Shabtai Adlersberg
Analyst · William Blair. Please proceed with your question
Thank you, Niran. We are very pleased to report solid financial results and continued business momentum for the first quarter of 2017. As reported, first quarter revenues came better than expected and earnings results were at the high range of the guidance provided for the full year, which supports the confidence in our ability to meet the growth expectations in coming quarters. As such, first quarter results provide strong indication that our business momentum over the past two years remains intact and that we should expect solid execution and growth of our business in coming years. Most important, the two key business lines in the Company UC-SIP and gateways, which together comprise above 90% of our revenues, continued to exhibit very healthy business trends and thus provide us, management, with a strong confidence level that allows us to continue to make our investment going forward in these areas. In UC-SIP, we grew about 18% year-over-year and we continue to successfully execute on our strategy to grow the business in market segments related to unified communication -- unified communications facilities, contact centers and SIP tracking, all of which keep expanding on a multiyear basis. Supporting growth in UC-SIP is our nice growth of revenues in several of our business lines including the session border controllers, the phone business and products related to sales in the Microsoft Skype for Business market. As for the gateways line, the consistent growing pace of migration to all-IP networks in North America and Western Europe continues to drive success in sales of gateways and SBCs in TDM to IP and IP to IP connectivity applications. As mentioned in our press release earlier this morning, we see a major change in the direction of sales for our gateway line. While declining in revenues for six consecutive quarters in 2015 and the first half of 2016, we’ve now seen the first quarter of 2017 and on the heels of the second half of 2016, sequential growth. In fact, the strength of the migration to all-IP allows us now to be more cautiously optimistic about this trend of stabilizing or even growing gateways revenues that will continue to develop in coming years as more service providers start the journey and the process worldwide. The growth in gateway sales is clearly evident in North America and leading Western European countries and should continue in these countries for the next three to five or even seven years. Obviously, we expect this trend to expand and unfold into more countries worldwide year-by-year. All-in-all, it’s a global trend. We now expect increased demand for gateways to develop and remain strong for the next five to seven years. We see similar such trends, not only in the service provider space and we expect similar such activity of moving the infrastructure from TDM to IP in the large enterprise and mid-market segments, all that with the leg of about a year or two. At the end of the day, the anticipated shift from TDM to IP will become a must for each country with a limited window of about five to seven years for migration and implementation. The potential though is huge. As upto now, only about 30 to 40% of businesses moved to Voice-over-IP North America; and globally, we believe that there is substantially lower percentage that has shifted to IP. As mentioned several times in the past, key to the success is the many, many years of huge investments in adapting our products and technologies to our partners, ecosystem, specification and earnings [ph] probability. Another big advantage we have developed over competition is the complete solution approach which we took several years ago and which allows us to provide higher value to the end-customer versus a single product. So summarizing the business trends for the first quarter of 2017 and talking about the implication going forward. UC-SIP is on track to grow to close to $70 million of sales in 2017 versus about $58 million in 2016, another year of about 20% growth. We are confident in our ability to continue this business growth and reach close to a $100 million revenue level in 2019. We remain focused on growing and positioning and/or establishing AudioCodes to become the leader in the enterprise and/or business voice market. And we have made important steps in the first quarter of 2017 towards achieving that goal. In line with the global trends for digital transformation, the all-IP process drives transformation in the enterprise base too. In the first quarter of 2017, we announced our EVM initiative. EVM stands for Enterprise Voice Modernization that is meant to help organizations modernize and upgrade for their voice networks for the new all-IP era supporting their new infrastructure for unified communication and contact center applications, obviously supporting business services too. We continued in the first quarter to grow our CPE business and are gradually becoming a most successful partner of choice for CPE gear worldwide for application partners and customers. The fact that we are a global company and we have operations in many countries in the world, allows some of our partners in North America expand their services in other parts of the world using our infrastructure and services in these countries. In the first quarter, we continued to evolve our business to the cloud era with growing deployments of cloud related products and solutions such as virtualized SBC for enterprise and service provider operations and appliances for the Microsoft Cloud PBX, the Skype for Business online. Finally, we continued to buy back our shares, as mentioned by Niran. Now that would be a longer term plan for the Company in coming years, with the aim of improving return value to shareholders. Now, let me touch some of the financial highlights, non-GAAP of the first quarter. Revenue came in at $37.4, which is 7.5% year-over-year, which is right on where we want to achieve with our annual goal. We basically were about 1.1% lower than the fourth quarter. This is better than what is usually expected; usually in the first quarter, we use to decline about 2% or 3%. I’ve mentioned UC-SIP; revenue growing 18% year-over-year. Service revenues which are now 30% of the Company revenues, kept growing, increasing 11.6% over the year-ago quarter. Gross margin was very high, record basically, 62.9% versus 61.3% in the first quarter of 2016. We are growing steadily on an annual basis. I’ll just mention that we were at 58% in 2015, 59.4% in 2014, 60% in 2015, 61.5% in 2016. So, we’re growing on a consistent basis. Why? Very simply, more services; migrating our solutions and products to contain much more software components. Operating margin improved to 7.3% versus the 5.7% a year ago. Headcount decreased five employees to 695 from the 700 employees we had in the fourth quarter of 2016. In first quarter 2017 we added though sales and marketing position as we plan to expand globally this year and next two years to support growing sales. Net income increased to 2.5% versus $1.6 million a year ago. Cash flow from operations was 0.9% -- $0.9 million versus the 2.7 we did in the first quarter of 2016. Deferred revenues continued to grow in the quarter. We reported $31.8 million in the fourth quarter of 2016. We ended up with $33.1 million at the end of the first quarter. Now to sales. Generally, sales performed to the target. Results came right on what we planned them to be. We also see some strong start for the second quarter of 2017. In the Americas, I’d like to note that North America enterprise sales were very strong. Also, we see some good initial signs for increased levels of activity in the service provider space. In Central America, in Latin America we performed better than expected. We believe that the economic recovery showed in some major countries such as Brazil, Mexico and others will help our revenue grow in coming quarters. EMEA was relatively okay. We felt some weakness in one or two countries but we don’t believe that that signals any change for the business. We believe that that will improve in coming quarter. All other regions performed fairly well. Now, let me give you some highlights of some of the notable deals we had in the quarter. First, in the Skype for Business markets, we had a very large project on premise’s project for a retail network in North America. That project alone provided close to a $1 million of revenues in the first quarter. We had obviously few more deals. We won a major deal with a very large and advanced technology company in the U.S. again selling our phones and SBCs. Touching the contract center market, we had great success in that market. We have gained probably a new good partner in that space, which we never sold to before 2017. We have also supplied a lot of products to another player in that market. In both cases, I’m not referring to Genesys. We enjoyed good sales in other two accounts, one of which was in Russia. Again, we see some recovery also in Russia and that is a contract in the markets. Touching the third market, business services. We continue to enjoy increased success in the over-the-top service providers markets. And also we have seen some good activity with one large tier 1 service provider in EMEA using our enterprise SBC and access SBC. Quick recap of Microsoft operation in the first quarter. That was a very successful quarter for us. Actually it went up to 45%, up from the first quarter of 2016. That represents somewhat a recovery in that market from the fact that Microsoft is now balancing its message between cloud deployment and hybrid deployment. So we saw recovery in the on-premises markets versus a year ago. Cloud PBX adoption for use remains low for production. Although we saw very substantial increase in Cloud Connector Edition appliances, which were both, by many parties over the world to support testing and initial proof of concepts. Our appliances for the Cloud Connect were selected by several major service providers. So, we have much belief that when more advanced releases of Cloud PBX will be delivered to the market mid of this year, we will see impact on growing Cloud Connector Edition and Cloud PBX solution in the market, second half of 2017 and in 2018 for sure. We’ve seen big growth in selling our phones into the Skype for Business market. Actually, we went up more than 50% from the year ago quarter. And we believe that on an annual basis, we will grow in similar way between 50% and 60%. All-in-all, we enjoyed our good sales into the Skype for Business server edition which goes into large enterprises. I’ve mentioned already the one retailer that basically drove much of our sales in that space. In the SBC area, we’ve also been successful. Revenue grew 18.2% over the year ago quarter. All-in-all, we target for this year to grow another 20% on the SBC side. That has been also a record quarter for the virtual SBC, which went up above 20% over the prior quarter, which signifies much higher growth. So, all-in-all, we moved very nicely from other base product into software-based product virtualized SBC which will, as I mentioned before, continue to improve our gross margins. Most of sales went into mainly North America and then into Western Europe. So, all-in-all, two very strong provisions for us in terms of our SBC sales. In terms of sales, we won a big tier 1 service provider account in Europe. We sold SBCs to a very large U.S.-based large enterprise. And we won few more in the international markets, in EMEA, in Latin America and few more areas. Most important, in the first quarter of 2017, we launched the enterprise voice modernization program, which is based on a new universal communication architecture. That is promising to be a very-advanced competitive solution for the enterprise space, which we’ll have to move to all-IP. The EVM, the Voice Modernization program aims to basically provide large enterprises that are built of multi-vendor PBX environments with the solution that will unify the overall global infrastructure. And that program basically talks about an overlay network of Session Border Controllers with the centralized routing and management server that provides a very advanced and unique solution to enterprises. We increased our activity regarding the deployment of our SBCs in the cloud. We also are deployed in various clouds including Amazon. And we believe that we will see more increased sales in that environment. I’d like also to mention one very, very big win in the service provider space in the region of Asia. Now, coming finally to our guidance for 2017 and outlook. Regarding revenue, we now have better confidence in reaching the higher range of the 152 to 157 range we announced earlier in the year, basically talking about all-in-all 7% growth in 2017. We remain conservative; we may be surprised by the growth of the gateway business that can push that number higher. First quarter 2017 performance and business momentum provides good support also to our plan to reach revenue level for $180 million in 2019. Regarding earnings, we expect to grow above the 25% increase over 2016, which we announced earlier in the year with no better by mid-2017. I should add though that we may face some FX headwinds in the second half of the year because of the lower U.S. dollars versus the Israeli shekel conversation rate. On buybacks, as reported, we purchased about 1.1 million shares. We do plan to continue our program in 2017 and already submitted an application for approval by the Israeli court. In fact assuming business trends continue in 2018 and 2019 as previously in 2016 and 2017, we see this program continuing on an ongoing basis for the next two years. And with that, I have concluded my presentation. I’d like to turn the session back to Q&A. Operator?