Synchronoss Technologies, Inc. (SNCR) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

My name is Jeff Miller, the CEO of Synchronoss Technologies. And joining me is Lou Ferraro, our CFO. I presume that many of you may not be familiar with Synchronoss. So we'll use this opportunity to get you introduced to the business quite quickly and why our business has turned itself around and put ourselves in a great trajectory for growth. I'll save you the safe harbor. So I think you're well familiar with those. But Lou and myself represent a microcosm of the leadership that we have across Synchronoss Technologies. And as we'll introduce you, we're a software solutions provider to the telecommunications industry. Both of us and the rest of our leadership team all have extensive, in many cases, decades of experience of working inside of telecommunications operations, whether it's AT&T or Verizon or companies that have served them like Motorola or others. As a result of that, we understand the language, the vocabulary, the technology that is embedded within the telecommunications organizations, and that allows us to serve them with software solutions. So what Synchronoss does, we are a Personal Cloud solution that we provide to global service providers. And they offer it to their subscribers on a branded basis, so we do it on a white-label basis. They offer to their subscribers to create engagement, interaction with their clients and to drive revenue growth and retention. So we're known to subscribers around the world as Verizon Cloud or AT&T Cloud or in Japan with SoftBank as Anshin Data Box, which means peace of mind in Japanese, but it gets the same connotation across. We're here to digitally protect and privately protect your digital content as a consumer. We do so on a very large scale, and we do it around the globe. Every day, over 50 million photos and videos are uploaded into the Synchronoss platform from the subscribers that utilize our platform today around the world. We just announced last week at the Consumer Electronics Show that we've exceeded the threshold of 11 million subscribers who are utilizing our platform once again around the world. And then the companies with which we have existing contracts represent over 400 million subscribers within their base. That is the immediate addressable market for us. And with 11 million subscribers currently on the platform, we're only about 2.5% penetrated and therefore, a great opportunity for growth, just with our existing customers. The reason we're relevant in the telecommunications world today is because we've generated over $2 billion of top line revenue for our clients. Verizon alone last year generated over $0.5 billion on Verizon Cloud as a value-added service business. They charge their subscribers a premium every month to digitally back up their content. We create that experience from start to finish, from the application to the way they interact and engage with that application and how we use generative AI to allow their consumers to modify old photos and turn them in from back -- black to white to into color or to apply any number of filters to enhance their capabilities. As I mentioned, our business is global, over 750 employees around the world, more than half of those in our India operation. But we've got development centers in Dublin, Ireland; in New Jersey, which is where our headquarters is; as well as an operation in Tokyo to support our clients in Japan. The brands you see represented at the bottom are our largest clients, and they represent that 400 million subscribers that I talked about earlier. To introduce you a little bit to the current metrics, as we concluded Q3, we updated our guidance and also reported our results. 5% year-over-year growth on a top line basis also matched 5% growth on our subscribers. And as you can appreciate, since this is a SaaS-oriented business, we enjoy a portion of the revenue that each subscriber pays to the operator every month. We are growing our revenues very closely aligned to the growth in subscribers. Our business because it's also SaaS-oriented, over 90% of our revenue is recurring, shows up in those monthly subscriber fees. And over 75% -- actually now as of an announcement we made at the end of the year, over 90% of our revenues going into 2025 are under contracts that have 3 years of length or greater with those telecommunication service providers. Our revenue guidance, between 120 -- $172 million and $175 million; EBITDA guidance, $47 million to $48 million. We lifted our guidance expectations for both of those metrics at the end of Q3. What we've done over the last 3 years for Synchronoss is very purposefully narrow the focus of the company to our cloud solution. We had formally been providing clients, for the last 20 years, a variety of technology software solutions that serve their businesses. Some of those were in the messaging arena. Some of those were there to automate network operations like the activation of a new client, but we divested those companies over the course of the last 3 years, placing all of our focus, all of our eggs in the cloud basket. And as a result, we are now a pure-play cloud business with much stronger financial operating performance. We were cash flow positive in 2023, '24, and we expect that trend to well continue. And we are backed by very long-term agreements. Our largest relationship is with Verizon. That contract runs all the way through 2030, which is a unique position for Verizon to extend a contract that long. In December, we executed a 3-year extension to our relationship with AT&T and also an extension to our relationship with SFR in France. And our SoftBank contract is a 5-year contract. So we've got a very solid foundation upon which to build and an opportunity to continue to take this platform and spread it elsewhere. That speaks to the market opportunity. So at this point in time, it's already a $20-plus billion market for digital backup of consumer content, growing at a 25% rate over the next few years. And we have a global opportunity that we're really just beginning to tap as a relatively small company. That just gives us a license, we think, to take advantage of that growth in the market and the underpenetration of cloud subscriptions. Everyone might think, well, look, we all have digital backup for our content. I use iCloud. I use Google Photos. Well, in fact, only about 1/3 of subscribers today have a digital subscription that they utilize to back up their digital content. And 1/5 of subscribers don't back up anything at all. So there is an opportunity for the global telecommunications provider to be that trusted backup adviser to how they manage digital content in the future. And you can all appreciate with the proliferation of photos, TikTok, videos how much more digital content is being captured every day. In our case, another 50 million photos will take place today. Our most recent market expansion was in Japan. We launched the Anshin Data Box solution for SoftBank in November of '23. It's off to a very strong start with hundreds of thousands of subscribers already on the platform as we concluded 2024, and they represent millions of subscribers alone. So it just gives you an idea and a concept that our market potential for growth even with our existing customers is vast. But the reason we were at CES last week was not only to take care of our existing clients, but also to talk to many existing prospects that are out there, who are considering also extending a white-label cloud solution to further endear those subscribers to their brand name and to generate new revenues and to improve their customer churn or their retention. Our solution is a visual, engaging, interactive service that you capture primarily through a mobile phone, but also we have desktop solutions, tablet-based access or web-based access. So we give you the option to choose what devices you want to work with and what operating systems you'd like to work on to capture your digital content, which speaks to why people come to us, and they don't simply rely on Apple and Google to provide digital content solutions. Those 2 are biased towards their operating system. We're agnostic. So you can have a family of 5 with a combination of Android and iOS devices. And we will capture and back up all of that digital content and enable you to share it across that family without worrying about what device you're on or what operating system you might be on. We also have enhanced security. We will never sell or advertise to you based on the digital content that you've captured. That, too, differentiates us from the Apples and the Googles of the world. And therefore, it provides a higher level of consumer security that their content is protected always and not exposed to anybody else. In fact, we were the first in the market to introduce a private folder functionality that requires additional biometric or password functionality for a subset of your content that you want to protect especially. We also provide you all the things you would expect in today's technology generation. We use generative AI as a means by which to enhance the digital content, allowing you to take a photo again that might have been captured 10 years ago and update it and apply a filter to it to make it an anime version of that such that you're more likely to capture and share that with others and engage with that content. And the more consumer engages with their content, the longer they will keep their cloud subscription and the less likely they are to churn from one operator to another because that operator is already protecting their background. Now as we work with our clients, we have a host of channels through which to communicate with their subscribers. Most of our clients come through a digital onboarding process when they power up a device. They are curated -- walk through a curated process of starting up the device, walking through how you get introduced to an offer to take advantage of Verizon Cloud, for example. We put them on a 30-day trial. And our conversion rates to those -- from those trials to end up users are greater than 80%. So we have that digital avenue, which is primarily the on-ramp. However, there's SMS communication. There's my account applications. There's using their sales force in the retail store. All of these channels are available to us to continue to expand the penetration of our activities with our existing customers. That gives us a lot to work on as we move forward. Now let me allow Lou give you a little view of our financial performance and where we're heading.

Thank you very much, Jeff, and good morning, everyone. As we look out at Q3, Synchronoss again experienced another positive quarter of momentum as a cloud-only company. As Jeff mentioned, 92% of our revenue was recurring. It was our 18th consecutive quarter of 5% or higher subscriber growth. And on a year-over basis, our GAAP revenue improved by 8%. Importantly, our margins also improved. Our gross margin on a GAAP basis was almost 70%, and it was in excess of 75% on an adjusted basis. As a cloud-only business, it's allowed us to focus on maximizing our return for our shareholders. Just in the last 2 years, we have more than doubled our performance of how we're bringing forth EBITDA improvement to the market, as you could see, going from 16% to 27% EBITDA margin and with our adjusted guidance going from 47% to 48% (sic) [ $47 million to $48 million ]. And with our continued subscriber growth fueling revenue growth, EBITDA growth, which will translate to cash flow improvement, will continue in the future. For 2024, our financial guidance. Our GAAP revenue, we increased low end, kept the top end at $172 million to $175 million. We adjusted our EBITDA guidance up to $47 million to $48 million, and we'll have positive net cash flow of about $5 million. Also, very importantly, on this slide is our last bullet. Synchronoss is one of the companies, especially in the small and microcap space, that is still waiting on the federal government to pay for their CARES Act tax refunds that go all the way back to the initial Trump administration. We filed for $42 million of refunds. We received $14 million very expeditiously, and now we have $28 million plus interest remaining. That process with the federal government goes through 3 steps or 3 phases: an audit phase, the tax computation specialist phase and then a joint committee review before check is issued. I'm happy to say that as of the 20 -- December 20, we're now into that joint committee process. They then review that. They speak to Ogden, Utah, and they issue your payment. The better news for us is we know from the auditor that our $28 million refund has been validated by the tax computation specialist, so we feel very confident that we will be receiving that refund plus the applicable interest. Finally, Jeff touched on something very important. If you look back to Synchronoss in 2023 when we were a digital business, a messaging business, a network business in addition to cloud, we had some trends that weren't really exciting. Our revenue was declining. Our recurring revenue was hovering in the low 80s. We were struggling to stay above 60% adjusted gross margin, and our EBITDA margin was sub 20%. We've cleaned all that up as a cloud-only company, both by improving our subscriber growth, improving our revenue growth, but also addressing and making sure our cost structure is optimized as a cloud-only company. That has led to what we believe will 30 be -- be 30%-plus EBITDA margins and free cash flow positivity into the near future. I'll now turn it back to Jeff to close.

So 2024 was, for us, our first full year operating as a cloud-only company. And it was pivotal for our operating performance and for our customer relationships. So during that period of time, we did sign many additional contracts that put over 90% of our revenue under very long-term protection, creating a great foundation upon which to build. We also, during that period of time, demonstrated that this model had great financial elements to it. So our margins improved, our revenue grew, our subscriber growth grew. So we are now in a position to be, ongoing at this point, on a growth path with great profitability, cash flow positive, things that we had been working on for the last couple of years. We also took a step last year to improve our balance sheet. We replaced an existing preferred stock position that was out there at an expensive rate and also redeemed a number of our outstanding bonds and put us in a position where we've improved our cost of capital in 2024. And we plan to take further steps in that as we get into 2025 and beyond. We're also maintaining competitiveness, believe it or not, with the Googles and the Apples of the world, ensuring that no subscriber is compromising by utilizing our cloud solution in relation to iCloud or Google Photos. And we do that by continuing to leverage machine learning, AI. We use open source models to do that at a competitive price. And it allows us to constantly evolve and improve the engagement with the subscriber. We hit that milestone of 11 million subs right at the end of the year, and we have been recognized as the world leader in providing a white-label solution. There is no one out there that works with the scale or the brand names that we do anywhere else in the world. And as a result, when a service provider in the U.S., Asia or Western Europe, in particular, are looking to partner and potentially put their own brand name behind a cloud solution to provide their -- to their subscribers, Synchronoss is the one to trust and what puts us in a great position for the future. We would also invite you to try this for yourself. So you can either scan the QR code, we can provide you a card later on at the end of the presentation such that you can go into our own Synchronoss Cloud. We call it [ Capsule ]. It would allow you to create your own account, test it out, download some of your photos, capture and see how we will invite you to engage with that content over time to remind you of memories and flashbacks and history that you've had in the past and invite you to share that content with other people.

So any questions? We'll kind of leave it at that. Yes? You have anything? Yes?

[indiscernible] I know you guys have -- do you have any plans or what are the plans [indiscernible] GAAP net income positive [indiscernible]?

Yes. Do you want to comment on that? I don't need this anymore.

From a GAAP net income perspective, in Q3, we weren't GAAP net income positive for one event. We had to deal with some foreign exchange losses, which on our transfer pricing between our entities, that can happen to us on occasion. We suspect that, that trend in Q4 is going to switch back to be considerably positive, which will basically take a lot of that negativity that we had in Q3 away. And it should put us on a trajectory other than major FX fluctuations to be net income positive on a go-forward basis as well. Good question.

Any others? Thank you for joining us. Hope you have a great rest of your day. Thank you.

Thank you.