Good evening, and welcome to the IDT Corporation's first quarter fiscal year 2023 earnings call. In today's presentation, IDT's management will discuss IDT's financial and operational results for the three month period ended October 31, 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 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. After my remarks, Marcelo Fischer, IDT's Chief Financial Officer, will join me, and we'll be available to answer questions. My discussion today focuses on the first quarter of our fiscal year 2023, the three months ended October 31st. For a more detailed discussion of 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 by Monday, December 12th. This quarter, please note that our NRS business is now a separate reportable segment, by greater visibility into its financial performance. The Fintech segment, which previously included NRS, now compromises BOSS Money and several smaller financial service offerings, and businesses that were previously included in our traditional communication segment. These include our Gibraltar-based bank and our Awards2Go gift cards.
Within Fintech, we have continued to break out BOSS Money revenue and KPIs for you. In the first quarter, we achieved our second consecutive quarter of record-Adjusted EBITDA. Our rapidly expanding NRS, BOSS Money, and net2phone businesses contributed 25% of our consolidated Adjusted EBITDA in the period. Their continued expansion positions us for significantly enhanced profitability in the coming years. We are focused on improving the bottom line performances of all of our businesses. In this quarter, both net2phone and the Fintech segment, which now primarily tracks the performance of our BOSS Money remittance business, turned the corner and generated positive Adjusted EBITDA. NRS also had another very good quarter, more than tripling its Adjusted EBITDA contribution compared to the year ago quarter.
As I discussed last quarter, NRS advertising data sales, which contributed over half of NRS' first quarter recurring revenue, is always impacted by seasonal factors and of course, industry-wide trends. In the first quarter, we benefited from sales of political advertising, and we expect to see a significant amount of holiday and year-end spending in the second quarter. However, January is usually a slower sales month, and we've begun to see the impact of macroeconomic headwinds that are buffeting the advertising market. Looking ahead, we are planning to increase our available advertising opportunities by expanding the number of screens in our network, and by adding digital window signs in high traffic areas, menu boards in busy food service establishments, and by opening a variety of other advertising venues, including across our various apps and websites and of course, for NRS retailer sites that we manage.
We expect to drive continued strong growth in SaaS and merchant services revenue, by increasing our velocity of sales, as well as continuing to expand our offerings as well as the sales channels. Over the next couple of months, we will launch our kiosk ordering, and beta version of an app-downloadable POS tablet for POS for tablets, as well as POSs customized for specific retail verticals with significantly higher SaaS monthly recurring charges than the level we realize with our current retail base. Thinking about longer-term NRS growth initiatives, we're also expanding our e-commerce offerings, which we conceived of to help NRS level the playing field for independent retailers who must compete against the expansion of national and regional retail chains. A key part of the effort is to help retailers expand their supply options, and to provide them with remote ordering and home delivery capabilities.
On the supply side, we just announced a B2B e-commerce initiative to help distributors and suppliers access NRS' extensive nationwide network of retailers while enabling NRS retailers to order the right items and the right amount of inventory to maximize sales and cash flows. On the B2C side we recently announced the partnership with Uber to integrate with their delivery platform. Together, we're providing home delivery at no cost to our retailers when customers order through our BR Club app. This expansion of e-commerce ecosystem will help our retailers become more profitable, and serve customers even when they're not in the store. BOSS Money continued to perform very well in the first quarter, with solid year-over-year increases in transaction volumes, revenue, and revenue per transaction. This quarter, we beta launched a new digital wallet, aptly named Wallet by BOSS Money, which I'm personally very excited about.
I hope you will agree, it provides an amazing user experience for sending, spending, and saving money. I encourage you to download the app from either the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store and try it. Preferably, you'll also sign up for direct deposit to maximize the wallet's benefits. Our wallet has tremendous potential, particularly for the immigrant communities we serve, and we expect it to become the ecosystem, for many of our payments and financial service offerings over time. We don't charge anything, so you have no excuse not to try it and give us feedback. net2phone reached a significant milestone this quarter, achieving positive Adjusted EBITDA even more quickly than we had expected. We've been able to outperform without slowing our pace of seat growth. In fact, we added over 18,000 seats this quarter compared to 12,000 last quarter.
Net2phone's strategic focus on the SMB market through channel partners continues to pay off. We have significantly simplified and streamlined the processes for our partners to onboard and provision their SMB customers, making the experience intuitive, quick, and hassle-free, while at the same time lowering our onboarding costs and their onboarding costs. In Q1, net2phone sold approximately 1,000 cloud-based contact center seats, leveraging the CCaaS platform that we acquired earlier this calendar year, and about which we continue to be super excited. Because our CCaaS platform is telephony-agnostic, we're able to sell CCaaS globally. During the quarter, we sold CCaaS to enterprise call centers and contact center customers in three new markets. We also released our Salesforce integration for contact centers, which will become a powerful tool. Turning now to our traditional communications segment.
Our IDT Digital Payments business, primarily our mobile top-up offerings, was again impacted by the decline of a key corridor. Removing the impact of that corridor, Digital Payments revenue would have increased 5% year-over-year. We are not satisfied with the results to date, and we are hard at work enhancing the product and, in some cases, changing team members to help ignite growth in this business. Boss Revolution Calling and IDT's global wholesale carrier revenue continued to decline, but we were able to substantially mitigate the bottom-line impact. With our strong cash flows and our stock undervalued, we repurchased about $5 million of our Class C common stock in Q1. Over the past two quarters, we have repurchased about 3% of our outstanding Class B shares in the aggregate.
The cash we expect to generate will build upon our very strong balance sheet, including $137 million in cash and current investments and no debt. That liquidity enables us to support our businesses with working and growth capital without resorting to increasingly expensive outside financing. In fact, we are even earning positive net interest income. To wrap up, we continue to benefit from strong performances from our growth businesses. As a result, we are on track to continue to deliver healthy improvements in our bottom line results for the remainder of fiscal 2023 and, God willing, beyond. Marcelo and I will be happy to take your questions. I'm sorry for the speed at which I read this. I'm just a little tired.
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. We will now pause momentarily to assemble our roster. One moment, please. Our first question is coming from David Polansky with Immersion Investments. You're on live.
Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my questions. I thought the performance was excellent, and I love seeing the buybacks. I mean, that's great to see. I wanna talk about NRS first. Shmuel, you've spoken about offering something like a B2B marketplace in the past. Can you talk big picture about what it means to your retailers? Why is it important? obviously the any potential financial impact to the NRS business?
Yeah. I'll try to give you, I call it a 50,000-foot view of what I would like to see the B2B, opportunity become. To start with, I mean, we already have an NRS marketplace, which again, is not a huge business for us, but we do tens of thousands of dollars already through it. We already have a couple of distributors, you know, signed up through our new B2B platform. Again, we also do tens of thousands of dollars, you know, in addition every month with those partners to date. This is really an expansion upon what we've already been beta testing sort of in New Jersey. Basically, from a 50,000-foot view, there's a couple of problems that our retailers have.
One is that, they're unable to buy the amount of volume that you need to order from some of the largest distributors, because their minimums are way higher than what, you know, a corner store, you know, can do. One of our plans is to sort of group together stores in a market, and let them buy their inventory together, share that inventory across their stores so that they would be able to meet those minimums. Again, this is not an exact number, but we expect that that will save retailers anywhere from 10%-20% on the cost of their goods, which will help, you know, with their margins. For other retailers, they have different problems. Some retailers have a problem that they need, I'll say, stuff from lots of different distributors.
You know, they might carry a wider array of, of products, and they don't want them coming in with 17 different trucks. Let's just use that as an example. They might essentially want to deliver to one point, and then have all those deliveries, you know, brought to the store. That's really where our, you know, Cinch part of the business comes in, and we're able to sort of get all the deliveries to one spot and then bring them, you know, to the sources. They don't have to have multiple orders. You know, through EDI integrations, you know, we'll basically be able to immediately update all of their inventory as soon as they get delivery. From a tracking standpoint and from tracking their cost standpoint, it will give them immediate access to that data.
It also just, generally speaking, opens up, you know, their eyes, I'll say, and I mean the retailers' eyes, to the fact that there's lots of different suppliers that they can get products from. I do believe in general that, you know, when you have a competitive market, you know, that's good for, you know, for customers and, in this case, retailers because, you know, their costs get brought down by the fact that there's more, that there's more suppliers available to them, and more opportunities for goods that they never carried before, which is another big thing. You know, I mean, some of these stores haven't really changed, I'll say, at least dramatically, you know, what they've carried over the past 10 years, while markets, you know, in terms of what customers want, have changed.
People want healthier for you know, natural, organic, you know, gluten-free, this, that, the other thing, and a lot of the stores that we encounter don't carry those types of products. This is really also a chance to introduce new types of products to our stores that they wouldn't otherwise necessarily choose on their own. If we show them that these are popular in their area, it gives them a reason to then want to carry them. Eventually, we have lots of, you know, I'll say, grander ideas that we think could be layered on top of this. We first have to get through, I'll call it the basics before we get to the grander vision. I think I hope that answers your question to some degree.
It does, for sure. How are you gonna be compensated on this? I mean, how does this help us?
Basically we charge a small percentage, to the distributors for facilitating these orders for them. We also do, you know, their merchant processing for the retailers, which we also, you know, then make a small margin on. Again, it also, you know, enhances just the ecosystem in general. Even though it might not be our biggest profit generator in the near term, it really will help, we believe, you know, stores over the long term, which again, helps us, you know. The better our stores do, the better we do.
Yeah, absolutely. It's great. I mean, I don't think I, at least I don't know of anyone in the market doing what you do that's offering this product, so that's fantastic.
Dave, as you know, right, we get the question all the time about how we do this as our competition, okay? This initiative and the other ones that we announced recently just come to demonstrate that NRS is different. NRS is not just selling a POS fancy cash register solution. We really try to fully understand the need of our retailers, participate in all the problems, kind of own the store, the supply concern, the delivery concern, create that level of stickiness and dependency and build that relationship that there's no match to us.
Yeah. I mean, again, I think we view ourselves really as a trusted partner, you know. Like, through good times and bad times, you know, when a retailer is struggling, you know, we're there to help them with their cash flow. You know, when we see problems that they're having, we wanna come in and solve them. That's our goal, and I think that that's the reason why we succeed. Yes, we're not embarrassed that we wanna make money, you know, by providing, you know, value to our stores. You know, we're there for them in good times and bad times.
Great. Fantastic. Are there any early learnings from the Uber partnership, or is it kind of too early to tell?
The Uber partnership actually hasn't, like, officially, I'll say, really launched. I mean, we signed the deal with them, you know, it doesn't start rolling out, I would say, until, I believe early, I believe early in January, right after the holiday season. We didn't wanna launch it during the holidays when things are harder to manage. But again, you know, I have no doubt that the Uber, you know, partnership is gonna be a major benefit for these stores. I mean, for one, you know, it's by far the cheapest, you know, option to do delivery, other than possibly doing it yourself and only if you have a lot of deliveries. Again, most of our stores don't have a lot of deliveries. This is really a great option.
It's a great option for customers as well because, again, we're not really trying to make a lot of money on this specific product. Again, you know, this is another example of us doing something that retailers need, where we will make a profit, but again, we won't make a ton of profit. Our goal is not to, you know, like a, like an Uber Eats, to mark stuff up 30%. You know, our goal is to bring it to them for, you know, as close to the cost that they pay for it in the store and allow retailers to, you know, to sell stuff to customers even when they're not in the store. Like, that is our goal and that's what we intend to do.
That's fantastic. I wanna jump to net2phone. I think we were initially thinking about net2phone being closer to EBITDA breakeven at the end of this fiscal year, and that's obviously tracking well ahead of what we initially anticipated. I love to see that. Is there anything we should be aware of from, like, anything one time, or do you think it's sustainably going to be profitable from here? I just wanted a little bit of color on that.
I mean, listen, my personal opinion is it's sustainable. I mean, listen, you know, the beauty of the net2phone business is, you know, it has very, very low churn and, you know, its revenue is pretty predictable. You know, the more lines you sign, you know, the more revenue you have and the more profit. As long as you know, manage your costs, you know, well, which again, I think that we are really good at, you're gonna see, you know, continued improvement in the bottom line from that business.
Not to mention the fact that, like, me personally, I'm extremely excited about, you know, the CCaaS business that they acquired and its potential to really, you know, bring up the ARPU of the entire business, as well as, you know, enhance the product overall. I think that it's, you know. I think it's really headed in a great direction, and I'm happy that we own more of it for longer, although that was not the plan.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, David. No, I went through the models. It's just very good performance right now. Churn is doing very well. ARPU is doing great. We are really focused on how we are deploying capital, acquiring customers in the countries that generate most ROI. Yeah, Q1 was a good surprise for us. We thought we're gonna be EBITDA positive end of the year. We are now EBITDA positive now. I believe this is now the new baseline. Hopefully, if we continue this way, we'll be able to be coming back to calls later this year and start saying when they're gonna become actually free cash flow positive, not just EBITDA positive.
'Cause, you know, net2phone spends a large number of dollars in CapEx acquiring the IP phones that we give to our customers. At the rate they're going, we might be talking already in fiscal 24 about becoming free cash flow positive.
23, you never know. Well, that actually, every day, we really, again, like, we focus on optimizing, you know, the business to make sure that, again, we're bringing on customers for the right price and the right kind of customers in the right areas where we get the right paybacks. You know, as Marcelo Fischer said to you already, like, you know, we think it will only get better from here.
Yeah. It's great to see that the business is still spending about $20 million a year or so acquiring customers and they are very close to be completely self-funding.
That leads into my next question, which is, I think, multiples in UCaaS, and in point of sale too. Across basically everywhere that you're competing, multiples have come down quite a lot. As you get closer to being self-sustaining, that obviously opens up the door to have sort of self-funding M&A. I'm curious, should we be thinking about anything on the horizon as it relates to M&A?
We don't have any, you know, big M&A plans, you know, in the works. I can tell you that much for sure. I mean, you know, I'm always open to, you know, looking at things that I think will be, you know, synergistic and will enhance our bottom line. That being said, I also think that M&A can have the effect of taking, you know, your eye off the ball. You know, again, we're not, you know, thank God, in any rush to do anything. We're, you know, right now we're focused on improving the business. When valuations, you know, do come back, we think it'll be even a much more valuable company than it would've been.
That's great. Thank you for all the color on all my questions. I'll hop back into the queue and let someone else take it.
All right. Thank you, David. Have a nice night.
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.