Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Wayside Technology Group Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen only mode. Later, we will conduct a question and As a reminder, ladies and gentlemen, this conference is being recorded. I would now like to introduce your host for today's conference, Melanie Caponigro. Ms.
Caponigro, you may begin your conference at this time.
Thank you, and good morning. Welcome to Wayside Technologies 4th quarter 2016 earnings call. Before turning the call over to Simon Ninance, the company's Chairman and CEO, I'll dispense with the customary cautionary language and comment about the webcast for this earnings call. We released earnings for the fourth quarter at approximately 5 pm Eastern Time Thursday, February 2, 2017. The earnings release is available at the company's investor relations website atwaysidetechnology.com.
Today's call, including all questions and answers, is being webcast live and a rebroadcast will be available at www.wasteighttechnology.com/sitecontent/webcast. This conference call and the associated webcast contains time sensitive information that is accurate only as of today February 3, 2017. A detailed discussion of risks and uncertainties are discussed in our forms 10Q and also in greater detail in our Form 10 K. Wayside Technology Group, Inc. Sees no obligation to sees no obligation to update and does not intend to update any forward looking statements.
Now, I would like to turn the call over to Simon Nineen.
Thank you, Melanie, and good morning to everyone. We had a great 4th quarter. Our net income for the 4th quarter increased 22% to 2,000,000 compared to $1,600,000 during the same period last year and diluted earnings per share increased 29 percent to $0.45 and were up 5% for the year. Our LiveVault division represented 88% of our revenue, and 84% of segment income in the 4th quarter. Our international sales were 12% of our overall revenue, down from 15% for Q4 of 2015.
I want to start by congratulating Kevin Askew as our vice president and general manager for Techxtend. Kevin was promoted in January, and he has been with us since 2010 and has been our Senior Director of Sales And Marketing for Tech Exens since 2014. Now, I'd like to hand it over to Bill Botay, our Executive Vice President it.
Thank you, Simon. As stated earlier by Simon, we had a solid quarter when compared with a good Q4 in 2015. In 2016, we grew revenue in all geographies and business units and did the same in gross profit dollars in most of them. Net sales for the quarter ended December 31, 2016 increased 20 percent to $120,000,000 compared to 99,800,000 the same period in 2015. Lifeboat Distribution segment net sales for the quarter ended December 31, 2016 increased 15% $102,400,000 compared to $89,400,000 for the same period in 2015.
TechXtend segment net sales for quarter ended December 31, 2016 increased 70 percent to $17,600,000 compared to $10,400,000 for the same period in 2015. The increase in tech 18, increased 9 percent to $418,100,000 compared to $382,100,000 for the same period in 2015. Lightbode segment net sales for the year ended December 31, 2016 increased 9% to $369,500,000 compared to $339,700,000 for the same period in 2015. TechXtend segment net sales during the year ended December 31, 2016 increased 15% to $48,600,000 compared to $42,400,000 for the same period in 2015. Gross profit for the quarter ended December 31, 2016 increased 16% to $8,000,000 compared to $6,900,000 for the same period in 2015.
Lifeboat distribution gross profit for the quarter ended December 31, 2016 increased 9 percent to $6,200,000 compared to $5,700,000 for the same period in 2015. TechExtend gross profit for the fourth quarter of 2016 increased 48 percent to $1,800,000 compared to $1,200,000 for 2015. Gross profit for the year ended December 31, 2016 increased 3 percent to $27,300,000 compared to $26,600,000 for the same period in 2015. And Lifeboat Distribution segment gross profit for the year ended December 31, 2016 increased 4 percent to $22,300,000 compared to $21,500,000 for the same period in 2015. Tech extend gross profit remained constant at approximately $5,000,000 for the years ended December 31, 2016 2015.
Gross profit margin gross profit as a percentage of net sales for the year ended December 31 decreased by point 5 percentage points to 6.5% compared to 7% for the year ended December 31, 2015. Like boat distribution segment, gross profit margin for the year ended December 31, 2016 decreased by 0.3 percentage points to 6% compared to 6.3% for the year ended December 31, 2015, The tech extend gross profit margin for the year ended December 31, 2016 decreased 1.7 percentage points to 10.2% compared to $11,900,000 for the year ended December 31, 2015. Net income for the quarter ended December 31, 2016 increased 22 percent to $2,000,000 compared to 1.6 during the same period last year. Net income for the year ended December 31, 2016 increased 1 percent to $5,900,000 compared to $5,800,000 during the prior year. We continue to face margin pressure ours, some segment had increases while others decreased due to these pressures.
Like the updates to light bowman and tech extend last quarter, We released a new Wayside Technology logo brand website and refreshed our brand image with very positive feedback from customers and suppliers. With operations for Lifeboat being turned over to Brian Gilbert in mid-twenty 16 and the recent promotion of Kevin asked you to run operations for Tech Xtend This affords me the opportunity to focus my efforts on working with them on our strategy and to spend more time with customers and vendors. We continue to be excited about our future as we manage our expenses and build our product portfolio to help achieve our growth targets.
Thank you, Bill. Mike Facey will now report on the financial numbers. Mike? Thanks, Simon.
I'll now review our operating expenses and some balance sheet highlights. Total SG and A expenses for the fourth quarter of 2016 increased $600,000 to $5,100,000, compared to 4,500,000 in the same quarter last year. Total SG and A expenses for the full year 2016 increased $600,000 or 9.4 percent to $18,700,000 compared to $18,100,000 in 20 15. The increase in SG And A expenses is mainly attributable to increased stock based compensation and employee related expenses to support our growth costs related to our new office relocation in October 2016, and increased public company compliance costs. SG and A expenses as a percentage of net sales actually decreased to 4.5% in 2016 compared to 4.8% in the prior year.
As Bill noted, our net income for the fourth quarter of 2016 increased 22 year, resulting in a slight increase for net income for the year ended December 31, 2016 to $5,900,000 from $5,800,000 in the prior year. Earnings per share on a fully diluted basis was $0.45 in the fourth quarter 2016, a 29% increase over the $0.35 the same quarter last year. Full year diluted EPS for the full year 2016 increased 5% to $1.31 from $1.25 in the prior year. The EPS amounts reflect the impact of a lower number of outstanding shares due to our stock buyback program in addition to the net income growth that Bill noted previously. Moving to our balance sheet.
Cash and cash equivalents was $13,500,000 compared to $23,800,000 at December 31, 2015. Our cash balance reflects the impact of a higher investment in working capital With accounts receivable increasing by $24,400,000 to $83,300,000 and long term accounts receivable increasing $3,700,000 to $11,100,000 The increased receivables were mainly driven by increased extended payment increase in payment terms for one of our large reseller accounts and the higher level of sales overall during the fourth quarter of 2016 when compared to the prior year. We collected about $9,500,000 on 2 large extended payment sales we made in 2016 in the 1st couple of months of 2017. During the year, we paid $3,200,000 in dividends and utilized $5,400,000 of our cash balance to purchase approximately $309,000 debt or balances under our credit facility. Working capital was $24,000,000 at the end of the year compared to $30,600,000 at the end of the prior year.
Our stockholders' equity now stands at $37,600,000 compared to $38,700,000 in the prior year. At our February 2, 2017 Board meeting, the Board of Directors declared a $0.17 per share dividend For its common stock, payable on February 27 to shareholders of record on February 16, 2017. The company has now paid dividends consecutively for over fifty six quarters. In conclusion, the company continues to have solid operating results, strong balance sheet and is adequately capitalized to support our continued growth plans. Simon?
2016 was truly a transformational year, new offices, new websites, new logos, new structure for our sales teams, and a new way of working together. Now it is executing, focusing on our jobs, having fun and attracting even more vendors and customers. We are well settled in our new headquarters. And as Bill mentioned, we released a great new website for Wayside Technology Group. We have great interest from new vendors in our offerings and we continue to invest in expanding our offerings, including services, We also received 2 awards this quarter, the Smart CEO New Jersey top corporate culture award in November and a future 50 award in January of this year, based on revenue and employee growth in the last couple of years.
We pride ourselves in providing the best possible place to work generating great financial results outperforming our competition. In conclusion, it was a busy quarter and a busy year, and I want to thank all of our team members for their hard work and dedication the success
Our first question comes from Jeff Gagan. Your line is open.
Thank you. Good morning, gentlemen. Hats off to you. Great quarter. This is really the recognition of a lot of hard work that you've described in the past and it's good to see that it's coming to fruition here.
Thank you, Jeff. Appreciate it.
Yes, glad to be able to make that comment to you. You have talked a little bit about extended payment terms I think this has come up in the past. Would you be able to elaborate a little bit on what those terms are like and why they are attractive to your customer?
Yes. So, these relate to multi year licenses. If you buy a license that is valid for 3 years, But your IT budget for a given year is set to a certain amount. What we are able to do is sell you the software for the full amount that you can pay us in 3 equal terms. The software is it's an irrevocable purchase order.
You cannot return the software, but you can spread the payments according to a plan that is that is, more viable for you in terms to cope with IT expenses within your budget. It compares a lot to software as a service in terms of spreading out those payments equally over the time that you're using the software. We are using that our excess cash in order to facilitate those payments, make it really easy for vendors and customers to work with us. To facilitate those transactions.
You had announced the retention of outside advisors to consider strategic alternatives presumably for the use of cash. Would it be fair for us to construe that this was the, outcome of that conversation with your advisors or will there be more to come?
No. So what this really was, this is our us operating and executing as a company. Our quarter, this was not impacted at all by our outside consultants looking for acquisitions. The determination internally was made. We have a lot of excess cash.
We started using that years ago to pay a dividend. We also started to buy back stock on a conservative level, and we've increased that level of stock buybacks in the last couple of years because we we think our stock is undervalued. And in addition, we've used that, that cash internally to grow. As you saw, sales have gone up, but expenses have also gone considering where we are in our life cycle, we really deem it important to continue to invest in the growth of our company compared to our competition and compared to the possible market that we address. We haven't even gotten started yet.
So we really need to continue to invest in our own team. Yet that left another sum of money in terms of the excess cash. And we said, let's look at acquisitions to see if that makes sense. So we hired a consultant to go out and see what kind of possible acquisitions are made. But having that said, we're we, we looking at our multiples And if you take the excess cash out of the balance sheets for which we don't seem to get a lot of recognition, we have about a PE multiple of about 7, 7.5 and a dividend yield, of what is it, Mike?
What is the dividend yield? 7, somewhere close to 4%. So it's hard to find the acquisition that is accretive. Having that said, as we've shown in the fourth quarter, the internal opportunities are there to grow. So if for us it's a determination, where do you invest where we can reap the largest and that's a constant moving, play field.
It seems like you're doing a good job of that. Following up on your comment, if you think the company's stock is undervalued and I know you can't say what you think the fair value is other than your comment that it's undervalued. Can you share with us how do you think about the valuation of the business in terms what are the important metrics or drivers that lead you to the conclusion that your shares are undervalued?
Well, you know, you sure if you want to.
I think, a couple of things we look at is, we benchmark ourselves against competitors. And you know, Simon mentioned that our company trades at probably between 6x and 7x EBITDA and maybe 10x earning. Earnings and our competitors traded higher multiples to that. They may be getting some premium for size. But nevertheless, we're growing.
So we think that, in the future, as we continue to, execute on our plan, we'll be Hopefully valued at similar multiples to some of the larger competitors.
We hope so too. And my final question, I know I'm over my welcome here, but I think it's really worth mentioning. With Brian Gilbert and Kevin De SKU and even Mike Vessey being in new roles, obviously that freeze up Bill and Simon to do new and creative things to drive value. Can you talk a little bit about the conclusion of the transformation and the impact of that and how you expect your business to evolve going forward?
Yes, Jeff. This is Bill. Great question. And I think that the, one of the primary factors is, as we've stated in prior quarterly calls is, the addition of new vendor product lines is the life's blood of distribution. And we're looking at a blend of emerging technologies and some larger, more well known logos that I'm working on, to add to the Live Boat And Tech Xtend portfolio.
Those things could potentially be very significant in our next few years if we're able to close some of those. Additionally, I have a lot of great relationships at significant customers around the country that haven't had the time to continue to foster those relationships on a regular basis. And generally, they all help benefit and drive additional business. And now that I'm not immersed in the day to day, as I had been in the the last couple of years since the prior VP of GMs left in 2014. I have the opportunity to go focus on the vendor customer community and Simon and I are very optimistic about that.
And should there be anything that we come across, it's worth investment in. We'll take a look at those as we do. It's a an open book.
Yes, but it's exciting times. It really is pivotable. For us, it's it was moving from the old building moving from old websites, moving from the step that got us to where we were realizing we have to take the next step in our company's evolution And we've executed very well. Fito Ligretali and his IT team have made tremendous steps forward. We're very proud of the the steps that they've taken to continuously enhance, and that's how we win.
It's not a nuclear submarine. It's executing on a day to day basis and that our teams are able to do that with the right technology. And now we have the right structure in place for the next phase of our company. And to be honest with you, very exciting times for us.
Well, again, congratulations on a terrific quarter. We look forward to seeing more in the future. Thank you.
You have a good weekend.
I'm showing no additional audio questions at this time.
Our company, and we look forward to reporting our first quarter results at the end of April 2017. Thank you so much.
Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect at this time and thank you for your participation.