Earnings Labs

ePlus inc. (PLUS)

Q3 2014 Earnings Call· Wed, Feb 5, 2014

$83.85

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the ePlus Third Quarter of Fiscal year 2014 Earnings Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question-and-answer session and instructions will follow at that time. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. I’d now like to introduce our host for today’s conference, Kley Parkhurst, Senior Vice President. You may begin.

Kleyton L. Parkhurst

Management

Thank you, Jasmine. Thank you, everyone for joining us today. With me are Phil Norton, Chairman, President and CEO of ePlus; Mark Marron, Chief Operating Officer and President of ePlus Technology; Elaine Marion, Chief Financial Officer; and Erica Stoecker, General Counsel. I want to take a moment to remind you that the statements we make this afternoon that are not historical facts may be deemed to be forward-looking statements and are based on management’s current plans, estimates and projections. Actual and anticipated future results may vary materially due to certain risks and uncertainties detailed in the earnings release we issued this afternoon, and our periodic filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including our Form 10-K for the year ended March 31, 2013, and subsequent Form 10-Q. The Company undertakes no responsibility to update any of these forward-looking statements in light of new information or future events. I'd now like to turn the call over to Phil Norton. Phil?

Phillip G. Norton

Management

Thank you, Kley. We had a very strong quarter. Revenues increased 10.4% to $267.2 million. Net earnings increased 17.5% to $10.6 million and fully diluted earnings per share increased 18.9% to $1.32 per share. During the quarter, we announced and implemented a 750,000 share repurchase plan. We will go into more financial and operational details during the prepared remarks. But one highlight of the quarter was sharp increase in gross margin on products and services which increased 140 basis points to 18.9% based in part on our stated strategy of success in transitioning to a higher margin service led business model. Our financial results just illustrate our ability to achieve double-digit revenue growth as a provider of complex integrated solutions at one of the highest gross margins in the industry. Our services led business model addresses our customers complex computing and business requirements for the entire IT life cycle. From the upfront session page through managed services ultimately optimizing and securing and managing our customers IT environment. For the quarter, net earnings increased at a faster rate than revenues, which reflects an increase in gross profit from both higher gross margin and more revenue, as well as our ability to hold the line on costs. As we discussed last quarter, we’re trimming underperforming personnel, while continuing to invest in sales and engineering talent to address the huge opportunity in security, storage, BYOD, Cloud and others. We are continuing on to focus on our chief strategic objectives, expanding our national presence through organic growth and acquisitions, growing sales to existing customers by offering a full suite of products and services, becoming more operationally efficient. First thing on profitability and continuing to hire, retain, and train the best employees. We continue to review many acquisition opportunities and given our balance sheet resources, we have the capital to execute acquisitions and expand 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 technology and solution areas. I would be happy to answer the questions at the end of the call, but for more detail on the quarter, I would like to turn the call over to Mark Marron, Chief Operating Officer of the Company and President of ePlus Technology, our largest segment. Mark?

Mark P. Marron

Management

Thank you, Phil. I would like to address some of our accomplishments we made during the quarter, both from an operational as well as from a sales and services standpoint. We as a management team and as a Company are very focused on corporate objectives that Phil highlighted and I will touch on some of those progress we’ve made in each of these objectives over the last -- over this past quarter. As it relates to expanding our national presence in footprint, in November we acquired AdviStor, a storage focused solution provider in the Rochester market. Now this transaction pleased to both of our primary acquisition strategies. One, expand this geographically and two, it brings in additional technology capabilities that we didn’t have in that area. Now while we’re already hired a strong group in Rochester as a Greenfield network to start a new office a few years back, our customers and vender partners were actually looking for us to expand our capabilities and reach in this market. AdviStor and its principles have a long history in the greater Rochester market and this deal instantly increased our presence, it created new customer relationships and increased our sales and engineering delivery capabilities. So while we already had a strong engineering and sales folks focused around Cisco technologies in this market, we really wanted a need of additional storage expertise that AdviStor was able to provide. So if you think about AdviStor’s focus in this area is a great addition to our portfolio because it allows us to expand our multi vendor solution capabilities, it expand our customer base and we on boarded some great employees. This AdviStor transaction is also a perfect example of ways we’ve improved and enhanced our operational efficiency. So we believe we’ve created an excellent platform to…

Elaine D. Marion

Management

Thank you, Mark. As Phil mentioned, for the quarter ended December 31, 2013, consolidated revenues grew 10.4% to $26.2 million, the 16th quarter of consolidated revenue growth on a year-over-year basis. Our financial results were strong compared to prior-year’s quarter as net earnings increased 17.5% to $10.6 million and fully diluted earnings per share increased 18.9% to $1.32 per share. For the nine month period consolidated revenues increased 6.8%, $797.6 million while net earnings were consistent at $27.1 million. Diluted earnings per share was $3.34 with $8 million diluted shares outstanding for the nine month ended December 31, 2013 compared to $3.38 per share based on $7.9 million diluted shares outstanding for the same period last year. Moving to the technology segment, revenue for the quarter increased 12.4% to $257.9 million compared to the same quarter last year and for the nine months ended December 31, 2013 the technology segment had revenues of $769.5 million, an increase of 7.3% as compared to the prior-year. Our revenue growth comes from increases in demand by our Fortune 100 customers as well as overall increases in our ePlus professional service revenue. In the technology segment, gross margin on sales and products and services increased to 140 basis points to 18.9% for the quarter ended December 31, 2013 driven by an increase in sales of third party software assurance, maintenance and services which are presented on a net basis as well as improvements in product margins. For the nine months ended December 31, 2013 our gross margin on sales of product and services increased 60 basis points to 18.1% from 17.5% in the prior-year primarily due to higher ePlus services revenue as well as higher sales of third party software assurance, maintenance and services. Earnings from our technology segment were $15.2 million for the…

Operator

Operator

(Operator Instructions) Our first question comes from the line of (indiscernible) from Canaccord. Your line is open.

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst

Hi. Thanks for taking my question. Two quick questions. On the technology segment you highlighted the strong growth. Is there a particular segment given that if you saw stronger growth like (indiscernible) or if you can just add some color on what the subsequent (indiscernible)?

Mark P. Marron

Management

Well, (indiscernible) this is Mark Marron here. It was in terms of -- the growth was across a couple of different areas, some of our larger enterprise customers. We had nice growth in our services business. Security, we had nice growth in our security numbers around the quarter as well. So those are the three off the top of my head that we had some nice growth year-over-year.

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst

And the second question I had was, given your growth margins I know you pointed to it's a huge bump up from the other go quarter, I know obviously you benefit from services, but (indiscernible) two higher margins they’re across the product portfolio or different from (indiscernible)?

Mark P. Marron

Management

(Indiscernible) did you say across the portfolio?

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst

Across your product portfolio was to -- I know the services added benefited it, but was it also better margins in products?

Mark P. Marron

Management

Well, okay. Then probably this one is a little tougher to answer just for one reason is I think it is across the product portfolio because we -- in the areas that we’re focused on which in the data center cloud space infrastructure management you’d see in collaboration space we’re providing all the services that our customers look for both from inflation, implementation, configuration, managed services and staffing. So that increased our blended margins across all of our focus areas that we’re looking for. And we also had one other thing that played into that, and we had a very strong quarter with our maintenance renewals which we feel pretty good about some of the processes and plans we put in place that helped as well.

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst

Great. And the last question I had was on your North Carolina managed services data center; if you can just give us some color on how you plan to roll it out? What type of customers you’re looking for on these managed services?

Mark P. Marron

Management

Well in terms of rolling it out, we’ve already rolled it out perhaps. So we’ve got offices in Pennsylvania, California and now in North Carolina mainly because there’s a demand that we were seeing from our existing customers as well as some of the new customers that we’ve been pitching our service capabilities to. We’re also as I’ve mentioned in my presentation, we’re rolling out basically an enhanced maintenance program, we’re providing Tier 1 support to our customers and we’re finding a lot of customers are looking for that one place to go or one (indiscernible) that can go across multiple vendor solutions providing both the Tier 1 support that they need and then the proactive management and monitoring that they need. So, we’re building out these capabilities across all three managed service centers. What it does for us, if you think about it East Coast, West Coast from a timing standpoint it also gives us the capability to provide the support in the timeframes that our customers are looking for across the entire U.S.

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst

Okay, great. And I have one more on just IT spending that you’re seeing out there in terms of do you expect growth or do you expect half year GDP growth? Could you provide any color and what you have seen for IT spending?

Mark P. Marron

Management

Well, we haven't seen anything that would dictate that we’ve seen IT spending slowdown at this point (indiscernible), but I don’t have any material percentages from an IDC or Gartner that I can share with you. But in our customer base and potential new customers we haven't seen any slowdown.

Question

Analyst

Okay, great. Thanks a lot.

Mark P. Marron

Management

Thanks, [Rob] [ph].

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Matthew Galinko. Your line is open. Matthew Galinko - Sidoti & Company, LLC: Hi. Thanks for taking my questions.

Elaine D. Marion

Management

Hi, Matt. Matthew Galinko - Sidoti & Company, LLC: Hi. I guess following up on the (indiscernible) question; do you have I guess additional headcount to add there going forward, just curious how many and sort of how long you would expect it to be fully ramped?

Mark P. Marron

Management

Yes, we -- hey Matt for that is Mark Marron here. We have added most of the headcounts that we need to support our managed services offerings and capabilities across the three sites. In fact that’s where we had some of our SG&A what I’d say headcount and expense heads has been in the managed service center. And the way that we’ll do it as we go forward is we have metrics in place as the business grows. We’re adding capacity as it needs. So as the business grows and the customers that we’re supporting grows we’ll continue to add people. The good news is that we have sales in each of the offices now to add incremental headcount as business grows or as we hope the business improves. Matthew Galinko - Sidoti & Company, LLC: Okay, got it. Thanks. And then on the Kodak plan, can you share a little bit more around who you compete against, who you’re I guess in general seeing in terms of the competitors and these sorts of offerings with larger customers and what was the hook or key to winning that one in particular?

Mark P. Marron

Management

Well I think there are few things that were the hook or the key as it relates to the Kodak needs, is one I don’t remember off the top of my head who the competitor was, I wouldn’t want a comparison on this well if you will, so I'll keep that to ourselves. We run across the traditional players that play in the space, maybe somebody like a Datalink when you mention storage would be somebody that we go against from a managed service capacity. But I think what set it apart was we had some local resources that Kodak to us were very talented and capable individuals that could lead a team, supervise all the things that they were looking for onsite. So maybe when I talk about the 24/7 onsite prefix and some of the other things we’re dealing with the helpdesk they felt very comfortable with the resources that we had and what we could bring to the table. The other thing that we think kind of set it apart was but we want them through our managed service offerings and what we need to do from a proactive monitoring and management. And then also the reporting that we provide back to them. So some of the deskwork and reporting that we provide back to them so they can understand what was happening in their environment and adjust accordingly. So we do quarterly business reviews with them and we actually walk through, where things stands, where things might improve, anything they need to be aware of as we progress with this contract. Matthew Galinko - Sidoti & Company, LLC: Okay, helpful. And then, did you sense there, can you talk to any pockets of strength or weakness in terms of your customer vertical?

Mark P. Marron

Management

I am sorry, it sounded like you said something about customer verticals? Matthew Galinko - Sidoti & Company, LLC: Yes, just any strength or weakness that you’re seeing across now that the industry fell into.

Mark P. Marron

Management

Yes, we haven't seen any downturn in any of the markets. What's nice about our business for the most part we are not depending on any one vertical. Each quarter a different vertical will be up or down versus another, but we haven't seen anything significant in any of the verticals either significantly up or significantly down from past history. Matthew Galinko - Sidoti & Company, LLC: Great, all right. Thanks for taking my question.

Mark P. Marron

Management

No problem. Thanks for your time.

Phillip G. Norton

Management

Thanks, Matt.

Operator

Operator

(Operator Instructions) And I’m showing no further questions. I would like to turn it back over to management for closing remarks.

Kleyton L. Parkhurst

Management

We like to thank you for joining us and we will see in another quarter.

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for participating in today’s conference. This does conclude the program. You may all disconnect. Everyone have a great day.