Earnings Labs

Tucows Inc. (TCX)

Q2 2011 Earnings Call· Wed, Aug 10, 2011

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen and welcome to Tucows Inc. Second Quarter 2011 Conference Call. Earlier this afternoon, Tucows issued a news release reporting its financial results for the second quarter. The news release and the financial statements are available on the company’s website at www.tucowsinc.com under the Investor Heading. Please note that today’s call is being broadcast live over the internet and will be archived for both replay by the 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 as well as at Tucows website. Before we begin 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. The risk factors are described in detail in the company’s documents filed with the SEC, specifically the most recent report on Form 10-K and Form 10-Q. The company urges you to read their securities filings for a full description of the risk factors applicable for its business. I would now like to turn the call over to Tucows’ Executive Vice President of Products, Mr. Ken Schafer. Please go ahead Mr. Schafer. Ken Schafer – Executive Vice President of Products: Thank you, operator. Good afternoon. Thanks for joining us. With me is Michael Cooperman, our Chief Financial Officer and unfortunately due to a family matter our President and CEO, Elliot Noss is not able to be with us today. I’ll be taking his place. Despite that this call will follow the usual format. I’ll begin with a brief overview of the financial and operational highlights for the quarter and then Mike will review our financial results in more detail. After that…

Operator

Operator

Our first question comes from the line of Thanos Moschopoulos from BMO Capital. Your line is open. Thanos Moschopoulos – BMO Capital: Hi, good afternoon. You answered most of my questions in your comprehensive prepared remarks but just a couple of follow-ons. Regarding OpEx I guess between the Ting launch your comment was we shouldn’t see an appreciable impact there. What about with respect to the acquisition should we see a slight uptick from that or should we expect OpEx to be fairly consistent in the coming quarters?

Michael Cooperman

Analyst

Hey Thanos its Mike. How are you doing? As far as EPAG is concerned, EPAG does have a real revenue stream attached to it. So, while you will see a marginal increase in our overall operating expenses as we start accounting for Ting, we don’t expect that it will have a negative impact on the bottom line. It will be marginally accretive once it becomes absorbed. Thanos Moschopoulos – BMO Capital: Okay. All right. And then what about the as you highlighted the Canadian dollars obviously showing some appreciation although I guess it’s gone either way in recent days. But how far out that your hedges extend and then at what point do we start to see some more of the impact of the currency start to flow into the OpEx if those hedges come off?

Michael Cooperman

Analyst

Well, obviously in an environment with the Canadian dollars moved for a sustained period of time in the – if you wish for our reporting purposes the wrong direction that generally slowly catches up to you what we’ve been able to do to-date is we’ve been able to mitigate that fairly significantly through buying forward contracts and obviously increasing our underlying productivity underneath the process to enable us to deliver the results that we have. As far as the hedging is concerned, we continue to hedge and have been buying forward contracts into 2012. Thanos Moschopoulos – BMO Capital: Okay. Okay was that Ken relatively consistent over the last two quarters?

Ken Schafer

Analyst

Yes, it is. Thanos Moschopoulos – BMO Capital: Okay. And then maybe just finally maybe just a little bit more on Ting and I guess I appreciate that you kind of limited and how much color you can provide given that this is still in beta. But maybe some more color around the potential magnitude of the opportunity, the timeframe over which we might expect to see the revenues ramp and start to have sort of a meaningful impact on the top line?

Ken Schafer

Analyst

I think the big impact is really going to be known when we see what happens with our reseller base. We will do some retail efforts to build the brand and to build the customer base that way. Our expectation isn’t that that’s going to be a very large part of the business at this point. We expect that wholesale adoption is going to be the thing that really drives it. And it’s really too early to say that at this point, we’ve gone out and talked broadly to our resellers about it and they’d been very interesting in the idea of offering of mobile service to their customers. But, what we wanted to do this time was to prove that out of retail basis, first let them be able to get in there, experience to themselves, kind of kick the tires if you will, and then for them to pass along to their customers. So, I think you’re right I think it is too early to tell. And, we’ve kind of structured it from an operational standpoint so that it is fairly efficient for us to run we haven’t had to make major investments to support it. So, either way it kind of positions us well for this whether it’s a small success or huge success. Thanos Moschopoulos – BMO Capital: So I guess ultimately the idea is that if it starts to get traction, it will ultimately become one more of the comprehensive slate of services that you are offering to your reseller partners?

Ken Schafer

Analyst

That’s right. Thanos Moschopoulos – BMO Capital: Right. Okay, all right. And then finally maybe on the sorry the Butterscotch business we saw some weakness there that just reflects the ongoing challenges in the display ad market or what’s behind that?

Ken Schafer

Analyst

Yes pretty much. I mean in short and sweet I think that’s an accurate assessment. What we’ve done though fairly successfully internally as we’ve been not allowing those resources to go idle or but have been taking full advantage of them in helping us position and market in other areas of the company and we’ve been very encouraged by the results we’ve been achieving. Thanos Moschopoulos – BMO Capital: Okay. All right, thanks guys. I’ll pass the line.

Ken Schafer

Analyst

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Alex Grassino, Laurentian Bank Securities. Your line is open. Alex Grassino – Laurentian Bank Securities: Good afternoon, gentlemen. I was just wondering if you could perhaps provide a little bit more color on how EPAG would strengthen your ability to respond to the expanded TLDs. What specific processes or steps do you feel will be improved upon or how will EPAG help you to meet the upcoming increase more effectively?

Elliot Noss

Analyst

First to offer domain now or in the future sort of different of these, it requires us to integrate both at a business process level, contractual level and at a technical level with the registries. What EPAG brings is expertise with over 200 different registries that they currently connect with. So, they have built a system that allow them to organize that and they built a body of knowledge around how to integrate with these people very quickly and manage that process. Because we then are connecting with them through kind of one standardized interface, it means that to a large extent the connections to the registries which is always something that the OpenSRS development team and product management team have had to take on. That work now kind of gets offloaded to the EPAG team and allows us to connect much more quickly with people – sorry, people registries. So, we feel that that’s going to give us real leverage when it comes to new TLDs. Alex Grassino – Laurentian Bank Securities: Okay, great. Thanks. Also in terms of Ting, on your website it sort of talks about how you’re planning on revamping the customer experiences well namely by providing increased training to your service reps. In terms of incremental costs for the inbound call centers for problems out sort of thing online presence, is there any way to sort of conceptually think about it or is it just still early days?

Ken Schafer

Analyst

Yeah, I think it’s very early days. We’re taking a lot of the lessons that were learned with Hover in terms of giving great service. A big part of that is about having a mindset that says that we have experts on staff that are answering these questions and we’re giving them a level of authority to actually resolve the presence on the first call. So, that’s making the entire process much simpler. The kind of no-wait policies, no-transfer policies that we put in place at Hover, all translate incredibly well to Ting. And in fact we’ve done some slight changes organizationally internally so that Hover and Ting will share a common customer service base both from a staff and a technical standpoint. And I think we’ll get a fair bit of efficiency out of that in cross training and kind of reuse of technology and effective tools. Alex Grassino – Laurentian Bank Securities: And can you just sort of give us an idea of what the headcount on that is currently?

Ken Schafer

Analyst

For Ting or for Hover overall? Alex Grassino – Laurentian Bank Securities: For Hover overall, for the customer service component specifically?

Ken Schafer

Analyst

Roughly 15 to 20 people. Alex Grassino – Laurentian Bank Securities: 15 to 20 people, okay thank you. Just conceptually over the last several quarters you’ve been talking a lot about looking at perhaps enhancing shareholder value through buybacks. I’m just wondering if there has been any change in philosophy on that wasn’t really mentioned on this call. So just sort of wanted to go back and verify that you are still looking at that as an option or is it perhaps more of a back burner things or initiatives you have with the recent acquisition you made?

Elliot Noss

Analyst

Well, I think the answer to that is, is that it’s certainly one of the strategies that we do regularly and successfully explored. I think you’re right that for the immediate future we do have this acquisition to absorb and we may not buy anything in the immediate future. But it is something that we do consider and do discuss pretty much at pretty much every board meeting. Alex Grassino – Laurentian Bank Securities: Perfect. And finally just a small one, in terms of your prepaid expenses, I noticed there was a slight quarter-over-quarter bump up. Do you expect it to revert back down to lower levels or is this sort of a new level that we’ll be looking at going forward?

Ken Schafer

Analyst

The – I think the answer is I think it will fluctuate and it will depend on the operational need at that time. On occasion we can operate those registries a little tighter. And then other times it’s the funnel of renewals maybe slightly skewed towards the beginning of the following month in which case we won’t take a chance of running out of money. So we’ll deploy more resources into it. Alex Grassino – Laurentian Bank Securities: Okay, perfect. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

And there are no further questions in queue at this time. Ken Schafer – Executive Vice President of Products: All right. Thank you, operator and thanks to everyone for being on the call with us today. We look forward to speaking with you on the next call.