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eHealth, Inc. (EHTH)

Q4 2014 Earnings Call· Wed, Feb 25, 2015

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good day, ladies and gentlemen and welcome to eHealth's preliminary Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2014 Results Conference Call. My name is Matthew, and I’ll be your operator for day. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode (Operator Instructions). As a reminder, this call is being recorded for replay purposes. And now, I'd like to turn the call over to Ms. Kate Sidorovich, eHealth's Vice President of Investor Relations. Please proceed, Ma'am.

Kate Sidorovich

Management

Good morning, and thank you all for joining us today, either by phone or by webcast, for a discussion about eHealth Inc.'s preliminary fourth quarter and fiscal year 2014 financial results. On the call this afternoon, we'll have Gary Lauer, eHealth's Chief Executive Officer; and Stuart Huizinga, eHealth's Chief Financial Officer. As a reminder, today's conference call is being recorded and webcast from the IR section of our Web site. A replay of the call will be available on our Web site following the call. We will be making forward-looking statements on this call, that include statements regarding future events, beliefs and expectations, including those related to our projected financial results and operating metrics for the fourth quarter and fiscal year ended December 31, 2014, as well as performance and key factors of certain of our businesses, also our ability to assist subsidy-eligible consumers during this open enrollment period, Individual & Family Plan application volumes during the weeks leading up to February 15th of 2015, potential stronger application volumes during the first quarter of 2015, lifetime values for Medicare Supplements and Medicare Advantage products, contributions from Medicare Supplement products saw revenue and number shift, postponed recognition of Medicare revenue until the first quarter of 2015, and our return on investment on Medicare marketing expenses. Forward-looking statements on this call represent eHealth's views as of today. You should not rely on these statements as representing our views in the future. We undertake no obligation or duty to update information contained in these forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. Forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected in our forward-looking statements, including the risks associated with delays in our receipt of items required to recognize Medicare revenue and estimates that could differ materially from actual reported amounts in eHealth’s Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2014. For a discussion of other risks factors that may affect our results, please refer to our press release issued yesterday, and our recent SEC filings, in particular, the risk factors section of our most recently filed Form 10-Q. We will be presenting certain financial measures on this call that will be considered non-GAAP under SEC Regulation G. For more information relating to non-GAAP financial measures, please refer to the information included in our press release and in our SEC filings, which can be found in the About Us section of our corporate Web site under the heading Investor Relations. And at this point, I will turn the call over to Gary Lauer.

Gary Lauer

Chief Executive Officer

Good morning and thanks for joining us as we review our quarterly results for the fourth quarter and fiscal year 2014. We thought it was important to share these preliminary results with you, given that our projected 2014 revenue and earnings are expected to fall short of the guidance ranges we provided previously. Since we haven’t finalized the closing process for the fourth quarter and don’t have the full financial and membership metrics that we typically report, today’s conference call will be limited to our prepared remarks. What I’d like to do today is update you on our fourth quarter performance in our Medicare business and our Individual & Family Plan business, and discuss key factors that affected our performance relative to our expectations. I’ll then turn the call over to Stuart, who will review projected ranges for our fourth quarter and 2014 financial results and provide some additional color around these numbers. In our Medicare business, we completed a successful Annual Enrollment Period during the fourth quarter, generating submitted application growth above our expectations at attractive acquisition cost per member. We’re especially pleased with submitted application growth rates for our Medicare Advantage and Medicare Supplement products, which are both characterized by high expected lifetime revenues. Primarily as a result of the strong application growth, we spent considerably more on Medicare marketing during the fourth quarter than we’ve planned. Although our per member acquisition cost was lower than it was in the fourth quarter a year ago. I’ll talk more about our Medicare business in a few minutes. In our Individual & Family Plan business, we are currently in the middle of the 2015 Open Enrollment Period. This is the second Open Enrollment Period under the Affordable Care Act, and there are several important differences this going on Open Enrollment…

Stuart Huizinga

Chief Financial Officer

Thank you, Gary. I will now review our preliminary results for the fourth quarter and fiscal year 2014. Please note that these results are based on our initial review of operations for the quarter ended December 31, 2014 and remain subject to change. We wanted to share our preliminary view on certain of our fourth quarter and 2014 annual financial results and we’ll report final results for these recording periods on our regularly scheduled fourth quarter 2014 earnings conference call. As detailed in our press release, we expect our 2014 revenues, EBITDA and non-GAAP EPS, to fall below the annual guidance ranges we’ve provided previously. Specifically, we now expect that our revenue for 2014 will be in the range of $178 million to $180 million compared to guidance of $185 million to $194 million. And for the fourth quarter of 2014, we expect our revenue to be in the range of $43 million to $45 million. We expect EBITDA for 2014 to be in the range of $1.5 million to $4 million compared to the guidance of $13.5 million to $18.5 million we’ve provided previously. For the fourth quarter 2014, we expect our EBITDA to be in the range of negative $16.3 million to negative $13.8 million. We expect non-GAAP net loss per diluted share for the full year 2014 to be in the range of negative $0.13 to negative $0.04 compared to guidance of $0.30 to $0.43 earnings per diluted share. And for the fourth quarter 2014, we expect non-GAAP net loss per diluted share to be in the range of negative $0.56 to negative $0.47. EBITDA is calculated by adding stock based compensation expense, depreciation and amortization expense, including intangible asset amortization expense, other income expense net and provision for income taxes, to GAAP net income. Non-GAAP net…

Operator

Operator

Thanks for joining today’s conference call, ladies and gentlemen. This concludes the presentation. You may now disconnect. Good-day. End of Q&A: