Paul R. Garcia
Analyst · Jason Kupferberg of Jefferies and Company
Thank you, Jane, and Happy New Year, everyone, and thanks so much for joining us this afternoon. I'm pleased to report that we are executing well across all of our businesses as evidenced by our solid results for the quarter. Second quarter fiscal 2012 revenue grew 20% to $531 million. Cash operating income grew 14% to $109 million. And cash earnings per share grew 13% to $0.86 for the quarter. As you are aware, the debit interchange legislation took effect October 1, reducing interchange rates on most domestic debit transactions. Our strategy is to pass along a significant share of this benefit to our customers. Consequently, this legislation resulted in less than $0.02 of cash earnings per share for the quarter. However, we added nearly $15 million in revenue, primarily from our ISO channel. While it is still early, we consider even these results to be transitory due to the strong competition in the marketplace. I am pleased to announce 3 targeted acquisitions, which will expand our international and eCommerce presence. First, we increased our footprint in Russia by acquiring a merchant business with more than 6,000 merchants from Alfa-Bank. Alfa-Bank is the largest private Russian bank by total assets and operates a network of over 300 branches in the market. This expands our existing referral network and overall sales distribution by adding over 20 new regions within the Russian Federation. Secondly, we acquired HSBC's merchant business in Malta, consisting of nearly 4,000 merchants. We believe solid card usage trends will continue in Malta, primarily driven by its tourism sector and the government's continued focus on increasing card-based payments. Most importantly, this transaction demonstrates the ongoing strength and expanding nature of our global relationship with HSBC. Finally, I'm pleased to announce that we have agreed to acquire the U.S. merchant portfolio of CyberSource from Visa. This transaction will broaden our U.S. eCommerce presence by adding over 9,000 merchants and it will expand our eCommerce strategy by augmenting our existing U.S. distribution channel. We expect this to close during our third fiscal quarter. Now, second quarter highlights. North America delivered revenue growth of 16% in the quarter, driven by our U.S. ISO channel, strong growth from our Gaming business and solid performance from our direct channel. Canada continues to perform as expected, delivering 4% local currency revenue growth, with transaction growth of 5%. Our International segment produced another quarter of solid results, with revenue growth of 30%, fueled by all regions across Europe. These results include the addition of Spain, which continues to perform well, coupled with solid performance across Europe. Asia's revenue growth was flat for the quarter, primarily due to the strong growth in last year's quarter related to an enormously successful product launch by one of our merchants. I will now turn the call over to David. David?