IDT Corporation

Good evening and welcome to the IDT Corporation's second quarter fiscal year 2025 earnings call. During management's remarks, 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. I'll now turn the call over to Bill Ulrey of IDT Investor Relations.

Thank you, John. In today's presentation, IDT's Chief Executive Officer, Shmuel Jonas, and Chief Financial Officer Marcelo Fisher will discuss IDT's financial and operational results for the three-month period into January 31st, 2025. After their remarks, they will be happy to take your questions. Any forward-looking statements made during this conference call, either in their remarks or during the Q&A that follows, whether general or specific in nature, are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from those which the company anticipates. These risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, specific risks and uncertainties discussed in the reports that IDT files periodically with the SEC. IDT assumes no obligation either to update any forward-looking statements that they have made or may make, or to update the factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from those that they forecast. In their presentation or in the Q&A session, IDT's management may make reference to non-GAAP measures, including adjusted EBITDA, non-GAAP net income, and non-GAAP earnings per share. A schedule provided in the IDT earnings release reconciles adjusted EBITDA, non-GAAP net income, and non-GAAP earnings per share to the nearest corresponding GAAP measures. Please note that the IDT earnings release is available on the investor relations page of the IDT Corporation website. The earnings release has also been filed in a Form 8K with the SEC. Now I'll turn the call over to Shmuel for his comments on the quarter's results.

Thank you, Bill. Welcome to IDT's earnings conference call. IDT had a strong second quarter led by NRS and BOSS money and supported by robust results from our traditional communications segment, which increased its cash generation for the third consecutive quarter. On a consolidated basis, we again generated record levels of gross profit, income from operations, and adjusted EBITDA. NRS continued to deepen its penetration of the independent retailer market. We are now launching new features and functionalities that increase the value of our solution for retailers and will help us deepen market penetration and drive growth. Boss Money delivered another quarter of strong year-over-year transaction and revenue growth. In the second quarter, we continued to focus on improving the margin contribution particularly on our retail channel, and that effort helped to boost our fintech segment's gross profit and adjusted EBITDA less capex to record levels. NetDefone continued its expansion, led by further growth in the U.S. market. We are especially excited about last week's launch of NetDefone's virtual AI agent. It has been very well received by our internal boss and NRS teams that are using it with great success to enhance the quality and consistency of customer interactions while reducing costs. We are confident that NetPhone clients will find that it provides them with great value right out of the gate. Moreover, as they build with our AI agent, it will provide clients with increasingly sophisticated, tailored solutions that add value across disparate functions within their organizations. Our traditional communications segment increased adjusted EBITDA for the third sequential quarter and surpassed $20 million for the first time since fiscal 2022. In light of our solid financial position and positive outlook, and mindful of the feedback we've received from our investors, we stepped up our repurchases of stock during the second quarter and have increased our regular quarterly dividend by 20%. Now Marcel will also brief you on the second quarter results, and we'll be happy to take your questions afterwards.

Thank you, Shmuel. I would like to briefly provide some additional insight to our discussion of this quarter's financial results. In today's earnings release, for the first time, we are providing capital expenditures for each of our reporting segments. Segment-level CapEx gives greater clarity into the cash-generating power of our key businesses, and we hope that this additional information will be useful to you, our investors, for comparative valuation purposes. Now, turning to our second quarter results, Obviously, we are extremely pleased with our performance. NRS had an exceptional quarter with 32% recurring revenue growth and adjusted EBITDA exceeding $10 million. This $310 in recurring revenue per terminal underscores NRS's ability to deliver value-added features that drive higher revenue generation. we anticipate this figure will remain around the $300 mark for the remainder of the fiscal year, reflecting continued deepening penetration of NRS pay and migration of retailers to premium sales plans as we continue to add new features and functionalities. Q2 is typically one of NRS's strongest revenue quarters of the year. and we are quite pleased with the business's ability to continue to scale effectively. Boss Money also delivered a very strong quarter. Our transaction volume reached another all-time record at 5.7 million, with digital transactions through our Boss Money and Boss Calling apps representing more than 80% of all our remittances. We are seeing somewhat slower revenue growth, primarily because of our decision to optimize gross profit total transaction, particularly in our retail channel. And as a result, we are quite pleased to have achieved GP growth for the larger fintech segment of 35% to a record 22 million. BOSS money has continued to grow strongly since the quarter end. During February, both transactions and revenue again increased by well over 30% compared to February of last year, despite the leap day in that same month a year ago. Netophone also grew quite nicely in Q2, even though foreign exchange translations masked the strength of the underlying performance of the businesses. Subscription revenue increased 9% to 21 million in the quarter, but on a constant currency basis, the increase was 14%. As an example, Netofont's subscription revenue in its Mexico market increased 18% year-over-year in pesos, but in dollar terms, sales actually decreased slightly. Across all of its markets, Netophone achieved its top line growth even while being incredibly disciplined in its spending. FG&A decreased 1.7% year over year and 1.5% sequentially to drive a 55% year-over-year increase in adjusted EBITDA to $2.9 million and an increase in the corresponding adjusted EBITDA margins from 9% to 13% over the same period. As well as NRF and Boss Money and Netofont have performed, We have been particularly pleased by the cash flows generated from our traditional communication segment. Adjusted EBITDA for this segment has increased in each of the last three quarters to reach over 20 million in Q2, a 19% year-over-year increase, while CapEx decreased slightly. The increase in profitability reflects our continued focus on shifting our sales channel mix and our geographical corridor mix to maximize gross profit, implementing new pricing strategies, particularly in our digital payments business, and working diligently to wring even more costs from our operations and achieve greater efficiency. A special shout out to our IDT global wholesale carrier team for continuing to deliver consistent gross profit results, notwithstanding the industry-wide ILD voice market secular decline. Consolidated adjusted EBITDA in the second quarter was a record $34 million. bringing our total adjusted EBITDA for the first half of the year to 63 million. Mindful that each of our segments has outperformed our expectations in the first half of the fiscal year, we now expect to generate at least as much adjusted EBITDA in the second half. To put it another way, IDT is on track to deliver approximately 40% adjusted EBITDA growth in fiscal 25, on top of the record 90 million we attained in fiscal 24. Although we remain watchful for potential impacts of the new federal immigration policies, To date, we have not seen a meaningful slowdown across any of our businesses. At NRS, as we disclosed yesterday, same-store sales at our retailers increased 3.5% year-over-year in February and increased 6% compared to January, indicating that business activity for our independent retailer customers remains healthy. At Boss Money, not only did we achieve robust transaction volume and revenue expansion in February, but this past week, Boss Money also delivered the second highest weekly remittance transaction volume in its history, exceeded only by Christmas week last December. Last week's Boss Money transaction volume even surpassed the total from Mother's Day week last year. As such, we remain cautiously optimistic about the potential impact, if any, that the new federal immigration policies may have on our NRS and BOSS businesses. Turning now to our balance sheet and our cash flow from operations, you will note that, exclusive of changes in customer funds deposit, This Q2, we generated only $7 million in operating cash, compared to $25 million for the same quarter a year ago. I want to point out that, due to the nature of our boss money business, working capital levels over the course of any one week fluctuate significantly. Fridays are typically the day of the week that ends with our lowest levels of cash because we pre-fund our boss money global payout network's wallet in order to enable our payout partners to make remittances disbursements during the weekend ahead. Heading into a routine weekend, it is not unusual for us to pre-fund 30 to 40 million in disbursements. On the other hand, Wednesdays typically register the highest cash balance of any day of the week. So this past January 31st, the last day of our fiscal second quarter, was a Friday. And as such, the cash in our balance sheet at the quarter close was at its lowest for the week. Our upcoming third quarter will end on Wednesday. April 30th, and as such, I expect that we will therefore be reporting materially significantly higher levels of operating cash flow generation for Q3. Given the strength of our balance sheet and our expectations for continued robust cash generation, as Shmuel noted, our board made the decision to increase IDT's quarterly dividend and we expect to be able to continue to increase the dividend each year for the foreseeable future. In addition, we will continue to return value to stockholders through our opportunistic approach to repurchasing shares. This quarter, we had a record level of repurchases, over 179,000 shares for $8.5 million, bringing our total for the 12-month end of January 31st to 380,000 shells for $16 million. Now operators, back to you for Q&A.

We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star, then 1 on your touch tone phone. If you are using a speaker phone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. To withdraw your question, please press star, then 2. We will now pause momentarily to assemble our roster. The first question is from Inigo Alonso. Please announce your affiliation, then pose your question.

Hello. Thank you again for another quarter of great results, and also thank you for the extended remarks this time. I have questions on the three main businesses. I'll start with NRS. Earlier in Q4, you provided a soft guidance of 6,000 terminals for this year. It looks like in last week's or yesterday's report actually, there was a neutral tendency of growth and that was due to the seasonal churn that you mentioned in the results. I was wondering if you still are trending towards 6,000. That's one of the NRS questions. The other one is around the ad revenue. It sounds like it was a really good quarter. I assume that maybe seasonal advertising had an impact. We know that it was the elections and maybe that was a huge driver or could have been because of the screens that you have been adding to your network. So I would like to get more color on ad revenue too. And lastly, in a long-term question, are you planning on taking NRS International in the medium term? When you go overseas, there is a more fragmented market. When it comes to convenience stores, there's not that many franchises. So I was wondering if that's in your plans for the medium-long term.

OK. Marcelo will answer most of your questions. If I have anything to add in, I'll add it in.

No, I just wanted to say that you're right. Advertising had a nice performance. During Q2, it was up about 12% year over year. But we also saw a real nice jump in the data side of the business. That grew by almost 40% a year ago.

In terms of international expansion, it's not something that I would say that we're looking to do organically. You know, frankly, you know, we're very, very busy just dealing with, you know, the problems and the growth, you know, that we have, you know, in the U.S. And we're very, you know, optimistic about, you know, the trajectory and the opportunity, you know, here in the U.S. So I think that if we end up, you know, doing something internationally, it would likely be through an acquisition. But, you know, and in terms of the number, you know, of units, again, I think we're, you know, we're slightly behind, you know, where we had thought we would be in terms of adding units. But I think that we will make it up over the course of the rest of the year is my opinion. We've had a lot of new salespeople come on, you know, recently. And, you know, unfortunately, you know, they need to be trained and, you know, seasoned a little bit before they start to become successful, but I have high hopes that they will become very successful.

That's really good color. Let me ask about NetSoup Phone. So in NetSoup Phone, it looks like we had the lowest seed count addition in a while, but we also had a really nice growth in constant basis for revenue. So And there's a lot of trends going on in this industry. We have the meta switch sale. We also have a buyer saying that they are not going to support the small and medium customers that they have. So I'm wondering if you have been seeing some of these trends and maybe getting a higher revenue customers as a result of the industry dynamics.

Yeah, I mean, I don't know if I would specifically tie our results with industry dynamics. So I'll separate what you said about MetaSwitch and Avaya from just what I'm seeing from the business. I would say that I'm seeing slightly larger deals come in than previously. I mean, we have a very good pipeline of deals that have already been signed but aren't online. And so I do expect that, you know, the numbers to, you know, to perform better in the second half of the year than they have during the first half on NetPhone. You know, as far as the currency, you know, I can't predict currencies any better, you know, than, you know, anybody else. Maybe currency traders do a better job than I do on it. But, you know, that has definitely been a headwind. for the business. That being said, I'm very optimistic about all of the things that we're doing to increase ARPU. I'm very optimistic about what AI is going to do for the NetPhone business. No real concerns. If anything, we talk a lot internally about increasing our investment costs in AI, both in terms of, you know, development and sales so that we, you know, can, you know, really, I'll say compete with the big boys who, you know, who have, you know, way different kinds of budgets than I could even understand, frankly.

Okay. And the last item around boss money, you provide a really nice color around why you need this working capital to support boss money and why you hold cash. It has been maybe a criticism of some investors that you're holding so much cash. And I think providing coloring boss money like you did today, it is important to understand why IDD has the balance sheet that it has. I was wondering what's the requirement or the amount of money of cash you feel comfortable with to run boss money? What are those working capital requirements of boss money? I'll let Marcelo answer that question.

Yeah, I'll take a little differently. The fact that we have the very strong balance sheet that we have, we are able to fund all the working capital needs of the both money business and other businesses, like our digital payments business as well. As you know, most of our competitors in the money return space who do not have this size balance sheet they resort to funding the working capital needs by taking lines of credit from financial institutions. And in the course of doing so, obviously, they incur costs that we are able to avoid in terms of interest, et cetera. So as long as we do not deploy the cash in our balance sheet towards new initiatives, towards building new businesses, reinvesting in current businesses, returning that cash to shareholders in the form of repurchases and dividends or finding good, attractive value acquisitions, we will continue to leverage the balance sheet to support the working capital needs that we have. It's not that we maintain the balance sheet because of the money bought business. It's the other way around. It's because we have not yet found the right opportunity to deploy our cash in full. We know we are opportunistic and we are able to support the working capital needs of the boss money business, thus generating higher returns on our investments because we are avoiding the financing costs involved.

Thank you for the wonderful research once again.

Okay, your next question comes from William Vaughn with Corian. Please proceed.

Congrats, Will and Marcelo, on another great quarter. My question surrounds boss money. You mentioned the tradeoff in terms of thinking about profitability and trading and profitability for a little bit of growth and focusing on that, the boss money business. My question is, you know, profitability is very important. We always want the business to be profitable. Are we possibly prioritizing short-term profits and foregoing some long-term profits by not investing more and being more aggressive in customer acquisition? How does the team balance profitability with growth in this business, especially with, you know, other competitors? And I'm thinking of one specific larger competitor that's spending a lot on marketing. You know, how does the team think about that?

I'll try to answer you a little generally. I mean, I would say that, you know, I'm probably a little bit too conservative of a person in general. And I'm not, you know, a swing for the fences, you know, type of a person in general. I like to hit, you know, singles and doubles and, you know, and, you know, get the batters home. But, you know, it's not to say that, you know, that I think that, you know, the competitors of ours who, you know, swing for the fences and spend, you know, insane amounts of money are completely crazy. You know, I don't think that they're completely crazy. I think that, you know, if you get a good return on, you know, your investment, you know, you should probably, you know, spend more. You know, I think that... You know, we've tried to, I'll say, you know, be a little bit of both, you know, in the sense that, you know, we are both profitable and, you know, growing over 30%. You know, we could obviously, you know, increase growth by, you know, by investing more. And, you know, I think that we are, you know, tiptoeing, I'll say, into, you know, investing more, not, you know... again, you're not going to see us go crazy tomorrow and say we're going to spend $5 million more a quarter on customer acquisition or expanding our retail footprint by double or anything like that. But I think that we are trying to increase you know, the verticals that we serve customers in. And we're trying to make each one of those verticals, you know, profitable on their own. And again, you know, I mean, this business has, you know, has had a very, very, you know, successful run so far. And I don't want to, you know, mess with it too much by, you know, by starting, you know, to invest in, you know, in maybe an irresponsible way.

And if I could just add, right, the overwhelming majority of the profitability that we are now generating from Boss Money is coming from our digital channel, which is about 80% plus of our total transactions. And the profits are significantly higher in terms of unit economics. It's in the retail channel that unit economics are lower. And most of our effort in terms of improving gross profit and gross profit per transaction is happening really on the retail channel part of the business. And it has paid off thus far, you know, by us trying to raise that GP in that channel while at the same time bringing up a lot of capital to continue to invest heavily on the digital side.

Yeah, and we have some really, like, you know, nice tricks up our sleeve that we expect to really, you know, help growth without, you know, supercharging the spending.

Okay, awesome. Thank you. That was, thank you for the detailed answer. Second question is also on boss money. You all expanded into, you know, some more verticals, and I appreciate, you know, all the color and, you know, it's a vertical by vertical business in terms of profitability for boss money. Can you talk a little bit more about the reasons for expanding to Venezuela, Brazil, Eritrea, and how those initiatives are going so far?

I don't have the numbers in front of me to give you country by country how they're doing. I would say just from what I've heard generally on update calls, is that they're going better than we expected at this particular time. The one thing I would say is that you need to have scale in every market for you to really start to reap the benefits of it. And today we don't have scale in that many markets. you know, countries. But, you know, like every time we open up a new, you know, a new country, it's a new opportunity to, you know, to see if we have, you know, the, you know, the, I'll say the veracity to, you know, to turn it into, you know, to turn it into something, you know, much larger. And, you know, but it takes months to get, you know, you know, traction. I mean, you know, as I said, Venezuela, you know, generally is going well, you know, Brazil isn't even live yet, so it's hard for me to say how well it will do, but I'm optimistic.

Okay. Awesome. Thanks, guys.

The next question is from Eric Brantley. Please announce your affiliation and pose your question.

Thanks, guys. Just one question really from me. Could you give a little more color around the decision to ramp share repurchases back up. Just curious kind of what investor feedback in particular changed your thinking on capital allocation.

I don't know. You know, sometimes you get like worn down by people, you know, and that changes your... No, I mean, in all honesty, I mean, on almost every investor call that we have, you know, we're told, you know, why do you guys have, you know, so much cash on the balance sheet? You guys need to be out there, you know, purchasing... you know, more stock and, you know, increasing the dividend and so on. And, again, we, I think, are a shareholder-friendly company. I at least try to be when I wake up in the morning every day. And, you know, that, you know, we thought, you know, that it was a good opportunity to buy.

Got it. Thank you.

Once again, if you have a question or a comment, please indicate so by pressing star 1 on your touchtone phone. Again, if you have a question or a comment, please press star 1 on your touchtone phone. We have a follow up coming from William Vaughn. Please proceed.

Yeah, just a follow-up. So on NRS, are you seeing any trends in terms of growth geographically? Any types of verticals or customers that you're seeing more growth or specifically more opportunities? And just any color you could add on NRS and growth opportunities would be helpful.

I mean, I would say in general that we're seeing growth across all of our channels I really, like, there's not one part of the, you know, the business that isn't seeing, you know, growth. I'm, you know, I have my own, you know, like, I'll call them, like, pet projects that I'm, you know, particularly excited about. You know, we just launched, you know, delivery service through DoorDash, like, directly integrated into the POS. And, you know, we have, you know, all the other ones coming online over the next couple weeks. And I'm, you know, I think that that's going to be a huge success for retailers. I mean, you know, the... You know, today you can't get, you know, accurate inventory, you know, on any of these, you know, delivery platforms. You know, when pricing, you know, changes, you know, for you, you don't necessarily update it, you know, into those platforms because it's, like, cumbersome and complicated, et cetera. You know, the... You're not sure when the driver is arriving. You're not sure when the delivery was. I mean, there's all sorts of issues by it being disconnected from the POS. So I'm very excited about that. I continue to be very excited about our QSR business. I think the integrations we're doing with liquor companies to have orders ship automatically is going to be a huge thing that will help stores make sure that they keep the correct inventory on their shelves. There's a lot of different things that are going on that I think are exciting. Some of them have had much more success than others. We launched LottoShield and and automatic cash taking through a separate machine called the PayPod. Those two have not flown off the shelf as fast as I thought. But there's other ones that are doing tremendous numbers. And again, we expect the SaaS revenue to grow tremendously. with all these new features. Again, I think almost every store needs delivery nowadays. There's, again, lots of opportunity.

Awesome. Thanks, guys. Once again, great quarter.

Once again, If you have a question or a comment, please press star 1 on your touchtone phone. Okay, we have a follow-up from Inigo Alonso. Please proceed.

Yeah. This is a follow up in on NRS. You have been talking about the screens that you are adding on different locations. Are you planning on disclosing the account anytime soon and adding this as a KPI to your metrics?

Hmm. I don't know. I mean, we don't usually disclose like, you know, which accounts, you know, we do business with. Um, But, I mean, again, it's, you know, in terms of what are you trying to gather? Maybe you can explain a little better.

Yeah, I think that as the number of screens start to become more materialized, we obviously are not going to include those customers together with our count for pos dominoes customers because those are going to be advertising only right so once those things start happening now we'll you know depending how large it gets we'll start showing that now most likely at a separate kpi Okay, so that you could easily track and calculate the amount of other type of revenue that's generated by those parties.

Yeah, what I'm thinking or trying to gather, it feels like this could be another hidden gem in your portfolio. The potential of having screens out there is pretty big. There's publicly traded companies everywhere. out there making more than $50 million a year just from having screens in Canada. So I'm wondering if this could scale that far. So that's why... Well, I don't know yet.

I mean, you know, when it starts to get there, you know, you'll see it, and by then we'll probably be breaking it out. So, you know, but again, like, you know, third-party ones come, you know, with obviously a revenue share that we don't have in the case of our own stores, I'll call them. But we are optimistic about it and we'll have more to talk about on the advertising front and what we're doing to expand it in the future.

Just as a benchmark, what was the number of screens added of that type this quarter?

I don't have the numbers that were added this quarter in front of me. I know that we just ordered another 1,500 screens. But I'm not 100% sure how many were actually put on this quarter. Thank you.

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.