Earnings Labs

TransAct Technologies Incorporated (TACT)

Q3 2013 Earnings Call· Sun, Nov 10, 2013

$3.32

-0.90%

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.
Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good day ladies and gentleman. And welcome to the TransAct Technologies Third Quarter 2013 Conference Call. At this time all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later we will conduct a question-and-answer session. And instructions will follow at that time. (Operator Instructions) As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. I’d now like to introduce James Leahy. Sir you may begin.

Jim Leahy

Management

Thank you operator. Good afternoon, and welcome to TransAct Technologies 2013 third quarter conference call. Joining us today from the company are Chairman and CEO, Bart Shuldman; and President and CFO, Steve DeMartino. Today’s call will include a discussion of the company’s key operating strategies and progress against these initiatives and details on the third quarter financial results. We will then open the call to participants for questions. As a reminder, this conference call contains statements about future events and expectations which are forward-looking in nature. Statements on this call may be deemed as forward-looking and actual results may differ materially. For a full list of risks inherent to the business and the company, please refer to the company’s SEC filings, including its reports on Form 10-K and 10-Q. TransAct undertakes no obligations to revise or update any forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances that occur after the call. Today’s call and webcast will include non-GAAP financial measures within the meaning of SEC Regulation G. When required, a reconciliation of all non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable financial measure, calculated and presented in accordance with GAAP, can be found in today’s press release, as well as on the company’s website. At this time, I’d like to turn the call over to Bart Shuldman. Bart?

Bart Shuldman

Management

Thank you, Jim. And welcome everyone to joining us on this afternoon’s conference call and webcast. I like to start this afternoon’s discussion with a high level thought on the progress we have achieved to-date in 2013. We entered the year focused on transitioning our business to the roll out of several recently introduced products targeted and improving our strong position in the gaming industry and addressing new high growth markets such as Food Safety. These products typically carry higher margins in some that we are beginning to de-emphasize. Our progress in the transition is a focus of everyone at TransAct. And I am extremely pleased at where we are at this point. Sales mix is changing to the new product and the effect could be seen in our growth in operating margins. This transition is now on full motion and is establishing a strong foundation of which we can further grow the business. Our work in 2013 has quickly established our Ithaca 9700 Food Safety Terminal as a must have product for restaurant and food service operators. And we’ve demonstrated the significant value of the Epicentral for casino operators. And we are making consistent progress with the introduction and the initial inauguration of our Printrex color printers for the oil and gas industry. We’ve only reported results for the first nine months of 2013, but I’m very comfortable saying that this year will be regarded as one on which we created significant new value for our shareholders as we implemented the new product roadmap that will continue and accelerate our progress in 2014 and beyond. While our results to-date have been solid, it serves to confirm that we can continue to grow; we are committed to keep our foot on the accelerator and pressing forward. So lets’ review the…

Steve DeMartino

Management

Thanks Bart, and good afternoon everyone. As Bart noted, 2013 third quarter net sales increased 9% to $16.8 million from net sales of $15.4 million in the year-ago quarter. Looking at our sales by sales unit, casino and gaming sales increased approximately 23% or $1.4 million year-over-year to $7.5 million. The improvement reflect a $2 million year-over-year increase in domestic casino gaming sales including a SoftTouch vision for Epicentral. We also benefited from higher sales of our Epic 950 casino printer as an equipment supplier for the sales the majority of our large replacement order generated in the quarter. The gain in domestic sales was partially offset by a lower international casino sales in Europe and Australia. As expected, it’s been the case throughout 2013 particularly given the historically high number of lottery printers we sold last year. Lottery printer sales in the September 2013 quarter fell $1.4 million compared to the prior year period. Despite the decline in Q3, based on order backlog in customer forecast we expect lottery sales for Q4 will be about 50% higher than the Q3 run-rate of a $1 million. Food safety, POS and banking sales doubled for $3.7 million. As Bart noted earlier, the growth continues to be fuelled by initial volume sales of our Food Safety Terminal. In fact Ithaca 9700 terminal sales accounted for more than half of our total sales from the sales unit in Q3. At the same time an increase in POS printer sales largely to McDonald’s was offset by a nearly identical decline in sales of banking printers. As we’ve discussed, our focus in this market now and going forward is on the higher value Food Safety opportunity. And we’ll continue to de-emphasize our focus on the lower margin POS market. And I think that our early…

Bart Shuldman

Management

Thanks, Steve. I want to spend just a moment to highlight and summarize the important drivers why we believe TransAct is positioned for a consistent long-term growth. First, our results for the third quarter on year-to-date clearly indicate that we are gaining market share and momentum in existing markets. We expect this to continue through the end of this year and throughout 2014. Second, we are forging new relationships in our historical and new market that we enforce and further expand or establish revenue based. Third, we expect to generate further improvements in operating margins as we leveraged our fixed overhead expenses and drive sales of our newest products which generally carry higher margins than our legacy products. In 2013 in the third quarter, we again achieved an operating margin of over 11% and this will expand further as revenue rises. Fourth, while we have invested prudently to bring new products to market and establish them as must have solutions. We remain committed to developing new high growth opportunities as evidenced by our plans to introduce the three new products next year. We believe bringing to market new products the customer need will benefit their business and our shareholders going forward. And finally, our balance sheet remains solid. And we continue to generate attractive free cash flow from operations providing us with the financial flexibility to invest in new product development and support new product commercialization while returning capital to shareholders. Our third quarter results demonstrates the momentum in our financial results with year-over-year improvements in revenue, gross margin, gross profit, EBITDA and diluted EPS. Our new solutions continue to improve our competitive position and establish TransAct as a leader in a growing number of end-markets. We have established a foundation for future revenue and margin growth and are laser focused on extending our momentum to the end of 2013 and into 2014. And boy, we have three more products to bring to market. With that let’s open the call to your questions. Operator?

Operator

Operator

Certainly. (Operator Instructions) Our first question comes from the line of Adam Krejcik with Eilers Research. Your line is now open. Adam Krejcik – Eilers Research: Hi, good afternoon guys. Couple of questions for you, starting off on number one the food and safety, so you had 120 terminals in trial, I think you said this quarter. And we just wanted to know how long you think these trials will last? And what is the reasonable expectation to convert those to different clients. Then I’ve a few more follow ups. Thanks.

Bart Shuldman

Management

Yes. So about a month maybe two months ago we put out a press release that said we had 100 trials going on with different customers. And we are now up to 120 trials. And we haven’t established kind of the length and the hit ratio. So based on how many trials, how many turn to sales. So we haven’t really been able to calculate that yet, because all of these trials are still going on. We would expect the given that we have closed some we got 20 customers now, 20 new customers including McDonald’s. So close over time and a good trial can last three months, can last four months, could last six months. Some of them started a couple of months ago, started – some of them started a month ago. So they will layer in as the trial is finished the integration is done, the operations people at the different restaurant chains decide to go forward. So we expect them to layer in. Again, we will probably see a little slowdown as we get into the Christmas holiday season. We are told that they are not going to put new things in the restaurant at that time, but then will pick up again in January. Adam Krejcik – Eilers Research: Okay, great. That’s helpful. Second question on gaming, you recently signed a distribution agreement with Suzo-Happ. Just want to know what sort of impact this new relationship is having and what you expectations for this relationship are going forward?

Bart Shuldman

Management

Yes. So I see the benefit in three ways right now. One, they have nine sales people on the road. So nine people added to our sales people calling on casinos directly to what we call do the pulse, which is convince them that our technology or our printers are the better printers to have in their casinos while also promoting the Epicentral print system, and we are already seeing the fruits of that, by having at least one if not two casinos already turned to TransAct from our competitor. Two, they have licenses, so where we say that a certain states which were – in certain case is small but we weren’t able to – in some cases even go on the property of those casinos because we don’t have licenses. Suzo-Happ opens up a world of opportunity for those casinos, because they have licenses just about in every jurisdiction or with every casino in the country. So it really does help us in regards to opening up those opportunities where we didn’t have that before. And third, there were distributors that is going to stop product along with what we are stocking. So their ability to get out in the marketplace and help us with sales is just going to be wonderful. They are well known in the industry. They sell all kinds of bits and pieces for slot machines or for different things that the casino uses. So they are always in the casino; they are always talking to the people – the slot managers and all that. So we’re just going to expand our sales activity in the U.S. and just recently they bought our distributor in Australia. So they are going to be very helpful in Australia as they give financing capability to our Australian…

Bart Shuldman

Management

So with international, I mean, we are looking forward to actually Macau in 2015 and 2016 opening up a couple of more casinos in the Cotai area. So really looking forward to the expansion that’s going to go on there. And of course we follow the same news Adam that you do about Japan and Korea and places like that. Europe was a little slow this year and I don’t think that would surprise anybody given the economic situation there. But we are hearing about Greece and in some other areas that are starting to look at expanding their gaming operation. So we think there is real potential there for 2014. Domestically, we did see the impact of one of our customers placing a large order with one of our slot manufacturers for replacement of video poker machines. We believe about two-thirds to that order and I listen to their conference call today. So that came right off their conference call that about two-thirds of that order is complete, and we should see another one-third of that order this quarter. We also saw a steady growth because we have won a lot of business. We have changed; we have won a lot of business by winning customers over from our competitor. But we have also seen a fair amount of casinos that have changed over to our Epic 950 because they are getting ready for the Epicentral software system. And we, this has been something that we have told the shareholders now for probably 2 years, where a casino that is planning to put Epicentral in goes through a bunch of different decision points. One, they might have printers from our competitor and have to change those out. We are starting to see that. If they have to put in the wiring in the floor, if they don’t have CAT 5 or something like that. And then they get ready for the system. So the beauty of casinos looking at buying our Epicentral software system and getting ready for that drives more printer sales for us because they will change out the competitors printer and put in ours. So we see a pretty stable domestic market clearly we saw the benefit of that large order that was placed, but we saw a pretty consistent business across all of our slot manufacturers and we are expecting to see that continue. Adam Krejcik – Eilers Research: Perfect, thanks Bart. Appreciate it. You guys have a good quarter.

Bart Shuldman

Management

Thanks, Adam, Yes, yes thanks. Good to talk to you again.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. (Operator Instructions) We will give it a few moments. And I’m not showing any further questions at this time. Speakers please proceed with any further remarks.

Bart Shuldman

Management

Yes. We thank our shareholders for joining us on the third quarter conference call. We are very pleased with the results. And we’ll probably talk to you sometime after the New Year. So I will wish you a happy holiday very early. But we will probably talk to you after the New Year when our fourth quarter is complete. Thanks for joining us this evening. Take care.

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for participating in today’s conference. This does conclude the program. And you may all disconnect. Have a great day, everyone.