Earnings Labs

Spok Holdings, Inc. (SPOK)

Q3 2013 Earnings Call· Wed, Nov 6, 2013

$11.43

+0.97%

Key Takeaways · AI generated
AI summary not yet generated for this transcript. Generation in progress for older transcripts; check back soon, or browse the full transcript below.

Same-Day

-1.25%

1 Week

+1.57%

1 Month

-10.62%

vs S&P

-13.00%

Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good day, everyone and welcome to USA Mobility’s Third Quarter Investor Call. Today’s call is being recorded. On line today, we have Vince Kelly, President and Chief Executive Officer; Shawn Endsley, Chief Financial Officer; and MyLe Chang, Controller; and Colin Balmforth, President of the company’s software subsidiary, Amcom Software. At this time, for opening comments, I will turn the call over to Mr. Endsley. Please go ahead, sir.

Shawn Endsley

Management

Good morning. Thank you for joining us for our third quarter investor update. Before we discuss our operating results, I want to remind everyone that today’s conference call may include forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties relating to USA Mobility’s future, financial and business performance. Such statements may include estimates of revenue, expenses and income as well as other predictive statements or plans which are dependent upon future events or conditions. These statements represent the company’s estimates only on the date of this conference call and are not intended to give any assurance as to actual future results. USA Mobility’s actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements. Although these statements are based upon assumptions that the company believes to be reasonable, they are subject to risks and uncertainties. Please review the Risk Factors section relating to our operations and the business environment in which we compete contained in our 2012 Form 10-K, our third quarter Form 10-Q, which we expect to file later today and related company documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Please note that USA Mobility assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements from past or present filings and conference calls. With that, I will turn the call over to Vince.

Vince Kelly

Management

Thanks Shawn and good morning. We are pleased to speak with you today regarding our third quarter operating results and what we believe was another excellent quarter for both our wireless and software businesses. On the wireless side, we ended the quarter ahead of our key operating goals for total revenue, cash flow, EBITDA, average revenue per unit or ARPU, and operating expenses. In addition, our wireless sales force exceeded plan for subscribers, including gross additions while our annual rate of revenue erosion improved to an all-time low. Our software business also achieved excellent results with increased bookings, a record high backlog and a growing pipeline of prospective accounts. At the same time, we were able to operate profitably, maintain strong consolidated cash flow margins, once again, returned capital to our stockholders in the form of cash dividends. Shawn will discuss our financial results in more detail in a few minutes, but first I want to review a few key highlights of the quarter. Number one, subscriber and revenue trends in our wireless business continued to show solid improvement in the third quarter, with the rates of paging unit and revenue erosion either achieving or near record lows. Our annual rate of subscriber erosion was 8.9%, down from 10.2% a year earlier. Our annual rate of revenue erosion improved to a record low of 10.6% and our quarterly rate declined to a two-year low of 1.9%. In addition to another strong performance by our wireless sales force, we believe these positive results were due in part to several other factors including the benefit of selling our wireless products in conjunction with our software solutions and continuing recognition among many customers, particularly in the healthcare space that paging remains the most reliable and cost effective form of wireless communications. Number two,…

Shawn Endsley

Management

Thanks Vince. Overall, we are pleased with our third quarter financial results and the continued progress we made for meeting our long-term goals. Both our wireless and software businesses performed well, continuing the positive momentum we established earlier this year. Further improvement in the rates of subscriber churn and revenue erosion combined with reduced operating expenses and a stable ARPU contributed to strong cash flows and continued high margins in our wireless business. At the same time, our software business reported increased bookings and the backlog reached a record high. Looking first at our wireless business, we ended the quarter with 1,408,000 units in service, a net decrease of 37,000 units. This compares to unit declines of 35,000 in the second quarter and 37,000 in the third quarter of 2012. Total net churn rate for the quarter was 2.6%, compared to 2.4% in the second quarter, and 2.3% in the year earlier quarter. The annual rate of unit erosion improved to 8.9% in the third quarter from 10.2% in the year ago quarter. Revenue from wireless totaled $37.1 million in the third quarter versus $41.4 million in the third quarter of 2012. The annual rate of revenue erosion improved to a record low of 10.6% compared to 14.6% in the year earlier quarter. While the quarterly rate improved to a two year low of 1.9% versus 3.1% a year ago, paging revenue, which represents approximately 95% of wireless revenue totaled $35.1 million for the quarter, a decline of 10.4% from the year earlier quarter. While paging revenues continues to decline, the annual rate of erosion has continued to improve in each of the last four years from 16.6% in 2010, 14.5% in 2011, 13% in 2012, and 10.4% in 2013. Healthcare represented 78.4% of direct gross placement. We experienced a…

Vince Kelly

Management

Thanks, Shawn. Before we take your questions, I want to comment briefly on our third quarter sales and marketing activities as well as update you on our current capital allocation strategy. With respect to sales and marketing activities, both our wireless and software sales teams performed very well during the quarter. On the wireless side, our sales team recorded 44,000 gross page replacements compared to 49,000 in the third quarter of 2012 again demonstrating continued demand for paging services despite long-term trends toward alternative wireless platforms. Notably, our wireless sales team won three new hospital accounts during the quarter, including a large Southwest Medical Center. We also completed two in-house paging systems conversions with existing customers. Our wireless sales team also deserves a tremendous amount of credit for reducing the annual rate of revenue erosion to an all-time low of 10.6% for the third quarter as well as reducing the quarterly rate of revenue erosion to a two-year low of 1.9%. In addition, our wireless team continues to play a major role in minimizing the rate of directed net unit churn. With regard to cross-selling, our wireless team collaborated with their software counterparts that closed six transactions during the third quarter, including three major contact center accounts for Amcom. As we look at long-term trends in wireless, we believe many of our accounts, the specialty and healthcare continue to be relatively stable notwithstanding the significant increase in alternative technologies such as smartphones, tablets, Wi-Fi and secured text messaging platforms. We attribute the stickiness of these customers to the cost and reliability of paging as well as our continued investment in Amcom’s unified communications solution. While some of our competitors have resorted competing strictly on price at the expense of maintaining their networks and servicing their customers, we have chosen to…

Operator

Operator

Thank you, sir. (Operator Instructions) Okay, we will take the first question from Brent Morrison with Zuma Capital Management. Brent Morrison – Zuma Capital Management: Good morning guys. Can you guys just briefly summarize the remediation efforts and kind of what was the SEC’s main focus. It looked like it was the recognition of maintenance revenue in the backlog, can you just kind of summarize that for me?

Vince Kelly

Management

Actually, yes, we are happy summarize that a little bit, it was not that, so the software revenue recognition rules are very specific. They are very involved and they really require company to change a lot of ways that we had historically done business including how our contracts work and specifically how we account and when we account and recognize revenue. We have been using that completed contract method and under the completed contract method you are required to completely finish all the work even though you might have done a bunch of the work and even though you might have collected all the cash before you recognize any revenue. So we went through a process last year with the audit that went all the way back to the time of acquisition. And we are really trying to add to restate every quarter rolling forward. It did require us to make changes in our 2011 financial statements which we did in our comprehensive 10-K we filed at the end of the year really didn’t have an impact on 2012 and its having that impact on 2013 other than the fact that since we have not yet remediated, we have this process where not only do we need to complete all the work, but we wait an extra 90 days on top of that for the warranty period to run before we recognize the revenue. As you think about it, all the work that we did in the third quarter to install software and get customer acceptances and wrap up, which under normal completed our contract methodology would have recognized in the third quarter, all of that gets deferred into the fourth quarter. So I think we currently have this kind of wage shift exercise going on. Now having said that…

Vince Kelly

Management

Well, like we said we did six deals in this last quarter. We haven’t quantified the dollar amounts and I don’t have that material available. But what I will tell you is these customers it’s almost everything we are doing now from a wireless standpoint and the software standpoint there is a cross sell. I mean most of the big customers already have both of our services. So really what we need to do is we need to move more mid-market to some of the smaller healthcare accounts in particular that have wireless services that don’t yet have Amcom software. We still think there is a lot of potential there. We think there is a lot of opportunity there and we are going to continue our focus there. I think you are going to see for 2014 much more integration of our company, of our systems, of our management, of our sales initiatives, of our marketing approach. So I think the lines on a board between gee, is this a cross-sell because the wireless people brought this particular piece of software sell-in or the software people actually sold some paging, we are going to be commissioning and paying sales reps to do both. So really I don’t think it makes a lot of sense to try to keep this separate going forward. Brent Morrison – Zuma Capital Management: Why has that been – why is that taking so long, it seems like that’s a low-hanging fruit if you have them as a wireless customer, they are going to be seasoned, why wouldn’t you offer the Amcom software solutions right away it seems like it was a no-brainer?

Vince Kelly

Management

Yes, absolutely we do and we have, but keep in mind these software solutions on average get about $140,000 a piece their capital budget item and the lead time or the cycle time on these things is 12 to 18 months. So I agree with you 100%. We actually we have and we had a pretty down good quarter in the third quarter with respect to that initiative and we expect that to improve over time going forward. Brent Morrison – Zuma Capital Management: I see, okay. And then the last question is about EBITDA margins it’s 27% versus low-30s in the past. And you have always kind warned us that hey do you see the game margins aren’t sustainable, would you say that that 27% high-20s kind of range is more sustainable?

Vince Kelly

Management

I think in general if you look at the businesses separately the paging business will get harder and harder over time to maintain the margins that it has. Simply because as the revenue comes down, even though it’s coming down at a slower pace every quarter it gets harder and harder to rationalize the network and take cost out. I mean, if you look at our network right now, over half of our technical network, the transmitters or private use agreements, they are basically free. It’s hard to get more than 50% in your network being free. So the margins on the paging side will come down over time. The margins on the software side will go up over time. You made a conscious decision over the past two years to invest in our software business and actually spend more money, particularly in the areas of sales and marketing and product development. So we actually reduced the margin over there. Over time that margin will be coming up over time that the paging margin will be going down, whether we can maintain 27% over the next multiple amount of years, I can’t guarantee that, but I would expect that we will have strong margins for the foreseeable future. Brent Morrison – Zuma Capital Management: Okay, alright, that’s all I have. Thank you.

Vince Kelly

Management

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

(Operator Instructions) And Mr. Kelly, we do not have further questions.

Vince Kelly

Management

Yes, there doesn’t appear to be any further questions. So I just want to thank everybody for your participation today. Like I have said before, we have good things going on at this company. We are very excited about our prospects in the future. And we look forward to talking to you next quarter after we release our fourth quarter operating results. Thank you very much everyone and have a great day.

Operator

Operator

And that does conclude today’s call. We thank everyone again for their participation.