Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the TransAct Technologies Q2 2023 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions]. This call is being recorded on Wednesday, August 9, 2023, and I would now like to turn the conference over to Ryan Gardella, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thanks, Chris. Good afternoon, and welcome to TransAct Technologies Second Quarter 2023 Earnings Call. Today, we'll be discussing the results announced in our press release issued after market close. Joining us from the company is CEO, John Dillon and President and CFO, Steven DeMartino. Today's call will include a discussion of the company's key operating strategies, progress on those initiatives and details on our 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 Forms 10-K and 10-Q. TransAct undertakes no obligation 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, reconciliation of all non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable financial measures calculated and presented in accordance with GAAP can be found in today's press release as well as on the company website. And with that, I'd like to turn the call over to John.

Thank you, Ryan. Good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for joining today. Last time, I had a chance to present to you all, I was only about a month into the job as CEO for TransAct. And now 127 days, I counted them up and I've had at least a little bit more of an opportunity to roll up my sleeves and dig into some of the work in earnest. So I'm happy with the progress we've made and I'm going to share some of that with you today. At a high level, the results came in as expected and discussed on the last call. Net sales came in at $19.9 million. Year-over-year, the increase was approximately 58% but it was a sequential decline of approximately 11% from the first quarter as we expected. And we've all tried to work hard setting the stage for success in the back half of the year and more importantly, on into '24 and beyond. Last quarter, I talked about the fundamental goodness I found here at TransAct and as well as some of the parts of the business that were going to require some action to allow us to take advantage of the opportunities up ahead in the market. I can say that we're always done revamping the parts of the business where that needed to be done. And we've added some new internal process where there was none before. We have moved some personnel around. We've let a few go. We've added a few. I like the progress we've made and I feel that we're fully ready to add some much-needed momentum for the business. The reality is that our sales teams, processes and go-to-market GTM strategies really required a pretty significant overhaul. And I'm really happy to say that the first phase…

Thanks, John. Thanks, everyone, for joining us this afternoon. Let's turn to our second quarter '23 results in more detail. As John mentioned, total net sales for the second quarter were $19.9 million, which was up 58% compared to the $12.6 million we reported a year ago. Sales from our food service technology market or FST, for the second quarter were $3.9 million, which was up 13% sequentially and also up 14% compared to $3.4 million in the prior year period. The increase was largely due to higher shipments of labels in our AccuDate 9700 product as well as record high BOHA! software subscription revenue. As John mentioned, we added 743 terminals in the second quarter, which gave us 13,476 in the market at the end of the quarter. While we're encouraged by the sequential increase in our FST sales, our sales initiatives will take time to implement and then flow through to our bottom line results. So we believe this number may continue to be lumpy for a while. Our recurring FST sales, which includes software and service subscriptions as well as consumable label sales for the second quarter were $2.5 million, which was up 14% compared to $2.2 million in the prior year period. Our ARPU for the second quarter of '23 was $782, which was down 9% compared to $861 in the second quarter of last year, but up sequentially by 3% compared to $761 in the first quarter. As a reminder, we're currently selling some BOHA! Terminals with no recurring revenue attached to them to start. While this presents an opportunity to sell recurring elements in the future, for now, they represent a drag on our ARPU. Our casino and gaming sales were $12.2 million, which was up 87% from the second quarter of '22, but…

[Operator Instructions]. Your first question comes from Jeff Martin, Roth MKM.

Hope you're doing well. John, I wanted to dig in a little bit more on what's changed with the go-to-market, how quickly that starts to produce changes in behavior and then ultimately, improved sales results?

Yes. There's a lot of stuff that you can do relative to marketing automation to use that as kind of -- you go out and you try to find somebody that's got some possibility of being interested in your product ultimately and you've got to work it all the way to the port where you close a deal. And then frankly, you've got to treat that customer well. So I call that from A to A, from awareness to advocacy. And we just really had a disconnect in my opinion, between marketing and sales. The market opportunity is big, but we really didn't have our arms around it. And so we've implemented a number of what I would call GTM metrics related to funnel management, everything from awareness to nurture track to marketing qualified leads to sales-qualified leads and then ultimately turning over sort of conversation ready opportunities to the sales team. And you can't take a salesperson and say, well, there's a lot of potential customers out there, go get them and have them basically making all the cold calls and yet you're still doing a bunch of trade shows and getting a bunch of people to scan badges. And so we are putting a process in place that sort of manages that, looks at the yield at every step and then figures out is it getting better? Is it getting worse? What's work and what's not and how do we improve where it's not working as well as it should be and how do we do more of the stuff that works well. And this is just something that we didn't do much of. A couple of other things are, I'm gradually implementing some metrics that I think for those of you and the investors that track companies…

Great. And then one more, if I could. In terms of FST markets, where they stand, are large restaurant groups looking to deploy further technology at this time? Or are we still in an environment where inflation costs related to input and labor are still affecting their decision-making. And then maybe you could touch on like convenience store and like the grocery market in terms of touching on the major end markets for FST in terms of the receptiveness in this environment?

Well, I think the restaurant space is still back on its heels a little bit. Prices are up. Most of them are focused on the front of the house right now. That's a more immediate payback kind of thing. I just read the toast print and it looks good. They've done a really good job, in my opinion. We see that market opportunity coming back, we're engaged. And if you get into the quick-serve restaurants, I mean, some of the large chains are very good candidates for us. I will mention because it's been mentioned before, one of the large ones is buying again from us. They kind of slowed down while they were revamping some of their stores. We're having good conversations with some of the other large groups but in terms of your fine dining and those sorts of opportunities where maybe they've got a handful of stores or maybe 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 stores. We're focused now predominantly on the larger chains and the larger restaurant operators because the effort to sell there is pretty much the same calorie investment as it is if we're trying to get somebody who's got 30 stores. If we do get a green light from some of the franchises, the headquarters, on a couple of these large ones where the individual franchisees have an opportunity to actually decide, yes, I do want to use this. I think you're going to see -- I wouldn't call it floodgates open, but I would say I think you're going to see a real steady uptick in business throughout those franchise organizations. Right now, Grab and Go grocery store, Sushi as an example and food service managers or easier sales right now. I mean, everybody is still eating food and adds everything from compliance, we help you with compliance, we help you by eliminating food waste, we help you by reducing labor, and we help you by not making mistakes. And frankly, a lot of these places have a lot of head count turnover and the ability to use these systems to train people or to make sure that they don't make the errors really makes a difference. And the economics and the ROI on the product is actually pretty excellent. So we're focusing right now where there's more low-hanging fruit. We've just done a pretty extensive market review where we're looking at the top x number of companies in every one of the different buckets. And we kind of know where we've been, where we haven't been and who needs us and who doesn't, and that's part of the go-to-market strategy that we've kind of implemented. We're targeting both the sales and marketing teams at the place where we -- the places where we think the greatest opportunity, if that makes sense.

[Operator Instructions]. Your next question comes from George Sutton, Craig-Hallum.

John, just a follow-up on something you just mentioned. You talked about the ROI being excellent for the BOHA! Terminals. I've not seen anything published or really discussed relative to ROI. So how do you actually communicate that?

Verbally, unfortunately, that's an area from a marketing standpoint that we're up leveling. We got a great product technically. We're very proud of it. We got great engineers. But feeds and speeds isn't why managers buy stuff. They buy it because of the business value it adds. And one of the things that I have encountered is that you can look at a brochure from TransAct and candidly, it talks about a nice bright screen, talks about 300 dpi printing. It talks about how reliable it is and those are all really important. But at the end of the day, you want to apply those things to some business problem you've got in your operation. And I'm working to -- if you will, add the business value dimension to our go-to-market from a sales team, whether it's prospecting, proof of concept or even here's the ROI on how much it's going to save if you buy one of these things. And frankly, the terminals easily pay for themselves in a matter of a few months, and we don't really market that way. And I think that's something that you're going to see that be part of the pointy end of the spear as we move forward.

Great. You mentioned that with the BOHA! 2, you've got an ability to go after some of your existing terminals out there. Can you just give us a sense of AccuDate, how many of those are out there in the market that you would view as opportunistic? And if I'm specifically looking at the BOHA! 1, a relevant number there as well.

Steve, do you want to hit that one, because you got the numbers? .

Yes, George, probably I think we're mainly talking about our first gen, replacing the 9700, and there's tens of thousands of those out there.

The difference between those 2 is the 9700 a stand-alone unit. Works great, very reliable, good little workhorse, but it's not online, it's not connected. And ultimately, my opinion is the BOHA! Terminal can be a platform in the back of the house. And frankly, you could run any software you wanted to run. And so the fact that it's connected and for large organizations that have multiple stores, the ability to have sort of one menu as it were or different menus in different geographies or to be able to upload stats on this that and the other thing. There's just a big difference between having interconnectivity of the BOHA! Terminal 2 and the older 9700. So we're pretty excited about that. We think we're going to get a lot of upgrades. The downside in all of this is a gang products we make are so darn reliable. That I love it on one hand, but on the other hand, no break. There's no planned obsolescence in these things. We've got printers out there doing workhorse printers that are out there have been working hard at work for 10 years. And we're just waiting for the customer to follow and say, it broke, could you get me another one. But with the 9700, the upgrade to being fully connected and being able to do some of the things like you can do today in the 21st century I think, ultimately, it's going to be really important for the organizations that want to use technology to gain competitive advantage.

Got you. And then final question relative to the printer side. When supply chain normalized and you were able to start shipping, you built fairly significant production capacity added lines, et cetera. Can you just give us an update on what your plans are for -- from a production capacity perspective?

We've got pretty good production capacity. It's all CM, contract manufacturing, and they are pretty elastic. So in that regard, we're in pretty good shape. We're probably going to add a fourth line in a different country. We haven't made an economic decision as to where is best. We've moved almost 100% -- almost -- not all, 100% of our manufacturing is not in China, but there's a little bit of stuff still left there. But I think we're going to pick another location. It may be in Asia, but that we might find an opportunity to do some manufacturing in the Americas. I haven't decided that yet, but we like the flexibility. We've got a really good engineering team and manufacturing and operations team. It's one of the areas where it ain't broke and don't fix it. And as you saw, I mean, we did marvelously well during the recovery from the pandemic when most companies couldn't ship, didn't have product, could be that part and we were able to come through on that front. And I give the team enormous kudos for being able to work their way through that. And as I mentioned in the call, I think we're going to retain easily 10% to 15% increase in market share, at least in the gaming and casino printing business.

There are no further questions at this time. Please proceed.

So let me wrap this up here. Bottom line, I think we put together a pretty solid quarter. I think we're doing a lot of the right work to put the company on the right track. And I mentioned that we've retooled the FST go-to-market piece, manufacturing is in good shape. We're watching expenses and optimizing the spend on marketing, the spend on sales and the new terminal, the BOHA! Terminal 2 looks to be a winner, and we're taking that to market. The only other thing I'd say is I'm not done figuring out everything that I think we need to be doing here, ultimate strategy, tactics and the like. I'm 127 days in here. But we're going to be formulating and are formulating our thoughts and plans going forward. And you'll probably see us discuss things like strategy issues, initiatives and this, that and the other thing. Probably either later in this quarter or very early in Q4 after we do our earnings announcement where we really want to give the stakeholders an understanding of the opportunity ahead the future, the trade-offs and the opportunities and what we believe are the best courses of action. So that's something to be determined yet to work in progress. And I would hope everybody will stay tuned and give us a little more time to sort of vet the future and communicate that transparently to the stakeholders and that's all I have.

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes your conference call for today. We thank you for participating and ask that you please disconnect your lines.