Phillip G. Norton
Analyst · First Wilshire
Revenues on our fiscal second quarter ended September 30, 2013, increased 4.3% to $271.1 million, the 15th consecutive quarter of increased revenues for the trailing 12 months. The revenues topped $1 billion for the first time ever. This is a significant accomplishment for ePlus and reflects the high value that our complex integrated solutions provide to our customers, vendors and partners. I would like to thank our employees, customers and partners for helping us to get to this point in our corporate history. During the quarter, we experienced some variability with revenues trending lower in the last 2 months of the quarter. We believe political events and general economic uncertainty negatively affected IT spending and caused some customers to delay purchasing and implementing projects. On a positive note, with these events behind us, we believe IT spending will standardize as customers -- stabilize as customers resume purchasing. Our gross margin percentage for sales of product and services of 17.8% is one of the highest in the industry. We continue to focus on this metric by increasing professional services as a percentage of total revenue, ensuring we are maximizing incentive programs with partners and optimizing our product mix, when possible, to focus on higher-margin sales. In our Technology segment, gross margins on products and services decreased 20 basis points for the quarter. But if we compare the 6-month period year-over-year, we had a 20-basis-point improvement in the gross margin. Our SG&A costs were up year-over-year, partially as a result of 89 new employees and about 75% of whom are customer-facing. We are investing in the most important resource for our long-term success, people, by scaling our professional services and sales staff to capture customer and market opportunity. Pursuant to our strategic plan, we are continuing to transform the company by building and executing strategies to address rapidly advancing technologies such as cloud, big data, mobile device management and software defined networking. Each of these offers significant future growth opportunities. For example, SDN is expected to increase six-fold over the next 5 years according to the Dell’Oro Group, an industry research firm. We have an advantageous combination of engineering capability and vendor relationships, especially Cisco, which is expected to be the dominant player to capture growth in this rapidly expanding technology. In all of these technologies, we need to make investments now to the best positioned for these future opportunities and to meet our customers' expectations of being a technology leader. While investments in additional headcount over the past year contributed to our SG&A increase of $2.6 million, or 7.4%, we have executed our plans to reduce our annual SG&A run rate by approximately $2.9 million, without affecting revenue or gross margin production. The cost savings from our completed plan should flow through the income statement in our fiscal fourth quarter. We will continue to find ways to further reduce costs by constantly evaluating all of our expenses -- our expense areas, product lines and types of businesses to ensure they are aligned with our strategic goals. In order to be a leader in complex integrated solutions, it is critical that we continue to invest in transforming ePlus by hiring and training the best people, and strategically aligning ourselves with key vendors and partners. We have built ePlus by employing the strongest and most experienced sales professionals, solution architects, implementation engineers and project managers available. We have aligned ourselves with the fastest-growing and most important vendors in technologies, such as Cisco, VMware, HP, EMC and NetApp. Using insights gained daily from some of our enterprise customers, combined with insights from our best engineers, we are significantly focused on driving value for our customers. Our goal is to engage our customers at the architectural level and provide a comprehensive solution set to plan, build, optimize and manage their advanced technology environments. We believe the emerging market for cloud opportunities continues to provide us with numerous opportunities in consulting and enablement. A number of these have developed into significant opportunities for private cloud consulting, enablement and implementation and should lead to future public hybrid cloud sales. Our strategy is to provide our customers with consultative approach that helps them realize the promise of cloud computing, whether it is in a private, public or hybrid solution. During the last 6 months, we have been focused on developing our engineering skills in software defined networking and big data. We see both of these areas as having great potential for future revenue growth. A number of our customers are pursuing big data efforts and we are developing strategic partnerships to facilitate delivery of analytic program and skills that complement and augment our infrastructure expertise. We are actively pursuing opportunities in next-generation equipment that support SDN programming and architecture. Over the past year, ePlus has invested heavily in our security practice by hiring regional security architects and business development executives to provide nationwide coverage by working closely with our regional personnel. Security is expected to be one of the highest growth areas in IT. While Gartner predicts an 8.7% annual growth rate in 2013, others predict a 10x increase over 10 years. Security is a growing concern for all of our customers, whether big or small, public or private. Further, it touches almost every one of our advanced technology, complex integrated solutions, including data center, networking and infrastructure, giving us a broad array of products and services on which we can leverage security sales. Turning to the financing segment. Our origination volume increased 40% during the quarter as compared to the prior year's quarter, reflecting better sales execution through our direct and indirect channels. Customers are continuing to value our processes, automation, responsiveness and ability to offer customized financing solutions that are tailored to their unique requirements. In this segment, our manufacturer partners are relying on us more than ever to meet their requirements for rapid turnaround on financing transactions. For the quarter, pretax earnings in the segment were down $1 million on slightly lower revenue. Earnings were affected by a decrease in revenue from our portfolio and an increase in direct lease costs. We remain focused on increasing volumes and increased profitability through gain on sale transactions and build our own balance sheet portfolio for the long-term to create recurring portfolio earnings and increase earnings from post-contract transactions. We continue to review many acquisition opportunities given our balance sheet, resources we have -- the capital resources to execute acquisitions and expand in new territories. Our strategic growth plan of building a national footprint through a balanced program of acquisitions and new hires is an optimal way to build the company effectively. We are also looking for acquisitions that can accelerate our growth in key technologies and solution areas. In summary, we remain highly focused on executing our growth plans and improving shareholder value. At the end of this call, I'd be happy to answer any questions. But first, I'd like to introduce Elaine Marion, our CFO.