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TransAct Technologies Incorporated (TACT)

Q2 2014 Earnings Call· Wed, Aug 6, 2014

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the TransAct Technologies Second Quarter Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, today's conference is being recorded. I would like to introduce your host for today's conference, Mr. Jim Leahy. Mr. Leahy, please begin.

Jim Leahy

Analyst

Thank you, Michelle. Good afternoon, and welcome to TransAct Technologies 2014 Second 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 second 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 would like to turn the call over to Bart Shuldman. Bart?

Bart C. Shuldman

Analyst

Thank you, and welcome to everyone joining us on our Second Quarter 2014 Conference Call and Webcast. This afternoon, we reported revenue of $13.8 million, adjusted EBITDA of $900,000 and diluted and adjusted diluted EPS of $0.02. Steve will review the financial results in detail in a few moments, but let me start the call by noting that should not surprised most of you that the casino and gaming industry remains very challenging, as evidenced by industries' gross gaming revenue trends in the first half of the year. This in turn has impacted casino operators’ capital budgets, which led to a year-over-year and quarterly sequential decline in our second quarter 2014 casino and gaming revenue. There is no doubt the domestic casino market is quite weak right now. That said, electronic gaming printer sales over the balance of the year will remain lumpy, even as we believe that appreciation for our Epic line of printers, in particular, our Epic 950 slot machine printer, continues to grow and that we are positioned to grow our market share. While industry headwinds have also impacted the pace of new Epicentral agreements, including most casino system companies implementing major software upgrades that casino operators had to install this year and help to soak up their systems budgets, our unique system is clearly delivering an attractive return on our customers' investment in technology that is helping them to drive repeat visitation, offpeak play, rated card play, new loyalty membership enrollment, among other metrics. In some cases, such as the recent installs of Epicentral in multiple casinos in Latin America, the value of Epicentral is so strong that it helped us displace our largest competitor slot machine printer product because each Epicentral installation requires that it be connected to gaming devices that have our Epic 950…

Steven A. DeMartino

Analyst

Thanks, Bart. Good afternoon to everyone. 2014 second quarter net sales were $13.8 million, up slightly on a quarterly sequential basis and down from $15.8 million in the year-ago quarter. By sales unit, casino and gaming revenue was $6.1 million compared to $7 million in the year-ago quarter, as revenue from a large international Epicentral installation at a multi-property casino was more than offset by broad weakness in both the domestic and international casino and gaming markets. Lottery sales of 800,000 improved 70% year-over-year, reflecting GTECH's normal minimum contractual buy in the [Audio Gap] 2014, compared to less than the minimum buy in the prior year quarter. Food safety, point-of-sale and banking revenue was $2.7 million, down $700,000 year-over-year, as one of our distributers placed an initial $1.3 million stocking order for Ithaca 9700 food safety terminal in the prior year quarter that didn't repeat this year. This decline was partially offset by an increase of 600,000 sales of POS printers to McDonald's as they continue their roll out of growing receipt printers for a new checkout application. Total revenue of our Printrex-branded printers was approximately $1 million, relatively consistent with the prior year quarter, as well as the first quarter of this year. These results include a 12% quarterly sequential improvement in sales of our Printrex oil and gas printers, which include sales of our new color printers. Finally, TSG sales were down 11% year-over-year to $3.1 million in the quarter. However, Printrex color printer consumable sales were up 73% over the prior year period and up 51% sequentially. And as Bart noted, the annual run rate for our Printrex color consumables business is now approaching $1 million and growing, as the installed base of Printrex 920s and 980s continues to expand. However, the increase in revenues from Printrex…

Bart C. Shuldman

Analyst

Thanks, Steve. Great job. Great job, again. Before opening up the call to your questions, I want to emphasize the strategic shift we undertook. By focusing on new sources of higher-margin businesses through the development and commercialization of innovative new solution for underserved industries that have large addressable markets, TransAct is somewhat offsetting the ongoing weakness in the casino and gaming industry, even in the early stages of our product introduction cycle. As such, I believe despite the near-term unfavorable comparisons in our financial results, TransAct today is more solidly positioned to achieve our growth objectives. Our new businesses, the Ithaca food safety terminals, the Printrex color printers for the oil and gas industries, the Epicentral software system, and soon our entry into the M2M market with the Responder MP2, all help diversify our revenue and offer margin-expansion opportunities. Each of our brands now has a dedicated sales staff positioning us to exploit these high-growth opportunities. While the ramp in our newer businesses have been slower than anticipated, we are making consistent progress in establishing new businesses. Our newest products are generating very high levels of interest in their respective industries, and we remain confident that each of these new business lines will continue to ramp. And as we've spoken about, our consumable business looks wonderful. Overall, with the right infrastructure in place and the financial flexibility to execute on our plan, we remain optimistic about the long-term growth potential for TransAct and our ability to increase revenue and profitability and create shareholder value. With that, let's open up the call to your questions. Operator?

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Todd Eilers with Eilers Research.

Todd Eilers - Eilers Research, LLC

Analyst

Bart, I was wondering if you can maybe talk a little bit more about, I guess, trends post quarter and kind of how you see the casino and gaming market in the second half, just kind of what are you seeing out there in the market?

Bart C. Shuldman

Analyst

Yes, Todd, it's not a pretty picture. You got kind of 2 stories going on. I think you know that Las Vegas, itself, has had some good results. We've seen some of the results come out of MGM and Win and really pleased, I was just there a couple of weeks ago: Las Vegas was crowded, the restaurants were crowded, the gaming facilities were crowded. It was great to see. It's really the local's market, Todd, that is -- it's not doing well. And a lot of competition, a lot of expansion, maybe too much expansion. Atlantic City about to close 3 casinos. So what we see is a tough picture for the next couple of quarters. Based on the feedback that we're getting from the slot manufacturers, the feedback or the input we're getting from our casino friends that are specifying our printers, they don't expect much improvement over the next couple of quarters.

Todd Eilers - Eilers Research, LLC

Analyst

Okay, great. That's helpful. Also, I was wondering if you can maybe comment on -- with respect to the international piece of the business in the casino and gaming market. It looks like the Rees VLTs are moving forward. Given your relationship with GTECH and SPIELO there, would think that you guys would get a good share of that market. What's kind of the timing of printer shipments to the VLTs for that market? Should we expect anything in the second half there?

Bart C. Shuldman

Analyst

Yes, so the big question, Todd, is going to be whether they're going to use printers or not. There has been a lot of discussion. If you look at the Italy situation, Italy went from street games to network VLTs with printers, allowing it to be a total open system. If a tourist came in, they could play. Greece is debating whether they want to do that or not. And if they don't, there will be no printers in the machines. Now we don't know the answer to that, but there is debate going on as to whether they think it's better to go with no printers. They would go with a card-based system, and as we all know, card-based systems eliminate the tourist and the player that just comes in for the day and leaves. So we don't know. I think the big opportunity in the international markets will clearly be the expansion in Macau. We've got 7 new casinos or expansions over the next 2, 2.5 years. I think you know them, MGM, and Wynn, SJM, Galaxy, Venetian. So there's a fair amount of expansion that's going to go on in Macau. And we plan on winning a lot of that. So we should see some of that come through. But the Greece situation, Todd, is up in the air. We just don't know. We've heard both sides. We've heard both sides of the argument. We clearly are on the side of putting printers and not a card-based system. As we know, card-based systems here in the U.S. have failed miserably. In fact, we placed a card-based system in a casino in the northeast just recently with a bunch of our printers because it didn't work. It stopped the impulse player from coming in. But Greece is going to make their decision, and we'll wait to see what they decide.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions]

Bart C. Shuldman

Analyst

Should I say that there's going to be no more questions?

Operator

Operator

I am showing no more further questions at this time, and I would like to turn the call back to Mr. Shuldman for any further remarks.

Bart C. Shuldman

Analyst

Thank, everyone, for joining us on the call this afternoon. We'd like to thank our shareholders for their support and, of course, I want to thank all of my team members here at TransAct. They've done a great job getting us into these new markets. We'd also like to take a moment to invite all of our shareholders to meet with us if you plan to attend the G2E trade show next month in Las Vegas, the world's largest gaming casino trade show. For those that can't make it, we look forward to reporting back to you on further progress in our business when we report the third quarter results in early November. Thanks for joining us today.

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for participating in today's conference. This does conclude the program, and you may, all, disconnect. Everyone, have a great day.