Company: DLX
Filing Date: 2025-02-21
Form Type: 10-K
Source: 0000027996-25-000051
Chunk: 58

Company: DELUXE CORP
Filing Date: 2025-02-21
Form: 10-K
Item: Item 7
Chunk 58
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 accessories, as well as business exits, which drove a $45 million reduction. These declines were partially offset by pricing actions and growth in data-driven marketing and merchant services.

•Net income – Increased by $27 million to $53 million, reflecting the impact of our pricing and cost reduction actions and reduced restructuring and integration expense. These positive factors were partially offset by the loss of earnings from exited businesses, the secular revenue declines in the Print segment, and inflationary pressures on hourly wages, materials, and delivery costs.

•Adjusted EBITDA – Decreased by $5 million to $412 million, including the impact of business exits, which drove a $20 million decrease. Excluding the impact of business exits, adjusted EBITDA would have increased due to the benefits of our pricing and cost reduction actions and growth in data-driven marketing and merchant services. These impacts were partially offset by the secular declines in the Print segment, inflationary pressures on our cost structure, and a $6 million increase in bad debt expense, primarily in the Print segment.

Adjusted EBITDA margin of 19.4% for 2024 increased as compared to 19.0% for 2023. Our pricing and cost optimization actions more than offset the impact of the Print secular declines, the inflationary pressures, and the higher bad debt expense. A reconciliation of net income to adjusted EBITDA can be found in the Consolidated Results of Operations section.

•Cash provided by operating activities – Decreased by $4 million to $194 million, reflecting the secular declines in the Print segment, business exits, inflationary pressures on our cost structure, and an unfavorable year-over-year impact from certain working capital changes, primarily related to receivables, prepaids, and inventories. These impacts were partially offset by our pricing and cost management actions, reduced restructuring and integration spend, and lower payments for cloud computing arrangement implementation costs and performance-based employee cash bonuses.

•Free cash flow – Increased by $2 million to $100 million, defined as cash flows from operating activities less purchases of capital assets. We continue to reinvest the free cash flow generated by our Print business into our growth businesses. A reconciliation of free cash flow to its comparable GAAP financial measure can be found in the Consolidated Results of Operations section.

Recent Market Conditions 

We continually monitor the interest rate environment and its impact on our outstanding debt. As of December 31, 2024, 61% of our debt had a fixed interest rate of 8.1%, which partially ins