Steven Montross
Analyst · Craig-Hallum
Thanks, Will and good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us on today's call. I will begin with an overview of our second quarter results and highlights, discuss the factors impacting our 2017 outlook, then cover current market conditions and close with some recent developments. Beginning on Slide 4. We have a summary of our second quarter 2017 results. Total net sales were $65.8 million, we generated breakeven adjusted net income in the second quarter. Adjusted EBITDA was $8.7 million and free cash flow was a negative $5.8 million. Now I'd like to give you some more specific updates on the second quarter and our outlook for business trends for the second half of 2017 on Slide 5. Beginning with the second quarter, our reported results reflect the sequential improvement over first quarter 2017 results, with net sales up 17.6% over the first quarter and adjusted EBITDA up $4.8 million from $3.9 million in the first quarter of 2017. Product net sales for the second quarter were $33.8 million, down 15.6% year-over-year. Similar to our first quarter, the decline in product net sales compared to the prior year period was predominantly driven by a decrease in our EMV card production volume. We produced 18.8 million EMV cards in the second quarter of 2017, down from 22.5 million in the prior year period, with the decrease again driven primarily by lower sales to large issuers. Partially offsetting this impact were increased revenues in the second quarter, from a contactless RFID loyalty card program for Tesco which is the largest supermarket in the U.K. and has the UK's largest loyalty card program. Tesco is a long-standing customer of CPI and we're very pleased to partner with them to relaunch their club card in the U.K. Average selling prices or ASPs, for our EMV cards were $0.86 in the second quarter, up slightly from $0.84 in the first quarter of 2017 and down from $0.94 in the year-ago period. On a year-over-year basis, our ASPs were primarily impacted by lower prices experienced in the large issuer market, as a result of more competitive pricing, partially offset by customer mix. As we mentioned on our last earnings call, we anticipate large issuer pricing will continue to be under pressure for the remainder of 2017. We have been able to realize lower chip cost to largely mitigate pricing pressure and we will continue to actively pursue cost reductions, including in our supply chain. Our services net sales were $32 million in the second quarter which is down slightly from $33.6 million in the prior-year period. Our U.S. card personalization fulfillment revenue in 2017 continues to run lower than last year, when we saw higher levels of new EMV conversion activity versus this year. Our leading financial card instant issuance solution, Card@Once, continued to show strong growth as we ended the second quarter with 6,355 installations, up from 6,050 installations at the end of the first quarter. Our Card@Once implementations are tracking to our expectations and we continue to expect significant growth in this solution for the remainder of 2017. As we have noted, the weakness in card manufacturing volume has been the most significant negative factor for our business in the first half of 2017. As we look ahead to the rest of 2017, we do not expect our card manufacturing volume to increase as we had previously anticipated for two reasons, first, lower overall industry card demand; and second, we have not gained new sales from existing customers as we had previously expected. In addition, while we're experiencing substantial and growing customer interest in our newer products and solutions, including Print on Demand and metal cards, the ramp up for this business is progressing more slowly than expected. These factors are leading us to reduce our outlook for the year which Lillian will discuss in greater detail later in the call. And consistent with our ongoing efforts to generate additional cost savings and increased efficiencies, we expect to realize more than $10 million of cost savings in 2017. We continue to look for areas of opportunity to drive sustainable cost savings in our business to enhance the quality of our earnings. I also want to note that we have discontinued the quarterly dividend as part of our long term capital allocation plan. And Lillian will discuss this in more detail later. Turning to Slide 6. I will provide a brief update on current market conditions. First, let's review the market for U.S. debit and credit card manufacturing. This market remains challenging in 2017, driven by lower levels of demand, primarily from large financial institutions. There are 2 negative factors impacting card manufacturing, first, when the large issuers converted the vast majority of their card portfolios to EMV over the past few years, they pulled forward into those prior years card reissuances that would normally have occurred now, reducing current year card demand. And second, a portion of the market has extended its card expiry dates beyond 3 years which had some impact on the frequency of reissuance and, therefore, annual card demand. On the other hand, there are also 3 positive factors impacting card manufacturing demand which we believe will benefit the market as we look forward, first, the number of cards in circulation continues to grow and given the replacement nature of the cards, the outlook for future reissuance demand is positive; second, the U.S. card market continues its steady migration to EMV cards; and third, the premium portion of the card market, including metal cards, continues to grow. On balance, we now expect EMV card production in the U.S. to decrease in 2017 from 2016 levels versus our prior expectations of flattish volumes year-over-year. Our outlook for card demand beyond 2017 is positive, as we anticipate significant reissuance activity in 2018 and 2019 to replace cards issued in 2014 and 2015, when EMV migration began in earnest in the U.S. Moving to the U.S. prepaid market. We expect growth in this market in 2017. We continue to see good growth potential in the enterprise B2B and B2C verticals of prepaid and we expect our retail prepaid card volumes will grow in line with the market in 2017. However, pricing pressure is expected to largely offset increased retail volumes, leading to flattish retail prepaid revenue in 2017 compared to the prior year. This view is unchanged from our prior outlook. Moving to Slide 7. I will highlight a few new product and business developments. For our Print on Demand solutions, we're experiencing strong customer demand with a growing pipeline of business. We have approximately $10 million in committed business and another $10 million of business that we're confident of securing, most of which is expected to translate into revenue in 2018. As I mentioned earlier, the pace of implementations has been slower than we previously expected which has pushed several customer onboardings from 2017 into 2018 and lowered our revenue outlook for 2017. I want to highlight that the delayed implementations are driven by customer timing and not related to issues with onboarding customers to our platform. Turning to metal cards. Following certifications by MasterCard, Visa and Discover for our 2 product formats, we have seen strong interest from large financial service providers for our metal card products. We believe that the timing of metal card orders in production are now primarily a function of the customers determining their marketing programs around this new product. We remain optimistic about CPI's metal card opportunities. As I mentioned earlier, we continue to see strong acceptance of our Card@Once instant issuance platform. This platform is a true cloud-based, software-as-a-service solution which is unique and differentiated in the market. We're continuing to experience strong growth of our installed base and our new implementations are tracking to expectations. We announced the commercial release of our precision by Card@Once solution in June and have been pleased with the early results of this product. The outlook is positive for continued growth in the U.S. instant issuance market. A leading payments industry consulting business forecasts approximately 10% compound annual growth of instant issuance installations and financial institutions branches over the next 4 years. And we're seeing interest in the application of instant issuance in new markets, other than financial institutions. We're also excited about the opportunity to broaden our value proposition and suite of payment solutions through digital services. We're seeing customer interest for a variety of digital payment products and capabilities for a range of different use cases. For example, we have developed and are in the process of launching prepaid virtual cards for 2 customers in support of their rebate and loyalty programs. These services will not provide meaningful revenue in 2017, however, digital services represents a promising growth area and we will work closely with our customers to support their growing demand for scalable digital services. While not a growth opportunity for 2017, I do want to provide an update on the more advanced contactless or dual-interface EMV product. The demand for dual interface cards in the U.S. remains low and we continue to supply a small amount of dual interface cards. Nevertheless, we remain encouraged by our discussions with issuers regarding dual interface technology and the overall level of activity by issuers in setting up their dual interface product roadmaps. We continue to view dual interface as an opportunity for us in the future when adoption by issuers takes hold in a meaningful way. In closing, the market remains challenging and we're facing some increased near term headwinds that are impacting our 2017 guidance. However, our longer term outlook for our business remains positive. Payment cards in circulation are growing and the EMV migration continues which supports a healthy longer term outlook for card issuance volumes. In addition, we're seeing strong demand for our new products and solutions which we believe will drive increased growth in the future. CPI remains in a strong position, both from a competitive standpoint as well as from a financial standpoint. And the recent initiatives that we have taken to enhance our value proposition by expanding of our end-to-end solution suite, strengthen our management bench and run our business more efficiently will serve to strengthen our business for the long term. With that, I'll turn the call over to Lillian to review the detailed financial results and 2017 guidance.