Digital Turbine, Inc.

Digital Turbine Fiscal 2024 First Quarter Earnings Conference Call. Today, all participants will be in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance during today's call, please signal for a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. If you would like to ask a question, please press star then one on your touch-tone phone. If you would like to withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note that today's event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Brian Bartholomew, Senior Vice President of Capital Markets. Please go ahead, sir.

Thanks, Chris. Good afternoon and welcome to the Digital Turbine Fiscal Year 2024 First Quarter Earnings Conference Call. Joining me on the call today to discuss our results are CEO Bill Stone and CFO Barrett Garrison. Before we get started, I'd like to take this opportunity to remind you that our remarks today will include forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are based on our current assumptions, expectations, and beliefs, including projected operating metrics, future products and services, anticipated market demand, and other forward-looking topics. Although we believe that our assumptions are reasonable, they are not guarantees of future performance, and some will inevitably prove to be incorrect. Except as required by law, we undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statements. For discussion of the risk factors that could cause our actual results to differ materially from those contemplated by our forward looking statements, please refer to the documents we file with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Also, during this call, we will discuss certain non-GAAP measures of our performance. Non-GAAP measures are not substitutes for GAAP measures. Please refer to today's press release for important information about the limitations of using non-GAAP measures, as well as reconciliations of these non-GAAP financial results. to the most comparable gap measures. Now we'll turn the call over to our CEO, Mr. Bill Stone.

Thanks, Brian, and thank you all for joining our call tonight. For the June quarter, I was pleased that we beat the top end of our guidance range, both on the top and bottom lines, but we still have a lot of work to do to reach both our internal expectations and the potential of our broader total addressable market, or TAM. I was pleased that we had a very clean quarter, As operationally, we sequentially improved our business performance across key financial metrics. Our strategy is not simply to harvest our profitable products for short-term financial performance, but rather use our profitability to make capital investments against the future with new technology platforming, new ad tech capabilities, our hub, alternative app distribution, and single tap. We believe these investments will prove to be well-served against our future growth. I'll provide updates on those future growth drivers after providing some operational updates and commentary on the current business. For the June quarter, we had $146.4 million of revenue, $27 million of EBITDA, and 18 cents of non-GAAP earnings per share, and gross profit margins were 47.1%. All of these financial metrics represented sequential improvements from our March quarterly results. From a segment perspective, Despite continued soft device sales, our on-device business, or ODS, also grew sequentially to $98.3 million. Operationally, I was pleased with our improvement of revenue per device, or RPD, in the US, which continues to grow and set an all-time high in the June quarter. Over the past five years, our RPDs have accreted from just over $2 in fiscal year 2020 to $3 in fiscal 2021. to $4 in fiscal 2022, to $5 in fiscal 23, and today is now over $6. We continue to see strong demand from our platform, both from advertisers and new products contributing more revenue to each device. Expanding global demand to our U.S. device supply has also been a big driver of those improved revenue per device results, as two years ago, U.S. demand was approximately 50% of our U.S. supply, And today, it is less than 25%. In particular, we've seen some positive movement on the willingness of our US supply partners to soften their positions on some popular Chinese applications, which increases the overall demand for our platform. While we expect the current quarter to experience continued softness in the US devices, we expect a strong global pipeline of expanding telcos and OEM relationships to help offset any macro weakness in device sales in the future. We also made progress on our single tap enablement. As a reminder, we have five ways we monetize single tap. The first is direct demand via our demand side platform where we leverage our own AI and machine learning to target advertising to single tap enabled devices. The second is enabling other third party demand partners from companies who can buy advertising on our single tap enabled supply. The third is licensing mobile web traffic from brands such as Epic Games' Fortnite title which then uses Singletap to convert its web visitors into native Fortnite users. The fourth is distributing alternative versions of applications, whether that's our own DTHub version, an Amazon version, and so on, for direct distribution of the device. And the fifth is enabling large distributors of application installs, such as large social media players, to leverage the conversion rate benefits of Singletap across their entire network. And given there's so many use cases of how we utilize Singletap going forward, we're going to focus on talking about Singletap in the aggregate versus confusing investors with each individual use case, which may be seen as overwhelming with various operational metrics. However, given the investor focus on this product and interest in social media players in particular, I did want to provide some operational updates on our progress. It's early days, but we have now generated our first revenues with TikTok, who is running single tap campaigns for their advertisers wanting to use their own version of an application to their users. We are also launching this quarter with LinkedIn, who's converting their mobile web users to native app users. And finally, we expect to begin a revenue generating pilot with another large social media company across their entire user base here in the US later this calendar year. Later in my remarks, I want to connect these operational updates to where we see Singletap fitting in with the alternative app distribution markets of the future. Our app growth platform segment, our HEP business, I was pleased to see our business show sequential growth in the June quarter, which was up nearly 10% from the March quarter. We are seeing sequential improved eCPM rates on both our brand demand and DSP from advertisers. And in particular, it was encouraging to see our brand business show double-digit sequential growth as we expand our relationships with large advertisers such as Starbucks and Chase Bang. The macro market has stabilized, and our execution is improving. In addition, our exchange business had solid double-digit sequential growth in the quarter, and the exchange business continues to be well diversified globally with approximately 40% of our publishers in North and South America, 35% in Europe, Middle East, Africa, and 25% in Asia Pacific. We've made numerous enhancements to our ad tech capabilities, such as improved AI and machine learning optimizations, ad rendering, new ad formats, and new vetting methodologies. We spent the last year integrating the companies and are now finally building upon the integration with new products and services. The combination of the new demand solutions and the expansion of supply types are allowing us to focus on controlling what we can control to drive improved performance. Combined with a more stable macro environment for ad spend, we expect these new ad tech capabilities to be a growth driver for our business as we enter the second half of this fiscal year. Turning to the future, I want to spend a few moments highlighting our longer-term growth drivers. I mentioned Singletap earlier in my remarks as a strategic growth opportunity, But as we mentioned on prior calls, we are building alternative app distribution for app publishers. We believe we're uniquely positioned with our on-device technology, our expansion of publisher relationships, and our operator and OEM relationships. We've launched our first alternative app distribution products, which we brand as DTHub, with four operators here in the United States, leveraging our Aptoide investment and are generating revenue today. The carrier feedback has been impressive and supportive, And it's very early days and not yet material to our overall results, but we are seeing incremental higher RPDs from devices engaging with our hub product, which is a combination of incremental in-app purchase revenues and incremental cost per install revenues from helping publishers acquire more users. So the focus for us is driving more devices, more engagement, and more downloads. We have not started leveraging our in-app advertising assets into this alternative app distribution, but we do expect to add that as an additional revenue stream to this opportunity, and then all three of these monetization capabilities being drivers of RPD accretion into the future. We also believe the global regulatory environment will provide additional thrust to this vision. Many of you may have seen articles in the press talking about a concept of direct distribution of applications involving mega cap tech players. This is highly strategic, and I want to spend a few moments describing it. Direct distribution is where any app publisher, such as a Spotify, Netflix, or Epic Games, can run advertising for a user to install its application. But rather than take the user to the Apple or Google store after clicking on the advertisement, it would direct download the application to the device with its own unique version of an application outside of the traditional app stores. And to achieve this, there are some market pain points that need to be solved, such as making it easy for the app publishers to port their app to a new version, managing the payments and advertising inside the application, installing the apps without friction, as there may not be a store involved at all, and managing the curation of the applications. And these are all things that Digital Turbine is uniquely positioned to deliver on, whether directly via our own hub product or indirectly through white labeling our capabilities to large players wanting to leverage their large audiences. And to accomplish all of these new growth areas, allocating resources will be key. In addition to paying down our debt, we are allocating capital to these new investments with a new dedicated team focused on unlocking this future growth opportunity. And despite these investments, our cash operating expenses are flat from the June quarter last year as we were focused on running lean and efficient with our legacy products while simultaneously investing in new platforms and products for future growth and scale. And Barrett will provide additional details in his remarks. And before I turn it over to Barrett, I want investors to take away from our quarter that we had a very clean quarter, and operationally we sequentially improved our business performance across key financial metrics. And we're making progress against our longer-term vision, but still have much work to do. Our strategy is to use that profitability to make investments against the future with new technology platforms, new ad tech capabilities, our hub, and alternative app distribution and single tap. And with that, this concludes my prepared remarks, and I'll turn it over to Barrett to take you through the numbers.

Thanks, Bill, and good afternoon, everyone. Overall, we were pleased to see results in the quarter ahead of our expectations for both top-line and profitability measures. Revenue of $146.4 million in the quarter was up 4% sequentially and down 22% year-on-year. With revenues improving sequentially across both segments of our business, on-device solutions, or ODS, and our app growth platform, or AGP, from the March quarter. Within ODS, revenues were slightly up sequentially from the March quarter and down 17% to the prior year. However, as Bill referenced, while we saw softer device volumes in Q1, this impact was offset by improved U.S. revenue per device, which exceeded $6 per device and increased both sequentially and year-on-year. As we discussed in the past, while our content business is stabilized in the quarter, our ODS segment continues to experience headwinds from our prepaid content media business from a year-over-year comparison, and we expect this grow-over comp to run off by Q3 within the December quarter. On our AGP business, Q1 revenues increased 9% sequentially and declined 32% over prior year. While we're encouraged by the improvement in the core business, the overall decline in AGP year-on-year continues to be driven largely by the short-term impact of the consolidation and exiting of certain legacy ad colony business lines that we have discussed previously. And we would expect these comps to fully run off by the back half of this fiscal year. I'd reiterate Bill's earlier comment that despite the near-term headwinds, we're encouraged by the integration benefits we are seeing from the investments we're making to bring these businesses together and expect these moves to have a positive return on our future growth. Our consolidated gross margin was 47% in Q1, which increased from Q4 sequentially and was down from 50% in Q1 from the prior year. Improvements in margins sequentially were largely driven by the combination of quarterly product mix shifts, where we experienced an increase in the mix of certain higher margin products or those where revenues are recognized on a net basis. As a reminder, while gross margin rates can fluctuate from quarter to quarter, we generally anticipate long-term margin expansion as we continue to execute on growth opportunities. We remain disciplined with expenses, and cash operating expenses were $42 million in the quarter, increasing 1% from prior year and represented 29% of revenues in the quarter. I'd highlight While our expenses have remained relatively constant, we are making important investments that Bill referenced to ensure we capitalize on the full potential of our growth strategy. These internal initiatives are focused on integrating the technology platforms and financial and back office systems across our assets, also developing new ad tech capabilities and strategic growth initiatives Bill discussed, namely within DTHub, alternative app distribution, and single tap. While the current and near-term periods will incur increased costs due to the completion of these integrations and new growth initiatives, we expect both the efficiencies and the growth to begin to be reflected in our results as we move into calendar year 2024. During this investment phase, we will continue to remain highly focused on operating efficiency. Turning to our profitability, Our adjusted EBITDA of $27 million in the quarter increased $3.8 million sequentially and was down from $52 million in the prior year. Our EBITDA margin of 18% grew sequentially from 16% in the March quarter. And given the inherent operating leverage in our business model, we expect the active focus on expense measures and integration efforts we are taking will strengthen the platform as we return to growth. and enable a greater portion of those dollars to fall to the bottom line. In the quarter, we achieved non-GAAP-adjusted net income of $18.2 million, or 18 cents per share, as compared to $38.7 million, or 38 cents per share, in the first quarter of last year. As compared to prior year, we incurred greater interest expense driven by the rising rate environment on our outstanding debt. Our gap net loss was $8.4 million or $0.08 per share based on 103.5 million diluted shares outstanding and compared to a prior year net income of $15 million or $0.15 per share on 102.7 million diluted shares outstanding. Our cash balance at the end of the quarter was $58.6 million after paying down an additional $5 million in debt using cash flows from operations. to further deleverage our deposition. Cash flow and working capital were negatively impacted by the timing of revenues, which were weighted towards the end of the quarter, and we expect a return to generating positive free cash flow in Q3. Our debt balance ended the quarter at $408 million, drawn on our revolving credit facility, and as our business continues to strengthen, we would expect to continue to pay down our revolver in larger quarterly increments. We continue to be confident in our balance sheet and our capital position, given our profit model, cash flow generation, and access to low-cost credit facility. Now let me turn to our outlook. We currently expect revenue for fiscal Q2 to be between $141 million and $149 million, and adjusted EBITDA to be between $25 million and $27 million. and non-GAAP adjusted net income per diluted share to be between $0.13 and $0.15, based on approximately 104 million diluted shares outstanding and an effective tax rate of 25%. With that, let me hand it back to the operator to open the call for questions. Operator?

Thank you. Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. As a reminder, to ask a question, you may press star, then one on your touchtone. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset. If at any time your question has been addressed and you would like to withdraw it, please press star, then one. At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster.

Today's first question comes from Omar Basuki with Bank of America.

Please proceed.

Hey guys, this is Arthur. I'm with Omar. Thanks for taking my question. So my question is on Google's header baiting into Fairbit. I understand this is still in testing, but I was wondering if you guys could talk a little bit about some of the early signals we're seeing from the initial integrations and what sort of learnings are you taking away from the initial testing? And probably just, you know, on the same note, like, if we should be expecting any sort of revenue contribution impact for the current or next fiscal year? Thank you.

Yeah, sure. I'll take that one. The short answer is yes. You know, we're seeing positive impacts there. And, you know, the strategy here is obviously to increase our share of voice and demand into the mediation platform, which then benefits publishers. And so, you know, having the ability to bring Google's obviously vast demand is a positive for us. Still very early days, I wouldn't characterize it as moving the needle. We're still kind of optimizing what we're doing around that, but it's absolutely something as we think as we go into next year, bringing more demand, bringing the credibility of Google to our publishers is something we think will be a benefit for us.

Understood. Thank you. Today's next question comes from .

Excuse me. Today's next question comes from Dan Day with B. Reilly Securities. Please proceed. Please proceed.

Yeah, morning, guys. Can you hear me? There was a little choppiness there.

Yeah, I think it's the operator's line.

Okay. Great. So thanks for taking the questions. Bill, in the past, when you talked about single tap on these calls, you've been pretty cautious around kind of the path of material revenue generation. You've been pretty clear, you know, you're developing it. Investors should be patient. I didn't hear you say that this time. Can we take that as a sign that you guys maybe have any more visibility than you have in past quarters into it becoming a material revenue contributor? Or am I just reading too much into that?

Yeah, we continue to be excited about Singletap. I mean, there's no question about that. It was not material to our results in the June quarter, but there's a lot of catalysts that we're seeing into the future right now. And so we're starting to see some excitement around the catalysts and the opportunity for scale to really improve on that. I will say it's going to take time, but the encouraging signs are starting to really show for us with the product. And the thing that I really want to remind investors about is we have this embedded base of many, many hundreds of millions of devices, and that's extremely difficult for anyone to replicate. And so having that high amount of devices already out in the market at global scale and our focus to continue to grow that is something I think that advertisers, publishers, demand-side platforms, and all the people that are going to integrate in this new app world is something I think they're going to want to take advantage of. I think an important point I want to also make on this is the integration with the alternative app stores. You know, there's going to be this increasing – our view is that there's going to be this increasing pressure on the duopoly of app stores today and that the ability to have a publisher get lower rates to pay is going to want – they're going to want to acquire new users. And Singletap is absolutely an enabler to help make that happen, to distribute non-Google or non-Apple builds out to customers. So that's going to be something that, you know, we're excited about and leveraging our existing hub capabilities to go do.

Great. Thanks. And then just for the fiscal second quarter revenue outlook, the midpoint is right around where fiscal first quarter revenue came in. Just any material difference between the on-device versus the app growth platform segments as far as the outlet goes? Or do you think pretty flat for both quarter over quarter?

Yeah. Dan, I think we think about You know, in the Q1, we've seen, we touched on the improvements we're seeing in AGP business, you know, near 10% sequential improvement. You know, we think there's a lot of opportunity there. We don't give guidance by segment, but, you know, we're seeing nice trends there. We touched on some of the device softness that, you know, is sometimes hard to predict. I think we might see that for the, you know, the near term. that's kind of embedded in our guidance. But I think the AGP business is growing nicely on a sequential basis, and I think that might be a continued trend we'd expect to see.

Perfect. Thank you, guys.

Appreciate you taking the questions. Thank you. Next question is from Darren Roth.

Please proceed.

Hey, this is Dylan for Darren. Thanks for taking my questions. I wanted to sort of talk about sort of RPD. In the U.S., you mentioned it's an all-time high at $6. I think you sort of said 25% of total supply. So I guess, I mean, what are sort of your strategies? in going after growing that RPD on the international side, both with sort of higher monetization on the existing devices and sort of just capturing more devices in the different markets with some of the partners you've mentioned in the past.

Yeah, sure. What we're seeing right now, and it was encouraging, is the diversification of our demand on our U.S. supply. And I wanted to highlight that out particularly because Now we're to a point where we're well north of 50% of the demand coming in to U.S. supply from places outside the United States. And a lot of international advertisers, whether they're from Europe or APAC, want to be on those devices. And so being able to bring those onto devices, and then we can do strategic demand deals, and whether that's carving out things like whether a particular game type or social media or whatever it happens to be, allows that international competition as well to come in. And so that allows us to achieve higher rates. So that's something that has been really encouraging for us. Now the key is for us, how do we expand that to other markets, whether that's in Europe or Latin America or what have you. So a major focus area for us to replicate that success that we're seeing in the U.S. outside. That's on the advertiser side. And then the other part would be on the product side. So historically, as you're well aware, we started with dynamic installs as a primary product. But as we've added so many other products to our portfolio, the product growth is also enhancing RPDs. So the combination of this more demand on the platform combined with the more products on the platform is really helping drive those accretion and results.

Great. Thank you. And sort of as a follow-up, with some of the investments you mentioned with ad tech and with other app stores, how should we think about the timeline of that trade-off of the incremental investment dollars that aren't really bringing in revenue in terms of the OPEX? When do you start to see those contribute?

Let me start on the revenue side, and I'm going to turn it over to Barrett on the OPEX side. You know, right now, in terms of how we're thinking about it, in terms of the back end of this year, you know, Barrett mentioned his remarks on AGP, you know, showing nice sequential growth. And our view right now is in the short term, as we look at future quarters in the near term, that, you know, AGP and these enhancements and things I mentioned in my prepared remarks will be drivers. And as we get into next year, you know, I think you're going to see more things like with the hub and single tap and some of these other things ramping. It's how we think about it from a revenue slash business perspective. And I'll turn it over to Barrett to talk about the OPEX and the investment side.

Yeah, Dylan, I think, you know, for your model, we touched on it in my remarks. You know, we're incurring those expenses, some of those excess costs for, you know, a lot of the back office systems that we're integrating, bringing the companies together. Those are our financial systems. Those are, you know, things like our HR systems, as well as the investments and the teams that Bill touched on. Those investments are in place today. I think we're going to carry those expenses at kind of similar levels out through the end of the calendar year. And then we'll start to see, you know, those costs, those investments drop off, and you'll start to see efficiencies in both our cost structure as well as the, you know, the incremental growth in revenues begin to pick up as well.

Great. Thank you. Thanks, Bill. As a reminder, if you do have a question, please press star, then one. The next question comes from Anthony Stoss with Craig Hallam.

Please proceed.

Hey, Bill. I wanted to ask about this Verge article where they were interviewing a meta-employee and they were discussing what certainly sounded like single-tap functionality. If not Digital Turbine, who else could it be?

Yeah, it's hard for me, Tony, to comment on like things that came from somebody on future speculation. So I'm going to kind of stay away from that. But what I will say, you know, is that you're seeing mega cap tech players, you know, not just meta, but others, you know, now talking about alternative app distribution. And you're seeing in specifically in Europe, now that the Digital Markets Act is coming into reality, and you're seeing For example, sideloading of applications on things like iOS 17. It's really opening up a lot of interest from MegaCap players. I'd highlight Amazon. I'd highlight with the Microsoft Activision Blizzard deal getting done as an example. Meta was in the article you're referencing. So there's a lot of interest you're starting to see right now. But I think the key is that, okay, it's one thing to have the interest and want to be able to do this. The question then becomes how. And so when you think about how the apps actually get ported from different versions of how you manage the internal kind of plumbing of the apps, how you make it a friction-free experience if it's not a store. It's being, in effect, distributed down to you. How do you curate that on the device with your telco and OEM partners? Those are all things that we've got unique advantages to go do. And so what I mentioned in my comments, doing it directly through DTHub or doing it white labeling with other large players, I think we're in a pretty unique spot here to really capture this wave of alternative app distribution here. And so it's something from our perspective, you know, I think about CTV a few years ago and how CTV is today. I almost think about alternative app distributions kind of at the early innings today and, you know, something, you know, as the regulations and some of these other large players and, you know, just customers and publishers, you know, really wanting, you know, alternative choice. I think it's going to be some really nice opportunities that, you know, we're really uniquely positioned to just given the embedded base of devices with our technology already on them.

Okay, and then a couple follow-ups. In past quarters, Bill, you talked about, I think it was in your prepared remarks quite often, international carrier launches. Clearly, the on-device segment's weak in the U.S. Not a shock to anybody. Is there anything or new carriers that you're planning on launching that will help offset that? I mean, I think in the past you used to highlight the percent of the international markets covered, and then you guys haven't really done that lately. If you could update us, that'd be helpful.

Yeah, absolutely. I did make a comment in the prepared remarks around, you know, a strong global pipeline of expanding our telcos and OEM relationships. And so I kind of draw you to that. You know, we're not going to name names here on the call for obvious reasons. But, you know, I think we have a lot of optimism right now in terms of, you know, the ability to continue to expand our addressable market here.

Got it. And if I can slide in one for Barrett, you know, normally your December quarter is up pretty strongly seasonally. Any thoughts on if you expect it to be more muted again this year like it was last? Andrew, that's December? Yeah.

Tony. Yeah, so, you know, December was an odd quarter last year, right? We kind of, markets changed quite quickly. I think, you know, as we're seeing things now, I would like to expect that we see, you know, closer to, you know, a more normalized seasonal trend. I'm not sure we're back to 21 levels, but yeah, we would expect to see some seasonal uplift for the holiday quarter.

Got it. And one last quickie for Bill. Love to hear more on Aptoide, how vital you think it is. I'm just curious kind of where you're at with Aptoide.

Yeah, we continue our Aptoide technology partnership has been great. Their tech's integrated into our hub product today. They've been great to work with. We're looking forward to expanding with them and looking forward to expanding with others. There's a lot of players out there in the space. Aptoide's been fantastic. But I think that we want to think about it even broader than that. We think there's an enormous opportunity. You heard the word investment a lot in Barrett and my prepared remarks. So we really want to think about how we can, you know, get after the space and really have some first mover advantages. Thanks, guys. Appreciate it. Thank you, Tony.

At this time, we are showing questioners in the queue, and this does include our question and answer session. I would now like to turn the conference back over to Stone for any closing remarks.

Yes, thanks for everyone joining the call today. We'll look forward to reporting on our progress against all the points that we made on the call, and we'll talk to you again on our fiscal 24 second quarter call in a few months. Thanks, and have a great night.

The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation, and you may now disconnect.