Bill Stone
Analyst · Craig-Hallum Capital Group. Please go ahead
Thanks, Brian, and thanks to all for joining. I want to cover our four main areas in my remarks. First are some macro comments about where I see our business today; second, we’ll be closing our fiscal year 2017; third is some operational updates for the current June quarter; and finally, we will provide an update on our strategy on how we are leveraging our Ignite platform beyond just our DT Media business. First, I want to begin with our stated goals on previous calls which is to make Digital Turbine a sustainably profitable business. I’m pleased to report that over the past few months, gross profit dollars have exceeded cash operating expenses. We still have work to do to turn this into positive net income, but we’ve made material progress in building a profitable and sustainable business. It’s taken us much longer than anticipated but the combination of our O&O revenue ramp, expanding gross margins, and better cost discipline is now paying dividends. Going forward, we expect the diversification of our revenues across many partners and migration to higher margin O&O partners will continue this favorable trend. I’ll provide some additional detail later in my remarks and Barrett will provide some more specific financial guidance. Now, let me turn to closing out 2017. Reflecting back on 2017, it was the year we made the pivot to scale our O&O business and took material steps in achieving profitability. The March quarter was the first in the history of Digital Turbine to generate positive cash flow from operations. Revenues for the O&O business were up 81% year-over-year. We are now operating the O&O business at scale, delivering Ignite across many millions of devices per month. This was driven by solid performance with our largest North American partner but also material growth from other partners such as AT&T and Cricket, America Movil and our open market program. Our O&O gross profit contribution continues to diversify. Our largest North American operator partner was 38% of our gross profit in the March quarter, which compares to 45% in the December quarter and 81% in the March quarter last year. Our A&P business revenues declined by 19% sequentially as we intentionally migrated resources away from the A&P business towards our O&O business. I’ll talk about the strategic feature of the A&P business later in my remarks, but reflecting back on 2017, we changed our A&P business to focus on profitability. The team had great execution on the strategy and our A&P business is now profitable on a standalone basis. Despite seasonality headwinds, our content and pay business finished the March quarter at $7.2 million, which is up sequentially 18% from the December quarter. We saw many of our merchants begin marketing again in the March quarter, especially on SingTel’s Optus network in Australia. Let’s now turn to the current June quarter, as I like to provide some real time operational updates. First, we successfully globally launched the Samsung Galaxy S8 in April. I was very pleased with our execution. It was tight and crisp and much improved from prior high-volume large device launches, holidays, Black Fridays et cetera. While I can’t comment on specific S8 device sales, what I can say is that we have seen two offsetting factors on S8 volumes. First is that preorders and customer demand was much stronger than expectations. This was offset by fewer promotions by operators on the S8 compared to S7 during the June quarter of last year. These factors have basically netted off one another, making the S8 perform as we forecasted it would. The demand for S8 by advertisers was very strong. For example, in the United States, we’re seeing revenue per slot or RPS on the S8 of $0.44, which compares to RPS of $0.38 or 16% higher on the S7 launch last year at the same time. In other words, advertisers are now paying higher prices for devices than they paid a year ago. This is a fundamental health metric of our business. Now, let me provide some updates by geography. First in the Americas, as part of our Ignite 3.0 offerings, we have launched Blended Flow with multiple slots on the AT&T, S8 and S8+ devices. AT&T has been a great partner and they’ve been particularly excited about the strong Ignite results they have seen on their Cricket brand. Cricket continues to exceed both our and AT&T’s internal forecast. We expect to launch this Blended Flow capability on all of the AT&T Ignite eligible devices over the next 30 days. This has and will drive a material increase in our AT&T revenues. Verizon continues to be a strong partner and we’ve expanded our relationship to now include their AppFlash product. AppFlash is Verizon’s recommendation and search product which is a right swipe off the home screen. Verizon is paying us a licensing fee for utilizing this functionality, so it is showing extra dimensions and a new revenue stream to our business model. We will continue to work closely with Verizon, AOL and Yahoo! on a variety of additional initiatives and business models leveraging the Ignite platform. Look for those to launch later this year. America Movil revenues continue to ramp and revenues were materially higher in March than December, and we expect current quarter revenues to exceed March. We’ve worked through many of the technical and operational issues that have caused this account to be slow to ramp. Other America’s partners including U.S. Cellular and BLU are growing. In particular, we’re excited about getting additional device volumes with BLU that should be beneficial later this fiscal year. We expect to launch with T-Mobile as well later this calendar year. These account’s taken longer than we have expected. But, we’re upbeat and optimistic about the prospects with them. We’re also eagerly anticipating our launch with TracFone, later this year. TracFone which is majority owned by America Movil has approximately 25 million subscribers in the United States including operating Walmart’s wireless activities. To give investors a sense of TracFone’s scale, they sell approximately the same number of Android devices as Sprint. In Asia Pacific, our India business continues to ramp with additional partners and products. We successfully launched advertising with Reliance Jio in addition to our current licensing model. We’ve also recently launched with Indus. For those of you not familiar with Indus, they are the number two market share operating system in India with actually more market share than Apple. The early results have been encouraging. We have also recently launched with Micromax. Micromax is the second largest OEM in India, just behind Samsung. Our focus in India is now turning to securing and scaling the demand as now the supply of home screens is ramping and scaling nicely. And finally, in India, we’ve terminated our deal with Airtel for Ignite but are live and working with Airtel on Pay. We continue to be live with Ignite in many other markets and geographies including the Philippines, Singapore and Australia. In Europe, Middle East Africa, we continue to have strong relationships with Archos in Western Europe and Buick [ph] in France. We made a joint decision to terminate our relationship with Deutsche Telekom, as the friction to ramp in each individual small country was not worthy opportunity costs involved. We continue to be in dialogue with Deutsche Telekom about other products and offerings but concluded our Ignite Silent offering integrated with their home grown app delivery platform, just had too many technical, operational and political complexities to ramp quickly. And finally, while not yet material on the overall results, we are seeing MTS revenues ramping sequentially in Russia in June. And finally, on the operational updates for our O&O business, as we’ve discussed on prior calls, the importance of how we monetize the open market or situations where customers are buying SIM cards from the operator and bringing their own device. Getting Ignite on these devices is key and our business here is growing nicely powered by brands such as Amazon and Yahoo! that want to ensure their applications are on these open market devices. In the September quarter, this business was zero in gross margin. In December, it was several hundred thousand dollars and in March the gross margin dollars more than doubled from December. We also attacked this market to our OEM deals such as BLU, Archos Cloud Phone and most recently via Indus, Micromax and Motorola through our global Lenovo contracts. We are excited to have a deal with Lenovo and all of their brands that move many tens of millions of devices per year. We are now live with Motorola on their new E series devices and expect to expand to other brands and devices later this fiscal year. I’m also pleased to report that we anticipate launching on Acer in the current quarter, beginning with their Android tablets. And I also want to call out a new deployment with Kogan in Australia that we anticipate being live in the September quarter. Kogan is the second largest retailer of mobile phones in Australia. And while we don’t expect this to be a large account, strategically, we see this is a new distributions channel of migrating into retailers who sell mobile phones directly to consumers. We’re going to be using this as a test batch to evaluate whether we want to further expand into retailers who sell open-market devices. I want to conclude my O&O operational comments with three key themes from all of this information. First, we are improving both our time to revenue for new partners and the revenue performance from our partners announced in 2016. Secondly, our focus is on three key geographies including the United States, Latin America and India. And finally, we are focused on open market opportunity as material growth area for our business. Turning to our A&P business, it now operates profitably but off a much lower revenue base than prior quarters. We recently began trials with our Ignite Delivers product to some of our A&P publishers. The results are early but directionally very encouraging. We believe that if they continue, this could be a nice catalyst to reignite growth in the A&P business as Delivers is a differentiator that our other competitors do not offer. Our content and pay business is continuing its growth as Australian merchants have resumed marketing activities. We’ve launched in new markets and new carriers in Pakistan, Malaysia, Singapore and India. We expect to add a number of new markets over the next 90 days throughout Asia, Africa and the Middle East, leveraging our relationships with the Axiata Group and [DoD] who is the payments aggregator in Middle East and Africa. And before I turn it over to Barrett, let me conclude with a few strategic updates. At the B. Riley conference in May, I spent a considerable amount of time ensuring investors understand that we’re a mobile platform company. This is important because we have many offerings to offer Ignite platform, not just our DT Media business. And we know that investors reward platform companies with better valuations due to the ability to generate multiple revenue streams. We’re going to continue to update investors our progress against these new revenue streams but it’s important note that we have business models today that our revenue shares with advertisers, license fees for our software operators and some early payments and Delivers revenue of Ignite installs. We can envision the model expanding to new revenue streams with our monetization of data and additional screens beyond smartphones. The key is getting Ignite to the device. Once it’s on the device, the platform has many options and models to leverage. I’ll continue to update you on our progress here, but the timing is right for investors to think both short term about our DT Media progress but also begin understanding our long-term positioning and revenue ramp with these other businesses. We’re building real franchise value. The business has achieved some major milestones since our last earnings call, and my optimism about our business is at a 52-week high. With that, I’ll turn it over to Barrett.