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KVH Industries, Inc. (KVHI)

Q2 2015 Earnings Call· Tue, Aug 4, 2015

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good day and welcome to the KVH Q2 2015 Earnings Conference Call. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Mr. Peter Rendall, Chief Financial Officer. Please go ahead, sir.

Peter Rendall

Management

Thank you and good morning everybody. Thank you for joining us today to discuss KVH Industries second quarter results and our updated 2015 guidance. With me on this call is, Martin Kits van Heyningen, the company's Chief Executive Officer. We issued our second quarter earnings and 2015 guidance press release this morning, which is available on our Web site and also from our Investor Relations department. If you would like to listen to a recording of today's call, you can access a webcast replay on our Web site. If you are listening via the web, feel free to submit questions to ir@kvh.com and we will answer them following this call. This conference call will contain certain forward-looking statements that are subject to a number of assumptions and uncertainties that may cause our actual results to differ materially from those expressed in these statements. And we undertake no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements. We would also discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures and you will find definitions of these measures as well as reconciliations of these non-GAAP measures to comparable GAAP measures in our earnings press release. We encourage you to review the cautionary statements and other disclosures made in our SEC filings, specifically those under the heading “Risk Factors” in our 10-k filed on March 17. The company's SEC filings are directly available from us, from the SEC or from the Investor Information section of our Web site. At this time, I would like to turn the call over to Martin.

Martin Kits van Heyningen

Management

Thanks Peter, thank you all for joining us this morning. I'm pleased to report KVH's second quarter results, met or exceeded our guidance in all key areas of our operating performance. Our revenues were 44.9 million up nearly 10% year-over-year from the second quarter of 2014 and for the quarter our adjusted non-GAAP earnings were $0.13 per share, also ahead of our guidance and up from $0.12 in 2014 Q2. This growth in revenue and profits was driven by improved performance in the every area of our mobile broadband business, including hardware, airtime and content services. Our guidance and stabilization business were also in line with our forecast. KVH is seeing increasing demand in most of our major markets, overall our fully updated portfolio of broadband connectivity, content services and satellite TV systems lead the maritime market and offer significant differentiating benefits that continue to win customers. Our FOG sales and rebounding as we continue to win new customers in emerging markets, especially for a variety of applications on autonomous platforms. We've also received some indications of the pending TACNAV orders we've been pursuing, may even be larger than we expected. Although, the timing of these programs is always difficult to predict. And Peter will cover the numbers in more detail shortly, so let me provide operating highlights for each of our key business areas. Beginning with our mobile broadband business, our Q2 revenue of $38 million were up 28% [technical difficulty]. This growth was driven by our content services offering which were up over 100% compared to Q2 of 2014, TV and VSAT hardware which increased 14% and VSAT maritime which was up 11% year-over-year. Note that the content services sales now include $5.8 million from Videotel which we acquired in July of last year. So let's take a…

Peter Rendall

Management

Thank you, Martin. I'd now like to discuss in more detail the financial results of the company for the second quarter. As Martin mentioned earlier, our second quarter revenues of $44.9 million for the upper end of our guidance range we previously gave and with 10% higher than the second quarter of 2014. The primary drivers for this growth were the incremental contribution of Videotel revenues, higher VSAT airtime revenues and higher mobile broadband product revenues, which were somewhat offset by lower TACNAV revenues as we had expected. Our second quarter service revenues of $26.9 million increased 35% year-over-year mainly due to the addition of Videotel in conjunction with our VSAT airtime revenue growth. Looking at our airtime subscription revenues more closely, in the second quarter airtime revenues were $16.2 million which was up 8% from the prior year and included an 11% increase year-over-year of VSAT airtime. Our VSAT ARPUs during the quarter for fixed rate plans were between $1800 and $1900 per month, or ARPUs for our metered plans continue to run slightly lower than we have seen previously between $500 and $600 per month. And as Martin also explained the decline in ARPUs for the oil and gas offshore vessels sector continues to be the main contributor. Our content and service revenues in the quarter, which includes subscription revenues associated with the entertainment and e-Learning content as well as any professional service fees was $10.7 million, which was 117% higher than a year ago. Almost all of this increase was attributed to revenues from our Videotel e-Learning business, which we acquired in July of last year. We were pleased with the level of subscription based service revenues in the quarter, which was 56% of total revenues up from 45% in the prior year second quarter. Now moving…

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions]. And we’ll go first to Rich Valera of Needham & Company.

Rich Valera

Analyst

Thank you. Question on the mini-VSAT revenue growth up 11% I think in the quarter, after a 12% increase in the first quarter. I think you had previously targeted that being up high-teens for all of calendar 2015, it would appear that’s ambitious at this point, do you have an updated target for that business this year?

Martin Kits van Heyningen

Management

We don’t have specific growth rate -- we haven't given specific guidance for the airtime revenue growth but I think that you're right in saying that the current growth rate is less than we had going into the year and I think we've mentioned a couple of times -- the reason for that is primarily the variable component of meter plans and day rate business which is used in the oil and gas. And that's really the area, the only area where we've seen any softness.

Rich Valera

Analyst

Couple of follow-ups I guess -- I mean can you say historically how significant and what percent oil and gas has been of that business and can you talk about what your sort of quarterly unit adds were if they were in that historical range you've talked about of 200 to 250?

Martin Kits van Heyningen

Management

Yes, they're still in that range and historically although it varies a bit quarter-to-quarter between -- you know between what we're doing in the gulf, in South America and Brazil and to some extent, some of the offshore business in Singapore, it was approximately 20% to 22% of the total VSAT sort of hardware and airtime.

Rich Valera

Analyst

Great. And last quarter you talked about having nicely dealed 11 order in backlog and thinking that might help sort of reaccelerate the -- I think both the airtime and the hardware sales as you moved into the back half of the year and any update on where that stands?

Martin Kits van Heyningen

Management

Yes, I mean we had -- we did a good growth in the hardware year-over-year, so we're in that low double-digit growth rate for hardware this quarter compared to a year ago. So, it is accelerating, it's just that at this point we don't see the oil and gas recovering for a while there. Our customers tell us that it had to be sort of in the $60 to $70 range before that business -- the offshore business recovers and it looked for a little while like we're moving in that direction, but now it looks like it's going the other way. So that's -- we're just assuming that we won't see any improvement in that part of the business, but I think we're encouraged that we're still able to get net adds and growth rate -- that's ahead of where we were year ago despite what's going on in this one sector. So, we're pretty well diversified, so I don't want to give the impression that we're totally focused on oil and gas -- right now probably 100% or 90% of our growth is in other sectors.

Rich Valera

Analyst

Just hoping if you could give a little more color on the IP-MobileCast rollout in terms of how it may be helping to leverage new wins and new actual hardware unit sales and if there's been any meaningful revenue impact from together is something that you're still expecting later this year to next year?

Martin Kits van Heyningen

Management

In terms of the net revenue, it's still small compared to the total content delivery business, so we're seeing a number of things happening. One is, somebody installed DVD based customers or switching which is fantastic because that's what we want to do. We're seeing that in new V11 contract we talked a little about last time, it's a key part of the selection which is our most expensive product and the V11 carries our highest ARPUs in addition to that we're adding IP-MobileCast revenue on top of that. So, we're seeing the early adaptors are our existing customers who are big fleet customers and they've been trialing it, now rolling it out across their fleets. So, I think the performance of the product and the reaction and everything is -- it's just been terrific, it's doing exactly what we expected which is a help to differentiate our product and help us win the VSAT business which is our number one goal.

Rich Valera

Analyst

Just in terms of the guidance on stabilization business overall, it sounds like you had -- specifically turns out a little bit in your annual guide, what was that change due to?

Martin Kits van Heyningen

Management

Partly, FOG business was really soft in Q1 and we're still optimistic we can make that back in the back of the year. We saw pretty good recovery this quarter sequentially and year-over-year but still little below where we had expected to be at this point so we've trimmed the estimates for the FOG business and that's really the only change in the guidance -- in terms of our guidance.

Rich Valera

Analyst

When would you need to receive the very large TACNAV follow-on order in order to make the year, any sense of it, the timing of when you'd hope to receive that?

Martin Kits van Heyningen

Management

I think, it really has to come - it could come as late as mid-winter Q4, we've bought the long lead parts. So there's really - we don’t have any concern that we're not going to get the order which is why we've gone ahead and purchased the material but there is always a risk of that, that it pushes out from the quarter. But right now, we're expecting to have it in hand by the beginning of Q4 and we should be able to ship it in Q4, which incidentally is exactly what happened a year ago.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] And we'll go next to Chris Quilty of Raymond James. My Quilty your line is open, please go ahead.

Chris Quilty

Analyst

Martin question on the content business, it looks like if you back out the Videotel business, content is actually down on a year-over-year basis, can you confirm that, and perhaps discuss what issues are going on there?

Martin Kits van Heyningen

Management

Just keep in mind that the change in the British pound has been about 11%, so that biz is actually up year-over-year in local currency.

Chris Quilty

Analyst

And can you give us some more details on where -- perhaps penetration rate amongst the existing customers or indications with new customers, what percent are looking at content versus just buying access to a network?

Martin Kits van Heyningen

Management

I think almost all the customers are looking at content now. So it's really an important part of the product offering. I think we’re seeing that also in the deal we did with Insmarsat where they want to have access to our content like our training product and our NEWSlink service. So it's just -- we've really changed the whole basis for competition. I think now everybody is looking at content services, training as part of the total solution. So they may not all have budgets for it in the current year, but I would say we aren't talking to anybody who says oh! I'm not interested in that because we don't need it.

Chris Quilty

Analyst

And what’s driving the decision for content, is it regulatory? Is it crew retention combination of the both?

Martin Kits van Heyningen

Management

It's more the latter, the regulatory stuff is not specific enough to force people to buy any particular type of solution, but the challenges of attracting and retaining crew is significant. And outside of fuel, which is declining, the operating cost, the single largest item is crew cost. So the cost of attracting and retaining a training crew is their number one expense now.

Chris Quilty

Analyst

And have you noticed any meaningful split amongst the hardware options for customers, the V3, V11, V7?

Martin Kits van Heyningen

Management

Not really. From quarter-to-quarter we see sometime big swings -- one quarter will have a huge V11 and then V3 in the next quarter, but in general we’re seeing a pretty constant mix, roughly half of it is V7 and the other part is split between the V3 and V11.

Peter Rendall

Management

To clarify Chris, normally when I talk about it I put the V11s and V7s together. And the current quarter represents about 60% of unit sales which is consistent with the same time last year.

Chris Quilty

Analyst

Got you. And Peter in the past you had talked about 60% incremental margins on new customers, that’s clearly fallen back, and I think that was due to some added network capacity. Should we expect to move back to that higher incremental contribution on a go forward basis or what are the dynamics we're looking at?

Peter Rendall

Management

We certainly, we’re expecting Q3 to tack a little higher, and then steady off in Q4 but we've certainly added some costs in the current year around the MPLS network, as well as our IP-MobileCast costs. So there are incremental costs in the first half of the year that certainly impacted a margin, but nothing else is expected to be significant for the remainder of the year beyond those.

Chris Quilty

Analyst

And Peter you had also talked about implementing some billing systems, I think right now most of your content business is acquired simply at the shipping company level creating the ability for actually crew to swipe a credit card, where you are in that process?

Peter Rendall

Management

We've implemented a new billing system for our Videotel business, that is up in running, in fact it's been up and running since the beginning of this year.

Chris Quilty

Analyst

And have you seen any pickup from that at the individual crew level?

Martin Kits van Heyningen

Management

No, what Peter is talking about is our back office billing system, which is integrated into the financial system. I think what you are talking about is sort of pay-per-view or onboard, where the crew pays, and when that's done -- a lot of these crew don't actually have credit card. So the way we handle that is through prepaid cards that we sell to the vessel master. So we sell the cards and if it doesn't involve credit cards by the crew on board. That’s part of our crew link product and is part of crew calling system that enables them to access the internet and make phone calls, but it doesn't allow them to purchase content.

Chris Quilty

Analyst

And a clarification Martin, have you seen actually any deactivations in the oil and gas side or is it simply the ARPU and the day rate going down?

Martin Kits van Heyningen

Management

No, we've definitely seen deactivations.

Chris Quilty

Analyst

Ok.

Unidentified Company Representative

Analyst

Lot of these vessels have been tide-up. So we've seen -- whether a suspension or deactivation, the net result is zero revenue from that, that's all for the month. That's the only part…. go ahead

Chris Quilty

Analyst

I was going to say in light of that should we expect that 2015 is not going to be the year where you breakthrough that sort of 1000 vessels a year you've been stuck out for the past several years?

Martin Kits van Heyningen

Management

I think we're at a point now where we feel pretty confident we'll be over the 300 a quarter if the offshore business was where it was a year ago, but that reality we don’t control that so, I think that we still are on a growth path and we think that we'll get there this year, but for the full year given that we're half way through it, it's unlikely that we'll exceed the 1000 for the full year, but it's hard to say at this point.

Operator

Operator

And that concludes are question and answer session. At this time I would turn the conference back to management for any additional or closing remarks.

Martin Kits van Heyningen

Management

Thanks again for joining us and as always you can reach us after the call either directly or via email. Thank you.