ACCESS Newswire Inc. (ACCS) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good day, and welcome to the IAccess Alpha Virtual Best Ideas Summer Investment Conference 2026. Our next presenting company is ACCESS Newswire Inc. [Operator Instructions] I'd now like to turn the floor over to today's host, Brian Balbirnie, CEO at ACCESS Newswire Inc. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you, Paul. I appreciate yourself, [ Alan ] and the rest of the crew from IAccess Alpha allowing me to be one of the closing out companies presenting today. Virtual rooms are full, and everybody seemed to have a great day of it. So with that said, for folks that don't know who I am and who ACCESS Newswire is, my name is, as Paul said, Brian Balbirnie, I'm the CEO of the company. NYSE American traded ACCS is the symbol, ACCESS Newswire is the name. We are the third, fourth largest, give or take, every day changes volume distribution news outlet in North America. We are the fastest growing newswire still to this day. We benefit from having thousands and tens of thousands of customers that use our platform every single quarter to tell their story, both public and private. This presentation isn't much different than what I used and the last presentations and shows. So I may be a little iterative to somebody and repetitive, rather. But folks who don't know the story, I hope I get a chance to talk to you tomorrow and do some follow-up. A little bit of a back story, right, about us. ACCESS Newswire actually was a company started in 2006 called Issuer Direct Corporation. We began our market entrance as an NYSE-listed company in 2010, launched our news business, mid-teens in the 2000s in 2017, did some acquisitions along the way and then disposed of our Compliance asset and rebranded our company in early 2025. And before I go further into the presentation today, I'll maybe just pause and digest a little bit about what that rebrand and divestiture was. We had a 15-year-old, 17-year-old Compliance business. That was a stock transfer company, an EDGARization company, annual meeting management company. And because the IPO markets are what they were, we firmly believe that the growth opportunity for what an addressable market would be to warrant, being the size of a company that we aspire to be, wouldn't be in the public company reporting business. It would more or less be in the investor relations and public relations space. And so that's what ACCESS Newswire took on is a whole new life of being the IR/PR platform subscription company of choice. Today, PR distribution is worth about $2.5 billion globally. We compete fairly in that market. We're still very small, kind of $23 million annual revenue and growing now in the back half of this year. But we really look at this as a content distribution and repurposing market. And that really opens our TAM up to $9-plus billion globally. And I want to tell you how we're going to get there because a lot of folks are going to say, wait a minute, you got press releases or one thing, where you're going is different, but it's not. And I'll explain to you the reasons why it's not. We are very, very focused on using artificial intelligence and LLMs and MCPs inside of our network to be more productive for our customers, to help our customers do and tell their stories faster with more insights, where we're not about a company that wanting to change us to be an AI business. We are a human capital company. Stories come to life by humans. They're told passionately by us, executives alike. Regardless of if you're a [ sepreneur ] or a multibillion-dollar company, we do business with everybody. But that repurposing business is how do I take my story from a press release and bring it to life and social media, bring it to life of my newsroom and a blog, in a case study, a white paper, a podcast or a presentation. And we're building tools and technologies around all of that to be able to help our customers tell their stories at the right times, along with the press release. And so that very digital-first approach is going to continue to expand our subscription business and help us drive into this repurposing market that we talk so much about. How do we generate revenues? What we do? ACCESS PR, ACCESS IR, our 2 subscription platforms that we sell today to well over 1,000 customers that subscribe on an annual basis through distributed press releases, target media, pitch the media, optimize their storytelling processes, put their news on their website and monitor their brands, including social. And then ACCESS IR is not too dissimilar from what a PR company would also need as an IR side of the business that it would include both your quarterly earnings calls, your investor relations website and those press releases that we talk about just previously. Customers that are public do buy both of these, and this is where we see a big opportunity for us in our ARR expansion that we'll talk about in a few minutes. But before we do, I want to talk about 2 -- a couple of things that we've done recently this quarter that are not reflective in Q1 revenue that you've seen. You'll start to see that print in Q2 revenue going forward and building momentum as we talk about guided numbers. The first was we upgraded our ACCESS PR platform to include our social monitoring tools. Those social monitoring tools added about $2,400 annually to a subscriber. And not all of our thousands of customers subscribed selected social monitoring, but a good portion did. So we are going to see a good uplift in ARR revenue as a result of that. The second was just launched in the last couple of weeks. It's our Insight and Analytics Report. And this is a report that we've talked about publicly for quite some time, but more specifically the last couple of weeks, of what we said in our prepared remarks of #KilltheReport. The distribution report of the press release industry hasn't changed in many years. PR Newswire was super intelligent and smart when they did it 80 years ago, but nobody has evolved it ever since. They may have changed logos and colors and maybe put a more interactive map. But at the end of the day, all they really were telling you is how much traffic did you get to your press release and what was the potential audience of that press release and where is the engagement. And what we've decided to do is really look at the underlying story and the sentiment of what's driving interest in that article. So we now tell you what citations are available to you, meaning what LLMs picked you up? What's the readability, what's the penality? And how is it being perceived in the industry that you compete with? And that you've got your peers that you're looking at. We're now benchmarking you over 12 different ways and then giving you suggestions on how to improve and then obviously find better outcomes for your press release. Of course, we'll still tell you who clicked on it and where they clicked from and all the traditional things, but we're really bringing to life some very powerful MCP LLMs that we built internally to get our customers understanding the benefits of what proper insight analytics will be and the economic side for all of us as shareholders and the benefactors of that, we up charge our customers for that as well, both on the pay-as-you-go and a subscription rate. So two important revenue drivers. But how do we generate revenues from those products? I just talked about the ACCESS PR product averages between $10,000 and $12,000 a year per customer. the ACCESS IR suite is about $12,000 to $15,000. And then as I mentioned, customers can buy both, typically spend about $20,000 to $25,000 to do that. We talked about subscription upgrades, and that's the $2,500 to $4,000. We believe since the beginning of Q1 or the end of Q1 this year all the way into to the 12 months forward, we're going to have $2,000 to $4,000 worth of upgrade options given to our customers to select that they'd like. That left-hand side of your screen is our subscription revenue business. It accounts for 60% of our overall revenues today. That annual commitment, that recurring nature business is very important to us. We've guided that ARR numbers will increase. We'll talk about that in a second, and the number of subscribers will increase. But that top of funnel is extremely important to us, and that is on your right-hand side of the screen. And the top of funnel comes from customers that may not be ready to buy a subscription or utilize more of the platform. They come in and buy a single press release. They buy a single event, or they may buy access to something for a very short period of time. That top of funnel is driven by all of our brands. Most of you know ACCESS Newswire, which we're very appreciative of. But we do operate 2 of the most widely trafficked websites in the news world, newswire.com and pressrelease.com. Those 2 domain properties bring us 10 to 15 to 20 new accounts every single day. Customers buying a press release, again, top of funnel, where our sales and marketing engines go to work and mature these customers into larger spenders on a pay-as-you-go bundle basis or into a subscription basis. So you're going to see us talk a lot about top of funnel in the coming quarters about where our customers are coming from and how we drive it. Our top of funnel approach is, I think it's important to point out, also come from the London Stock Exchange, New York Stock Exchange, OTC Markets, where everyday customers are coming in subscribing to our platform via those direct connections and partnerships as well. As we move along, we talked about subscribers. We'll get right into the details. If you look over the last couple of years, we've moved subscription numbers from under 1,000 to now 1,100 plus and likely into the 1,200-plus here in this quarter. ARR numbers have been very, very impressive for us. We're proud of what we've been able to do, both from walking up current customers to rightsize contracts to sell in new customers at higher ARR values and adding more to the value proposition to the customer. So we've gone from about $8,000, all the way up to $12,800 at the end of Q1 for ARR average revenue per customer. And we believe that number will guide very close to the $15,000 number by the end of this year. So we see that subscriber growth year-over-year continuing to happen. The net effect over the 2-year period of 38% increase in ARR spend for these customers. This is a beautiful business when it comes to building tech, building infrastructure, the right human capital, amazing team that we've got, and infrastructure for this business to really grow and flourish. As many of you probably don't know, this is a highly fixed cost business. And so as we believe -- as we begin to see revenue coming in at a higher clip, meaning next year, getting into the teen digit growth, a lot of this falls right to the bottom line in this business as we continue to push ARR numbers. The premium tier launch is something I want to talk about. This is how we drive value to our customer. And so a lot of times, people will ask specifically in IR conferences that I go to, can you not just raise prices? You're not -- you're cheaper than everybody, just raise your price. And although from a [ steward ] basic business principle, one could argue you could do that. But for our proposition to the customer is we want to build value to you. We want to continue to give you things that you can't get elsewhere like our access and insights report like some of our social monitoring integrations that we're doing with Hootsuite is to build further, that competitive moat. So every single product that we launched this year and into next year is going to give us the ability to have this moat around our platform that no provider like GlobeNewswire, Business Wire or PR Newswire is going to be able to have. That will drive our cross-selling ability to give our multiproduct approach to each 1 of our customers and will also give us an AI-first focus on giving the customer the AI tools that they need. And as I said earlier, it's all about being an AI company. We have used AI significantly in our platform for the last 2 years to make the editorial processes run more efficiently, to preprocess articles quickly, to give the editors more human time to talk to the customer and really help them with their press release. And then lastly, we've built a marketplace and we launched it in the last couple of months to give our partners and customers the ability to bring their offerings to the table to our 13,000-plus customers and hopefully, to bring our offerings to their customers. And that is something I talked a lot about, about a white space opportunity and where we're headed as a business in the next couple of quarters. Where we're headed, I think I've talked a little bit about this, but I'll go through it a little bit now. Continue the new subscription tiers. We're going to release sub subscriptions here in the next couple of days. It's being worked on in marketing and development today where customers will be able to buy 2 -- 1 or 2 of the components of our platform to get started quickly and easier rather than buying the entire platform. And I've talked about this on our last quarterly call that if our ARR numbers begin to drop and our customer account numbers begin to cycle much higher, it's because we've made the decision with customer feedback to go to a lower tier subscriber plan. But we'll fully detail that in our quarterly numbers, so everybody understands what our core subscription business is still doing because we believe we're going to guide to that number. But where a subset can go to that can drive some volume into the business. And that ultimately is what we all want is to see that top line number continue to grow. That continued subscriber growth is going to happen both on the IR and PR side. I've talked a lot about all the products we've released and rebuilt for public relations, but we're also doing it now for investor relations. And so there's 2 new products coming to market at the end of this quarter, early into next quarter that will drive ARR for those customers on the investor relations side and ultimately get us down the hall to larger enterprise customers that we are working with. And we hope to work with more. And that will move our TAM expansion as we have an opportunity now to be selling content repurposing. We're doing it in some basic cases for a few accounts today. We're releasing our what we call [ Amplify ] internal system to an MVP group of customers is beta testers to help us get customer feedback loops moving to make that product even better. And we're super excited about some of the additional feedback that we've got. All of those things in combination give us that margin expansion opportunity. It really does provide leverage for the business. And although we operate a beautiful company today, we've got a clean balance sheet. We've got 1 class of equity, common stock only available. And it's out there today. We have less than 4 million shares issued and outstanding. We really don't have any debt. We're net cash positive. The business generates cash every quarter. We've got a great gross margin profile in the mid-70s, probably 5 to 8 points higher than anyone else in our industry. Last quarter, we had 11% adjusted EBITDA. There's a lot of really good things happening inside of this business. But like I've said publicly, we clearly know what we need to do. There's 1 most important indicator is top line growth. This business is built for that now. And when that comes back and the industry comes back to start the growth mode again, we're going to start to see that leverage both on our top and bottom line margin, EBITDA margin expansions. A little bit about industry, right? We want to look at this as there are probably 12 pillars of our values, but we're 1 of their with us down for today because time is limited to look at the fact that although we compete with these folks, we're the only publicly traded newswire available. There used to be others that were, and it was easy to gain information to understand. But now we're at the target for everybody to get information on us. We're the first newswire to have a subscription first kind of go-to-market. PR Newswire decision is mixed as it related to both of those companies. Business Wire is a solely focused transaction engine. They sell press releases. That's all they do. They do nothing else. To be fair to them, they do a really good job at it. But that's all they do. And the Globe Newswire notified, somebody may call them Bullish or EQ. They got multiple names. They're going through a lot of transition as well, but they're a very mixed business. We're 1 of the only ones that have the most advanced insights and analytics report. Or #2 by a citation, just not on this. Last PR Newswire is #1, and we're second already. And we talked about earlier, our gross margin profile is much higher than our industry average and our peers and still generating good adjusted EBITDA margins that we believe can get into the high teens and 20s next year. This chart is a little bit outdated, but not materially updated for it to be a different discussion today. When we look at our business, we tend to kind of think about peer values. And then we look at the business and reflect about what we believe our value could be. And then ultimately, we're judged on what the marketplace values the business at. And when we look at this, we want to look at it against an EV to revenue multiple to gross profit to adjusted EBITDA multiples. And as you can see from the highlighted area of what our current values are, this data was based on, say, a $7 share price, so slightly off from what today is. We're still traded at an extremely low multiple to what our peers have gotten in the IR/PR space. These are transactions done. This is not hypothesis. This is what were the businesses valued at and what were they acquired at and a take private and/or an acquisition. And on leaves us mediums alone, right? Because to be fair, it's just -- it's off the radar in my mind, but I wanted to make sure that it was here. And we really look at this and say this business is entirely not valued correctly. And that's evident because 3 of our Board members are buying back securities every single week. I bought back more today, a Form 4 will be filed tomorrow morning. The business is buying it back. We have an open market repurchase program to spend up to $1 million to buy shares back. We clearly see the value in what we're doing. We clearly understand where the business is going. And I hope that we are being able to tell a story in an articulated way that also shows the value to our shareholders and potential shareholders that could decide to take a position in the company. So in quick summary, single-digit growth, back half of this year, 5% to 7% growth projected for the business, double-digit growth next year. Gross margins sitting around mid-70s today will improve again into next year to get to high 70% gross margin. Adjusted EBITDA margins last quarter were 11%. We'll likely guide into that for the remaining part of the year into high teens, into 20 next year. Customer account numbers at 13,000, subscribers at 1,200, guiding to 15. And ARR going to $15,000 from about $13,000 today. All the right things are happening, top of funnel, customers are most important as we continue to grow and execute this business. We believe we have all the capital we need. We don't need to raise money. We're not in a position to be servicing some bad instruments in the past. We've really set the business up for success. It's hard to do everything in 22 minutes to tell everybody about who ACCESS Newswire is, how we generate revenues, how we view the business and how we guide the business and what we're excited about. I'm sure we're going to flip into a bunch of questions. And so I'm going to jump over to the Q&A section.

I see a bunch of questions. So if I don't get a chance to answer all of them, I will try to follow up with the folks at IAccess Alpha and have an opportunity to speak with you from there. The first question is, what are the key factors that give you confidence ACCESS can return to sustainable revenue growth in the second half of this year? That's a great question. And I'm going to answer it in 3 components. The first component is product expansion for us. We are delivering product that is new to the market that our customers are asking for, not what we're wanting to build. We're spending a lot of time with our product and development teams and our marketing teams to understand what the customer wants and exactly how they're willing to consume, use and pay for it, and that's what we're delivering. And so that's a big indicator. That's an attribution of why we've seen ARR numbers move like they have over the last several quarters, and we believe we're going to continue to see that happen. The second is, there is a prevailing thought -- and I don't want to be the educator of AI -- but there is a prevailing thought that more frequently used distributed press releases are then indexed at a higher rate for LLMs, list of calls and citations alike. So we're advocating to our customers as well as the industry that, that needs to occur at a faster pace, meaning tell more to the markets about what you're doing. And we're starting to see early indicators that, that is going to become an executable educational process, meaning it's being educated today that will benefit the market later. And that just as for revenue, but our customers from being mentioned. And that is important, and we've got a lot of marketing efforts to talk to folks about that. And then the third really is moving down the hall a little bit to what we talked about earlier in the presentation, that we want to get to the other side of the content repurposing market rather than the story retailing and distribution market. And it's not that we're going to waver from our strategy, who we are. We just know that partnerships and things that we're doing with companies like Hootsuite are going to get us there, and we see a clear insight to where that is going to meet our customer and what they're willing to spend. Second question is, customer retention improved to approximately 92% and management has discussed a goal of 98%. That's a great point. I did that in the last presentation I did. What specific initiatives have been the greatest impact on retention was the back half of the question. This is -- I love this honesty question-and-answer session, right, because this is always me giving the reality. We did a good job selling subscriptions at the beginning. We did a bad job of maintaining customers. We didn't understand the level of commitment we needed to be onboarding, training and building out a customer experience team as well as we have today. So we took our licks. We were down into the low -- we were actually 88% at 1 point. That improved to 92%, and we're likely guiding into the numbers of 98% today. That is a direct result of what our product teams and our CX teams are doing with our sales teams and our customers. We now tandem approach every single account with their account manager and a CX professional to train them and to them and follow up with them often, to help them build targeting and pitching, to help them understand how to monitor media and social. We're doing that better today than we ever have. To be fair, we're learning. And we've done a really good job of that. And I think it's a good metric for you all to be looking at from our business perspective every quarter. But I think another metric that you want to also focus on is net dollar retention. And today, the net dollar retention may be sitting at 100%, 101%. We want that number going to 105% and 110%. That's a strong indicator that we're continuing to sell our customers more of the new products and raising their spend as we continue to retain them. So yes, I'm happy with what my team has done. I'm happy with what some of the outputs have been and improvements and believe we can continue to get better there. Gross margins have historically been strong, and management has discussed the path back to high 70s, 80s range. What are the primary drivers behind future margin expansion? Another good question. Q1, we had 74% gross margin. Q4, I believe it was 77% gross margin. And if you go back through the prior several quarters, we typically fit the 72% to 77% range. And so there are some leverage quarters that are still a little seasonal for our business. Typically, we see Q1 as a little compressed. I will tell you, as part of our optimization operation efforts, we have done a really good job of minimizing fixed costs and the cost of goods scenarios, right? Distribution costs, editorial costs, trying to maintain and hold those steady. So as volume continues to grow again, we're going to see that improvement there. There is some [ muscle ] direct vendor costs that we've been able to eliminate beginning Q3 and going forward that we know will also increase gross margin a couple of percent. So we're doing all the right things above and below the line to manage the business, but nothing more important than just focusing in on growth. So we're confident we're going to see those gross margins continue to improve. Another question is, do you continue to actively repurchase shares despite maintaining a strong balance sheet? How are you thinking about capital allocation priorities over the next several years? We said this publicly, we're going to continue to do this. We have a very aligned management and Board with conviction about the business. Our capital allocation strategy is very simple. We're not going to pay dividends. We believe in buying our own stock back, and we'll continue to do that. We believe in investing in the business. We can't starve it. Like we said earlier, we have a strong balance sheet. Like we said earlier, we don't need to raise capital to execute the business, but we should be investing in the business. And we spent 1.5 years rebranding the company, building on new tech. We had some CapEx expense. We had some capitalization costs, and we've rightsized all of that now where our R&D team is our R&D team, and we don't believe there's anything further there. But our sales and marketing team needs to expand. So at the end of Q1, we hired more sales and marketing folks. We're going to continue to do that. This quarter, we'll hire more in the next couple of weeks to start next quarter. Those folks will come in. We train them. We love them. We make them effective. They pay for themselves. We hire more people. The more people we have out there telling our story, the better we'll do as a business, and we need to continue to do that. And so I want to invest in the business because of that conviction that the opportunity for us to grow is absolutely there. We just need more people to be shouting from the top of our new tree top in order to tell the world who we are. Next question -- and we're running out of time here, but I'll try to sneak through a couple more. For investors due to the story, what you believe is the most misunderstood and underappreciated thing about ACCESS Newswire today? I'm going to answer the question a little differently than I think maybe most would have the or given this question about their business. I think the biggest thing that's misunderstood is our volume to revenue ratio. When we entered the news market basically 10 years ago, we came in at the extreme low-price provider. So when we talk about having being the third or fourth largest news distribution outlet, it does not correlate to revenue. And so I think sometimes people look at our revenue and say, well, if they're as big as Business Wire in revenue and volume, then this industry really isn't very big. So maybe it's not an opportunity for us to invest in because the opportunity is not there for us. And that couldn't be any more wrong, right? Business Wire themselves probably generating about $100 million and $150 million in top line press release revenue. GlobeNewswire has probably doubled that. PR Newswire were probably triple that. The industry is there. That's just press releases, folks. That's not media monitoring database, analytics, pitching, IR websites, investor relations quarterly calls and social monitoring. There's a lot that we do here, and I think that's the biggest misunderstood part of our business is the volume of our industry and what we tell everybody is not correlated to our revenue. It's the complete opposite, actually. And once folks start to understand that, they see the opportunity for growth. Last question with a minute or so to go. The company has highlighted growth opportunities within investor relations websites, newsrooms and broader communication solutions. Which products are seeing the strongest customer demand today? Good and bad, the reality is our public relations products are where people are finding the value and we're selling the most. Our IR practice business, public companies themselves is sub-1,000 right, that we work with that buy subscriptions that are related to IR. We have 13,000 customers. Those customers are buying our public relations products. And so we see that as our biggest continued opportunity. There are more private companies in the world than there are public companies. But I will tell you that the IR practice business for us is near and dear to our heart. We've got some really, really innovative add-ons coming that will drive ARR, drive stickiness and help us continue to move upmarket to continue to get the big brands like Delta and UPS and Moderna and BlackBerry. There's thousands of really good customers here. I'm glad I got through most of the questions. I'm glad we had a packed virtual audience, and I couldn't be happier than the order to talk to you about ACCESS Newswire. Thank you so much for today.

Thank you. That concludes ACCESS Newswire Inc.'s presentation. Thank you very much for attending today's presentations. On behalf of all of us at IAccess Alpha, we would like to thank all of the presenting companies, investors and partners who help make these events possible. We truly appreciate the contributions from all of you, as these events would not be as valuable without your participation. We look forward to your attendance at our future events, including the IAccess Alpha Virtual Best Ideas Fall Investment Conference taking place September 15 and 16, 2026. For more information, presentation replays and updates on future conferences, please visit www.iaccessalpha.com. Thank you again for joining us. We appreciate your participation.