Ron Konezny
Analyst · Roth Capital. Your line is now open
Thank you, Jamie and welcome to everyone that has joined our call today. We capped off another record-breaking fiscal year with a strong fourth quarter and entered fiscal 2020 with excitement in both of our business segments and also with the pending acquisition of Opengear. Our past fiscal year was driven by key initiatives that the team delivered. New product introduction, we doubled our revenue from products introduced within the past three years to nearly $40 million and we forecast that number will increase to $70 million in fiscal 2020. These key metrics shows the alignment and effectiveness of our product management, sales, and R&D teams within IoT Products & Services. Strong direct sales force and solution selling. We are sustaining high win rates on large opportunities, while continuing to work closely with our critical channel partners. Our $20 million purchase order this past summer highlighted this effort. While we are still unable to disclose the specific end user, we can talk about the project in more detail as we think we can replicate its success. A large U.S. city is deploying a full suite of Digi products and services to connect thousands of signalized intersections to its traffic management center. When finished, this smart city project will be one of the largest mission-critical cellular networks in the world. This smart city project is a natural consequence of the global trend towards urbanization where city managers must increase surface transportation capacity to support residents and businesses. So you package the solution with partners to control reference design and is actively engaged with other cities. The Digi product suite includes Remote Manager, WR54 FirstNet routers, 900 megahertz radios, and port servers. Digi services include custom application development, configuration, solution kitting, and technical support. Improve system and process efficiency. We launched the final stage of our CRM ERP transition in early October. The entire company is now on one system with one database and increased visibility, a tremendous accomplishment and a huge thank you to the team. We are digging into process efficiency with the goal of making Digi an easier company for customers and partners to do business with. Effective leadership. We named presidents of each business unit in November of last year, a new supply chain leader in early 2019 and a new CFO this past May. We have a great team that is aligned in our mission and supporting each other with unwavering commitment. As we look forward to fiscal 2020, we look to deliver another record year, turbocharged with the Opengear acquisition. As disclosed on November 7, Digi announced we have agreed to acquire this leader on remote access, network resiliency, and automation services. The Opengear team will continue to be led by Gary Marks, their CEO and reports in to Mike Ueland, the President of Digi's IoT Products & Services business. We share similar cultural values. Some of our teams have worked together in the past easing the planned transition. It will be imperative that we support all the attributes that has made Opengear a leader in their market, while acclimating their teams to Digi. Jamie will provide the expected financial contribution to our results in his comments anticipating a close by year-end. Now a few comments on each of our business segments. Our IoT Products & Services customers and partners are looking for more complete solutions, oftentimes incorporating professional services and sometimes including other products that are integrated with Digi's offerings. We will expand our professional services team to support these initiatives building from our large smart city project. New product introduction in our cellular and infrastructure management product lines, we will be introducing new and refreshed offers that are based on a single device operating system linked to our Digi Remote Manager application. In our embedded and RF product line, we'll be launching the ConnectCore 8, ConnectCore 8 Nano SOMs and we will be building on our leading XBee product family to offer choice and ease of use. Service offerings. We will increasingly offer our products in combination with device management, wireless data and professional services. This combination will help our customers but will also provide opportunity to our channel partners to have more repeatable sales. Increasingly we are hardware-enabled and software and services defined. Increased efficiency. We must drive improvements from forecast to cash. We will be leveraging NetSuite to integrate point-of-sales data, integrating it with demand planning software and improving the productivity of our team. This will benefit customers as we expect this to lower the time and effort required to do business with Digi. As we look forward to fiscal 2020, as project-based business can experience uneven performance, as you will hear in our guidance, we will start a bit softer but we expect to ramp throughout the year. Including the pending Opengear acquisition, we expect IoT Products & Services to generate higher growth rates, higher gross margins, and higher EBITDA margins. Our SmartSense IoT Solutions business continues its focus on health care, food services, and logistics customers to increase their efficiency, improve their safety, and enhance their decision-making. This subscription-oriented business was increasingly focused on annualized recurring revenues including bundled offers to an increasing number of enterprise customers. We expect this bundling will temper top line growth rates but will accelerate recurring revenue growth rates. We added over 2500 sites in the quarter ending the year with approximately 63500 sites. We anticipate continued subscriber additions that will build on our nearly $15 million in annualized recurring revenue. SmartSense 4, the singular destination platform was launched last quarter and more of our new customers would join that platform. We will work closely with our existing customers to introduce the new platform and migrate them when appropriate. New product introduction. New products introduced in the first half of 2020 will allow the interoperability of our Bluetooth and ZigBee sensors to better meet our customer requirements. This provides an optimized IoT environment to help our customers achieve their goals. We are investing in automation and process control to make onboarding and support of our customers easier and more efficient. Improved mobile applications will guide users through the installation and training process and a new e-commerce site will allow our customers to self service. Our IoT Solutions business remains in growth mode and we expect the business to contribute a modest but growing EBITDA contribution in fiscal 2020. Lastly we improved our cash balance by $30 million and reduced our inventory to just under $40 million in fiscal 2019 providing an even stronger balance sheet. The Opengear transaction will put us in a net debt position but we expect to generate significant cash in fiscal 2020. We continue to look for acquisition opportunities in both businesses and would ideally like to enhance our solutions business if the opportunity presents. I will now turn the call over to Jamie for more detail on our financial performance.