Presentation
Management
BlackBerry Limited (BB)
Q3 2015 Earnings Call· Fri, Dec 19, 2014
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Presentation
Management
Operator
Operator
Good day and welcome to the BlackBerry Third Quarter 2015 Results Conference Call. Today’s conference is being recorded. At this time I would like to turn the conference over to Mr. John Chen, CEO of BlackBerry. Please go ahead sir.
John Chen
Management
Thank you. Thank you very much and good morning everybody and welcome. And before we start I'm going to turn over to Joe for the Safe Harbor language.
Unidentified Corporate Participant
Management
Thank you, John. So after I read our cautionary note regarding forward-looking statements, John will provide a business update and James Yersh will then review the third quarter results. We will then open up the call for questions. Our Q&A will be slightly shorter today given preexisting commitments. In order to let as many people as possible ask questions, please limit yourself to one question. The call is available to the general public via call-in numbers and via webcast in the investor relations section at blackberry.com. The webcast can be accessed through your BlackBerry 10 smartphone, your personal computer or your BlackBerry PlayBook tablet. A replay of the webcast will also be available on the blackberry.com website. Some of the statements we will be making today constitute forward-looking statements and are made pursuant to the Safe Harbor provisions of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and Canadian Securities Laws. We will indicate forward-looking statements by using words such as expect, plan, anticipate, estimate, may, will, should, forecast, intend, believe, continue and similar expressions. Forward-looking statements are based on estimates and assumptions made by the company in light of its experience and its perception of historical trends, current conditions and expected future developments, as well as other factors that the company believes are appropriate in the circumstances. Many factors could cause the company’s actual results, performance, or achievements to differ materially from those expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements, including the risk factors relating to the company that are discussed in the Risk Factors section of our Annual Information Form, which is included in the company’s annual report on Form 40-F and the company’s MD&A, copies of which filings may be obtained at www.blackberry.com. These factors should be considered carefully and you should not place undue reliance on the company’s forward-looking statements. The company has no intention and undertakes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by law. I will now turn the call over to John.
John Chen
Management
Thank you, Joe. Well I'm sure you have the results in front of you and again I welcome you all to our call here. I, together with my team are extremely pleased with the management of our finances. We turned in $0.01 on a non-GAAP profit and a positive cash flow from operation of $43 million for the first time in two years. Operating expenses and margins were managed extremely well, while we were able to launch and deliver very important new products. I will get into that a little later, the detail of those products. We expect to remain cash flow positive and continue to expect to achieve sustainable profitability sometime in the FY '16 timeframe. Now that the team has a pretty good handle on content margin, I myself and a number of our senior executives are spending most of our time on improving and expanding our distribution. It is my belief that we can grow and stabilize the revenue or stabilize and grow the revenue of the company in FY '16 and while we will make every attempt to stay profitable going forward, sustainable profitability only comes from revenue growth and that is certainly our strategy here. To see this revenue growth we probably need a couple of quarters and I will explain that a little later. One of the things that we’ve already done is to have -- has been aligning internal resources to support the field and a couple of 100 employees have been commissioned into the field to drive this, to help drive this growth. I see about one more transition -- we call it a transition quarters, the one that you just saw in Q3, in terms of revenue as we ramp up the volume in Classic, which we just announced, followed by…
James Yersh
Management
Thanks John. I am going to start with a couple of financial highlights from the quarter. In the quarter we did have positive cash flow of $43 million, adjusting for items not part of normal operations, meaning that we achieved our first financial milestone that John and I started talking about a year ago. In the quarter we also turned in a non-GAAP net profit of $6 million or $0.01 per share. These results were largely attributable to disciplined management of margins and expenses. Now turning to the income statement, revenue for the third quarter was $793 million. Hardware represented 46% of revenue, the same as last quarter. We recognized revenue related to approximately 2 million devices in the third quarter consistent with the previous quarter. Legacy BB10 and BBOS product inventory is down 93% year-over-year as John mentioned previously. ASP in the quarter was roughly $180 and we expect this to increase on the back of our new product releases. Service revenue represented 46% of revenue, consistent with last quarter. Service access fees declined 13% compared to last quarter's SAF revenue and we continue to model a SAF decline of approximately 15% for the next quarter. Software and other revenue represented 8% of revenue. Both GAAP and non-GAAP gross margins were 51.7%. Hardware gross margins were positive for the second quarter in a row. We continue to model gross margins to be in the high 40% range for the next couple of quarters. Non-GAAP operating expenses were $394 million, down from $433 million last quarter. GAAP operating expenses were $549 million and included in GAAP OpEx were $5 million of restructuring charges as well as the non-cash charge of $150 million for our convertible debt, which as I have explained in prior quarters, GAAP requires that we record a charge as the value of our debt increases. This is a non-cash charge, has no impact on our face value of the debt, on our liquidity, on our operations or cash flow. In the quarter, amortization expense was $74 million. The GAAP tax recovery in the quarter was approximately 8%. GAAP net loss, which includes the impact of debt and restructuring was $148 million or $0.28 per share. Now moving on to our balance sheet and operating working capital performance, our cash balance increased by $12 million quarter-over-quarter. Purchase obligations and other commitments amounted to approximately $1.6 billion relatively flat to last quarter. Purchase orders with contract manufacturers represented approximately $565 million of the total. This is up 64% quarter-over-quarter due to our new product launches that will occur over the next couple of quarters. These purchase commitments are still ramping up and are backend loaded. Total cash, cash equivalents and investments amounted to $3.1 billion. Looking forward we expect to remain cash flow positive and continue to forecast a non-GAAP income statement profitability at some point during FY ‘16. That concludes my comments and I'll send it back to John.
John Chen
Management
Very good. Thank you. All right, operator, do help by polling the Q&A please.
Operator
Operator
Thank you. [Operator Instructions]. We'll go first to Tim Long with BMO Capital Markets.
John Chen
Management
Tim Long
Analyst
John Chen
Management
James Yersh
Management
Tim Long
Analyst
James Yersh
Management
Operator
Operator
We'll take Colin Gillis with BGC Financial Next.
John Chen
Management
James Yersh
Management
Colin Gillis
Analyst
John Chen
Management
Colin Gillis
Analyst
Operator
Operator
We'll go next to Maynard Um with Wells Fargo.
Maynard Um
Analyst
John Chen
Management
Maynard Um
Analyst
John Chen
Management
Maynard Um
Analyst
John Chen
Management
Operator
Operator
We’ll go next to Ehud Gelblum with Citi.
Ehud Gelblum
Analyst
John Chen
Management
James Yersh
Management
John Chen
Management
Ehud Gelblum
Analyst
John Chen
Management
Ehud Gelblum
Analyst
John Chen
Management
Ehud Gelblum
Analyst
John Chen
Management
Operator
Operator
We'll go next to Simona Jankowski with Goldman Sachs.
Simona Jankowski
Analyst
John Chen
Management
Simona Jankowski
Analyst
John Chen
Management
Simona Jankowski
Analyst
John Chen
Management
Simona Jankowski
Analyst
John Chen
Management
Simona Jankowski
Analyst
Operator
Operator
We will go next to Mark Sue with RBC Capital Markets.
John Chen
Management
Mark Sue
Analyst
John Chen
Management
Mark Sue
Analyst
James Yersh
Management
John Chen
Management
James Yersh
Management
John Chen
Management
James Yersh
Management
John Chen
Management
Mark Sue
Analyst
James Yersh
Management
John Chen
Management
Mark Sue
Analyst
John Chen
Management
Mark Sue
Analyst
John Chen
Management
Mark Sue
Analyst
John Chen
Management
Operator
Operator
We’ll go next to Rod Hall with JPMorgan.
John Chen
Management
Rod Hall
Analyst
James Yersh
Management
Rod Hall
Analyst
James Yersh
Management
Rod Hall
Analyst
James Yersh
Management
Rod Hall
Analyst
John Chen
Management
Rod Hall
Analyst
John Chen
Management
Rod Hall
Analyst
John Chen
Management
Operator
Operator
All right we'll go next to Amitabh Passi with UBS.
Amitabh Passi
Analyst
James Yersh
Management
Amitabh Passi
Analyst
John Chen
Management
Amitabh Passi
Analyst
John Chen
Management
Operator
Operator
We’ll take our next question from Richard Tse with Cormark Securities.
Richard Tse
Analyst · Cormark Securities.
John Chen
Management
Richard Tse
Analyst · Cormark Securities.
James Yersh
Management
Richard Tse
Analyst · Cormark Securities.
John Chen
Management
Richard Tse
Analyst · Cormark Securities.
John Chen
Management
Thank you. Okay. Let me wrap because I am sorry I have to go and do my town hall meeting so I have all my employees waiting for me. So I appreciate that you all tuning for today and so I could summarize the fact that we are very proud of the fact we delivered a profitable quarter, very positive cash flow. We now have work to do on revenue and then we have got number of goal mentioned. We talked about that in hardware and software and value added service, QNX and the like and then we are going to talk about IOT at CES, we’re also going to give you our BBM technology roadmap at CES for those people who are planning to join us and please do make sure you come and get the time and day and locations from our team. And we’re also going to review our handset strategy at Mobile World Congress just like last year. We did the handset strategy review in last year and we’ll see in Barcelona that’s I guess is the first week of March in Barcelona. So with that I wish you all a happy and safe holidays and thank you very much for tuning in.
Operator
Operator
And that concludes today’s conference call. Thank you for your participation.