Bart Shuldman
Analyst · B. Riley FBR. Please go ahead
Thank you, Jim, and welcome to everybody joining us on this afternoon's conference call and webcast. We’re delighted to speak with you today about our 2018 third quarter in which we set several records. We generated net sales of 15.8 million, operating income of 3.2 million and adjusted EBITDA of 3.6 million and delivered quarterly records for gross margin which was 50.5%, operating margin which was 20.3% and diluted EPS which was $0.33 per share. Steve will review the results in more detail in a few moments, but I’d like to begin by providing some high-level comments about our business and where we’re taking it. Overall, TransAct’s strong third quarter is a clear indication that our ongoing efforts to transform our business continues to drive improved results. TransAct today is successfully leveraging the healthy cash flow generated by sales of our industry leading casino and gaming printers and software solutions to self-fund the development and evolution of our restaurant solutions products ahead of what we believe is significant long-term and highly profitable market opportunity. For a number of years now, the company’s success has been tied to the casino and gaming market in which we sell the world-class Epic products. Our Epic 950 is the cornerstone for casino floors worldwide delivering unmatched reliability and stability. At the same time, our Epic roll-fed printers are a critical component for many of the world’s gaming needs and our EPICENTRAL promotional and bonusing system continues to gain the attention of operators looking to differentiate themselves in what has become a competitive industry. I’d also like to point out that our decision to take control of our sales in the European casino and gaming market has proven to be a homerun. Steve will go through our great results in the gaming and casino market with our business, but I’d like to spend my time talking about the very large software and hardware opportunity for TransAct and our shareholders in what we call restaurant solutions market. We entered what we originally called the food safety market back in 2012 when we first began to sell our AccuDate 9700 to McDonald’s and their franchisees. Back then, everything we sold centered on a food safety terminal that provided our customers with the ability to label food, used by [ph] labels and also label grab-n-go sandwiches and the like with sell-by dates and nutritional labels. At that time, we did our research to determine a total available market for such a terminal and determined this was a wonderful opportunity for TransAct to grow our revenues and profits. Wow, have things changed. What we once thought was going to be a big opportunity for hardware sales for TransAct has what we believe is a much larger, much bigger opportunity. What we once thought would be an opportunity for hardware sales has expanded beyond hardware into an even larger opportunity for recurring software revenue, recurring label sales and recurring maintenance and support agreements. Put simply, TransAct’s total available market in the restaurant solutions market has exploded. Now, before I get into more details, I have to ask our shareholders to be patient. Things in this restaurant solutions space are moving very rapidly and we have some more work to complete which may adversely impact our results in the short run. Every TransAct team member not needed for our casino and gaming market is now working to complete our restaurant solutions market, including our sales and marketing and engineering and programming personnel. So what is happening? First, we have no doubt that this identified market needs automation and digitized solutions with the back-of-the-house. Wages are rising to $15 an hour and food costs are escalating. While restaurants and other venues have tried to increase their prices, they are not overcoming the rising costs. Just look at what some publicly traded restaurant companies have been saying over the past couple of weeks in their earnings releases and the message is clear. As we previously said, the introduction of our latest terminal, the XL2e, began migration away from just hardware sales and towards the addition of more software to our sales offerings, and we believe the software apps we are offering and will soon offer will become the major component of our potential opportunity. We also introduced TEMS, the TransAct Enterprise Management System, to address our company’s needs as they saw a solution to lockdown the terminal and let users only access those programs and applications they needed as part of the work in the back-of-the-house. Importantly, TEMS allows TransAct to send out software updates over the air to every terminal in the field just like you experience with apps on your cell phones every day. Over time, the XL2e and its robust software platform positions our solution to become a kitchen hub that will play a critical role in managing the expected proliferation of Internet of Things devices, including devices of our own which we expect operators will leverage to manage and bring enhanced efficiency to their increasing complex operations. Now, we are beginning to add more software apps so we can supply customers with an end-to-end solution, an ecosystem for the back-of-the-house. What does that mean? As we add up all the applications and software solutions we can provide, we believe that the recurring software sales we could receive would be 2x to 3x the original terminal price every year. Yes, we are beginning to sell SaaS-based software solutions that we believe will ultimately grow our recurring revenue. Some of the apps we’re getting to offer are now fully finished, as we integrate the wonderful feedback and market intelligence provided by our current and prospective customers. We’ll have much more to say over the next six months, but it is our customers that are driving our software development since it is these customers that need these solutions for their businesses. Food safety, our original focus is just one of the applications we are pursuing and let me tell you when we add up all the opportunities for software sales, we cannot be more excited about TransAct’s future. As always, I will put some cautious around what I just said. We have work to do and contracts to close. I ask you to be patient with us as we get through the programming, testing and field trials and progress closer to closing the many potential opportunities we have in front of us right now. The time that we need to devote to these processes will likely negatively impact our revenues in the short run but should position us well for future success. I believe we have just started to scratch the surface of these opportunities and their benefits for TransAct. Going forward, our restaurant solutions team is working on a number of large projects that have the potential to deliver significant hardware and software sales for the company in the coming years. We’ll have more to say about these opportunities as they manifest themselves in the year ahead. In summary, we are extremely pleased with the company’s performance in the third quarter. We continue to make progress in establishing our restaurant solutions business as an industry leader and significant long-term growth driver for TransAct as we believe this opportunity will dramatically transform our company and its financial profile. At the same time, our casino and gaming business continues to grow and take share while we introduce new innovations to the market. With that, I’ll turn the call over to Steve for a deeper review of the 2018 third quarter results, after which I’ll make some summary remarks before opening the call to questions and answers. Steve?