Ed Ryan
Analyst · Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead
Great, thanks Scott, good morning everyone, and welcome to the call. Thanks for joining. This is another great quarter here at Descartes. We have another set of outstanding financial results. We continue to grow our network profitability and with it, our global logistics community. Hopefully, everyone will have seen our announcement last week of the acquisition of Oz Development. I'll speaking more about that in a minute. But, we're really excited about what these guys bring to the table. And that's a very large community of small-to-medium sized businesses that are playing in a larger part of e-commerce initiatives of the world and resulting evolution of the supply chain, along with a ton of expertise about how to deal with the logistics and supply chain issues the small and medium businesses face. Before I speak to that and some of the other trends in our business, I'll start with some financial highlights for the quarter. Allan will then talk through our financial results in detail and I'll finish up the call by talking about our business calibration and the landscape that we see in front of us. So, let's start by going over some of the financial highlights for the past quarter and the first nine months of the year. Our primary focus continues to be on growing our adjusted EBITDA. This quarter, we generated $15.8 million of adjusted EBITDA, an increase of 20% over last year and for the first nine months of the year we were up 17%, generating $44.6 million in adjusted EBITDA. Consistent with what we've seen in the past, our natural FX hedge meant that the continuing FX volatility hasn't really impacted our bottom line. However, similar to last few quarters, FX rates continue to have a big impact on our revenues on a year-over-year basis. Revenue for the quarter was $47.4 million, which was up 10% from last year. The FX impacts on revenues for the quarter was negative $2.7 million, meaning if you're using last year's FX rates, revenues would have been $50.1 million, which would have meant growth of 16%. Revenue for the first nine months of the year was a $137 million which was up 8% from last year. The FX impact on revenues was negative $9.8 million, meaning that using last year's FX rates, revenues would have been a $146.8 million, which would have meant growth of 16%. We remain well-positioned with our revenues and expense currency mix to handle the continuing volatile FX environment. I think it's also worth noting that our services revenue this quarter was 96% of our overall revenues, up from 91% at this time last year. This reflects our continued focus on growing recurring revenues and deemphasizing license sales, though as I said before, we don't expect license sales to go away entirely as we still have some customers that want to buy that way. Also, we may buy businesses that have more license exposure than our existing business, and it can take some time to integrate and flush out. From a cash flow perspective, we continue to see strong cash conversion metrics. We converted 85% of adjusted EBITDA into cash for the quarter and for the first nine months of the year, meaning $13.4 million of cash generated for the quarter and $38 million for the nine-month period. We continue to reinvest that cash in our business and just last week, we announced another important acquisition to help us address key trends we're seeing in the logistics and supply chain markets. So with that, I'd like to shift gears from our financial results and talk about a few trends we're seeing in the market and what we've been doing about it. Let me start by talking a little about e-commerce and our announcement of the Oz acquisition last week. We've talked quite a few times before about how our routing and scheduling solutions are helping retailers and other businesses navigate the ever increasing expectations of consumers around how things are bought and delivered. Customers now expect to have choice and visibility over when their purchase will be delivered and are purchasing in higher online volume than ever before. It's no longer, deliver my stuff when you can; it's now, deliver it when I want it, and let me know early if I'm not going to get it when I want it. As you know, we do exactly that for our customers, and this area of our business still has great momentum. Today, I want to talk about another segment of the home delivery market. The portion of e-commerce market that's been driven by small and medium businesses that don't typically have their own fleets of vehicles. These guys typically rely on third parties like UPS or the United States Postal Service for final mile delivery. Our recent acquisition of Oz positions us well to better service this segment of the market. So, let's talk for a second about what Oz does. Oz helps their customers typically small and medium sized businesses connect to and integrate with leading ERP, CRM, e-commerce and supply chain platforms. The solutions address a number of pain points for e-commerce shippers by automating logistics and supply chain processes including order fulfillment, inventory management, scanning and shipping. As an example, Oz may take a small and medium sized business customer’s order directly from an ERP system like NetSuite and automatically send the order to partial shipping systems like UPS. This is very helpful for SMBs involved in e-commerce that are taking customer orders from a website and using efficient way to deliver the product to their customers. Let's look at the e-commerce market itself. The Oz business has been growing quickly by solving these pain points. And the growth has in large part been helped by having strong channel partnerships with the likes of UPS and Net Suite. Both UPS and Net Suite are partners of Descartes as well and we're looking forward to working together in a new strength and relationship. I'd like to again welcome the Oz employees, partners and customers to the Descartes community. We're really looking forward to working together with you. Second trend I'd like to speak to is security and more specifically regulators’ desire for advanced electronic information about business transactions. We talked a lot in the past about the regulatory environment and how we continue to help our customers comply with various advanced electronic information security filing requirements for international shipments. This in turn helps governments better secure their borders. And as we’ve talked about, the secured filing environment for shipments continues to evolve with new initiatives for electronic data sharing currently rolling out around the world and more expected to come in the future. As an update on some of the key initiatives that are on the horizon, in the U.S. there's two key initiatives that remain a focus for us, ACAS and U.S. export filings. ACAS or Air Cargo Advanced Screening is a new filing that freight forwarders will make to the U.S. government on air shipments. The pilot programs continue, and it’s currently scheduled to wrap up by the end of 2016 -- excuse me, summer of 2016. U.S. export filings. This is a new carrier manifest pilot program. Right now information is gathered only on imports and this program extends this to understanding what cargo is on vessels leaving the United States. That pilot's going on through 2017. We’re actively working with customers to make sure they understand the proposed regulations and the requirements and to help them from each of the pilots or through each of the pilots through to go live and enforcement. Canada also remains active with new initiatives such as eManifest for highway carriers, freight forwarders and the actual importers or shippers. For highway carriers, this is the ACI initiative. eManifest went live in May of this year with financial penalties to begin January 2016 for non-compliance. We're already helping customers and are ready to help those who might turn their minds to solution as the reality of penalties get closer and closer. Forwarder eManifest’s delayed of the trade community and CBSA finalize the in state solution, we'll keep you posted on that one as we learn more. And importer manifest or eManifest or ATD is a new initiative for importers or shippers and is currently scheduled to begin testing in Q4 of 2016 for all modes of transportation. We continue to educate and engage the trade community as we analyze and develop network solutions for these initiatives in Canada. And in Europe, the PRECISE initiative remains the next big one out there on horizon. This is a forwarder focused finally, much like U.S. ACAS filings. Preparations still continue for it to enter the pilot phase in the upcoming year. We also expect to see other countries to come out with similar initiatives for sharing electronic shipment data in the near future. In addition to helping our customers comply with these shipment security filing initiatives, you’ll recall that in the second quarter we acquired MK Data to help our customers comply with regulations around restricted parties. While shipment security filing is driven by government’s monitoring shipment data, restricted party screen is a bit broader from a security perspective. It’s focused on making sure you aren't doing business with restricted parties, both domestically and around the world. And these could be customers, suppliers, partners and even your own employees. As a recap to how this works, governments around the world maintain a variety of list of people, organizations and countries that are restricted or prohibited for you to do business with. And with our MK Data business, we help our customers comply with these regulations. These lists continue daily, and we keep on top of this to make sure our customers don't do business with the wrong people. You only need to read the daily headlines to see that the forces that can drive changes to these lists, as sanctions are imposed by countries against others as a consequence of military conflict, terrorist activities or trading economic influence. And you don't want to get this wrong, not only because of a large fines and potential criminal convictions, but it’s just a good business practice. Someone on a restricted list is on there for a reason. As a business, you want to identify that risk, as soon as possible so you can shut it down; we help our customers do that. That's a great momentum since we've combined with MK in July and remain committed to expanding our business in this area to help our customers and the wider logistics community identify restricted parties before shipment is executed. This is not something you want to find out about when your goods are at the border. This causes massive delays and other problems, fines and things like that for your company. And finally, third, this brings me to the last trend to highlight today and that's what we're seeing with the Global Logistics Network. Our network continues to expand. We continue to see demand from the market to have one place for shippers and logistic service providers to go to research, plan and execute their shipments, and execute them properly and in a compliant but also cost efficient manner, we need to have all the information and tools at hand in one place. For us, this place is the Global Logistics Network. You’ve heard me talk before about our network being like Bloomberg terminal for logistics, a place where customers can make informed decisions about who to do business with, how to classify goods appropriately and submit complaint documentation, how to move goods efficiently and work with a broader ecosystem of parties and how to do it all, not just cost effectively but in a way that can allow your customers -- our customers differentiate themselves and give them a competitive advantage in their markets. Every quarter we see more momentum for this vision and every quarter we invest in our business accordingly. We continue to invest to build our capabilities and reach outside of our existing network. We continue to invest to make more and more content available on the network. And we continue to invest to add tools and applications for the existing community as well as new tools to broaden the community like the investment in Oz. We feel strongly that we have -- what we have here is very difficult to replicate and increasingly a big differentiator for us in the market is we continue to invest to bring everything together. Before I hand it over to Allan, I'd like to talk a little bit more about -- to talk more about the financials, I'd like to thank the people that made this another great quarter for Descartes. So, thanks to our employees for all the hard work you put in to make sure our customers get results, thank you to our customers who continue to place confidence in Descartes as their network of choice, thanks to our partners for helping us rapidly expand our ecosystem, and finally, I'd like to thank our shareholders for continuing to have confidence in Descartes. And with that, I'll turn it over to Allan.