Earnings Labs

QuinStreet, Inc. (QNST)

Q1 2014 Earnings Call· Tue, Nov 5, 2013

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the QuinStreet First Quarter Fiscal 2014 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. I would like to turn the call over to Matthew Hunt with The Blueshirt Group for Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Matthew Hunt

Analyst

Thank you, and good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for joining us today to report QuinStreet's first quarter fiscal 2014 financial results. Joining me on the call today are Doug Valenti, CEO; and Greg Wong, CFO of QuinStreet. This call will be simultaneously webcast on the Investor Relations section of our website at www.quinstreet.com. Before we get started, I would like to remind you that the following discussion contains forward-looking statements. These are statements that relate to future events or financial performance and involve risks and uncertainties. QuinStreet's actual results may vary materially from those discussed here. Factors that may cause the results to differ from our forward-looking statements are discussed in our most recent 10-K filing with the SEC, completed on August 20, 2013. Forward-looking statements are based on current expectations, and the company does not intend to and undertakes no duty to update this information to reflect future events or circumstances. Now I'll turn the call over to Doug, CEO of QuinStreet. Please go ahead.

Douglas Valenti

Analyst

Thank you, Matt. Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. Revenue in the quarter was $77 million, just above the midpoint of the range we provided last call and just about flat with last year, our best year-over-year revenue performance in 8 quarters. Adjusted EBITDA was 13% of revenue, also just above what we projected. Our cash flow and balance sheet remain strong. Normalized free cash flow in the quarter was $7 million, and we closed the quarter with net cash of $37 million. Turning to the business. Overall, we are continuing to work through challenges, but this is also a period of progress and innovation along an unprecedented range of initiatives that are important to overcoming the challenges and returning to growth. Our Financial Services client vertical grew year-over-year in the quarter, fueled by insurance and mortgage. This was the first year-over-year growth we've seen in Financial Services in 9 quarters. Expanded product lines drove the growth. For example, policy sales in auto insurance were up 172% year-over-year, and though still very early in our rollout of that product, generated more than $1 million in revenue in the quarter. Mortgage clicks were up 67% year-over-year in the quarter and are now generating over $5 million in revenue per quarter. Education client vertical revenue was down 5% year-over-year, the best year-over-year performance in that client vertical in 8 quarters. We are making good progress expanding our products, media and clients in Education. We saw strong growth in new segments in all of those areas, though not yet quite enough to fully offset continuing for-profit industry headwinds. For example, growth in nonprofit client revenue was up 161% year-over-year in the quarter, now approaching $3 million per quarter. Growth among underpenetrated for-profit clients that we specifically targeted for increases in…

Gregory Wong

Analyst

Thanks, Doug. Hello, and thanks again for joining us today. For the first quarter of fiscal 2014, we posted $77 million of revenue, a 2% decline compared to the same quarter last year. Adjusted net income for fiscal Q1 was $4.4 million or $0.10 per share on a fully diluted basis. Adjusted EBITDA was $9.6 million or a 13% margin. Revenue for the quarter was close to flat with the prior year, our best year-over-year performance in 8 quarters. We continue to generate free cash flow and adjusted EBITDA margin, while at the same time, spending on initiatives that we believe will return us to growth over time. I'll now discuss the details of our fiscal Q1 results. Please see the supplemental data sheets available for download on the Investor Relations page of our corporate website. They provide essentially all of the figures that I will now walk you through. For revenue by client vertical, our Education client vertical represented 43% of Q1 revenue or $33 million. The year-over-year decline in revenue moderated for the fourth consecutive quarter to 5% as we continue to execute on various growth initiatives focused on both product and market expansion. To provide some context for this client vertical, one, this is a solid profitable client vertical for QuinStreet. Two, we believe we are the leader in the space in terms of revenue, market expertise and competitive assets. This is a great long-term business for us if challenged in the near term. Three, clients are continuing to adapt to various regulatory changes, and we seek to be a high-quality provider and partner with our clients as they adjust. And four, initiatives in place to support our return to growth include product expansion around our relatively new click and call products and market expansion to both…

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Douglas Anmuth with JPMorgan. Bo Nam - JP Morgan Chase & Co, Research Division: This is Bo Nam on for Doug Anmuth. Just 2 questions here. Can you kind of give us a little bit more color on your cost structure for next quarter that's implied in your guidance and a little bit more details on what you mean by the amount predicted by the seasonal revenue decline and resulting loss of top line leverage? And then secondly, can you just give us a little bit more detail also about some of the investments that you're making in media for the auto insurance side?

Douglas Valenti

Analyst

Sure. And Bo, happy to take questions. Let me let Greg answer the first questions on the cost structure and the amount predicted by top line, and I'm happy to talk a little bit more about the details on auto media investment.

Gregory Wong

Analyst

Yes. So Bo, to give you a little color on that, what we're saying is it's primarily a fixed cost issue over smaller top line. So no structural change to our margin structure. It's primarily just a seasonal loss of top line leverage over a fixed cost base of your operating expenses, if that helps. Bo Nam - JP Morgan Chase & Co, Research Division: Okay. I mean, by specific -- so then by specific OpEx line, there's not going to give any particular standout increase in cost?

Gregory Wong

Analyst

Correct. Bo Nam - JP Morgan Chase & Co, Research Division: Okay.

Douglas Valenti

Analyst

So you just have the seasonal loss of that top line, and it just drops right down to the EBITDA line. Given that we're not going to reduce our cost structure for our one quarter seasonal trend, you just get a natural drop in EBITDA. So I guess the main point is nothing structurally different about our EBITDA approach this quarter that we're in versus last quarter, which probably leads to your other question, which is talk a little bit more about the investments in media on the auto insurance side. As you know, we've been talking for a while now about our investment in the product expansion in auto insurance going from just clicks to policies, calls and leads. In addition to the click product, and we've talked primarily about it for a while, we talked about the acquisitions and then the implementations and the assets, and now we've been talking about adding clients. So we're getting to the point where we have enough client coverage that we can begin to grow our media footprint. We don't yet have enough client coverage that we can be fully efficient in media, but we have enough that in order to satisfy the clients that have already committed and to begin to work our way up the monetization curve or the optimization curves, we need to get going. And so we are doing that primarily around the policy product as we ramp the call center and seek to make sure we're providing enough policies to hold budget and interest to the clients we already have signed, while we build out more client coverage, which is coming quite nicely, by the way. We're doing that in some other forms of media, including pay-per-click, where we have not been that active in Financial Services or auto insurance historically but is now one of the largest drivers of revenue for our -- in fact, it's now the largest driver of revenue for our new products. And we have made great progress there in both building on our presence in those campaigns, building out volume and optimizing the margin curve. But it does, as you probably know, take quite an investment to do that as you buy into those campaigns, buy into those accounts and earn your quality score and pricing with Google. And that's probably one of the bigger devours of kind of new media investment. While at the same time, we're continuing to fight for publishers in our -- in the historical traditional business and make sure we're fighting where it makes sense strategically, where we believe we can over time and continue to improve monetization for them and us and hold those at margins that we might not choose to hold if we did not see the growth in monetization coming from the expanded product set. So those are the things we're doing, which I think are -- I would depict as necessary and on track and promising.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Lauren Slabaugh with Stephens.

Unknown Analyst

Analyst · Stephens.

This is James Rutherford [ph] in for Lauren. My question was just about the Education business and specifically the non-for-profit. I know there's been some growth in there recently. But I was hoping to get some color about your ideas of the total market possibilities out there, as well as sort of the long-term perspective on where that's going.

Douglas Valenti

Analyst · Stephens.

Sure. The total market opportunity, we think, over the medium- to long-term is quite substantial. As you probably know, nonprofits represent about 85% of the Education secondary market versus for-profits at about 15%. Of course, the for-profits have historically been, by far and away, the largest marketing spenders. And that's why we have such a high dependence historically and still on those for-profit clients for our budgets. And that has, of course, been a problem as that industry has declined and it continued to adapt and I think getting certainly closer to its point of stability, and we're anxious to see that and to continue to serve and work with them through that. And we think we've gained share there. But they've been the biggest part of the market. The good news is that the nonprofits, while still relatively small, and as you can hear in our numbers, are growing very rapidly in terms of their marketing budgets and their presence in the ecosystem. And that's driven by a couple of things. One is the advent of online programs and the relatively easy low-cost access to technologies that allow you to put your programs online, combined with the desire for nonprofit schools to expand their footprint, their market, and very importantly, their income, partly to offset declines in funding elsewhere. And the second thing that's a big driver of the budgets for nonprofits is the advent of third parties that serve those nonprofits of various shapes and sizes. But they are third-party companies that will very often provide marketing services in student enrollment for the online programs, and in some cases, even also provide the curriculum management and technology for the online programs. So those third parties are profit-driven, ambitious, and then quite a number of them have raised a…

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from Nat Schindler with Bank of America.

Nathaniel H. Schindler - BofA Merrill Lynch, Research Division

Analyst · Bank of America.

Doug, I'm just wondering, longer term, when these market corrections end and you get back to where you think you should be with your new product, is there a path to your old standard 20% EBITDA margin that you had? Or is something structurally changed in the business that will keep it from ever getting back to those levels?

Douglas Valenti

Analyst · Bank of America.

Yes, great question, Nat. And we think quite adamantly that there's absolutely a path to 20%. I'm, quite frankly, a little surprised that we can do on a non-December quarter 12% or 13%, given that we're running auto insurance really at a negative contribution. 47% of our auto insurance is not itself, but Financial Services is 47% of our business. Auto insurance is probably 30-something percent of our business. We're doing that because if you look at the rest of the business, structurally, we're generating way more than we need to, to generate 20% EBITDA margins. And in auto insurance, we are super early in the ramping and rollout of what we are seeing to be and predicted would be much stronger monetization capabilities so that we'll be able to not only afford more media, but we'll be able to make a lot more money on the media we have. So yes, we think that over the medium- to long-term, there's a quite predictable path back to our 20%.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] And this will end our Q&A session for today. Ladies and gentlemen, thanks for participating in today's program. This concludes the program. A replay will be available 2 hours after this call and can be accessed dialing the following: 1 (800) 585-8367, 1 (855) 859-2056 and (404) 537-3406, using the code 83621517. Thank you for participating. You may all disconnect.