Earnings Labs

Zedge, Inc. (ZDGE)

Q3 2016 Earnings Call· Thu, Jun 9, 2016

$3.34

-0.89%

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good afternoon. And welcome to Zedge’s Third Quarter Fiscal Year 2016 Earnings Conference Call. During management’s prepared remarks, all participants will be in listen-only mode. [Operator Instructions] After today’s presentation by Zedge’s management, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. [Operator Instructions] In today’s presentation, Tom Arnoy, Zedge’s Chief Executive Officer; and Jonathan Reich, Zedge’s Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer will discuss Zedge’s financial and operational results for the three months ended April 30, 2016. Any forward-looking statements made during this conference call, either in the prepared remarks or in the Q&A session, whether general or specific in nature, are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from those which the Company anticipates. These risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, specific risks and uncertainties discussed in the reports that Zedge files periodically with the SEC. Zedge assumes no obligation, either to update any forward-looking statements that they have made or may make, or to update the factors that may cause actual result to differ materially from those that they forecast. Please note that the Zedge earnings release is available on the Investor Relations page of the Zedge website. The earnings release has also been filed on a Form 8-K with the SEC. I would now like to turn the conference over to Mr. Arnoy.

Tom Arnoy

Analyst

Thank you, Operator. I am Tom Arnoy, the Co-Founder and the CEO of Zedge, and welcome you to Zedge’s first earnings conference call as an independent public Company, recapping the third quarter of fiscal 2016, the three months ended April 30, 2016. Joining me today is Jonathan Reich, our Chief Financial and Chief Operating Officer. In my remarks today, I am going to provide a brief overview of our strategy and update you on our operational priorities, particularly in new product development that we expect will drive our long-term growth. But first, I want to make it clear that we consider our shareholders as partners and will strive to be open and honest about the business and forthright in expressing our expectations and challenges. I’ll begin the discussion of our plans with our pipeline of exciting new features and enhancements that we expect to drive continued user growth and engagements in our flagship app over the long run. Later this calendar year, we expect to launch the Set My Ringtone, a new feature that will allow users to select their ringtone that they associate with and have anyone in their address book seamlessly set this as their contact ringtone. For example, I like the ringtone Thomas Calling. I can send the message to any of my contacts saying click here to set this ringtone as Tom Arnoy’s contact ringtone. From then on, any time I call them their phone will ring to Thomas Calling. This will open up a new way of engaging an enjoyable communication between people tapping into their social graphs. If we are correct about the broad appeal this serves, there is the potential for viral growth. Furthermore, Set My Ringtone can act as a wonderful user acquisition vehicle for recipients that do not have Zedge installed…

Jonathan Reich

Analyst

Thank you, Tom. Our remarks today will focus on our key operational and financial results for the three months ended April 30, 2016. For a comprehensive and detailed discussion of our results, please read our earnings release issued earlier today and our Form 10-Q, which we expect to file with the SEC by June 14. Following my remarks, we will open the call and address any questions you may have. Joining us for the Q&A on this call will be Mitch Silberman. As you know, we entered into a transition services agreement with IDT for finance support, and Mitch has done a great job in leading this effort. I want to thank Mitch and his team accordingly. They are truly helping to smooth the transition. As our business is linked to the seasonality of the advertising cycle, sequential comparisons may not be meaningful. For the purpose of today’s call, I will compare our fiscal year ‘16 Q3 performance, mainly February, March and April 2016 to the year ago quarter’s results. I’m proud to report that Zedge continued growing its user base, revenue, profitability, and cash flow year-over-year. And I’m very pleased by the advances that we’ve made in introducing new features and releasing new products in a more timely and streamlined fashion. Active installs that is the number of devices that have the Zedge app installed, have grown nicely to more than 90 million from around 70 million a year ago. As such, we are able to promote and market new products and enhancements to any of these devices, making them an important operational metric for us. Zedge’s revenue in the third quarter increased year-over-year by 17% to $2.6 million closely tracking the growth in our active user base, which increased 18% to 31.6 million. Average revenue per monthly active…

Operator

Operator

Thank you. We will now begin the question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions]. Our first question comes from Gary Ribe of MACRO Consulting. Please go ahead.

Gary Ribe

Analyst

So, I guess my first question just relates to some of the cash. You’ve mentioned you have a fairly -- you have a strong balance sheet, no debt, and you just put capital under the Company. I was wondering just us as shareholders, if you can help us understand the priorities for the use of cash, given that you guys -- your business seems to generate cash already at a pretty descent cliff. So, I just wonder if you can help us understand that a little bit.

Jonathan Reich

Analyst

Sure. So, this is Jonathan. What we’ve been saying while meeting with investors over the course of last couple of weeks is we have historically really managed the business to throw off free cash. And we want to now take those profits and that cash, and reinvest that in the business. In addition to that, recognize that with the cost associated we’re going public, we have a new set of expenses that we will need to address accordingly. And then, finally, we also have the need to not only accelerate the business in terms of hiring new staff, whether that be staff in Norway where we take care of product developments, we take care of engineering and we take care of product design, but also staff here in the United States and growing our commercial team by bringing on these people, marketing people, and the customers support people accordingly. So, those various investments will require us to deploy cash in growing business accordingly.

Gary Ribe

Analyst

So, if I am hearing you, then the additional investment would be in things you’re looking at driving organic growth?

Jonathan Reich

Analyst

That’s correct. If you’re hinting at whether or not we are looking to acquire companies at this point, although in the information statements we did make reference to that as being a possibility, that is not something that immediately we are going to act upon, unless an incredible opportunity crosses our radar screen. We need to make sure that the underlying foundation of our business is accelerated. And while we’re going through that process, if either we see an opportunity to acquire another Company that can be advantageous in terms of growing your organic business, or alternatively in terms of hiring group of people be hirer, then we would certainly pursue that.

Gary Ribe

Analyst

And I was just kind of curious, one of the things that jumped out of me, reading the filings and everything, the average revenues per user, are there any things like are reasonably obvious leverage you can pull to drive that up without negatively impacting the user experience?

Jonathan Reich

Analyst

Sure. It’s a great question. So, what we have really prioritized and what we will continue to prioritize right now is making sure that we continue to develop products, and products that our users will embrace. And as Tom had alluded to in his comments, we have a fairly robust product roadmap that we need to execute on. The way that we have historically grown the Company is by making sure that, the product is there. Our belief is that with the great products, we’ll have a long term users. Long term users are ultimately the ones that will help us in terms of climbing up the monetization scheme. But with that in mind, we believe that there are going to be new monetization opportunities, whether it be Zedge Stories that we feel that we can get out and sell to content and create content creators and brands that are premium or exploring new avenues for us, whether it would be merchandizing. Tom has mentioned that a user that chose their phone with content that is strong measure of intent. So, if I’m actually going to download a wallpaper and a ringtone and an app icon around the particular theme, we have a hypothesis that we can extend beyond the handset by selling other merchandise, whether it would be t-shirts with that content, coffee mugs, phone cases and the like. And the beauty there is that we do not need to take on the operational risk associated with fulfilling and producing all that stuff, rather we can work with third parties that have an expertise in that. Tom, do you have anything to add.

Tom Arnoy

Analyst

Yes. I think like we’re definitely not like focusing on heavily chasing new revenue streams at this point. So, we are sort of like focusing on the line [ph] first and then there is programmatic advertising and making sure we focus on sustainable revenue streams at scale. And we certainly have other revenue streams that we see and that we could return as we get ground if we wanted. But now the most important for us is to invest heavily in the products and user growth. We need to do enough on the revenue side.

Gary Ribe

Analyst

Okay, that’s great. And I guess just one last one for me and then I’ll leave that if there is anyone else. Just kind of a stuff with iOS, I think you guys mentioned that from your prepared remarks, I don’t know, you can kind of expand on that or is that an area where you guys look to or you could potentially show better penetration in growth and kind of like, it’s really [indiscernible] versus Android platform and I think versus other apps. My understanding is that, if you here develop for the app store, then it is for Google Play, so kind of surprising to see, just kind of help us understand the balance, and is that a potential driver for you in the future and kind of what happens with the ringtones if you comment on it?

Tom Arnoy

Analyst

So, this is Tom. I want to say a few words. Personalization on iOS has always been complicated, do anything what you can do in that platform. So, -- it’s impossible to create a really good user experience anyway, although there are success on Android, this is also causing a great demand on iOS. We see that on search statistics. So, there is great, great demand for such product on iOS. So, it’s like we are very -- it’s very sad that we can’t really right give the users what they want on iOS. However, we are now making new products and we’re chasing social content or these types of contents, they’re leveraging our strength and still within sphere of self expression or try new products and those products will have equal, let’s call…

Jonathan Reich

Analyst

Ubiquity.

Tom Arnoy

Analyst

On iOS as on Android. So, we really hope that we can and that this can change moving forward with new products. When it comes to personalization part, who knows, may be Apple, yes, of course, they should.

Gary Ribe

Analyst

It should change.

Tom Arnoy

Analyst

Because people really want this; there is a huge demand for personalization in general. I would be surprised if Apple changes that in the future. But yes, that we need to...

Jonathan Reich

Analyst

This is Jonathan, and I do want to add two points there. What we’ve said consistently is we’re not managing or running the business or making any assumptions about what Apple may or may not do. Everything that we talk about is based upon what we know today, not in conjecture. That being said, in the events that Apple were to open up the space and make it seem less as it is on Android, our business would double or triple very, very quickly, we feel pretty comfortable in saying that. And finally just to give you an idea of magnitude, when we released the wallpaper only version of the app after having been removed from the store for more or less around two months, we jumped to the top 50 or 60 apps literally within a period of a couple of days, which really speaks to the demand for what we offered and specifically speaks to the strength of our brand, which we will take advantage of as we roll out new products that are ubiquitous across Android and iOS accordingly.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] It seems that we have no further questions at this time. This concludes our question-and-answer session and conference call. Thank you for attending today’s presentation. You may now disconnect.