Bill Stone
Analyst · Craig-Hallum Capital Group. Please go ahead
Thanks Brian, and thanks to all for joining today. I want to start my remarks with our progress against our stated goal. Our goal has been to build a sustainable and profitable business, while demonstrating solid execution against our strategy. I am pleased to report that we continued our momentum in the December quarter as we delivered our third consecutive quarter of positive adjusted EBITDA, while also delivering $1.4 million of positive free cash flow. We expect continued positive adjusted EBITDA and free cash flow growth into the current March quarter. I'll break out my prepared remarks [in short] revealing the past December quarter, some operational updates on the present March quarter and conclude with some strategic comments about future quarters. First on the operational performance, our overall revenues were $38 million, which compares to $27.9 million in the September quarter and $22.3 million in December, a year ago. In particular, our operator and OEM for O&O business finished at $22.7 million for the quarter, which was up 93% from the December quarter last year. This was primarily driven by success with our North American operators and a successful launch of the Samsung Galaxy Note 8. We got very good momentum with our O&O business and expect that momentum to continue into the current quarter. We also finished with more than 130 million devices now having Ignite on them, an increase of more than 23 million devices during the quarter. This is an important metric to demonstrate scale and network effects from our platform. Our Advertising and Publisher business, or A&P, finished at $1.5 million or now is only 4% of our total revenues. As I said on prior calls, there's been an intentional refocusing of our resources away from our lower margin A&P business to the higher-margin O&O business. Our content business more than doubled year-over-year and this represents our fourth consecutive quarter of double-digit sequential growth. We did see some modest negative revenue impacts in December as Telstra transitioned away from subscription services for traditional content types such as games, videos and music, and those services now migrated to event-based charging. This changes has already been in effect at Vodafone for most of 2017 and I'll provide some additional commentary on our Australian operations later in my remarks. Next, let me shift to some customer and partner updates from the December quarter. First, I want to discuss our advertisers. I've been pleased with the diversification of our advertisers. They are comprised of four main groups. First, our brands such as Starbucks, Bank of America and McDonald's. Secondly, our ecommerce players such as Amazon, eBay, NEO. Third, our gaming providers such as EA, Zingo, King, Machine Zone; and the final category, our utilities, like weather, stocks, flashlights, keyboards and so on. And while O&O total advertising growth approximately doubled, gaming-related revenues increased by approximately 10% in 2017 while non-gaming revenues more than tripled. In other words, we are diversifying our advertising mix across many different types of categories. Our scale is growing and we continue to be recognized as one of the top Android distributors of non-gaming applications in the U.S. just behind companies such as Facebook and Twitter. A key health metric of this advertising demand is our revenue per slots or RPS. RPS on high-end devices continues positive momentum as the RPS in North America was $0.42, which compares to $0.38 for high-end devices last year in the December quarter. In particular, we are seeing strong demand for the Note 8 with RPS of $0.48 in the December quarter. We still have work to do to improve our RPS performance both outside of the United States as well as on some lower-end devices here in the United States, but I am optimistic that the combination of adding additional sales people, additional third-party relationships and improved global campaigns will drive results. Next, I'll make some comments about our operator and OEM partners. I continue to be pleased at the overall growth of our largest North American operator, which grew revenues over 50% annually, but what is also encouraging is that operator’s percentage of our overall O&O gross profit continues to decline as we ramp our other O&O partners. While still a small percentage of total revenues, our growth of our OEM partners also showed nice progress in the December quarter with 60% sequential growth. Growing our OEM existing partners such as Motorola, Acer, BLU, Lenovo, Arcos and so on and launching new ones in the pipeline is a major focus area for our business. Now, I want to provide some updates on our current March quarter. We spent much of 2017 preparing our product intact to scale by adding more devices in new revenue streams. And as we enter 2018, we are now launching these capabilities into the market. Our number one focus continues to be profitably building our O&O business momentum as we believe this is the area with the most growth and opportunity for investors. We are continuing to work in this current quarter on strategic alternatives for both our content and A&P business. Specifically, we expect Telstra to exit the direct carrier billing business in its current form next month. While this represents a very low single-digit percentage of our gross profit dollars, it does impact our thinking on strategic options for the pay business as it represents more than $10 million a year in revenue. For O&O business, we've rebranded Ignite Delivers and is now called Single-Tap. I'm pleased to report that we are now launching our Single-Tap product across multiple global operators. Single-Tap is the ability for end consumers to download applications without having to go to the app store, while remaining whatever experience they're already in with that social media application, music application, game, news or so on. It’s still early days as we now have less than 10% of our addressable devices enabled, but we have launched with the tech end product we plan to scale. This is no longer a trial. It is now live. We anticipate it will take us the next few quarters to roll this capability out across our entire base, plus new partners as each partner has to integrate our software into their current environment. Thus, I don't expect this to be a material driver of results in the short-term, but an exciting development for the long-term and I'm proud of our product and tech teams hustle and execution to bring this live, scalable solution to the market. We've also launched a custom version of Single-Tap between a large social media platform and a large North American operator that can be integrated into other operators over time. This will allow our operator partners to maintain more control over their end-users, while still allowing the social media platform, the ability to improve their conversion to revenue and bring an improved end-user experience. The feedback or demand from the market has been fantastic for Single-Tap as our partner share our enthusiasm for the long-term opportunity. Another exciting development this quarter is the launch of new services that enable monetization, not just the first boot of the device, but over the entire lifetime of the device. New services like smart folders, exclusive app offers and notifications are all examples of these types of services. We're in the processes quarter of launching these with our O&O partners. As they launch, it will be a slower ramp of revenues, but we anticipate due to the recurring nature of these revenue streams, they will grow over time as more devices become enabled, plus receiving revenues from their devices that were already enabled in the past. And this leads to the final section of my prepared remarks about the future. The platform stories really generated traction in the marketplace. The combination of the additional devices, multiplied by the numerous revenue streams is what is exciting as this is how you deliver network effects from the platform. This current March quarter is the transition of taking the platform from a strategic story to now an operational and execution one. Thus, the keys for our success in the future quarter will be threefold. First, is adding more devices. As a company, we're making material investments around the globe to secure more operator and OEM agreements. Our recent announcement with Qualcomm is just a small example of this investment as we look to integrate our capabilities on as many devices as possible. In particular, we are focused on getting our software on open market devices with global OEMs. Secondly, is launching additional services and scaling the ones that have already launched. With our business, there's not a button that gets pushed to launch our services globally. We build software and then integrate it into our O&O partner environments. On one hand, this can be a tedious, nuanced and time-consuming process, but on the other hand, once it's complete, it really makes our solutions very sticky with our partners. And finally, its continuing the solid execution on our current business, which includes improving things like revenue per slot, advertising breadth, slots and overall delivery. We can't get distracted from all the exciting things in the future and take our eye off the ball from our current business. Our execution has materially improved from prior years and quarters and we have to keep that focus while simultaneously taking that improved execution and focus into the new opportunities. I want to conclude my remarks by saying that December was our best quarter in the history of the company. So, the short term is clearly in good shape, but the long-term is what I'm really enthusiastic and optimistic about. And what that, I'll turn it over to Barrett to take you through the numbers.