Najeeb Ghauri
Analyst · Legend Capital. Please proceed with your question
Thank you, Roger. As I mentioned in my opening remarks, Q3 was an overall great quarter for NetSol. We continue to execute in all areas of our core business, enabling us to achieve certain major company milestones that positively impacted our financial results and operational performance. Looking ahead, we feel that fiscal 2019 has represented an inflection point as we transition into our next stage of future growth. The state of our business is very strong and our results have been reflecting this truth for some time now. But what's also important to consider in looking at our results is what we would commonly call our core operations. That is, basically, what you expect to be NetSol'S main business, compensation received for auto and asset finance and leasing software and services. For context, NetSol, for a number of years, was able to effectively monetize and leverage its superior international engineering team for other non-core work with outside third-party vendors or partners, which contributed nicely to our overall results, acted as an additional diversified revenue stream and enabled us to more dynamically distribute human resources on as-on-need basis. Now that said, more recently, our relationship with Innovation Group, or IG, our joint venture partner for several years, ended as a result of a change of ownership. As a part of that relationship, NetSol has enjoyed a healthy revenue stream that led to over $8 million in the 2015 fiscal year. With the ending of our relationship with IG, the impact was two-fold. First, we leveraged this situation as a positive and an opportunity to reallocate our existing human resources to areas that were only high impact that is our flagship Ascent solution, which was a major factor in our ability to reduce cost over the past year-plus period. Second, our related party top-line results were obviously impacted to a degree by the loss of this consistent result of revenue, which was historically recognized in related party services revenues. However, as we continue to move forward into subsequent fiscal years, we will be able to get past the year-over-year comparisons that include vestiges of the legacy business, which will give us a truer presentation or representation of the great growth potential of our core business. Again, NetSol has obviously been doing quite well irrespective of this point, but we also think it's worth pointing out in order to paint a more accurate picture of our growing operation in the most meaningful way. Moving to the rest of my remarks, I will start, as we typically do, with updates on our major implementations and highlights on our new business, we were able to generate during the quarter. First, I'd like to begin with our ongoing multiyear international deployment associated with the previously announced 12-country $110 million contract with a major German multinational auto manufacturer. During the quarter, we issued a few press releases that provided updates on some of our implementations. Most recently, we announced in April that we have successfully gone live in Japan after implementing the NFS Ascent Wholesale Finance System and the Dealer & Auditor Access System or DAS. Japan marks the seventh country in which we have deployed some portion of our services on this contract, so we are continuing to make formidable progress. Each new deployment in every location has so far been a success, and we are even being able to outpace our recently anticipated time line for completion. The speed at which we continue to execute has been driven by our ability to avoid any major setbacks, which for others can be a huge issue when it comes to a large-scale tier-one implementations. We expect to be perfect or near-perfect every time. This expectation, this belief is a testament to both the adaptability of our technology and dependability of our team. Next, on the development road map, we have Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, India and Thailand. As of today's call, we have made significant progress in each of these regions, and we're looking forward to providing more meaningful updates when these respective implementations go live. Finally, I'd like to discuss China. In March, we announced the successful completion of the implementation process for this same contract, which included the complete NFS Ascent suite, both retail and wholesale. While on the surface, going live in one country seems as meaningful as any other, in China, this is not the case. Our successful Go Live in China represented the greatest single deployment of our Ascent platform in the largest leasing market in the APAC region, making it one of the most significant events in the history of our company. China, in particular, has proven to be incredibly difficult to tackle for many of our competitors. Beyond the need for the highly technical and domain-specific skill set, accomplishing an undertaking of this size and scope also require a significant amount of dedication and sacrifice from countless members of our team worldwide. In total, more than 400 key personnel from both organizations devoted nearly a year's worth of work and testing to get the job done to achieve total fidelity in the data migration and accounting reconciliation as well as compliance with the China Banking Regulatory Commission or CBRC, and the People's Bank of China, which is PBOC, is an outstanding achievement for NetSol. I'm so proud and grateful for the tireless efforts of all these involved and who made this goal a reality. Staying in China, but moving to recently acquired customer, BMW Financial. We have continued to make solid strides in both our retail and wholesale implementations. At this point, we're optimistically looking to a Go Live date for the commercial a wholesale system in this calendar year with a retail component finishing sometime in 2020. We still have a number of key road map items to cross out before the project is final, but we will continue to keep you updated as we get closer to the launch. And a final check update, China update as it relates to our previously announced deal with an American multinational auto manufacturer to implement our Ascent retail platform, we are making great progress here too, and expect to finalize the full implementation around end of our fiscal year or shortly thereafter. In our European region, we began the LeaseSoft implementation process for a UK-based commercial and individual financing provider and are making solid progress along the deployment road map. In our American region, we recently signed an agreement with SEI for five years with a multimillion dollar total contract value. The leaseback implementation is in process with an estimated completion by the end of this calendar year, which is 2019. Before finishing with an outlook for the remainder of our fiscal year, and then turning it over to questions, I'd like to spend some additional time focusing on our innovation map, which as I mentioned in my opening remarks, will now be referred to as OTOZ, which is O-T-O-Z. But first, I'll take a step back. We have spent time in previous calls discussing the major transformational shift for both our business and for the greater leasing and financing landscape. Put another way, from a unique industry vantage point, we are able to more closely follow trends that others might miss. One of those trends, which we think is really a long-term evolution, is the rise in the potentially massive global subscription economy. While OTOZ, in its future, will aim to address a number of yet unknown opportunities, the underlying technology of the platform was conceptualized and will be built based on advances that are expected to have a material impact on auto and fintech industries specifically. And this does not have to come at the expense of our existing business. We envision a future, where the OTOZ can actually enhance the reach of our Ascent platform, beginning first with car-share opportunity for new and existing auto captive finance customers. What's more with the rapid evolution and new types of vehicle and asset ownership models, we're also witnessing massive growth in digital and mobile solutions being desired and even required by our existing and new partners alike. To address this demand, we formed a strategic partnership with a company called Drivemate. Drivemate is the top car-sharing peer-to-peer car rental service in Thailand and a perfect build in customer for us to be able to test our new technology in a low financial risk environment. We also have additional opportunity to leverage the expertise of a well-established company in the car sharing and peer-to-peer rental market, which we believe has great growth potential. Further, to the last point, we are actively developing several new products under our doors to ensure that our global customer base will be ready and able to adopt these fast evolving business models. We are especially interested in fully enabling our clients to launch more flexible auto ownership plans as well as car sharing and fractional leasing alternative, all of which should grow secularly in the coming years. At the same time, our Innovation Lab has been focused on continuing to build out our capabilities in intelligent technologies, such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, blockchain, IoT and cloud native architectures to help future-proof our core business to innovate around new opportunities. While these areas are obviously nascent in our development - in their development, they have great long-term potential. And we are even making progress in securing partnerships with two of the top enterprise software companies in the world to augment our OTOZ business model going forward. We look forward to sharing more details on that soon. The point is change is happening right now in front of us and with such comes new opportunities, but those companies that have the resolve to adapt, hard it may be, and the vision to innovate ahead of the pack. Our vision for NetSol is to be one of the most innovative companies for the future in our space, and that is why we are acting. As our industry continues to evolve, we will alongside, too. No company in the asset leasing and finance space is more well equipped than NetSol to take advantage of the disruptive technologies that have the power to transform ownership model as we know with the best delivery and development capabilities in our industry and domain. In closing, with numerous deployments now underway, under our belt for our flagship solution as well as the prospective business we have in our near-term line of sight, we remain comfortably on track to achieve our previously stated goal of double-digit revenue growth for the year. And with that, I'd like to open the call up for questions. Operator?