Spok Holdings (SPOK) Q3 2026 Earnings Call: EBITDA Rises Nearly 30%

Key Takeaways

• Spok Holdings reported Q3 2026 GAAP net income of $9.7 million, or $0.46 per diluted share, versus $3.2 million, or $0.15 per diluted share, a year earlier.
• Excluding the after-tax gain from the narrowband license sale and remaining restructuring costs, net income was approximately $4.5 million. Adjusted EBITDA rose nearly 30% year over year to $8.6 million.
• Adjusted operating expenses declined more than 8% to $26.1 million as savings from the April strategic realignment offset continued investment in research and development.
• Software revenue was essentially flat year over year at $16 million. License revenue increased nearly 30% to $1.4 million, while managed professional services revenue rose more than 30% to $2.4 million.
• Cash and cash equivalents increased to $30.1 million, supported by approximately $7.6 million from the completed narrowband license transaction. Management expects year-end cash of $28 million to $32 million.
• Spok reiterated its full-year 2026 revenue and adjusted EBITDA guidance and maintained its commitment to the quarterly dividend. The company expects to pay more than $27 million in dividends during 2026.

Core Financial Data

Business and Operating Performance

Wireless trends improved during the quarter. The year-over-year sequential revenue decline improved by 220 basis points, helped by lower unit attrition and prior pricing actions. ARPU increased to $8.36, supported by pricing, pass-through taxes and fees, and a higher mix of GenA pagers.

Software revenue remained stable despite lower operations bookings. Management said bookings can vary materially between quarters because of the timing of large contracts. Higher-margin managed services continued to support the software revenue mix.

Spok executed 42 six-figure and seven-figure customer contracts during the first nine months of 2026. Q3 agreements included a three-year renewal and expansion with a large Midwestern nonprofit health system and an expanded contract with a nationally ranked pediatric health system in the Southeast.

The company invested nearly $10 million in product research and development during the first nine months, an increase of more than 8% from 2025. Spok is also deploying artificial intelligence to accelerate product development, shorten time to market for Spok Care Connect capabilities and improve internal efficiency.

The completed sale of narrowband spectrum licenses generated more than $7.5 million in net cash after fees and transaction costs. Management said additional opportunities may exist to monetize the company’s asset base.

Management Guidance

Spok reiterated its full-year 2026 revenue and adjusted EBITDA guidance, citing the expected full-year benefit from its strategic realignment and visibility into the product sales pipeline.

Management expects Spok to end 2026 with approximately $28 million to $32 million in cash and cash equivalents, reflecting the license sale, lower anticipated working-capital requirements and operating performance.

The company expects to distribute more than $27 million in dividends during 2026. Management reaffirmed its current dividend and capital-allocation policy.

Risks and Watchpoints

• Total revenue declined year over year, although expense reductions more than offset the decline at the adjusted EBITDA level.
• Hospital customers are taking longer to make purchasing decisions and increasingly favor shorter-term, more flexible agreements, reducing initial booking values.
• Reported software backlog fell nearly 15% to $52 million. Gross backlog declined approximately 6% to $67.7 million.
• Cancelable contractual obligations excluded from reported backlog increased to $15.7 million from $11.2 million. Management said historically few such obligations have been canceled.
• Wireless unit losses remain a revenue headwind, with pricing and product sales serving as partial offsets.
• Management cited an uncertain macroeconomic environment and tight hospital budgets as continuing constraints.

Full Earnings Call Transcript

Complete Earnings Call Transcript

Management Remarks

Operator

Greetings. Welcome to the Spok Holdings, Inc. Q3 2026 Earnings Results Call. [Operator Instructions] Please note, this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to Al Galgano, Investor Relations. Thank you, Al. You may begin.

Al Galgano

Hello, everyone, and welcome. I am joined today by Vince Kelly, Chief Executive Officer; and Michael Wallace, Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer.

After a brief presentation by management, we will open up the call to your questions. But before we begin, I want to remind everyone that today's conference call may include forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties relating to Spok's future financial and business performance. Such statements may include estimates of revenue, expenses and income as well as other predictive statements or plans, which are dependent upon future events or conditions. These statements represent the company's estimates only on the date of this conference call and are not intended to give any assurance as to actual future results.

Spok's actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements. Although these statements are based upon assumptions that the company believes to be reasonable, they are subject to risks and uncertainties. Please review the Risk Factors section relating to our operations and the business environment, which are contained in our third quarter 2026 Form 10-Q and related documents, which will be filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Please note that Spok assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements from past or present filings and conference calls.

With that, I'll turn the call over to Vince.

Vincent Kelly

Good afternoon. Thank you for joining us for our third quarter 2026 earnings call. Let me preface my comments by saying how proud I am of our Spok team and that we remain true to our mission. Since the strategic pivot we announced a few years ago, our focus has not changed. That is to grow revenue, generate cash and return capital to our stockholders. We believe that Spok has struck an excellent balance between making the necessary investments to support those goals while aligning our organization with the market demand that we are seeing.

In the third quarter, we were able to deliver a more than 200% year-over-year increase in net income, nearly 30% year-over-year increase in adjusted EBITDA and an additional 12 basis point improvement in wireless unit attrition from the already low second quarter rate as well as an increase in year-over-year wireless average revenue per unit. While driving our top line, we also continued our focus on expense management as operating expense levels fell in the third quarter and were down more than 7% from the prior year. Much of that improvement is a result of the benefits from the strategic realignment that we announced in April.

Additionally, Spok is implementing artificial intelligence to drive further operational efficiencies across the organization with a particular focus on accelerating product development time lines, reducing time to market for new Care Connect suite capabilities and other internal uses. It is important to note that our focus on expense management as one of the key drivers to generate increased cash flow does not come at the expense of our product platform as we continue to make the necessary investments in product development, sales and marketing, customer support and professional services to support the growth of our Spok Care Connect solution offerings.

The first 9 months of 2026, Spok invested nearly $10 million in product research and development, a more than 8% increase from 2025. Investments such as these are critical to creating a best-in-class product platform and to maintaining our solid industry reputation. So today, we'll provide you with a sense of how our strategic business plan is progressing. First, I'll provide a review of our third quarter sales performance. Second, I'll review a few of the recent key highlights that position our company for the future. Next, Michael Wallace, our COO and CFO, will provide a review of our third quarter financial highlights, including our financial expectations for the balance of 2026. And finally, I will conclude our prepared remarks with a brief wrap-up before opening the call up for your questions.

Amidst all the progress in continuing to create this solid financial platform and stockholder-friendly capital allocation strategy, I want to reiterate that we remain true to our mission of being a global leader in health care communications. As we remind the listeners each quarter, simply put, we deliver critical information to care teams when and where it matters most to improve patient outcomes as Spok enables smarter, faster communication throughput for our customers. And importantly, we continue to maintain our reputation as a thought leader in the health care communications space as we continue to see customer satisfaction ratings at very high levels.

In the first 3 quarters of 2026, we were able to execute 42 6-figure and 7-figure customer contracts. We are pleased with our performance this year, especially with the headwinds our team has faced in this uncertain macroeconomic environment. I'd like to highlight a couple of the notable customer agreements from the third quarter as Spok continued to strengthen relationships with long-standing customers across the health care industry.

First, Spok successfully secured a strategic 3-year renewal expansion with one of the largest nonprofit and integrated health care systems in the Midwest that is comprised of 24 hospitals and hundreds of clinics and service organizations. This agreement expands Spok's footprint and strategic value across the organization, marking another milestone in our nearly 20-year partnership and reinforces Spok's role as a trusted provider of mission-critical communications. Beyond renewing its existing Spok SmartSuite, Spok Messenger and Spok Mobile solutions, this health care system will expand deployment to additional facilities, increasing its Spok Mobile user base to approximately 4,500 users and adopt new capabilities, including Spok Facility Alerting, Epic interfacing, multi-carrier SMS messaging and Spok Care Connect reporting and dashboards.

These investments are designed to enhance enterprise-wide communication, streamline clinical workflows, strengthen operational visibility and support timelier coordinated care delivery. The new agreement also includes ongoing premium maintenance, managed services and professional services to support continued modernization and optimization of its Spok technology environment. Second, a nationally ranked pediatric health care system located in the Southeast renewed and expanded its Spok contract.

Last year, a total of 70,000 emergency department patients, making it the busiest pediatric emergency department in the Southeast and has the state's only Level 4 NICU. This new agreement includes upgrades to Spok SmartSuite, Spok Smart Web, Spok e.Notify, Spok Voice Connect as well as our reporting consulting service and Spok Academy. The renewal of this partnership for more than 20 years reinforces Spok's position in specialty health care and reflects strong customer confidence in our platform.

Spok remains committed to delivering effective solutions that enable smarter, faster clinical communication for hospitals and health care systems. Our third quarter results reflect focused execution and continued progress against our strategic priorities. With many more exciting developments planned for the remainder of 2026, we look forward to continuing to deliver our solutions that support health care organizations and their evolving communications needs.

I'd also like to take this opportunity to point out a few recent accomplishments that we believe position Spok well for the future. As you may remember, in June, we announced the entry into an agreement to sell certain narrowband spectrum licenses in our two-way paging inventory to Sensus USA, designer and manufacturer of metering and automatic meter reading products. The purchase price was $8 million with a portion of the consideration deferred until existing Spok users were migrated to alternative frequencies. The transaction was subject to approval by the Federal Communications Commission.

I am pleased to report that this transaction has fully closed with all licenses cleared for transfer. After the customary closing fees and transaction costs, we still generated in excess of $7.5 million in cash. Resultingly, cash and cash equivalents totaled in excess of $30 million at September 30, 2026. We believe that there may be additional opportunities such as this to create stockholder value through monetizing our asset base.

Also during the quarter, we announced that Spok customers include all the children's hospitals and 18 of the 20 adult hospitals named to the 2026 and 2027 U.S. News & World Report Best Hospitals Honor Roll. We congratulate these Honor Roll hospitals on their outstanding achievement. Their recognition reflects years of dedication to patient care and clinical excellence. We are grateful for the trust they place in Spok to strengthen communication across their care teams and remain committed to providing communication infrastructure that helps their teams deliver outstanding care.

Also, this is particularly important to Spok as consumers widely reference these rankings because they emphasize factors that directly impact patient care, including clinical outcomes, adherence to best practices and the quality of hospital resources.

Finally, I'd like to highlight the announcement we made last week regarding the appointment of Shiv Gopalkrishnan as Executive Vice President and General Manager. Shiv will lead Spok's engineering, product strategy and sales organization. He is an industry veteran with 25 years of experience in building and scaling health care software businesses across electronic medical records, revenue cycle management, virtual care, clinical workflow and patient engagement.

We are excited to welcome Shiv to the Spok team as he is a rare leader who combines deep product knowledge and engineering expertise with a strong commercial mindset and unwavering focus on customer outcomes. He understands what it takes to help long-standing customers move forward with confidence.

At this very critical juncture for Spok, we are bringing engineering product strategy and sales together under one experienced leader as we position Spok to move faster, serve our customers better, pursue new growth opportunities and further leverage artificial intelligence technologies.

Before I turn the call over to Mike to review our financial performance, let me briefly summarize the goals that support our critical and important mission. Our strategic goal is simple: run the business for profitable growth, generate cash flow and return that capital to stockholders. Spok has a proud legacy of creating stockholder value and returning capital through free cash flow generation, and we intend to continue that track record. Our dividend level represents a yield in excess of 10% for our stockholders, and we're proud of our legacy there and our ability and commitment to continue funding it.

Since the beginning of our strategic pivot, which started in 2022, Spok has returned approximately $125.2 million or nearly $6 per share to our stockholders in the form of our regular quarterly dividend. In fact, since we created the company in 2004, Spok has returned nearly $750 million to our stockholders either through our regular quarterly dividend, special dividends or share repurchases.

In the third quarter of 2026, our history of returning cash to our stockholders continued as we returned $6.5 million in dividends. We expect to pay dividends in excess of $27 million in 2026 and we remain committed to our dividend policy and returning capital to our stockholders. When you take into consideration our current cash balance, distribution to stockholders, share repurchases, debt repayments and acquisitions, Spok has now generated nearly $1.1 billion of free cash flow since our creation in 2004 and returned approximately 2/3 of it to our stockholders.

Our focus on maximizing cash over the long term supports the 4 major tenets of our strategy. Those are: number one, continued investment in our product platform; number two, growing our revenue base; number three, disciplined expense management; and number four, a stockholder-friendly capital allocation plan. Going forward, we believe our extensive experience operating our established communication solutions and world-class customer base will continue to create significant value for our stockholders.

Now I will turn the call over to our Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer, Mike Wallace, who will talk about financial performance and earnings guidance. Mike?

Michael Wallace

Thanks, Vince, and good afternoon, everyone. I would now like to take a few minutes and provide a recap of our third quarter 2026 financial performance, which we reported earlier today. As always, I encourage you to review our 10-Q, when filed, as it includes significantly more information about our business operations and financial performance than we will cover on this call.

Turning to our income statement. In the third quarter of 2026, GAAP net income totaled $9.7 million or $0.46 per diluted share compared to net income of $3.2 million or $0.15 per diluted share in the prior year. However, adjusting for the onetime after-tax impact of the gain on the narrowband license sale we completed this quarter and some remaining severance and restructuring expense from the strategic realignment in April, third quarter 2026 net income would have been approximately $4.5 million, up from the prior year quarter.

Also, adjusted EBITDA of $8.6 million in the third quarter of 2026 was up nearly 30% from the prior year quarter as expense reductions resulting from the strategic realignment more than offset the year-over-year decline in total revenue. Overall, a very strong quarter from a profitability perspective. With respect to wireless revenue, the year-over-year sequential quarter revenue decline improved by 220 basis points, bolstered by continued improvement in the rate of reduction in the units in service as well as the impact from previously taken pricing actions over the course of the last couple of years.

Product sales also continue to augment any losses related to units in service. Average revenue per unit, or ARPU, which totaled $8.36 and was up $0.17 from prior year levels, continues to be our primary tool in partially offsetting revenue decline from unit loss. Sustained ARPU levels have been driven by previously discussed pricing actions and to a lesser extent, incremental pass-through taxes and fees as well as an increased mix of our higher ARPU GenA pagers in use.

Turning to our software revenue for the quarter. Revenue totaled $16 million in the third quarter and was essentially flat to the prior year period despite the lower total operations bookings. License revenue totaled $1.4 million compared to $1.1 million in the same period of 2025, up nearly 30% on a year-over-year basis. As we have said consistently, software bookings are lumpy and can vary significantly from quarter-to-quarter based on the timing of larger contracts.

We also continue to see the trends we discussed last quarter. Longer decision cycles as hospital customers conduct more extensive evaluations before committing and a preference for shorter-term agreements, which lowers the initial booking value of those contracts. Given that variability, we continue to believe bookings are best evaluated over a long period rather than in any single quarter.

Additionally, the continued solid performance of professional services revenue, albeit slightly lower than last year due to the timing of some higher dollar value projects and overall backlog levels, was a key driver in third quarter software revenue levels. Specifically, managed professional services revenue of $2.4 million in the third quarter was up over 30% from revenue in the prior year quarter. We will continue to align total resources with our backlog, and we should continue to see benefit from our higher-margin managed services mix.

Third quarter adjusted operating expenses, which excludes depreciation, amortization and accretion and severance and restructuring costs totaled $26.1 million, down from $28.5 million in the prior year or more than 8%. Drilling down into the specifics, cost of revenue was down from the prior year, primarily due to the decline in operations bookings from the level that we saw in the third quarter of 2025. Increases in research and development reflect our continued investment in our product and services platform with reductions in technology operations driven by our normal practice of cost reduction in relationship to declining wireless revenues.

Selling and marketing costs decreased approximately 23% from the prior year, consistent with what we saw in the first half of the year, reflecting lower commissions and lower trade show and event expenses. And year-over-year general and administrative costs also declined by nearly 7% as a result of the expense reductions from the strategic realignment we announced in April.

Regarding our cash balances, at the end of the third quarter, they totaled $30.1 million. The sharp increase in cash and cash equivalents from the second quarter total of $16.6 million results from 2 factors. First was the impact of the sale of the narrowband licenses. After the contribution from the purchase price as well as the additional premium from the holdback from the license transfers, which Vince pointed out, is now complete, we were able to add approximately $7.6 million to our cash balances. Also, consistent with prior years, our cash balances declined in the first half of the year as a result of typical working capital needs that include items such as the payment of our short-term incentive plans and prepaid annual renewals of technology contracts.

Additionally, first half cash flow financing activities are typically higher than in the second half of the year, reflecting payments on the company's long-term incentive plans. As anticipated, cash balances increased in the third quarter due to the lower working capital needs, coupled with the strong adjusted EBITDA performance. Given the contribution from the license sale and the anticipated reduction in working capital needs throughout the remainder of the year, we anticipate that we will exit 2026 with approximately $28 million to $32 million in cash and cash equivalents.

On a final note, I'd like to address our software operations bookings backlog, which totaled $52 million at September 30, 2026, down nearly 15% from the third quarter of 2025. As a reminder, since 2024, we have reported software backlog, excluding contractual obligations that customers can cancel without significant penalty. As shown in our earnings release tables, that exclusion totaled $15.7 million this quarter compared with $11.2 million in the prior year quarter. On a gross basis, which is how we manage the business internally, backlog totaled $67.7 million, down approximately 6% from a year ago.

The growth in the excluded amount reflects how hospitals are buying today. With budgets consistently tight and technology changing quickly, customers increasingly prefer shorter terms and more flexibility over long-term commitments. That changes how our contracts are structured, but we do not believe it changes how they perform. Historically, very few of our cancelable obligations have actually been canceled, and that track record reflects the customers behind them.

As Vince mentioned earlier, we serve all 11 children's hospitals and 18 of the 20 adult hospitals on the 2026, 2027 U.S. News & World Report Best Hospitals Honor Roll with an average relationship tenure of more than 20 years. That is why we view gross backlog as the more meaningful measure of the revenue ahead of us.

So moving on to financial guidance for 2026. Based on the anticipated full year impact of the strategic realignment and our visibility into our product sales pipeline, we are reiterating our full year 2026 financial guidance estimates. The guidance ranges for revenue and adjusted EBITDA are contained in the press release that we issued earlier today.

With that said, I would now like to turn the call back over to Vince.

Vincent Kelly

Thanks, Mike. Let me reiterate our focus on the opportunity in front of us in critical communications. From a business configuration and strategy perspective, we believe we are strongly positioned to grow our franchise while returning capital to shareholders. We have advantages over the competition in our core health care software contact center space, including long-term and deep relationships with the top health care systems in the nation who continue to purchase from us on a regular basis, offering customers an integrated platform as opposed to multiple point solutions and continuing to invest in and enhance our platforms consistent with what our customers are requesting. We are a pioneer in health care communications with a best-in-class product offering and have built an industry-leading reputation over the years.

Before I open the call up to your questions, let me take a moment to enumerate Spok's significant positive attributes. As a leader in health care communications, we maintain the largest paging network in the United States. We control significant narrowband personal communication services spectrum, an asset that we have shown can be monetized. We have a blue-chip customer base of more than 2,000 hospitals. We've created a large portfolio of intellectual property via strategic R&D investments, and we continue to generate significant cash flow and return to our investors on a quarterly basis.

I'd like to take this opportunity to thank our stockholders for their continued support and want to assure you that our primary focus remains on generating cash and increasing stockholder value. We are committed to our current dividend and capital allocation policy.

That concludes our prepared remarks. So at this point, I'll ask the operator to open the call up for your questions. We'd ask you to limit your initial questions to one and a follow-up and then after that, we'll take additional questions as time allows. Operator?

Operator

[Operator Instructions]

Vincent Kelly

Operator?

Operator

We have reached the end of the question-and-answer session. I'd like to turn the floor back over to Vince Kelly for closing comments.

Vincent Kelly

Thanks, everyone, for joining us today for our third quarter earnings release. We look forward to speaking with you in February when we release our fourth quarter results. Everyone, have a great day.

Operator

This concludes today's teleconference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.