Earnings Labs

CorVel Corporation (CRVL)

Q1 2009 Earnings Call· Tue, Aug 5, 2008

$57.69

-0.74%

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

(Operator instructions) As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to your host, Dan Starck and Mr. Gordon Clemons. Gentlemen, please go ahead. (Operator instructions) As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to your host, Dan Starck and Mr. Gordon Clemons. Gentlemen, please go ahead.

Daniel Starck

Management

Thank you, Tina. This is Dan Starck, and I would like to thank everyone for joining us today to review and discuss CorVel’s June 2008 quarter results. I’m joined by Gordon Clemons, our Chairman. And as we have for the past several calls, I will be covering the financial results and future initiatives and Gordon will be covering product development. After our overview, we’ll open the call to questions. Now to the June 2008 quarter results. Revenue for the quarter was $78.2 million, which is a 5% increase from the June 2007 quarter. Earnings per share were $0.40 for the quarter, up 3% from the $0.39 reported in the June 2007 quarter. When comparing the June 2008 quarter to the June 2007 quarter in our traditional business lines, Network Solutions results continued to improve from our expansion in our customer savings and growth in unit volumes. The Case Management business line also showed improved margins and revenues as well. We continued with our Enterprise Comp expansion, our strategic initiative of bringing in a new approach to claims management, and becoming a full service provider for the workers compensation market. With our traditional business growth, our Enterprise Comp expansion, and the infrastructure required to support our transition, over the course of the past year we’ve experienced growth in our general and administrative expenses. As we’ve discussed before, CorVel is in the process of becoming a full service provider to the workers compensation industry. And in the past 18 months, we’ve acquired two claims administration companies in support of this initiative. Following the completion of the acquisitions came a period of analysis and the setting forth of development plans. At this point, we are now investing to implement our plans for Enterprise Comp. Our investments have been in three main areas. First,…

Gordon Clemons

Management

Thanks, Dan. The June quarter was a particularly busy period for the development teams. Historically, companies evaluating information management technology have been focused primarily upon the capture of data and upon its use in the traditional processes within a company in fact many have used systems primarily for financial reporting. In CorVel’s business, systems often manufacture our product, if you will; further the focus of our development now includes more than just recollecting and storing of information. Also now part of development is the analysis and capturing of CorVel business intelligence in our rules engines and CorVel’s domain expertise in our workflow management tools. Such efforts bring with them a requirement for new types of business development efforts more involved than just capturing and just storing the data processed within the business. These initiatives are also an important part of our vision for Enterprise Comp. Enterprise Comp in the quarter included the adding of the two new large Enterprise Comp customers and completing the work necessary to meet their unique needs. Efforts will continue throughout the coming year as well to migrate claims applications from our acquisitions to the workflow and rules engine based systems that we are building in all of our service areas. In the CareMC area – CareMC is central to all of our services as well as to how we intend to produce unique results in the workers compensation, claims management marketplace. During the quarter, we added vocational management tools to CareMC incorporating our preferred workflow management tool sets. We are now implementing the resulting application. As we add new features or transfer of features from legacy platforms, we are simultaneously converting the new implementations to the rules driven workflow process that increasingly are the foundation for our new products to claims management. Software we picked…

Daniel Starck

Management

Thank you, Gordon. I just like to add a few more items prior to opening the call to questions. Cash flow for the quarter was a positive $3.8 million with quarter-ending cash balance at $21.8 million. Our DSO maintained at 46 days. We repurchased 100,000 shares in the quarter and spent $3.7 million on the repurchases. We’ve spent $166 million inception to date and we have repurchased 11,787,000 shares. Hard shares for the quarter were 13,758,000; diluted EPS shares were 14,045,000. In summary, we are making progress in the execution of our strategic initiatives. We believe that we are making the investments necessary in order for us to become successful long term. We are seeing positive organic sales growth in a difficult claims environment and our cash flow continues to be strong. These results only made possible by the contribution of the entire CorVel organization. And I’d like to now open the call to questions. Tina?

Operator

Operator

(Operator instructions) And we have no questions at this time gentlemen.

Gordon Clemons

Management

Okay.

Operator

Operator

Dick Herber – SBH: Hi, guys.

Gordon Clemons

Management

Hi, Dick. Dick Herber – SBH: Can you hear me?

Gordon Clemons

Management

Yes. Dick Herber – SBH: Okay, very good. Just a question on the upfront spending on initiatives and the – I guess he disconnect for revenue generation with them, if you could speak to how long those initiatives have to be put in place before we will see positive impact?

Daniel Starck

Management

Dick, it’s a little hard to say just because of the strategic transition I think we are in right now. We’ve certainly made the two acquisitions, we’ve seen benefit from the acquisition activity on the revenue side as well as some synergies from that. And now as we do the integration of the software and really develop the underlying foundation that should be – that lead time is a little difficult to project simply because we are really embarking on an area where we are going to put workflow management into something that really hasn’t been done before. If I could liken it to a couple of things, maybe the company’s venture before, it took the company a couple of years to move from basically a two to three year process of moving from a completely paper-based system on its bill review business to move into scanning and implementing workflow technologies. We’ve like to think or I like to think that we’ve learned a lot in that process and it won’t be a two to three year process, but certainly we are moving into a new product line. We are completing against some formidable competitors, but once we believe we can take on and do well against by bringing a different solution and not bringing just the same what I would say traditional solution to claims management. So, we would like to see more traction on the sales side. However, we also understand what we are up against and we are selling a combined service today that we believe is very good and we believe will continue to evolve that process here in the next six months to 18 months as we get the software integrated and are able to really convince that market that we have a different and differentiated product. Dick Herber – SBH: And the two new large customers on the Enterprise Comp, I guess, if you could speak to that a little bit related to how you own those and also then also the upfront work that needed to be completed this quarter? It sounded like maybe that’s in front of truly having revenue recognition with those two new wins.

Daniel Starck

Management

I think that is. And there is two – let me – I won’t name them individually, but there is certainly two different customers. One of the customers was a traditional managed care customer of ours. And they are now an Enterprise Comp customer and added claims administration. We did a fair amount of programming to bring them up. They are a national customer and we have now representation in all 50 states and are able to handle claims in all 50 states based on their needs. Another with the customers was specific to California that did require a significant amount of upfront programming and hiring, if you will, just to make sure that we were able to facilitate their business, and how they wanted to be able to report and look at their business. The piece that I think was very strong in both of those new customer sales was their ability for – or our ability to relate where we are going with claims management to them. And they believe in where we are going and we thought that is a very positive sign. Dick Herber – SBH:

Gordon Clemons

Management

This is Gordon. Now I kind of enjoy those things, so I’ll grab that one. I would say that the margins in the Enterprise Comp area are little better, at least our sense is that they will be a little better and they have been so far than in our historical business position in just managed care. I don’t think we see the capital intensity and the Enterprise Comp here is being meaningfully different than it is in the managed care. And in fact, in many ways it’s due to tightly [ph] learning. As a managed care vendor we were a subcontractor to TPAs and insurance companies, as we remain. And so the services are fairly similar, the margins are a little better, I would think the return on equity trends would be similar. We are spending more on systems, but I feel that’s handy. In the short term there is a little bit of an investment and some of those, as Dan mentioned, we took our customers that wanted us to service them nationally and in one year CorVel moved from hardly being in the business to handling national customer needs. So, there were upfront costs there, but do we trend out over the future, we would like to think that the balance of the economic will be similar in the Enterprise Comp market if not a little better than what we experienced in managed care. Dick Herber – SBH: My last question just related to dimension [ph] of cost containment measures, just curious if there is any additional commentary (inaudible) on that.

Daniel Starck

Management

We are looking at all the opportunities. I think the think that what I want to make sure that I think if we come a late in the call that is we are significantly invested and we are going to move forward with all the projects and the items related to our strategic initiatives and the execution. I think we don’t have a large scale what I would call cost reduction plan. We are going to focus on driving the initiatives. We are looking at items unrelated to the strategic initiatives as to where we can contain costs. But John – or Dick, for us what we want to make sure we do is drive through the initiatives in the investment period. Dick Herber – SBH: Sure.

Operator

Operator

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Daniel Starck

Management

Okay. I would just like to thank everybody for joining the call and certainly appreciate everybody sticking with us here. And we will close the call. Thanks everybody.

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude today’s teleconference. You may all disconnect.