John Saunders
Analyst · Catalyst Research. Please proceed with your question
Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, Q2 was another good quarter for Where Food Comes From. A quick recap of financial results. Q2 revenue grew 13% to $2.8 million, up from $2.5 million last year. Six-month revenue was up 15% to $5.2 million from $4.6 million. Gross profit increased 10% in Q2 and 17% through six months on a year-over-year basis. Gross margin declined slightly to 47% from 48% in Q2 but increased to 48% from 47% for the six-month period. SG&A expense as a percent of revenue improved for both the second quarter and six-month period, reflecting our scalable model and our focus on maintaining a tight cost structure. Net income increased 18% to $170,000 in the second quarter and 29% to $257,000 in the six-month period. The second quarter was our ninth consecutive profitable quarter. Year-to-date, we have generated nearly $766,000 in cash from operations. On our balance sheet, cash and cash equivalents were up 13% to $4.3 million from $3.8 million at year-end. Our current ratio is very healthy at nearly 5 to 1. Our revenue increases for both the three and six-month periods are notable for a couple of reasons. Our IMI Global subsidiary continues to experience headwinds in the form of a stronger dollar that is negatively impacting demand from Europe for NHTC verified cattle. This in turn is resulting in some domestic producers scaling back on their NHTC audits conducted by Where Food Comes From, which of course has the effect of reducing our taxes as well. In addition, lower domestic cattle prices are squeezing margins for producers, some of whom are responding by eliminating other verifications such as Source & age, Natural and GAP. All these factors combined to result in a relatively lackluster quarter for our IMI Global unit. But, there are a couple of pieces of good news around this. One, cattle prices like all commodity sectors are cyclical in nature and will inevitably come back around. You don’t need to look any further than the long-term trends in worldwide beef consumption and the likelihood that China will be reopening its country to U.S. beef imports to feel pretty good about our overall prospects for growing the IMI Global business long-term. And just recently, Saudi Arabia just reopened U.S. beef after being closed since 2012. The reopening requires several verification steps on beef cattle and we expect to win a lot of that business. This won’t be huge but it’s another example of how fast moving the verification business is and how opportunities keep springing up. The other piece of good news is the performance of our Validus and ICS subsidiaries, which are really stepping up. Both Validus and ICS turned in record performances in the second quarter with Validus meeting strong demand for pork and poultry verifications, and this in spite of lagging effects from the porcine epidemic diarrhea disease and Avian flu. And ICS is doing a great job keeping up with growing demand for non-GMO and organic verifications and exploiting our competitive advantage of being able to bundle these and other solutions which increases our sales and margins by giving producers a lower cost, less intrusive alternative to using multiple vendors. So, my congratulations to the Validus and ICS teams for continuing to grow their operations. On a related subject, we continue look for ways to strengthen our current service offerings and to add them with new complementary offerings, either organically or through M&A. I can’t overstate how important it is for us to continue expanding the competitive advantage we enjoy by virtue of our solutions portfolio, which now numbers more than 30. Not only does it give us a big advantage on the new business development side, but as we saw in the second quarter, it reduces our reliance on any given market segment or verification solution. Thereby, reducing our vulnerability to the inevitable cyclicality of commodity prices and trends. A quick update on the McDonald’s pilot program for sustainable beef in Canada that we conducted early in the second quarter. As the exclusive third-party verification value for the pilot, we tracked 9,000 head of cattle raised in Canada, the equivalent of 2.4 million McDonald’s hamburgers from birth, to ensure that each participant along the supply chain was practicing sustainable practices as defined by the Canadian Roundtable for Sustainable Beef. In the process, the work through comes [ph] from verification team conducted 183 onsite audits at cow calf operations, dairies, feedlots, packers and other processing operations across all Canadian provinces. The pilot was McDonald’s initial step towards its goal of purchasing a portion of its beef from verified sustainable sources beginning in 2016. In June, we joined with McDonald’s Kargal, the World Wildlife Fund and other program participants in presenting results of the pilot program to the Canadian Roundtable for Sustainable Beef. The CRSB’s verification committee which includes a representative from Where Food Comes From, will evaluate data gathered during the two and one and half year pilot program to determine the path forward for sustainable beef production guidelines and practices in Canada. Where all this will lead is still unclear, but we are hopeful that the key role we played in the project and the relationships we’ve developed along the way and at the June Gala [ph] will lead to good things with both McDonald’s and the sustainability movement in general. Another recent highlight was our move into our new space here in Castle Rock, on August 1st. For those of you who have visited us here in our current space, in the Old Bank building, you know that we were crammed in here pretty tight. In one case, threw people to one office and there wasn’t much in the way of natural light or ambience. This is part of the lean culture we adopted at the outset, and we think it’s served us well during our formative years when we have been focused on putting our infrastructure in place and trying to produce profit at the same time. On the other hand, it wasn’t necessarily conducive to hosting customers, business partners, M&A prospects or investors or building employee morale for that matter. So, we think the timing of our move is perfect. Our new space is a couple of blocks away; it’s a newly constructed modern facility with a lot of space and natural light and comprises 8,000 square feet versus our former 3,000. So, we have ample room for expansion as our business continues to grow in a beautiful venue to entertain representatives of our many constituencies. It’s not the Trump Tower but it’s a very professional space that is much more a representative of where we are now as a business. From a cost standpoint, we believe the increase in overhead is not material and will be more than offset by the benefits the space will afford us. With that, I’ll open the call to questions.