Good evening, and welcome to the IDT Corporation's third quarter fiscal year 2022 earnings call. In today's presentation, IDT's management will discuss IDT's financial and operational results for the three-month period ended April thirtieth, 2022. During remarks by IDT's Chief Executive Officer, Shmuel Jonas, all participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After Mr. Jonas' remarks, Marcelo Fischer, IDT's Chief Financial Officer will join Mr. Jonas for Q&A. Any forward-looking statements made during this conference call, either in the prepared remarks or in the Q&A session, whether general or specific in nature, are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from those which the company anticipates.
These risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, specific risks and uncertainties discussed in the reports that IDT files periodically with the SEC. IDT assumes no obligation either to update any forward-looking statements that they have made or may make, or to update the factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from those that they forecast. In their presentation or in the Q&A session, IDT's management may make reference to non-GAAP measures, including adjusted EBITDA, non-GAAP net income, and non-GAAP earnings or loss per share. A schedule provided in the IDT earnings release reconciles adjusted EBITDA, non-GAAP net income, and non-GAAP earnings or loss per share to the nearest corresponding GAAP measures. Please note that the IDT earnings release is available on the investor relations page of the IDT Corporation website. The earnings release has also been filed on a Form 8-K with the SEC.
I will now turn the conference over to Mr. Jonas.
Thank you, operator. Welcome to IDT's earnings conference call. I'm joined on the call by Marcelo Fischer, IDT's Chief Financial Officer. We will both be available to answer questions after my remarks. My discussion today focuses on the third quarter of our fiscal year 2022, the three months ended April 30. For a more detailed report and discussion on our financial and operational results, please read our earnings release filed earlier today and our Form 10-Q that we expect to file with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday, June 9. Since its inception over 30 years ago, IDT, excuse me, has generated shareholder value by incubating and growing promising business initiatives.
We are currently leveraging our core strategic assets to scale three high-margin growth businesses, NRS, Net2Phone, and BOSS Revolution Money Transfer, while simultaneously benefiting from the significant cash generated by our traditional communication segment. Each of these three high-margin, high-growth businesses had a very strong third quarter, helping us to again achieve solid levels of consolidated income from operations and adjusted EBITDA, consistent with our results from the first two quarters of our fiscal year. NRS added nearly 1,400 net POS terminals and 1,200 net payment processing accounts during the third quarter, maintaining the accelerated rate of acquisitions achieved in the second quarter. NRS recurring revenue increased 102% year-over-year, keyed by strong merchant service and advertising sales. Looking ahead, we expect that NRS will sustain robust high-margin growth in the coming quarters.
In particular, we expect advertising and data offerings to benefit from both long-term trends, such as the increasing allocation of advertising budgets to out-of-home venues, as well as from seasonal tailwinds, including increased political advertising heading into the second half of the calendar year. Net2Phone's strategic focus on the SMB and small enterprise markets within North and South America, efficient execution, and acquisition of CCaaS provider, Integra, all contributed to solid growth in the third quarter. Subscription revenue increased 42% year-over-year, due primarily to the addition of approximately 22,000 seats during the quarter, including almost 7,000 seats from the Integra acquisition. Seat growth was again strongest in our Latin American markets, although our U.S. businesses performed very well as well.
We will begin selling our CCaaS offerings in North America in the current fourth quarter of our fiscal year and expect its expansion to gradually become a key driver of both seat growth and ARPU expansion. A month ago, we announced our decision to postpone the spin-off of Net2Phone in light of market conditions. We believe that we can significantly enhance Net2Phone's value by continuing to grow the business and improving net margins. In fact, we are already making good progress. The Net2Phone UCaaS segment's loss from operations in the third quarter decreased to $2.3 million from nearly $4 million in the year ago quarter. Segment CapEx in the third quarter was $1.4 million, compared to $1.3 million a year earlier.
BOSS Money, our international remittance business, increased revenue 51% to $15.5 million, driven by a 27% year-over-year increase in transaction volumes and a comparably robust increase in revenue per transaction, including both transfer fees and revenue derived from foreign exchange. We continue to build out our disbursement networks, particularly in Africa and the Caribbean, and to fine-tune our direct-to-consumer pricing strategies to capture additional revenue and margin. In our traditional communications segment, revenue decreased by $59.9 million or 17% to $285.9 million. The surge in demand for paid voice that we experienced during the COVID pandemic is now retreating and exacerbating the impact of the underlying revenue declines in retail calling and wholesale carrier services.
Our mobile top-up business struggled this quarter, but we are investing in technology, marketing and sales to improve its performance. Because traditional communications lost revenue overall was skewed to lower margin sales, income from operations from this segment decreased $3 million year-over-year to $17.4 million. On a consolidated basis, income from operations decreased $500,000 to $13.3 million, while adjusted EBITDA increased $100,000 to $18 million. To wrap up, all three of our high-margin, high-growth businesses had a strong quarter. Their expansion continues to offset the decline of the low-margin, minute-based revenues within our traditional communications segment. We expect that as our growth business continue to expand, our consolidated bottom line results in the coming quarters will increasingly reflect their contributions.
Although we have postponed the spin-off of Net2Phone, we continue to believe that the spin-offs can be attractive and appropriate strategy to help shareholder benefit more directly from the expansion of promising young businesses whose assets and operations are readily separable from those of our other businesses. Now, Marcel and I would be happy to take your questions.
We will now begin the question-and-answer session. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your touch tone phone. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster. Once again, that's star one if you have a question or comment. The first question comes from David Polansky with Immersion Investments. Your line is live.
Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my question. Obviously great job as usual, especially with NRS. I wanted to ask, you know, this is the second consecutive quarter you're putting up 1,400 installs, which is kind of an accelerated rate from what you've been doing previously. Can you discuss through which channels you're seeing that NRS growth? Is it direct, distribution, call center? Could you talk about that a little bit, please?
It's really basically enhanced sales in each of the segments. It's not coming from one in particular. They're all having an increased rate of sales.
Okay. I know I've asked you this before, but given the fact that I think this is your first time giving any forward-looking commentary about NRS explicitly in a press release, which it seems like it's coming from the ARPU side of the equation rather than the new unit side. I wanted to ask again, do you have any updated thoughts on where we think ARPU for NRS could go from here?
I don't have a specific number in mind, but I do believe that ARPU will go up.
Okay. Any reason to think that we can see 1,400 installs per quarter as a new normal, or should we still be thinking about this as a 1,000 units per quarter business?
I personally think that we can grow above 1400 new units per quarter. One of the things that held us back this particular quarter was really shortages of equipment. We spent a lot of money to bring in a lot of inventory and equipment so that we will not have that issue again. We think that we're in a good shape now to deploy more than we've been deploying.
You said you might be able to do more than 1400. Is that all coming from your traditional C-store Bodega installs? 'Cause I know, I know in the past you've talked about initiatives to sell outside of that market. Is there any update you can give us on that?
I don't have anything like, you know, at the tip of my fingertips at this moment about, you know, what kind of stores, you know, the sales came from. Obviously, a large percentage came from, you know, the, you know, what I would call, you know, our primary, you know, market. We really had sales in lots of different areas, anything from dollar stores to liquor stores to, you know, to quick service restaurants, et cetera.
To quick service restaurants? I think that's a new one.
Um, that might be
How long have you been selling to quick serve?
I don't know. The past, I would say 12 months since we rolled out modifiers, we've been adding restaurants.
Okay. That's very meaningful. I mean, is that gonna be a material portion of the business? Are you putting extra resources in that, or is that just. Are you still solely focused on C store and bodegas?
Again, I don't think that we're solely focused on it, but I would say that we're primarily focused on it. You know, when we build new features and functionality like that is who you know we primarily have in mind. You know, if other customers also see the benefits in those same features, then great. We definitely do target our development towards our core market.
Okay, great. On the payment side, payment processing, can you disclose the proportion of new customers? So last quarter, you had 8,000, now you have 9,200. What percentage of that was from new installs? Was it substantially new customers or are you making progress on penetrating your existing base?
I would say substantially new customers, but we are also making some progress in going after the base of existing POS customers.
Right. I mean, how should we think about NRS and your payments business in particular in an inflationary environment? I mean, I think taking a percentage of the swipe, I would think that at least on a dollar basis, you would keep up with inflation. I mean, how do we kinda think about that, given the current economic environment?
I don't have, you know, a real answer to you. I would say that our stores, you know, have been doing well. You know, their average, I'll call it check size or ticket has grown. You know, by that happening, you know, the average, you know, credit card volume has grown, you know, along with that. You know, what effect inflation in specific has to do with that, I can't give you an answer. I don't expect that to have a material effect, although maybe Marcelo has more to add on that.
No, David. Hi, David. Marcelo. Your headline, okay? I mean, you know, being that our payment processing is really more a variable component of the total cost of the total charge, now we are kind of inflation protected, okay, from that perspective. We ride the inflation wave on this.
Great.
Yeah.
Last one for me. Is there any desire to make an acquisition on the NRS side, something maybe in the payment space, data space, just something to sort of accelerate your growth? I mean, your growth's obviously fantastic, but I'm still looking at NRS within the larger IDT house, right? I'm-
Yeah.
I'm trying to think about what attracts people to the stock and, you know, with that EBITDA kinda going down and looking at flat year-over-year growth, it's like, you know, it's fine, and your growth is great, but I really wanna see people focusing on this NRS piece. I'm just curious if there's anything that we can do to kind of accelerate that in any way or what are you thinking about that?
I mean, I'll say two things. I mean, one is, you know, we look at, you know, lots of things. You know, some of them are, you know, outside of our comfort zone. For that reason, you know, alone, we do not, you know, do them. I would say that we are conservative by nature. On the other hand, I would say that I believe that, you know, organic growth is gonna be very, very strong. You know, when you do an acquisition, it does take a lot of effort and time from, you know, management of integrating that acquisition into your business.
You know, we're a little bit hesitant to you know throw a monkey wrench into something that's you know working well. I you know would say that if the right opportunity comes along, we're definitely open to you know acquisitions that you know in particular areas for NRS, but we are not by any means in need of an acquisition to help us continue to grow both stores and ARPU.
All right. Great. Thanks, guys. I'll sign off.
Okay. The next question is coming from Adam Wilk with Greystone Capital Management. Your line is live.
Hey, guys. How are you? Thanks for taking my questions. Great job. Really strong quarter. Just one for me. An update on mobile top up would be helpful, I think, especially as I believe last quarter, you talked a little bit about competition and wholesale and the potential negative effects from that.
Yeah.
Anything you'd like to add would be really helpful. Thank you.
You know, I don't wanna give away anything to our competitors that also listen to the calls. You know, I would say that, listen, a bunch of our competitors have gotten, you know, large investments into their mobile top-up businesses. I think, you know, to maybe please their investors they're focusing, you know, more on revenue growth than on profitable growth. You know, we try to focus on both. This quarter, unfortunately, you know, we didn't do maybe a good enough job focusing on the revenue side of the business.
I do believe that a lot of the products that we have in the pipeline are going to, you know, to make our offerings much stickier and therefore the revenue from them much more predictable and profitable.
Okay, great. Yeah, that was it for me. Thank you for the color. I appreciate it.
Okay. The next question is coming from Sean Berger with Adirondack Retirement. Your line's live.
Hi. Congratulations on a great quarter and particularly NRS. I just have one other question, or actually I guess two quick ones. One is with regard to NRS, and I'm wondering about the expansion possibility. Again, it's kinda land and expand. You sell an active terminal, and then you get more services. I'm wondering on the services side, have you, I guess without giving away too much, thought about or given, have a strategy with regard to expansion, so like more NRS Pay adoption, on the NRS side? The other quick question was with regard to the Net2Phone spin-off, if you have a new target date for that as well. I know that it's been postponed.
I talked to Marcelo about it having been postponed this quarter and not gonna happen by the July thirtieth time 'cause of market conditions, which I think was wise. Just wondering if you have a new target date on that.
I'll answer your second question first. We do not have a new target date on it as of yet. You know, again, as we stated, you know, both in, I guess, my remarks today as well as in, you know, our press release related to delaying the spin-off, you know, we are very focused on, you know, improving Net2Phone's bottom line, as well as, you know, expanding their base of customers. And we think that, you know, when the right time, you know, recurs, which it will, that, you know, Net2Phone will be a much more valuable company at that point in time. As far as your question, you know, regarding, you know, land and expand relating to NRS, I would say that that is definitely, you know, a big part of our strategy.
While I would say we didn't have a great quarter expanding merchant services into existing stores, we did have a very good quarter expanding the software side of the business into new stores. I'll say expanding the software offerings that we offer into new stores. Not into new stores, into existing stores, so upselling them into higher software programs. Our software programs and our merchant service programs are actually aligned in the fact that, you know, the. If you take our merchant services, you get significantly lower pricing on our software services. That has definitely been a reason why so many of our customers have taken merchant services from the beginning.
Now we need to do, you know, also a good job of going back out to some of our stores and you know, retelling them the reasons why they need to switch to our merchant services and to take more software solutions from us. We will continue doing that in the coming quarters.
Okay. Thank you, and congratulations on a great quarter.
Thank you.
Okay. The next question is coming from Tim Delaney with Immersion Investments. Tim, you're on.
Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my call. The absolute beast with NRS obviously. My question's about Net2Phone. It's nice to see that North America growth is happening in there. Give us any color around that and so your expectations going forward, particularly around North America.
You know, I would say that, you know, I think that the level of sales that we achieved, you know, this quarter in North America, we feel, you know, pretty confident that we can, you know, achieve at least, you know, those level of sales going forward, you know, if not quite a bit higher. Again, as I remarked also, you know, during the prepared remarks, you know, we are adding our CCaaS solutions beginning this quarter. You know, I'm already, you know, starting to see some sales coming through from that. That will lead to, you know, both a higher ARPU, you know, as well as, you know, higher margins.
Great. That's awesome. Thank you so much.
Okay, the next question is coming from Jason Lustig with J. Goldman & Co. Your line is live.
Hey, guys. Thanks for the question. I'd just like to start off by building on what David asked earlier on NRS. What would it take to get to, you know, call it 2000 net adds from the current 1400?
One or two good months. No.
Switch to a four-month quarter.
Yeah. No, I mean, I think that. Again, we don't give forward guidance, and I wanna be careful, you know, not to give forward guidance. I do believe that we are gonna get to those kind of numbers, you know, relatively soon.
Okay.
It comes from multiple channels. It's not from any one specific channel. You know, it comes from having, you know, success from all the different channels that we sell through.
Okay. What was NRS EBITDA on the quarter, Marcelo?
The EBITDA was, if you exclude some one-time non-cash compensation items, it was about $1.9 million EBITDA for NRS.
Okay. Switching to Net2Phone, can you just, Shmuel, can you just elaborate a little bit on the plan for improving the bottom line there?
Yeah. I mean, I guess it's a variety of things. You know, it's you know, being more careful on marketing spend, being more careful on, you know, only keeping productive salespeople. It's being, you know, more careful about, you know, which customers you decide to, you know, to work with and what size deals, you know, you go after. You know, I would say it's focusing on the details. I think Marcelo has something to add.
Yeah. I mean, it's also focusing on geographies, right? You know, as you know, we operate in a number of countries. Some countries are growing at a much faster clip than others. We are looking at our customer acquisitions in a much more disciplined way in terms of allocating that capital to the geographies that are giving the highest return. Mexico's growth is exploding right now, for example, although all the markets are growing. There's going to be more focus in targeted investments so we get the capital going to the highest IRR generating customer acquisitions. A very deep look at the cost structure, and at the same time continue to grow the top line.
Let me tell you, as the business continues to grow, you know, the scale matters significantly. Q3 was a great quarter for us in Net2Phone. If we continue to scale this way, I would really hope that, you know, as we go into next year, that you're gonna see a Net2Phone business which is strong, still growing, you know, 20%, perhaps more, you know, on the top line, and we're getting very close to profitability, if not already, being EBITDA accretive.
Okay. Thank you for the questions.
Yeah.
Again, if you have a question, please press star then one. As there are no more questions, this concludes our question and answer session and conference call. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.