Earnings Labs

WidePoint Corporation (WYY)

Q4 2013 Earnings Call· Mon, Mar 31, 2014

$6.02

+10.46%

Key Takeaways · AI generated
AI summary not yet generated for this transcript. Generation in progress for older transcripts; check back soon, or browse the full transcript below.

Same-Day

-5.00%

1 Week

-8.75%

1 Month

-10.50%

vs S&P

-11.21%

Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good day, ladies and gentlemen and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the WidePoint Corporation Full Year 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, March 31 of 2014. I would now like to turn the conference over to David Fore of Hayden, IR. Please go ahead, sir.

David Fore

Management

Thank you operator. Good afternoon to all participants in WidePoint's full year 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 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 risks 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 the 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 would 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 afternoon to all of you that have joined us today. As has been our past practice, we’d like to continue to express our appreciation to all of you for your continued interest in WidePoint Corporation. Let me start by saying that 2013 proved to be a challenging, a critically important year for WidePoint. Early in the year, we announced the launch of a number of programs that would change the way we did business and pursued revenue growth as a company. This range from increased investment in our sales and marketing organization and resources, to building of a national direct sales force, growing our alliances and channel partner programs, reinvesting in our product development and infrastructure capabilities and fundamentally changing our management structure to better meet the needs of an accelerated revenue growth environment. In effect, it was a conscious commitment to reinvest our targeted annual profits during the year in order to position the company for the future and we share those plans and expectations with you in our quarterly calls during the year. I am pleased to state that we’ve achieved these objectives and have primed WidePoint for accelerated growth in the years ahead. With my opening comment as a backdrop, I’d like to spend a few minutes telling you why the company has a dramatically different profile than it did a year ago. I am quite proud to say that WidePoint entered 2014 as a much stronger, much more diversified company, with a much larger market opportunity available to us than when we began 2013. We’re now at an inflection point, driven by accelerating business momentum and the increasing adoption of our newly launched Managed Mobility Solutions platform. Given its obvious importance to us, I’d like to spend a few minutes focusing…

James T. McCubbin

Management

Thank you, Steve. Hello everyone. Again thank you all for joining our call today. This past year has been truly interesting, challenging, fulfilling and definitely filled with enough drama intrigue to fill the pages of a long novel. Through it all, the one thing we can say is that we leave 2013 financially stronger than we entered it with more assets, customers and opportunity than we have seen in our past. The financial challenge for us today is to build upon our new customer contracts and awards that we won late in 2013 to build a recurring and sticky new set of revenues streams that will bolster our financial foundation in 2014 and beyond. Looking at 2013, we witnessed the decrease in revenues of approximately 16% to $46.8 million as compared to $55.8 million in 2012 revenues. This decrease was attributable in part to a shift in our sales strategy that Steve has already discussed along with a combination of other factors such as delays in government product resell transactions, customer implementations, commercial market attrition and a subsequent delay of a major contract award with the DHS that we originally received in April of 2013, but did not see release until December of 2013. Looking at gross profit for the year, we had gross profit of approximately $12.1 million or 26% of revenues as compared to approximately $13.9 million or 25% of revenues in 2012. The dollar basis decrease in gross profit was due to the lower revenues, but the percentage increase was due to the shift in mix of services and products that we sell. Should be noted that we may continue to see periods of variability in margin growth as a result of lower margin government resale transactions that may occur from time-to-time and the fact that the…

Steve L. Komar

Management

Thanks Jim. To sum-up our growth strategy, I wanted to highlight our top five key initiatives for 2014 and beyond; number one, to accelerate sales and marketing results by showcasing our integrated managed service offering product suite. In support of that effort, we bought on our earlier mentioned Chief Sales and Marketing Officer, centralized our sales and marketing and deployed a national direct sales force as well as unifying our branding strategy. The building blocks are in place to drive this acceleration in new business successes. Number two, is to expand our channel partners and third-party relationships to increase our geographic breadth and distribution reach and coverage. I have already mentioned Compass and Truphone, but we are also very excited about new partners like Xceedium [Indiscernible]. Number three, to strengthen our international and multinational position, we plan to enter Europe/Middle East and Asia-Pacific markets via partnerships, joint ventures and/or acquisitions. Number four, to displace competitors with our broad cloud-based products suite; we are the only player in the market that can overlay a combined telecommunications lifestyle, mobile device management and mobile security solution, also featuring our proprietary cyber security offerings. Number five, to pursue acquisitions in the U.S. and abroad; this goes hand in hand with strengthening our international positioning particularly in supporting our U.S. based multi-national customers, but we are also actively looking for complementary both on solutions to expand and enhance our managed service offerings. I hope this gives everyone the framework for how we plan to grow and pursue the market opportunity ahead of us in 2014 and beyond. We definitely believe that we are in the right place at the right time and that we have taken the necessary steps that will give us the tools to achieve our growth goals and our success in building the future value of our business. I’d like to now open the call to our listeners’ questions. Operator, if you can assist us by opening the line and sequencing the questions and comments from our listeners that would be appreciated.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question-and-answer session (Operator Instructions) and our first question comes from the line of Mike Malouf with Craig-Hallum Capital Group. Please go ahead. Ross L. Licero – Craig-Hallum Capital Group LLC: Hi this is Ross Licero on for Mike.

Steve L. Komar

Management

Hi Ross. Ross L. Licero – Craig-Hallum Capital Group LLC: Hi. Could you give us a little color on gross margins? It looks like they are down pretty notably from the first half at about 29.2% down to the second half. Was that just government resale or is there something else going on there?

James T. McCubbin

Management

That was just a bit of a shift to the mix to a little bit higher in the fourth quarter specifically margins on the resale, software resale for the end of the year. Overall, that was a blip that caused a little bit of an overall decline that's all. Ross L. Licero – Craig-Hallum Capital Group LLC: Okay, great, and touching on that the fifth bullet point for growth looking forward to next year, how is the pipeline for acquisitions looking, are you close to anything and I guess where specifically are you looking?

Steve L. Komar

Management

Ross, I think my answer to that has to be couched a little bit in what I can and can’t say. I will say that we have an active pipeline. We have identified approximately three potential opportunities for us to consider and put in place in the course of 2014. The timing is different on each and they comprise both what I refer to as a bolt-on acquisition and also as a potential international markets or geographic expansion beyond that obviously for reasons of confidentiality I can’t say more. Ross L. Licero – Craig-Hallum Capital Group LLC: Okay thanks, I appreciate the color.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Mike Crawford with B. Riley & Company. Please go ahead. Mike Crawford – B. Riley & Co. LLC: Thank you. Steve you talked about a frenetic pace of activity and growing pipelines and backlogs, is there any way you could quantify backlog or vendor proposal pipeline?

Steve L. Komar

Management

I will start with frenetic pace, what I was referring to is that in the course of the last four months we have basically embodied and put in place major new relationships and I think that’s indicative of not only the pace but our expectations going forward. In terms of pipelines and backlog, backlog is a difficult thing for us because like for instances, we just talked to you about $600 million BPA, the backlog value of that today is $2.3 million. So the reality is our backlogs tend not to measure where we are effectively. If we go to pipeline, I will tell you that we have put a number of disciplines in place that we did not have before and when I look at a pipeline report from our sales and marketing organization today, it is in the area of pushing between $125 million and $150 million. That does not include the major, other circumstances that we have talked you about on this call. It involves a normal day-to-day customer building relationships, new opportunities. That number is dramatically higher than it was a year ago. So we view that as a very positive directional statement. Mike Crawford – B. Riley & Co. LLC: Okay, thank you Steve. Then Jim, is there a way - how much can you differentiate among revenue between what one might call it a low margin pass through or carrier services revenue versus everything else for Q4 in 2013?

James T. McCubbin

Management

Well Mike in general I can’t comment on the fourth quarter. I can estimate - for the full year 2013 and that number would probably be around $18 million as an estimate. We put in new tracking capabilities where in the first quarter, we will start reporting on carrier services as a portion of our business and then tracking it forward and where we expect it to go. Mike Crawford – B. Riley & Co. LLC: Okay, thank you, and then just on your technology, clearly you invested on many fronts in 2013, you have also historically acquired some companies that had done a lot of investing in products and services in platforms in the past, yet where this all shows up in say GAAP reporting line it’s less clear because it’s a R&D line itself - well, I mean there isn’t a specific R&D break up, but can you just talk a little bit about the level of investment spending that WidePoint is doing today and maybe has been done historically by the companies that comprise WidePoint today?

James T. McCubbin

Management

Well, let’s kind of approach it in a couple of different ways. On a lot of the credentialing work that was done with the DoD and various components parts of that, the federal government invested just to one of our subsidiaries alone over a period of time probably in excess of $35 million in consulting services, on a design and build capability as well as what they invested themselves. We put that into our G&A is where a lot of that shows up, when we turn around and look at the telecom expense and mobile management that was developed by TSA [for us] [ph], we see another multi-million dollar effort that was done through consulting efforts where we built it no longer with them where we got to keep the commercial rights. This past year we have been working on a consolidation and a unification of some of the platform work there in which case again we invested, probably not quite $1 million, but in continuing telecom – continuing telecom and R&D support in this area probably touching it. We did that because we’re consolidating and unifying a lot of our software into this new platform. So we continue to do that. It’s a big component part of our G&A that you see in it. We have not broken it out in the past because we haven’t broken out different components of G&A. Does that help? Mike Crawford – B. Riley & Co. LLC : Yes. That’s very helpful. Thank you. And then final question, you mentioned you expected Compass to ramp in the second half of 2014, but by that did you mean just deploying internationally in several markets for Compass itself or do you think we can also see some success on their channel partner initiative where they’re marketing your relations to their customers?

Steve L. Komar

Management

Well, I think Mike in the frame of reference that we talked about in this call, I think it’s fair to say that we expect - to clarify it, it’s fair to say that we expect to see the international deployment of Compass services through 10 countries in the second half of 2014. We have a number of plans in place to accelerate and take advantage of this partner relationship. Honest conversation is that we have not factored that into our numbers because we need to get a little further along to better understand how this partnership is going to work and also we want to take a little bit of extra care to make sure we don’t screw it up because there are – there is an awful lot of revenue potential out there and right now we have just not put anything into the forecast for 2014. We clearly expect that to be a ramp up in 2015. Mike Crawford – B. Riley & Co. LLC : Great. Thank you, Steve. Thank you.

Steve L. Komar

Management

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. (Operator Instructions) And I’m sure we have no further questions. Please continue.

Steve L. Komar

Management

Thank you, operator. It appears we have taken all requests and operator thank you for your assistance. As a closing comment, I just want to say that we’re very, very positive about our presumptions for revenue growth and profitability and the future outlook for WidePoint in 2014 and beyond. The management of your company is obsessively focused on building the business through the future and maximizing enterprise value in the years ahead. So until we speak again, we thank you very much for your interest and wish you a pleasant evening.