Earnings Labs

Champions Oncology, Inc. (CSBR)

Q1 2017 Earnings Call· Tue, Nov 29, 2016

$5.90

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good morning. I am Joel Ackerman, the CEO of Champions Oncology. Thank you for joining us for our Quarterly Earnings Call. I will start the call today with highlights and updates since our last call; then discuss the financial results for the quarter, and then open up the call for questions. Before I start, I will remind you that I will make forward-looking statements during the call and actual results could differ materially from what is described in those statements. Additional information on factors that could cause results to differ is available in our Forms 10-Q and 10-K. Reconciliation of the non-GAAP financial measures that may be discussed on the call to GAAP financial measures is available in the earnings release. As a quick overview we had another quarter of great progress. Our bookings were strong and growing and give us increased confidence in our full fiscal year 2017 projections. The cost control efforts we have established over the last year continue to deliver. Our expense base has not grown materially despite a dramatic increase in revenue. Our burn rate increased this quarter as a result of the natural fluctuations in certain balance sheet items. However our operating loss continues to come down and we are confident we have the cash needed to get to cash flow breakeven. Strategically we made good progress this quarter on our new offerings and continue to see these progress towards proven commercial products. We performed ahead of our projections and are confident about the continued progress for the rest of the year. As you know, our most recent call was only six weeks ago, because that was the end of our last fiscal year and those results are always announced later in the quarter to give us time to complete the 10-K. Therefore the…

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] We have a question from the line of Anthony Marchese. You may ask your question.

Anthony Marchese

Analyst

Yes, hi, good morning Joel, great quarter. It's nice to see…

Joel Ackerman

Analyst

Nice to see positive results and I noticed that stock has picked up and volume dramatically, which is also nice to see. Question for you, and really it's an investor related question, are there any comps that investors can look to in terms of trying to evaluate this company? In other words, it's hard, I believe for me and for other investors to figure out, is this something that should be trading at one times revenue, two times revenue, or are there any other metrics that we should be looking at in valuing the company? Because personally I think the stock's undervalued but it's my opinion. But is there anything that we should be looking to use as a comp.

Joel Ackerman

Analyst

So it's a great question. Obviously multiple of earnings is not possible for valuing the company. So I think you are left with the multiple of revenue, which leads the obvious question well, what's an appropriate multiple of revenue? And I don't have a great set of comps to point you to. The CROs tend not to be a particularly good set of comps, because they are businesses that are typically pure service businesses without any technology component. They don't grow anywhere nearly as quickly as we do, and their gross margins tend to be a lot lower. There are some life science tools companies that might be the best proxies for us. They tend to be in very different businesses. So they also don't leave you with the cleanest set of comps. So I would say we do not have a list that we think of as here is the right group against which we should be compared naturally. So I guess the answer is we struggle with the same question you do. And I don't have a great answer for it. Probably, the best single comp you could look at would be the acquisition by Charles River of one of our competitors, a company called Oncotest, a little less than a year ago. They didn't disclose revenue or multiple. So I'm reluctant to put words in their mouth. But if you could kind a look at the press release back and do a little bit of math and come up with an answer there, that said that deal had a control premium in it because it was an acquisition, it wasn't a publicly traded comp.

Anthony Marchese

Analyst

What was it acquired for, I'm not familiar with the company?

Joel Ackerman

Analyst

It's one of the small -- a company that's a little bit smaller than us, kind of does similar things to us. It was off the top of my head, it was acquired for something like EUR33 million.

Anthony Marchese

Analyst

Okay. So at the time about we were about 40, I guess $40 million to $45 million.

Joel Ackerman

Analyst

I think somewhere around that, yes.

Anthony Marchese

Analyst

Right okay. Well again, I'm just looking…

Joel Ackerman

Analyst

No, look, it's an important question. It's one we've always struggled with. Wall Street likes to have companies fall into neat buckets and be able to compare to other companies. And we don't naturally fall into any neat bucket.

Anthony Marchese

Analyst

My final question is, is Champions the kind of company that could potentially look to acquisitions for growth or is this basically something that you believe you'll grow just organically?

Joel Ackerman

Analyst

We think about it a lot. It is not my expectation that we will invest large amounts of capital to acquire big companies. We look at what we've accomplished in AML, where we have effectively in-licensed technology from an academic group. We're working with two academic or semi-academic like groups, where the capital we invested was less to buy a business and more to develop a product. We are looking for other opportunities like that where folks have built the product, where they don't have the commercial capabilities to sell it, nor do they have the operational capabilities to deliver it. And it's something that we think we could put through our system that our existing customers would love to buy. So that's probably the more likely way we would approach non-organic growth in the near future.

Anthony Marchese

Analyst

Great, okay. Thank you very much.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] We have no questions in queue at this time.

Joel Ackerman

Analyst

Great, well thank you all for your calling in. And we look forward to updating you next quarter.

Operator

Operator

That concludes this morning's teleconference. You may now disconnect.