Michael Prinn
Analyst · Taglich Brothers. Your line is open
Thanks Ari. So, I will review the results of operations for the third quarter ended June 30. Third quarter revenue was $3.7 million compared to $4.9 million in the third quarter of last year. As Ari mentioned, we’re making steady and accelerated progress in our efforts to transform Bridgeline into a SaaS focused company as evidenced by a greater mix of license revenue. As you mentioned our previous calls, and as Ari talked about earlier, we've been focused on rebuilding our sales team and focused on our new product offering iAPPS Pro which will generate more license revenue at higher gross margin levels compared to our previous offerings. So let me give some additional color around the various components of revenue. Our subscription and perpetual license revenue for the third quarter of fiscal 2016 increased 2% to $1.5 million compared to the third quarter of fiscal 2015. Our licensing revenue for the third quarter makes up 41.3% of our total revenue compared to about 30.9% of the total revenue in the third quarter of last year. Also as Ari mentioned our license revenue and our hosting revenue combined our 60% of our total revenue. That's up from 40% in the third quarter of last year and this is the first quarter in Bridgeline’s history that we've reached 50%. So you can see even though our revenues decreased we're driving a higher percentage of license revenue to total revenue and expect to continue to do that in the future quarters. This will help transform Bridgeline to an improved SaaS business model in the future. Our SaaS revenue increased 9.2% for the third quarter of fiscal 2016 compared to the third quarter of fiscal 2015. Our recurring revenue, which consist of SasS licenses annual maintenance on perpetual licenses and hosting revenue remains steady quarter-over-quarter at $1.8 million. Our services revenue decreased by approximately $1.1 million from the third quarter of last year. As we've discussed previously, we've made some changes in the last few quarters to align our delivery team with our revenue projections. We will continue to focus on our billable utilization and our resource planning to make sure we have the right team to continue to drive the forecasted service revenue. We believe that with our focus on increasing the sales team at our Pro series products, we can continue to drive service revenue back towards $2.5 million per quarter. We’ve made further progress in the third quarter in terms of expanding the sales team and increasing our spending on lead generation. We expect to see the results of these investments pay off in the upcoming quarters. I also think it’s very important to point out that although our service revenue decreased by $1 million, our cost of providing that service revenue decreased by almost $900,000 in the current quarter demonstrating our commitment to streamline our costs, in line with our revenues, and that's evident in our gross margin improvement, which I'll talk about in a bit. As we mentioned in our conference calls over the last - probably year, we initiated expense reductions that started in the second quarter of last year and it continued throughout this fiscal year. Our goal is to align our cost structure with our revenue forecasts. In the current quarter, we took initiatives to use some of these costs to drive future revenues and made investments in our sales team. We'll continue to focus on keeping our cost structure lean and remaining fiscally responsible while executing on our strategy and ultimately growing our top line. In terms of gross margin, we significantly improved our gross margin in the third fiscal quarter demonstrating the benefits of our ongoing transition to a SaaS based model. Gross margin for the third quarter was 54.3% compared to 45.4% in the third quarter of last year. We continue to see the benefit of all the infrastructure improvements that we've made throughout the last three to four quarters. We're seeing a delivery team that has a much higher billable utilization and ultimately as we continue to sell more license engagements, we believe we can drive a higher gross margin in future quarters. Also contributing in the gross margin increased our improvements in many facilities and overhead reductions. These changes also impacted our license and hosting margin, which improved to 74.7% in the third quarter of this year compared to 71.4% in the third quarter of last year. Our operating expenses were $3.0 million for both the third quarter of this year and the third quarter of last year. However, I want to mention that we included in this quarter an increase in our allowance for doubtful accounts based on the aging of some of our accounts receivables. We're monitoring this but thought it was best to increase the allowance in the third quarter. This was the charge to our general and administrative expenses of approximately 200,000 in the third quarter of fiscal '16. I mentioned this because excluding this charge operating expenses would have been 200,000 lower than the third quarter of last year and then it’s even with our increased spending in sales and marketing. We've made every effort to reduce our operating expenses to be in line with our current revenue and we have initiatives that we will continue to focus on for the remainder of 2016 and into 2017. We've continued to make changes in our office footprint and these changes alone account for significant savings compared to prior years. We'll also continue to look for opportunity to reduce our operating expenses while not impacting the planned growth of our sales team and our marketing spend. Let's take a minute and walk through a line item on our income statement that already mentioned – that's new for us. So this quarter you will see a charge for a loss on inducement of convertible notes for 726,000. This is a non-cash charge and the offset in the balance sheet is additional paid in capital. As we discussed on prior calls and mentioned in recent press releases, we successfully completed the conversion of $6 million of convertible notes and term notes into common stock. This process began in the second quarter with our proxy filing in our annual meeting and was completed recently in the fourth quarter. Not only does this significantly improve our balance sheet and will reduce the amount of interest we pay on a quarterly basis, but this also sends a strong message that our noteholders elected to become shareholders and they believe in the future of Bridgeline Digital and support our long term business plan. From accounting perspective some of the notes that converted had an initial conversion price from over three years ago that was much higher than the $0.75 conversion price that was approved by the shareholders at our annual meeting. So we had to do is, we have to take the fair value of the difference between the number of shares that would have been issued according to the original notes and the number of shares that were actually issued in the fair value of those shares as a loss on inducement of convertible notes. The total non-cash charge is approximately $3.4 million and it’s a onetime charge but we have to record the charge based on the dates that the noteholder elected to convert and these happened in June, July and August. So that's charge will broken into two quarters in our P&L. In the third quarter you will see a charge for the 726,000 and the remaining $2.7 million will be an inducement charge in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2016. Again this is the accounting that was required to convert this debt into equity. This makes our balance sheet much healthier and in future quarters reduces our interest expense by over 150,000 per quarter or 600,000 annually. Our GAAP net loss was $2.1 million in the third quarter of fiscal 2016 compared to a loss of $1.1 million in the third quarter of last year. This difference in net loss between Q3 of last year and Q3 of this year is primarily related to the non-cash inducement charge that I just walked through. Our non-GAAP adjusted net loss was $1.8 million or a loss of $0.19 per diluted share in the third quarter compared to non-GAAP adjusted net loss of $3.1 million or a loss of $0.45 per diluted share in the third quarter of last year. That’s an improvement of $1.2 million or $0.26 per share. Adjusted EBITDA for the third quarter of 2016 was a loss of 575,000. In the third quarter we made the decision that we needed to continue to rebuild the sales team, make additional efforts around an inside sales team, as well as increased marketing spending for lead generation. This cost in our income statement this quarter but was still a quarter to wait and see a improvement to the top line. Our goal as we wrap up the fourth quarter of fiscal 2016 and begin our planning for fiscal 2017, is to get back to generating positive adjusted EBITDA and drive towards an operating profit in fiscal 2017. So turning to our results for the first nine months of fiscal 2016 compared to the first nine months of fiscal 2015, our revenue for the first nine months of fiscal 2016 was $12.1 million compared to $14.7 million for the same period last year. Our subscription and license revenue increased 7.4% and our SaaS revenue increased 12.5%. Well our service revenue did decrease by over $2.6 million, our related cost of service revenue decreased by almost $3.1 million as a result of our focus on streamlining our delivery teams billable utilization, as well as facility and overhead costs. Our gross profit for the first nine months of fiscal 2016 was $6.4 million compared to $5.9 million for the first nine months of fiscal 2015. This resulted in an increase in gross margin from 40.1% for the first nine months of 2015 to 52.6% for the first nine months of fiscal 2016. To show this kind of improvement in gross profit and gross margin on a revenue number, that's $2.5 million less this year-to-date compared to last year is a testament to our focus on our initiative to reduce and streamline our costs. Our operating expenses for the first nine months of fiscal 2016 excluding restructuring charge of $795,000 were less than $8.4 million compared to $10.5 million in the first nine months of fiscal 2015, an improvement of over $2.1 million or 20.1%. An inclusive of the $726,000 non-cash charge related to the inducement of a convertible debt, net loss improved by 17.2% to $4.4 million to the first nine months of fiscal 2016 from a net loss of $5.3 million for the first nine months of fiscal 2015. And our adjusted EBITDA improved by approximately $2.2 million from a loss of $2.6 million in the first nine months of fiscal 2016 compared to a loss of $484,000 for the first nine months of fiscal 2016. So turning to review Bridgeline's balance sheet, as of June 30, the company had cash and accounts receivable of $2.2 million and our DSO was 50 days. In Q3 and in July, we completed equity financing to provide an additional $3.6 million in working capital for the company to continue to execute on its long term business plan. We'll continue to manage our cash and operating expenses and remain fiscally responsible as we execute our business plan for the remainder of fiscal 2016 and beyond. Our total assets are just under $18 million and our total liabilities decreased from $13.6 million in the second quarter of 2016 to $9.1 million this quarter June 30. This significant decrease in liabilities was a portion of the debt converting in equity and that process was fully completed - that was not fully completed by June, 30, so you’ll continue to see the debt decrease and it will be significantly lower on September 30, our next balance sheet that we release. Now that the convertible notes and the term notes have been converted, our only significant piece of debt that remains is our line of credit that we have based on our accounts receivable. In our line of credit balance at June 30 was a little over $1.8 million. So before we move to Q&A I just want to say that both Ari and I believe that the company is positioned to execute for the remainder of fiscal 2016 and into 2017. We're both pleased with the recent changes that we’ve made and are excited about our Pro series, which has the ability to drive a true SaaS business model and accelerate our timelines of profitability. So thank you. And at this time we'd like to open a call up to Q&A.