Earnings Labs

Tucows Inc. (TCX)

Q1 2020 Earnings Call· Thu, May 7, 2020

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Transcript

Monica Webb

Operator

Welcome to Tucows’ First Quarter 2020 Management Commentary. We have pre-recorded prepared remarks regarding the quarter and outlook for the Company. A transcript of the management commentary is also available on the Company’s website. In lieu of a live question-and-answer period following the remarks, shareholders, analysts and prospective investors are invited to submit their questions to Tucows’ management via email at ir@tucows.com until Wednesday, May 13. Management will address your questions directly, or in a recorded audio response and transcript that will be posted to the Tucows website on Wednesday, May 20 at approximately 4:00 p.m. Eastern Time. We would also like to advise that the updated Tucows Quarterly KPI Summary, which provides key metrics for all of our businesses for the last five quarters, as well as 2018, 2019, and year-to-date, is available in the Investors section of the website, along with the updated Ting Build Scorecard and Investor Deck. Now for management’s prepared remarks: On Thursday, May 7, Tucows issued a news release reporting its financial results for the first quarter ending March 31, 2020. That news release, and the Company’s financial statements, are available on the company’s website at tucows.com, under the Investors section. Please note that the following discussion may include forward-looking statements, which, 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 the Forms 10-K and 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

Analyst

Thanks, Monica. I’ll begin with a review of the business in the context of COVID-19, and then a more detailed review of the first quarter across business units. Dave Singh, our Chief Financial Officer, will then review the first quarter financial results in detail, and I’ll return for some concluding comments. First, we are fortunate that domain registration and mobile phone service can be effectively delivered from our laptops and servers, and are both absolutely central to how people are connecting and transacting today. And, while fiber-to-the-home requires a physical component, it is also experiencing an upsurge in demand. The state of our business is thankfully very strong. We’ve talked for years about how conservative, consistent, resilient and efficient our business is. On mobile, over half our subscribers have been with us more than three years. On fiber, our first glimpse at churn rates points to incredibly long customer lifetimes. On Domains, we have thousands of active resellers who have remarkably been with us for fifteen or more years. We run on recurring, automated payments from a large, diverse, global portfolio of loyal customers. We acquire a customer once and enjoy returns for years. That has never felt safer and healthier than it does right now. Further, well prior to the current situation, we had already moved to a distributed workforce and virtual work processes. Our meetings were already on video calls and our documents, spreadsheets and presentations on G-Suite. Our perpetual chat is on Slack. Our product backlog is in Jira and our projects in Wrike. Support reps help customers from anywhere. Senior leaders sit in Los Angeles, Copenhagen, Portland, Bonn, Oakland, and Amsterdam, nowhere near head office. So, with the exception of fiber installs, there was very little adjustment or interruption when our employees moved entirely to work…

Dave Singh

Analyst

Thanks, Elliot. Total revenue for the first quarter of 2020 increased 6% to $84 million from $79 million for the first quarter of last year, driven by growth in the Wholesale Domains channel, which included the incremental contribution from the acquisition of Ascio completed on March 18 of last year. As well as growth in the Ting Internet subscriber base, which was up organically, but also benefited from the acquisition of Cedar Networks, that closed on January 1 of this year. This growth was partially offset by a small decrease in Ting Mobile revenue. Cost of revenues before network costs increased 2% to $53.2 million from $51.9 million for Q1 of last year, with the increase due primarily to higher revenues. As a percentage of revenue, however, cost of revenues before network costs declined by nearly 300 basis points, to 63% from just over 66%. Gross margin before network costs for the first quarter increased 14% to $30.8 million from $27 million, or as a percentage of revenue, increased to 37% from 34% for Q1 last year. I’ll now review gross margin for each of the Domain Services and Network Access businesses. Starting with Domain Services, gross margin for the first quarter increased 15% year-on-year to $17.9 million from $15.6 million in Q1 last year. As a percentage of revenue, gross margin for Domain Services increased to 30% from 28%. Within the Domain Services business, gross margin for the Wholesale Channel increased 20% to $13.4 million from $11.1 million for the first quarter last year. As a percentage of revenue, gross margin for Wholesale increased to 26% from 24%. The increase, on both an absolute dollar and margin basis, was primarily the result of our focus on managing the business for gross margin, in particular, our focus on high quality…

Elliot Noss

Analyst

Thanks, Dave. In February, we renewed our open market buyback program, under which we can purchase up to $40 million of our stock until February of 2021. As Dave just mentioned in his remarks, we repurchased roughly 67,000 shares at an average of $46.69 a share, with a total spend of $3.1 million. We were quite pleased to be able to acquire shares at these levels. Last quarter we provided guidance for 2020 of $50 million in EBITDA. The first quarter was comfortably on plan, but this year contains both more challenges, and more opportunities than we have ever seen. Accordingly, we will leave guidance where it is at this time, but will do what is best for the business as this all unfolds. We expect this call to be the first of a number of quarters, where we will be sharing results and changes in this current environment. Accordingly, I will try and share the broad principles that are informing our thinking through the pandemic. The greatest certainty in the current situation is uncertainty. As a leader, I feel my greatest strategic responsibility right now is to distinguish between what I can know and what I cannot, and to act accordingly. And there is so much that I, and we, cannot know. We cannot know when businesses and everyday life will return to normal. We cannot know what that new normal will look like. We do know that it will be very different from the world before the pandemic. With all of this, we take a very conservative view. We are planning for the current circumstances, with minor variability, to persist for the foreseeable future. And we are planning accordingly. We are rethinking our installation practices, our marketing practices, our human resources practices, our product offerings and more; and…

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Analyst