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Tucows Inc. (TCX)

Q3 2010 Earnings Call· Wed, Nov 10, 2010

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Tucows Inc Third Quarter Fiscal 2010 Conference Call. Earlier this afternoon, Tucows issued a news release reporting its financial results for the third quarter of fiscal 2010. The news release and the financial statements are available on the company’s website at tucowsinc.com under the investor 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 third quarter financial results as well as at Tucows website. Before we begin today, let me remind you that matters the company will be discussing include forward-looking statements and as such are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause the actual results to differ materially. These risk factors are described in details in the company’s documents filed with the SEC. Specifically, the most recently report on Form 10-K and Form 10-Q. The company urges you to read its security filings a full description of the risk factors applicable for its business. I would now like to turn them 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. This afternoon’s call will follow our usual format. I will begin with a brief overview of our financial results and operational highlights for the quarter. Mike will then review our financial results in more detail and I will return for some concluding comments before opening the call up to questions. The third quarter saw the continuation of the solid results that we delivered in the first half of the year, as each of our business units continued to perform well. Revenue grew by 3.5% compared to the third quarter of last year to a record $21.2 million. And as was the case in Q1 and Q2, we achieved this growth despite the lower contributions from our email service and direct navigation name sales. Adjusted cash EBITDA for the quarter was $1.8 million and cash flow from operations was $1.9 million. I will now briefly review some of the operating highlights for the quarter beginning with OpenSRS. Again this quarter, OpenSRS domain service saw strong year-over-year growth in transaction volumes. Total transactions grew 16% compared to the third quarter of last year and new registrations grew 25%. Both of which were buoyed by the launch of the new .CO TLD that I discussed last quarter. Net of the CO launch, new transactions grew a healthy 15%. Renewal transactions remain strong with year-over-year growth of 11% and our renewal rate held steady at a level that is firmly above the industry average. Domains under management were up 8.6% year-over-year to $10.1 million. Growth in transactions contributed to a year-over-year increase in domain service revenue of 9.4% and our strong competitive position once again resulted in a number of a significant customer wins…

Michael Cooperman

Management

Thanks, Elliot. Net revenues for the third quarter of fiscal 2010 increased 3.5% to $21.2 million from 20.5 million for the third quarter of last year. Cost of revenues before network costs for the quarter increased by $1.3 million, or $9.8 to $14.9 million from $13.6 million for the same quarter of last year. Gross margin for the third quarter of this year decreased to $4.9 million from $5.3 million for the same quarter last year. On a percentage basis, gross margin decreased to 23% from 26%. Largely the result of the 7% price increase implemented by the assigned in July and the continued shift in sales mix from higher-margin services to lower margin domain name services that we’ve discussed on previous calls. Gross margin from our OpenSRS service which includes domain services, email services and other wholesale services was $3.8 million or 18% of net sales compared with $4.2 million or 23% of net sales for the third quarter of 2009. This decrease is primarily attributable to the lost contribution of the three media portal email customers that we have previously discussed and to a lesser extent, the success of our strategy to grow revenue from higher volume lower priced customers. Domain services gross margin percentage decreased to 16.3% from 18.4% last year due mainly to the additional 7% pricing increase that the VeriSign registry levied on July 1. Gross margin for YummyNames decreased by $500,000 to $1.1 million, when compared to the third quarter last year and primary reflects the timing of larger portfolio sales of domain names. In addition our bulk name sales from the portfolio also resulted in our having a smaller inventory of names available for delivery of third-party advertising on park pages. Gross margin percentage for YummyNames declined marginally to 86% from 88% for…

Elliot Noss

Management

Thanks, Mike. Let me begin with an update on our share repurchases. In the second half of 2010 we’ve continued to deliver on our objective of returning capital to shareholders. In September, we initiated our fifth modified Dutch auction tender in the last two years with the intention to purchase up to 2.9 million shares with the option to take up additional 2% of our total shares outstanding at the time of the announcement. With more than 3.9 million shares tendered we exercised that option, repurchasing the entire amount at a price of $.70 per share for a total cost of just over $2.7 million. This brings the total number of shares repurchased this year including both Dutch tenders and open market purchases to almost 13.7 million or more than 20% of our shares outstanding at the end of last year. Since initiating our share buyback programs we have now repurchased a total of 23.2 million shares representing 30% of total shares outstanding at that time. We remain committed to returning capital to our shareholders and continue to believe that buybacks either via Dutch auction or the open market are an excellent means by which to achieve this. On last quarter’s call, I discussed opportunities for growth. Over the last decade, domain registrations have been a tremendous platform from which to build a large and diverse customer base. Over the past few years, we extended and enhanced our retail channel and we are now seeing thrive at Hover. We revamped and rebranded our content business and are now watching it drive as Butterscotch. And we are now rolling out our unified control panel for open SRS and introducing new things for resellers to sell like trust services. As I noted earlier, before the year ends we will be launching GoMobi…

Operator

Operator

(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from the line of Thanos Moschopoulos, BMO Capital Markets. Your line is open. Thanos Moschopoulos – BMO Capital Markets: Hi. Good afternoon.

Elliot Noss

Management

Hi, Thanos.

Elliot Noss

Management

Eliot, just in terms of the growth you are seeing on the OpenSRS front, can you provide with more color as to what’s driving that and you said that the coTLD was part of it, but aside for that is it really been driven by new customer wins or more transactions coming from the same customers? Is it sort of the market recovering from, I guess, whatever modest economic impact there was last year, what’s driving -- some of the growth we are seeing this year on that front?

Elliot Noss

Management

I think that you’re seeing primarily -- while that the single largest factor is market growth and we are supplementing that with customer wins. Now, you’ve probably heard me talking over the last couple of quarters a little bit more about customer wins on the domain side. Those do tend, as you know, to take time to ramp up. So, we feel like if it’s a year from -- now you are asking me the same question, the waiting is going to be a little but more towards competitive wins than markets. But certainly, the market is, I would describe it as fine and we are doing quite well competitively. Thanos Moschopoulos – BMO Capital Markets: And so the customer wins are those customers that were using other wholesalers previously or in some cases were they registrars themselves?

Elliot Ross

Analyst

Primarily from other wholesalers and sometimes from customers who have grown, you know, they might have been using registrars who have smaller wholesale businesses relative to the retail businesses and they’ve now grown to a size where a dedicated wholesale supplier fits better. Thanos Moschopoulos – BMO Capital Markets: Okay. And as far as competitive wins is this to be a function of them looking at your broader offering and seeing the value of that offers relatively to current supplier that was driving that?

Elliot Noss

Management

I think the single largest reason is focus. And, you know, you’ve heard me say for some time that we really are the registrar who is most focused on the wholesale channel. That’s the core of our business and no other registrar can really say that. And at the end of the day, we spent a lot of time and effort on relationships. You know, these are companies for whom domain registrations -- your hosting company, domain registration is a very important part of your business, not necessarily one that will drive your bottom line, but is really central to smooth and strong operation. So, having that kind of deeper relationships, really is valued and that’s why you see us primarily win customers and very, very rarely lose them. Thanos Moschopoulos – BMO Capital Markets: Okay. On the upper side, there you mentioned there was good transaction growth there, could you provide more color as to why we didn’t see it on the revenue lines? And I realize that most of the revenue in that line is from deferred from previous quarters but nonetheless I would have thought we would’ve seen more of an impact?

Elliot Noss

Management

Yeah. Quite frankly, I was a little surprised and took a second look at that myself. I will tell you that if you remember back to the middle of 2009 we really re-launched Hover in 2009 and in that re-launch we merged three brands together and we were working through some things. Not only in the original Hover design, but also dealing with some customers who were a little bit -- who didn’t necessarily fit as well any more. And so, you really saw that kind of relatively flattened through the middle of the year with Hover last year which just makes those year-over-year comparisons quite stark and very, very strong. You know I did want to add, as you heard me say in my remarks, that the quarter-over-quarter comparisons were strong as well. So, I think what you are seeing there is that we’ve got the positioning right. We’ve now got kind of the front door of the website right and really starting late in the second quarter and driving through the third quarter, now we think we’ve got the first elements of a very strong customer acquisition strategy right. So, we feel pretty encouraged about that going forward and there’s more change to come. You are going to see a pretty significant redo of the control panels underneath which will, again, improve retention ability to cross sell customer happiness in general. One of the things that’s really quite remarkable now there is what’s going on in the customer service side? Customer service just leads into happy customers more word-of-mouth, stronger renewals. They are now, I think I referred last quarter to the fact that we have this kind of no hold customer service but if you phone in, the phone brings right to a customer service rep. We now have it for most of the last number of months, you were kind of getting the phone picked up 99 plus percent of the time in sub 20 seconds recently. That’s up 10 seconds and we’ve seen days where the average call pickup time is in 5 seconds which is quite remarkable when you’re calling in for customer service in any organization. Thanos Moschopoulos – BMO Capital Markets: Okay. It is. On the GoMobi front, I think it’s an interesting model whereby you’re taking a third party offering and acting as a channel, selling into your installed base? Do you see more opportunity to do that in the future?

Elliot Noss

Management

The short answer is yeah. One of the – I think I should take a step back, first you heard me talk about control panels. That tends to be – it’s kind of under the covers work it’s not very sexy, but the reason that I did talk about it a fair bit on this call is because it’s really all of that work that allows us to spend up new services more effectively. So, I think you will see more of that. And the GoMobi side in particular, it either was really very, I guess, reassuring to see I mentioned it, but I am going to say it again, the customers were coming to us and say, hey we really want to offer this. It’s in the market what are your plans. And then think because it really like to get it sooner we don’t want to go direct, please let us get it from you. And at the same time the suppliers say, look we don’t want to deal with all of these customers directly, hey -- and we also don’t want to leave demand on the table, could you pick it up a little bit? So it’s was very kind of re-affirming of our view of our role in a relationship between the suppliers and customers. Thanos Moschopoulos – BMO Capital Markets: Okay. That’s great. I’ll pass the line, thanks.

Elliot Noss

Management

Thanks.

Operator

Operator

(Operator Instructions) There are no further questions at this time, Mr. Noss I will return the call back over to you.

Elliot Noss

Management

Thanks very much and I look forward to speaking with you all again next quarter. Thank you, Operator.

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes the conference call for today. Thank you for participating and please disconnect your line.