Earnings Labs

Anterix Inc. (ATEX)

Q4 2018 Earnings Call· Tue, Jun 5, 2018

$47.70

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the pdvWireless Fourth Quarter Update Conference Call. At this time, all participants have been placed on a listen-only mode and we will open the floor for your questions and comments after the presentation. It is now my pleasure to turn the floor over to your host, Natasha Vecchiarelli. Ma’am, the floor is yours.

Natasha Vecchiarelli

Management

Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us. With me today are Brian McAuley, our Chairman; Morgan O’Brien, our CEO; Rob Schwartz and COO, and Tim Gray, our CFO. Before we begin, I’d like to highlight that during today’s call, we will refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures. We have provided reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measure in this afternoon’s earnings release, which is available on our Investor Relations page. As a reminder, the following discussion may contain forward-looking statements and our actual results may differ materially from our current expectations or those implied. Information regarding factors that could cause such differences can be found in our public filings. With that, I’d like to turn the call over to Brian McAuley, our Chairman.

Brian McAuley

Management

Good afternoon. Today is my first opportunity to speak to our shareholders and investors about the leadership transition which the company announced in April. Before I turn the microphone over to Morgan, Rob, and Tim, I want to say a few words about the transition. First, on behalf of the Board and management team, I would like to thank John Pescatore for his significant contributions to PDV. John was instrumental in transforming PDV from a private to a public company. Under his leadership, the company raised over $300 million to fund its strategic initiatives, established its TeamConnect business in seven major markets, and advanced its FCC regulatory initiatives by forging relationships with partners in the critical infrastructure and enterprise space. As you’ll hear a little later, PDV has decided to even more intensely focus on its broadband opportunities, both at the FCC and by developing used cases for our spectrum. Since Morgan is the leader of that intensified effort, passing the baton from John to Morgan is a macro progression for PDV. Morgan is the ideal candidate to assume the role of CEO as we build towards a broadband future. It has been a pleasure working with John at PDV over the past fourteen years. John built a strong foundation for our future success. We look forward to John’s ongoing contributions to PDV as Vice Chairman of our Board, consultant and shareholder. His talent, experience and judgment will continue to help guide the company and deliver value for our shareholders. On a personal note, I have worked with John over twenty five years both at PDV and Nextel and it’s the one of the most rewarding, personal, professional relationships. As our business grows, change will be a constant. As Chairman, I look forward to guiding our new team towards its…

Robert Schwartz

Management

Thanks, Morgan, and thank you all for joining the call. I’d like to focus my time here to summarize the key results in fiscal 2018 and to-date, specifically through the lens of our focus and executed business strategy and to highlight how this well positions PDV to capture market interest and demand this coming year and into the future. First I’d like to point out the key nuance of our business strategy that may not be readily apparent, so I’ll take a minute to elaborate. As part of our continued assessment in the landscape of opportunities before us in putting our spectrum to the highest and best use, we identified an important link between the incumbents in our 900 megahertz spectrum band, primarily utilities some of whom were in opposition, and the compelling business opportunity to enable private broadband networks for the same utility industry. So based on this understanding, over the course of the year, we built a lean and experienced team of employees and consultants to lead our commercial outreach to the industry. We’ve first went on a listening tour to better understand the specifics of the needs issues, and used cases of these important, but rather complex users. We then progressed to business development discussions working intensively with the utility industry’s thought leaders and broadband pioneers to design a solution to serve their rapidly growing needs. We engaged in commercial discussions with utilities and leading vendors, participated in industry’s tradeshows and responded and learned from RFPs. We came to see that the needs of these utilities boil down to a few common themes including the desire by large investor on utilities or IOUs to own and control their broadband networks. As the offerings of commercial carrier networks can't fulfill these fundamental requirements, these utilities also require a…

Timothy Gray

Management

Thanks, Rob. Good afternoon everyone. As you just heard, we made significant progress during fiscal 2018 and during the first quarter of fiscal 2019 in advancing our regulatory initiatives and in evaluating and identifying compelling broadband business opportunities. Having achieved the critical milestones that Morgan and Rob discussed, we feel that we are well positioned to accomplish our primary objectives of building stockholder value by monetizing and realigning the 900 megahertz band to increase its usability and capacity. During fiscal 2018, we continued to evaluate and test sales and marketing strategies to improve the performance of our TeamConnect and pdvConnect businesses. Today, we have spent over three years actively pursuing the dispatch business. It has become clear that despite our efforts the market opportunities for our dispatch business are limited. The increase and improvement in carrier-based dispatch type applications, particularly in the past four years suggests us that the market opportunities are limited for standalone, narrow-band dispatch systems. The future of the 900 megahertz band remains broadband, which was and continues to be the driving reason for our FCC broadband initiatives. We, together with our Board of Directors have determined that it is in the best interest of the company and its stockholders to shift our focus and resources to finalizing our regulatory initiatives and preparing for the future deployment of broadband and other advanced technologies and services. Today, we announce the initial phase of our restructuring plan aimed at reducing the future operating costs of our TeamConnect and pdvConnect businesses. As part of that restructuring plan, we eliminated approximately 20 positions or 20% of our workforce primarily from our TeamConnect and pdvConnect businesses. The announced reductions in our workforce will result in significant cost savings for our business providing us with additional capital that we preserve for our future…

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] Your first question is coming from Mike Weisenberg. Sir, your line is live.

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst

Thank you very much. With the timeline on the regulatory process, do you anticipate any additional entrants into the notice of enquiry?

Robert Schwartz

Management

Hi, I think, it’s – Mark, this is Rob Schwartz. As you know, we’ve had a really continuous role in processing I think as Morgan talked about of comments coming in through the – since the issuance of the NOI and we would expect that we continue to see additional comments through the continuing process.

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst

And when would that process potentially end? Do you have any indication of that? Morgan O’Brien: Yes, this is Morgan. A lot depends on how the FCC decides to take its next step. Optimum for us would be they go right to notice of proposed rulemaking. Once they do that, they typically have a comment, reply comment cycle, which can be anywhere from a month to two months and after that then typically they would be ready to go into a reporting order. Of course, anything can happen in this process. So, you never know. Maybe part of your question was, do we anticipate any new players coming into – in our position or support, we do expect a bunch of new supporters. Opposition typically comes up early in these processes and then thereafter there is a process of knocking that opposition down and that’s where we are I think on this process, we feel pretty good about where that’s been.

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst

Thank you for clearing out that was where I was going with that. In terms of any investments for the regulatory process, is there anything that’s significant that we should be looking out for? Or you don’t foresee anything coming out of the blue that you haven’t already prepared for? Morgan O’Brien: I think, I’ll start, maybe Tim can fill in if he likes, but we assume that our investment will be continuing as you’ve seen in the past that we’ve got a very strong group of employees and consultants that are driving the process forward and we are confident with the resource that we have and that’s going to drive the process to where we need to be.

Timothy Gray

Management

And we are working on potential pilots with utilities and the cost of those may vary, but we don’t have anything to put out publicly on that right now. Morgan O’Brien: Let me make another point, for those who looked carefully at our May filing where we attempted to revise the proposal to meet the outstanding objections, there is quite a different process suggested there. We of course don’t know whether the FCC will accept that. But if they do, the process of who gets the broadband license and therefore who has the responsibility to pay to clear the spectrum which is going to be the largest follow-on cost will be determined as that process unfolds. So we don’t know. It could turn out that we are not the party in some of these cases who undertakes the obligation to clear the spectrum and that could be the critical infrastructure player that wants to step forward to broadband. So, it depends very much on how this next phase unfolds. So, sort of stay tuned.

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst

Excellent. Thank you very much for the call. That’s all I had.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] There are no questions in queue at this time. Morgan O’Brien: Okay, well, thanks everybody for your time and we look forward to continuing our dialogue with our investors and look forward to our next investor call. Thank you very much.