Ramesh Srinivasan
Analyst · Maxim Group. Your line is now open
Thank you, Dave. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining our fiscal year 2019 fourth quarter earnings call. Joining me on the call today will be Tony Pritchett, our Chief Financial Officer. Fourth quarter revenue increased 14.2%, that’s 14.2, increased 14.2% over the comparable quarter last year to a record $36.6 million. Q4 fiscal 2019 was our third consecutive double-digit year-over-year growth quarter, the fourth consecutive record revenue quarter and the sixth consecutive sequential revenue growth quarter. Our sales momentum continues to be strong. The third and fourth quarters of fiscal 2019 were two of our strongest ever with respect to overall global sales. That sales momentum trend has continued into the first half of our current Q1 fiscal 2020 quarter as well. And we seem well set to make this current Q1 FY ‘20 our fifth consecutive record revenue quarter. Our full year fiscal 2019 revenue was $140.8 million, that is 1-4-0, $140.8 million, slightly exceeding our expectations and just above our full year revenue guidance of 10% growth over fiscal 2018 revenue. For the full year, our overall recurring revenue base grew by $6.4 million over the prior year. The largest single year increase since we became a pure play hospitality software solutions provider during fiscal 2014 and included a 24% increase in full year subscription revenue compared to fiscal 2018. Adjusted earnings from operations or AOE was positive during each quarter in fiscal 2019, adding up to $4.8 million for the year, approximately $10.7 million better than fiscal 2018 and well ahead of our original expectations and guidance provided. Adjusted EBITDA grew approximately 13%, 1-3, 13% year-over-year to $10.3 million. Free cash flow was $1.7 million for the year, our first such positive free cash flow year since before fiscal 2014. Fiscal 2019 was an important milestone year for us, where in we made the transition from a turnaround company to a growth company. We executed on a number of transformational positive initiatives across almost every aspect of our business that have set us up well for continued and sustainable profitable growth. Fiscal 2019 was by far our best year with respect to international sales. One of our key strategic initiatives continues to be to make Agilysys an engineering driven company, consistently innovating, creating and enhancing great products, and we made substantial progress with that objective. Our overall R&D and technical services personnel grew from approximately 450 at the beginning of fiscal 2019 to 510 by the end of the year, helping us drive our products forward at a pace far higher than at any time in our history and I suspect quite possibly faster than most of our competition. During fiscal 2019, we made substantial improvements with all our core product sets, including point-of-sale, property management systems, inventory and procurement, document management and data analysis. Our increased pace of innovation significantly improved our core products, and in addition, helped us create and implement high value ancillary software modules around the core POS and PMS products. Most of these additional modules have been sold and implemented in at least a couple of customer sites each during fiscal 2019. Along with a couple of crucial mobile-enabled software modules, which add value to our POS products, the majority of the additional software modules have been valuable additions to our core PMS product sales. Such additional software modules command good pricing, comparable to the pricing of the core products, and will play an increasingly crucial role in driving our revenue growth, and increased profitability. Our customers today cater to guests with high expectations regarding technology efficacy. The additional modules we’ve brought to the market in the recent past cater to that exact mean. Each of these additional software modules integrate seamlessly across all our core PMS products, allowing for less integration work and good value for our customers and in turn for us as well. During fiscal 2019, we developed and implemented the following additional software modules, all well integrated with our core PMS products. One, rGuest Book, a web booking system that is arguably the only booking engine in the market today that integrates with major loyalty and revenue management systems, allowing for truly personalized and differentiated booking experiences for each loyalty tier level of guests. Two, rGuest Express Mobile, a mobile check-in, check-out module that enables guests to check in by room upgrades, make dining reservations, do digital ID verification, check-out and receive room ready SMS notifications, all from the convenience of their own mobile device. This module is the industry’s first fully integrated check-in, check-out solution with digital ID verification and digital key delivery. Three, rGuest Express Kiosk, a self-service kiosk that allows guests to check in and out of their rooms, while balancing ease of guest use with security considerations of the hotel operators and includes innovative features like soft check in and the ability to purchase upgrades at the time of check in. rGuest Service four, this software module facilitates resort-wide staff communication and integrated customer service and is designed to mobilize all internal workflows by using wearable technology, thereby enabling all staff to receive instant housekeeping, in-room dining, concierge and other alerts. Additionally, we are a few months away from implementing new modules for golf and spa facilities that will help our customers operate more efficiently and leverage customer data from across the guest journey. As we continue to improve our PMS products to drive the level of revenue growth that exceeds the current POS revenue growth rate, we are simultaneously strengthening the ecosystem around PMS to further leverage the PMS competitive advantage we are working toward. While POS is carrying the bulk of our revenue growth currently, we expect PMS to begin contributing significantly to our growth during the upcoming years. Regarding our POS food and beverage business, we continue to add solutions that bring the point-of-sale to the guest in dynamic ways that improve guest experience and provide operational efficiency to our customers. We will soon be implementing the InfoGenesis mobile order application, which enables restaurant staff to carry out most of their order taking functions using consumer grade iOS or Android devices or even cellphones. This is in addition to the InfoGenesis Flex application that we have implemented at many customer sites over the past several years, which is essentially a full featured InfoGenesis terminal application optimized for mobile devices. We round out our POS offerings with the guests facing rGuest Buy Kiosk and our recently implemented rGuest Buy on demand module, which enables restaurant guests to order directly from their mobile phone or PC before going to the F&B location for pickup. What makes this value proposition even more attractive for our customers is that, we are able to provide all this functionality through a single integrated menu, price and order management functionality set driven by the core point-of-sale application InfoGenesis, instead of the multiple disparate systems many properties are currently having to deal with. During this quarter, we also implemented a new rGuest Pay and Go module, which is a new payment app that gives the guests control to tender their checks from their mobile device, including the ability to add tips and split checks. It further enhances the guest experience and helps our customers turn over their tables faster. The vastly improved engineering strength along with a sharp culture shift to become obsessively customer-centric has helped us significantly improve how we serve our customers. This is reflected in the fact, fiscal 2019 saw the lowest customer churn in the past four years in spite of operating with a far higher recurring revenue base. Increasing recurring revenue and decreasing customer churn together led to our lowest customer churn year in percentage terms. Customer retention as a percentage of recurring revenue during fiscal 2019 improved 10% over fiscal 2018 and 25% over fiscal 2017. Our customer retention rate was significantly higher than 95% during fiscal 2019. During Q4, 22 new customers joined the Agilysys family, bringing the total to 89 new customers for the year. Fiscal 2019 was our best year ever with respect to competitor replacements, especially during the second half of the year. Continuing to grow our market share in a steadily expanding overall market is a great position to be in. Being entirely focused as we are on the hospitality industry and serving it well by balancing day-to-day execution and future innovation simultaneously is not an easy task. And we are happy to be handling the challenge seemingly better than most of the competition. With respect to the various market verticals we serve, we continue to thrive and grow in the gaming sector as that industry continues its shift toward non-gaming amenities and focuses on non-gaming revenue growth. During Q4 fiscal 2019, about five different casino operators switched from a competitor system to Agilysys products. With respect to the hotels, resorts and cruises market vertical, Q4 was one of our biggest ever sales quarters in this segment. Apart from many new customer, competitive replacements, and other wins across various hotels and resorts, the highlight of the quarter was a successful pilot go-live on a major new cruise customer ship where we replaced a competitor’s system with InfoGenesis and InfoGenesis Flex and helped automate many processes within the ship, making the handling of food and beverage orders and fulfillment across multiple restaurants and bars a lot more efficient. The other major highlight of the quarter was the expansion of our foodservice management, FSM business. We continue to expand our partnership with a major FSM customer, who we have had a longstanding relationship with and we recently completed a successful pilot install at one of their major clients, again replacing a competitor system. We expect to expand our implementation with that important client during the next few quarters. Apart from that, we are also in the early stages of expanding our business with a couple of other major FSM providers, who are relatively new customers for us. In addition, we made significant breakthroughs into the healthcare, senior living and higher education, FSM market segments and are getting close to a breakthrough in the sports and entertainment area. These are all market segments, which have not been areas of strengths for us in the past. With our increased product development strength, we are now able to provide the required product functionality these new customers require. During fiscal 2019, our marketing efforts were a lot more focused on our key messages and played a big part in Q3 and Q4 being two of our strongest sales quarters ever. The overall stability and increasing constructive teamwork among the management team was another highlight of fiscal 2019. Apart from the addition of Jeba Kingsley to head US professional services teams about six months ago, all the members of the current management team were with us at the start of the fiscal year and continue to drive our progress now. All things considered, the biggest highlight of fiscal 2019 is the major improvement in sales processes and sales results across our three major geographical regions US, Asia and Europe. Fiscal 2019 was our best global sales year since we became entirely focused on hospitality software solutions in fiscal 2014. Along with having more and improving products, together with improving customer service levels, our sales processes have become a lot more disciplined with a far higher level of accountability for forecasts and for results. Now looking forward to fiscal 2020, we expect to grow revenue at a similar rate as last year. We expect our revenue levels to grow approximately 11% in fiscal 2020 from the approximately $141 million revenue level in fiscal 2019. We continue to enjoy good operating leverage and expect to grow profitability faster than our revenue growth rate. In spite of no longer having the benefit of capitalized software development costs unlike previous years, we still expect to grow adjusted EBITDA by around 25% in fiscal 2020 to approximately $13 million. As a result, free cash flow generated during fiscal 2020 should be well ahead of the $1.7 million generated during fiscal 2019. In summary, we are pleased to get past the turnaround phase and enter a growth phase across all our business areas. We worked hard for it, but we are also lucky to be in a marketplace largely insulated from the short-term economic vagaries and market fluctuations created by the daily news cycle. We will continue to work hard and smart to translate our successful efforts to growing shareholder value. Our annual revenue level is still a small fraction of the total addressable market we operate in, and even more so, when we look at the vast opportunities before us in Asia and Europe. A long growth runway is ahead of us. It is great we are in a growing industry with an increasing need for a world-class technology vendor, who is focused on serving the industry with a broad range of products backed up by world-class services and support. Even if that industry growth rate were to slow down a bit due to external reasons, our growth path will continue as we keep expanding our competitive edge. Our future is clearly in our own hands and not too dependent on anything else. As we continue to get better, we will also perform better. Our top line growth will continue to be driven forward by many factors, but none more important and impactful as subscription recurring revenue, which grew by 24% during the full fiscal year 2019. The top line growth will continue to outpace required cost investment increases, thereby driving profitability at an even faster clip. We look forward to catching up with all of you again in our next earnings call a couple of months from now when we will report on what should be our fifth consecutive record revenue quarter. We expect Q1 of fiscal 2020 to be the first quarter in which we exceed the $38 million quarterly revenue milestone. With that, I will now turn the call over to Tony Pritchett for further color on our financial results and future outlook. Tony?