Steve Humphreys
Analyst · Northland Capital Markets
All right. Thanks, Sandra. In my opening comments and in Sandra’s financial review, we covered most of our core businesses’ strengths and recent events. And I think you can see the progress we’re making in our strategy, our execution and the development of our business. Now I’d like to look forward, where we think we’re hitting our inflection point and we’re positioned to deliver as profitable, growing and strategically positioned. To do this, I’ll focus on two things: our Thursby merger, what it means and how we expect to leverage our advantage together in several dimensions; and then our outlook for the balance of the year and into next year. So with Thursby Software Systems, we have a perfect fit with our Identity segment. We’ve known the people and the company as a partner since 2011. We aligned on our federal government focus. And their software gross margins are a substantial margin expansion opportunity for our combined business. Strategically, they connect in several key aspects with us: mobile apps, software and systems to enable secure and convenient access across smart cards as well as derived credentials across Apple iOS and Android mobile devices. These are all strengths of Thursby and directions that are core to Identiv’s platform. So you can hear the touch points that are core to our vision and I just wanted to highlight that upfront, but let me get into Thursby’s core business and core strengths. As you’ve heard, Thursby’s mobile apps and secure software platform enabled DoD-issued common access cards, federal personal identity verification ID cards, and mobile-based derived credentials to access, sign, encrypt and decrypt information and e-mails from Apple iOS and Android mobile phones or tablets. Now what all this means is with Thursby’s Sub Rosa software and with our smart card readers, armed services personnel now can use their own iPhone or Android, connect the reader, open the app, slide in their military ID card and access all their military websites, secured content and even send and receive encrypted e-mails, all from within Thursby Sub Rosa or controlled environment that Sub Rosa enables. In most cases, this has been prohibited for military personnel. They had to use desktops or government-supplied Blackberrys and had no access through their own mobile devices. Now a great anecdote about this was conveyed to me by Louis Modell, who is leading the combined business for us together. And he was demonstrating at one of the many military bases that we demonstrate our solutions on, and he was demonstrating the combined Thursby and Identiv solution. And a Marine officer slid in her CAC card and saw, with the Thursby Sub Rosa app, the – secure websites come up. And you can see it on the slide here in the middle. You can see right in the middle of the slide here, one of the mobile phone screens that has – it starts with My Navy Portal and goes down. And she was able to open and access her own U.S. Marine, in this case, site, all the secure content she needed, all the things she needed now to be effective mobile-y. And all she had to do was slide her card here and access the app. And she said, "This changes my life." And when you can have one of armed service personnel interact with a mobile device that way and immediately see the value, that’s when you know you’ve got a killer app. And one of the things that Thursby really did thoughtfully here is in addition to all the security – and it is very secure. I’ll take you to one of these other screenshots in a moment. But in addition to security, they put in this enablement, pre-enrolled all of the secure sites that Navy, Marines, Air Force, Army might want to see. So when you bring up your CAC card, it’s not just, "Okay, you’re secured, now download a bunch of sites and figure it all out." They are right there and you can import them within the app and be up and running immediately. That kind of frictionless-ness, number one, is terrific from a business perspective; and, number two, really aligns with the way we want to go to market. Now there’s another screen I want to bring your eye to here on the board, and this is the last one I’ll do and then we’ll go more into Thursby. But if you look towards the right there, you see one of the screens that has FIPS 140-2 mode, zero data at rest, enable CAC Dual Persona. So a lot of the promise of these CAC cards has been very secure identities. Zero data at rest means effectively no data is actually coming through the mobile device. If you pull that card out, none of the e-mails, none of the browsing, none of the content you’ve looked at there has actually been downloaded to the phone. So this type of capability, as you can tell, makes it very secure but also super easy for the service people to access and use. And so this is just – I wanted to give you a little bit of a – from the experience taste of what Thursby is delivering and why we’re so excited about that. Now this has already been deployed to over 100,000 DoD personnel, starting with the U.S. Navy reserve via the Thursby-developed Ready-2-Serve mobile application. This allows them to use personal devices to access needed information on the go, all of their deployment orders, other things for reservists, which are particularly challenging environment because they aren’t often in a military facility. They’re often coming from home or somewhere else, and they need to get access to the military content. And now they can in these ways that I just showed you and that you’ve got on the screen. Now prior to the merger with Identiv, Thursby had already sold more than 1 million software licenses to a broad range of customers and industries. So we’re talking about the DoD here because that’s the primary thrust right now, but their services and solutions have included government, health care, financial services, energy, education, across the Fortune 500 and also OEM solutions. So in addition to the Defense secure mobility opportunity, the Thursby team has really demonstrated their ability to deliver high-quality, scalable, secure software across the multiple platforms. So what does this mean for Identiv and Thursby together? Just to bring it up and back a little bit, the obvious touch points, the federal government and smart card readers, cores for Identiv’s business, core to Thursby business, and together much stronger and able to leverage our capabilities. Just as relevant, now we have virtually the only platform to enable Credentials for both logical and physical access in the high security environment of the DoD. Identiv now does CAC and PIV for FICAM secure access to facilities and uses the same credentials through the Thursby platform for secure mobile log-on and secure session. In mobile apps, overall, we both delivered mobile apps. We’ve got them for our 3VR video analytics platform as well as our Hirsch access control platform. But now we’ve gotten exposure to truly widely used mobile apps across iPhone and Android, which Thursby has deployed. This much greater mobility strength is also core to our RFID transponder business. In this segment, our customer use mobile devices and apps to interact with our NFC-enabled RFID devices, which represent tens of millions of the transponder units that we ship every year. So the core of the market excitement here is that we’re expanding our opportunity size from a number of buildings and doors, which our physical business is typically related to, to the number of people or employees we can serve. The DoD is a great example, and we can go into more detail around the metrics and the total business opportunity in the Q&A if there is interest, but here’s a quick thumbnail. Thursby’s gross margins run well above 70%, and the unit prices for the full solution is in excess of $100. In the DoD alone, there are about 1.3 million active service people, over 700,000 civilian DoD employees, and over 800,000 National Guard and reservists. So when you think about both the unit prices and gross margins and an immediate target market of nearly four million DoD personnel, plus the strategic leverage points we have together, you can see we’re excited about – why we’re excited about our combined opportunity. Now I know I’ve spent a fair amount of time on Thursby here and I’ll get to the rest of the business, the outlook now. To be clear, they’re a small company, but this is a great example of how we’re driving growth both organically and inorganically, doing accretive transactions that can contribute to our business in multiple dimensions. We don’t want to buy just revenues. We expect to add capabilities we can leverage and then grow organically and strategically. And we truly believe our combination with Thursby will accomplish exactly that. So on that basis, let’s look at our outlook for our business and then we’ll open to discussion for questions. So as you can see on these takeaways from – for 2018, we’ve got a strong base and a growing momentum across our business. We expect our growth to continue across all of our business areas, including services, software, federal government, video and analytics, smart card readers and Thursby software and RFID transponders. Now one area where we do expect revenues to fluctuate is in access cards as those products always have been opportunistic, but we expect this to be more than offset by our strong transponder business, resulting, again, in a double-digit growth for our overall Identity and Credentials segment, as Sandra mentioned in her guidance. Our RFID pipeline continues to grow and will be anchored by major corporate customers deploying mission-critical applications, which become stronger as we integrate more and more of our security platform especially for mobile users, and will cover the entire RFID spectrum as we bring online our enhanced UHF capacity and capabilities, which is happening within the next month, as I mentioned earlier. Now all this increasingly strong core business, driving organic growth is now being augmented with inorganic growth, as demonstrated by our second acquisition in a nine-month period. I think I’ve spoken enough about Thursby, but we can go into more detail in the Q&A if there’s interest. So with our demonstrated EBITDA consistency and expansion, our reduced operating and interest expense base, expanding gross margins and growing revenues from software and recurring revenues, we believe we’re positioned to deliver the next level of our business model. Even externally, we believe the environment is positive with strong core markets and resilient demand. So as you look at our 2019 and beyond, we believe we are very well positioned both to deliver continually improving financial results and our strategic vision to secure and improve all of our interactions with the physical world. As we build scale rapidly towards $100 million, we believe our profitability, growth and strategic value is getting stronger than ever. So with that, I appreciate your attention to everything we’re doing in our business, and I’ll open it for questions. Operator?