William Stone
Analyst · Craig-Hallum Capital Group. Please go ahead
Great. Thanks, Brian, and good morning to all of you. I wanted to cover our four things today. First is a review of our Operator and OEM or O&O business including some new partner announcements; second is a review of our Advertising and Publisher or A&P business; third is a review of our Content and Pay business; and finally, are some comments around our work to unlock shareholder value. First on the O&O business, I was very pleased with the continued ramp in this higher margin business and strong demand we are seeing from advertisers wanting to be on the home screen of the device, especially here in the United States. Our overall O&O revenues increase 19% from the prior quarter and 70% compared to the prior year. Of the growth witnessed in the December quarter, 70% of that growth was sourced from new partners that were not live with us last December. Our revenue per slot or RPS was up 22% in this year's holiday period as compared to last year. And as you've heard me say many times, I consider this to be a fundamental health metric of the business as it clearly showcases this demand from advertisers wanted to be on the home screen. Now I'm excited to unveil three new O&O partners. We anticipate having some additional PR around these wins in the coming weeks and months, but I wanted to be able to offer investors some color today. First, I'm pleased to announce that we've signed a new OEM deal with Acer to become a standard feature on their Android devices. We expect to launch with Acer in the June quarter. The Acer deal is a multi-year global partnership, but we anticipate that a majority of the devices will be sold in the Americas. Second, we are launching with Micromax in India. Micromax is consistently one of the largest OEMs in India. We anticipate launching with Micromax over the next 60 days to expand our India opportunity that I’ll address later in my remarks. And finally, we will be deploying Ignite with TracFone. For those of you who don't know TracFone, they are owned by América Móvil and operate in the U.S. under several different brands including TracFone, Simple Wireless, NET10 and Walmart's Wireless brand Straight Talk wireless. Collectively TracFone has more than 25 million subscribers and 90,000 retail locations in the United States. I'm particularly excited about the prospects for this partnership given our success to date with other prepaid bands like Cricket as well as the high device volume units that prepaid companies like TracFone move. We expect TracFone to launch Ignite in the September quarter. With this and other wins we have set ourselves up to be on the vast majority of Android devices sold in the United States by this time next year. In total, as we ramp throughout 2017 we anticipate these three agreements should translate into tens of millions of annual devices. Turning to our O&O performance by geography, our North America revenue increased by 13% sequentially and 50% year-over-year, driven by positive results with our partners Verizon, AT&T Cricket and U.S. Cellular. I’m particularly proud of the performance of the O&O business in North America which factored in a negative impact during the quarter stemming from the Note 7 recall and the Google Pixel phone which resulted in fewer Ignite devices being sold through our largest partners during the quarter. We managed to achieve significant overall growth in the quarter despite this somewhat seasonal muted growth in the quarter as a result of our strong RPS performance and new partner adoption. We also continue to make significant strides diversifying our business both by partner as well as by advertiser. Last year in the December quarter, our largest partner represented 83% of total O&O gross margin dollars. In the September quarter, this number was 55%. For the December quarter, it was 48%, which showcases how additional higher margin partners are continuing to ramp. Helping continue with that diversification, we expect to launch in our first devices with T-Mobile and Metro PCS in the June quarter. Our advertiser base also continues diversified. For 2016, we had over 2,000 advertising partners in our O&O and A&P business and no single advertising partner contributed more than 6% of total revenue. I'm also pleased to report that our Latin America O&O revenue grew 90% sequentially driven by greater Ignite adoption by both Millicom and América Móvil. We are now beginning to see Ignite be preloaded on new América Móvil devices going forward, which should continue to help ramp those revenues. The two biggest headwinds we have had with América Móvil are working through the performance or CPI business model and working through the operational and technical complexities of the SDK solution integrated into their container door application. We’re actively addressing both issues with América Móvil real-time and continue to be optimistic that we will ramp revenues more materially in 2017. In Asia-Pacific, I continue to be pleased with the ramp of Reliance Jio in India. We are surprising our six million devices this week with Ignite in just over four months of being live. We also recently launched advertising with Jio, which will be an additional source of revenue on Jio devices going forward. I mentioned Micromax in my earlier remarks and expect them to start generating revenue in the next 60 days. Regarding Airtel, they've recently begun trying to renegotiate the terms of their exclusivity and then guarantees and as a result I don't have to go live day to highlight today. We continue to launch Ignite on new devices elsewhere in the APAC region, including Singtel in Singapore, Vodafone in Australia and Globe in CloudFone in the Philippines. There are a number of other promising pipeline customers that we hope to announce soon. In Europe, Middle East Africa, we successfully launched with Archos in November. Archos is a top five Android OEM in the European market. Bleak in France continues to be a solid partner, MTS in Russia is launching additional devices this quarter, but we continue to have challenges ramping with Deutsche Telekom. And then with our executive sponsor after the Consumer Electronics Show a few weeks ago and mapped out a game plan and how we can bear more fruits together as both sides want to see improved performance. Some of the issues are structural in Europe with regulatory compliance fragmentation of the local countries versus the group headquarters for decision making and some are local with us in the partner and how we work forecast and get operationalized and so on. We’ll reconvene at Mobile World Congress in a few weeks and check on our progress. But overall, our Europe, Middle East Africa has a strong pipeline and a few solid partners, but it remains the weakest of our three global regions. With our advertisers, I've been pleased with the demand of many new brands and existing brands spending additional dollars such as eBay, Starbucks, spotted by machines own and others being great customers with strong spending. Also implementation of the new advertiser business models including revenue shares with the advertiser has been growing nicely. Advertiser partners in this area include names like Amazon and Yahoo, who share a percentage of the gross revenues they receive via the installed app from Ignite. In the September quarter, the revenue derived from this model was nil and today it’s on a multimillion dollar run rate. We expect this to continue to grow, but more importantly it is highly strategic as it provides an on going monetization opportunity for the entire life of the device versus just revenue at first boot. On the product development front, I'm pleased on how we're evolving our Ignite platform to be more than just app delivery. We are working with operators, OEMs, advertisers and other strategic partners on Ignite 3.0, which will be formally announced in advance of Mobile World Congress in Barcelona later this month. If we reflect back, Ignite 1.0 was about making app delivery simpler and more dynamic. Ignite 2.0 was about giving our operator and OEM partners more choice to the Wizard and through the SDK. Ignite 3.0 builds upon its capabilities, but it’s really focused on building recurring revenue models and solving end consumer pain points around the friction of getting the applications, organization in the app trade and integrating elements, so you can make purchases directly in the applications. You will see more on these capabilities over the upcoming weeks, but Ignite Delivers its 1.0 specifically call out this morning. Today, when customers on Facebook, Snapchat using our A&P service or any third-party mobile advertising there's anywhere from five to eight steps a customer has to go through to seen an app they want before opening on their home screen. This results in frustration for all parties. With Ignite Delivers, we can leverage our access to the system privileges with an android, so that when a customer clicks on any advertisement, we have a deep link to download the application directly to the device with no friction to the end consumer. We are working with many high profile companies and how we leverage this capability to allow our operator and OEM partners to maintain control, while simultaneously allowing any third-party to still be able to get the applications to the device with a single click. One other strategic imperative within our own O&O business that I want to specifically highlight today is our opportunity to capitalize on a global movement towards open market devices. This is where a customer purchases a SIM card from the operator, but already has a device that was acquired from another channel or place. To address this market opportunity, we are increasing our exposure with deals with the likes of the OEMs we announced today with Acer and Micromax, but also our existing partners such as BLU, Archos, Visio and Cloud Phone, whereby we managed third-party app delivery for these OEMs and share advertising revenue directly with that OEM rather than with a specific mobile operator. Next I want to provide a brief update on the Samsung Galaxy S8. I want to confirm that we anticipate being on the Galaxy S8 with our global partners including the key one such as Verizon, AT&T and America Movil among other global carriers when that phone launches later this year. That concludes my remarks on the O&O business except to again repeat my level excitement around the myriad of opportunities that lie in front of us. Demand for Ignite continues to be strong from all sides as evidenced by a growing advertiser interest, rising revenue per slot trends and widespread new partner adoption from carriers as well as OEMs. Additionally, we feel great about the potential for Ignite 3.0 features to expand our addressable marketplace and positioned ourselves to be the primary beneficiary of the trend towards open market devices. Next, I want to move our discussion to the A&P business which in short was a disappointment for the December quarter. While our margins improved slightly, we saw our revenue declined by 17% sequentially and 58% from a year ago. As we've discussed in prior calls, there are structural issues where the A&P business is migrating towards programmatic or real time bidding. We made a strategic investment in this in 2016 and while the results were showing progress, the cost that continue to grow and expand the platform were greater than the margin dollars we were receiving. Thus we made a calculated decision to suspend our real-time bidding efforts in the immediate term as profitability is a higher priority. We have simultaneously taken steps to align our cost structure and deduct many millions of dollars of annualized expenses from the A&P business to ensure that we achieve and grow profitability at this lower level of revenue going forward. Today, our A&P business does generate more gross margin dollars than its direct costs. Our Content and Pay business comprise 27% of revenue which compares to 33% of revenues sequentially and 28% last year. Our Content business also continues to generate more gross margin dollars and its direct costs. And as mentioned on prior calls, the impact of Telstra changes to the user experience did impact marketing by some content providers which in turn impacts revenues. We have seen this stabilized in Australia over the past few months and in fact have seen a return to growth for our overall DT Pay business thus far in the first months of 2017. We have launched Pay in India, the Philippines, and Singapore and those revenues are beginning to ramp as well. We also recently announced a global deal with the Axiata Group, which has nearly 300 million subscribers in 10 countries. This one to many connections will provide access to all 10 markets through a single integration and we expected to go live in the June quarter. Before turning over to Barrett, I want to announce that we enjoyed a break-even month of profitability in December. I recognize it's important to note it’s only one-month and continue in the momentum into the current quarter is key, but nevertheless it's an important milestone against our top priority of a creating a sustainable profitable business here Digital Turbine. Our O&O business continues to perform well and meanwhile we've undertaken actions and reshuffled resources to ensure profitability to our A&P and Content businesses as well. Barrett will talk more about these efforts in his commentary. And finally, as I mentioned on our last call it's incumbent upon us to showcase the value of all of our assets which we do not believe are being fairly valued by the market today. And while you don't have anything specific to announce today we are continue to assess a variety of outside opportunities to unlock greater value for our shareholders in a more timely fashion. This Board supported process is underway and we look forward to updating you further on these value enhancing activities as we deem necessary and appropriate. With that, I'll turn it over to Barrett.