IDT - Q2 2024

Transcript

Operator (participant)

Good evening and Welcome to IDT Corporation's Second Quarter Fiscal Year 2024 Earnings Call. In today's presentation, IDT's management will discuss IDT's financial and operational results for the three-month period ended January 31, 2024. During remarks by IDT's Chief Executive Officer, Shmuel Jonas, all participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After Mr. Jonas's remarks, Marcelo Fischer, IDT's Chief Financial Officer, will join Mr. Jonas for Q&A. Any forward-looking statements made during this conference, either in the prepared remarks or in the Q&A session, whether general or specific in nature, are subject to risk 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 IDT files periodically with the SEC. IDT 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 results to differ materially from those that they forecast. In their presentation or in the Q&A session, IDT's management may make reference to non-GAAP measures including Adjusted EBITDA, non-GAAP net income, and non-GAAP earnings per share. A schedule provided in the IDT earnings release reconciles Adjusted EBITDA, non-GAAP net income, and non-GAAP earnings per share to the nearest corresponding GAAP measures. Please note that the IDT earnings release is available on the investor relations page of the IDT Corporation website. The earnings release has also been filed on Form 8-K with the SEC.

I will now turn the conference over to Mr. Jonas.

Shmuel Jonas (CEO)

Thank you very much. Welcome to IDT's earnings conference call. Our remarks today focus on the second quarter of our fiscal year 2024, with three months ended January 31st. For a more detailed discussion of our financial and operational results for the quarter, please view our earnings release filed earlier today and our Form 10-Q that we expect to file with the SEC on Monday. The second quarter was highlighted by the continued expansion of our growth businesses, with both NRS and BOSS Money surpassing the $100 million annual revenue run rate milestone. However, our expense management was not where I wanted to be for the quarter, and I expect it will get better. NRS continued to deliver robust recurring revenue per terminal. We again saw strong growth in merchant services and SaaS revenue, an increased merchant services revenue per NRS Pay account.

We added approximately 1,500 net new terminals to the NRS network this quarter. We did have some one-time costs related to bad debt, which affected our quarter. BOSS Money delivered another quarter of impressive results with 42% year-over-year revenue growth. Its improving economics helped our Fintech segment to achieve Adjusted EBITDA break-even for the quarter. One key to the continued growth in this business has been our commitment to making money transfers faster, more convenient, and secure for our customers. And to that end, we recently introduced an option for our U.S.-based customers to send money directly to bank accounts through the recipient's Visa or Mastercard. We are seeing good customer response in the remittance corridors where we have launched this offering and will be expanding the service to many other destinations in the coming months.

I am also very pleased with net2phone increasing subscription revenue 19% year-over-year and achieving cash flow break-even, which we measure as Adjusted EBITDA less CapEx. Together, our combined growth segments propelled IDT to achieve another quarter of record consolidated gross profit and increased gross margin. The businesses within our traditional communications segment continue to generate strong cash flows. Over the past few months, we have been very focused on reducing our overhead and on streamlining our operations within our businesses and company-wide. You will see the benefits of these efforts in the third quarter and beyond. Now I want to provide some context to our board's decision to initiate a quarterly cash dividend. NRS, BOSS Money, and net2phone no longer need new cash investments to fund their organic growth.

In aggregate, they have become significant contributors to our bottom line, and we expect them to continue to increase those bottom line impacts. Meanwhile, we expect cash flows from our traditional business to continue to remain robust for years to come. The strength of our operational results and our balance sheet, including our enhanced liquidity, provides us with flexibility as we invest in the development of our next generation of exciting early-stage initiatives and scout for other growth opportunities in other countries in which to add our services. In light of our robust financial position and positive outlook, the board felt that we should supplement our ongoing program of opportunistic stock buybacks, which can vary from quarter to quarter with regular predictable dividend payments to our stockholders.

To wrap up, I want to thank our employees at all our offices worldwide for their hard work to make these results possible and thank our board for their support. Now, Marcelo, and I will be happy to take your questions.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star, then one, on your touchscreen phone. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. To withdraw your question, please press star, then two. We will now pause momentarily to assemble our roster. Once again, to ask a question, please press star, one, on your touchscreen phone. We have the first question comes from William Vaughan with Corient. Please proceed.

William Vaughan (Wealth Advisor)

Hi, gentlemen. Congratulations on the great quarter. I just wanted to ask about what you're seeing in terms of the consumer base for the NRS business. What trends are you seeing in that type of consumer in terms of spending, in terms of inflation? And a follow-up question would be, what are you seeing in terms of acquisition opportunities for expanding to different businesses or different business segments out in the marketplace?

Shmuel Jonas (CEO)

That's a good question. Well, I mean, the first thing I would say is we've put out a monthly report called NRS Insights that our data team provides, which if you don't get, I suggest you look it up. I mean, I can give you the basics from I don't want to give away the report before we publish it, but I'll give you just a couple of pieces from it, which I think are probably the highlights you're looking for. So overall, I think that the stores are doing pretty well, not as definitely, I would say that from an inflation standpoint, it's moderated quite a bit. The average price increases for February were 1.2% year-over-year. Same-store sales February of this year versus February of last year increased 3.5%. However, there was one day more, so I'm not sure.

Although I think we might normalize for that. I think we take it as I think it's actually 3.5% once it's normalized for that. And then from January, there was a pretty decent bump. I think sales were up about 7.4%. So those are the big picture numbers from the insights. When the report comes out on Friday, you can read the rest of it. As far as where the business is going in these types of acquisitions that we're looking at, I would say that in net2phone, we're not really looking to make any large acquisitions. I mean, we think that we have a lot of projects that are being worked on internally, and we're very happy with the pace there.

In the remittance side of the business, we've looked at possibly adding on certain channels of countries that we're not so strong in to sort of gain a foothold in and then expand upon. The one or two that we had been looking at relatively recently ended up really not fitting our qualifications, and we decided not to go ahead with them. But we're always in the market looking for acquisitions that will help our bottom line and, as I said, help us grow into new countries and new verticals. As far as NRS, there are some small acquisitions that we are looking at. We just made an acquisition in the restaurant technology space to help us get into that vertical. But overall, I would say that we're really more focused on growing things organically.

I know that's not maybe as exciting, but we think we're doing pretty well, and we're going to continue to try to grow things organically.

Operator (participant)

Okay. The next question comes from Jason Lustig. Please announce your affiliation then pose your question.

Jason Lustig (Partner and Portfolio Manager)

Hey guys. Just curious how you're thinking about spin-offs or potential spin-offs with net2phone and NRS in light of them both being free cash flow break-even or better going forward?

Shmuel Jonas (CEO)

I would say that we're not looking to do anything imminently. I mean, as I talked about on the investor day, I mean, I think a big piece of that is how the market perceives things. Particularly in the net2phone area, the market has still really not been particularly strong for companies, I'll say, in our verticals, even though I think we're by far the best. It's still you are when you're in a weak vertical, you get judged amongst them as well. As for NRS, I think one day it's going to make a great independent company. I think that when that right time to spin off is, I can't comment on that today, but we continue to build it for it to become much more valuable than it is now.

Jason Lustig (Partner and Portfolio Manager)

Okay. Thank you.

Shmuel Jonas (CEO)

Thank you, Jason.

Operator (participant)

Again, if you have a question, please press star, then one. Okay. We have a follow-up coming from William Vaughan with Corient. You're on the line.

William Vaughan (Wealth Advisor)

Hi again. So I just thought of a follow-up. You mentioned this might have been during the annual meeting, that in the BOSS Money business or the money transfer business, the key is getting to scale. So getting to a scale where you can reach profitability and getting that transaction volume through. So with the reaching of, I think, Adjusted EBITDA break-even this quarter, do you feel like you've reached that point of scale where you're going to get future profitability in that business? And can you talk a little bit more about the trends you're seeing there and what you think the long-term profitability could be of the Fintech side?

Shmuel Jonas (CEO)

I mean, it's not as simple of a question to answer as you would think. I mean, what I would say is, I mean, we sort of said that if we continue to grow the business at sort of half the pace that we've been growing it at, we could see it getting to, I think you said $14 million-$15 million of profitability from that part of the business over the next two to three years. The one thing I would say is it's all depending on how much you want to invest back into acquiring more customers and growing verticals that you're not as strong in. So I mean, you can pick any country, but pick Vietnam. Today, we have no volume to Vietnam. If we wanted to get into Vietnam, there's really two ways of doing it.

You can either acquire another company that has volume to Vietnam, or you can spend a lot more than you have to acquiring customers and sort of overpaying on the payout side and hope that once you get to a larger base of customers, you'll then figure out how to maximize the profits on it. So we've sort of taken the approach of really trying to be much more focused on verticals that we already had penetration on in our calling business or in our top-up business and really trying to move customers from one place to another. But it's definitely going to be a profitable and growing part of our business. So I mean, I don't know if that answers your question, but Marcelo, you have anything to add maybe?

Marcelo Fischer (CFO)

I would say, William, just to add a little more context, is that obviously, the BOSS Money business, BOSS Money, is the lion's share of the fintech segment in terms of revenue. That part of the business, BOSS Money, has been generating positive EBITDA now for the last two quarters. And I mean, I think it's more than $1 million in positive EBITDA the last six months. So it's doing well, and that EBITDA will continue to grow as it scales. But to some extent, the BOSS Money now growing EBITDA funding all the investments in that segment, right? We have our Gibraltar Bank, which is at the cusp of receiving a full license to operate as a full bank. We have our initiative in online banking, our Rayo. So Gibraltar, Rayo, they're kind of mostly pre-revenue at this stage. And so it requires investment.

So we're kind of investing in those initiatives now with the cash flows from money transfer at this point. But going back to the money transfer topic and to earlier comment, a lot of the acquisitions that we have looked at in the last few months were focused on the money transfer space. We do believe that scale matters hugely in terms of getting to higher profitability in that industry. And growing organically has been good for us. We've been going at around 35%-40% clip, which is excellent, better than other companies in this industry. But being able to supplement that with an acquisition would probably make a lot of sense in reaching scale. We looked at a few of them. As you mentioned, right, the ones we looked at so far have not met our criteria.

We're going to maybe continue to look at some future opportunities in that area.

William Vaughan (Wealth Advisor)

Okay. Thanks, guys.

Operator (participant)

All right. Once again, if there are any remaining questions or comments, please indicate so now by pressing star one. Okay. We have a question coming from Bill Monet. He's a private investor. Bill, please proceed.

Speaker 5

Hi, guys. Just a question. I see cash balances are building fairly rapidly. You guys have stated that big acquisitions do not seem to be part of the plan now, and your businesses are self-funded. I know you put in a small dividend, I guess, about $5 million a year that'll be at this point. Do you have any plans for the cash? It seems to be building up fairly rapidly, and it doesn't seem that there's many uses for it.

Marcelo Fischer (CFO)

I mean, either acquisitions or stock buybacks, that's really the two main places.

Speaker 5

Got it. Thank you.

Marcelo Fischer (CFO)

Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Okay. It looks like we have no further questions in queue. Is there no more questions? This concludes our question and answer session and conference call. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.