VISTA LAGS AS CIMPRESS HITS RECORD RESULTS

Cimpress, owner of online print giant Vista, has posted record sales and profits for the year, but Vista itself failed to shine compared with the group’s other operations.

Vista, which has a plant in Deer Park, Melbourne, achieved some US$1.5bn in revenue for the year ending 30 June. It is the biggest part Cimpress, where sales at the mass-customisation and web-to-print giant increased to US$2.89bn from $2.58bn in the financial year.

Adjusted EBITDA for the group fell by 20 per cent from US$349m to US$281m, while EBITDA at the Vista division alone fell by US$124m. Other parts of the group are Upload & Print businesses, National Pen, BuildASign, and Printi.

While hailing the “all-time high consolidated revenue and gross profit” chairman and CEO Robert Keane said, “The Vista segment generates our highest profits, but those profits and cashflow are currently depressed relative to past and potential levels.

“To return Vista to sustained revenue growth and to its traditional levels of profit, we have been investing deeply in the multi-year transformation journey. We seek to build what will become best-in-world design and service capabilities that will integrate seamlessly with a broad range of physical and digital small business marketing products.”

Keane said that multiple factors impacted Vista's FY2022 profitability, including revenue growth that was not as strong as the group’s other businesses, and cost inflation not offset by price increases “as price testing in major markets was limited prior to Vista's platform migration”, together with high levels of discretionary long-term investment.

Keane said that if the world went into an inflation driven recession, the impact on the group was unknown. However it does have US$327m in cash and marketable securities to help it ride out any storm.