Mike Brown
Analyst · Piper Jaffray. Your line is open
Thank you. Excuse me. Thank you, Rick and welcome everybody who's joining us today. As Rick mentioned, we had an outstanding first quarter, delivering constant currency growth of more than 20% in all consolidated financial metrics. This year, our teams worked extremely hard to overcome not only the traditional seasonal challenges we typically experience in the first quarter, but also significant foreign currency headwinds. I am particularly pleased with these results because they were made possible by strong contribution from all three segments. Our new PowerPoint template features graphics from our 2014 Annual Report which you all should be receiving here shortly which celebrated the success of Euronet's first 20 years while looking forward to our bright future. The coins on the front cover represent the global currencies on which our company was founded and our history of bringing financial payment convenience to more people around the world. The more modern design reflects Euronet's continued innovation and our position among the best technology partners in the payments industry. With strong opportunities for growth in each segment which we will highlight in the coming slide, I am excited for where we're going to be going in 2015. Now please jump to slide number 13. EFT delivered another solid quarter. Our team is extremely focused and continues to add more products on more ATMs in more countries. The strong start gave us the ability to proactively amend and extend our agreement with one of our largest European customers which will provide greater opportunity for us in the next five years. Let me just step back on this. Rick talked about it a little bit, but give you a little bit more color on this particular contract extension, because the numbers are pretty big. Over the last two years, one of our long-standing card-processing customers has grown remarkably. Kind of blew us away. Due to bank consolidation, they're acquiring a number of banks in their markets. We've got two more years left on this contract and we're making just great money. But we decided now that we wanted to proactively extend that contract for five years rather than waiting for the next two years and perhaps having this bank decide to go internal or to go to a different competitor. So what we did was, is we sat down with them, we looked at where their business was now and where we expect it to go in the future, because they have other accusations of banks in their sights. We did not have any competition for this. The bank itself still has further upside, with other potential acquisitions it might do. Timing was not particularly wonderful for us, because we're doing this and it hits us straight in our margin line exactly in Q1 which is our weakest quarter for EFT on top of it. Because don't forget, in Q1, our costs are pretty much fixed and constant throughout the year, but our revenues are weaker. You've seen the strong revenue getting stronger through Q2, Q3 as the biggest one and then Q4. So that was the reasoning behind our extension. We're happy that we've got this contract for the next five years and we'll be looking forward to its continued growth. Now let's move onto slide number 14. As you can see, we had a very active quarter, signing several new agreements and launching quite a few new products. I won't go into details on each of these agreements, but we'll highlight a few. First of all, we continued to expand our acceptance of China UnionPay. This quarter we UnionPay acceptance to our Euronet-branded ATMs in Poland, Romania, Italy and the Czech republic. We signed an ATM driving debit card management and gateway services agreement for Commercial Bank International in Dubai. We signed a switching agreement with Aegean Airlines which will allow them to use their POS terminals inflight. Finally, we signed an agreement with Creacard, the largest provider of prepaid cards in France, to issue and distribute three types of prepaid cards; corporate expense, key money and general purpose reloadable cards. Now let's move on to the next slide. On slide number 15, I continue to be excited about the value proposition our EFT team brings to the financial institutions around the world. Many banks around the world are slow to sign outsourcing agreements for their ATM networks for a number of reasons; however, many major financial institutions have acknowledged and trust, our market-leading expertise to deliver value-added services which mean revenues, to their ATM networks. From the U.S. to Europe to Asia, we have become the global leader in value-added service distribution to banks and we now have signed agreement with banks in 16 different countries to offer value-added products on more than 165,000 ATMs which don't even include the almost 21,000 ATMs that we currently operate ourselves. As you may remember from our recent press release, we also signed an agreement to launch value-added services on the Elan Financial Services ATMs in the United States. In the first quarter, we signed an agreement with BPCE Group, France's third largest bank group, to add value-added services to their network of approximately 17,000 ATMs. We expect to start rolling out these ATMs with our products in the second half of this year and continue through 2016. We also signed an agreement with the State Bank of India, the largest bank in India, to launch value-added services on their network of approximately 55,000 ATMs. We're currently working on integration and expect to have these fully live in the next several months. These recent value-added service agreements include a large number of ATMs - as you can see, 165,000 - so I'd like to take a minute to explain the dynamics of these deals. Through these agreements, we provide banks with the technical capabilities to put more value-added content on their ATMs through a connection to our data processing center and content distribution center. So while we do not operate these ATMs, they can provide nice opportunities for the banks to enhance their revenue stream. We're pleased with the confidence the banks have shown us and believe these agreements will contribute nicely to achieving our growth goals this year and in future years. Back to the highlights. Pure Commerce continued to make progress, adding new retailers. In the first quarter, they brought live Heinemann Asia Pacific in Sydney, adding to our list of duty-free shops around the world. To give you another example of our value-added product portfolio, in Poland we completed a coupon campaign with Lux Express, a Polish bus service. Customers received a coupon for discounted bus fare with each cash withdrawal made. We ended the quarter with 20,863 ATMs, adding 499 ATMs in the quarter, with the largest increases coming from India and Poland. I just wish we would have got one more, so I could have said 500 and made it even. As you can see, we continued to see great opportunities for growth across our entire EFT business. So let's now move on to slide number 17 and we'll talk about epay. Epay had a very, very strong quarter. We saw more balanced growth with expansion across most markets, driven by our strategy to add more content and more retailers across more countries. Let's move on up to slide number 18. Here you can see that we launched processing of e-vouchers, mobile top-up and bill payments for Zain in Saudi Arabia. Zain is Saudi Arabia's second-largest mobile operator and a nice addition to our mobile business in this country. In the U.S., we signed an agreement with CITGO, a leading U.S. fuel store franchise chain. Epay will now be the recommended prepaid partner for more than 5,000 CITGO locations across the U.S.. We also renewed our agreement with the UK Post Office to continue mobile top-up and non-mobile content distribution through more than 11,000 POS terminals across the UK Post Offices. The Post Office locations are in high-volume locations for prepaid customers and we're pleased to keep this distribution within our networks. On to slide 19. Here we see some of the highlights from our non-mobile business. In Germany, we expanded our relationship with both Microsoft and MSH, Germany's leading electronics provider, by launching Microsoft Office across all MSH stores. This is our first distribution of Microsoft Office in Germany. This distribution also further expands on the strategy I have previously shared with you to move the PIN activation from the CD to the point of sale, eliminating the need for packaging and distribution of our software content partners. We continued our expansion of Google Play across our markets. In Germany, we added Google Play and Steam, the gaming site, to 400 E-Plus locations and in Austria we added Google Play to 1800 Austria Post locations. Finally, in Russia we launched EA Sports, representing our first launch of EA Sports content. We're excited to add this new content to our portfolio. Overall, I am very pleased with the performance of our epay segment in the first quarter. They did an outstanding job. Now let's move onto slide number 22 and we'll talk about money transfer. Well, I don't know, on slide number 22, you take a look at these graphs. What more can I say. We had over 300% constant currency operating income growth. Other than this, it was just a phenomenal quarter for our money transfer segment. These results are a testament to our teams out doing work to get another location and another country with another customer and the highlights of the next page certainly backs this up. We had a good quarter from HiFX, with good transaction volume, stimulated by the foreign currency fluctuations that Rick spoke about. We're also pleased that the process to launch HiFX U.S. is under way. We still expect this service to launch in the second quarter and we will provide additional details in the coming weeks. Let's move on to slide number 24. Before I wrap up money transfer, I'd like to tell you a little about our most recent award for the Walmart2Walmart product. Payments.com, a leading web site in the payment space, awarded Walmart and Ria with their 2015 Best Cash Innovation award. We're proud to power the Walmart2Walmart product and are pleased with the acceptance of the product by consumers in the U.S.. Overall, our money transfer segment had an outstanding quarter, with strong growth driven by their continued focus on adding more locations in more products in more countries. Now, finally, let's move on to slide 25 and we will wrap up this quarter. We achieved adjusted cash EPS of $0.56, $0.02 ahead of our guidance and a 22% increase over Q1 2014 which also equates to a 35% increase adjusted for foreign currency which reflects the strength of our underlying business. EFT posted solid results through continued ATM expansion and increased value-added services on both the ATM and POS terminals. Epay delivered double-digit operating income growth for the second consecutive quarter, driven by increased sales of non-mobile products. Money transfer realized triple-digit operating income and adjusted EBITDA growth, driven by continued organic growth in the existing Ria businesses, including the addition of Walmart2Walmart, as well as from the acquisition of HiFX. Our balance sheet continues to strengthen, with good free cash flow generation. Finally, we expect our Q2 2015 adjusted cash EPS to be $0.70, assuming foreign currency exchange rates remain consistent. With that, we'll be happy to take any questions. Operator, will you please assist?