Earnings Labs

Tucows Inc. (TCX)

Q4 2022 Earnings Call· Thu, Feb 9, 2023

$16.34

-1.39%

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Transcript

Monica Webb

Operator

Welcome to Tucows’ Fourth Quarter 2022 management commentary. We have pre-recorded prepared remarks regarding the quarter and outlook for the company. A Tucows-generated transcript of these remarks, with relevant links is also available on the Company’s website. In lieu of a live question-and-answer period following these remarks, shareholders, analysts and prospective investors are invited to submit questions to Tucows management via email at ir@tucows.com until Thursday, February 16. Management will address your questions directly or in a recorded audio response and transcript that will be posted to the Tucows website on Tuesday, February 28 at approximately 4 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 eight quarters, as well as for full years 2020, 2021 and 2022, and also includes historical financial results is available in the Investors section of the website along with the updated Ting Build Scorecard and investor presentation. Now for management’s prepared remarks: On Thursday, February 9th, Tucows issued a news release reporting its financial results for the fourth quarter ended December 31, 2022. 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. Finally, as discussed previously starting in Q1 of 2022 we started reporting as separate businesses;Ting, Wavelo and Tucows Domains; in addition to Tucows Corporate. As a reminder, we have a video available for additional detail and rationale for the change on the Tucows website. I would now like to turn the call over to Tucows President and Chief Executive Officer, Elliot Noss. Go ahead, Elliot.

Elliot Noss

Analyst

Thanks, Monica. The last quarter of the year is always an important time to reflect on the past year’s performance, challenges and lessons learned and channel that into the work for the following year. 2022 was both productive and challenging as we restructured Tucows into separate businesses at the start of the year. This has successfully provided the financial flexibility we hoped for, allowing Ting to access infrastructure capital without impacting the rest of the business, which I now refer to as ex-Ting. We did okay with the provisioning of shared services across the business but more importantly learned how to operate a holding company. We have also dealt with increasing costs of capital and economic uncertainty and a world restarting life post-pandemic. And in times like these, as I’ve said before, it’s important to focus on what you can control. So that’s what we’ve done. Now for 2023, we have more exciting growth plans in each of the three businesses than we have had for years, but for the first part of the year, work continues on the long-term funding of the business. More on that in the close. I’m pleased to report that we finished 2022 with total adjusted EBITDA of $59.1 million for ex-Ting, beating guidance of $53 million to $56 million. We had an EBITDA loss of $21.7 million for Ting, comfortably inside the guidance of a $20 million to $25 million loss. The year is notable for the base it established for each business. Tucows Domains is towards the end of a years-long integration of multiple platforms and is poised to be able to do new things. Wavelo has finally commenced the migration of Boost customers in earnest and is now poised to take advantage of the revolution coming to telecom. And Ting is now built to scale and is able to turn to refined execution. You will now hear directly from the heads of each business in these remarks, as well as from our CFO, Dave Singh, who will cover our financial results in detail. The first speaker is Dave Woroch, Chief Executive Officer, Tucows Domains. Go ahead, Dave.

Dave Woroch

Analyst

Thanks, Elliot. Tucows Domains finished the year with another quarter that was in line with our expectations, as both the domain industry and our business continue to normalize at pre-pandemic levels, albeit within a broader challenging environment. For 2022, adjusted EBITDA was $44.8 million and consistent with our guidance of $45 million. Revenue for Domain Services for the fourth quarter was $60.3 million, down 2% from the same quarter of last year, while gross margin was $18.4 million, down 7%. Domain Services adjusted EBITDA was $10.6 million in the fourth quarter and down 4% from Q4 of last year. The results reflect the normalization of transactions to pre-COVID levels that we have discussed on previous calls. The decline in domain transactions has slowed sequentially and it appears that our channel has worked through the demand that was pulled forward by the pandemic and we may be starting to move back to a path of modest growth. Our results also reflect the tail end of the impact of the Euro devaluation to the U.S. dollar, which escalated in 2022 through the end of Q3 and has since recovered some. We did implement two price increases in the second half of 2022 that addressed the cost of us buying domains in U.S. dollars when selling to customers in Euros. This is expected to help our margins in 2023. Additionally, our careful management of expenses, both for efficiency and in support of adjusted EBITDA is ongoing. With results now available for the full year of 2022, I would like to share our view of the health of the business over a multi-year timeframe that normalizes for the pre- and post-COVID periods. When looking at our results comparing 2022 with 2019, the last full year before COVID, domain transactions are up 2% and gross…

Justin Reilly

Analyst

Thanks, Dave. Wow! What a year. 2022 marks Wavelo’s first year as an independent business. Overall, I’m very pleased. In 12 months, we launched the Wavelo brand, built the team, productized and developed a feature-rich platform, and built a business with two anchor customers that will generate between $25 million and $30 million in revenue. But of course, we’re just in the first inning. And it’s a long game. Since the very beginning, I’ve spoken about the opportunity for Wavelo that there is a chasm between the fragmented collection of legacy billing and provisioning systems used today and a flexible solution that aggregates fixed and mobile networks, allowing for multiple brands and services into a single platform. I emphatically believe the gap exists and the opportunity is large. You’ve heard us say, “Everything is billing and provisioning.” It should not matter the service, customer or network type for the platform to deliver a seamless experience. That platform is Wavelo, and we are excited to wrap the year with something no one else has. We continue to be pleased with our partnership with DISH. As they add Boost Infinite, the cheapest unlimited service in the country, they continue to push on a legacy market with disruptive pricing. Between our shared focus on a superior customer experience, DISH’s progress towards 5G, and their launch of a competitive and fulsome product lineup, we are optimistic about the growth of DISH’s subscriber base. As always, when we speak about DISH, we recommend investors supplement with DISH’s own disclosure. While we’ve spent decades at Tucows sharpening our migration toolkit across domain names, email and mobile customers alike, telecom has struggled often with clunky experiences and doing so on the customer’s dime. We now have the most robust migration tool on the market. This means less…

Elliot Noss

Analyst

Thanks, Justin. In Q4, Ting delivered another strong quarter of fiber construction, including in Alexandria where construction started in September and is accelerating nicely using microtrenching. We expect the first serviceable addresses there in late Q1. The total serviceable address number for Ting-owned infrastructure for Q4 is 96,200 and 19,500 Partner addresses, taking us to 115,700 total serviceable addresses. Our Q4 fiber CapEx was $23.6 million, consistent with the previous quarter. Annual CapEx for 2022 was $86.3 million, which is up 53.5% over 2021 as we have been increasing our build velocity to a consistent, higher level the last three quarters. And I note that, in addition, we spent about $25 million in inventory additions to address any potential supply chain issues. Our total for both Ting-owned and Ting Partner serviceable address additions was 7,200, taking us to that nearly 116,000 we talked about. We expect those numbers to continue to ramp in Q1 in both Ting-owned footprints as well as some of our Partner footprints. We added 2,000 net subscribers in Q4, taking us over 34,500 in total. Our total subscribers have grown 34.5% year-over-year. I’ve mentioned before that high subscriber growth is largely a function of serviceable address growth. And we did have good serviceable address additions in Q4. The challenge is that they were lit with service at the end of the quarter and during the holidays. So the corresponding bump in subscribers will be in Q1 as we’re currently working through installing preorders. It is worth mentioning again this quarter that despite the ongoing macroeconomic factors in the U.S., we continue to have a strong preorder pipeline. The mature market contribution for Q4 is $2.4 million, up 8% from Q3 and 45% year-over-year. Gross profit grew by 8% quarter-over-quarter, and 31% year-over-year to $7.2 million. Ting’s…

Davinder Singh

Analyst

Thanks, Elliot. Total revenue for the fourth quarter of 2022 decreased 4.3% to $78.9 million from $82.5 million for the fourth quarter of 2021. Ting had revenue gains of 38% year-over-year, increasing to $11.5 million in Q4 of 2022 from $8.3 million in Q4 of 2021. The gains were offset by a decline in revenue of 53% year-over-year from Wavelo, mainly due to reduced professional services revenue from DISH, as well as a revenue recognition impact related to a reassessment of fixed payments in the DISH agreement. There was also a decline in corporate revenues of 17% year-over-year, from $3.2 million in Q4 of 2021 to $2.7 million in Q4 of 2022, driven by the expected decrease in low margin transitional service revenues with DISH. Domains revenue had a modest decrease of 1.8% year-over-year, from $61.4 million in Q4 2021 to $60.3 million in Q4 2022, as transaction levels normalized following the pandemic. Cost of revenues before network costs for Q4 was up slightly at $49.2 million as compared to $48.2 million for the same period of last year. As a percentage of revenue, cost of revenues before network costs increased to 62% from 58% in Q4 2021. This was primarily due to the lower high-margin impact of the Wavelo business which had both lower revenues and proportionally higher cost of revenues in Q4 of this year versus last year. Gross profit before network costs for the fourth quarter decreased 14% year-over-year to $29.7 million from $34.3 million with the decrease due mainly to the lower Wavelo contribution and lower contribution from Domains. As a percentage of revenue, gross profit before network costs decreased this quarter to 38% from 42% in Q4 of 2021. Breaking down gross profit by business, Tucows Domains’ gross profit for the fourth quarter of 2022…

Elliot Noss

Analyst

Thanks, Dave! First some housekeeping. With the added complexity of three businesses and a holding company, I am pleased to announce that Tucows will be hosting its first investor day. We will hold it in May at a date and time and mode to be determined after receiving your input. All investors who are interested in participating should let us know whether they would like to attend in person or remotely; any timezone restrictions or preferences; and, if in person, the dates when they could be in Toronto. We will try to accommodate the broadest range of investors possible. This idea has been discussed with shareholders over the last couple of quarters, and we want to be on the other side of some of the balance sheet work before holding it. We’ve been informed here by other companies like Constellation Software. The Tucows executive team and business heads will participate. We are also interested in your views on specific content you would like addressed, although we note we have a pretty good idea of what we need to cover. Also, I note that we announced today that we have reinstated our buyback for 2023. It is at the same level as the past several years of up to $40 million. This is always important to allow us to be opportunistic. In the rest of these remarks, I intend to quickly look back on 2022, look forward to 2023, and then discuss the balance sheet. In terms of 2022, and meeting guidance, you heard the positive numbers upfront. Operationally, each of the businesses performed roughly to plan. This was true across all three businesses and the holding company. We continue to operate our businesses in a remarkably predictable and reliable fashion. The biggest negatives in 2022, the delayed Generate closing, the…