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Operator: Greetings, and welcome to Mobivity Holdings Corp. First Quarter 2018 Financial Results Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Charles Mathews.
Charles Mathews: Thank you and welcome to Mobivity’s first quarter 2018 financial results conference call. We appreciate your interest in our company in joining us on the call. On the call today is Mobivity’s Founder, Chairman and CEO, Dennis Becker and myself, Charles Mathews, CFO. Before we just started I’d like to call everyone’s attention to our Safe Harbor policy. Please note that certain statements made on this call will be forward-looking statements, which are subject to several risks and uncertainties. We caution you that such statements reflect our best judgments based on factors currently known to us kind of the actual events or results could differ materially. Please refer to the documents we filed from time to time with the SEC and particular our most recently filed quarterly report on the Form 10-Q and our Annual Report on the Form 10-K. These documents contain and identify important risk factors and other information and may cause our actual results to differ from those contained in our forward-looking statements Any forward-looking statements made during this call are being made as of today, if this call is replayed or reviewed after today, the information presented during this call may not contain current or accurate information. Except as required by law, we assume no obligation to update these forward-looking statements publicly or to update the reasons actual results could differ materially from those anticipated and forward-looking statements even if the information becomes available in the future. Today’s call may include non-GAAP financial measures, which require a reconciliation to the most directly comparable financial measures, which are calculated and presented in accordance with GAAP and can be found in this week’s press release, which is also available at mobivity.com. I’d also like to remind everyone that we adopted the new revenue recognition accounting standard otherwise referred to as ASC 606 during the first quarter of 2018 on a modified retrospective basis. This means the results for reporting period beginning on or after January 1, 2018, presented under the new revenue recognition standards or prior period amounts before January 1, 2018 are not adjusted. With that, I’d like to turn the call over to Dennis Becker, our CEO. Dennis?
Dennis Becker: Thanks, Charles, and thanks everyone for joining us on our call today. I’m pleased to report that during the first quarter of this year we drove strong growth in our sales pipeline that is now bearing fruit and accelerating topline revenue performance. Our mission all along has been to empower brick and mortar brands with the ability to leverage data in driving consumer behavior to improve business performance and the market is starting to take notice like never before. Current events, including Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony to Congress, highlight just how powerful data is in shaping consumer behavior. The fact that the outcome of a presidential election may have been swayed by leveraging consumer data to target information speaks volumes as to the immense power data can have on influencing the behavior of people. High profile events, such as Facebook’s implication in the 2016 presidential election, are creating an awakening to the power of data across all industries and we’re now well positioned to lead in the transformation of brick and mortar commerce to a data driven world. On the heels of the massive scale of onboarding Subway’s thousands of locations to our platform in 2016, we proceeded to invest in bolstering our technology and product offering throughout 2017. These investments an advancing and expanding our product offering are creating strong tailwinds, propelling our progress and ability to absorb accelerating demand in the marketplace. A key win in Q1 includes a private equity own brand that thanks to the overwhelming results we delivered, extended their contract from a small trial to a three-year term with a seven figure contract value, including an agreement to prepay their full three-year contract license fees within the first 13 months of the 36-month contract. This transparent owns and operates more than a 1,000 additional locations across to other brands and we're confident we'll expand this relationship to their entire system, which would triple the contract value. We're also told that they intend on acquiring several other brands over the coming years and our goal is to ensure their entire system leverages our full solution portfolio as it grows, should they hit their growth goals, as one account alone could double our current annual revenue run rate. More importantly, this wins stand from a growing relationship with a major beverage brand. Consumer Packaged Goods brands or CPGs generate a material portion of their distribution through restaurant chains. For example, a brand like Chick-fil-A, they only serve Coke products, while Pizza Hut only served Pepsi products. Other brands might serve snack products, such as Subway markets free to Lays chips like DORITOS. It turns out that these CPG brand set aside hundreds of millions of dollars in co-marketing funds, when brokering deals with restaurant chains. These marketing funds are use to help promote their products throughout the restaurants locations as well as other forms of marketing such as television or digital advertising. One major CPG brand that purchased last year and began evaluating how our product could enhance the value of their joint marketing efforts with their restaurant customers, as well as create a competitive advantage in winning and defending restaurant partnerships against competitors. We learn our product is uniquely positioned to drive value not just for the restaurant operator, but for the CPG as well given invaluable data and fully attributable marketing programs powered by our technology. For example, we could operate targeted mobile engagement campaigns that provide consumers with discounts and offers that include to CPGs products, such as get $2 off a sandwich with the purchase of a $20 off beverage. These campaigns drive product sales for the CPG increased traffic for the restaurant and extensive data for everyone so that the campaign can be fully evaluated performance, everyone wins. This potent combination of value for both the CPG and the restaurant operator has attracted a major beverage brand that works with more than 700 restaurant partners and represents more than $100 million of addressable market for our services. And just the last 60 days we have already one new customer contracts with this partner including one deal, where the beverage partner is even subsidizing the licensing costs of our solution on behalf of the restaurant brand. Collaborating with CPGs has quickly suggesting that our sales cycles can be dramatically decreased, while very efficiently expanding our reach directly to the vast majority of the restaurant space. Key to this recent win with the launch of our recurrency platform earlier this year. Recurrency is the combination of scaling our technology across thousands of locations, millions of consumers and billions of transactions over the course of the past few years, since commercially launching with Subway in 2016. In fact, the investments we've made in expanding our product value coupled with proven results has supported increases in our licensing fees. We're quoting as high as $200 per month per location, where brands maybe looking to license our full recurrency solution. To be clear, length of term, volume of locations and other factors ultimately shape final pricing. However, we've been very excited to see recently closed sales at prices of $100 per month per location, including annual licensing fees being paid upfront. According to the National Restaurant Association, there are over 1 million restaurant locations in the United States alone. For just 10% of this addressable market equates to $120 million in upside assuming $100 per month per location licensing fees. I'm also very excited to report on progress for making towards a very hot trend in the marketplace, digital ordering. The use of mobile apps, text messages and internet to order food from a restaurant or other food service outlets grew by 18% last year and now accounts for 1.9 billion food service visits reported by the NPD Group, a leading global information company. Carissa Ganelli, Chief Digital Officer of Subway stated that Subway’s goal is to make ordering and receiving in your favorite Subway meal as easy as possible. Having been recently featured with the GSMA and Google at this year's Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona, we featured a demo we developed with Subway where a consumer could place an entire order sandwiches, snacks and beverages all through the simplicity of a text messaging conversation using Google’s RBM or RCS for rich communication services and business messaging. This dynamic and interactive technology makes it incredibly easy for customers to get what they want using the conversational simplicity of text messaging and tap to select action. Last year, Mobivity selected to join Google’s early access program and it’s now among the first to bring RCS experiences to market. RCS as a part of the new GSMA universal profile for advanced messaging industry standard represents the next step in the evolution of SMS and provides businesses with a new way to engage and serve customers. Unlike mobile apps many of which are never used shortly after download, RCS reaches customers within their default text messaging app and app most customers check hundreds of times a day. For brands like Subway this technology will open a powerful channel for customers to find the nearest restaurant, learn about special offers, prepare an order and pay by mobile, while getting a truly engaging and personalized experience. We built the application showcase their customer searching for a Subway store by sharing their location with a simple button push selecting their sandwich with a text reply provide choosing from options on screen and making selections for size, beverage and desert all with fun images and simple tasks to confirm their choices. And all in the conversational dialogue they used to text friends every day. Orders placed via smartphone will become a $38 billion industry and make up nearly 11% of all quick service restaurant sales by 2020 according to Business Insider Intelligence reports. Given we’re now powering up to 80 million mobile marketing engagements per month, we’re well positioned to transition these marketing engagements to mobile commerce transactions and become a key point of sale for the industry. Last but not least, I’d like to comment on our progress to incorporate blockchain technology to power next-generation loyalty schemes. Recall that most loyalty programs create small brand specific data silos and a fragmented experience for consumers. Blockchain coupled with the recurrency platform can securely store transaction records across brands and allow consumers to build a currency that can be used as they go about their lives. Each transaction informs the brand we work with the consumer and enriches the consumers’ persistent digital identity. Consumers can take that persistent identity including their preferences and habits and leverage it across brand to get better more personalized service. With recurrency each brand owns the data about their interactions with the consumer. But the consumer owns the data about all of their transactions across all brands stored in the distributed ledger of blockchain technology. With it’s strong interest since announcing our plans to leverage blockchain technology. Beyond our publicized plans to build a blockchain powered program for Chanticleer Holdings and their burger brands, we’ve had several other perspective customers approach us ranging from a multibillion dollar CPG brand to various restaurant chains. We believe there are tangible revenue opportunities in adding blockchain technology to our solutions portfolio given the demand we’re seeing. We expect to announce additional customer agreement this year that create new revenue streams for us by applying blockchain technology to next-generation loyalty concepts powered by our recurrency platform. I will now turn the call over to Charles for a more detailed review of our financial results. And then I will come back for a few summary comments. Charles?
Charles Mathews: Thanks, Dennis. For the company’s first quarter of 2018 total revenue under the new revenue standard ASC 606 was $3.7 million representing a 75% increase over first quarter of 2017 revenue of $2.1 million. This increase is primarily due to the impact of ASC 606, which represented an adjustment of $1.6 million for the period. Deferred revenue was $1.6 million as of March 31, 2018 compared to $1.4 million as of March 31, 2017. Deferred revenue consists of payments received in advance of revenue recognition from customers and is recognized as the revenue recognition criteria are met. The increase in deferred revenue is due to the receipts of prepayments from certain enterprise customers. The deferred revenue balance on our consolidated balance sheet does not represent the total contract value of annual or multi-year non-cancelable customer agreements. The first quarter’s’ gross margin was 79% under ASC 606 compared to 74% under the old standard in the first quarter of 2017. The increase in gross margin is primarily due to the ASC 606 adjustments for the period. General and administrative expenses increased $233,000 or 23% during the first quarter of 2018 compared to 2017. This increase includes an adjustment related ASC 606 of $94,000. The increase is primarily due to the increases in personal cost and share based compensation expense. Sales and marketing expenses increased $263,000 or 21% during the first quarter of 2018 compared to 2017. This increase was primarily due to more commissions approximately $293,000, being earned in the first quarter of 2018 compared to 2017. Engineering, research and development expenses increased $942,000 during the first quarter of 2018 compared to 2017. This increase includes an adjustment related ASC 606 of $842,000. The increase was primarily due to an increase in personnel related costs supporting the Company's growth as well as fewer software development costs being capitalized. Operating loss for the first quarter of 2018 was $1.4 million compared to $1.3 million in the same period of 2017. Net loss for the first quarter of 2018 was $1.5 million or $0.04 per diluted share, compared to a net loss of $1.4 or $0.04 per diluted share in the first quarter of 2017. Net cash used in operating activities increased $1.6 million in the first quarter of 2018 compared to cash provided in operations of $237,000 in the same period of 2017. The increase in cash used in operating activities includes an adjustment related to the adoption of the ASC 606 of $714,000. Net cash used in investing activities decreased $223,000 to $32,000 for the first quarter of 2018 compared to the same period of 2017. The cash used for investing activities in the period was primarily the purchase of equipment and a capitalization of software development costs. Net cash provided by the investing activities was $1.3 million for the first quarter of 2018 compared to $38,000 provided in the same period of 2017. During the three months ended March 31, 2018, the payoff of a loan and payments on other notes represented $1.9 million. We borrowed $1 million from related parties and received $2.2 million from the exercise of warrants. As of March 31, 2018, our next cash was $419,000. With that, I would now like to turn the call back over to Dennis for his closing remarks. Dennis?
Dennis Becker: Thanks, Charles. With a growing sales pipeline, expanding partnerships and continued upside opportunities from existing customers, 2018 is off to a great start. New customer relationships such as the private equity own brand, I described at the beginning of today's call can generate a material uplift in our financial performance, couple that with a multi-billion dollar beverage brand partner to use in some cases even willing to subsidize the cost of our solution for restaurant operators. And we're developing an effective recipe to rapidly expand our market reach, reduce sales cycles and accelerate growth. We also continue to believe that our expected growth to the first [Audio Dip] positive operating cash flows by year. We appreciate your continued interest and look forward to sharing your ongoing progress with you.
Operator: [Operator Instructions] Our first question is from Jeff Porter with Porter Capital Management. Please proceed.
Jeff Porter: If you can give me a little bit more color on how the new accounting treatment increased our R&D spend by almost $800,000, I'm just not following through on how that would work?
Charles Mathews: Yes. Sure Jeff, this is Charles Mathews. The revenues that we had to recognize is 1.7 we had to have the employee expenses related to that recognition of revenue. And we have to recognize that employee spends about $935,000 relative to that 1.7 we recognized. So is that an – out of that $935,000, $841,000 was related to engineering, research, development.
Jeff Porter: So how should I think about sort of the R&D expenses going forward, are they going to continue to be $1.5 million a quarter?
Charles Mathews: No. As we recognized large enterprises contracts. We're going to see a bump in revenue relative to that and a bump in the employee expenses relative to that revenue that we have to recognize. So in periods we have new contracts with enterprise license agreements, you're going to see both revenue and expenses.
Jeff Porter: Is that because we're sort of recognizing that 70% of the licensing revenue upfront and we're trying to match the implied costs of what it's going to take a service that revenue?
Charles Mathews: Right. That’s generally true. As our revenue increases the cost associated that are going to – not – it’s not a fixed cost relative to revenue. So the variable costs are going to go down as the revenue goes up. So over time it's going to be left as a percentage basis.
Jeff Porter: And in addition the actual expenditures will be credited back over [indiscernible].
Charles Mathews: Yes. We accrete the expenses that we’ve recognized up front over the life of the contract.
Jeff Porter: Okay. Yes. And then the follow-up, as the Levi reported $21 million number for the total amount of contracts going forward. And I understand from previous call that some of those contracts could be one year, some could be two years, some could be three years. But can you give us a sense of a sort of what the average time span of whether of when that $12 million of contracted revenue would be expected to be realized?
Charles Mathews: Yeah. I mean the biggest clue is Note 3, if you look at the balance sheets were like separate out the ASC portion. You'll see that I've got a accounts receivable short-term and accounts receivable long-term. And since they're both about the same number it's just a fair guess that half is within 12-months and the other half is in the next 12-months. So just based on this presentation we're going to have two year average to recognize all that increase in accounts receivable.
Jeff Porter: Right. And that would be minimum contract revenues that I’m thinking the contracts where you have a significant variable piece based on number of text or whatever that wouldn’t be included in that minimum contract value?
Dennis Becker: Well, put it another way. The only thing that we’re recognizing up front is the portion its relative to the enterprise license a part of the agreement. Okay, so we’re not recognizing anything outside of the license portion. So that stuff is still non-GAAP and will be recognized ratably over the term of the contract.
Jeff Porter: Okay, thanks.
Operator: [Operator Instructions] Our next question is from [indiscernible]. Please proceed.
Unidentified Analyst: Hi, I was just wondering, can you just talk a little bit about your balance sheet specific emphasis on ability to these financial stuff without raising money and just talk a little bit about your debt which seems that are you paying 12% to 15% and the ability to get a bank line?
Dennis Becker: Well, we recognize that – we need to get more healthy and since I’ve been on here since March 26 of 2018, my focus is to make sure that we’re being more efficient we’ve recognized the situation where we’re at year end. We did a number of things that are discussed in the footnotes to make it better, but we understand we need to make it more healthy.
Charles Mathews: Yeah, I think I’ll add to that we mentioned that the recent [indiscernible] that we signed a seven figure contract with that the retire contract values do within the first 13 months of the agreement, so we expect questions from new customer sales also to buoy the cash flows that’s going to be big – I think development in our contract quality as we build new brand is the ability to command upfront payment, it’s also important that some of the brands that we already have in our contract, as we’ve mentioned in past calls are also under fairly large prepayment at the anniversaries of their the annual anniversaries of their contracts. So there’s quite a bit of cash flow left through of course remainder of the year from similar to be existing customers as well as their annual anniversary lasted and they required to pay the next 12 months up front.
Unidentified Analyst: So obviously that should be beneficial as far as your liquidity goes, but I didn’t really have a chance to go through the Q, but went into the liquidity session, a clearly a capital raises potential this year or you’re hoping to avoid that?
Dennis Becker: Well, we’re doing everything to avoid it. We don’t believe that we require at this time. We were able to get a clean opinion from auditors on our recent K, so with at least visibility in the next 12 months we feel real good with cash flow or the cash reserves that we have on hand.
Unidentified Analyst: Okay, thanks very much.
Operator: We now have a follow up question by Jeff Porter from Porter Capital. Please proceed.
Jeff Porter: Hi, guys, Dennis, thank you. Provide some color on sort of the new business initiative we have on the major beverage plan, could you just maybe explain a little bit more on how they see the value in what Mobivity brings to the table and sort of how you see working with that beverage customer going forward, is it just going to be on a case-by-case basis or do you see perhaps, a deeper relationship sort of with a global operating agreement?
Dennis Becker: Sure. So the first part of that question, there is a kind of money that is allocated to help these beverage brands customers market the beverage brand in parallel to the restaurant brands owned product, and you know the win-win there is – they’re just familiar to also help incentivize beverage attachment to orders and the restaurant brand wins, because a lot of times the commitment – their commitment they buy the restaurant brand for a fewer as well as a price on the beverage product if possible. And so they’re incentivized to drive as much volume as they can. The problem is that most of this money goes into untrackable nonattributable marketing channels like print, signage, menu boards and no one ever really knows the efficacy of how those dollars drive beverage attachment, and by allocating some of those budgets to our product, you get a lot of kind of the same benefits for example, our receipt product is essentially a display advertising product printing, targeted ads on receipts. So, by being able to include beverage products in those promotions as well as the beverage brands identity. They’re getting exposure, but that they’re also then being able to look at the full loop on how those redeem and cause incident left. So, it really creates the perfect win-win for the beverage brand to get data, to get attribution and to allocate those fill marketing dollars in a more intelligent way, and then a restaurant brand gets all of those benefits as well. So kind of in this new era, data has driven everything from presidential elections to general advertising, this is very congruent to how everybody is changing the way that they operate from a marketing perspective. And to the extent that there are only a few real massive players in the beverage phase that are fighting for these restaurant properties – we’re being viewed as a tool or a weapon in that arsenal to create a competitive advantage. it’s safe ways to the progress we’re making in this partnership and that we’d – I can comment that we’re already executing sales training, probably the sales force that fits beverage brand employees to work with pursue, sell and support restaurant brands, and beyond that, there are more strategic discussions underway as well. And this is all really developed just in the last four months or so on the heels of kind of the initial joint when that I commented on earlier in the call.
Jeff Porter: Okay. That’s very perfect. Thanks.
Dennis Becker: Yeah. Thanks, Jeff.
Operator: [Operator Instructions] Okay. This concludes today’s conference. You may disconnect your lines at this time and thank you for your participation.