that.

We’re flipping that on its head and figuring out what do our customers want and how do we meet that need. Then finally, and this will become more apparent in coming quarters, we’re using the bank as a differentiator in the shipping software space. You know, financing, it can be pretty important in the shipping software space. There’s a lot of cash that flows through that business, and being the only player out there with a bank gives us real opportunities to offer products and services to customers that our competitors simply can’t. You know, I guess put that all together, you know, that’s the progress we’re making in terms of when we get to growth.

I think we’ve made a lot of promises in the past and not be able to deliver. I, you know, we and, you know, our team, I keep emphasizing let’s focus on getting things right day to day, and the future will take care of itself. We, you know, I believe that day is coming, but we’ll update as we get closer to that date.

Jasper Bibb, Analyst, Truist Securities: That all makes a lot of sense. Maybe last one for me. It sounded like a good quarter for net new business in Presort. I think the letter mentioned you think volumes might get back to growth in the back half of the year. I guess just on that comment, can you piece out maybe how much of that is, you know, net new business wins and incremental volume that you won versus, I guess lapping the customer losses in the prior year?

Kurt, Chief Executive Officer, Pitney Bowes: Yeah. Yeah. Paul, I know you’ve done a lot of work on that. Do you want to take that one?

Paul, Chief Financial Officer, Pitney Bowes: On Presort? Yeah, look, we’ve stopped the losses, and we’re picking up wins, and we’re obviously filling our pipeline, which is the right thing. I think as we get into the latter half of the year, we should start to see some positive momentum again in Presort.

Jasper Bibb, Analyst, Truist Securities: Got it. Thanks for taking the question.

Kurt, Chief Executive Officer, Pitney Bowes: Thank you, Jasper.

Operator: One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from Aaron Kimson with Citizens. Your line is open.

Aaron Kimson, Analyst, Citizens: Great. Thanks for the questions. Can you help us think about the drivers of the strong 1Q free cash flow of forty-three and a half million dollars? I think the consensus before you pre-announced on April 21st was a $14 million outflow, so call it a fifty-seven and a half million dollar delta to the upside. Is there a signal investors should be taking away about the durability of free cash flow between years, given that cash flow can vary quarter to quarter, but you followed up a strong 4Q 2025 number with a strong 1Q 2026 number? Thanks.

Paul, Chief Financial Officer, Pitney Bowes: Hi, Aaron Kimson. Now, listen, this is Paul. Thanks for the question. You know, look, we had good working capital management in Q1, better than I would have originally thought. So that was a good thing, and you are right to point out it was strong in Q4. At the end of the day, we don’t totally control all aspects of when our Presort customers prepay. You know, obviously we benefit from that, and we used it to improve our operating performance. Yeah, overall solid operating performance, Q4, Q1, and just good working capital management are the reasons. Yeah, absolutely, I think there’s durability in our free cash flow.

I mean, Kurt and I have both said for many times, you know, we’re an undervalued stock if you believe in free cash flow, and obviously the durability is sort of proving itself out.

Kurt, Chief Executive Officer, Pitney Bowes: Yeah. Aaron, just to add to that, you know, the way that we’re really looking at it, in your question about durability, Q4 was obviously an incredibly strong quarter for cash flow. There was a little bit of concern on our part that, you know, as you mentioned with working capital, there could have been a pull forward effect of cash flow that maybe would have normally come in Q1, got pushed into Q4. With the strength we saw in Q1, there’s two real takeaways. One, it makes us more confident that our Q4 cash flow was a real number, not a artificially impacted number by, you know, by the pull forward of cash. Secondarily, you know, the strength of Q1 also gives us a lot of optimism for the current year.

You know, this is the first positive free cash flow quarter we’ve had in quite a few years. We’re trying to be a little conservative on the guidance side. This is, you know, a whole new world for us in terms of the strength we’re seeing in our cash flow. We like to think it’s durable and will lead to a strong 2026. We’re trying to be a little bit conservative on the cash flow side just in case there was a pull-forward effect into Q4 and Q1.

Aaron Kimson, Analyst, Citizens: Okay, that’s helpful. Then bigger picture, Kurt, this has been a great story since you formally stepped into the CEO seat from the board almost a year ago now. Stock closed at $15.54 yesterday versus $9.10 before you came down from the board and officially took over. What’s the one thing you’re most proud of over the last year, and then maybe something that’s proven harder than you thought it would have been initially that you’re hoping to get right in the remaining two-thirds of 2026? Thank you.

Kurt, Chief Executive Officer, Pitney Bowes: Yeah. In terms of the thing I’m most proud of, I’d really say the employees of Pitney Bowes. We have over 6,000 team members. You know, I’m an ex-consultant. I’ve, you know, been in, you know, been in startups, worked inside of, you know, more than a dozen companies. One thing that impressed me even before joining the board and, you know, before the proxy campaign, it’s just evident how dedicated the employees are to the company. I think maybe they needed better guidance and leadership, but the commitment is there. You know, I think it’s a Peter Drucker saying that culture eats strategy for lunch. The culture of Pitney Bowes is incredibly strong.

Just seeing the ability of employees to stay focused on execution, remain upbeat, remain committed to the transformation despite not having maybe the clarity they might want in terms of strategy. I think the way to run a business is to fix what you have and then figure out how to grow from there. For a company in our situation, that can be incredibly hard on employees, and they’ve performed admirably. You know, that’s certainly been the thing I’ve been most proud of. As far as the biggest challenge, I would just point to our forecasting, you know, that, you know, it’s always difficult as a CEO to come out, you know, reiterate guidance and then miss.

I think, you know, that highlighted some of the problems we had in terms of forecasting within the business. Paul and his team have done an incredible job over the past few months to really improve our ability to forecast. There’s been a silver lining to it. To get better at forecasting, it’s really forced the team to dig into the nuts and bolts of the business, to get down into the weeds. As we do that, we’re learning a lot about the business and helping us make better decisions on a go-forward basis.

Operator: Thank you. One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from George Tong with Goldman Sachs. Your line is open.

George Tong, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: Hi. Thanks. Good morning. On Presort, you’re now competitively priced versus peers and are starting to win back market share. Can you elaborate on the near-term and then longer-term strategies you have to drive a further revenue recovery from both a product and sales perspective?

Kurt, Chief Executive Officer, Pitney Bowes: Yeah. Paul, do you wanna take this one as well? Like, I know you’ve put a lot of work in the Presort side of things.

Paul, Chief Financial Officer, Pitney Bowes: Look, I mean, obviously, it’s important for us to know our cost in Presort. We, you know, we have an advantage given we’re the low-cost provider, we can sort of flex that muscle if we so choose to do that. What we’re seeing is, you know, Debbie and her team are doing a great job and their new sales team of building up our pipeline. That in part is one of the reasons it led us to take actions on our guidance where we increased the lower end and in some places raised the upper end. We know our costs, we know where our position is. We’ve done a good job of, you know, stemming the losses, picking up some wins, and I see momentum picking up.

Kurt, anything you wanna add to that?

Kurt, Chief Executive Officer, Pitney Bowes: Yeah. I would just say, George, I think you’ve known our company for quite some time. Looking back with GEC, there was such a focus on generating cash flow from the core businesses to fuel the growth of GEC, that I would say that SendTech and Presort were really starved of resources. Debbie and her team have done a fantastic job. You know, we’ve opened up the purse strings to allow Debbie to invest in new capital, get more aggressive on pricing. Rather than focusing on how do we maximize free cash flow tomorrow, how do we maximize long-term free cash flow? If you think about it’s not just on the revenue side, it’s also on the cost side. You know, sometimes you have to spend money to save money.

A lot of things we could do to improve efficiency require resources to evaluate, to look into, and those weren’t there for Debbie in the past. You know, I think we’ll continue to get more efficient. Our cost advantage should grow over time, and as Paul said, just gives us more ability to price aggressively, win more business. It’s, you know, there’s a bit of a flywheel effect. The bigger we get, the more profitable we get, you know, on a, on a per piece basis.

Paul, Chief Financial Officer, Pitney Bowes: George, the only other part to that is obviously we’re in a great liquidity position these days, you know, we can now sort of look at acquisition opportunities. Kurt mentioned that in his letter about that. You know, inorganic growth and also organic growth.

Operator: Thank you. One moment for our next question.

Kurt, Chief Executive Officer, Pitney Bowes: Thank you, George.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from Anthony Lebiedzinski with Sidoti. Your line is open.

Anthony Lebiedzinski, Analyst, Sidoti: Good morning, thank you for taking the questions. You know, it certainly was nice to see the SendTech business down only less than 1%. You know, quite an achievement there. Can you comment on the number of paid software subscribers that you talked about in the press release and how that contributed to Q1 and your increased guidance? Also you talked about booking sales also up in Q1 and Q2, if you could comment on that as well. Then I have one other question about the SendTech as well.

Kurt, Chief Executive Officer, Pitney Bowes: Yeah. Do you wanna take that, Paul?

Paul, Chief Financial Officer, Pitney Bowes: Yeah. Let’s talk about bookings. You know, we’re seeing growth in our pipeline and the sales teams where they are at their quotas. They’re achieving targets that we set out for them. Again, reason why we did what we did on guidance, we’re seeing positive momentum there. As far as the subscriptions, I mean, we are seeing, you know, we are seeing better enterprise subscriptions. I don’t know if we actually give the exact number, if we’ve ever given that out. You know, the reason we have better sales subscription, paid subscription is also our sales team’s performing. That’s what it is. One is really linked to the other.

I don’t, again, I don’t wanna be evasive on you, Anthony, but I don’t think we’ve ever given out exact paid subscription numbers.

Kurt, Chief Executive Officer, Pitney Bowes: Yeah.

Paul, Chief Financial Officer, Pitney Bowes: If it is something that-

Kurt, Chief Executive Officer, Pitney Bowes: That’s fair.

Paul, Chief Financial Officer, Pitney Bowes: that we should, you know, something maybe we’ll consider putting on our investor website at some point, but let us think about that. Kurt, you wanna add to that?

Kurt, Chief Executive Officer, Pitney Bowes: Yeah, yeah. Anthony, a couple things I’d add as well. You know, I think we put in our release, this is the first year that bookings were up year-over-year. In terms of impact on the quarter, you know, one thing important to understand about our shipping software business and our meter business as well, is we have what we have equipment sales, you know, upfront one-time revenue. We also have what we call stream revenue. Think of it as SaaS or recurring revenue. You know, that’s, you know, discounts on shipping labels, et cetera. Whenever you see strong sales and bookings like we saw in Q1, it certainly helps revenue. One of the encouraging part is we do get that stream revenue that’s gonna help us in future quarters. That’s been really encouraging.

You know, going back to the previous question about what you’re proud of, you know, what’s really driving it is, you know, Todd has reignited the sales organization, the go-to-market strategy. Just one anecdote that I personally love is we had our Winners Circle Conference down in Florida or Fort Lauderdale recently, and it was all the top salespeople across the organization. And it was in a big hotel that hosts all sorts of conferences. In coming out of that conference, there’s multiple companies there. We had one of our salespeople go over to the big conference right next to us, you know, start talking to people, find out what it is they did.

Got in touch with, you know, some of the leadership there, started pitching our solution. We have a, you know, a sales lead coming out of that. That type of initiative, you know, hasn’t always been there with us, but we’ve gotten incredibly aggressive in our go-to-market. Again, the energy and the enthusiasm is great to see. It’s very encouraging. We’re getting better at our product, you know, developing products. We’re getting a lot better in go-to-market strategies, and we’re also getting a lot more aggressive. You know, more to come, but it’s an encouraging sign. It’s again showing up in our results.

Anthony Lebiedzinski, Analyst, Sidoti: That’s great to hear. Kurt, in your shareholder letter, you did say that you could experience some one-time headwinds later in the year for SendTech. What did you mean by that? Maybe if you can elaborate on that.

Kurt, Chief Executive Officer, Pitney Bowes: Without going into too much detail ’cause, you know, it does pertain to customers that we work with. What I’d say is when you really think about the core of our business within SendTech, it’s the meters and shipping software. We do have some related businesses that are, I would call non-core. You know, some of them get into things like fulfillment, and they’re not really central to what our business is. Just the reality is it’s not a core business to us, and over time we expect those to go away. You know, there’s certainly the potential in the second half. You know, we have 1 customer in particular that the volumes decline almost quarterly, and that could pick up in the second half of the year.

Unfortunately it will create a headwind, but it doesn’t reflect on the overall health of the core business. We just wanna be cognizant and, you know, that may not come to pass, but we just want to be very transparent with investors about, you know, some things that might be coming down the pike.

Anthony Lebiedzinski, Analyst, Sidoti: Gotcha. Okay. Last question from me. A few weeks ago, you guys announced a partnership or collaboration with Temu. Can you just comment maybe on that? You know, what have you seen thus far? Could we see additional partnerships like this, being announced by the company?

Kurt, Chief Executive Officer, Pitney Bowes: Yes. We don’t wanna get, you know, too much into the weeds on, you know, our customer relationships with any particular customer. Again, this is something that we’re really focused on, and it’s figuring out how do we make the most of the assets we have. You know, you know, we’ve looked into ways to offer, you know, banking services to customers. We’ve looked at all sorts of ways trying to think creatively about, with our unique set of assets, how we can do that. You know, what you’re discussing is more of what I’d call, you know, sort of a beta test, where we’re trying to figure out, is this something that’ll work? We don’t wanna lean too heavily into it. You know, we’ll see how that particular deal works out.

If we have success there, we’ll certainly try to, you know, spread it throughout the organization. I would just say it’s just a little bit too early to talk more about that. You know, maybe in a future call, assuming we have success, we can, you know, have a fuller discussion on that.

Anthony Lebiedzinski, Analyst, Sidoti: Very good. Well, thank you very much and best of luck.

Kurt, Chief Executive Officer, Pitney Bowes: All right. Thank you, Anthony.

Operator: One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from Kartik Mehta with Northcoast Research. Your line is open.

Kartik Mehta, Analyst, Northcoast Research: Hey, good morning. Kurt, you know, you talked about potentially adding, I don’t wanna use this word, but adding maybe another business line to SendTech, to help the growth profile of that business and being a complementary business. I’m wondering, you know, if you have any more thoughts on that and if that would be something that’s small or something that you’re thinking of that would be bigger that could actually change the trajectory of that business?

Kurt, Chief Executive Officer, Pitney Bowes: Yeah. Kartik, I apologize. Is this from the letter? Is this previous calls we’ve talked about adding?

Kartik Mehta, Analyst, Northcoast Research: Yeah, just, I think where we’ve had previous conversations.

Kurt, Chief Executive Officer, Pitney Bowes: Okay

Kartik Mehta, Analyst, Northcoast Research: where I think SendTech has an opportunity to maybe use some of the strengths of that business, and if it’s possible to maybe add another business line or maybe that’s too big of a word, but add another business to help that.

Kurt, Chief Executive Officer, Pitney Bowes: Got it. Yeah. I guess, you know, the easiest thing that I can that I can point to that we’ve discussed publicly really relies on the Bank. You know, as you can imagine, if you’re an e-commerce company producing a tremendous amount of shipping labels, there’s a lot of outflow of cash. You know, obviously we don’t wanna expose ourselves to undesirable credit risk. We can really, you know, by extending credit to those customers, if they’re credit worthy, you know, we have a strong balance sheet, a lot of access to capital. With the Bank, we have access to brokered CDs and low cost of capital.

It’s a way to essentially take advantage of our low cost of capital in the bank to profit by improving opportunities for our customers that have a significantly higher cost of capital. That would just be one example of a real opportunity for us. Again, just to I can’t emphasize it enough ’cause I don’t feel like we get appropriate value for the bank that we have. You know, our borrowing rate at the bank is, you know, on deposits is incredibly low. Again, we have access to brokered CDs, which is well below the cost of capital for any of our competitors. It’s a really unique asset we have.

You’ll see over time with Steve and his team, ramping up, you know, some of the value we can create out of the bank, not just through the bank, but also for our customers and other businesses.

Kartik Mehta, Analyst, Northcoast Research: No, I think the bank is a pretty big asset and probably an area you can leverage a lot more. Kurt, just on cost cutting, you’ve done a great job reducing the cost of the business, and it seems like from your commentary in sales hasn’t suffered. You know, one of the biggest issues or questions comes up is the company cutting too much cost, and is it going to hurt the eventual long-term prospects of the company? I’m wondering how you’re managing the cost cutting to make sure that the true meat of the company doesn’t get hurt.

Kurt, Chief Executive Officer, Pitney Bowes: Yeah. Why don’t I let Paul take that? Obviously, he’s, you know, integral to what we’re doing on the cost side, but I think he can answer that pretty well for you.

Paul, Chief Financial Officer, Pitney Bowes: Yeah. Kartik, I mean, obviously we’re the initial round of cuts, that’s more like blunt force, we’ve been very surgical in how we do cuts going forward. Obviously, we don’t wanna cut into our muscles. We’ve got muscles to flex. I don’t think that our costs are such that it’s gonna impact our ability to grow this business in the future. I spend a lot of time here in the office, you know, I live through this, as does Kurt. We’re very mindful of that, not to overcut this such that this company doesn’t have a viable future going forward.

The bigger point is initially, you know, it was as it always, a lot of times it happens, you know, you bring in a consulting firm to do this. This last round of cuts, this was all management led. You know, we were very, refined on how we did that. You know, to this point, we’re seeing positive results.

Kurt, Chief Executive Officer, Pitney Bowes: Kartik, just a couple things to add as well. Contrary to, I would almost say our experience has been a little bit different to than the concept of your question. A great example I’d point to. First of all, just for some context, a lot of our focus has been, you know, employee focused. You know, we’ve gone through some painful rifts, which has been really hard on the team. You know, we’re of the mindset that at this point we have You know, hopefully that’s not something that’s a part of our future. Associated with those rifts, not only have we not cut into muscle, but we’re a 105-year-old company.

We’ve had some processes in place that have, you know, been what they’ve been for, you know, 20, 30, 40 years. As we’ve made some changes, you know, people have stepped up into new roles, had to learn those roles. Just as 1 example, you know, within HR, we elevated somebody who’s, you know, looking at benefits and having to get up to speed on our benefits plan. That person’s taking a whole new look at them, and they’ve identified, you know, north of $1 million of just low-hanging fruit that we can take out of the business from third party spend. That was a direct result of bringing somebody new into the chair as a result of the cuts we’ve had.

In a way, these cuts are leading to new thinking within the business and are leading to better outcomes rather than worse.

Kartik Mehta, Analyst, Northcoast Research: Thanks, Kurt, and Paul. That was very helpful.

Kurt, Chief Executive Officer, Pitney Bowes: Yeah. Thank you, Kartik.

Kartik Mehta, Analyst, Northcoast Research: Yep.

Operator: One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from Justin Dopierala with DOMO Capital. Your line is open.

Justin Dopierala, Analyst, DOMO Capital: Good morning. On your pre-release, there seemed to be some confusion regarding the pension expenses, and I’d say also some even skepticism about whether or not you actually raised guidance. I was just wondering if you could provide some clarity on that.

Paul, Chief Financial Officer, Pitney Bowes: Yeah, no, I can, I can address that. We absolutely did raise guidance. You know, we further refined our thoughts on how we treat, how we sort of take pension out of our numbers. I mean, it’s true that we’ve annuitized our U.S. and Canadian pensions very successfully, and now we’re turning our attention to a few other ones. What we’ve decided on is we need a triggering event, and when we have that triggering event, we’ll back that out of our adjusted numbers. You know, if you, if you didn’t have that, our guidance would have gone up even more. What you’re seeing is we’re erring on the side of conservatism. There’s many examples out there of companies backing out all legacy pensions.

We decided we’re gonna tie it to a triggering event.

Kurt, Chief Executive Officer, Pitney Bowes: Just to be clear, I don’t know if the genesis of your question, Justin, to put a very fine point on it, you know, Value Investors Club, other places, you know, we’ve seen comments that, hey, this pension issue actually was artificially made things look better, and it’s quite the opposite. Our guidance would have been stronger were it not for this change. I think, you know, some of those investors, presumably shorts, you know, have the story backwards.

Justin Dopierala, Analyst, DOMO Capital: Perfect. Makes a lot of sense. Lastly, Kurt, reading your CEO letter, you know, at the very end, you know, there seemed to be to me a shift in tone perhaps or emphasis and at least regarding debt. It seemed to be, you know, some emphasis. I don’t know. The way I read it sounded like we should be expecting, you know, some more material payments on reducing leverage. I guess if you could just maybe provide your thoughts on that. Thank you.

Kurt, Chief Executive Officer, Pitney Bowes: Yeah. I’ll give a quick answer, Paul obviously is the guy to give the more detailed answer. You know, obviously, you know, we have a fiduciary duty to do what’s in the best interest of our shareholders. At the same time, part of doing that is we have partners in our, you know, in our lenders, whether it’s banks or debt holders. You know, our obligation is to our shareholders, but a part of that obligation is to make sure we have a good relationship with our debt holders. You know, we’ve done a lot for our shareholder. We think it’s appropriate to de-risk for the lenders to, you know, make sure that they wanna continue to work with us and be a lender to us.

Specific to de-levering, we’re in a really strong financial position. We have the 2027s coming up. We have cash and liquidity to take that out. Our expectation would be within the next couple of months that we should be able to pay off the 2027s without having to issue any additional debt.

Justin Dopierala, Analyst, DOMO Capital: Wow.

Kurt, Chief Executive Officer, Pitney Bowes: answer to the broader issue.

Paul, Chief Financial Officer, Pitney Bowes: Yeah. I mean, look, I’ll just to sort of add to what Kurt said, obviously, you know, we have a duty to our shareholders. It was the best course of action to do the share buybacks in the manner of which we did. You know, now we shift to other aspects. You know, obviously, we desire to have improved credit ratings. We’re working on that. With improved credit ratings is obviously a goal to de-lever the company. I’ve said, you know, to keep our net debt to EBITDA, you know, around 3 or slightly lower than that. That’s just our next focus area. Obviously, the most prompt thing we have, which is current to us, is our twenty-sevens.

As Kurt said, you know, between cash and liquidity, you know, and other tools that our banking partners have out there, you know, we’re gonna address that in the next few months. We need to get this company back to the right, appropriate leverage, and that’s now our focus.

Justin Dopierala, Analyst, DOMO Capital: That’s amazing. Thank you.

Kurt, Chief Executive Officer, Pitney Bowes: Thank you, Justin.

Operator: I’m not showing any further questions at this time. I’d like to turn the call back over to Kurt for any further remarks.

Kurt, Chief Executive Officer, Pitney Bowes: Great. Thank you. Yes, everybody, thank you for joining us. Again, I can’t be more excited about the performance of the business. You know, it’s a great quarter for us. We had a lot of progress that makes us optimistic about the coming quarters and years. You know, and I would just like to say a thank you to, first of all, our shareholders for the trust you put in us. We work hard every day to try to deliver value for you. I think we’re doing a pretty good job so far, and I think there’s a lot of good things to come. Second, you know, a big thank you to the employees. As I’ve said before, this truly is an exceptional set of employees at this company.

The dedication to the company is phenomenal, and I can’t thank all of them enough for the hard work they put in. Then finally, a thank you as well to our customers. You know, they’re incredibly important partners to us, and we strive every day to do a better job for them. You know, just appreciate the trust they put in us, and we continue to drive value for them and look forward to, you know, continued business with them in the future. Thank you, everybody, for joining, and I look forward to next quarter’s call.

Operator: Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. This concludes today’s presentation. We thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect and have a wonderful day.