Earnings Labs

Innodata Inc. (INOD)

Q3 2016 Earnings Call· Tue, Nov 1, 2016

$42.15

+0.77%

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good morning. And welcome to the Innodata Third Quarter 2016 Earnings Call. Today’s conference is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Ms. Amy Agress. Please go ahead, Ma'am.

Amy Agress

Management

Thank you, Priscilla. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. Our speakers today are Jack Abuhoff, Chairman and CEO of Innodata; and O'Neil Nalavadi, our CFO. We’ll hear from O'Neil first, who will provide a detailed review of our results for the third quarter and then Jack will follow with additional perspective about the business. We’ll then take your questions. First, let me qualify the forward-looking statements that are made during the call. These statements are based largely on our current expectations and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties, including without limitation that contracts may be terminated by clients; projective or committed volumes of work may not materialize. Our Innodata Advanced Data Solutions segment, IADS, is a venture that has incurred losses since inception and has recorded impairment charges for all of its fixed assets. We currently intend to continue to invest in IADS; the primarily at-will nature of our contracts with our Digital Data Solutions clients and the ability of these clients to reduce, delay or cancel projects; continuing this Digital Data Solutions segment revenue concentration in a limited number of clients; inability to replace projects that are completed, cancelled or reduced; depressed market conditions; changes in external market factors; the ability and willingness of our clients and prospective clients to execute business plans which could rise to requirements for our services; difficulty in integrating and deriving synergies from acquisitions, joint ventures and strategic investments; potential undiscovered liabilities of companies and businesses that we may acquire; changes in our business or growth strategy; the emergence of new or growing competitors; various other competitive and technological factors; and other risks and uncertainties indicated from time-to-time in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. We undertake no obligation to update forward-looking information, and actual results could differ materially. Thank you. I will now turn the call over to O'Neil.

O'Neil Nalavadi

Management

Thank you, Amy. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today to review our financial performance for the third quarter 2016. I will start with the background before reviewing the financials. On July 14 we completed the acquisition of Agility business from PR Newswire. So this quarters financials reflect the contributions of Agility under the Media Intelligence segment. In the third quarter our results were impacted by certain one time expenses. These include a $220,000 general and administrative expense in Digital Data Solutions that relate to an investigation that we had mentioned previously. In the Media Intelligence segment these include $360,000 of restructuring and integrations costs for Agility. Of this amount approximately $120,000 was accounted under cost of goods sold and the balance under SG&A expenses. As a result of the acquisition of Agility and its integration with MediaMiser we amended the terms of supplemental purchase considerations under MediaMiser’s share purchase agreement. Prior to the amendment the amount of payment was to be based on future financial results subject to a cap of $3.8 million. The amendment fixed the payments at $1.5 million to be paid in two equal installments in March 2017 and March 2018 subject to certain conditions. We have retained the option to pay up to 70% of this supplemental consideration in Innodata stock. To account for this supplemental consideration we took a charge for a net expense of approximately $1 million after offsetting a $500,000 reserve in the books. This quarter we also earned a one time revenue of approximately $240,000 in connection with the Agility purchase transaction. My remarks on competitive results for both Q3 and Q2 exclude the effect of these one time special expenses and income as I will indicate. Excluding the impact of one time revenue total revenue in the third…

Jack Abuhoff

Management

Thank you, O'Neil. Good morning everyone and thank you for joining us this day. As O’Neil just mentioned in the third quarter we had approximately $1.6 million of one time costs most of which related to our third quarter acquisition of Agility from PR Newswire. And a payment we agreed to make and due to the earn out we put in place when we acquired MediaMiser in 2014. I'll start by discussing our Media Intelligence business, what these costs were for, where we are with the business and what we hope to accomplish. And then I'll cover our other two operating segments in turn. We closed our Agility, our acquisition of the Agility business from PR Newswire on July 14. Agility is a SaaS based tool used by PR and corporate communications professionals for identifying journalists and bloggers who might have an interest in a particular story. And then distributing the story to those identified journalists and bloggers. Now Agility Plus is a tool that PR and corporate communications personal use to monitor and measure media coverage of stories. We paid $4.1 million for the business in a sale that was forced by market regulators in the US and the UK in conjunction with the acquisition of PR Newswire by Cision. Agility produced approximately $5 million in revenue last year this quarter it produced $1.8 million, which suggests an annual growth rate in the mid-20% range. It also contributed $350,000 of EBITDA to the quarter after excluding onetime costs incurred for restructuring and integration. There are several reasons why we like this acquisition. First it's almost all recurring revenue. As a result in this quarter 80% of our total company revenues were recurring. As you know driving recurring revenue has been a strategic priority for us. Second it fits well…

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] And we will take our first question from Tim Clarkson with Van Clemens, your line is open.

Tim Clarkson

Analyst

Hi Jack and O'Neil.

JackAbuhoff

Analyst

Hi Tim.

Tim Clarkson

Analyst

Hey just wanted to go through some of the pieces of the business here. So on the European piece I know that at the beginning of the year that we are expecting to try to get additional a million to two million dollars from these European players that were basically shifting some of their in-house business to Innodata. What’s the status in terms of how much revenue are we getting from those new sources of revenue.

Jack Abuhoff

Management

I don’t know that we have that exact number for you right now because the new business is part of a, part of this clients over all business. So I think may be we’ll have to share that with you at another time.

Tim Clarkson

Analyst

Okay.

Jack Abuhoff

Management

I think important thing though is that we are continuing to ramp up on that. The losses that we are incurring there are, we call them just gestational losses because it’s basically hiring the staff that we need to do the work and training them in advance of the work coming in. Then as the work comes in and we take over those operations, here is a learning curve. So people are less efficient at first but then they gain efficiency. And as they gain that efficiency we end up making greater revenue per person because our revenue is typically denominated in a unit base way not in a per person recovery rate way. So that’s why we hold those costs, it’s in anticipation of that revenue and the revenue is going to be continuing to come in.

Tim Clarkson

Analyst

I mean are we still looking at potentially a million and half to two million a quarter from these deals or what’s the potential revenue on these deals?

Jack Abuhoff

Management

Yeah and that’s in the range of the potentially, the Euro depreciation has taken little bit off of the top when you convert that back to dollars. But at the same time we are also seeing other opportunities within that client there. They want to be aggressive, they want to accomplish a lot in terms of cost savings and we are continuing to work with them to look at other things.

Tim Clarkson

Analyst

Okay. And going to the insurance piece, so right now we’re somewhere between $1 and $1.2 on the whole IADS status, what’s the reason I mean is there a goal of getting this to $1.5 million to $2 million in a reasonable period of time or what’s a reasonable expectation in terms of growing that division?

Jack Abuhoff

Management

[indiscernible] (0:28:39): Beyond that we’ve got a Data Driven Solution that supports automation and if you look at any of the big conferences, the life insurers and insurers generally are having they are all talking about the importance of data and data digital transformation within their businesses. So the right place, right time I think the headwinds of the bureaucracy. It’s the incremental approach to change and even beyond that it’s that and now where we are kind of getting a view of these things. This year especially they prioritized in terms of that digital information developing some of their front-end web based systems so that people can order life insurance online. A bunch of these guys didn’t have that in place, believe it or not, and then they are saying and this is what’s happening and the ones that kind of pushed over to 2017, they are saying, “well now that we have got that in place alright key people can work with you on the operations side and the big data side, to do the things necessary to utilize your service”. I hope that answers to the question Tim…

Tim Clarkson

Analyst

Sure sure. One other piece you mentioned that you have a potential in the disability end is that something that you can start working on right away or is it do you have to do a lot of development work on that?

Jack Abuhoff

Management

Well we had to do some development work but that’s already done. So we are now working with two clients.

Tim Clarkson

Analyst

Okay.

Jack Abuhoff

Management

Within their disability divisions as well, that’s new for us. And then we’ve got two other clients who are looking to take us into their long-term care underwriting division which is yet another opportunity within that general insurance space.

Tim Clarkson

Analyst

Okay. And now moving into the MediaMiser, what’s the new term for this division?

Jack Abuhoff

Management

And it will be called Media Intelligence.

Tim Clarkson

Analyst

Media Intelligence Solutions, yeah. So based on what I am hearing it is a 20, 20 % growth rate, is that kind of the goal of this division in terms of revenue growth?

Jack Abuhoff

Management

We are going to be sharing some metrics and growth expectations with you in our next call but we think that there is a large addressable opportunity out there. One of the fun things about it is I think we are probably one of the companies out there who has the best customer service, the best client retention rates and may be even some of the best technology, but we are small. Small fish, big pond and the big pond adds up to close to a billion dollars of addressable revenue. So we plan to have some fun with it and we think we are going to be positioned well in order to grow that. There is some work to be done, for sure, we are going to have put in place the mechanisms that effectively substitute for PR ends sales channel. We get that but we have got some good plans and ideas there as well.

Tim Clarkson

Analyst

Okay, well I am done, thanks.

Jack Abuhoff

Management

Thank you Tim.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] And we will go next for Joe Furst from Furst Associates. Your line is open.

Joe Furst

Analyst

Good morning gentlemen. In your basic business, which is still the biggest part of revenue what are you doing to try to grow that business because that’s key?

Jack Abuhoff

Management

Yeah it’s key. So we are doing few things. One of the things that we are doing is we are setting our sights increasingly not just on information companies and publishers and e-book retailers but we are looking to the enterprise. There are all sorts of companies that are trying to figure out their big data place, their digital transformation players. And we think that there is opportunity within that for us. So we talked , we are talking this quarter about a significant new client that we brought in who is not a publisher or an information company or an e-book retailer, they are a financial services institution. But they are doing things with data and they are doing things with data that we can help them do. So a lot of what we are going to be doing is focusing on that. We are going to be continuing to innovate on the technology side. In fact the innovation that we’ve done with our Innodata Labs group was what enabled us to win this new client. We see other things forming up that they can be helpful with as well and in that in Innodata Labs what we are really focusing on is applying artificial intelligence to problems of information processing and publishing and obtaining value from digital data. So we think there's, there's good opportunity there.

Joe Furst

Analyst

And with your business in Great Britain, over this Brexit vote is that anything negative as far as your business is concerned.

Jack Abuhoff

Management

Night and we're not seeing anything right now. Of course currency is always an issue for us and in Agility we've got a piece of the business that is in the UK and is exposed to foreign currency fluctuations. But that’s something that we’ll continue to watch and manage.

Joe Furst

Analyst

Alright thank you.

Operator

Operator

Thank you we’ll go next to Ed Fowler [NBS Securities]. Your line is open.

Ed Fowler

Analyst

Good morning Jack and O'Neil you today.

Jack Abuhoff

Management

Hi Ed good morning.

Ed Fowler

Analyst

Yeah I don't have much to ask here but what do you anticipate the revenue to be from the European publisher in the fourth quarter?

Jack Abuhoff

Management

Ed what we're doing is we're kind of baking that into our overall guidance that we're giving and within the range that where we're giving where we're not prepared to provide guidance on a client by client basis.

Ed Fowler

Analyst

And I have in my notes it was something like $4.9 million.

Jack Abuhoff

Management

Yeah I think that again for a whole bunch of reasons including competitive reasons and confidentiality reasons we don't go down to the client specific level and provide guidance.

Ed Fowler

Analyst

Okay. Are you done with the improper payments. Are there any further charges.

Jack Abuhoff

Management

Where we are, there is we’re essentially we hope closing the investigation. We are hopeful that there isn't going to be more where that came from. But we will continue to provide updates.

Ed Fowler

Analyst

Okay, Thank you Jack.

Jack Abuhoff

Management

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] And I am showing we have no further questions at this time I'd like to turn the call back to our speakers for closing remarks today.

Jack Abuhoff

Management

Thank you operator, so we’re off to a solid start with Agility in terms of integration. We're pleased that in two years time we've gone from a business with a zero subscription revenue to now having more than $10 million of annualized subscription revenue. That's a big change for the better to our business model. In our Synodex business we came out of the gate strong with a new important client. They have expressed their delight with what we've enabled them to achieve. That has helped in fact drive revenue. It expanded our footprint within their underwriting division just this week they started bringing us into their disability underwriting division. We're continuing to nurture our customer prospects and push forward. Although it's a slower slog than we’d want it to be. We expect that revenue will go up next quarter in our Digital Data Solutions segment we're continuing to face headwinds from a key e-book customer dialing back in its requirements. But we're continuing to innovate the core business to align it with the needs of go-to-market to see the benefit of Digital Data within their businesses. Our win this quarter of a potentially $1 million contract with the financial services firm is encouraging. Thank you everyone for joining us on today's call. We will look forward to sharing with you more as we progress. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Today's conference. It's available for replay from 2:00 P.M. Eastern today to December 1 2016 at 2:00 P.M. Eastern. You may access the recording by dialing 8663751919 or 7194570820 using pass code 6808319. Again the numbers are 8663751919 or 7194570820 pass code. 6808319. This concludes today's conference. You may now disconnect.