Quotemedia Inc

Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to today's Quote Media Q1 Financial Results Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, you will have the opportunity to ask questions during the question and answer session. You may register to ask a question at any time by pressing star 1 on your telephone keypad. You may withdraw yourself from the queue by pressing star 2. Also, today's call is being recorded, and I will be standing by if anyone should need any assistance. And now at this time, I'd like to turn things over to Mr. Brendan Hopkins. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, and thank you, everyone, for joining us today. We have a brief safe harbor, and then we'll get started. Except for historical information contained herein, the statements in this conference call are forward-looking statements that are made pursuant to safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties that may cause our actual results in future periods to differ materially. forecasted results. With that said, I would like to turn the call over to Dave Schwerin, CEO of Quote Media.

Thank you, Brandon. Welcome, everybody, and thank you for joining us. We unfortunately had a flat quarter in Q1 of 2024, and that was unfortunate, but there were several factors behind the Q1 numbers. We did have a few, I'd say, I'd call them medium-sized firms discontinue use of our data and services at the end of 2023. And it wasn't because they went elsewhere. It was more because they were not succeeding in their business ventures and could no longer support the cost of the data. And some other customers simply moved to lower-cost exchange data, which decreased our top line but doesn't really affect our bottom line. So combined, all of these caused a decrease in revenue for the quarter. That said, we closed new contracts and expanded on existing contracts and replaced that lost revenue, taking us more to a break-even quarter. So that was good. CoMedia actually has a very low churn rate, and our client retention rate runs at about 97%. But what is unfortunate is if that 2% or 3% happens in one quarter like it did in the first quarter, it does hit our books pretty hard. Another factor to consider was that the comparative quarter last year was very strong. In Q1 of 2023, we had an increase of 14% on a Forex neutral basis. So Q1 of this year was measured against that very strong quarter. In any case, we're not concerned. We've got quite a few deals of all sizes in the pipeline, and we do foresee improvements over the coming year. Of interest, prior to Q1, we had 30 consecutive quarters of growth compared to the quarters of the previous year. So I know it was a bit of a shocker as this was our first flat quarter in a long time. I believe the last time we lost a bulk of clients in the same quarter was back in 2016 when we showed a flat quarter then. But if you look back, that was a blip on our radar in 2016, and again, this is just a blip on our radar now. As I mentioned, we do have some large prospects in discussions, but they do take quite a bit of time to close. In addition, I'm excited to say that we will be announcing some new products this year, so stay tuned for some upcoming announcements. And in summary, everything's going really well at Colt Media, and we do feel we're going to have a strong 2024. I'll now pass the mic to Keith Randall so he can take us through the numbers for the quarter, and then we can answer questions. Thank you, Dave, and welcome, everyone. I'll start with the income statement. Note that all comparisons are on a year-over-year basis unless otherwise noted. Overall, we had a 1% decrease in total revenue for the quarter. As previously mentioned, we had a few clients who reduced or discontinued their spending with quote-media. offsetting the revenue from new clients added during the quarter. Breaking down our revenue, interactive content revenue, which is web display content, was flat versus the comparative quarter. A decrease in the number of customers was offset by an increase in the average revenue per customer. Our total closed-stream revenue decreased by 3%. Corporate closed-stream revenue decreased by 2%, and individual closed-stream revenue decreased by 4%. both resulting from a decrease in the number of customers offset by an increase in average revenue per customer. Our cost of revenue consists of fixed and variable stock exchange fees and other data costs and amortization of capitalized development costs. Our cost of revenue increased 1% for the quarter. This is mainly due to increased amortization expense associated with capitalized costs related to improving infrastructure, new product development, data collection, and the expansion of our global market coverage.