Recently acquired Navigant International today released its first-quarter 2006 results, showing marginally reduced revenue of $121.5 million, from $122 million in the first quarter of last year. The company attributed the decline to continued growth in online adoption and the discontinuation in 2006 of an incentive program.
"Excluding the impact of this program, revenue would have increased on a year-over-year basis," said Ed Adams, chairman and CEO of Navigant, who also said he was pleased first-quarter results met financial guidance targets for net income, which reached $3.7 million, although it was down from $4.8 million during last year's quarter.
Adams declined to comment on any analyst questions regarding Carlson Wagonlit Travel's recent acquisition of Navigant
(BTN, May 1), but provided insight on why the company decided to sell. "As a board, we've got fiduciary responsibility to our shareholders, and the timing of the Carlson transaction was actually very good coming off the issues we had in '05 with getting back on Nasdaq and getting everything compliant," he said. "Quite frankly, the board thought the offer was more than fair, based on both closing price before the deal was announced and the 60-day average prior to that. The percentage of improvement over stock price was very good."
Also during the first quarter of 2006, Navigant paid down $12.7 million in debt from cash operations—which the company named as a financial priority during its 2005 year-end earnings call
(BTNonline, Feb. 10)—though higher interest rates from those payments resulted in a 16.9 percent year-over-year increase in quarterly net interest expense.