IDT Corporation

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 Jones, 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' remarks, Marcelo Fisher, 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 unlimited 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 IEDT 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 IEDT earnings release is available on the investor relations page of the IEDT Corporation website. The earnings release has also been filed on Form 8K with the SEC. I will now turn the conference over to Mr. Jonas.

Thank you very much. Welcome to IDT's earnings conference call. My 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 read 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 SAS revenues, and 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. That bought money delivered another quarter of impressive results with 42% year over year revenue growth. It's 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 US based customers to send money directly to bank accounts to 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 NetOwn increasing subscription revenue 19% year-over-year and achieving cash flow breakeven, 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 Netfone 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 and 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 Marcel and I will be happy to take your questions.

Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your touchtone 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 touchtone phone.

We have the first question comes from William Vathon with Coriant. Please proceed.

Hi, gentlemen. Congratulations on the great quarter. I just wanted to ask about what you're seeing in terms of the cost of 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, you know, expanding to different businesses or different business segments out in the marketplace?

That's a good question. Well, I mean, the first thing I would say is, you know, we 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. Overall, I think that the stores are doing pretty well. 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 decent bump. I think sales were up about 7.4%. So those are like the big picture numbers from the insights. You can, you know, when the report comes out on Friday, you can read the rest of it. As far as, you know, where the business is going and the types of acquisitions that, you know, that we're looking at, I would say that, you know, in Netophone, we're not really looking to make you know, any large acquisitions. I mean, we think that, you know, we have a lot of projects, you know, that are being worked on, you know, internally. And, you know, we're very happy with the pace there. You know, in the, you know, in the remittance side of the business, you know, we've looked at, you know, possibly, you know, adding, you know, on certain, you know, channels or countries that, you know, we're not so strong in, you know, to sort of gain a 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 we... 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 do pretty well, and we're going to continue to try to grow things organically.

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

Hey, guys. Just curious how you're thinking about spin-offs or potential spin-offs of Net-to-Phone and NRS in light of them both being, you know, free cash will break even or better going forward.

You know, I would say that we're not looking to do anything, you know, imminently. You know, I mean, as I talked about on the, you know, the investor day, I mean, I think, you know, a big piece of that is, you know, how the market operates you know, perceives things, particularly in the Netophone area, you know, the market is still really not been particularly strong for companies, you know, in, I'll say, you know, in our verticals, even though I think, you know, we're by far the best, you know, it's still, you know, you know, you are, you know, when you're in a weak vertical, you get, you know, judged amongst them as well. You know, as for NRS, I think one day it's going to make a great independent company. And 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.

Okay. Thank you.

Thank you, Justin. Again, if you have a question, please press star, then one. Okay, we have a follow-up coming from William Vuffin with Coriant. Your line is live.

Hi again. So I just thought of a follow-up. This might have been during the annual meeting that in the boss money business or the money transfer business, you know, 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?

I mean, you know, it's not as simple of a question to answer, you know, as you would think. I mean, what I would say is, you know, I mean, you know, we sort of said, you know, that if we continue to grow, the business at sort of like half the pace that we've been growing it at. You know, we could see it, you know, getting to, you know, I think you said $14 to $15 million of profitability, you know, from that part of the business, you know, over the next, you know, two to three years. You know, the one thing I would say is, like, it's all depending on how much, you know, you want to invest back into acquiring, you know, more customers and growing, you you know, verticals that you're not as strong in. So, you know, I mean, you can pick any country, but, you know, pick, you know, Vietnam. Like, you know, today we have no volume to Vietnam. You know, if we wanted to get into Vietnam, you know, there's really two ways of doing it. You can either, you know, acquire, you know, another company that has, you know, volume to Vietnam or, You know, or you can, you know, spend a lot more than you have to, you know, acquiring, you know, customers and, you know, sort of overpaying on the payout side, you know, and hope that once you get to, you know, a larger base of customers, you'll then, you know, figure out how to, you know, maximize the profits on it. So we've sort of, like, taken the approach of really trying to be, like, much more focused on, you know, verticals that we already had, you know, penetration on, you know, in our calling business or in our top-up business and really trying to, like, move customers from one place to another. But, you know, it's definitely going to be, you know, a profitable and growing part of our business. So, I mean, I don't know if that answers your question, but, you know, Marcel, you have anything to add maybe?

I would say, William, just to put a little more context, is that obviously the money, financial business boss money, is the lion's share of the fintech segment in terms of revenue. And that part of the business, boss money, has been generating positive EBITDA now for the last two quarters. I think it did more than $1 million in positive EBITDA the last six months. So it's doing well and that EBITDA will continue to grow at its skills. But to some extent, the BOS 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, in the online bank, El Royo, Neobank. So Gibraltar, the neobank, 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 your earlier comment, a lot of the acquisitions that we have looked at in the last few months all focused on the money transfer space. We do believe that skill matters hugely in terms of getting to higher profitability in that industry. And growing organically has been good for us. We've been growing at around 35%, 40% clip, which is excellent, better than other in this industry. But being able to supplement that with an acquisition will probably make a lot of sense in reaching scale. We've looked at a few of them. As you mentioned, the ones we looked at so far have not met our criteria. And we're going to maybe continue to look at some future opportunities in that area.

OK, thanks, guys.

Once again, if there are any remaining questions or comments, please indicate so now by pressing star 1. Okay, we have a question coming from Bill Monet. He is a private investor. Bill, please proceed.

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 are many uses for it.

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

Got it. Thank you.

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