Bill Smith
Analyst · Chardan Capital. Please go ahead with your questions
Thanks Tim. Before we drill into the details about the first quarter, I want to reaffirm our strategic direction of providing our carrier customers and prospects with software that enhances their users experience and satisfaction. Strategies to boost customer loyalty and reduce subscriber churn remain a high priority for all mobile service providers. Of course one of the most effective ways to combat subscriber churn and create stickier customer relationships is through value added services like our SafePath Family platform and our CommSuite messaging platform. Let's start off by talking about our SafePath implementation at Sprint, known as Safe & Found. Subscribers of the new Safe & Found service at Sprint continue to grow in correlation with the carriers increased marketing efforts. New subscribers are added each and every day, seven days a week, plus Sprint continues to transition users of its legacy service to Safe & Found. There are several initiatives underway to acquire new users for the service as well. For example, Sprint is rolling out a new MMS-based acquisition campaign this month, targeted at its wider travel base. To support this initiative, they will also launch a retail-based campaign to build service awareness. To promote the Safe & Found service, Sprint is training and compensating retail associates and will be launching additional new promotional activities throughout the year. These new marketing initiatives will coincide with some significant upgrades planned for the core SafePath Family platform. For obvious reasons, I don't want to share too much about the product roadmap until features are formally announced, but I think it is important to talk about the general direction of the product from a strategic perspective. Currently in development, the next major release of SafePath will introduce a new, family-centric user experience that further extends the platform beyond a location focused service. With the next release, SafePath will evolve to a digital lifestyle management platform for the entire family that will provide enhanced location services, easy to use parental controls, powerful web filtering functionality and built-in support for new IoT products and services. This improved platform will extend the products capabilities to support a multitude of new consumer-oriented use cases around variable locators, tech trackers, onboard diagnostic devices and home automation platforms. As you can see, there some exciting things on horizon for SafePath. It is also important to note the functional superiority of our SafePath platform on iOS devices versus the legacy service we're focused on replacing. For instance, some large carriers such as T-Mobile still use the legacy platform, do not even offer an iOS version of the family location app. This lack of an iOS application leaves a significant portion of the user community without the access to a family safety platform. We see Sprint decision to replace the old service with the SafePath Family as a strong indicator that our vision for Family Safety services is directly on target. Now let's talk about other core solutions. On the consulate front, I'm happy to report the revenues from the Sprint VVM service continue to grow with expansion of premium visual voicemail subscribers. This subscriber growth can be attributed to the backend product enhancements we implemented late last year. As a value-added service platform, our premium Visual Voicemail enhances the overall Android experience for mobile voicemail users by providing valuable, time-saving features such as voice-to-text transcription and message forwarding. It also delivers strong revenue channels through the proven service model, as carriers realize revenue from both premium service subscriptions and in-app advertising. As I mentioned on the last call, we are actively developing integration pathways within our visual voicemail product, to tie in with other voice-centric devices, such as Amazon Alexa and Google Home. This expanded functionality will increase the relevancy of the platform with voicemail users of all ages. Later this year, several new features, currently in development, will launch, continuing a theme of delivering a better personalized voicemail experience to a wide range of mobile consumers. With this strategy, we are confident that our market opportunity will expand throughout the rapidly changing voice messaging universe. Next, let's talk about our, quickly, IoT platform, which continues to grow and evolve. The continued expansion of the IoT market has created emerging useful cases that we are well-positioned to address through our portfolio of proven wireless solutions. Having robust Device Management and edge computing functionality for connected devices, continues to grow an importance, as low latency, IoT use cases proliferate. It is important competitive differentiator for Smith Micro in the IoT space, as our LightweightM2M clients can operate with intelligence on very constraints IoT devices. We're currently in conversations with several device and chipset OEMs as well as IoT solution providers and operators who have active interest in using our LightweightM2M client to add substantial management functionality to these resource-constraint devices. In the coming quarters, our QuickLink IoT product development team will continue their effort to reduce the size and resource consumption of our client, which will increase our competitive advantage in this attractive and growing market. Now for a bit about our Wi-Fi optimization and management solution, NetWise. In terms of license count, the number of installed instances of our NetWise client continues to grow across our three major customers. Additionally, during the first quarter, we also saw growth in policy counts. This is a positive and solid indicator of the utility and effectiveness of our NetWise solution as an enabling technology in the emerging market of Wi-Fi-first mobile service. We see a fresh upside with NetWise, as we expand our market presence on new device types. We also enhanced our analytics engine during the first quarter to better capture important data metrics, central to network planning, cost-saving strategies and in-depth understanding of Wi-Fi usage trends in large device populations. From these developments, it's evident that the cost-saving benefits and strategic insight, enabled by our NetWise solution, continues to have value across the mobile services industry. I'm very pleased with the progress of our graphics group across several fronts. We achieved some key milestones in the first quarter, as we continue to build upon the changes made last year. Firstly, implemented some significant and much-needed upgrades to our backend e-commerce infrastructure and digital content marketplace. And by adding an exciting new product to our portfolio, we expanded our existing graphics product line up. As I mentioned in the last earnings call, this activity is central to long-term strategic vision of this business unit, as it supports the expansion of the customer base and helps reengage the incredibly loyal users of our core graphics products, Poser, Moho and Motion Artist. As I'm sure you saw, we announced our strategic relationship with Escape Motions a few weeks ago. Under this partnership, we will resell for award-winning graphics products, Rebel 3, a market-leading paying application is the first product we've added to our graphics portfolio as part of this agreement. I urge you to visit our online store, mydotsmithmicro.com, to take a look at Rebel. It is an amazing product. Rebel 3 also works very well with our other graphics products, such as Motion Artist and Moho, as digital artists can use these applications to bring their work to life with movement and sound. Our graphics portfolio will continue to grow throughout 2018, as several more releases are planned. These additional releases will further energize our market expansion, as we seek to transform our graphics portfolio into our comprehensive toolkit for digital artists. There are some exciting content-based opportunities emerging for graphics business in the expensive online universe of digital comics and the emerging virtual-reality market. Needless to say, there are exciting changes on the horizon within our graphics lineup, so stay tuned for future announcements. Now let's discuss the proposed merger of T-Mobile and Sprint. This will be a major change within the wireless world. First off, we have seen mergers many times over the years. I understand the process. I know how to develop and position our wireless solutions to take advantage of new opportunities as they arrive. In terms of the future of our business, I view this proposed merger as a stimulating and energizing opportunity. As you know, Smith Micro has always been very opportunistic, and I believe our ability to adapt and respond to the ever-evolving wireless marketplace is an advantage. Our strength in balance sheet will allow us to accelerate roadmap development for both CommSuite and SafePath, products presently sold to Sprint. By executing on the strategy, we can markedly expand our competitive advantages and ensure our success with a combined carrier. Additionally, we have strong relationships with both Sprint and T-Mobile. Both carriers know our solutions and are confident in our ability to deliver valuable service offerings. As such, should Sprint and T-Mobile complete their merger, we are confident in our ability to leverage our relationships to expand our market position and support theirs. With that said, I look forward to an exciting 2018. It promises to be a year of expanded revenues and a return to profitability in the coming quarters. Now, operator, we can open the call up for questions. Operator?