SeaChange International, Inc.

Good afternoon and welcome to C-Change's fiscal third quarter 2023 conference call for the period ended October 31, 2022. My name is Shamali and I will be your operator this afternoon. Joining us from the company is Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Peter D. Aquino, President Chris Clemmer, and Chief Financial Officer Kathleen Mosher. After the market closed today, C-Change issued its financial results for the fiscal third quarter in a press release. a copy of which is available in the Investors Success section of the company's website at www.cchange.com. Before we begin today's call, I would like everyone to please take note of the safe hard work paragraph that is included at the end of today's press release. This paragraph emphasizes the major uncertainties and risks inherent in the forward-looking statements that management will be making today. As indicated, forward-looking statements are based on management's current expectations and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from expectations. These risks and uncertainties are also outlined in the company's SEC filings, including its annual report on Form 10-K and quarterly reports on Form 10-Q. Any forward-looking statements should be considered in light of these factors. Additionally, this call contains certain non-GAAP financial measures, as that term is defined by SEC and Regulation G. Non-GAAP financial measures should not be considered in isolation from or as a substitute for financial information presented in compliance with GAAP. Accordingly, C-Change has provided a reconciliation of the non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures in companies' earnings release issue today. I would like to remind everyone that this call is being recorded and will be made available for replay via a link available in the Investor Relations section of C-Change's website. Now, I'd like to turn the call over to C-Change's Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Peter D. Aquino. Sir, please proceed.

Thank you, Operator. Good afternoon, everyone. This is Peter Aquino, Chairman and CEO of C-Change International, and welcome to our third quarter call. Our momentum to strengthen our software platform continues, and we're now hitting on all cylinders. Revenue growth was very strong, up 16% year-over-year and 13% sequentially. Profitability and cash generation continues as we record another quarter of positive EBITDA and increase our cash balance to nearly $15 million with no debt on the balance sheet. And our new SaaS and fast channel software products are now taking hold. and producing incremental growth revenues now reflected in this quarter. Our transition towards providing our customers with streaming services and software to support their smart TV operating systems, such as the project we announced last quarter with Vita and Hisense, is clearly the momentum that we could build on. All of this is now translating into improved financial performance for C-Change, resulting in double-digit revenue growth. We continue to leverage our embedded expertise in video and ad tech to power over-the-top services for all of our customers. Our rich history of supporting MSOs, telcos, and content owners allows us to upsell many of our customers with IP-based services that ride increasingly advanced broadband networks, not only in the U.S., but around the globe. Streaming content over wireless or wireline is being powered by SeaChange in North and South America, Europe, and EMEA. We are truly an international software company with the bulk of our 100 plus software engineers working out of our office in Warsaw, Poland. And we're so very proud of our team there, as well as all of our employees around the world. Many of our customers in the who's who of the video industry are depending on us to seamlessly enable their move to the streaming world while we diligently support their large deployments of traditional VOD and ad insertion. Our embedded core business produces great baseline of cash flow as we reinvest that same expert team into everything streaming for connected devices. This is our future. This quarter is a great example of the impact of our revenue composition shift towards growth products. For example, new StreamVid sales to content owners and software development for Vita specifically contributed towards our high value mix, accounting for over 70% of new sales this quarter. We are managing our go-to-market efforts to continue to sell growth products. SaaS and streaming software products are not only high value in terms of expected multiples for these revenues, but tend to be more recurring in nature as well which is a great business model. In addition, C-Change's progress and consistent revenue growth while right-sizing our cost structure has been fueling better cash flow. And this is exactly the profile that we've been striving for. And we could do even better. Our effort to promote profitable organic growth continues to be job number one. Simultaneously, we continue to look for ways to be opportunistic to gain scale We continue to explore strategic and transforming ideas, as well as commercial opportunities with players in our space. Market timing for M&A is very difficult for most at this time in this current environment, but we will aim to be prepared when the opportunity to transact arises. The good news is that C-Chain has a strong liquidity profile and a relevant video platform to sell and support. This allows us to execute our organic program without much disruption. And as most would agree, the best time to discuss strategic alternatives and maximize values when the company is in a position of strength, along with improved capital markets. In the meantime, we have a large TAM and tailwinds in our favor for what sea change delivers, and we aim to capture as many opportunities as possible to keep sea change moving in the right direction. So with that, let me pass the call over to our president, Chris Clemmer, to take a deeper dive into our operations. Chris?

Thank you, Pete, and good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. Q3 was yet another strong quarter for C-Change as we continue to grow our top line and transition our business to a more sustainable level of profitability while delivering increased value to our new and existing customers. During Q3, we continue to execute on our strategic growth plan centered around three main pillars. First, renewing and strengthening long-term relationships with our existing base of long-standing TV operator customers, which has resulted in multiple long-term support renewals and several system upgrade bookings. Second, increasing our recurring revenue baseline with high margin SaaS based deals. And third, creating a new and extended product portfolio and services that can help our customers maximize their returns across all TV and streaming channels, while also increasing end user stickiness and engagement. Since our last call in September and in line with our strategic growth plan, we have executed on numerous accomplishments, which I want to spend a couple of minutes highlighting. As we announced last week, SeaChange was selected by Fox Sports Mexico to power their next generation streaming service with our comprehensive streaming enablement platform, StreamVid. We believe we won this deal as we have the best technology to support Fox Sports Mexico's three key business objectives, which include maximizing content monetization with flexible subscription packages and targeted advertising, retaining existing and acquiring new customers, with the highest quality of service on all major device platforms, as well as increasing user engagement by improving user experience and simplifying content discovery. For those of you newer to our company, Streamvid is a cloud-based, over-the-top or OTT streaming enablement platform that provides content owners the ability to deliver unique, highly scalable and personalized streaming services and to handle rapid user growth. Our new partnership with Fox Sports Mexico serves as further validation of not only the growing need for a platform like StreamVid, but also of C-Change's unique capabilities in the market. This agreement with Fox Sports Mexico is a software as a service engagement, where C-Change will benefit from Fox's success in growing their viewership base and increasing their subscription and ad revenues. It therefore supports our strategy of growing higher margin and recurring revenues. Speaking with the topic of sports, we recently expanded our services agreement with Grupo TV Cable, the leading cable provider in Ecuador, to help support the streaming of the FIFA World Cup event in Qatar. Our cloud-architected technology has proven to enable Grupo TV Cable to support large increases in concurrent subscriber load, and combines with our ability to enable an engaging sports experience with our flexible user interface. Lastly, we have completed a major development phase for VIDA, the leading provider of operating systems for connected TVs, in an ongoing project to help them build out their own dedicated streaming and free ad-supported streaming TV, or FAST, services. As a result of completing this major phase, VIDA can now launch the C-Change-based streaming service on the millions of VIDA-powered connected TVs across the world, providing a premium experience for connected TV viewers and outstanding monetization options with C-Change's ad insertion service for targeted ad insertions across fast channels. We expect VIDA's use of the SeaChange-based streaming service to be launched no later than Q1, with a potential impact to revenue as soon as Q4. Now, looking ahead at the outlook and future growth opportunities for SeaChange, I'd like to point out two major organic growth catalysts we are focused on. The first catalyst is growth in the connected TV market. As we've seen in recent trends, consumer eyeballs continue to shift towards streaming on connected devices, and especially to the large screen. In this paradigm shift, there's growing demand for technology vendors like SeeChange that can help content owners realize their connected strategies and optimize their monetization opportunities. We believe our long-standing relationship with many Tier 1 operators as well as our growing international footprint with content owners, including positive reference cases, make us an ideal partner for many of these players. The second catalyst involves advertising. In addition to the consumer shift towards streaming on connected TVs, we've also seen a trend in consumers shifting away from subscription-based business models to free ad-supported content. we believe that with our unique technology to help operators and content owners alike to protect existing and build incremental ad revenue streams we are extremely well positioned to grow our market share in this growth sector of our industry by extending our product and service portfolio for existing customer base and by winning new logos that adopt ad-based business models we can begin to increase our market share and capitalize on this new growth sector, driven by changes in consumer preferences. That concludes my prepared remarks. I'll now turn the call over to our CFO, Kathy Mosher, to cover the financials. Kathy?

Thanks, Chris, and good afternoon, everyone. Turn into our financial results for the third quarter of fiscal 2023 compared to the second quarter of fiscal 2023. Total revenue for fiscal Q3, 2023 increased 13% to 8.3 million from 7.3 million in the prior quarter, driven by increases in service revenue. Product revenue for fiscal Q3, 2023 decreased 27% to 2.2 million or 26% of total revenue compared to 3 million or 41% of total revenue in the prior quarter. The decrease in product revenue was primarily due to decrease in licenses revenue. Service revenue for fiscal Q3 2023 increased 41% to 6.1 million or 74% of total revenue compared to 4.3 million or 59% of total revenue in the prior quarter. The increase in service revenue was primarily due to an increase in professional services revenue driven by the acceptance of completed work by multiple customers. Revenue from our international markets in fiscal Q3 2023 was 3.6 million or 44% of total revenue, which compares to 4.6 million or 63% of total revenue in the prior quarter. Revenue in our U.S. market for fiscal Q3 2023 was 4.6 million or 56% of total revenue, which compares to 2.7 million or 37% of total revenue in the prior quarter. Looking at our margins, gross profit for fiscal Q3, 2023 was 5.2 million or 62% of total revenue compared to 4.8 million or 65% of total revenue in the prior quarter. Product gross margin for the fiscal third quarter of 2023 was 26% compared to 72% from the prior quarter due to a significant increase in the amount of third-party goods for several customers that typically carry a lower margin and brought down the average product margin. However, this was offset by strong service gross margins of 75% compared to 60% from the prior quarter. Looking at our expenses. Non-GAAP operating expenses for the fiscal third quarter of 2023 were $5 million and an increase from $4.8 million the prior quarter. GAAP loss from operations for fiscal Q3 2023 totaled $3.7 million compared to a $6.5 million loss in the prior quarter. Note, we recorded a non-cash impairment loss on Goodwill during the second and third quarters of 5.8 million and 3.3 million, respectively. Note that at quarter end, we no longer had any goodwill recorded on our balance sheet. As a percentage of total revenue, GAAP loss from operations for the third quarter of fiscal 2023 was negative 44%, which compares to negative 89% in the prior quarter. Non-GAAP income from operations for fiscal Q3 2023 totaled $152,000 or break even per fully diluted share, an improvement compared to $11,000 or break even per fully diluted share in the prior quarter. In our second consecutive quarter of positive non-GAAP income, as the percentage of total revenue non-GAAP income from operations was 2% compared to less than 1% in the prior quarter. GAAP net loss for fiscal Q3 2023 totaled $3.7 million or a loss of $0.07 per basic share. This was an improvement compared to a net loss of $6.5 million or a loss of $0.13 per basic share in the prior quarter. Non-GAAP net income for fiscal Q3 2023 totaled $134,000 or break-even per fully diluted share compared to a non-GAAP net income of $52,000 or a break even per fully diluted share in the prior quarter. Turn into our balance sheet. At quarter end, we had 14.5 million in cash and cash equivalents, which is an improvement compared to 14.3 million at the end of the prior quarter. We continue to have no debt on our balance sheet. This completes my financial summary. For a more detailed analysis of our financial results, please refer to today's earnings release as well as our 10Q which we plan to file by the end of the week. I will now turn the call over to Jeff Gramp from Gateway Investor Relations to moderate the question and answer session for pre-submitted questions.

Thank you, Kathy. This is Jeff Gramp of Gateway Group, C-Changes Investor Relations Advisors. I'll now read out the top questions that we received at our firm from investors ahead of this call. The first question is, with the stock price at this level for an extended period of time, much like many micro-caps, what actions has the company taken with respect to NASDAQ?

Thanks, Jeff. First of all, I believe that the share price of the company doesn't really reflect the assets or the strong financial and operating results that we discuss here today. And I'm a real believer, and I've been a buyer of the stock personally, in the open market this year, as I believe C-Change is an attractive investment. But specific to the NASDAQ listing, we filed an application on December 6th to be listed on NASDAQ's capital markets tier that better matches our peer group. And this will have no practical effect on the trading of our stock. However, this will provide the company with a six-month extension to get our stock price up through execution despite broader market conditions to meet NASDAQ's listener requirements. And this is exactly what a lot of microcaps are doing today as we speak. So as time progresses, we'll provide regular updates as necessary to keep everybody informed.

Thank you, Pete. The next question is for Chris. Which products or services do you expect to be the most meaningful revenue contributors for C-Change looking ahead, understanding that the sales process can be somewhat lumpy?

Thank you for this question. So first, I think that the performance over the past five or six quarters, where we have posted steady quarter-over-quarter top line growth, shows that we have been successful across all our key revenue streams, products and services alike, and that we have diversified our revenue structure. This is true for our core operator business and our services business, all the way to our new product lines that generate SaaS revenues for us. In terms of these products that we are very excited about here at SeaChange, I would start with StreamVid, our comprehensive streaming enablement platform that offers a multitude of options to attract viewers and monetize content. Another exciting market for us is free ad-supported streaming TV, or FAST, where we can support operators, content owners, and TV platform providers to provide streaming services and monetization capabilities through ad insertion. Lastly, we should not forget about our ability to expand and deliver for our long-standing relationships with Tier 1 telcos. This market still delivers strong revenues and margins for us. Essential for us to build value and drive innovation across all of our product lines is our Center of Engineering Excellence in Poland. you may remember that we have more than 100 full-time in-house video software engineers that help us to realize innovation along our tech roadmap and to accelerate the expansion of our product portfolio. For example, we have just recently filed two provisional patent applications for products that will enable our customers to further personalize the viewing experience on their platforms and to measure and stimulate engagement. Thank you.

Thank you, Chris. The last question we received is for Kathy. How should investors think about the company's ability to grow revenue and achieve positive EBITDA?

Thanks, Jeff. We have been encouraged with our operational performance that has generated strong top-line revenue growth, while our costs have remained relatively stable and more efficient during this timeframe, allowing us to generate positive EBITDA for two consecutive quarters. Further, We have been encouraged with our results year to date, with revenue of $22.3 million, up 19% over the prior year period, while non-GAAP operating costs of $14.5 million have decreased 10% over the prior year period. We remain optimistic about our future revenue growth capabilities and do not expect our cost profile to change materially over the near and medium term, and therefore feel good about our ability for an EBITDA break-even or better outlook.

Thank you, Kathy. This completes the pre-submitted Q&A session. I will now turn the call to the operator to continue the Q&A session for today's listeners.

Thank you. And at this time, we'll be conducting a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star two if you would like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, It may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. And one moment, please, while we poll for questions. And our first question comes from the line of Nehal Toksi with Northland Capital. Please proceed with your question.

Yes, congratulations on the Solid results, sequential increase, and free cash flow generation there. And the Fox Sports Mexico is a strong testament to the tantalizing opportunity that you talked about of subscription content moving towards advertising. Can you discuss the evolution of that deal and the potential for that deal to replicate across other properties of Fox as well.

Thank you, Nihao. Let me take this question. So, essentially, the evolution of the deal is based on a very strong sales effort in the region. You may know that we have sales team locally also in Latin America. And the focus here, especially with selling the streaming platform and the services that the platform entails, is to help content owners that have a premium content proposition to reach their subscribers directly, to go direct to consumers, with the full flexibility across all of the monetization models that are possible in streaming. Fox is a good example. Fox Sports Mexico is a good example that shows how our platform allows hybrid monetization models. They will go to market both for the subscription model, but also use our ad insertion capability. And I think it's a testament not only of our ability to be a great technology vendor to premium and tier one media and content companies, but also to our ability to help that content to be monetized across business models, across platforms, and eventually hopefully also across territories.

So would you say that your Latin American team is the star of your overall sales team?

I think we have a very, very good global sales team. Latin America has shown very, very good results over the past couple of quarters. We believe that the market in Latin America is in the perfect state where more direct-to-consumer content propositions push to the market. And with the good reference cases that we have there now, with a good footprint, with a strong sales team, and of course with our product, I think we're in a very good position to continue to be successful in this market.

So what's the ability, you believe, to replicate the success in the Latin American market to other markets then?

So we do see success in other markets as well. I just want to highlight the BIDA engagement again, right? So BIDA is also a global company, but their main operation is in Europe, or in the MIA to be precise. So we have a very strong footprint across our main markets, which are Latin America, North America, and the MIA. To replicate this particular engagement in Mexico to maybe other sports bodies or sports rights holders is something that we're actively working on right now, and we hope to show first results in the sports sector over the next quarter or two.

Excellent. Thank you for taking my questions. Thank you.

Thank you. At this time, this concludes our question and answer session. If your question was not taken, please contact SeaChange's IR team at SEAC at gatewayir.com. I would now like to turn the call back over to Mr. Aquino for his closing remarks.

Thank you, Operator. Well, we appreciate your interest in SeaChange and look forward to our future communications. Have a great evening, everyone. Thank you.

And thank you for joining us today for C-Change's conference call. You may disconnect your lines. Thank you.