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Amdocs Limited (DOX)

Q2 2016 Earnings Call· Wed, May 4, 2016

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Amdocs Second Quarter 2016 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we'll conduct a question-and-answer session and instructions will be given at that time. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to Matthew Smith, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir. Matt Edward Smith - Secretary & Head-Investor Relations: Thank you, Karen, and before we begin I would like to point out that during this call, we will discuss certain financial information that is not prepared in accordance with GAAP. The company's management uses this financial information in its internal analysis in order to exclude the effect of acquisitions and other significant items that may have a disproportionate effect in a particular period. Accordingly, management believes that isolating the effects of such events enables management and investors to consistently analyze the critical components and results of operations of the company's business and to have a meaningful comparison to prior periods. For more information regarding our use of non-GAAP financial measures, including reconciliations of these measures, we refer you to today's earnings release, which will also be furnished with the SEC on Form 6-K. Also, this call includes information that constitutes forward-looking statements. Although we believe the expectations reflected in such forward-looking statements are based upon reasonable assumptions, we can give no assurance that our expectations will be obtained or that any deviations will not be material. Such statements involve risks and uncertainties that may cause future results to differ from those anticipated. These include but are not limited to the effects of general economic conditions and such other risks as discussed in our earnings release today and at…

Tamar Rapaport-Dagim - Chief Financial Officer

Management

Thank you, Eli. Second fiscal quarter revenue of $926 million was within our guidance range of $905 million to $945 million and included a negative impact from foreign currency fluctuations of approximately $1 million relative to the first fiscal quarter of 2016. Our second quarter guidance range had included a marginal sequential impact from foreign currency, so revenue performance was therefore at the midpoint of our expectations after adjusting for foreign currency fluctuation. Our second fiscal quarter non-GAAP operating margin at 17.1% represents an increase of 10 basis points compared to the first fiscal quarter of 2016 and towards the high end of our long-term target range of 16.2% to 17.2%. Below the operating line, non-GAAP net interest and other income was $1 million in Q2, reflecting positive contributions from foreign exchange. For forward-looking purposes, we continue to expect the non-GAAP net interest and other expense in the range of a few million dollars quarterly due to foreign currency fluctuations. If we look at non-GAAP EPS, it was $0.92 in Q2 compared to a guidance range of $0.84 to $0.90. Foreign exchange gains, which are included in net interest and other income, and a slightly lower effective tax rate positively impacted diluted non-GAAP EPS in Q2. With respect to Q3, we expect the non-GAAP effective tax rate to be on the high end of our target range of 13% to 16%. For the full fiscal year 2016, we expect our non-GAAP effective tax rate to be within our target range of 13% to 16%. Free cash flow was at $91 million in Q2. This was comprised of cash flow from operations of approximately $118 million less $27 million in net capital expenditures and other. This result includes an annual cash bonus payment for the prior fiscal year, consistent with our…

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our first question comes from the line of Ashwin Shirvaikar from Citibank. Ashwin your line is open, could you check your mute button? He may have left the computer, we'll move on. Our next question comes from the line of Jason Kupferberg from Jefferies.

Amit Singh - Jefferies LLC

Analyst

Hi, guys. This is Amit Singh for Jason. Thank you for taking my question. Just quickly on your overall guidance, first thing I wanted to check is what is the organic revenue growth expectation over there? Has anything changed in the contribution that you're expecting from Comverse for the full year?

Tamar Rapaport-Dagim - Chief Financial Officer

Management

No, not significantly. As we indicated in the beginning of the year, we thought it will take some time until we start seeing the upsell and synergy opportunities, just given how naturally sales cycles work. So, we are seeing the business momentum picking up. We are happy about where we are seeing the pipeline. We just talked about a couple of examples of new deals we're seeing. So, I'd say roughly in line with what we thought in the beginning of the year. Eli Gelman - President and Chief Executive Officer, Amdocs Management Ltd.; Director, Amdocs Ltd.: And also, the encouraging thing there with Comverse is that we came up with, like Kenan going digital, basically offering extension of the Kenan offering with the new digital components from the CES stack, which is a very nice combination. It does not force Comverse customers to move away from some of the billing engines and rating engines that they like. And that allows a gradual transformation to those that want to take this path. Obviously, people want to transform to CES, we encourage it as well. But we see different angles of positive momentum with the digital component, with going to managed services, which is quite rare for, in the past, had been at least, with Comverse customers, and the acceptance in many other areas. On top of all that, we have additional services that Comverse did not offer before. So, we more or less see that the engines that we anticipated while carrying this deal, start warming up and performing and we hope for a continuation of it.

Amit Singh - Jefferies LLC

Analyst

All right. Great. And then between last quarter and this quarter, now you're expecting your revenue growth to be slightly below the midpoint of your guidance range. I just wanted to get a sense of what changed there. And also, it seems like a lot of AT&T revenue growth is sort of, and there's a bit of back-end loaded acceleration in your guidance. I just wanted to test the – your confidence level in that. Eli Gelman - President and Chief Executive Officer, Amdocs Management Ltd.; Director, Amdocs Ltd.: Well, Amit, it's mainly a matter of timing. We're basically trying to tell you that we are not losing the project we planned. We're not deteriorating on pricing significantly. I mean, the regular pressure all is there, but when you take into account the overall market conditions and you look at our competitors and a lot of not so good things that's happening around us, we cannot exclude that there will be some slowdown in certain areas of ours. And when we contemplate forward on a detailed level from bottom-up all the different accounts, the timing of projects and so on and so forth, we came to the conclusion that the third quarter and mainly fourth quarter will be, again, they'll grow faster than the beginning of the year. It's just that the overall will be slightly lower than the midpoint. I would say, probably 30 basis points, 40 basis points, 50 basis points, maybe half a percentage, not a – it's not like significant. But it's a result of when you add up all the timing and execution of projects that's what you'll end up. And I think that in terms of our position, our momentum in the market and many other indications including Comverse and the new projects in Domain 2.0, which is a network function virtualization project. And the wake-up that we see in the cable and satellite industry show that the fundamentals, that we believe the fundamentals are as good as always. And it's just that when we add up all the numbers and some of the slowdown of project conversion from sales to project, or the execution of a project, we are guiding to slightly below midpoint on mainly in the quarter four.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. And we have a question from the line of Ashwin Shirvaikar from Citi.

Ashwin Shirvaikar - Citigroup Global Markets, Inc.

Analyst

Thanks. Hi, Eli. Hi, Tamar. Eli Gelman - President and Chief Executive Officer, Amdocs Management Ltd.; Director, Amdocs Ltd.: Hi, Ashwin.

Ashwin Shirvaikar - Citigroup Global Markets, Inc.

Analyst

Sorry, I was disconnected. Eli Gelman - President and Chief Executive Officer, Amdocs Management Ltd.; Director, Amdocs Ltd.: I hope that you heard our prepared comments, though.

Ashwin Shirvaikar - Citigroup Global Markets, Inc.

Analyst

I did. I got disconnected just as Tamar was saying let's go to questions. So, congratulations on the quarter. I like the capital allocation announcement. It's good to hear the wins at AT&T, I guess two sub-parts. Do the wins affect the pricing on the overall contract? And secondly, on their earnings call, AT&T also had comments on service delivery automation and IT rationalization. How does that affect you? Eli Gelman - President and Chief Executive Officer, Amdocs Management Ltd.; Director, Amdocs Ltd.: So, pricing in general is always an issue that we deal with. Our new deal with AT&T does not connect to pricing. I mean, we are competitive, everybody knows AT&T, it's not like we are the only people that knows AT&T, so we have to be competitive on everything we do there. Definitely on everything new that we do. And these new activities on the network function virtualization is a fruition of a very long process. AT&T does not take any discounts or nothing less than perfect. So, they obviously compared us with everybody and his wife. Everybody. Everybody want to be part of this project. And the fact that we are the lead partner to develop together with AT&T these components of Domain 2.0 is definitely encouraging and exciting, and it's a groundbreaking product set. Now, whether we will be able to sell it later on in many copies or whatever, I don't know yet. It's way too early, we are just constructing it as we speak. But pricing was not part of this thing. It was pure engineering capability, no discount, no shortcuts, tight process that took more than a year. And you can imagine that all the big names, I mean like the biggest names in the industry were competing for that and we…

Ashwin Shirvaikar - Citigroup Global Markets, Inc.

Analyst

Yeah. Eli Gelman - President and Chief Executive Officer, Amdocs Management Ltd.; Director, Amdocs Ltd.: ...the rest of it, the details will have to wait until we'll get there.

Ashwin Shirvaikar - Citigroup Global Markets, Inc.

Analyst

Yeah. Thank you for those comments. Just follow up on the note very good managed services traction that you're seeing, particularly nowadays, outside the U.S. and the question I have is, if you can comment on the impact on the business model. I mean, does it become more stable in terms of outcomes because of this worst impact on profitability. Do you need to build in-country facilities in each of these countries to support managed services or can you do with just regional global facilities?

Tamar Rapaport-Dagim - Chief Financial Officer

Management

Thank you, Ashwin. I think it's a very important point. We always said that as part of the buildup of relationship with customers, we see that as a long-term cycle. Usually starts with a transformation project, and we would like them to see that evolving into additional capabilities, we could provide managed services, and definitely an important one among that list as well as upsell of additional product. And with the managed services, I'm happy to say the phenomena you described that we are seeing also outside North America in recent years, customers moving into managed services. Sometimes it's a customer that's already implemented our product and went into production and then moving into managed services. And sometimes like in the case of the recently announced deal with Three in Ireland, it's assigned what we call managed transformation that includes the modernization project as well as taking responsibility for the legacy they want through managed services, and then put the new system that will be put in place. In general, the delivery model we have is comprised of large global centers of competencies in different aspects, as well as some relatively thin layer usually on the ground. We have been practicing that for years including automated tools around that and different sophisticated capabilities we've built in terms of how to do it in an effective way. And in terms of the business impact, we definitely like the recurring nature of the revenue that comes with the managed services. And not less important is the fact we are becoming incumbent within the customer on a day-to-day basis. We stay very close to what's happening within the customer environment, can identify different pain points, can bring to the table different ideas and practically suggest additional things we can do for the customers.…

Operator

Operator

Thank you. One moment to see if we have any additional questions. And that concludes our question-and-answer session for today. I would like to turn the conference back over to Matthew Smith for any closing comments. Matt Edward Smith - Secretary & Head-Investor Relations: Thank you very much for joining our call this evening and for your continued interest in Amdocs. We look forward to hearing from you in the coming days, and if you do have any additional questions, please call the Investor Relations group. Have a great evening, and with that, we'll conclude the call. Eli Gelman - President and Chief Executive Officer, Amdocs Management Ltd.; Director, Amdocs Ltd.: Thank you. Matt Edward Smith - Secretary & Head-Investor Relations: Thanks.