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WidePoint Corporation (WYY)

Q2 2013 Earnings Call· Wed, Aug 14, 2013

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good day, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by. Welcome to the WidePoint Second Quarter 2013 Earnings Conference Call. During today's presentation, all parties will be in a listen-only mode. Following the presentation, the conference will be opened for questions. (Operator Instructions) This conference is being recorded today, August, 14, 2013. I would now like to turn the conference over to David Fore with Hayden IR. Please go ahead, sir.

David Fore

Management

Thank you, Operator. Good afternoon to all participants in WidePoint's second quarter 2013 financial results conference call. With me today are WidePoint's Chairman and CEO, Steve Komar; and Chief Financial Officer, Jim McCubbin. Steve will provide an overview of the second quarter 2013 results, and Jim will provide additional financial details. Then, we'll open the call to questions from participants. Before I turn the call over to Steve, I'd like to remind all participants that during this conference call any forward-looking statements are made pursuant to the Safe Harbor provision of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Expressions of future goals, including financial guidance, and similar expressions including, without limitation, expressions using the terminology may, will, believe, expect, plans, anticipates, predicts, forecasts, and expressions which reflect something other than historical facts are intended to identify forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements involve a number of risk factors and uncertainties, including those discussed in the Risk Factor sections of WidePoint's annual report on Form 10-K, and its quarterly reports on Form 10-Q, and other SEC filings that company releases. Actual results may differ materially from any forward-looking statements due to such risks factors and uncertainties. The Company undertakes no obligation to revise or update any forward-looking statements in order to reflect events or circumstances that may arise after this conference call, except as required by law. I’d now turn the call over to WidePoint's Chairman and CEO, Steve Komar for opening remarks.

Steven L. Komar

Management

Thank you, David, and good day to everyone who has joined us this afternoon. As has been our past practice, we’d like to acknowledge and reaffirm our appreciation, to all of you for attending our call and for your continued interest in WidePoint Corporation. In the second quarter of 2013, we continued our progress in addressing several of WidePoint’s strategic goals relating to our business and repositioning ourselves against our target markets to maximize future growth and success. We have continued to diversify our revenue streams and migrate toward higher margin opportunities, while simultaneously adding and repositioning business building resources and funding technology infrastructure and development. Financially, our second quarter revenues of $11.3 million and $23.3 million year-to-date are approximately 10% below our prior period performance. This revenue drop was the result of some sequester related delays and software reselling opportunities on the cyber security side, and a combination of customer attrition and delayed customer implementations within the telecommunications management area. And Jim will take you through those in greater detail during his comments. What we believe that the much more significant is that our migration to a higher margin revenue mix is evident in our gross margin improvement throughout the first six months of 2013. During the first quarter, our margins improved 300 basis points than the prior year period and in this quarter added an additional 400 basis points with gross margins now up to 31%. As a direct result, WidePoint’s income from operations in the quarter was $600,000 better than the comparable year ago quarter and $400,000 better on a year-to-date cumulative basis. Also as a result of this higher margin performance, the Company has been able to maintain year-to-date net profitability even in the phase of its significant infrastructure reinvestment program outlets. The perspective details of…

James T. McCubbin

Management

Hello everyone and welcome to our call. Our second quarterly financial numbers produced expected financial results. We’ve realized a slight reduction in comparative quarterly and six months revenues over prior year periods, predominantly due to a shift in our strategy to focus on higher margin services that have longer recurring lines that did not fully offset some of the effects brought about the federal government’s sequestration efforts along with some effects associated with either contract attrition, protest and really start some of our recent awards. In recognition of this strategy though, we did realize increasing margins and better bottom line comparative performance that continued to allow us to make the investments this year that Steve has discussed, along with providing us the ability to continue to pay down our credit bank debt. We believe as we progress with our strategy, which is changing the make-up of the company and what have we sell, we should realize increased marketplace value from our portfolio of longer recurring contract wise and improved and optimized internal software systems and intellectual property. We believe that given some of our recent awards, some of which were generically disclosed in our press release today, along with some of our pending awards, we’ll have to see in the near future, that our second half should experience continued financial improvements. Looking closer revenues, we did witness for the three month period ended June 30, 2013, a decrease of approximately 9% to approximately $11.3 million, compared to approximately $12.5 million for the three month period ended June 30, 2012. The decrease was attributable to a shift in our sales strategy to focus upon higher margin recurring services with longer lives for which we did see improvement. We also witnessed a combination of factors including delays in government product resale transactions,…

Steven L. Komar

Management

I think – Jim, I think we’ve probably taken more than a few minutes to go over this. So why don’t we not frustrate anyone any longer, and I’d like to now open the call to your questions and comments. Operator, if you can help us out by opening the lines. We appreciate it.

Operator

Operator

Thank you, sir. We will now begin the question-and-answer session (Operator Instructions) And our first question comes from Mark Jordan with Noble Financial. Please go ahead. Mark C. Jordan – Noble Financial Capital Markets: Good afternoon, gentlemen. A balance sheet question or two. It’s good to see you paid down $1.2 million debt in the first half. Cash was up about $600,000 also. My question would be as, say, we move into next year and you start to get payback from all the investments and you get hopefully an acceleration of revenue, how are you going to fund that and what kind of need might you have for working capital growth to facilitate that, the payback from the investments that you’re incurring this year?

Steven L. Komar

Management

Well, Mark, we’ll always manage to. What we’d like to thank is effective cash management to able to fund our operations pretty much from available assets and resources. We obviously do have a pretty substantial standby line of credit with Cardinal Bank and we can utilize if we need to do so. And given that it’s in many ways specifically tied to increased revenue and receivables carrying value we would expect to have a substantial amount of room to help fund that activity. Jim, I don’t know if you care to add or expand on that.

James T. McCubbin

Management

Mark, as long as you’ve known us we’ve balanced it fairly effectively for normalized growth. We continue to – it’s internal funding. If there was a very large ramp up and all the sudden a very immediate ramp up, we would first go to debt. If that wasn’t sufficient then we will look in other options, but at this term and the short-term we think we have what we need in place to continue in the near-term. Again, any material events could change that, but we do believe as Steve put it, have resources with an untapped line of credit that we could tap first. Mark C. Jordan – Noble Financial Capital Markets: Okay. Relative to your mobile device management activities, I’ve noticed that GSA has an initiative out there, government-wide Mobile Device Management program. How do you [bind] the competitive lay of the land, I guess selling directly versus the GSA competitors, which I think four or five of them on that contract?

James T. McCubbin

Management

Well, Mark there are several programs. We’re either directly involved or we’re involved as a subcontractor with various parties. Remember we’re sitting more in the background than in the forefront on actually delivering devices. There are some new very large cyber awards that have come out and we can play a part in the puzzle that all of these primes are trying to address. Our focus is really making sure that we have a wide breadth with many parties that need our puzzle piece to fulfill a strategy that the government is trying to deploy. Mark C. Jordan – Noble Financial Capital Markets: Okay. Finally, is there a way to quantify – you’re talking about building higher margin recurring revenue streams. Looking at the business here in the second quarter, what percent of revenues would be in that pile of recurring higher margin and then what percentage would you hope that to be, say, this time next year?

Steven L. Komar

Management

That’s a pretty incisive question, Mark. I would characterize it in the second quarter of 2013, roughly one-third, 30%, 35% of our revenues were at the top-end of our scale of what we consider to be attractive margins and I think in general on balance, we have less low margin business in the second quarter, primarily due to the fact that some of the software resale transactions were deferred. From my perspective and we’ve done a little bit of modeling on this. I would expect that number to increase to more than 50% in 2014 and I don’t think we will be finished there.

James T. McCubbin

Management

Mark, there is really three levels of stratification that we have; call it the under 20%, call it 20% to 50% and then over 50% and I think this is addressing it more quantitatively for you. I would say this 10% to 20% of that is let’s hope over 50% and we’ve been seeing that expand and we’d hope that would continue to expand. The 30% to 50% is a good portion as well and we’re looking at that to be the biggest part of the expansion of our revenue streams. Notwithstanding there is a big award out there that as that comes to fruition, we’re going to have to take a look at that and see what portion of it would be the lower margin and higher margin. We may break that out separately, okay because of just the relative size.

Steven L. Komar

Management

Yeah, Mark, it might be worth another amenities, I thought Jim’s comments were great in terms of clarifying our direction on this, but again reference to this DHS contract, which I used the term three months ago, transformative, which has come back to haunt me in regard to that contract. But I think it’s particularly relevant here. Should we receive what we expect to receive, which is that award within the next 30 days, we’re going to be looking at a situation where a substantial part of the revenues associated with that contract will be, call it the lower tier of marginal profitability and given the size of that contract, it can skew many of our measurements and kind of up the scale little bit the direction that we have been going at. So James comment is right on in the sense that we may need to break that out, so people can better understand what is going on in our environment.

James T. McCubbin

Management

But Mark, a large chunk of it though as well as high margin, so this award is got to be made up of all three parts. So it’s really coming down to how is it blend out. We won’t know until really the one we have to receive it formally. And then two we have to get with the customer and start deploying it. So most importantly Mark, it’s a problem we love to have. Mark C. Jordan – Noble Financial Capital Markets: Yeah.

James T. McCubbin

Management

And looking forward to it. Mark C. Jordan – Noble Financial Capital Markets: Well, thank you very much and hopefully it will all fall under place in the current quarter.

James T. McCubbin

Management

Thanks, I appreciate it Mark.

Operator

Operator

(Operator Instructions) Your next question is from Bhakti Pavani with B. Riley& Co. Please go ahead. Bhakti Pavani – B. Riley & Co. LLC: Hi, Steve, hi, Jim.

Steven L. Komar

Management

.: Bhakti Pavani – B. Riley & Co. LLC: Just a quick question; on the last conference call you had talked about the rollout of your new Mobile Device Management solution. I am just curious to know would you provide some color on how what kind of initial response you have received in the marketplace with regard to the product.

Steven L. Komar

Management

Sure. I will take a shot at that and it’s obviously a topic of lot of discussion amongst us right now. First of all, let me let you know that we are pretty early into the sale cycle. So any comments we might make right now are little bit preliminary. But we have been demonstrating the new product under the WidePoint logo for the better part of the last month and a half to two months. We’ve had some interesting feedback in terms of the variability and the feature functionality of the product, and as I said, I think the jury is still out in terms of our ability to aggressively sell that. We are positioning that along as our preferred solutions, but also positioning at all alongside several other MDM options. So we’ve always characterizes ourselves as being agnostic in this marketplace with a preference, if you will for our home grown or home label products, but honestly I think it’s probably going to take another month or two to really get a sense of how our aggressive sales efforts are working out.

James T. McCubbin

Management

Yeah. Thank you for joining the call. And again welcome to B. Riley, I heard you’ve just recently joined moved into this role. Gartner, we have put out a press release with Gartner, so for quantifying it, Gartner believes that MMS marketplace will grow from I believe approximately $300 million now to about $3.6 billion over the next three years. This is really driven by the introduction of some security protocols, some secured functionality mobile device functionality and a series of functionalities all being rolled into one enterprise solution. So our new EVP of Sales and Marketing Head, John Atkinson has been building this and demonstrating in taking into market. There has been a high level of interest for us, because we have a differentiated approach with the high assurance solution. So with that as Steve said over the next month or two or before our next quarterly call, we do believe we’ll have the beginning of what we see is a pipeline and as we take that out to the market the rest this year. Does that help with quantifying and explaining or giving some color to this marketplace? Bhakti Pavani – B. Riley & Co. LLC: Definitely. That’s really helpful. Thank you.

Steven L. Komar

Management

All right. Thank you. Bhakti Pavani – B. Riley & Co. LLC: My other question was, apart from the contract awards that you mentioned in the prepared remarks, what kind of a timeframe do you have on the contract on the commercial end, are those multi-year contracts as well?

Steven L. Komar

Management

I’m sorry. You broke up a little bit there. We can’t hear you. Bhakti Pavani – B. Riley & Co. LLC: Regarding the contracts that you mentioned in the prepared remarks, apart from the government contract what kind of a timeframe do you have on the contract from the commercial side, for instance, the contract that you announced with the fast food company, major food service company in UK?

Steven L. Komar

Management

Yes. I think I can answer that generally by telling you that we expect to see revenues roll out for each of those three that I referred to in the second half of this year. We have essentially locked the contracts and as aggressively as we can startup I think we’ll start seeing the service provision and the billings come to us. Bhakti Pavani – B. Riley & Co. LLC: Okay.

James T. McCubbin

Management

So, we signed those agreements and really put them to bed just recently. So it will take us a little time to kick start and getting up, but revenue should be recognized from it starting in the second half. Bhakti Pavani – B. Riley & Co. LLC: Okay.

James T. McCubbin

Management

And it will scale. Bhakti Pavani – B. Riley & Co. LLC: Okay. Yeah, that’s it from my side. Thank you very much for taking my questions.

Steven L. Komar

Management

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

There are no further questions at this time. I would now like to turn the conference back over to management for any closing remarks.

Steven L. Komar

Management

Thank you, operator. I’d just like to mention to everyone on the call that we are really both positive and excited about our opportunities for the remainder of 2013. We believe, we posses the products and solutions and the strategies, skill-sets and personnel to support these goals as we seek to leverage our government market experience and reputation, and aggressively expand our presence in the commercial marketplace both in the U.S. and internationally. I’d like to thank you all for your time and interest in WidePoint. We appreciate your continued commitment to us. And we will look forward to talking with you again on our next conference call in mid-November. Thank you and have a great evening.

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes the WidePoint second quarter 2013 Earnings Conference Call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.