Digital Turbine, Inc.

Q1 2022 Earnings Conference Call

8/9/2021

spk03: I've been pleased with how the teams from each company are beginning to gel together. Very few companies have the ability to walk and chew gum, but our team continues to show an amazing set of skills, whether it's on acquisitions, integrations, COVID, new business opportunities, or whatever comes at us, to maintain focus and hustle on what's right in front of us, but also simultaneously anticipate what's around the corner. I'm going to break my remarks out into four areas. First is some commentary on our consolidated results for the quarter. Second is a breakout of each of our segments. Third will be some real-time operational updates. And finally, we'll close on our strategic integration progress of One Digital Turbine. I want to remind investors that our results announced today are for a partial quarter of results for both ad colony and fiber. Our results include a full quarter of appreciate, two months of ad colony, and one month of fiber. At a macro level, our consolidated actual results were $213 million in revenue, $40 million of adjusted EBITDA, and 34 cents of non-GAAP earnings per share. Our top line and EBITDA growth were over 100 percent and 200 percent, respectively, on a pro forma basis, and our earnings per share growth was over 150%. This showcases the operating leverage of the model, the strength of the businesses independently, and doesn't include much in terms of synergies that we believe will fuel future top and bottom line growth for the company. We also believe it demonstrates how well we are now positioned with real scale to attack the $300 billion plus mobile media market. More specifically, we will begin reporting our business across three segments. The first is our on-device media business, which includes our app media, content media, and single tap businesses. The second segment is our ad colony business, and a third segment is our fiber business. Given that Digital Turbine, ad colony, and fiber have all been public companies, we believe reporting these segments in the short term will provide investors the best comparison and transparency of results. Also, to make comparisons easier for investors, I'm going to refer to the ad colony and fiber results as if we had owned them for the full quarter. We believe this will be an easier apples-to-apples measurement versus the stub quarters that may be a bit more confusing. First, I'll summarize our on-device media segment. Our on-device media business set all-time revenue records in the June quarter and generated over $120 million in revenue, which is 93% organic growth year over year. Driving this strong organic growth was strong performance across the board in our content media, app media, and single tap business. Our app media business grew an impressive 81%. In particular, we saw hypergrowth of nearly 600% year-over-year with our SingleTap business. SingleTap was almost 20% of our total on-device media revenues in the June quarter compared to 4% a year ago. Having SingleTap now fully integrated with our Appreciate acquisition is a major driver of these accelerating growth results. We expect to see continued momentum in SingleTap, as I'm pleased to announce that Samsung has decided to begin launching SingleTap across their global footprint, which historically has been approximately 250 million devices per year. Our results in Latin America have been strong, and Samsung now wants to expand to other geographies, and we've already started the process of expanding into Europe. Our international growth in app media continued as we saw approximately 50% of app media demand now being outside of the United States, despite U.S. demand growing more than 30% year over year. This is fueled by companies such as King, Playtika, Alibaba, Tencent, and many others. We expect it to continue to grow as evidenced by our recent announcement that we are expanding our TikTok relationship. TikTok's been a strategic partner for us in Latin America, and we are now expanding that to North America, which will drive short-term growth for us. But more strategically, we look to collaborate with TikTok on many of our strategic products from app media, content media, fiber, and ad colony in the future. Our content media business grew by nearly 150% year over year. We think this growth rate is obviously impressive, and now includes a full year of results of owning Mobile Posse. We continue to be on track to launch additional content media products on AT&T and Verizon later this fiscal year, which we expect to be a future catalyst for growth. And as we begin integrating Fiber and Ad Colony, we think it's important to remind investors how well the DT team and Mobile Posse teams have integrated into one company. as demonstrated by the strong operating performance of our content media business. Turning to our ad colony segment, ad colony has an impressive 46% year-over-year growth comparing this June quarter to last June quarter. In particular, the ad colony brand business, which is highly strategic for our one digital turbine efforts, showcased over 70% year-over-year growth, and now accounts for over 80% of AdColony's revenues. We were pleased to see AdColony recently recognized by AdWeek as having a top ad network for brands and continue to see very strong momentum in the global brand business. As was widely anticipated, we began to see some impact of Apple's IDFA changes late in the June quarter as AdColony's less strategic performance business which is less than 20% of their total revenues, declined year-over-year. But we're now starting to see budgets return in the current quarter from many performance advertisers that were taking a wait-and-see approach earlier in June. Turning to Fiverr, Fiverr's full quarterly results were impressive, showcasing nearly 200% year-over-year growth. Fiverr has achieved nearly 90% of last year's revenues and triple the adjusted EBITDA in the first six months of 2021 compared to the full year of 2020. In other words, they're not only accelerating growth on the top line, but are now at that critical inflection point of scale that enables accelerating operating leverage in their core business. This impressive growth was driven by both rates and volumes. On rates, Fiverr saw eCPMs more than double from a year ago, and in volume of ads, delivered more than 60% growth. More specifically fueling this strong growth was nearly 450% growth in marketplace video. Both Ad Colony and Fiverr made strategic investments in video rendering of mobile ads over the past few years and are now capitalizing on the macro global tailwind of video ad formats as advertisers prefer the stickier, richer, and more price inelastic ad format compared to other traditional digital formats. With these three segments now in place, our diversification of revenues and partners has also changed dramatically. For example, our top U.S. carrier partners have grown over 40% in the past year, but as a percentage of our total reported revenues they are just over 25% of our total pro forma revenues compared to nearly 80% a year ago. We now have no single customer or partner that is more than 10% of our pro forma revenues. In particular, we've seen both ad colony and fiber show nice 71% growth combined in the U.S., but outside the U.S., it has grown by over 160%. This is important to remind investors that while Apple and Android are approximately 50-50 market share here in the U.S., Android's approximately 85% of the global market. Thus, our on-device advantages with technologies like SingleTap, combined with the impressive more than 1 billion device global footprint between ad colony and fiber, should be a nice driver for future global growth given the strong international infrastructure of people, partners, customers, and technology that all the businesses have. Now turning to the forward outlook, I want to provide some commentary on how we're positioned for continued growth. With our acquisitions, our growth levers of devices, products, and media have not changed. They've just been accelerated. First on devices, After many quarters of flattish to declining device sales in the US, I'm pleased to announce that we grew devices nearly 10% in the US and more than 60% internationally compared to last June quarter. We're also seeing over 40% of new devices sold with our largest US carrier partners being 5G, which is a material increase compared to prior quarters. This is important as it drives richer video advertising formats. We've now passed over 700 million devices that our software has been installed on. On the product front, our revenues from dynamic installs grew by almost 50% year over year in the June quarter, but now represent less than 30% of our total pro forma revenues compared to over 60% last year as the company has been repositioned to monetizing over the life of the device versus just monetizing at first activation. Our revenues that occur over the life of the device now represent over 70% of our total revenues compared to just 38% last year. Diversifying away from revenues only attributable to first boot and monetizing over the life of the device is a strategic priority for our business, and this progress today is material. I mentioned Singletap as a major growth driver earlier in my remarks. but we're also looking to offer many other products that are generating growth, such as Notifications, Discover Bar, Fairbid, Offer at Wall, and Marketplace. In other words, diversification is working well to drive both top-line growth and no reliance on any single product to drive growth. I'm also pleased to see the cross-selling of new products into our existing operator and OEM partners. This is and will continue to be a driver for our improved revenue per device or RPD metrics. On the media front, our new acquisitions extend our global reach. The ad colony global brand relationships with companies like McDonald's and Starbucks, BMW, Ford, Unilever, and so on, pair up perfectly to match that brand demand with the increased supply of fibrous publisher relationships and the digital turbine on-device relationships. We're also seeing our increase in our ability to go to our media partners with a more holistic solution, which is being seen as a big positive. This scale brings us better rates, which on a revenue per slot or on an eCPM basis. I now want to turn to our recent acquisitions and our strategic game plan. With the completion of the acquisitions, we have now successfully assembled the key pieces for our full stack end-to-end ad tech platform. I want to spend a minute here to highlight for investors what truly differentiates our end-to-end platform versus other industry players. I should start with our overriding mission statement, which is to become the largest independent mobile advertising monetization platform leveraging our unique on-device technology and long-term partner and advertising relationships. A couple words here I want to stress. because they represent what differentiates us. First is having our technology on device. This software presence on underlying devices provides us distinct advantages, a critical one of which is our ability to use our patented single tap technology to drive materially higher conversion rates on the platform. Second is our independence. We've opted to vertically integrate by functionality unlike many other industry players who have drifted into the content arena, thereby compromising their platform neutrality and posing potential conflicts of interest for other app publishers and advertisers on the platform. In essence, our on-device technology presence and independent approach make our platform more attractive to app publishers and advertisers trying to optimize monetization and return on investment. It's still early days, but we've already received positive feedback from numerous partners and customers validating this unique approach, and we're already benefiting from revenue synergies within specific accounts. In closing, I want to emphasize to investors how well the four businesses of Digital Turbine appreciate ad colony and fiber are operating organically and independently, but they are also already working synergistically, and we're already seeing encouraging results. We're ecstatic about the people, the products, and the companies we've acquired and how they fit together to achieve our mission. Our excitement and optimism about the future of Digital Turbine is at a 52-week high. With that, this concludes my prepared remarks, and I'll turn it over to Barrett to take you through the numbers.
spk01: Thanks, Bill, and good afternoon, everyone. Before I cover our financial results, I'll start by echoing Bill's sentiments. We're excited to be announcing our first quarter with the results of the newly joined acquisitions and want to welcome the fiber and ad colony teams to our one digital turbine team. Across the teams, the cultures and values are incredibly well aligned, and I continue to be excited about the tremendous opportunity ahead of digital turbine, especially during this transformational phase of the company. Now turning to our results, we're pleased with a strong first quarter performance, which exceeded our expectations for both our existing business and the performance on the new acquisitions. As a reminder, we completed the acquisitions of Ad Colony and Fiber on April 29th and May 25th, 2021, respectively, and our actual reported results reflect partial contributions of those businesses beginning on the dates the acquisitions closed. I will occasionally reference results on a pro forma basis, which reference quarterly results and comparisons as if all acquired businesses were owned for the entirety of the first quarters of fiscal 2021 and fiscal 2022. We believe these pro forma results provide additional insight into the underlying trends when comparing current performance against prior periods. My comments today will refer to comparisons on a year-over-year basis, unless otherwise noted. Revenue of $212.6 million in the quarter was up 260% as reported and 104% on a pro forma basis. Adjusted EBITDA increased to $39.8 million, growing 183% year-over-year. As a result of the successful acquisitions, starting this quarter, we are reporting our revenues in three segments. On-device media, in-app media ad colony, and in-app media fiber. On-device media revenue is which represents existing revenue derived from the company's application media, inclusive of single-tab, DSP, and content media and platform products, increased 93% year-over-year to $120.3 million. Total in-app media ad colony revenue contributed $44.9 million during the quarter and was up 46% on a pro forma basis. Our in-app fiber business contributed $49.6 million during the quarter and was up over 190% on a pro forma basis. On a pro forma basis, as if both fiber and ad colony were owned for the full quarter, total consolidated pro forma revenue for the fiscal quarter 22 would have been $292 million, representing a 104% increase. Non-GAAP gross profit was up 172% to $72.4 million, which was up 87% on a pro forma basis. Gross margin on the platform was 34% in Q1. The newly acquired businesses will have further margin impact in Q2 since Q1 contained a partial stub period. And I would highlight, while our gross margins in the quarter are impacted by the business mix of new acquisitions, we continue to experience expanding sequential margin improvement in our on-device business. We experienced continued impressive expense scale on the platform, as cash expenses were $32.6 million in Q1, or 15% of revenue. That was down from 21% of revenues in the prior year and increased only 21% year-over-year on a pro forma basis, while our revenues were up over 100% in the period. Total operating expenses were $52.6 million, including approximately $8.3 million in transaction-related costs, and compared to total operating expenses of $15.5 million in the prior year for the acquisitions. I will note that while the key rationale of our new acquisitions is based on driving new revenue growth and platform capabilities and not a cost reduction play, We do expect to realize favorable expense synergies over time that will further complement the operating leverage and scale on the platform. While we are still early in the process, the integration efforts are off to a strong start, and we anticipate certain cost benefits to be realized over the coming quarters as integration efforts are successfully implemented to further improve our operating leverage. As a reminder, our operating leverage is being achieved even as we continue to make a number of focused near-term investments, primarily within our sales force and technology teams to support new partners and products to drive future incremental revenues onto the platform. I also continue to be pleased with the profitability and free cash flow delivered by our business. In the quarter, we achieved Non-GAAP adjusted net income of $33.4 million or $0.34 per share as compared to a $12.5 million or $0.13 per share in the same quarter last year. Adjusted EBITDA was $39.8 million in the quarter, up 183% over prior year. And our non-GAAP free cash flow totaled $14.3 million, enabling us to exit Q1 2021 with a cash balance of $83.1 million. Our GAAP net income was 14.3 million, or 14 cents per share, based on 98.8 million diluted shares outstanding, compared to our first quarter of 2020 net income of 9.9 million, or 11 cents per share. I would also highlight, with respect to the recent acquisitions, each of these new businesses are high-revenue growth companies and profitable on a standalone basis. and are accretive to both our earnings and free cash flow, further improving the profile of the digital turbine enterprise. Turning to the balance sheet, during the quarter, we successfully closed on these two acquisitions, and the upfront cash at closing was approximately $250 million, which was primarily funded with our existing debt facility. We exited with $257.5 million of debt, consisting of $237.1 million drawn against our $475 million revolving credit facility, inclusive of a $75 million accordion feature, plus $20.4 million in debt assumed through the Fiverr acquisition. Our net debt position at the end of the quarter was $174.4 million. With our recently expanded credit facility, a healthy balance sheet, and strong free cash flows combined with a transformative new acquisitions out of the platform, we're excited and poised to execute on our growth plans for fiscal 2022 and beyond. Now, let me turn to our outlook. The momentum underway has positioned us for a strong fiscal 2022. In that context, we currently expect revenue for Q2 to grow to between $300 million and $306 million and expect adjusted EBITDA to grow to between $44 million and $46 million and adjusted net income per diluted share to be $0.38, based on approximately 105 million diluted shares outstanding. With that, let me hand it back to the operator to open the call for questions. Operator?
spk06: Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star, then 1 on your touchtone phone. If you're using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. To withdraw your question, please press star, then 2. At this time, we'll pause momentarily to assemble our roster. Our first question comes from Darren Aftahahi.
spk07: from roth capital partners please go ahead hey guys thanks for taking my questions and a nice job on the quarter so two things um first on your comments about the samsung um just kind of curious like how big the opportunity is there and then um as maybe a derivative you know you've been working with samsung for a while now i'm just curious if there's any other kind of large OEM, either handset or even larger screen sizes where you feel there's a kind of a near-term opportunity where we might see another name logo be on Samsung?
spk03: Yeah, sure, Darren. Yeah, so specifically, you know, on Samsung, I think it's important to highlight to investors, you know, we have all these new products. You know, we've got our on-device products, you know, whether it's our, you know, dynamic installs, now the Bach Wizard that people are familiar with. But, you know, now we're talking about, you know, things like single tap or content media products. you know, things that, you know, we now have as part of our acquisitions from fiber and ad colony. So as we think about, you know, taking our Samsung relationship with broader, which we're talking about today with more devices, but also deeper, As it relates to a lot of these new products. So, you know, we're pretty excited about that. And, you know, encourage investors to think a little bit more broadly about the opportunity there than just, you know, kind of historical our first boot products. And that's definitely how we want to think about it throughout the entire life of the device with Samsung. In terms of other operating OEM relationships, a lot of good things happening here. Because we have so many things to talk about on today's call, we didn't get into any specifics like we did back in the old days of specific accounts. There's a lot of good things happening here. The results are starting to see a lot of our other partners around the world beginning to grow and scale. That includes people like Xiaomi, Telefonica, to name a few. The pipeline continues to remain encouraging for us as we expand globally, and it's just a classic scale begets scale. So we feel pretty good about the strategy and the ability to add additional partners, additional screens, and so on.
spk07: And just one more, if I may. So with AgColony, I mean, anybody in their stable or your core stable on the brand side where you've already seen kind of cross-pollination in terms of opportunity, or is it still too early there?
spk03: Yeah, so we're seeing great opportunities both on the fiber side, you know, and on the ad colony side. You know, ad colony, a couple specific examples I'd highlight would be McDonald's and Starbucks are ones that are already today, you know, where there's, you know, cross-selling, up-selling, and, you know, we're able to, you know, pull through, you know, McDonald's brand dollars on ad colony into some of our on-device media products. So, you know, those would be a couple examples. You know, the pipeline is pretty rich and encouraging right now. And then on the supply side with fiber, you're already working with a number of, you know, various publishers around there. So you can think of names like Zynga and Scopely and Triple Dot and names like that that, you know, we're already seeing nice synergies from in terms of collaborating together.
spk07: Great.
spk06: Thank you. The next question comes from Austin Muldow from Canaccord. Please go ahead.
spk04: Thanks for taking my questions and also thanks for all the transparency. Can you talk a little about how meaningful your Verizon and AT&T content deployments might be later this year in terms of how wide-ranging those deployments will be? And can you also maybe talk about some of the other cross-selling you've realized thus far between the two entities?
spk03: Yeah, sure, Austin. You know, so, you know, as we think about our, you know, we think about the opportunity, you know, today, you know, we have, you know, just north of, you know, around 10 million daily active users, primarily on T-Mobile today. So I think in terms of we think about the opportunity set, you know, and that 10 million users, you know, generating, you know, let's call it, you know, roughly $100 million today. of revenue, that seems like an opportunity set, given that they've got a third of the market, and Verizon has a third, and AT&T has a third in rough terms. So that seems like the market opportunity that we should be thinking about. In terms of the specifics of rolling out, we're working those real time right now. I don't think Verizon or AT&T want me making forward-looking statements on their behalf today about their rollout plans. But just to face it, I think we're in good shape with both partners right now, and they're excited to get going on these incremental opportunities.
spk04: Got it. And last question, what does the guidance assume for fiber performance?
spk01: Yeah, we're not breaking out segment-specific guidance, but we see a lot of headroom on the horizon for each of our businesses. We did break out their growth in our prepared remarks as well as in the queue. But those are organic results. obviously organic growth rates, and so the synergies that Bill touched on will be things on the horizon that will come at different paces. But we've been very pleased with each individual performance on each of our segments and have high aspirations for their growth rates.
spk04: Okay. Thanks very much.
spk06: Again, if you have a question, please press star, then 1. The next question comes from Alan Klee from Maxson Group. Please go ahead.
spk08: Alan Klee Hi. Two financial questions. One, your tax rate was around 19 percent for this quarter. Is it reasonable to assume that going forward you'll be a taxpayer and is that a reasonable rate? And then how do you define, you mentioned a term non-GAAP free cash flow. How are you defining that? Thank you.
spk01: Yeah, good tax question. So obviously with the acquisitions, we've got operations in different regions now, so it makes it a little more complex. We still do have NOLs in certain regions, so we will be taking advantage of shielding some of our taxes in some of those regions. But we are generating net income and operating income, so we will have tax obligations in certain regions. So I couldn't give you, Alan, I couldn't give you specifically the effective tax rate. We're going to be on an enterprise level. Some obviously will be shielded with NOLs and others won't, but we will be a net taxpayer overall, fortunately, given the profitability in the business. And then with respect to the way we determine our operating non-GAAP free cash flow, we have a table included in the press release. When you get a chance, you'll be able to see the walk there. But we're basically demonstrating the free cash flow after, so our operating free cash flow less CapEx and less any non-recurring activities. So trying to get to our true inherent, you know, business cash flow results.
spk08: Thank you.
spk06: The next question comes from Dennis Lavelle from Lantern. Please go ahead.
spk02: First of all, Bill, I want to thank you for assembling a team that made this all possible. And on today's call, you didn't mention anything about the TV market space. Number one, how big is that? And who are the competitors? And when will we be able to see some results in that arena?
spk03: Yeah, thanks, Dennis. Yeah, we already have some results, you know, in terms of some revenue from one of our carrier partners that has paid us for some licensing on televisions. And we're excited about the opportunity. We're excited about the space, that's for sure. And we think the opportunity is compelling. That's why we're in it. But I would highlight to investors that while we're excited about the opportunity, today we just talked about adding 60 million devices to the footprint, plus the billion devices that add colony and fiber on. I think if you look at a company like Roku, for example, I think they have less than total users than we just announced in a quarter on televisions. So the opportunity while there, it's impressive. The linear television market is roughly a $100 billion market, relatively flat. The mobile media market is $300 billion. We view the TV market as a nice adjacency for us, but in terms of just total size and scope, we see the mobile market as vastly larger. And, you know, given, you know, out of that $300 billion plus mobile media market, you know, we're less than 1% of that. We see an enormous opportunity to grow that and generate results. So, you know, I think the key for us is with our operator and OEM partners, is showing the breadth of services that we can offer, whether it's on smartphones or tablets and televisions, and really integrating those things together. That's something that we're excited about. But in terms of the overall opportunity, I think it's important to have kind of a relative size between mobile versus television.
spk02: As always, you're on top of it. Thank you.
spk06: The next question comes from Anthony Stoss from Craig Hellam. Please go ahead.
spk05: Hi, guys. Nice job. Say, Bill, you talked about 70% of your revenues right now are for the life of the device. You mentioned notifications and a bunch of other software ads that are forthcoming. When you look out, how much potential revenue per device do you see over the next couple years versus where you're at today?
spk03: Yeah, one of the things, you know, on that, Tony, is, you know, we continue to say there's a lot of opportunity for revenue per device. We've been asked this for many years, and it continues to go up and to the right. You know, I think what we've seen, you know, both in our international business and our domestic business is we've seen revenue per device in the June quarter go up 60% year over year, which, you know, we're pretty excited about. It's north of $4, you know, now, you know, here in the United States. You know, so now with all these new products, we see continued accretion there. and we see the accretion coming from both the additional products, which adds revenue, so think of notifications, single tap, et cetera, but also now all these new media relationships too, right? So the combination of the media relationships and the new products and all these cross-selling and up-selling gives us a lot of optimism of being able to have increased RPDs, especially as the percentage of our revenues that are monetized over the life of the device increased. So, for example, in our app media and content media businesses, Our legacy dynamic install business was up like 50% year over year, which is great. But all the other products combined were up over 175%. So that kind of growth is really what's driving the improved revenue per device metrics. And we think that's something that investors should be excited about.
spk05: Then a clarification on Samsung. Is it just single tap that the new agreement is covering? And then how quickly is it going to begin?
spk03: Yeah, so what we announced today was for Singletap. And as I was mentioning to Darren earlier, Tony, is I'd encourage investors to think about the relationship with Samsung more broadly than just the app should get out of the box, which is, I think, how most investors have seen that relationship historically. We like to think about it now, but all these products and things that we've acquired and assembled over the past few years. So today we are live with Samsung in Latin America on Singletap. We just recently expanded that into Europe. And we look forward to continue to expand that to other geographies. And we're working through those details with SAMHSA in real time.
spk05: Thanks, Bill. Appreciate it. Good luck, guys. Thanks, Tony.
spk06: There are no more questions in the queue. This concludes our question and answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Bill Stone for any closing remarks.
spk03: Yeah, thanks, everyone, for joining the call today. We'll look forward to reporting on our progress against all the points we made on today's call. And we'll talk to you again on our fiscal 2022 second quarter call in a few months. Thanks, and have a great night.
spk06: The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.
Disclaimer

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