Shabtai Adlersberg
Analyst · Needham & Company
Okay, thank you Guy. We’re very pleased to report strong financial performance for the first quarter of 2014, our 7th consecutive quarter of growing revenues. We’ve been engaged in many improvement and productive activities in this quarter, most notably the markets of Lync environment that is been very active. Same goes for One Voice initiative for the asset services and the collaboration with BroadSoft. But in view of some of the margin we achieved this quarter, its I’m confident in stating that AudioCodes is now emerging a much stronger company at the end of this quarter and better position to be an industry leader in the year end, unified communication, real-time communications, business services and mobility. Most notably networking business line keeps growing; we’ve been talking in the past about our class to grow networking at a rate of 10% to 15% a year in each of the next three years. I’m glad to report that in the first quarter of 2014, we executed on our plan and grew 15% over the year ago quarter. Before, I provide more details on our ongoing operations in the different business lines; I would like to touch on two most noteworthy unique and strategic milestones that we’ve achieved this quarter. First is the offering. I’m glad to say that we have completed a public offering, have raised $29.7 million as new capital for the company. Second milestone is the launch of the cloud delivery network architecture program and the approved budget and support from the office of the Israeli Chief Scientist for about $29 million over the next three years. This would allow us to recruit a 100 more engineers in order to fuel our development in the emerging cloud in SDN and NFV areas and will allow us to become a leader in the industry. That’s with the offering on March 5; we announced the pricing of successful completion for public offering of about $4 million ordinary shares raising net proceeds of $29.7 million. The funds raised will have strengthened our balance sheet and provide more adequate backing to our ongoing operations. Additionally, they will provide enhanced flexibility to pursue strategic growth opportunities in the future. Just as a note, I would like to note at this time that, currently we do not have any immediate such plans. Regarding the cloud delivery network architecture, on April 9th, we announced that the Israeli office of the Chief Scientist as approved in principal a three year plan 2014, 2016 for AudioCodes for approximately 100 million new Israeli shekels, which translates into about $29 million, in order to establish and advance an innovative research and developments here for cloud technology. The Israeli office of the Chief Scientist approved a budget of approximately $6.4 million for the year 2014 of which nearly two-thirds will be supported by the Chief Scientist. AudioCodes cloud delivery network architecture forum includes the establishment of infrastructure for a new research and development and hiring of engineers through which in R&D stuff, a 100 engineers by the end of 2016. Under that program, we intend to develop technologies, infrastructure, platforms and services that will design to operate in challenging cloud environment and will enable delivery of real time communication as well as value-added services. This platforms and products will utilize principles of NFV and SDN architectures. This will allow our business partners to be able to focus on the application and rely on our abilities provide them with into networking capability in the area of Unified Communications, Connectivity to WebRTC, security, anti-fraud, quality of service monitoring and enhancement of selection of advanced cloud-based services such as mobility, recording, speech recognition, et cetera. Now to some of the financial highlights in the quarter, as Guy as mentioned, quarterly revenues increased 11.4% over the quarter -last quarter and basically that’s, I’m sorry, 11.4% over the year ago quarter. More significant and relevant is our performance on the networking where we achieved 15% growth as I mentioned before, which enabled to achieve gross margin growth and improve it nicely to 59.5% from 58.1% in the previous quarter. We believe that this is a sustainable gross margin range or better given our focus on transitioning to better mix of products including software solutions and services. Glad to say that net cash provided by operating activities were $1.9 million at the end of the quarter we ended with $94 million in cash and cash equivalents about of which, $80 million are net. Also in terms of deferred revenues, we’ve been able to grow them just like in the previous quarter, as are now 43% higher than those of the same quarter a year ago. New product sales continue to ramp up, we’ve grown new product sales more than 20% over the previous quarter and as compared to the quarter year ago, we grew more than 50%. That proves that our investment in new products including Session Border Controllers, IP Phones and Multi-Service Routers is proving to be beneficial for the company. We saw strong momentum in revenues from Session Border Controller Services and Microsoft Lync-related activities and I will touch that in a few minutes. As we go first to give you some highlights on the sales side, generally sales were in line with the original plan for the quarter, all-in-all we saw a nice contribution from across all regions, the one region that stands out for weakness was Russia and I think we all can assume that as related to the latest political events surrounding Russia and its neighbors. In terms of some of -more notable deals in the quarter, in the Lync – Microsoft Lync market we had two nice deals one in North America was a large company in the biotech area. We have another new contribution for a completely new area for us. We start to see China looking into Microsoft Lync. We have been able sign up with a living [indiscernible] in China and I think we will see more for Microsoft Lync activity coming from that area too, which is good going forward. So that’s on the Microsoft Lync. On the Multi-Service Router, I will mention that we, mentioned two deals one in Europe, one in Latin America, nice reception for a new multi-service routers which represents a unique capability mainly in ERF adding voice capabilities and certification with leading software vendors with their traditional data multi-service routers players. Further, I will mention ago and mentioned to at the end is, we had a nice deal signed up with a Tier-1 service provider in the mobility space, and we expect that activity and success in mobility for service provider will pick up nicely in coming quarters. Now to some of the most important business lines in the company let me first touch Microsoft Lync. All-in-all we had great quarter, we had close to 40% growth over the year ago in the Microsoft Lync activities. Lync growth territories remain substantially United States and Western Europe, we have seen noticeable pickup in Western Europe, we have seen that long-term efforts -development efforts we have invested in Western Europe so as to stay back. We’ve also seen some activity growing in Canada and I have mentioned before China. We kept working with some of the strategic enterprise accounts continuing adoption of Microsoft Lync and we’ve seen nice pickup in that area. We want to also to know that during the month of February, we had a very successful Lync Circle of Excellence event in Las Vegas in conjunction with Microsoft Lync conference with the private session was close 20 large enterprises, North America enterprises. And I think it was beneficial both for honors for our customers and ourselves in terms of discussion and exchanging knowledge and ideas during that event. We have that type of event, and it’s an ongoing activity, we just said about two or three weeks ago another such meeting here in Israel where we brought in substantial number of partners from Europe. And now a point to mention is that during the quarter, we have certified our Mediant 9000 Session Border Controller. Microsoft just to remind you that this is a high-density 16,000 concurrent SIP trunk session high capacity SBC. Now let me go to the SBC operations. Again, a very good quarter, which were more than 10% quarter-over-quarter and again, when comparing to a quarter year ago, we grew about 40%. In the quarter, we have released a new -release for the software SBC and Mediant 9000. As I mentioned before, we now provide 16,000 concurrent SIP trunk sessions. Our plans for first quarter of this year about six months from now, we will scale up density to about 30,000 SIP trunk sessions. We also announce our excess SBC capabilities and we will support the industry emerging with RBC technology. In terms of environments in which we sell our session border controllers, we focus substantially in the ecosystems of our partners namely Microsoft, Genesis, BroadSoft and Avaya. With a big focus on collaborating with BroadSoft and I will touch that in a second. We have basically announced One Voice for Hosted Services at the end of 2013, during February we had an event in Europe where we met with BroadSoft personnel, myself and the CEO of BroadSoft. We’ve also been there, and we’ve been working with our teams and selected partners and customers on providing a comprehensive outlook for combined offering. AudioCodes is now being added into the Broad cloud offering. In terms of products, BroadSoft is now pushing more and divesting more uniform products to their clients among those products are Session Border Controllers, IP Phones, voice quality props and telephony adopters. We started to work with BroadSoft on collaborating with some of their largest partners, we cannot name specific names at this time, but I can tell you that we’re dealing with some of the largest Tier-1 service providers in the world. Now to our services, again, we enjoyed very good quarter; revenues associated with our growing managed and technical services, business line improved by 21% year-over-year and were above 20% of total revenues. That translates to $7.4 million in the first quarter, again compared to $6.1 million in the first quarter of 2013. I would like to mention also that service revenues are also beneficial in that they are typically characterized by very high gross margin and usually have recurring revenue. Our services are based on very extensive experience and we believe that that will make a difference for us and grow in coming quarters. Just to mention that we have been able to exceed in terms of invoicing -services invoicing. We were able to exceed our plan this quarter by more than 5%, again comparing to the quarter a year ago, we saw invoicing growing 8.5% and the technical support and maintenance and more than 40% in the professional services year-over-year. And before I conclude my part, let me talk a bit about Mobility. We believe mobility will emerge to be a very important growing area for AudioCodes in coming quarters and years. As you know right now, our activity is comprised of mobility for service providers supporting consumer products. We just released a business addition that targets enterprises. And then we have the voice dialing solution that is named VocaNOM. In February, on February 20th, AudioCodes has introduced new cloud-based enterprise mobility services delivered from the Amazon Web services cloud. We have announced both the mobility cloud business addition for enterprises into VocaNOM application which enables mobile and office voice dialing. Those solutions are pretty complicated technologically or basically where we provide mobile clients actually coupled with the delivery platform for secured connectivity management and monitoring and that enable service provider to offer their business customers, anywhere, anytime, any device type of mobile communication service with data networks while reducing further cost of ownership. The new application for enterprise leverages AudioCodes existing Tier-1 service provider customers for the over the top solution, we are providing that technology for more than four or five years now with some of leading names that we have mentioned such as Telefónica in South America, Liberty Global, GVT, Vonage, Bezeq and others. We believe that our solution for mobility and for dialing will basically be superior to other solution in the market. It will leverage the successes for various technologies including voice compression, SIP technology, SBC technology and few more. And we believe that we will see substantial growth in our users in coming quarters and we believe that in coming quarters we will start quantifying that product. With that, I have concluded my part and we’ll now turn it to the Q&A session.