Earnings Labs

Tucows Inc. (TCX)

Q1 2019 Earnings Call· Thu, May 9, 2019

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Transcript

Monica Webb

Management

Welcome to Tucows’ first quarter 2019 investor call. Management has pre-recorded its prepared remarks regarding the quarter and outlook for the Company. A transcript of these remarks is also available on the Company’s web site. In lieu of a live question and answer period following the prepared remarks, shareholders and analysts are invited to submit their questions to Tucows’ management via email at ir@tucows.com. Management will address your questions directly, or in a recorded audio response and transcript that will be posted to the Tucows website on Tuesday, May 21st at approximately 4 p.m. eastern time. We would also like to remind you of the Tucows Quarterly KPI Summary that we began publishing on our website last quarter, which provides key metrics for all of our businesses by quarter since 2017. The updated version is available now in the Investors section. Now, on to management’s prepared remarks. On Wednesday, May 8th, Tucows issued a news release reporting its financial results for the first quarter ended March 31st, 2019. That news release, and the Company’s financial statements, are available on the company's website at tucows.com, under the Investors page. Please note that the 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 detail in the company's documents filed with the SEC, specifically the most recent reports on the Form 10-K and Form 10-Q. The company urges you to read its security filings for a full description of the risk factors applicable for its business. I would now like to turn the call over to Tucows’ President and Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Elliot Noss.

Elliot Noss

Management

Thanks, Monica. I will begin our remarks with a review of the quarter. Dave Singh, our Chief Financial Officer, will then review the first quarter financial results in detail. And I’ll return for some concluding comments. Now on to the quarter. While it might not appear to be, the first quarter was in fact a solid start to 2019. Total revenue was $79.0 million, compared to $81.2 last year, excluding the acceleration of nearly $15 million in revenue resulting from a bulk transfer. Gross margin dollars were essentially flat. Net income was $2.8 million, compared with $3.7 million in Q1 last year, and adjusted EBITDA was $9.4 million compared to $10.4 million, both impacted by some outsized costs that we will discuss in more detail. I’ll now review the performance of the individual businesses. Our Domains business saw another quarter of consistent performance. The wholesale channel again benefitted from the price adjustments implemented in the first half of last year. While registrations during the quarter, adjusted for the bulk transfer of names, were down 3% year-over-year, at approximately 4.1 million, gross margin dollars for wholesale domain services were up 9%. The wholesale renewal rate continued its strong performance at 77%. Gross margin dollars from value added services for Q1 were down 5%, primarily due to mediocre expiry stream results. In total, the wholesale business grew gross margin as expected at 4%. In our retail domains channel, we had total registrations in Q1 of approximately 420,000 versus 460,000 in the same period the prior year, with the decline coming primarily from the Enom brands. Gross margin dollars, however, were still up 6% year-over-year. The renewal rate for the retail channel was also 77% in Q1. Renewal rates for both the wholesale and retail channels continue to track solidly above the industry…

Dave Singh

Management

Thanks, Elliot. Total revenue for the first quarter of 2019 was $79 million. This compares to revenue for the same period last year of $95.8 million and, as Elliot discussed, includes the acceleration of $14.6 million due to the bulk transfer out of approximately 2.65 million very low margin domain names in the first quarter of last year. Excluding this amount, revenue for the first quarter of this year was about 3% lower than that of last year. Cost of revenues before network costs decreased 25% to $51.2 million from $68.3 million for first quarter of last year, with the decrease due to the year-over-year decline in revenue. As a percentage of revenue, cost of revenues before network costs decreased 600 basis points to 65% from 71%. Gross margin before network costs for Q1 increased marginally to $27 million from $26.8 million. As a percentage of revenue, gross margin before network costs expanded to 34% from 28% for Q1 last year. I’ll now review gross margin for each of the Domain Services and Network Access areas. For Domain Services, gross margin for the first quarter was up slightly to $15.6 million compared to the same period last year at $15.4 million. As a percentage of revenue, gross margin for Domain Services for Q1 of this year was 28% compared with 21% for Q1 last year, with the increase primarily due to the atypically low reported gross margin in Q1 of last year resulting from the acceleration of the $14.6 million of revenue, with essentially no gross margin, into that quarter, as I discussed earlier. I want to just take a minute to note that our overall domains gross margin this year will be negatively impacted by our amortizing into revenue, deferred revenue that was recorded at fair value for the…

Elliot Noss

Operator

Thanks, Dave. With the first quarter in the books, we are reiterating our 2019 cash EBITDA guidance of $62 million. We do so from a similar position to last year. Three months into this year, we are about 18% of the way to our cash EBITDA guidance. At this same point in 2018, we were at about 22%. Q1 was an interesting quarter in that all the negatives were anomalous short term impacts amidst a backdrop of positive long term trends. In the short term category, we experienced our worst quarter of carrier penalties ever at Ting Mobile. By far. We dealt with a delay in the Ascio acquisition. And we experienced poor results in the domains secondary market, which for years now has been identified as a smaller tactical opportunity. In the long term category, we saw continued progress in fiber passes and installs, particularly through March and April. We have more in the pipeline than ever before. We made material progress in sorting out our MVNO supply relationships, which we expect to share more about next quarter. We made a fantastic acquisition in the domains business that not only added a little more scale -- but also a strong group of new employees. It is truly a quarter where it would be a lot easier to be private than public, but all of that makes me continually grateful for the nature of our investors. This past week was the Berkshire Hathaway AGM. Value investors from all over the world descend on Omaha to listen to huge heapings of common sense. This tends to be the busiest week or two of the year for me for meeting with investors, as I assume the flight connections from Toronto to Omaha must be pretty good. We met with potential new investors…