Earnings Labs

Research Solutions, Inc. (RSSS)

Q4 2016 Earnings Call· Tue, Sep 20, 2016

$2.44

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to Research Solutions Fiscal Fourth Quarter and Full-Year 2016 Earnings Call for the period ended March 31, 2016. My name is Getika [ph], and I will be your operator today. Joining us for today’s presentation is Research Solutions’ President and CEO, Peter Derycz; and the Company CFO, Alan Urban. Following their remarks, we will open the call for your questions. Then, before we conclude today’s call, I'll provide the necessary cautions regarding the forward-looking statements made by management. I will also provide information regarding the company’s use of non-GAAP financial information. I’d like to remind everyone that today's call will be recorded and it will be made available for replay via a link in the Investors section of the company’s Web site. Now, I’d like to turn the call over to Research Solutions’ President and CEO, Mr. Peter Derycz. Sir, please proceed.

Peter Derycz

Management

Thank you all for joining us today to discuss our results for our fourth fiscal quarter and year-end 2016. Throughout the year, platform deployments and transactions related to Article Galaxy, our cloud-based SaaS solution for efficient access to full-text scholarly research continue to gain momentum. In fact, total Article Galaxy revenue increased by 13% to a record $24.1 million in fiscal 2016, which was driven by a 23% growth in transactions and a 210% increase in the number of Article Galaxy's SaaS platform deployments. Our strong results reflect an increasing focus on deploying higher margin subscription based Article Galaxy SaaS platforms that provide premium features and functionality to our customers. By year-end, we had 59 premium platform deployments or nearly three times more than last year. And they were generating an annual run rate of 581,000 in recurring subscription based billings. When it comes to reporting our results, historically we’ve combined Article Galaxy transactions and SaaS platforms into one line. But given the growing amount of recurring subscription based revenue and a significantly greater gross margin, it seemed appropriate to begin breaking out this portion of our revenue. We are also excited about how this new business line is developing. While revenue from Article Galaxy transactions is still many times greater than revenue from Article Galaxy SaaS platforms, Article Galaxy SaaS platforms gross margin has been at 82% or about four times Article Galaxy transactions at 22%. Further, while Article Galaxy transactions represent repeat revenue, Article Galaxy SaaS platforms generate even more predictable recurring revenue, which moreover reflects the strengthening leverage in our business model. We’ve also continued to see our customer acquisition efforts, maintaining 90% plus closing rate when our solutions evaluated against the competition. And we’re finding that in most instances when it comes to platform sales, we've virtually no competition except for a customer's home-grown system which typically inefficient, costly and far less useful and capable than Article Galaxy. Before I talk more about our operational progress during the quarter, and discuss our outlook for the new fiscal year, I'd like to turn over the call to our CFO, Alan Urban, to walk us through the financial details for the quarter and the year. Alan?

Alan Urban

Management

Thank you, Peter, and good afternoon, everyone. Earlier today we issued a press release with the results for our fourth quarter and year-end June 30, 2016. A copy of the release is available via the Investor Relations section of our Web site. Please note that all quarterly comparisons I will be making today are to the same year-ago quarter in 2015. Starting with our income statement, our total revenue in the fourth quarter was up 10% to $8.3 million and for the year it was up 8% to $34.4 million. As Peter mentioned, beginning this quarter, we began to break out our Article Galaxy results according to platform subscriptions and transactions. What we now call Article Galaxy SaaS platforms represents customer deployments that provide premium access to Article Galaxy on an annual subscription basis. And what we call Article Galaxy Transactions represent all customer transactions conducted via premium and standard Article Galaxy platform access. So for the fourth quarter, total Article Galaxy transaction revenue increased 12% to $6 million and for the year it was up 12% to $23.7 million. For the year, we realized a 127% increase in Article Galaxy SaaS platform subscription-based revenue, which totaled $402,000. Article Galaxy SaaS platform deployments that provide premium access to Article Galaxy on a subscription basis increased by 210% to 59 for the fiscal year. The annual billing run rate of subscription Article Galaxy SaaS platforms at year-end totaled $581,000, which was up 146% from the end of the prior year. Underpinning these results was a 12% increase in Article Galaxy active customer accounts conducting transactions, which totaled 909 in the quarter. Active corporate accounts increased by 7% to 756, while academic accounts increased by 43% to 153. For the fiscal year 2016, Article Galaxy active customer accounts conducting transactions was up…

Peter Derycz

Management

Thank you, Alan. Now from an operational perspective, throughout the last fiscal year we made tremendous progress enhancing Article Galaxy in terms of greater security, more time-saving and cost-saving features, and especially creating even easier access for researchers around the world. And with our official summer release in August, that introduced numerous new features and capabilities, we’ve made Article Galaxy an even more engaging and indispensable tool for our customers in both the corporate world and academia. And this has helped to sustain our enviable position as far in the way, the world leader in our space. While the improvements provide many new user benefits and ensure our competitive advantage, the growth in our numbers revealed, they’re also stimulating greater user engagement, with this naturally leading to more transactions per user and greater monetization within the platform. Moreover, all of this is driving strong growth in our platform sales. And especially with an increasingly wider audience of small to medium-sized businesses, that is companies with up to 1,000 employees mostly have been using home-grown systems and methods for accessing STM information and managing their journal subscriptions. Our SaaS platform, which provides premium access and custom feature sets, makes Article Galaxy extraordinarily powerful and unique and it creates a very compelling value proposition for these organizations. Our Article Galaxy customers include more than 70% of the world's top 25 pharma companies, as well as many leading academic institutions. But now with our subscription-based SaaS platform increasingly being adopted by a broader market of small to medium-sized corporations, we see it is beneficially reducing the concentration risk that is inherent in having mostly large customers. But certainly having a marquee list of top pharma and other major corporations provide excellent references and assurances for smaller organizations and helps make them feel more…

Operator

Operator

Thank you. We will now begin the question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] The first question comes from Scott Billeadeau from Walrus Partners. Please go ahead.

Scott Billeadeau

Analyst

Hi, guys. Just wanted to dig in a little bit you raise some money here in the quarter, and I’m wondering if you could give us little detail on what the game plan is for putting that to work. I trust it's probably sales and marketing, but I’m just trying to maybe peel back the onion and kind of how many guys you are planning on? Are there quotas or what’s the game plan for deploying that capital?

Peter Derycz

Management

Yes, there is – it’s sort of three-pronged. It's Peter. Hi, Scott. We find that we built a lot of technology out in the past in Article Galaxy like I said during the call, it's a pretty powerful platform now. So one of the main challenges we’ve is sales and marketing like we pointed out. We have built out a -- an internal sales management team, an account management team, and so that team is going to be reaching into our existing customer base, which is nearing a 1,000 customers now to upsell other Article Galaxy functionality and upsell our subscription platform to them. And external sales is another aspect of growing our sales team both in the U.S. and in Europe. So we’re really focused on growing and training up that sales team, as well as adding to our value-added reseller network. So, I’d say in terms of deploying capital, probably $0.80 out of every dollar is going to go into sales and marketing. And the third prong of our strategy is to continually improve the Article Galaxy platform. So, we’re doing enhancements to it all the time now and we’re planning to launch a new version of it in 2017 as we mentioned in the call. And so about $0.20 out of every dollar is really going into -- continuing to improve and enhance our technology.

Scott Billeadeau

Analyst

Great. And then a follow-up would be you mentioned getting a fairly good win rate nearly 90% in off [ph] the platform level is really no one else involved other than some internal stuff. Do you lead with the platform or maybe are you shifting strategy as how you attack new customers, or is it go where the -- wherever the easiest, the point of least resistance?

Peter Derycz

Management

Well, actually, historically we’ve gone after article transactions, right. So that’s our first question find -- when we found a new prospect or talking to an existing customers view. How many article transaction do you do every year? We are definitely reorienting our entire sales and marketing organization to ask questions like, hey what are your problems making your research more efficient? What are your problems in accelerating your research? So we’re definitely leading now with the platform sale. Its quadruple the gross margins of our article transaction sales. Article transaction sales are great lead in for us in many cases, but the emphasis of the sales and marketing strategy now is the platform sales. And like I said, it’s not only quadruple margin, but it's also our fastest growing business line. Really growing quite rapidly.

Scott Billeadeau

Analyst

And is that taken new guys or different guys or has there been retraining or guys who do transactions let them do and then supplement that with new guys that have more of the platform selling capabilities?

Peter Derycz

Management

Yes, I’d say that in our case when it comes to our sales organization, we identified which sales people are, let’s say better cold callers or better hunters, and which ones are little bit more relationship oriented. And so we’ve taken the people that are talented in talking to existing customers, and put them into the account management team and taking the people that are talented in hunting for new customers and sort of put them on the hunting side. And augmenting all of that with our distributor and reseller network that can generate new leads from their customer base, as well as new leads generated from our marketing efforts.

Scott Billeadeau

Analyst

Okay, great. I will hop back. Thanks. Thanks, guys.

Peter Derycz

Management

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] This concludes the question-and-answer session. I’d now like to turn the conference back over to Mr. Derycz, for any closing remarks.

Peter Derycz

Management

Yes, thanks to everyone for joining us on our call today. Really appreciate it. I’d also like to extend a special note of thanks to our customers, suppliers, and our internal teams who have all been essential contributors to our success. If we weren't able to address all of your questions today, please feel free to contact us directly, we are always available. We look -- really look forward to speaking with you soon. Thanks.