Earnings Labs

Digi International Inc. (DGII)

Q2 2015 Earnings Call· Thu, Apr 23, 2015

$54.72

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Digi International Incorporated Q2 2015 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later we will conduct a question-and-answer session and instructions will follow at that time. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would now like to introduce your host for today’s conference Mr. Steve Snyder. Sir, please begin.

Steve Snyder

Analyst

Good afternoon and thank you for joining us today. Before we start, I need to go over a few details. First, if you do not have a copy of our earnings release, you may access it through the Financial Releases section of our Investor Relations website at www.digi.com. Second, I would like to remind our listeners that some of the statements that we make in this presentation may constitute forward-looking statements. These statements reflect management’s expectations about future events and operating plans and performance and speak only as of today’s date. These forward-looking statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties. A list of the factors that could cause actual results to be materially different from those expressed or implied by any of these forward-looking statements is detailed under the heading, Forward-Looking Statements, in our earnings release today and under the heading Risk Factors in our 2014 Annual Report on Form 10-K and subsequent quarterly reports and other filings on file with the SEC. We undertake no obligation to update publicly or revise these forward-looking statements for any reason. Finally, certain of the financial information disclosed on this call constitute non-GAAP measures. The information required to be disclosed about these measures, including reconciliations to the most comparable GAAP measures, are included in the earnings release. The earnings release is also an exhibit to a Form 8-K that can be accessed through the SEC filings section of our Investor Relations website at www.digi.com. Now, I would like to introduce Mr. Ron Konezny, President and CEO.

Ron Konezny

Analyst

Thank you, Steve, and greetings to everyone on the call today. We’ve had a busy and productive quarter attacking the immediate objectives we discussed in last quarter’s earnings call. First, focus the business. We exited the end-to-end IoT solutions business, we returned Etherios to their core strength of implementing cloud solutions and sales force in particular, our Wireless Design Services group has been branded Digi and is working closely with our RF embedded and channel teams to bring incremental value to our Digi product customers, and our Device Cloud is also been branded Digi and is directed towards helping our customers manage and control their Digi products. Secondly, increased profitability. We implemented a restructuring program in fiscal Q2 to improve our overall profitability and drive improved operating efficiency by eliminating areas of the business that were deemed non-essential to our strategy moving forward. In addition, spending is being scrutinized and rationalized within the various operating units to meet our business objective. Lastly, driving growth. We kicked off key innovation projects across our product lines to position us to deliver on our future growth plans, our product teams have executed well producing year-over-year growth with particular strength in our cellular and RF product lines, and we are tracking and keeping larger account opportunities. In addition to these three major initiatives, we also accomplished the following. We announced a new Chief Financial Officer, Mike Goergen, who started this week. Mike’s experience, leadership and talents will further sharpen the company’s processes and performance which will lead to higher levels of productivity and profitability. Mike’s skill set fits Digi well with his prior success in accounting, tax, finance, supply chain and information technology and systems. We’ve also recovered from the supply chain disruption from November of last year. Fabulous efforts by our team, strengthened…

Mike Goergen

Analyst

Thanks, Ron. I’m excited to join the Digi team. I look forward to meeting our analyst as well as working with the investment community. Since I just joined the company Monday, I’m going to turn the call over to Steve so he can run through our financial performance. Steve?

Steve Snyder

Analyst

Thank you Mike and welcome to Digi.

Mike Goergen

Analyst

Thank you

Steve Snyder

Analyst

We are pleased with our second quarter financial performance from both a revenue and profitability standpoint. Starting with revenue, our total revenue grew 15.8% from the previous year. The key driver of this was total product revenue, which was up 18.6% from the previous year. Product revenue from the growth product line was up $9.6 million or 45.9% from the previous year led by increases in cellular gateways and routers, which saw revenue grow by 60%. Volume in our energy and retail verticals pace this growth. Our RF business also saw year-over-year growth in excess of 50%, which is higher than normal. We believe that about $1.5 million of this increase was due to the orders that could not be fulfilled in Q1, due to the impact of the fire at our Thailand subcontract manufacturer’s location, in November 2014. As you will recall, we identified this timing issue last quarter since the RF business was lighter than normal in the first quarter. By looking at the business on a year-to-date basis, our RF business is up 24%, which is at the high end of the range where we expect that business to perform. Our mature product line revenue decreased by $2 million or 10.2%, which was faster than expected in the quarter, but not outside the range of 5% to 15% we have discussed before. Contributing to the decline was the absence of revenue from certain products that have been discontinued in the last 12 months. As Ron mentioned we have taken steps designed to slow the rate of decline in this product set. We are pleased with the positive movement in our services business during the quarter. Although revenues are down 5.2% year-over-year it was our first meaningful sequential improvement since Q3 of 2013. This was paced by an…

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Mike Walkley with Canaccord Genuity. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.

Mike Walkley

Analyst

Great. Thanks for taking my questions. I guess Mike looking forward to meeting you, and Steve, it’s been great working you and best wishes in your retirement.

Steve Snyder

Analyst

Thanks, Mike.

Mike Walkley

Analyst

Just maybe starting off for me on high level questions for Ron, you’ve been there relatively short time, but already seem to have implemented quite a few changes. As you take a broad picture of Digi’s portfolio what are areas that you are seeing that you need to allocate more resources towards, now that you have been there Ron, where will you see the biggest opportunity to drive growth?

Ron Konezny

Analyst

Yes, that’s a good question and when I got here the company was stretched pretty thin on the innovation side in particular as the company was putting a lot of innovation effort into chasing IoT end-to-end solutions that was also having an impact on starving the product line a bit and so we have focused our engineering efforts, obviously away from the IoT solutions, but we’ve also incrementally increased our efforts on our product lines. The cellular and RF parts of our business as Steve mentioned are showing the greatest growth rates right now for us, but there are opportunities in embedded and our mature portfolio as well that we’ve dedicated resources to innovations that we are very confident will pay off.

Mike Walkley

Analyst

Thanks, and just building on that maybe you can share some of your feedback I know you’ve been visiting a lot of customers and as you focus on some of those areas for innovation, what do you think is a realistic timeline to come up with the new products and take growth maybe to that next level as you reinvest in innovation?

Ron Konezny

Analyst

Yes, it’s another good question. We do have what we feel are some fairly short term initiatives, especially projects that are software oriented where we can take an existing product and add new capabilities, download that capability either to existing products in the field or of course as new products are shipped, but we also have some projects that we think will impact fiscal ‘16 because I am really starting to imagine what ‘16, fiscal ’16 is going to look like and we want to make investments today that really position ourselves to continue momentum into that year. And that’s going to be nicely complemented with our 2016 planning process that really kicks off in May with our fiscal year ending in September. So, we really want to be in a better position in July to sharpen that update.

Mike Walkley

Analyst

Okay, great. And then on the services side with the change in the focus away from end-to-end solutions revenue already had a nice uptick, how shall we think about the revenue run rate for that business I know it can be volatile and with some other restructuring in India, where else could gross margin go do just to help us in modeling that business.

A - Ron Konezny

Analyst

Yes, it is a very good question and I think you also hit the nail on the head with - we’ve got a couple of services business in there, they can be volatile quarter-to-quarter due to their size, but we really are at this point feel like we’ve stabilized that group and should expect the performance we demonstrated in this current quarter and the margins associated with it. As we mentioned, we did the restructuring in last quarter, which will yield us some incremental benefits on our cost line, but on the revenue side we feel good about the revenue generation we had and see no reason why we can’t duplicate that.

Mike Walkley

Analyst

Okay, great. And then just last question from me, kind of filling out the model with I think you said cellular router and gateway business grew 60% if I heard that right, it is a great number, but at lower gross margin and RF was at the high end of your range maybe 24% growth for the first half of the year. As they become more of the mix, how shall we think about gross margin trends offsetting leverage in the model on high revenue, but gross margin headwinds on faster growth lower margin products?

Ron Konezny

Analyst

We are trying to get much more aggressively stanced in our larger volume customers that need us to evolve with their needs. Of course we are not standing still. So, we are working hard on our cost of goods. We think we can grow into slightly reduced gross margins that we exhibited this last quarter with a better operating expense profile. And so – to be sure, we are not giving up if you will, on a gross margin pursuit. So we are going to continue to drive efficiencies. We still saw a little bit residual in this last quarter in terms of our manufacturing recovery, so we have slightly higher cost and maybe would anticipate on a run rate basis. So [indiscernible], we are fighting on both fronts, we are going to retain these customers at pricing levels that are market driven but we are also going to drive down COGS and hopefully that growth will then put us in a good position because we won’t have to scale OpEx to support that growth.

Mike Walkley

Analyst

Okay, great. Congrats on the strong first quarter results here as a CEO and best wishes for continued success with all your initiatives.

Ron Konezny

Analyst

Great. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Howard Smith with First Analysis. Your line is open.

Howard Smith

Analyst · First Analysis. Your line is open.

Yes. Good afternoon, and Steve, it’s been a pleasure working with you over the years. I wish you nothing but success; Mike, welcome, and Ron, great first quarter. So it’s a nice start.

Steve Snyder

Analyst · First Analysis. Your line is open.

Okay. Thank you, Howard.

Howard Smith

Analyst · First Analysis. Your line is open.

A question, first of all, just kind of a numbers question on guidance. If I am kind of going with the midpoint of guidance for Q3 and the midpoint for the full year, it implies to me they are flat or possibly even down top line and maybe flat on the bottom line in your fiscal Q4 and I want to [indiscernible] reading, is there anything causing a softness seasonally or otherwise or is it just don’t read too much into that?

Ron Konezny

Analyst · First Analysis. Your line is open.

Yeah, I wouldn’t read too much into that. Steve mentioned, we did get a little bit of a lift in this current quarter from some product that we were unable to ship in the first fiscal quarter. And so but I wouldn’t over read into the guidance.

Howard Smith

Analyst · First Analysis. Your line is open.

Okay. And then on the large customer retention margin trade off, a thing which we’ve talked about in the past, little surprised not just in terms of what you said you are tracking but actual current customers, maybe you can give a little more color. I mean did you actually during the quarter go to some of your existing customers and have discussions around this or it’s a little more immediate than I thought maybe you could explain a little bit.

Ron Konezny

Analyst · First Analysis. Your line is open.

Yeah. As I mentioned, we did have slightly higher cost basis in the last quarter as we were fully recovering from this disruption in Q1. So that certainly had a little bit of impact. I wouldn’t characterize the margin as being impacted primarily by going to existing customers and having this dialog. As much as it is I think a more competitive and aggressive stance in the marketplace, we are very focused on winning, we are very focused on retaining. We’ve got increased I think levels of customer engagements, hand-to-hand combat if you will and I think that’s allowing us to have deeper relationships where we can possibly trade off a slightly lower margins for increased visibility, longer term commitments. So we are being smart about it, but we are trying to win as well.

Howard Smith

Analyst · First Analysis. Your line is open.

Alright. Appreciate the color. Thanks so much.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] I am showing no further question. I would like to turn the call back to Mr. Ron Konezny, CEO, for closing remarks.

Ron Konezny

Analyst

Great. Thank you. As we mentioned, we are pleased with our results. We are anxious to build on this momentum. We are anxious to deliver on our promises internally to our customers, to our partners, and to the investment community. We are very excited to have Mike join us and again I want to thank Steve for all his contributions during his tenure at Digi. Thank you everyone.