Earnings Labs

Tucows Inc. (TCX)

Q1 2010 Earnings Call· Wed, May 12, 2010

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Welcome to Tucows, Inc.’s first quarter 2010 conference call. Earlier this afternoon, Tucows issued a news release reporting its financial results for the first quarter of fiscal 2010. The news release and financial statements are available on the company’s website at tucowsinc.com under the Investors heading. Please note that today’s call is being broadcast live over the Internet and will be archived for replay both by telephone and via the Internet beginning approximately one hour following the completion of this call. Details on how to access the replays are available in today’s news release reporting the first quarter financial results as well as at Tucows website. Before we begin today, let me remind you that the matters that the company will be discussing include forward-looking statements, and as such, are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. These risk factors are described in detail in the company’s documents filed with the SEC, specifically the most recent reports on Form 10-K and 10-Q. The company urges you to read its Securities filings for a full description of the risk factors applicable for its businesses. I would now like to turn the call over to Tucows President and Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Elliot Noss. Please go ahead, sir.

Elliot Noss

Management

Thank you, operator. Good afternoon, and thanks for joining us today. With me is Michael Cooperman, Tucows Chief Financial Officer. As per the usual format for our calls, I will begin with a brief overview of our financial performance and some of the operational highlights for the quarter. Mike will review our financial results in more detail and I will return for some concluding comments before opening the call up to questions. First an overview of the financial results. Q1 marked another quarter of solid financial performance for Tucows with results that continue to demonstrate the consistency and reliability in our business. At a high level, revenue for the first quarter was $20.4 million up about 2% from the first quarter of last year. I would note that this growth is despite the expected impact of the loss of revenue from email and direct navigation sales we have discussed previously. Adjusted cash EBITDA for the first quarter was $2.3 million and we once again generated positive cash flow from operations of $1.4 million. Turning to some operating highlights, with OpenSRS, I would now like to briefly review those highlights and starting with OpenSRS. The domain service is the foundation of the consistency and reliability in our business. That was evident again in the first quarter of 2010. The domain service saw continued steady growth in transaction volumes. New registrations grew almost 12% compared to the fourth quarter of 2009 and 12% on a year-over-year basis factoring out the special registry promotion in the first quarter of 2009. Renewals were up 24% from the fourth quarter and 11% on a year-over-year basis. I will note with respect to the sequential growth renewals tend to spike in the first quarter given this was the quarter we first launched our domain registration service…

Michael Cooperman

Management

Thanks Elliott. Net revenue for the first quarter fiscal 2010 was $20.4 million, an increase of 2% from $20.1 million for the first quarter of last year. I will review the impact on the quarter of revenue for each of our services in my comments on gross margin contribution. Cost of revenues before network costs in the quarter increased by $1.1 million or 8.7% to $13.7 million from $12.6 million for the same quarter of last year. Network costs were down marginally compared to the first quarter of last year at $1.6 million. In assessing all of our operating costs including network costs I think it important to bear in mind the significant strengthening of the Canadian dollar relative to the U.S. dollar we have seen over the past year or so. You will recall the majority of our network and operating costs are in Canadian dollars. In fact, when compared to the first quarter of last year, the Canadian dollar has appreciated on average by approximately 15%. Gross margin for the first quarter of this year was 25% down from 29% for the same quarter of last year primarily the result of a shift in our sales mix from higher margin services to lower margin domain names. Gross margin from our OpenSRS service which includes domain services, email services and other wholesale services was $4 million or 20% of net sales compared with $4.5 million or 22% of net sales for the first quarter of 2009. This decrease is primarily attributable to the expected loss of three media portal email customers that we have previously discussed and to a lesser extent on the success we have been seeing from our strategy to grow revenue from higher volume, lower priced customers as we continue to aggressively compete to attract new…

Elliott Noss

Management

Thanks Mike. For some time now whenever a shareholder or prospective investor asks me about what makes Tucows a good investment, I answer, “Consistency, reliability and visibility in the context of growth.” We are a milk and eggs type of business. Our revenue base is composed of a large volume of transactions at a low per-unit price. The vast majority of our business is subscription based with high renewal rates and we have very low customer concentration. To follow that up with several pieces of data that demonstrate this over the long-term. We have grown revenue every year for 14 years. We have generated positive cash flow from operations for the last 8 years. The number of domains under management has grown every year since we entered the industry a decade ago. The five individuals on our senior management team have been at Tucows an average of 8 years out of the last 10. As I discussed earlier on the call, all of this is supported by a track record of expense control and the significant leverage in our business. While billings have grown almost 15% over the past three years, total cash operating expenses have decreased 23%, again despite the appreciate in the Canadian dollar over that period. At the same time, we were able to pursue growth opportunities without consuming too much capital. I again point to the successful re-launches of butterscotch and Hover which you don’t see in our costs and we continue to deliver on our stated intention to return capital to shareholders. I will note since we implemented our open market share buyback programs in February of this year we have repurchased an additional 956,000 of our own shares. That brings the total number of shares we have repurchased since the beginning of January 2009 to $13.4 million or 18% of the company. Throughout our history we have consistently demonstrated our ability to grow the business. A decade ago we turned great opportunity in the content business into a great opportunity in the wholesale domain business. We then layered on top of that additional revenue streams from digital certificates and the secondary domain name market. Then we reinvented some of those older business lines to add new growth opportunities from previously static or declining revenue streams. While there have certainly been some challenges and even some failures along the way we have maintained our momentum. We continue to have excellent growth opportunities going forward and have the advantage of being able to capitalize on them in a way that doesn’t impact our ability to maintain this consistent, reliable business with the will and demonstrated ability to return capital to shareholders. Most importantly, every year we add more customers. Every year we add more domains. Every year we grow our distribution channel and that grows the great platform we have for long-term growth; one that provides consistency and reliability. With that, I would like to open the call for questions. Operator?

Operator

Operator

(Operator Instructions) The first question comes from the line of Jim Kennedy – Marathon Capital. Jim Kennedy – Marathon Capital: Since I am somewhat new to the story, could you articulate the challenges…you were talking about growth internationally. Could you talk about the challenges in terms of how you do that internationally? Is it that much different than what you might do domestically, say here in the U.S. versus overseas? Is it incrementally harder? How do you build that momentum globally and what sort of challenge is that?

Elliott Noss

Management

I think we have always been blessed by the fact our roots in the software download business, the old Tucows.com software libraries were extremely popular especially outside of North America. So when we launched wholesale domain registration we came in with people knowing Tucows and therefore the Open SRS brand. So we were able to at the beginning establish a pretty good footprint globally. Over time all business is local. Where we have done best internationally is where we could actually put some people on the ground. In Europe for example we have a couple of heads and we spend a lot of time and effort flying around and meeting people. Both our VP of sales and myself try to get over there at least once or twice every year. Similar, although to a little lesser extent in South America and Africa where again we have pretty good bases and pretty good penetration. Asia in particular presents a unique challenge and that is one we have really kind of taken a bit of a finer focus to for the next year or two. Now, we are very lucky that in the wholesale model it is our partners that really do all of the heavy lifting in terms of penetrating a market. In a market like Poland where we have a great footprint or any number of markets in Europe it is that partner that is going the dealing with the language and providing support in the local language and taking payments according to local currency and customs. So we get away with bits of that. But these businesses; hosting businesses, ISP businesses are local businesses and that is true all over the world. So you have to hustle a little more but there is still incredible leverage. Jim Kennedy – Marathon Capital: What sort of language barriers exist in terms of your being able to port things electronically or present them? I know you have local partners that do a lot of the selling and interfacing but is language an issue?

Elliott Noss

Management

There are two elements to that. Luckily English is very much the Lingua Franca of the internet. When we are dealing with a customer it is overwhelmingly likely they kind of grew up in and around the internet and have a working knowledge of English so we are able to conduct business. That being said, our people on the ground in Europe I want to say cover between 6-8 languages between them. Certainly, again as we are dealing in certain parts of Asia language you really do need that. On an interface level where the one place that manifests itself is web mail. When we are selling our email product, our hosted email service, there if somebody is providing it to their end users we do have to provide a translated version. It is a tad limited. So I think now we cover somewhere again between 8-9 different languages with our web mail interface and that is something we tend to expand on in sort of an as-needed basis based on customer demand.

Operator

Operator

There are no further questions in queue. Mr. Noss I will turn the call back over to you.

Elliott Noss

Management

Thanks very much, operator. We look forward to seeing you all next quarter.