e8vk
SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION
WASHINGTON, D.C. 20549
FORM 8-K
CURRENT REPORT
PURSUANT TO SECTION 13 OR 15(D) OF
THE SECURITIES EXCHANGE ACT OF 1934
DATE OF REPORT (DATE OF EARLIEST EVENT REPORTED): August 11, 2011
PFSweb, Inc.
(Exact name of registrant as specified in its charter)
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Delaware
(STATE OR OTHER JURISDICTION
OF INCORPORATION)
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000-28275
(COMMISSION FILE NUMBER)
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75-2837058
(IRS EMPLOYER
IDENTIFICATION NO.) |
500 NORTH CENTRAL EXPRESSWAY
PLANO, TX 75074
(ADDRESS OF PRINCIPAL EXECUTIVE OFFICES)
(972) 881-2900
(REGISTRANTS TELEPHONE NUMBER, INCLUDING AREA CODE )
N/A
(FORMER NAME OR ADDRESS, IF CHANGED SINCE LAST REPORT)
Check the appropriate box below if the Form 8-K filing is intended to simultaneously satisfy the
filing obligation of the registrant under any of the following provisions:
o Written communication pursuant to Rule 425 under the Securities Act (17 CFR 230.425)
o Soliciting material pursuant to Rule 14a-12 under the Exchange Act (17 CFR 240.14a-12)
o Pre-commencement communications pursuant to Rule 14d-2(b) under the Exchange Act (17 CFR
240.14d-2(b))
o Pre-commencement communications pursuant to Rule 13e-4(c) under the Exchange Act (17 CFR
240.13e-4(c))
INFORMATION TO BE INCLUDED IN THE REPORT
ITEM 8.01. Other Events
On August 11, 2011, PFSweb, Inc. hosted a conference call announcing its financial results for
the quarter ended June 30, 2011. Attached to this current report on Form 8-K is a copy of the
related conference call transcript dated August 11, 2011. The information in this Report on Form
8-K, and the exhibit hereto, shall not be deemed filed for purposes of Section 18 of the Exchange
Act or otherwise subject to the liability of that Section.
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Exhibit No. |
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Description |
99.1 |
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Conference Call Transcript Issued August 11, 2011 |
SIGNATURE
Pursuant to the requirements of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, the registrant has duly
caused this report to be signed on its behalf by the undersigned hereunto duly authorized.
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PFSweb, Inc.
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Dated: August 15, 2011 |
By: |
/s/ Thomas J. Madden
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Thomas J. Madden |
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Executive Vice President,
Chief Financial and
Accounting Officer |
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exv99w1
Exhibit 99.1
Company: PFSweb, Inc. (Nasdaq: PFSW)
Subject: Q2 2011 Earnings Call
Date: August 11, 2011
MANAGEMENT DISCUSSION SECTION
Operator: Good morning. My name is Brandy, and I will be your conference operator today. At
this time, I would like to welcome everyone to PFSwebs Second Quarter 2011 Earnings Conference
Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers
remarks there will be a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions]
Thank you. I would now like to turn the call over to Garth Russell, with KCSA Strategic
Communications. Please go ahead.
Garth Russell, Head-Investor Relations
Thank you, Brandy. Before turning the call over to management, I would like to make the following
remarks concerning forward-looking statements. All statements in this conference call other than
historical facts are forward-looking statements. The words, anticipate, believe, estimate, expect,
intend, will, guidance, confident, target, project and other similar expressions typically are used
to identify forward-looking statements.
These forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance, and involve and are
subject to risks, uncertainties and other factors that may affect PFSwebs business, financial
condition and operating results, which include, but are not limited to, the risk factors and other
qualifications contained in PFSwebs annual report on Form 10-K, quarterly reports on Form 10-Q and
other reports filed by PFSweb with the SEC to which your attention is directed. Therefore, actual
outcomes and results may differ materially from what is expressed or implied by these
forward-looking statements. PFSweb expressly disclaims any intent or obligation to update these
forward-looking statements.
During this call, we may also present certain non-GAAP financial measures such as EBITDA, adjusted
EBITDA, non-GAAP net income, merchandise sales, and certain ratios that use these measures. In our
press release with financial tables issued today, which is located on our website at pfsweb.com,
youll find our definitions of these non-GAAP financial measures, a reconciliation of these
non-GAAP financial measures with the closest GAAP measures and a discussion about why we think
these non-GAAP measures are relevant. These financial measures are included for the benefit of our
investors and should be considered in addition to and not instead of GAAP measures.
At this time, its now my pleasure to turn the call over to Mark Layton, Chairman and CEO of
PFSweb. Mark, the floor is yours.
Mark C. Layton, Chairman & Chief Executive Officer
Thanks, Garth. Good morning everybody. With me this morning is Tom Madden, our CFO; Mike
Willoughby, President of PFSweb. This morning, well be providing the overview of financial results
for our second quarter end of June 30, 2011. After our prepared comments, we will be available for
a few questions.
As you can see in our press release issued this morning, the second quarter of 2011 was marked by
the continuation of several major growth drivers that we discussed in our last call. At the center
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of our continued strong growth is our service fee business, which reported a great increase in
revenue this quarter of 27% compared to the same period last year. The increase is attributable to
existing client growth as well as the ongoing ramp-up of several new client programs implemented in
the last several months. This includes several new End2End solutions launched within the last year
that are supporting the transition of some of the worlds most well known brands into todays
eCommerce marketplace, including the likes of kate spade new york and the recently announced
relationship with Starbucks.
As I mentioned last quarter, we are experiencing what we believe to be a significant tailwind of
the industry factors and a growing list of outstanding PFSweb and client success stories that are
driving exciting growth opportunities for us by reputation and referenceability. Were keenly
focused on capturing these growth opportunities for clients and ourselves through expanding our
sales efforts, deploying a rapidly growing professional staff in our technology and operational
areas and by investing in our infrastructure with an eye towards being prepared in advance for the
growth forecast of our clients.
The collective result of these factors is that our service fee revenue continues to experience
strong growth, and we believe that will continue. Along with that, we continue to make strategic
investments to ensure we continue to capture the opportunities and that is resulting in higher SG&A
costs.
We are keenly focused on striking a careful balance between the need to grow and the need to
continue to improve our financial performance. As such, while we are investing for the future, we
are continuing to target and will reiterate our guidance of adjusted EBITDA between $6 million and
$7 million for calendar year or fiscal year 2011.
While as I just described the Service Fee business continues to grow, this revenue is being
partially offset by lower product revenue from the Business and Retail Connect business segment.
Recently our largest client relationship in this segment proactively communicated to us certain
realignment and restructuring activities that they expect to take over the next 12 to 18-months.
We understand that these changes are designed to streamline our clients business processes, reduce
cost of operations and set the business up to be a stronger market presence in the future.
Collectively, we believe that these changes may result in some gradual and modest declines of
product revenue and result in gross margin dollars for our Business and Retail Connect segment over
the next several quarters while our clients restructuring activities are implemented and before
their targeted benefits take a foothold. That being said, the Business and Retail Connect segment
did experience a benefit in margins during the second quarter, due to certain client pricing
adjustments.
As Mike will address further, we currently expect our service fee business segment to maintain its
positive momentum and drive our growth as we look to the future. We currently have about 15
separate contracted eCommerce client programs set to launch over the next six months, including 10
End2End solutions with some new client programs some of those which include new client programs
that we announced during last quarters conference call.
As we continue to close and implement new client agreements, weve also been able to attract a
healthy flow of potential new business, allowing our business pipeline to remain strong and
healthy. As a result of the hard work of our team over the past quarter our pipeline sits today at
about $45 million in size based on client annual projections. While this pipeline amount is down
somewhat from the past few quarters, much of the change is attributable to yet-to-be-announced
client wins coming out of the pipeline combined with the normal Summer season of new business
softness that we generally experience each year.
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We believe the continually strong pipeline speaks for itself in terms of both the rapidly growing
number of End2End opportunities we are pursuing and in the growing reputation that PFSweb has
earned for successfully implementing high quality and customizable solutions for our clients.
In line with this positive momentum, weve spent the last couple of quarters and expect to continue
making strategic investments in our staff, facilities and technology, both domestically and abroad.
It is through these investments that weve been able to support our existing client programs and
will be able to support the growth we expect from clients currently in the new business pipeline.
During the first half of 2011, we made significant additions to our technology development team as
well as other investments in our facilities and technology and operational infrastructure. This
includes the new food grade distribution facility, we opened at Memphis earlier this year that will
be used to support Starbucks, as well as other new CPG client programs we are targeting to launch
in the future.
Also were in the process of aggressively expanding our call center operations within the next few
months that will include the opening of a new larger facility in the Dallas area. A by-product of
this exciting expansion is that we do expect to record various one-time facility relocation costs
during the next several quarters.
We are targeting strong service fee revenue growth to continue in Q3 and Q4, but as I have
discussed the impact of this growth will be somewhat tempered in our financial results by the
higher cost necessary to be prepared to embrace our current and future clients growth forecasts.
Just to be clear, while were definitely making investments that will result in higher SG&A costs
in the near term, we believe those investments bode very well for us in terms of the financial
future of our business.
Again, were continuing to provide guidance that our Adjusted EBITDA for fiscal year 2011 is
targeted to be between $6 million and $7 million. With this information as a backdrop, Id like
Mike to take the call for a few minutes and give you some details in terms of our client programs.
Mike?
Michael C. Willoughby, President & Chief Information Officer
Thank you, Mark, and good morning, everyone. As Mark just mentioned, were really excited about the
growth were experiencing in our service fee business for this quarter and the first half of 2011.
This growth is being driven by a number of factors, including the ramp-up of the number of new
clients launched over the past year, as well as from the organic growth of several of our
established clients. For me one of the highlights of this conference call is the announcement of
the launch of the new StarbucksStore.com website, which is powered by PFSwebs End2End eCommerce
solution.
We have referred to this client on previous conference calls as a well-known company in the
pre-packaged food and beverage category. So for those of you that follow us conference call to
conference call, that answers that question for you. The new website went live during the last week
in July and Starbucks announced the new site with a press release last Thursday. As indicated in
that press release the new site is a complete redesign of the prior site that makes shopping for
coffee, tea and merchandise easier and more convenient for the Starbucks customer. This site is
part of Starbucks growing digital presence and it offers an elevated Starbucks experience thats
consistent with the well-known and respected brand experience that Starbucks creates in its stores
throughout the world.
While the launch of the new eCommerce site is exciting in itself, theres some really great
eCommerce innovations within the new site that I think are worth mentioning, including a new
subscription service. With the subscription service in the site, registered customers can set up
time-
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based shipments for not only coffee and tea products, but theyll be eligible to place pre-orders
for special items from time-to-time, items that are only available online.
The subscription service utilizes as a customized version of our continuity module to deliver a
very easy to use online tool for the customers to maintain their service using a familiar queue
interface. The new site also contains new coffee and tea tour packages that combined relevant
products into exciting new experience for the customers. Using this feature of the Starbucks Store,
customers can educate themselves to the different dimensions and tastes of coffee and tea by
participating in these tours, which are multi-month product packages that ship to them
automatically.
For example, in a coffee tour you can receive two contrasting styles of coffee per month to compare
and contrast the idiosyncrasies of each blend and increase your knowledge of coffee. Standard
ground shipping is free for all products included in the tour.
In addition to the coffee and tour packages the site will feature a rotating selection of Starbucks
Reserve coffees. Now customers across the U.S. have access to limited release coffees that
otherwise are only available in select company-owned stores in certain areas of the country.
And speaking of Starbucks stores, in order to integrate the digital channel seamlessly into the
iconic Starbucks in-store experience, weve included the My Starbucks Reward and the Starbucks Card
in the new site. You can purchase Starbucks cards from the site for yourself or as a gift. And when
you shop online at the Starbucks Store, you can use the registered Starbucks Card to earn Stars,
which is the Starbucks reward currency for each purchase that you make online. These stars can be
redeemed for free drinks in the store and other unique prizes from Starbucks including personalized
product offers and coupons.
In addition to the great features we built into this site, its also simply just a wonderful
eCommerce experience, with beautiful content thats consistent with the world-class Starbucks
brand. And I encourage you to shop the StarbucksStore.com site frequently over the next year and
just experience not only what it looks today, but experience the End2End eCommerce solution and
participate in the process of innovation that were going to be partnering with Starbucks as we
evolve this site over the next year and years to come.
Im also pleased to be able to name another new client that weve referred to generically in
previous conference calls. In the last conference call I mentioned that three of the new client
programs we were working on were eCommerce sites for Western Europe and/or Canada. Two of those
programs are branded eCommerce programs for the Columbia Sportswear brand supporting both the
Columbia brand and the Sorel footwear brand in Western Europe and Canada.
These sites are expected to launch over the next 60 days and theyll utilize Columbias existing
technology agreement with Demandware in combination with remainder of our End2End components
including high-touch customer care, order management, fulfillment, payment processing and marketing
services. Customer care and fulfillment services for European and Canadian consumers will be
provided out of our Liege, Belgium location and our Toronto, Canada area location respectively.
Were really excited to add these two excellent fashion brands to our rapidly growing portfolio of
fashion and apparel clients.
As we said in prior conference calls, success in global markets is really important for our
businesss long-term success. While our global End2End eCommerce footprint solution is already well
established, expanding this footprint is a key element to our growth strategy. And it will help us
service our customers even more effectively and make us an even greater force in the market. I
believe the addition of Columbia to our global brand portfolio demonstrates the success were
having in winning global deals. And there are more global engagement announcements to be coming in
future conference calls.
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Also weve now launched one of four planned new fragrance, beauty and skin care eCommerce sites
under our existing master agreement with Procter & Gamble. These four sites leveraged the End2End
solution we previously deployed for P&G with the eStore, and these launches will serve to
illustrate our ability to rapidly launch successive brands on a common platform and a common
infrastructure, while still delivering a completely customized consumer experience at every touch
point.
You may have noticed that we continue to roll out separate customized programs under these master
agreements such as our P&G enterprise agreement, our Liz Claiborne master agreement and the master
agreement we have with a still unnamed fragrance and beauty company. We believe this success
validates our approach to target luxury, prestige and CPG brand holding companies or portfolio
companies where a single contact relationship may lead to multiple valuable brand engagements.
We believe our End2End solution is uniquely positioned in the industry to meet the needs of these
brand holding companies where we can provide a single solid infrastructure and provide tremendous
leverage to our client, giving them economies of scale while still providing a completely
custom-branded experience for each brand. And I think this is critical to the luxury and prestige
brands that theyre targeting since they have really zero tolerance for anything thats less than a
completely customized brand-centric message.
In total, including this new fragrance and beauty site and the StarbucksStore.com site, we now have
over 17 End2End programs in operation since the first End2End solution was initially launched in
2008. This track record, along with our reputation as a leading solution provider in our industry,
is quickly helping us gain entry to potential new clients and helping us compete for new business
both in the U.S. as well as abroad.
Looking forward, as Mark mentioned earlier, we have approximately 15 new client programs set to
launch over the next six months. These programs are for companies which span multiple industries as
we continue to benefit from the emergence of several large product categories accelerating growth
in the web commerce space. These categories include fashion, health and beauty and consumer
packaged goods or CPG.
In fact last quarter, we signed a master agreement with a major CPG company in the pre-packaged
food and beverage space to launch End2End eCommerce solutions for two of their major beverage
brands before Christmas this year. This engagement represents a significant revenue opportunity for
us in 2012 with some contribution currently anticipated in Q4 of this year. This opportunity also
represented one of our larger individual proposal amounts in the pipeline that we reported last
quarter.
And with our new business sales pipeline still at over $45 million in size based on client
projections, were encouraged that we are continuing to win major new deals while our business
development activities backfill the pipeline with new opportunities. I believe this a very good
indicator that we can sustain our targeted growth rates moving into the future.
Finally, as I indicated at the beginning of my comments, we continue to benefit from impressive
organic growth with several of our established clients including recently announced programs with
Carters and kate spade new york. Helping our clients to grow their businesses with our End2End
eCommerce solution, particularly with our digital marketing services, is a core part of our value
proposition to our clients.
Benefiting from our clients organic growth is also an important part of our financial model. In
order to take advantage of these client organic growth benefits, we must continue to offer
leading-edge, comprehensive End2End solutions and we must operate those solutions with a very high
level of quality.
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We believe our success in winning and now expanding these new client business opportunities
validates our model and provides an inherently positive reference to the high levels of quality
that we provide to our clients and our customers.
And with that exciting news, Ill turn the call over to Tom, for review of the financial results
for this quarter. Tom?
Thomas J. Madden, EVP, Chief Financial & Accounting Officer
Thank you, Mike. Well, as Mark and Mike had both alluded to, Im also pleased with the progress
PFSweb has made this quarter in terms of both our business and financial results. Just a recap on
the quarter, total consolidated revenue for PFSweb in the quarter ended June 30, 2011 was $68.0
million compared to $66.4 million reported in the second quarter of 2010. This included an increase
of 27% in our service fee revenue up to a level of $21.0 million compared with $16.6 million for
the 2010 second quarter. This increase is attributable to increased service fees generated from
both new and existing service contract relationships.
To break that increase down for you a little bit further, new service fee contract relationships
generated approximately $4 million of this year-over-year increase, while existing client activity
generated approximately $3 million of growth. These two increases were partially offset by a
year-over-year reduction of $2.7 million from the impact of terminated clients. Most of this
related to the non-renewal in mid-2010 of the large technology manufacturing client, which we
discussed last year. If you exclude that non-renewal, our year-over-year service fee revenue growth
would have been approximately 43%.
The increase in our service fee revenue helped offset a decrease in our Business and Retail Connect
business segment, which includes our Supplies Distributors operations. Our revenue for this segment
was $38.8 million for the second quarter of 2011 as compared to $43.7 million for the 2010 second
quarter.
Our consolidated gross profit for the second quarter of 2011 increased to $8.6 million or 14.3% of
net revenue, excluding pass-through revenue, as compared to $7.6 million or 12.6% of net revenue,
excluding pass-through revenue, again in the second quarter of 2010. This improved percentage is in
part due to an increased percentage of our overall revenue mix coming from the higher gross margin
service fee business.
In addition, our gross profit received a boost during the quarter from the incremental gross
margins earned from certain product price increases enacted by our large client in the Business and
Retail Connect segment, as well as the impact of certain incremental inventory cost adjustments. We
expect our margins for the Retail and Business Connect business to settle back to historical levels
again in the third quarter.
Our second quarter results reflect ongoing SG&A investments we are making in our business to
support increased client activity both domestically and abroad as well as for future anticipated
growth. These activities have primarily included strategic investments and personnel, facilities,
sales and marketing, and technology. SG&A for the quarter increased approximately $1 million to
$9.4 million as compared to $8.4 million for the same period a year ago.
In the second quarter of 2011, our consolidated Adjusted EBITDA was $1.1 million which was the same
as the prior year period. We anticipate our SG&A investments to continue to have an impact on our
Adjusted EBITDA in the third quarter of 2011. However, we are now expecting a stronger fourth
quarter. Overall, we continue to target an Adjusted EBITDA range for fiscal 2011 of $6 million to
$7 million. This target excludes certain facility relocation related costs which we expect to incur
during the next few quarters.
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For the second quarter, our net loss totaled $1.2 million or $0.10 per basic and diluted share
compared to a net loss of approximately $1.5 million or $0.14 per basic and diluted share for the
same period last year. Net loss for the second quarter of 2011 included an income of about $14,000
from discontinued operations related to eCOST.com, compared to a loss of $0.4 million from
discontinued operations for the same period last year.
We continue to maintain a solid financial position with total cash and restricted cash as of June
2011 of approximately $20.2 million. During the quarter, we also completed a renewal of a credit
facility for our Business and Retail Connect business segment to support its financing needs.
Our capital expenditure so far in 2011 have reached approximately $4.7 million. This includes new
client start-up integration activity that is generally funded by clients. In addition we continue
to make investments in technology and infrastructure to support our growth and enhance
productivity.
Now Id like to turn the call back to Mark for some closing comments.
Mark C. Layton, Chairman & Chief Executive Officer
Great. Thanks, Tom. I hope that our prepared remarks today, which you heard from myself and Mike
and Tom, give you a little insight to the feel that I and our entire team here at PFSweb are
currently experiencing. Seeing the finished product of great client names like Procter & Gamble,
Starbucks, kate spade new york, Carters and so many others and watching many of these clients
businesses experienced strong growth as a result of the new technology platform, marketing programs
and site features that have been implemented, is incredibly rewarding not only for our clients, but
for our PFSweb team as well.
I can feel within our business and our staff an awesome buzz of excitement and expectation that
feels a lot to me like the dot.com boom years in the late 90s, but with what I believe is a whole
different universe of tangible and financially sustainable growth opportunities. It is exciting
times, lots going on and we look forward to continue to update you on our progress in the coming
quarters.
With that, that concludes our prepared comments for today. Operator, well be available for a few
questions.
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QUESTION AND ANSWER SECTION
Operator: [Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Mark Argento
with Craig-Hallum Capital.
<Q Mark Argento Craig-Hallum Capital Group LLC>: Good morning, guys.
<A Thomas Madden EVP, Chief Financial & Accounting Officer>: Hi, Mark. How are you?
<A Mark Layton Chairman & Chief Executive Officer>: Hi, Mark.
<Q Mark Argento Craig-Hallum Capital Group LLC>: Good thanks, nice quarter and looks
like you guys are continuing some nice incremental progress at the services business. Specifically
around that I know youd mentioned that you had 15 new, I think its new is it new programs that
youre launching maybe you could just kind of clarify that number for me a little bit?
<A Michael Willoughby President & Chief Information Officer>: Sure. So when we refer to
a client program, its a specific, usually geographic program deployed. So for instance if we have
a global client, we sign a master agreement with them, then we launch a U.S. and a Canadian and a
Western European site we would count those as three separate client programs under one master
agreement.
<Q Mark Argento Craig-Hallum Capital Group LLC>: Okay.
<A Mark Layton Chairman & Chief Executive Officer>: And we view it that way, Mark,
simply because each one of them is while the technology backbone is common, the look and feel of
the interface is different in order to deal with the localization requirements in each of the
countries. And thats true across brands as well. So we may have a you look at Procter & Gamble
relationship that Mike discussed in there, I mean there are a number of client programs within that
that are distinct either geographies or brands within that.
<A Michael Willoughby President & Chief Information Officer>: And generally were going
to be deploying a separate project team for the launch of each program. So, from our perspective
the bandwidth that we have in order to launch new client programs, one of those teams would be
taken up by a new client program. So, if we say weve 15 client programs in progress, generally it
means that we have 15 project teams deployed to launch those.
<Q Mark Argento Craig-Hallum Capital Group LLC>: Got it. Okay, thats helpful. And you
said within the 15 is one of the a major packaged foods guy and the beverage programs are two of
the 15, is that right?
<A Michael Willoughby President & Chief Information Officer>: Thats correct.
<Q Mark Argento Craig-Hallum Capital Group LLC>: Okay. Maybe you can better help me
understand the whole beverage/eCommerce. I mean, are you actually going to be a direct-to-consumer
model here or is it a B2B or what do you have going on or what potentially does this thing look
like?
<A Michael Willoughby President & Chief Information Officer>: The program is an End2End
direct-to-consumer program and products are pre-packaged. So, shelf stable type products like you
see on a grocery store shelf, for instance, direct-to-consumer.
<Q Mark Argento Craig-Hallum Capital Group LLC>: Got you. And is it actually I
assume its a beverage type of liquid product?
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<A Michael Willoughby President & Chief Information Officer>: Its in that category so
theres a variety of different types of products. Some are liquids. Some are other powder type
products. And theres also merchandise and consumer electronic type products in there as well.
<Q Mark Argento Craig-Hallum Capital Group LLC>: Got you. Okay, thats helpful. And
then you guys, you expect to have it up and running by the end of the year?
<A Michael Willoughby President & Chief Information Officer>: Before Christmas.
<Q Mark Argento Craig-Hallum Capital Group LLC>: Got you, okay. And will they let you
to hopefully announce the client at that time? Or...
<A Michael Willoughby President & Chief Information Officer>: We expect to be able to
announce the client at or after the launch.
<Q Mark Argento Craig-Hallum Capital Group LLC>: Got you, okay. Mark, when you talk
about, I mean, you guys are cool, is it just a massive pipeline of business here, and you talked
about gearing up to be able to handle that business. When youre talking about incremental spend,
are you is it hiring people to call center people, operations people, what maybe you could kind
of, high level bucket out the spend a little better or help us think about that?
<A Mark Layton Chairman & Chief Executive Officer>: Okay well, it is a combination of
people and then capital investments in other existing infrastructure to expand it or new
capabilities that we have. So specifically, technology developers for example that area has grown
pretty significantly over the last year. And we have a period of time during their ramp-up period
as we train them on the technology backbone that we use that they are not necessary assigned to a
client. So that results in a, increase in SG&A during that period of time that we would then expect
will move in the cost of goods as new client programs are implemented with those people working on
them.
Thats a similar scenario for account managers that manage our client relationships. Weve seen a
significant head count increase in that area as well, again there is a training period thats
involved with that. Particularly our entry level account manager are primarily new college
graduates. So our recruit program and the runway run up time period if you will for their training
is included in SG&A during that period of time until they are assigned specifically to a client
area and then they will show in our cost of goods. So, what youre seeing is a people component
running through SG&A that we expect over time will move to cost of goods and be associated with new
revenue that we would make in that area. So, thats the people front.
On the infrastructure side of things in here weve made some pretty significant investments in
terms of our mobile pick cart technology in our facilities in Memphis. The pick cart technology is
a very highly productive picking method for many of our clients and with the growth that weve
experienced with clients like Carters and a number of the others, the pick cart technology has
grown significantly in that area so weve made significant investments there. Weve talked about
the food grade facility already that we added earlier this year so thats some of the
infrastructure.
And then we just have facility expansion needs so, for example, our call center agents will grow
substantially. We have a smaller period of time where they are in SG&A but theyve become
productive much more quickly in our environment that were ramping up infrastructure requirements
to support the seat needs for the new clients that Mike described as well a pretty significant
fourth quarter peak that we expect at this point.
So that is square footage, furniture, telecom equipment I mean PCs and so on and so forth in that
area that from an infrastructure needs and again a lot of that will end up in cost of goods as the
revenue comes from there. So you see a bit of a ballooning in the SG&A component that will move
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the cost of goods but as we continue to see an aggressive new business pipeline that amounts going
to continue to be in there, if we get get ready for the next bulge as well, so.
<Q Mark Argento Craig-Hallum Capital Group LLC>: Got you. And then Tom, you had
mentioned facilities relocation costs is that at a corporate level or is that just additional
just distribution facilities?
<A Thomas Madden EVP, Chief Financial & Accounting Officer>: Combination, weve talked
little bit about different facilities. We, just within the last couple of weeks, have relocated our
Canadian facility from its prior location to somewhat larger facility to support some of the growth
activity there. As Mark alluded to, were talking about were in the process of looking at a new
call center environment for us. In addition, we are evaluating a whats new from a corporate
headquarters standpoint as well.
<A Mark Layton Chairman & Chief Executive Officer>: Our lease in our current facility
here ends in March of next year. So, were looking at some various options to deal with our growth
aspects. The technology developers and the account managers what comes with that obviously is
requirements for that space and square footage to put that on and there, so you will see some
expansion in our square footage both on the headquarters side as well as the call center side and
some additional facility expenses as we go forward.
<Q Mark Argento Craig-Hallum Capital Group LLC>: Last question and maybe, Mike, or and
I guess whoever can chime in on this one, but when you really look at, I mean we see there is
really big trend of branded CPG companies really wanting to develop that direct one-on-one
relationship with their customer and using the internet, the web and then eCommerce to do that. Are
you starting to see them actually put real spending behind on the marketing side, really start to
drive the channel not only just establish the channel, but really start to drive throughput through
that channel yet on the marketing side opening up their customer account, their databases, all
those things. Are we at that point now where were kind of starting to light that up?
<A Mark Layton Chairman & Chief Executive Officer>: Every client has got a different
viewpoint on how they want to use the direct-to-consumer site. This is Mark. And so there are some
clients who immediately want to aggressively move activity through specifically the site itself. I
think youll see us begin to talk more and more about our role we see ourselves evolving into as it
relates to being a facilitator of commerce across channels. And the client in many cases is using
our expertise and our technology that we bring to play that may facilitate transactions that go
across the eCommerce bandwidth if you will but that dont necessarily get shift out of our
facilities or results in a call in our call center. They may grow revenue activity in another piece
in the channel.
And so increasingly I think over the next several years our role will become more of an eCommerce
facilitator if you will, and as the consumers continue to determine when where and how they want to
buy, more and more our role will be to facilitate the convenience of that consumer to complete
their demand, if you will, in that case. And thats an exciting component I think for our clients
is they want to grow overall whether its they want to grow market share, they want to grow
revenue and they want to do it in a manner that a lot of the consumers can kind of choose the most
convenient method for them. So its a bit out there a little bit strategic-wise but it gives you
some feel for where were at.
And I think if you look at a company like Procter & Gamble, for example, theyre much more
interested in overall eCommerce growth for them as a company regardless of which retailer or which
channel gets it, they want themselves, the company, to be at the forefront of servicing clients,
their customers in the future. However, that customer wants to be serviced and theyre using our
expertise and our technology to allow them to get there. And where that shows up at is somewhat
relevant to in terms of that. So, youll see our revenue models evolve to where that will be,
whether its a rev share or people billing hours and things along that to kind of align with where
our clients are taking from that area.
10
<Q Mark Argento Craig-Hallum Capital Group LLC>: And you guys have proprietary
software, are you developing the technology platform to be able to manage across all the if its
the companys own website a third party website, I mean, you guys have technology to be able to
start to do more that type of business?
<A Mark Layton Chairman & Chief Executive Officer>: The combination of those things and
certainly our relationship with Demandware is important to begin with, one of the differentiators
that we have is an integrator for Demandware. I think were Im certain were pretty much the
largest integrator for Demandware in the world. And in terms of the developers that we have so, we
distinguish ourselves from a competition, first of all, by the fact that we have more high-quality
developers on the platform that know how to use it and we have developed a number of proprietary
type capabilities around that.
So Mike mentioned the continuity program for Starbucks, as an example, we have other if you will
apps that have our plug-ins that the Demandware technology that our competition cant offer nor
really can Demandware offer it directly or they can do it with in partnership with us but they
couldnt do it on their own.
So, were developing our own technology. Secondly to that is that weve developed hundreds of
interfaces to third party technologies that allow whether its a payment processing method or a
rating and review service or and on and on and on with that were building a library of
technological interfaces that have that allow the products that be enabled into the Demandware
platform out there and use on the site that again is a differentiator for us.
Were not setting out to try to be a large software development house if we could buy it, well do
that, but in many cases, the technology is not necessarily available or not to the quality
standards that we would like. And so well develop it in house in those cases from there. So, which
youll see increasingly as a library of either our own proprietary technology of our third-party
interfaces that we have created reseller agreements within there, bundled around the Demandware
platform.
And that same concept can work with other software manufacturers products. Now theres really not
another strong SaaS player in the industry today. So this is where Demandware itself has a
significant advantage in terms of the architecture design that they have for their platform and why
were so keenly aligned with them in terms of where they are and where theyre going and its been
a great partnership continues to be and both of us are benefiting significantly from it.
<Q Mark Argento Craig-Hallum Capital Group LLC>: Great. And just last question if you
look at the service fee revenue the $21 million you guys did in the quarter, I know you kind of
broke it up in new relationships, existing relationships. Maybe just step back a little bit, if
were looking at the $21 million, of that $21 million how much is kind of what well call
production revenue meaning revenue generated from actually doing the fulfillment work versus say
initial setup or pre-revenue or pre-production service fee revenue?
<A Thomas Madden EVP, Chief Financial & Accounting Officer>: I dont have those exact
numbers in front of me but Ill estimate for you. I think that the total fulfillment revenue
activity for the quarter would probably be approximately 50% of our overall revenue, 45% to 50%
would be my expectation with then call center following second as the second largest component.
<A Michael Willoughby President & Chief Information Officer>: And start-up revenue is
not going to be a major.
<A Thomas Madden EVP, Chief Financial & Accounting Officer>: Im sorry yes startup
revenue is not a significant component. We generally take that activity and defer it over the life
of the contract for the startup activity.
11
<Q Mark Argento Craig-Hallum Capital Group LLC>: Okay so you guys arent really getting
paid $2 million to spool up on the front-end of the deal?
<A Thomas Madden EVP, Chief Financial & Accounting Officer>: We may get paid to cover
our anticipated costs. But were generally deferring net revenue and cost over the life of the
contract.
<A Mark Layton Chairman & Chief Executive Officer>: Right.
<Q Mark Argento Craig-Hallum Capital Group LLC>: Okay, all right thats helpful. Thanks
guys, I appreciate it.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Marco Rodriguez with Stonegate Securities.
<Q Marco Rodriguez Stonegate Securities, Inc.>: Good morning, thanks for taking my
questions. I was wondering if I can get a clarification in regards to the Retail Connect. The
sequential drop in revenues is that particularly been driven by that one customer you refer that is
restructuring or just something else in there?
<A Mark Layton Chairman & Chief Executive Officer>: Yes the as we look at over the
next several quarters, I think that my comments related to the modest decline what we may
experience in that is related to that large client in that area and the restructuring activities
that theyre undertaking.
<Q Marco Rodriguez Stonegate Securities, Inc.>: Okay. And then shifting to the gross
margins on the service fees in the quarter is a little bit lower than whats going on from a
historical perspective. Can you provide any color there?
<A Thomas Madden EVP, Chief Financial & Accounting Officer>: Sure, a couple of
components there. First of all, we did have a high level of new client start-up activity.
Generally, when you have a new client, you start operating with a gross margin thats a little bit
lower than what our long-term targeted gross margin percentage would be, so thats one component.
Another component is the fact that we didnt have a lot of project work, incremental project work
this quarter that we generally see it north a higher level of and oftentimes, some of that project
work can sometimes be occur at a higher than traditional gross margin effort.
<A Mark Layton Chairman & Chief Executive Officer>: And just to add a little color
there, Marco, the Tom was talking about startup hes really talking about the time period of
when a client site goes live okay and when we kind of get it operating maturely. A few months
typically, not the ramp, not the building period, right, that goes into startup revenue that you
described earlier thats amortized over the life of the contract.
So once the client goes live and were recognizing revenue, we typically experience lower gross
margins in the first several months of the client until things are at a steady state aspect and
given the number of new clients were bringing on has a mix impact right now thats impacting
margin.
The other part about the project work its not necessarily it isnt available, its just were
our staff are all busy working on new deals right now, so we havent been able to take advantage of
some of the project opportunities that were out there in that, so that had a little bit of impact
on margin because as Tom mentioned, that typically those we kind of can sell that at list price
in many cases so.
<A Michael Willoughby President & Chief Information Officer>: Yes and where we have
taken on some projects weve used staff augmentation model, where were bringing some outside
contractors that would be at higher rates and so it isnt necessarily that were not getting the
job
12
done for the client, but were not deploying our internal resource to do some of those things were
putting them on new client deals, because we have that opportunity right now.
<Q Marco Rodriguez Stonegate Securities, Inc.>: Got it, thats helpful. And so with the
new 15 client engagement that youre expecting to launch in the next six months or lets just say
the second half of the year, are you expecting that same sort of an impact on the gross margins for
your service fee or are you expecting it to kind of bounce back up?
<A Michael Willoughby President & Chief Information Officer>: I think we thats the
pattern that we expect and have seen historically where the first 90 days or so of the contract as
we have the project management folks still on the project additional work just to make sure that
everything is going really well. And setting in the processes and procedures around the deal thats
a phenomenon that we historically have seen and we would expect to continue.
<Q Marco Rodriguez Stonegate Securities, Inc.>: Okay. And then just in regard to the 15
new clients or 15 new engagements that youre launching here, can you provide color in terms of how
many or rather by kind of by brand, how many of those 15 represent? And any sort of additional
information in terms of which ones are kind of doing the full line of services?
<A Michael Willoughby President & Chief Information Officer>: A couple of different
questions there. One is I assume youre sort of asking what category your vertical market they
might fall into. Most of the deals that were currently working on do fall into one of the three
top verticals we have most of them are fashion and apparel or accessories. In fact, our current
pipeline and 50% of the opportunities we have in our pipeline are fashion, apparel or accessory
deals.
And so if you kind of extend that into what were working on, its pretty close about half of the
deals are in that category. A couple are in health and beauty so on average, about 15% of our
opportunities show up in that vertical market health and beauty, skin care. And then CPG is 10% of
our pipeline and so a couple of deals as we mentioned two for that prepackaged food beverage
category or CPG. Does that help?
<Q Marco Rodriguez Stonegate Securities, Inc.>: Yes, yes. And then I guess you
mentioned that if you have a client and youre going to launch that client a particular brand in
three separate geographic locations, if I were to look at it from I guess counting those three
the example that you have, we have three different locations Europe, the U.S. and Canada and if you
were to kind of consolidate it and count that as one, how we should think about those 15
engagements?
<A Michael Willoughby President & Chief Information Officer>: So just to give you a
flavor kind of where were at year-to-date. We have signed six new clients so that would be either
an individual deployment or a master agreement with a client and for those six that would include
22 client programs. So on average, you can see that were doing little less than three or a little
bit more than three kind of client engagements per master agreement on average.
<Q Marco Rodriguez Stonegate Securities, Inc.>: Thats helpful. And then lastly I was
wondering, if you could maybe provide us with a little bit of an update in regard to your
competitive environment now that your largest competitor has been acquired and spinoff is complete.
Any kind of color you can provide there?
<A Mark Layton Chairman & Chief Executive Officer>: I dont think theres been a lot of
change in terms of where we see the competitive marketplace. I mean, weve typically come down to
the two large global providers being the final two selections in that. eBay is certainly trying to
tout its PayPal capabilities and the marketplace around the PayPal area as an advantage. However,
its an open environment and we have relationships with PayPal as well. So I dont see that in
there. I think there are certainly some clients that are still trying to understand it all and with
that creates uncertainty so maybe there is at times a little bit of advantage for us, in terms of
being a known
13
stable entity in that. So maybe we get a little bit of an advantage and a check mark in that. But I
would say as of today, the competitive landscape has not really changed.
Now for all the reasons that weve described out there, particularly the technology deployment of
our End2End solution out there, weve been in a very strong competitive position for some time,
even before the acquisition from our perspective and I think that we expect that to continue
particularly with some of the investments that were making and also were, as I described a couple
of minutes ago to Mark Argento, kind of how we see ourselves in the years to come as a facilitator
of a lot of these eCommerce transactions.
<Q Marco Rodriguez Stonegate Securities, Inc.>: Great. Well, thank you guys, I
appreciate it.
<A Mark Layton Chairman & Chief Executive Officer>: Thanks, Marco.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Alex Silverman with Special Situations Fund.
<Q Alex Silverman AWM Investment Co., Inc.>: Hey, good morning.
<A Thomas Madden EVP, Chief Financial & Accounting Officer>: Hi, Alex.
<A Mark Layton Chairman & Chief Executive Officer>: Hi, Alex.
<Q Alex Silverman AWM Investment Co., Inc.>: The End2End beverage brand that you
mentioned, the CPG client that ramps by Christmas. Is this the client that you initially won that
resulted in the leasing of the 50,000 square foot, food grade facility?
<A Mark Layton Chairman & Chief Executive Officer>: No, as I covered in the prepared
comments and that weve originally built that facility for the Starbucks deal.
<Q Alex Silverman AWM Investment Co., Inc.>: So that was for Starbucks and this one
will then be incremental to that?
<A Mark Layton Chairman & Chief Executive Officer>: No, at this point, the fulfillment
activity is not included in that particular deal. This is a large, large relationship, but at this
point in time, the activities that we are performing are technology and customer interaction
relating to customer response and a lot of marketing services.
<Q Alex Silverman AWM Investment Co., Inc.>: This is for the beverage.
<A Mark Layton Chairman & Chief Executive Officer>: Thats correct...
<Q Alex Silverman AWM Investment Co., Inc.>: Okay thats very helpful. Thank you. And
then in terms of the Retail Connect margin benefit this quarter, which will fall back in Q3. Can
you give us a little can you help us there with that explain a little further what happened
there?
<A Thomas Madden EVP, Chief Financial & Accounting Officer>: Sure this is Tom. The
our primary client in that business put in place a price increase back towards the beginning of the
quarter, when that price increase occurs, we generally get some benefit of the sell-through of some
existing products as we carry that price increase on to the channel. So its a kind of a temporary
benefit that we.
<Q Alex Silverman AWM Investment Co., Inc.>: So, in other words your inventory was
priced at the lower price.
<A Thomas Madden EVP, Chief Financial & Accounting Officer>: Thats correct.
14
<Q Alex Silverman AWM Investment Co., Inc.>: Got it. And so itll just be a catch-up.
<A Thomas Madden EVP, Chief Financial & Accounting Officer>: Thats correct.
<Q Alex Silverman AWM Investment Co., Inc.>: And what I dont know how much you can
share, but I think your comment was that the same client was planning to restructure. Can you give
us some sense of whats going on there?
<A Mark Layton Chairman & Chief Executive Officer>: Yes I mean, its pretty much public
information thats available out there. But, so I dont want to get too much into that aspect of
things in there. But youve got a what was being operated as a totally separate subsidiary
worldwide basically they are making some rationalization, if you will, by combining a lot of the
operations particularly in the international markets into the mothership if you will.
<Q Alex Silverman AWM Investment Co., Inc.>: Okay.
<A Mark Layton Chairman & Chief Executive Officer>: It allows them to align some
product lines together, eliminate a little bit of duplication in some of those product areas that
they had and also make some significant benefits for them in terms of their sales force and the
engineering aspects of things from there. So theyll be able to reduce kind of streamline cost
of operations going forward. So our relationship with them, they have reiterated, is solid. There
will be some changes in the product categories out there that we think could result in some modest
declines of revenue over the next several quarters but well kind of keep our finger to the pulse
and frankly I think that there is some opportunity for us to potentially begin to expand with this
client into other business lines that were at the mothership that we had previously not had a lot
of access to.
<Q Alex Silverman AWM Investment Co., Inc.>: Is there a chance that, that arrangement
moves from a basically a buy/sell to a consignment service contract?
<A Mark Layton Chairman & Chief Executive Officer>: Well Ive been answering that
question for 15 years. But I think theres always a chance is that and as I mentioned before, we
are relatively agnostic as to how our clients choose to deploy with us. We can make similar from
a modeling standpoint, we can make similar gross margin dollars if it were our operating income in
either model in terms of how clients deploy with us.
So, while product revenue might go away if the model was changed hopefully, were in a situation at
least in terms of how we model these things in here that we can earn a similar operating income
regardless of which way it happens. So, theres nothing at this point that indicates that they want
to make any change in that relationship but it has been discussed over the years and its something
that at least pops up on the radar screen in terms of should we consider this and at this point,
they continue to feel that the way they want to deploy the relationship with us has been through a
buy/sell model.
<Q Alex Silverman AWM Investment Co., Inc.>: Okay. And then just to change gears, can
you give us sense of how much was taken out of the pipeline in the quarter, and then of that, that
was taken out how much of that won versus, either passed on or lost?
<A Michael Willoughby President & Chief Information Officer>: Sure, so and just to
remind you that we if you look at our sales funnel, our objectives are to propose on about 50%
of the leads we sort of qualify in, so youd expect to see some pretty significant churn in the
pipeline. And this quarter we actually have seen much more activity than we even traditionally see.
We actually completely turned over our pipeline. So, we added in the neighborhood of $65 million in
potential that has client projection value to the pipeline and we actually took out $61 million and
if you look at the pipeline for the quarter 22% of the pipeline was actually deals that we won that
we contracted, and that would equate to about $15 million or so in value.
15
<Q Alex Silverman AWM Investment Co., Inc.>: So, and so historically 50% you actually
end up bidding on, so I assume that half of that was taken out because you didnt bid on it, 22%
you won and the rest you didnt win?
<A Michael Willoughby President & Chief Information Officer>: Thats right.
<Q Alex Silverman AWM Investment Co., Inc.>: Okay, very helpful. And then any update in
terms of an umbrella lender?
<A Thomas Madden EVP, Chief Financial & Accounting Officer>: Still kind of looking at
that. Now that the eCOST business has been sold and were in the process of having discussions with
our banking partners about a potential U.S. consolidated facility but, not a lot has been done
further on that, well probably be looking at that a little bit more in early part of 2012.
<Q Alex Silverman AWM Investment Co., Inc.>: And your most of your credit facilities
come up for renewal in the March, April, May of 12 range?
<A Thomas Madden EVP, Chief Financial & Accounting Officer>: Actually we the
facilities we have just gone through significant amount of renewals. The primary ones are with
Comerica those are now come up for renewal in September of 2012. So it is an 18-month renewal which
is longer than what we normally got from a renewal period from them.
<Q Alex Silverman AWM Investment Co., Inc.>: Yes.
<A Thomas Madden EVP, Chief Financial & Accounting Officer>: The Wells Fargo renewal,
its for a three-year period. So that from the Supplies Distributors business. So thats goes
through March of 2014, the business or the Retail Connect piece that we just renewed in May was
extended for a year and then IBM Global financing relationships extended for a year so. Its kind
of a little bit of mixture as we look out into next year; we wont have as many coming up for
renewal at that March timeframe as weve had this year.
<Q Alex Silverman AWM Investment Co., Inc.>: Okay.
<A Thomas Madden EVP, Chief Financial & Accounting Officer>: Many of them extending had
-extending their terms with us this year.
<Q Alex Silverman AWM Investment Co., Inc.>: Great, thank you very much
<A Mark Layton Chairman & Chief Executive Officer>: Thanks, Alex.
Operator: [Operator Instructions] Your next question comes from the line of Glenn Primack with
PEAK6 Investments.
<Q Glenn Primack Broadview Advisors LLC>: Good morning. I was wondering how much extra
cost that you take on with Starbucks this quarter without the matching revenue that would
eventually I guess move from SG&A up to gross margin expense?
<A Thomas Madden EVP, Chief Financial & Accounting Officer>: Im not going to go into
specific details on individual clients, there would have been some this quarter. It wasnt a
significant amount, but there would have been some.
<Q Glenn Primack Broadview Advisors LLC>: Okay. And then Mark on your vision on PFS
being an eCommerce consultant major CPG companies. Has that come about just because youve had so
much potential project demand that you cant get to because youre taking care of your clients?
16
<A Mark Layton Chairman & Chief Executive Officer>: No, thats coming about because the
worlds changing in terms of the way, I mean, the simple thing you can look at today 99% of these
eCommerce transactions originate from a PC today. As we sit back and look at this over the next
several years, that number is, we believe will decline significantly. And as mobile transactions
come to play in other electronic widgets, if you will, come about whether that might be a seat-back
device at a stadium or something in a cab, an electronic billboard, a shelf talker various ways the
consumers can interact with brands and potentially purchase products.
What we see is that an ability to facilitate electronic commerce transactions if you will across
channel partners. Some of which will continue to result in shipments from our own facilities and
interactions with our own call center others of which might facilitate transactions between various
retail locations out there in order to be certain that the brand still captures the sale and
doesnt lose it to a competitor.
So this is several years out, but with that, then you sit back and say well how does our revenue
model evolve around that and there will be things more oriented around potential rev-share
agreements and things along that basis and there that would go, this is a perfectly a
hypothetical example Ill give you here but lets assume for a minute that we moved $2 billion of
overall commerce facilitated $2 billion in overall commerce. Today, almost all of that moves
through would move through one of our facilities and the customer interactions would be with one
of our call center agents. Fast forward five years, lets just say that we may facilitate $10
billion of commerce and $3 billion of that moves through our facilities and $7 billion of that is
facilitated across various channels will mean we might not actually hold the inventory for the
client at all or handle the interaction there may not be an interaction required.
But we might be able to gain a rev share of that other $7 billion because we facilitated through
our technologies and our, both proprietary and our technology interface relationships that I
described earlier in there those particular transactions. So its a new revenue source for us,
if you will almost a new product area that we can offer that we see the opportunity for going
forward.
<Q Glenn Primack Broadview Advisors LLC>: So your return on invested capital looking
out I dont know, sort of three to five years goes up dramatically, if that kind of takes place?
<A Mark Layton Chairman & Chief Executive Officer>: If that hypothetical example takes
place, that would we would assume that would happen, yes.
<Q Glenn Primack Broadview Advisors LLC>: Okay. Last one with Barrons writing that
piece couple of weeks ago on Amazon, I dont know if you saw it or not, but the whole. Yes, theyre
growing revenue, but theyre having to put that much more into infrastructure. Can you just kind of
compare and contrast on what youre going through, I mean you guys started as big distributors,
they kind of started as not. And so, is there something thats similar or you wont even kind of
view that as a comparable-type company?
<A Michael Willoughby President & Chief Information Officer>: So, I dont Im not
familiar with the piece that youre referring to. When we look at Amazon we look at them in two
different ways, one is as a potential competitor because they have a fulfillment by Amazon type of
a product.
They arent really a competitor to us because their infrastructure and their go-to-market strategy
is really targeted to small and medium businesses with a pretty generic fulfillment and eCommerce
offering whereas our vertical markets demand a highly customized, very robust offering across the
touch points.
So if you look at their sort of outsourced business, we dont see them as a competitor and the
infrastructure that they built is really built for this large volume of products across a large
number of small-to-medium businesses.
17
And I think the problem with that model is you got this huge diversity of clients and products that
youre trying to warehouse and pick-pack and ship. We may have say 35 clients across our facilities
doing very large volumes per client and we can get a lot of leverage in economies of scale across
those 35 clients. If you had 3,500 clients doing a similar volume you could just see the
complexities and the inability to get economies of scale if there is any customization required or
diversity with the product.
The other side of Amazon obviously is our core business which I think is the emphasis for them. And
as they try to broaden their product categories with other peoples products, third-party products
that theyre bringing into their facility, the complexity just gets exponential as far as
technology you have to deploy and processes and procedures you have to put into the facility just
to make that work.
<A Mark Layton Chairman & Chief Executive Officer>: Weve often been asked why dont
you have a box solution if you will that can deal with small and medium size websites out there.
And this conundrum that Mike just described has been something that we have circled around for many
years and have never really been able to identify a financial model that we think it works.
We do take some calculated risks with start-up sites each year that dont have any revenue and may
not have a customer base with them in there, but might be a great brand name and well take some
risk with that, but generally weve got to be able to see both for our clients financial
justification and our own. We got to be able to see a site that can generate more than $20 million
a year in commerce in the first couple of years or it just doesnt really make a lot of financial
sense for either party to be able to deploy the solution necessary to make that happen. The
technology is expensive, the people around it are expensive and its really the whole justification
as to why do people outsource their web commerce platforms.
Theyre fast moving. The features and functionalities change constantly, theyre expensive to
deploy and today most web commerce sites dont have the economies of scale in terms of revenue to
be able to overcome the investment necessary to deliver the consumer the type of experience that
theyre after and that the brand wants to deliver in that. So, the fact that we share several
billion dollars worth of economies of scale across the 40 or so clients and 80 or so programs that
we have in place in there, we share that with all these clients that are out there, but doing that
across the several thousand clients is a whole different ball game when theyre when theyre a
lot smaller. So, and thats where I think the big diversion between the Amazon model and ours sits.
<Q Glenn Primack Broadview Advisors LLC>: Okay, great. That really clears things up for
me. Lastly, in terms of measuring how youre leveraging your model and internally, what do you look
at operationally like line items coming under at the given facility or what types of things that we
wouldnt necessarily see on a press release, that, you know, a daily sales, line shipped?
<A Mark Layton Chairman & Chief Executive Officer>: Yes all of those things I mean
theres different metrics in every key area of the business. Theres a lot of web analytics related
to visitor traffic conversion rates, abandoned rates, minutes spent on the site which pages are
used that we we get from our web analytics programs that are used to analyze the activities.
Theres a lot of e-mail metrics from a marketing standpoint that were looking at related to e-mail
sent, open percentage, monitoring the potential for spam, labeling on the activity thats there. In
the new customer site, its very important in terms of new customer ads that is an important
statistic as it relates to the vibrancy and the ability for the site to survive long-term in that.
And then you move into the distribution area, you speak into average order sizes, average weight
per order, freight cost per order, lines per order. Were looking a lot at the at the cubic size
of products that are involved in the facility, movements per individual unit that allows us to
maximize pick rates and how we store the product for the clients at different types of technologies
that we can deploy on the floor to be able to do that.
18
In our call center, were looking at length of call, call per order, e-mail per order how long it
takes us to respond to e-mails so on and so forth and we can kind of go on and on with that.
Theres a lot in the technology areas it relates to response time and the monitoring of our
equipment in those areas in there. Demandware has a whole other set of statistics that theyre
monitoring related to their whole worldwide deployment of technology stacks that allow things from
there. So theres a lot of gauges and a lot of daily metrics that are looked at in order to manage
the business.
<A Michael Willoughby President & Chief Information Officer>: But in our current level
the leverage comes from the transactions that are flowing through the infrastructure whether its
just electronic transactions or physical transactions thats where we get the leverage.
<Q Glenn Primack Broadview Advisors LLC>: Okay super. And would you share some of that
data with your customer base in terms of about I guess how the master agreement and the partnership
like as if I dont know back in the analog days when you had sales run that you share as
distributor back to the manufacturer?
<A Michael Willoughby President & Chief Information Officer>: There are two areas where
we would work with our clients. One is obviously complete transparency into how their program is
operating across all service levels and across all of the statistics that Mark is mentioning. The
other thing we can do with our clients is to give them an idea of how theyre stacking up against
their peer.
So we would divide up our clients into what I call cohorts by vertical market, aggregate our
statistics and also industry statistics were seeing and then we can during our quarterly business
review process with our clients, give them an idea of how their program is performing compared to
comparable programs out there, which we think is a huge value and when you start to see the kind of
client number of clients that we have within these top three verticals even with just the things
that were doing for our clients and just giving our clients valuable information.
<Q Glenn Primack Broadview Advisors LLC>: Great. Thank you for your time.
<A Mark Layton Chairman & Chief Executive Officer>: Thank you.
<A Michael Willoughby President & Chief Information Officer>: Thank you.
Operator: Your final question comes from the line of George Walsh with Gilford Securities.
<Q George Walsh Gilford Securities, Inc.>: Just wondered if you could review the
landscape relative to the GSI / eBay deal made earlier this year. Has there been any follow up in
the industry in terms of strategic partnerships and potentially how that might affect you? And
really Im speaking on a business level here just the idea you mentioned that you are looking at
smaller entities, theres start ups that you might make a partner with. But are there larger
entities that you guys can work with or looking for your capabilities in terms of the services
business?
<A Michael Willoughby President & Chief Information Officer>: I think in this
conversation we were talking about smaller entities, it was talking about clients that we might
take on, who are starting from zero that have a great brand presence and that we would decide even
though they dont have the kind of year one volumes that would meet our minimum threshold.
<Q George Walsh Gilford Securities, Inc.>: Okay, right.
<A Michael Willoughby President & Chief Information Officer>: But they have the
potential to get there quickly and so were going to take a little bit of risk in taking on a
client using up an implementation slot. We do that once or twice maybe three times a year where we
just really love the brand and think theyve got great potential. Youre saying all the right
things wanting to spend
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the money on marketing programs and well place the bet along with them on their program. I dont
think we were talking about potential acquisition targets.
<Q George Walsh Gilford Securities, Inc.>: Okay.
<A Michael Willoughby President & Chief Information Officer>: And at least in that
conversation.
<Q George Walsh Gilford Securities, Inc.>: Okay but the broader question is just
industry wise industry wide, is there any need for strategic services or consolidation or larger
entities that are looking for to expand their services?
<A Michael Willoughby President & Chief Information Officer>: I think if you look at
our strategy over the long-term, George, weve partnered very aggressively with what we call
best-of-breed partners. In some in many scenarios where the partnership allows us to make money
on the service thats being provided so we get to be a reseller of that technology, which I think
gives us the ability to access the technology without locking us into an R&D spend if we were to do
it ourselves or if we were to buy that provider like GSI has traditionally done and then sort of
being locked into only having that technology and having to make the investments to keep it up.
And so I think our strategy going forward is to continue to do that to partner aggressively with
best-of-breed providers and then as Mark says, we look towards the future where the strategic
direction is in some of these multi-channel initiatives and supporting these touch points that are
diversifying, if it makes sense to buy either the technology or the provider I think wed be open
to that but that remains to be seen as the strategy evolves.
I do think overall, we do continue to see consolidation in our industry. We were seeing activities
with the providers like Demandware looking to go public and filing as to type documentation or...
<A Thomas Madden EVP, Chief Financial & Accounting Officer>: Just one.
<A Michael Willoughby President & Chief Information Officer>: Just one, sorry.
Obviously the crazy market may affect their long the decision what theyre going to do. I dont
see any reason why that wouldnt change but we continue to see some level of consolidation in
companies going public taking advantage of the opportunity they have.
<Q George Walsh Gilford Securities, Inc.>: Okay. Thanks.
<A Mark Layton Chairman & Chief Executive Officer>: Thank you.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Chris Cerniglia with Stifel Nicolaus.
<A Mark Layton Chairman & Chief Executive Officer>: Hi, Chris.
<Q Chris Cerniglia Stifel Nicolaus>: My question Hi guys, how are you? My question
was actually in line with the caller just before me, which was are you seeing other opportunities
due to GSI Commerce being taken over and then being part of a bigger entity that other institutions
may not want to do business with GSI any longer?
<A Mark Layton Chairman & Chief Executive Officer>: As I mentioned earlier, I dont
think the competitive landscapes changed all that much at this point. As I said earlier, I think
the one thing we are seeing is at least a ponderance from some potential clients to say how is this
its new, so how is this going to sort out and whats going to happen.
I dont think that the competitive advantages that we feel that we have I think theyre still
there, they are strong and Ill go back again to the technology platform, what weve done with
Demandware
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and the SaaS offering we believe is a very significant competitive advantage versus what GSI could
offer with its proprietary technology platform and the challenges that theyve had in terms of
updating it. And eBay has been public about the fact that theyve got some technology things they
want to do as well.
So, youve got some rationalization thats got to happen on that side. So I think thats created a
little bit of concern and confusion potentially in the market. Im certain that eBay and GSI can
answer it from their standpoint, because theyre still very formidable competitors. And as I said
earlier, almost always its the two of us that stand in the batters box at the end, to see who can
win the deal. So, I dont think a lot has changed at this point.
<Q Chris Cerniglia Stifel Nicolaus>: Thanks.
<A Thomas Madden EVP, Chief Financial & Accounting Officer>: Thanks, Chris.
Operator: At this time, there are no further questions. I will now turn the call back to Mark
Layton for closing remarks.
Mark C. Layton, Chairman & Chief Executive Officer
I appreciate everybodys time this morning. Well talk to you next quarter. Have a great day.
Operator: This concludes todays PFSwebs Second Quarter 2011 Earnings Conference Call. You may
now disconnect.
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