Earnings Labs

Zedge, Inc. (ZDGE)

Q3 2019 Earnings Call· Wed, Jun 12, 2019

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good afternoon and welcome to Zedge’s Third Quarter 2019 Earnings Conference Call. During management’s prepared remarks, all participants will be in a listen-only mode. [Operator Instructions] In today's presentation, Tom Arnoy, Zedge's Co-Founder and 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-month period that ended April 30, 2019. Any forward-looking statements made during this conference call, either in the prepared remarks or in the question-and-answer session, whether general or specific in nature are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from those in which the Company anticipates. These risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to specific risks and uncertainties disclosed in the reports that Zedge files periodically with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Zedge assumes no obligation either to update any forward-looking statements that they may have made or may make or to update the factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from those that they forecast. Please note that Zedge earnings release is available on the Investor Relations page of the Zedge website. The earnings release has also been filed on the Form 8-K with the SEC. I would now like to turn the conference over to Mr. Arnoy. Please go ahead, sir.

Tom Arnoy

Analyst

Thank you, operator. And thank you all for joining us today. I am Tom Arnoy, co-founder and CEO of Zedge. Welcome to Zedge’s third quarter fiscal 2019 earnings conference call, recapping the three months ended April 30, 2019. Joining me today is Jonathan Reich, our Chief Financial and Chief Operating Officer, who will provide additional insight into the numbers that we reported earlier this afternoon. Q3 was a challenging quarter for Zedge. Although we are upbeat about the opportunity that our new subscription-based product presents, many of our other initiatives to stimulate user and revenue growth haven’t yet panned out and the impact of the shift of our userbase from well-developed to emerging markets continues to have a negative drag on revenue which dropped 25% year-over-year. As we previously mentioned, in January, we started offering an ‘Ad Free’ subscription and we are investing time and resources to advance this initiative. During Q3, we scaled the ‘Ad Free’ subscription across all geographies and customers for the Android app. We started the quarter with around 1,000 subscribers, and ended April with close to 60,000 customers. These customers generate significantly more revenue than historical users where our revenue stream is solely ad-based. In addition, we benefit from the fact that these customers pre-pay for the service. Our current subscription offering is rudimentary, focusing solely on removing unsolicited advertisements from the app. Recently, we started optimizing by offering regionally based pricing which should improve conversion rates and corresponding revenue. In addition, starting this quarter, we will begin bundling content or other value-added services together with the subscription as well as initiating discounting strategies and re-targeting campaigns in order to drive further adoption not to mention test new marketing messages that may outperform our current promotion. All designed to increase subscription rates. Before moving on,…

Jonathan Reich

Analyst

Thank you, Tom. My remarks today will focus on our key operational and financial results for the third quarter of our fiscal year 2019. 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 17, 2019. Following my comments, we will open the call to any questions you may have. Throughout my remarks, the ‘third quarter’ refers to February 2019 through April 2019 and comparisons are to the corresponding period in 2018 or our “second quarter” which was November 2018 through January 2019. Monthly active users, or MAU, that is, the number of unique users that opened our app during the last thirty days of the quarter, decreased 0.5% to 34 million during April 2019 from 34.2 million in the corresponding period a year ago and decreased 7.2% from 36.7 million in the previous sequential quarter. The sequential decline relates significantly to seasonal factors - specifically an outcome of the post-holiday season. Year-over-year growth in emerging markets was 12.1% offset by a decline of 16.6% in well-developed markets. On a sequential basis, we also experienced a decline of 11.4% and of 4.6% in emerging and well developed markets, respectively. As Tom discussed, we are allocating resources to both organic and paid user growth initiatives targeted to improve MAU growth and the geographic makeup of our user base. Our introduction of the ‘Ad Free’ subscription offering generated $26 thousand of revenue and $164 thousand in deferred revenue during the quarter. The bulk of the deferred revenue relates to customers that opted for an annual subscription which we amortize over the one-year subscription period. We exited the quarter with approximately 60 thousand ‘Ad Free’ subscribers starting from a base of close…

Operator

Operator

We have no questions in the queue. This does conclude our question-and-answer session and the conference call. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.