Marin Software Inc (MRIN) 2015 Q1 法說會逐字稿

Greetings, and welcome to the Marin Software first quarter 2015 financial results conference call.

(Operator Instructions)

As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to your host, Greg Kleiner, Investor Relations for Marin Software. Thank you, you may begin.

Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Marin Software's first quarter 2015 earnings conference call. Joining me today are David Yovanno, Marin's Chief Executive Officer; and John Kaelle, Marin's EVP and Chief Financial Officer. By now, you should have received a copy of our earnings release which crossed the wire a short time ago. If you need a copy of the release, please go to investor.marinsoftware.com to find an electronic version. Call participants are advised that the audio of this conference is being recorded for playback purposes and that a recording of this call will be made available on the Investor Relations section of our website within a few hours.

Before we begin, I'd like to note that our discussion today will include forward looking statements within the meaning of Securities Act of 1933 and Securities Exchange Act of 1934. These forward-looking statements include statements about our business strategy and outlook and statements about historical results that may suggest trends for our business. We make these statements as of May 6, 2015, and disclaim any duty to update them. For more information regarding these and other risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied in these forward-looking statements, as well as risks relating to our business in general, we refer you to the sections entitled Risk Factors in our most recent report on Form 10-K and our other filings with the SEC.

This presentation contains certain financial performance measures that are different from the financial measures calculated in accordance with GAAP and may be different from calculations or measures made by other companies. A quantitative reconciliation of these non-GAAP financial measures to most directly comparable GAAP financial measures is available on our first quarter 2015 earnings press release.

With that, the me turn the call over to Dave.

Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the call today. Our Q1 results exceeded our guidance on both the top and bottom-line despite continued headwind from foreign exchange. Importantly, we saw tangible signs of progress with our Ad Cloud vision in the quarter.

While still in the early stages, we are winning an increasing number of multiproduct deals and our broader vision for this space is helping to influence deals across our product portfolio. Overall, we continue to make good progress with our cross-channel go-to-market strategy and are seeing this play out as planned, as the productivity of sales force has increased.

In addition, our pipeline for social and display deals continues to build as we are seeing traction in both new and existing customers with these products. Having a best in class social product is generating an increasing number of opportunities with both prospects and existing clients alike. The value we can provide in our platform by providing search, social and display capabilities is positively impacting our win rates as well.

Our challenge and opportunity now is to get involved in more sales angles by showing we are no longer just a search Company but can now provide a true cross channel ad management platform that solves a growing number of pressing needs for digital advertisers. This effort will be increasing focus of the Company as we move forward in order to deliver early on our Ad Cloud vision.

Related to the core search business, the growth and search spending across the broader market have slowed somewhat. We believe this has been driven primarily by some customers taking from search spend while holding search spend steady to fund social and display campaigns given the growth and attractive economics available in many cases.

More and more we are seeing advertisers shift their thinking about search, display in social channels away from individual silos to a more holistic approach with digital advertising dollars moved freely to where audience and highest returns are available. I should point out that we don't yet have our fair share of our customers in social and display budgets, but we are well-positioned to grow our shares in these nonsearch categories while maintaining leadership in enterprise search.

While early, the number of multiproduct deals closed in Q1 was up significantly from the levels we saw the prior quarter. In addition, our pipeline reflects a continuation of this trend that we hope to deliver going forward.

Both social and display have the ramp period as either less mature categories than search. So the initial contributions to revenue so far remain modest. By combining these products and leveraging the data inherent in each across the platform, our Ad Cloud vision is suited to evolving and ever-more complex needs of digital advertisers.

More importantly, we believe that we will more fully capture this shift in spend as we continue to execute. To that end, in second half of this year we expect to report nonsearch revenues exceeding 10% of our total revenue for the first time.

We were pleased to win several of notable advertisers in the last quarter. One example was the new relationship with SolarWinds, a provider of IT management software. In evaluating platforms, SolarWinds was looking for a solution with powerful bidding capabilities, which was lacking in their previous provider.

What drew SolarWinds to Marin was our platforrm's proven patented bidding algorithm, as well as the transparency allowed in our bidding and reporting. Marin's no blackbox approach with Keith of SolarWinds was they wanted complete visibility into how and why automated bid calculations were being made.

With a global rollout plan for the near future, SolarWinds is also looking to take a cross-channel approach to their campaign management. As a result, our capabilities in both social and display were key influences in their decision.

Also signing with Marin this quarter was Digicel Group, a large mobile telecommunications operator in the Caribbean and Central American markets. Digicel saw the value of using both Marin's search and display tools together to hep push their customers faster through the sales funnel. In doing so, Digicel will be a what is specifically retarget converting customers, increasing their retention rate as well as pipe in audience data to Twitter to promote tweets to prospects that have visited Digicel's website.

One of the other key benefits Digicel anticipate taking advantage of by using Marin is our flexible reporting. Using MarinDimensions in our suite of reporting tools, Digicel will be able to reduce the amount of time spent on campaign management across regions, allowing them to invest more time on new opportunities and grow their business.

Another brand that we're proud to have brought on board this quarter is Time Inc. Parterneing with agency customer AKQA, Time required its agency team to use Marin to create more transparency across the publisher's multiple accounts looking for a single view of their data, Time will be able to consolidate 26 different publications of this campaigns on the Marin platform. Now, Time will have various campaign search data available at their fingertips for easy data analysis and program optimization.

We also made numerous product enhancements designed to improve the value we were able to deliver across the platform. In search, we released new features to improve our abilities to drive campaigns across the major players in the market.

For Google, we expanded functionality to better manage Google's shopping ads. For Bing, Marin debuted mobile and tablet bid adjustments among other capabilities. And for Yahoo Gemini offerings, Marin launched bidding support for Native and mobile campaigns, as well as campaign creation, enabling advertisers to better leverage this fast-growing publisher channel.

In social, we've been hard at work integrating our recent acquisition of industry-leading SocialMoov. We've completed Phase I of deliverables where we connected SocialMoov to our channel connect module to improve cross-channel visibility and performance along with adding the ability to pass revenue data back to our social product.

As we complete the integration of SocialMoov back in to the rest of 2015, we'll be able to leverage Marin's shared platform services to provide SocialMoov with Marin's enterprise class scalability and uptime. This will free up our core social development team to focus even more on rapid, customer-facing innovation such as support for Facebook's recently introduced dynamic product ads. And while on subject of Facebook, we also it completed the integration of Facebook's relaunched Atlas tracking technology.

In addition, we released one of our first core shared services service features which has implications for for the value we can deliver across the platform. In Q1, we launched a cross-device feature which allows Marin to uniquely identify the same person on multiple devices.

This is an important feature as consumers continue to shift their usage to mobile. In fact, in Q1,approximately 40% of search spend, 50% of display spend and 60% of social spend that Marin managed on the platform were ads shown on mobile devices.

With Marin's new cross device feature, as an example, if a person visits a brand's website on their laptop, Marin can now retarget that same person on their mobile device with a display ad. As we continue to execute on our cross-channel platform vision, platform shared services such as data, which includes cross device, bid optimization, personalization and reporting analytics are critical. We will continue to release features in these areas from a robust development roadmap that provide broadly across all products on the platform as we deliver on our Ad Cloud vision.

We also announced today that John Kaelle has as resigned from the Company to pursue other opportunities and spend more time with his family. He will be staying with us in the role of CFO until May 15 and than a special advisor until June 4.

I'd like to thank John personally on behalf of myself, the Board and the entire Company for his service over the last four years. John has built not only the processes, but also the team that has helped the Company scale from a private company through our IPO and into the public markets. We all wish him the bests in his future endeavours.

Steven Kim, our EVP and General Counsel, will be stepping into the role of interim CFO while we conduct a search for a permanent replacement. In addition Parveen Nandal, our VP of Finance, will be assuming the role of interim Principal Financial Officer and Jugnu Bhatia, our Corporate Controller, will be assuming the role as interim Principal Accounting Officer to help us through this transition. I have full confidence in our entire finance team and expect the finance function to run smoothly until we find a new leader to take John's place.

In summary, we are pleased with the initial results from our broaded go-to-market strategy as the interest for our expanded suite of Ad Cloud product is growing. In addition, our vision to seamlessly combine search, social and display in a single platform is positively impacting business in the individual product lines as well.

We will be working over the course of the year to build on this early success and increase the awareness of our products suite. We continue to believe that the Company is uniquely suited to meet the ever-changing needs of digital advertisers and their agencies worldwide.

With that, let me turn the call over to John to discuss the financials in more detail.

Thanks, Dave. I really appreciate the kind words. I would also like to take the entire Marin team, including our employees, Board of Directors, customers and partners, along with all the investors and analysts I've had a pleasure working with for the past four years. There's never a right time to leave a Company but I've decided to take some time off to spend some more time of my family.

I would echo Dave comments about our finance as I believe they are fully capable to assist Steve and the rest of the Company through this transition. That being said, maybe turn to the first quarter results.

Revenue for the first quarter came in at $26.4 million, up 16% year-over-year and down 2% sequentially from our seasonally strong Q4. This was above our guidance of $25.5 million to $26 million and was despite an impact from foreign exchange in the quarter of approximately $500,000, sequentially, a slightly higher headwind in our expectations of approximately $400,000 when we provided guidance in February. Overall, our revenue would have been up 21% year-over-year and in-line, sequentially, with Q4 on a constant currency basis.

Consistent with Q4, our geographic revenue mix was 34% international, and 66% domestic. And this international contribution is driving the FX impact I just described given the strength of the dollar.

The business continues to produce a balanced performance from both our direct and agency customers with the mix of quarter coming in at 52% of our direct clients and 48% of our agency clients, respectively. We served 820 active advertisers in the first quarter. This is up 16% from the 704 in Q1 of last year and up 2 sequentially from the fourth quarter.

There are several drivers in our active advertiser metric so let me impact the number for a moment. We added 12 new advertisers to the Q1 count from the acquisition of SocialMoov, which closed on February 12 of this year. I would note that there were more than 40 additional SocialMoov advertisers that overlapped with existing Marin advertisers already in the count.

As we discussed on the last call, we did also see some additional impact from our decision to focus are support efforts on larger customers. Though the impact to this impact was lower than it was on Q4, some smaller advertisers, again, fell out of the count this period.

One other note for this metric, as in past Q1's, we did see a net number of advertisers moving below the $2,000 revenue threshold that is inherent in our active advertiser metric definition during the quarter that still remained on the platform. In the quarter, the average length for all active enterprise contracts was approximately 14.5 months, just under the 15 month mark at the end of Q4.

In Q1, our revenue retention metric on a constant currency basis was in the low 90%s. As a reminder, revenue retention tracks revenue from all advertisers in the corresponding prior year period that remained advertisers in the current period and includes growth in spend from attained advertisers net of churn.

This metric was impacted in the first quarter by the moderation in same-store sales growth of search spend from our existing customers, given the macro issues in search Dave described earlier. Churn on a dollar basis has been very stable over the last several quarters.

Before moving on to the profit and loss items, I would like to point out that I will be discussing non-GAAP results going forward unless otherwise stated. A detailed reconciliation of our GAAP results to the non-GAAP results can be found in our earnings release.

For Q1, our gross profit margin was 67%, down 2% sequentially, but up 1% from 66% in the year-ago period. The year-over-year increase is reflected of the continued leverage in the business, along with recent actions aimed at improving the efficiency of the support organization.

Sales and marketing expenses were $11.3 million for Q1 compared to $11.6 million in Q1 of last year, driven by efficiency gains and lower variable compensation. Research and development expenses were $7.5 million in Q1, compared to $6.3 million in Q1 of last year.

This increased spending was driven by our ongoing efforts to expand the functionality in the breath of our platform to deliver on our Ad Cloud vision. Additionally, this line was impacted by roughly one month and one-half of R&D expense from the SocialMoov acquisition.

G&A expenses were $4.4 million for the quarter compared to 4.0 million for the year-ago period. Operating losses came in at $5.4 million for the quarter, compared to a loss of $6.7 million in Q1 of last year. Significantly improved from our guidance of a loss of $7.0 to $6.5 million.

Net loss for the first quarter was $5.4 million, compared to a loss of $6.9 million in Q1 of last year. Based on a weighted-average share count of $35.7 million, this produced a net loss per share $0.15, exceeding our guidance of a loss of $0.21 to $0.19. This compares to a net loss per share of $0.21 in the first quarter of last year, based on the weighted-average share count up $33.1 million.

It is also word noting that while the movement in foreign exchange rates did impact our top line in the quarter, the impact to the bottom line was minimal even the costs incurred in local currencies from our people and facilities spread across the globe. Adjusted EBITDA was a loss of $3.8 million in the quarter, compared to a loss of $5.4 million in Q1 of last year as we continue to make progress towards our breakeven target.

On the balance sheet, we ended the year with $52.8 million in cash and cash equivalents compared to $68.3 million at the end of Q4. As a reminder, as part of the February SocialMoov acquisition, we used $7.5 million of net cash for the transaction.

Moving on to guidance. For the quarter ending June 30, we expect revenues to range from $26.7 million to $27.2 million and non- GAAP loss from operations to range from loss of $7.9 million to a loss of $7.4 million. This should lead to a non-GAAP that loss per share in the range of $0.23 to $0.21, based upon a weighted-average share count up $36.5 million. As you consider our guidance for operating losses from Q2, please recall that we will be absorbing a full quarter of expenses from SocialMoov in the quarter.

For the full-year 2015, we are updating our guidance and expect revenues to range from $114 million to $116 million and non-GAAP loss from operations to range over loss of $21 million to a loss of $19 million. This should lead to a non- GAAP net loss per share in the range of $0.60 to $0.55, based upon a weighted-average share count up $36.5 million.

I would like to note our guidance is based on current spot rates. Given the recent strengthening of the dollar, our growth rates have been negatively impacted year-over-year by about 6 points in Q2 and 5 points for the year as a whole. Finally, like to reiterate we continue to anticipate reaching adjusted EBITDA break-even in the fourth quarter of this year.

Overall, we were pleased with the results from the quarter and early signs of success from are go-to-market realignment. Though we've seen some moderation of the broader market search spend and currency changes continue to impact our top-line growth, we do believe we have the right assets and strategy with our Ad Cloud vision and offer a compelling value proposition for advertisers around the world.

With that, I want to thank you for your time and I will turn it back over to the operator to open it up for questions.

Thank you.

(Operator Instructions)

Thank you. Our first question comes from the line of Frank Robinson with Goldman Sachs. Please proceed. Mr. Robinson, your line is live. Please proceed with your question.

Sorry about that. I was on me. Thanks for taking my question. I wanted to talk about the sales force. Can you give us the average tenure of the rep? I know you said they're making productivity gains. How far out are they from being -- from the sales force being what you would consider fully productive, and what are your plans in terms of adding reps to the year?

As we reflected on our last call, we are complete the core training that we embarked on the second half of last year, moving from a single product primarily to multiple products. We had a successful sales kickoff event in January, so we're at the early stages of building and closing the pipeline of these deals.

When we look at Q1 activity specifically, we have had good increase in terms of opportunities with multiple products attached to them. It's just continuing to execute on the plan that we've started. In terms of tenure, we don't report specific tenure. I don't have that at hand in terms of how long reps have been with us.

But we've been building this team over the course of the last couple of quarters. We have refined the experience that we thought could grow beyond search. As we've brought on new reps, we looked for a more diversified set of experiences.

But as you can expect, sales forces are continually evolving, we continue to add reps roughly at the rate of growth. We've seen an increase in activity per head while keeping the support cost for those folks relatively flat. We've seen really good improvement with regards to productivity in the sales organization in the first quarter.

Can you talk about the segmentation of the sales force? Are you talking about the Ad Cloud vision? Are reps going to customers with the entire platform, or are they segmented to where you could have separate deals in search and social and digital?

We have essentially four different levels in our sales organization. We have got our mid-market teams. We've got what we call our -- that's most an inside sales team.

We got our territory or geographic reps that are assigned by geo region that are selling at a slightly higher spend per month. We've got our strategic sellers that are selling to our largest spending clients and then we have our agency team.

I think across-the-board within each of those groups, we are not trying to sell the entire package all at once. This has been part of the training exercise to get in there and do some proper qualification info gathering and start with the pressing needs.

To give you one example, sometimes we will be in a situation where there is an existing search contract in place that may not be due or up for renewal for another six months. So we will get in there now and try and assess an opportunity to sell through a display or a social opportunity. Sometimes it's the same buyer. Sometimes these are different buyers, these decisions. But by and large, our strategy is to get one hook in, demonstrate success and then introduce them to multiple products in time.

Great. Two more questions. You said that you expect nonsearch revenue or nonsearch business to account for 10% of revenue this year. Could you share what it was last year?

And then last one, higher level, given the acquisitions and to social and digital, how do you think about -- how would you define your TAM at this point? How big the market is and who are your biggest competitors?

In terms of how big are nonsearch revenue was last year, we have been consistent in talking about that each earnings report. It's less than 10%. As we have indicated here on this report, we expect that to be greater than 10% in the second half of this year. We will provide more detail as we get to that.

In terms of our addressable market, there is a lot of debate in terms of the trends in this space. The majority of advertising moving towards what's called programmatic where there is automation applied to the buying and selling of advertising across all channels. The percent of the spend that goes towards platforms or technologies or analytics is the category that Marin falls into.

Each of those channels, I think, we talked about -- when we Magna global report, we look at search being an $80 billion global market, if I call specifically, gentlemen, correct me if I misstate here. I think the display is roughly in the $40 billion range globally. But there's a programmatic part of that is growing very fast and expected to be more than 50% of that spend within a few years.

And then you've got the social spend which is, I would expect is kind of in the $20 billion range. It's a combination of Facebook, Twitter, and the other large social publishers. I think if you add all that up, it's roughly in $20 billion range globally right now.

Those are the addressable markets for us, but we are a percent of that spend, if you will. That goes towards the investment in ad management technologies.

You can apply our average take rate to that, which has been pretty consistent. As we expand into the new channels of social and display, there is potential for that take great to tick up a bit.

Thank you, guys.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Nandan Amladi with Deutsche Bank.

This is [Jamir Golger] calling and for Nandan. I was wondering if you could provide a little more color on weak trends on the search and display ads that you are seeing. Is it specific to some geographies or some large or small accounts? Any segmentation you can provide.

Were you referring to my comment specifically about the trends in search spending I referred to the call?

Yes. In the beginning that you mentioned.

Right. That is specific to search. When you look at the reports from the other companies including Google and Yahoo, you see some of that same indication in terms of the broader market trends in search spending, we are seeing clients either holding that spend consistent or taking from search to apply it to emerging channels like social and programmatic display.

Our biggest challenge right now I think as a Company is that we are still, today, primarily seen as a search company. And it is up to us to go-to-market with better sales and marketing execution to capture our fair share of that on a shift in budget from search into these other channels. Does that make sense?

Broad based then.

It is, it is not a Marin specific trend. It's broad across the market. I think when you look at the Q1 report from the other search specific publishers, you will see that, and that is been happening for several quarters.

Got it, and then my second thing is on the timelines for the new CFO search, any plans you have in mind right now?

No, this is a relatively new change for us. I feel very good and confident in the team that we have in place. John has done an amazing job in building a strong team, strong processes.

Both Parveen and Jugnu are strong in there respective areas of finance and accounting. I don't feel a hurried rush to just fill a CFO slot. We are going to take our time to find the best possible candidate for Marin Software.

Thanks, and a last one. How much did SocialMoov contribute in this quarter and what you think it's going to contributing Q2?

We're not breaking it out. What we've talked about is, again, we believe SocialMoov as well as the contribution on the display side from Perfect Audience from our acquisition last year, we believe that those two combined will crest over 10% mark in the back half of the year. We said when we announced the acquisition last quarter that we felt that SocialMoov itself would contribute a few million dollars on the full-year.

You had the few million comment, I was wondering if you can provide more color on that. Got it, no, that's good enough. Thanks so much.

Thank you. Next question comes from the line of Tom Roderick with Stifel.

Hi, it's Parker Lane in for Tom Roderick. I was just wondering if you could comment on the size of your R&D team, post integration of SocialMoov, and do you expect to make any more hires there throughout the year?

I'll just give a broad comment, at John can maybe follow-up with specifics if you need more. But we remain committed to R&D. We are a technology company. We do benchmark a bit higher than other companies in terms of our investment in R&D.

We picked up, obviously, a development team largely based in Paris with SocialMoov. We have a real opportunity with integrating their back-end with the core Marin Software infrastructure to free up that team. Not use it as a strategy to reduce headcount, but have more investment on the front-end and more innovation features that are really required in social.

We've continued to expand that team. That is the priority hiring area of our business, along with a quota carrying sales headcount.

Do you have any other specific -- you can see it in the metrics around percentage of revenue, I think we're in the high 20%s in Q1.

Yes, that's what I would say, we continue to invest and prioritize that investment. Longer-term in the model, we would put out a long-term model, it's in the Investor Relations deck that's on the website.

Over time that investment will moderate as a percentage of revenue, but it near-term it a remains area of focus for the Company. And while we're looking for leverage on all of the lines and have seen it particularly in the cost of revenue line, that would be an area still of prioritization in terms of investment.

I would just add that, you will recall that we had made some important changes in our product and engineering team starting Q4 last year. We brought in Avik Dey, he's got distributive database experiences in companies like eBay, Intel and others.

We been doing a lot of innovation to Marin's platform infrastructure, other features around data, specifically, accessibility of data, how we capture managed data for our clients and use that to drive unique results. When we talk about the combination of these channels, we are leveraging data sets from one channel and applying it to another. That's a relatively new strategy for Marin and so it requires some investment over the next couple of years to bring some of those opportunities to light.

All right, thanks, guys.

Thank you.

(Operator Instructions)

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Karen Russillo with Wells Fargo. Please proceed.

Thanks for the question. I was wondering, as you move into these other areas and are getting more -- advertisers are getting more focused, they are shifting more dollars to search, shifting more dollars to social, what, as a company, what are you guys doing to try and promote yourselves to try and get the message out there that you have these other products that you -- you are not just search anymore? What sorts of things are you doing to promote yourself?

Yes, we have a pretty aggressive event calendar throughout the year. You see it in some of our expense lines in Q2. We haven't let up on that.

Last week, for example, we were in New York with MarinMasters event. We have five of those a year in the major markets. We were oversubscribed for the first time. We were sold out, we were turning away both clients and prospects.

When you start to move into channels like social, that does capture more attention we found. We are out there, we are at TMO events, we are hosting our own events, and we are doing what we can to create awareness for ourselves.

Great, and then I just have one quick follow-up. If you could remind us what the CapEx plan is for 2015?

I don't think we have given and exact forecast on it. Last year we were at I believe 6% or 7% of revenue. I would imagine that this year it would be roughly in the same range on the full year.

Okay. Thanks a lot.

Thank you. We have no further questions in the queue at this time. This concludes today's teleconference. You may disconnect your lines at this time, and I thank you for your participation.