iPower Inc. (IPW) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for participating in today's conference call to discuss iPower's financial results for its fiscal second quarter 2025 ended December 31, 2024. Joining us today are iPower's Chairman and CEO, Mr. Lawrence Tan; and the company's CFO, Mr. Kevin Vassily. Mr. Vassily, please go ahead.

Thank you, Josh. Good afternoon, everyone. By now, everyone should have access to our fiscal second quarter 2025 earnings press release, which was issued earlier today at approximately 4:05 p.m. Eastern Time. The release is available in the Investor Relations section of our website at www.meetipower.com. This call will also be available for webcast replay on our website. Following our prepared remarks, we'll open the call for questions. Before I introduce Lawrence, I'd like to remind listeners that certain comments made on this conference call and webcast are considered forward-looking statements under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements are neither historical facts nor assurances of future performance. Instead, they are based only on our current beliefs, expectations and assumptions regarding the future of our business, future plans, strategies, projections, anticipated events and trends, the state of the economy and other future conditions. Because forward-looking statements relate to the future, they are subject to inherent uncertainties, risks, changes and circumstances that are difficult to predict and many of which are outside of our control. Our actual results and financial condition may differ materially from those indicated in these forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are also subject to other risks and uncertainties that are described from time to time in the company's filings with the SEC, including our annual report on Form 10-K, which was filed with the SEC on September 20, 2024. Do not place undue reliance on any of the forward-looking statements, which are being made only as of the date of this call. Except as required by law, the company undertakes no obligation to revise or publicly release the results of any revision to any forward-looking statements. Our presentation today also includes certain non-GAAP financial measures, including adjusted net income, EPS and supplemental measures of performance of our business. All non-GAAP measures have been reconciled to the most directly comparable GAAP measures in accordance with SEC rules. You'll find reconciliation tables and other important information in the earnings press release and Form 8-K we furnished to the SEC this afternoon. With that, I would now like to turn the call over to iPower's Chairman and CEO, Lawrence Tan. Lawrence?

Thank you, Kevin, and good afternoon, everyone. We delivered strong results across all key financial metrics in our fiscal second quarter, while further enhancing our SuperSuite platform. Throughout the quarter, we continued to optimize operations and strengthen our presence across both our established and emerging sales channels. We also remain focused on supply chain diversification by exploring new supplier relationships beyond our existing network, reinforcing our commitment to build a more resilient and adaptable infrastructure. Our SuperSuite platform is gaining further momentum as we drive sales growth for partners with innovative product catalogs. Additionally, the platform offers strategic insights that enhance our operational efficiency and competitive positioning in the market. SuperSuite's continued revenue acceleration underscores the value we bring through our expertise in supply chain management, fulfillment and merchandising. As we advance our pipeline of prospective partners, we are focused on scaling SuperSuite's capabilities, and we anticipate it will grow as a larger share of our overall revenue mix. This quarter, we took meaningful steps to strengthen SuperSuite by integrating critical functions from value-added partners across logistics, merchandising and data analytics to optimize our service offerings. These enhancements reinforce our commitment to fostering a fully connected ecosystem where all partners collaborate towards a common goal that is driving sales in both U.S. and international market. By creating seamless integration across the supply chain, we empower our partners with the tools to expand efficiently, navigate shifting market dynamics and optimize their operations for long-term success. This collaborative approach positions SuperSuite as a leading comprehensive solution for today's evolving e-commerce and supply chain landscape. We continue to make steady progress with our recently launched SuperSuite supplier portal as well, refining its capabilities to enhance supplier collaboration and streamline operations. This platform is designed to optimize supplier interactions by providing data insights, facilitating access to multiple sales channels, improving shipment efficiency and enable seamless collaboration on merchandising strategies. As part of our ongoing innovation efforts, we are actively researching artificial intelligence applications to further enhance the platform's predictive analytics, automate routine processes and provide smarter decision-making tools. Integrating these advanced features will enable us to foster stronger engagement between our suppliers' internal teams and partners while driving greater efficiency across the supply chain. We have always prioritized diversifying our revenue streams as evidenced by the launch of SuperSuite and our continued expansion into new sales channels like AliExpress. Our approach to channel expansion is strategic, focusing on strengthening our presence on our established channels like Amazon, where we have a proven sales track record and well-defined operational processes. We -- at the same time, we continue to build our momentum on other channels like TikTok, which offer access to younger demographics and the growing social commerce space and Tmall, which unlocks new revenue avenues for brand exposure and sales growth in rapidly expanding marketplaces. Our commitment to expanding across these diverse channel underscores our commitment to providing a comprehensive multichannel solution that enables our partners to reach and engage customers both in the U.S. and globally with greater efficiency and scale. At the operating level, our ongoing efforts to optimize our cost structure have delivered meaningful results as we continue to drive gross margin expansion and operating leverage in our business. We also have officially shuttered our legacy commercial hydroponics business as we are now focused on our core competency as a data-driven, technology-driven consumer products and services company. As we have mentioned before, we are continuing to benefit from a healthier supply chain, which enables us to operate with lower level of inventory as lead times have normalized compared to recent years. As of December 31, 2024, we reduced our inventory level by approximately 12% compared to June 30, 2024. As we often say, we remain committed to enhancing operational efficiency and building a more resilient, adaptable supply chain. A key part of the strategy is our ongoing effort to diversify our supplier network, reducing dependency on any single region and strengthening our ability to navigate global supply chain fluctuations. Last quarter, we took a significant step forward by expanding our manufacturing base to Vietnam, reinforcing the stability of our sourcing strategy for both customers and partners. As we further diversify and begin generating sales with these suppliers, we expect to see meaningful benefits, including lower production and logistics costs. Our optimized supply chain will also be able to react more quickly involve macro changes, reducing our exposure to elevated lead times, cost and potentially import restrictions. These enhanced efficiencies will enable us to offer more competitive pricing, strengthen our margins and position iPower for long-term sustainable growth. We plan to continue identifying new supplier partnerships to further optimize our cost structure and ensure a robust, flexible supply chain that supports our growing business. Looking ahead, we are well positioned to build on our momentum and execute our strategic initiatives. We will continue expanding our sales channels while further investing in SuperSuite to enhance its capabilities and drive greater value for our partners. We are committed to strengthening every aspect of our supply chain, ensuring a resilient, efficient infrastructure that supports the evolving demand of e-commerce, supply chain management and logistics. By leveraging our deep expertise in supply chain optimization, warehousing and merchandising, we are well positioned to drive long-term growth for both iPower and our partners. As we move forward, we will stay agile, adapting to market dynamics and capitalize on potential M&A opportunities as we reinforce our position as a leader in end-to-end supply chain solutions. I will now turn the call over to our CFO, Kevin Vassily, to take you through our financial results in more detail.

Thanks, Lawrence. Unless referenced otherwise, all variance commentary is in comparison to the year ago quarter, so I'll dive right into the fiscal Q2 results. Total revenue in the fiscal second quarter of 2025 increased 14% to $19.1 million compared to $16.8 million. The increase was driven primarily by growth in our SuperSuite supply chain business as well as greater product sales to our largest channel partner. Gross profit in the fiscal second quarter of 2025 increased 15% to $8.4 million compared to $7.3 million in the same quarter of fiscal 2024. As a percentage of revenue, gross margin increased 40 basis points to 44% compared to 43.6% in the year ago period. The increase in gross margin was primarily driven by improved pricing through key supplier negotiations. Total operating expenses for fiscal Q2 improved 22% to $7.7 million compared to $9.9 million for the same period in fiscal 2024. The decrease in operating expenses was driven primarily by lower selling and fulfillment expenses related to our largest channel partner. Net income attributable to iPower in the second fiscal quarter improved to $0.2 million or $0.01 per share compared to a net loss attributable to iPower of $1.9 million or a loss of $0.06 per share for the same period in fiscal 2024. Moving to the balance sheet. Cash and cash equivalents were $2.9 million as of December 31, 2024, compared to $7.4 million as of June 30, 2024. As a result of our debt paydown, total debt was reduced by 31% to $4.4 million compared to $6.3 million as of June 30, 2024. As Lawrence mentioned earlier, we continue to benefit from the optimization initiatives we implemented last fiscal year, reflected by another period of gross margin expansion and improved operating leverage. We've also reduced our debt obligations by nearly $2 million compared to June 30, 2024, reflecting our commitment to strengthening our balance sheet. These initiatives, coupled with our accelerating growth in our SuperSuite business should enable us to execute on our goals ahead. This concludes my prepared remarks. We'll now open it up for questions. Operator?

Our first question comes from Thierry Wuilloud with Water Tower Research.

A few questions on the product sales. In the fourth quarter, if we look at seasonality, I mean, the main driver there would be the fan business, right, kind of a slow quarter for fans. But with your other product categories, are there any other seasonality factors?

We have clearly like products that perform especially like season for fourth quarter. Historically the hydroponics line business online with retail side performed well, a little bit better than on the fourth quarter -- I'm sorry, on the quarter end maybe quarter, but that's a smaller share of our business. It doesn't mean...

Okay. Maybe one more question on the product sales. You said you shuttered the commercial hydroponics business. I know you've been deemphasizing it, and it become a smaller and smaller percentage of your revenues. But why actually closing down that line of business rather than kind of letting it -- just letting it go?

We are transitioning ourselves from a hydroponic seller online retailer to multi-category retailer across multiple categories with other categories growing much, much more meaningfully compared to hydroponics. And we are also transitioning ourselves from just online retailer to a services provider with the SuperSuite platform. And that's our goal to become a platform that connecting supplier chains, logistics, merchandising and potentially financial services to -- and for the sales to facilitate sales for online and offline channels here and globally. By -- as a steps to accomplish that goal, we have shuttered down the commercial hydroponics business. It now no longer like contribute to our business revenue as it hasn't -- it wasn't contributing any meaningful numbers anyway before, like not long ago.

Yes. And Thierry, it's Kevin. Just to be clear, this is the commercial side. So this would be the business where we were selling product directly to commercial operators. We still do have hydro as part of the product portfolio and we're selling that through our online channels to consumers. But it's the commercial piece that we've officially shuttered.

Okay. Okay. Great. Moving on to SuperSuite. Can you give us an update of how many partners you currently have? And then you talked about a strong pipeline. I'm kind of curious, is there a limit in terms of how many new partners you can onboard on a quarterly basis? Or what kind of -- what's going to drive that business going forward?

Yes. While I don't think the numbers of the partners indicate much, -- what I can share with you is that we have -- now last quarter, like December quarter, it -- the SuperSuite side of the business contributes about 20% of the sales. So it's growing much, much -- it's growing fast.

Yes. Maybe another piece of data you can use, Thierry. It's roughly $16 million a year run rate. So that's up pretty meaningfully from kind of the prior year.

Yes. Last year, at this time, you were more on a, if I recall, $2 million or $3 million annual run rate, right?

We might -- I think we were a little higher than that this time last year, but it was definitely well below where we are right now. So we're absolutely gaining progress and momentum with this approach.

Okay. And is there any way to describe the pipeline of new partners or kind of just stay tuned and see how things go?

We -- at this time, we have a very healthy like a number of partners that we are actively engaging at different stages. We sign them on board continuously. What I can tell you is that we are not sort of potential partners with [Technical difficulty]

Okay. Kevin, I had a hard time understanding Lawrence. Maybe you can kind of summarize what he said.

Yes, that connection is breaking up. No, it's bad. Thierry, how about we take -- we can take that in the follow-up call.

Okay. And I had just one more -- one last question. I've kind of heard anecdotically that Amazon was kind of continuing to reduce their 1P relationships and kind of pushing some of the smaller players towards out of those -- that type of relationship. Can you like comment on that? And does it impact you in any way? I mean, does it make the fact that you have a healthy relationship maybe even more attractive? Or any thoughts around that whole dynamic there?

Just to reclarify, are you talking about like Amazon moving smaller vendors, 1P relationship to the equation? Okay. Yes, we don't get impact and actually, that's probably good, meaning that they are concentrating resources to focusing on better servicing larger ones. And that's actually -- I think it's a good thing for us.

And yes, Thierry, that dynamic is something that we've observed happening probably starting 6 months to a year into the pandemic, where I think Amazon was pretty aggressive in inviting suppliers prior to that onto the first-party platform. But the pandemic, I think, revealed some of the weaknesses that some of the vendors maybe with a little less operating history, et cetera, had in terms of execution and expectations that Amazon had set. And so I think this has been going on for some time. Reiterating Lawrence's view, our view is that during that period, we actually executed fairly well on the metrics that Amazon measures. And if anything, it has strengthened our kind of relationship there. So in some ways, that can be a natural kind of market share opportunity for us because I think you're better off in your ability to kind of get consumer attention when you're selling to Amazon's 1P platform as opposed to trying to differentiate amongst the very, very large set of competitors on a third-party platform. So we're encouraged by what we see right now.

I would now like to turn the call back over to Kevin Vassily for any closing remarks.

Well, we want to thank everyone for dialing in today. We look forward to speaking with you again for our March quarter earnings release and call and potentially at some conferences in the near future. Thanks again, and take care.

Thank you. This concludes the conference. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.