Earnings Labs

Bridgeline Digital, Inc. (BLIN)

Q1 2021 Earnings Call· Thu, Feb 11, 2021

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Bridgeline Digital First Quarter 2021 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to your host, Mr. Mark Downey, Chief Financial Officer. Sir, please go ahead.

Mark Downey

Analyst

Thank you, and good afternoon, everyone. My name is Mark Downey, and I am the Chief Financial Officer for Bridgeline Digital. I am pleased to welcome you to our fiscal 2021 first quarter conference call. On the call this afternoon is Ari Kahn, Bridgeline’s President and CEO, who will begin with a discussion of our business highlights. I’ll then update you on our financial results for the quarter, and we’ll conclude by taking questions. On February 3, Bridgeline announced that it had entered into an agreement to acquire 100% of the stock of Woorank SRL. Woorank helps companies make intelligent recommendations for optimizing search engine organic rankings by increasing their online traffic, leads and touchless sales with an artificial intelligence system. These capabilities fit perfectly with your Bridgeline’s eCommerce360 strategy and broad suite of apps. Additionally, on February 4, Bridgeline announced a registered direct offering of approximately $2.7 million with lead investors, this offering including those certain of the special situations funds and other institutional investors. Joseph Gunnar, LLC acted as a lead placement agent and Taglich Brothers, Inc. as co-placement agent. If you would like a copy of these press releases, you can access it on our website at www.bridgeline.com. Before we begin, I would like to remind listeners that during this conference call, comments that we make regarding Bridgeline that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Act of 1934 and are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause such statements to differ materially from actual future events or results. These statements are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. The internal projections and beliefs upon which we base our expectations today may change over time and we expressly disclaim and assume no obligation to inform you if they do. Results that we report today should not be considered as an indication of future performance. Changes in economic, business, competitive, technological, regulatory and other factors, such as the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and related public health measures could cause Bridgeline’s actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by the projections or forward-looking statements made today. For more detailed information about these factors and other risks that may impact our business, please review the reports and documents filed from time to time by Bridgeline Digital with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Also, please note that on the call this afternoon, we will discuss some non-GAAP financial measures when discussing the company’s financial performance. We provide a reconciliation of these non-GAAP measures to our GAAP financials in our earnings release. You can obtain a copy of our earnings release by visiting our website. I would now like to turn the call over to Ari Kahn, our President and CEO.

Ari Kahn

Analyst

Thank you, Mark and good afternoon everyone. Thanks to our eCommerce360 strategy, we’re delivering another quarter with operating profit and 15% growth in subscription license revenue. Previously, I’ve called our eCommerce360 strategy, Revenue 360. Our new marketing team has refined the naming, so it’s eCommerce360 going forward. eCommerce360 has several components that have boosted the trajectory for Bridgeline’s accelerate sales, reduce costs and guide strategic growth through M&A. In eCommerce360, we focus our business on guiding companies to grow their online revenue with apps that drive traffic, boost conversion and raise average order value. eCommerce360 leads us to develop and acquire many apps that increase online revenues from these three dimensions. All apps have a shared dashboard that evaluates the strength of your e-commerce site to make recommendations for the multiple apps we have that will help you grow. eCommerce360 apps are out of the box, enabling them to sell with a touchless sales process for faster sales cycles, with lower sales and marketing expenses. The recommendation dashboard further reduces sales costs by cross-selling the best app at the right time to help our customers. Because our apps are out of the box, we can increase our gross margins as a more significant percentage of our revenue in subscription and license versus services. eCommerce360 guides our M&A focus towards apps that can drive traffic, boost conversion and raise average order value. The dashboard simplifies the integration of new products and accelerates cross-sales across acquired customer bases. We recently made a huge step forward in eCommerce360 with the acquisition of Woorank SRL. Woorank is an app that drives traffic with a recommendation dashboard powered by an artificial intelligence engine that evaluate your search engine optimization relative to your competitors and identifies areas of opportunity. It is smart enough to recognize the…

Mark Downey

Analyst

Thanks, Ari. I’m very excited to share the positive financial results for the first quarter of fiscal 2021 ended December 31, 2020 with you this afternoon. Total revenue for the quarter ended December 31, 2020, which is comprised of licenses and services revenue was consistent at $2.8 million for the quarters ended December 31, 2020, and 2019. The following are the various components of revenue. Subscription and licenses revenue, which is comprised of the SaaS licenses, maintenance and hosting revenue and perpetual license revenue increased 15% for the quarter ended December 31, 2020 to $2 million from $1.7 million for the same period in 2019. As a percentage of total revenue subscription and licensed revenue increased 9% to 70% of total revenue for the quarter ended December 31, 2020 compared to 61% for the same period in 2019. This increase is attributed to significant multi-year license renewals across our diverse portfolio of Fortune 500 companies. Services revenue decreased $259,000 to $837,000 for the quarter ended December 31, 2020 as compared to $1.1 million for the same period in 2019. As a percentage of total revenue, services revenue accounts for 30% of total revenue for the quarter ended December 31, 2020 compared to 39% of total revenue for the same period in 2019. Bridgeline’s overall strategy, as Ari has mentioned called eCommerce360 has been on increasing recurring subscription revenue with out of the box apps that require little or no services to implement. This focus and continued growth are expected to further increase our subscription and license to service revenue ratio. Gross profit increased 27% or $405,000 to $1.9 million for the quarter ended December 31, 2020 as compared to $1.5 million for the same period in 2019. Cost of revenue decreased 30% or $401,000 to $957,000 for the quarter ended…

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] You have a question from Howard Halpern from Taglich. Your line is open.

Howard Halpern

Analyst

Hi guys. Nice solid quarter. Good recurring revenue growth.

Ari Kahn

Analyst

Thank you, Howard.

Howard Halpern

Analyst

In terms of – now that we’re entering into the second quarter, how many customers did you acquire in the first quarter? And what is the trend in so far in Q2?

Ari Kahn

Analyst

All right, we picked up I think it was 12 customers in the first quarter, something in that range. And that’s pretty consistent for the first half of Q2 as well. Now that we’ve got this huge lead base coming in with Woorank, we expect that to accelerate significantly. The big challenge that we’ve had in customer acquisition has been just our brand equity, right, I mean, not that many people know who Bridgeline is, we only have so many leads coming in and that has moved up two orders of magnitude overnight for us. That lead generation was one of the very attractive things for us as we were evaluating Woorank. First and foremost, we look at technology after that we look at the customer base, make sure that the customers are not leaving and that we can cross-sell and deliver more value to them. But the huge bonus here, I mean, just giant one was the tremendous lead generation that we have. And Woorank standalone was – did didn’t have a broad enough product suite to be able to monetize that lead base, as well as we’ll be able to, so we’re going to do great things thus.

Howard Halpern

Analyst

Okay. So that, I guess brings me to a series of questions. Do you – what kind of revenues they generated last year? Do you have a rough estimate?

Ari Kahn

Analyst

Yes. Woorank was not an audited company and we’re auditing the financials for them, after an acquisition gets 70 days to do the audit. They’re about $2 million company, standalone profitable. And there were a few synergies that make it even more profitable while combined with Bridgeline.

Howard Halpern

Analyst

Okay. And what type of I guess incremental G&A cost might there be from the acquisition during the last part of the year? Do you have a rough estimate?

Ari Kahn

Analyst

Sure. So Woorank it’s a Belgium company and we’re going to have some additional going forward, finance costs just in terms of managing the books and so forth for the entity. And they’re not big, even when it was standalone, it was not a significant amount. So going forward, it’s not going to make a significant difference. We do have costs that we’ll have for the due diligence and for doing the deal that’ll come into this quarter. And those are going to be around $100,000 and we’ll continue to be posting positive operating income, I think we’re like $650,000 positive operating income this quarter. And we can be even stronger with Woorank.

Howard Halpern

Analyst

Now you talked about the big lead generation, is that going to require additional personnel to run down those leads or is that going to be part of an automated process that you’re going to develop?

Ari Kahn

Analyst

Well, it will have more people. Now there’s a lot of automation. And one of the great things that Woorank has is they’ve got the ability to connect incoming leads with databases to recognize the size of the company that the leads coming from and revenue and in personnel to sector and so forth and automatically categorize it based on that information. But we are going to be investing in additional sales people. These are all touchless sales and we’ll be – we raised $2.7 million not to acquire Woorank, we had cash on hand for that to follow-up on those leads in a large part.

Howard Halpern

Analyst

And are those leads, do you know or have a sense of what the breakdown might be between the U.S. and outside the U.S.? What are the breakdown of those lead generations are?

Ari Kahn

Analyst

Sure. Yes. So Woorank has never been geographically focused in its marketing. Just in terms of the way that the economies of the world are split up. They’re slightly heavier in the U.S. just use round numbers, probably 60% U.S., 40% Europe. There’s really nothing coming in through Asia. And that’s because the products aren’t localized in the Chinese or Japanese. But there are Australian leads.

Howard Halpern

Analyst

And how long do you think the integration might be with the dashboard getting all that stuff squared away? Do you think by the second half – entering the second half, we should expect a unified product or unified dashboard?

Ari Kahn

Analyst

Yes, it will be by the second half. It’s great. The way that the Woorank dashboard is structured is that it’s got AI system where you can – it can learn different patterns and make recommendations. And we’re just going to expand that recommendation set that’s already exists from an infrastructure perspective to include recommendations about our products that improve conversion and improve average order value. So the product itself is completely teed up for eCommerce360. We’re very fortunate to have met the Woorank.

Howard Halpern

Analyst

And will your current customers be – will that be like a second generation product for them that they’ll see?

Ari Kahn

Analyst

It will, it will. So Woorank adds value for every single one of Bridgeline customers, there’s not a single customer that can't drive value from Woorank, and they're all going to get a free trial for it. And I think a lot of them are going to become long-term customers.

Howard Halpern

Analyst

Okay. And one last one, I might've missed it. The warrants could you just breakdown again, is it March that half the warrants are gone? Which will limit the warrant liability going forward?

Ari Kahn

Analyst

That's right. That's right. Yes. So there are approximately 5.4 million warrants with us, the cash warrants. So we'll receive cash when they exercise and they have a strike price of $4. 5.5 million warrants, half of those warrants expire in one month on March 12, I believe. So we're looking great. Maybe they'd be in the money by then. That'll be nice. Again, the other half will expire in 2024.

Howard Halpern

Analyst

Okay. Okay. And I guess, maybe I'll get ahead of myself a little bit, but you talked about, do you have a robust or a growing pipeline of acquisition candidates that would even that we should be looking forward to seeing sometime this year or next year?

Ari Kahn

Analyst

Okay. That's the important question, right. It's a big part of our strategy with eCommerce360 is to rapidly grow our product suite. So we have more products to cross-sell and to rapidly grow our customer base. So we have more customers that we can show our products to. The cost of selling a license to an existing customer is much lower than finding a new customer. So strategic growth, M&A is an important part of our strategy. We've been very patient and careful. We've looked at multiple opportunities every single month. We wanted to get the perfect one to kick it off. And Woorank is the perfect one. And we've got a backlog of other opportunities that we're talking to. And in the same way that we were so careful with Woorank, we're going to be careful with those. But my hope is that we can integrate multiple companies in 2021.

Howard Halpern

Analyst

Okay. Well, I look forward to the upcoming year and keep up the good work.

Ari Kahn

Analyst

Thank you, Howard. It's going to be exciting.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] There are no further questions at this time. I would now like to turn the conference back to the Mr. Ari Kahn, President & CEO.

Ari Kahn

Analyst

Thank you, Ren. We look forward to continued success in 2021. We're off to a great start. Woorank is excellent, and we have lots of different ways that we're going to deliver value for our shareholders by expanding our customer base, by expanding our product line. It's going to be very exciting year. Thank you all for listening, and have a wonderful 2021. Be safe.

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference. Thank you for your participation and have a wonderful day. You may all disconnect.