AudioCodes Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Quartr
Provided by Quartr
May 7, 2024

There are 7 speakers on the call.

Operator

Please note this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to your host, Mr. Roger Chuchek.

Operator

Roger, over to you.

Speaker 1

Thank you, operator. Hosting the call today are Chathai Alsberg, President and Chief Executive Officer and Naram Varug, Vice President of Finance and Chief National Officer. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that information provided during this call may contain forward looking statements relating to AudioCode's business outlook, the future economic performance, product introductions, plans and objectives related thereto, and statements concerning assumptions made or expectations as to any future events, conditions, performance or other matters are forward looking statements as the term is defined under U. S. Federal Securities Law.

Speaker 1

Forward looking statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those stated in such statements. These risks, uncertainties and factors include, but are not limited to, the effects of global economic conditions in general and conditions in AudioCodes industry and target markets in particular, shifts in supply and demand, market acceptance of new products and the demand for existing products, the impact of competitive products and pricing on AudioCodes and its customers' products and markets timely product and technology development upgrades in the ability to manage changes in market conditions as needed possible need for additional financing ability to satisfy incumbents in the company's loan agreements possible disruptions from acquisitions, the ability of Otico to successfully integrate the products and operations of acquired companies into Otico's business, possible adverse impact of the COVID-nineteen pandemic on our business and results of operations, the effects of the current terrorist attacks by Hamas, and the war on hostilities between Israel and Hamas and Israel and Hezbollah, as well as the possibility that this could develop into a broader regional conflict involving Israel with other parties may affect our operations and may limit our ability to produce and sell our solutions.

Speaker 1

Any disruption in our operations by the obligations of our personnel to perform military service as a result of current or future military actions involving Israel and other factors detailed in AudioCode's filings with the U. S. Securities and Exchange Commission. AudioCodes assumes no obligation to update this information. In addition, during the call, AudioCodes will refer to non GAAP net income and net income per share.

Speaker 1

AudioCodes has provided a full reconciliation of the non GAAP net income and net income per share to its net income and net income per share according to GAAP in the press release that is posted on its website. Before I turn the call over to management, I'd like to remind everyone that this call is being recorded. An archived webcast will be made available on the Investor Relations section of the company's website at the conclusion of the call. With all that said, I'd like to turn the call over to Shouta. Shouta, please go ahead.

Speaker 2

Thank you, Roger. Good morning and good afternoon, everybody. I would like to welcome all to our Q1 2024 conference call. With me this morning is Niran Baruch, Chief Financial Officer and Vice President of Finance of AudioCodes. Niran will start off by presenting a financial overview of the quarter.

Speaker 2

I will then review the business highlights and summary for the quarter and discuss trends and developments in our business and industry. We will then turn it into the Q and A session. Niran?

Speaker 3

Thank you, Sharta, and hello, everyone. Before I start my formal remarks, I would like to remind everyone that in conjunction with our earnings release this morning, we will post shortly on our Investor Relations website and earnings supplemental deck. On today's call, we will be referring to both GAAP and non GAAP financial results. The earnings press release that we issued earlier this morning contains a reconciliation of the supplemental non GAAP financial information that I will be discussing on this call. Revenues for the Q1 were $60,100,000 an increase of 1.5% over the $59,200,000 reported in the first quarter of last year.

Speaker 3

Services revenues for the Q1 were 31,500,000 dollars up 3.3% over the year ago period. Services revenues in the Q1 accounted for 52.5 percent of total revenues. The amount of deferred revenues as of March 31, 2024, was $80,500,000 compared to $77,600,000 as of March 31, 2023. Revenues by geographical region for the quarter were split as follows: North America, 43% EMEA, 38% Asia Pacific, 14% and Central and Latin America, 5%. Our top 15 customers represented an aggregate of 50% of our revenues in the Q1, of which 38% was attributed to our 11 largest distributors.

Speaker 3

GAAP results are as follows. Gross margin for the quarter was 64.4% compared to 61.7% in Q1 2023. Operating income for the Q1 was $3,300,000 or 5.5 percent of revenues compared to operating loss of $800,000 or 1.4 percent of revenues in Q1 2023. Net income for the quarter was $2,100,000 or 0 point 0 $7 per diluted share compared to net loss of $200,000 or 0 point 0 1 dollars per diluted share for Q1 2023. Non GAAP results are as follows.

Speaker 3

Non GAAP gross margin for the quarter was 65.2% compared to 62.1% in Q1 2023. Non GAAP operating income for the Q1 was $6,300,000 or 10.5 percent of revenues compared to $2,900,000 or 4.9 percent of revenues in Q1 2023. Non GAAP net income for the Q1 was $5,200,000 or $0.17 per diluted share compared to $2,700,000 or $0.08 per diluted share in Q1 2023. At the end of March 2024, cash, cash equivalents, bank deposits, marketable securities and financial investment totaled $106,000,000 Net cash provided by operating activities was $15,000,000 for the Q1 of 2024. Purchase of property and equipment was $6,800,000 in the quarter, significantly higher than historical periods related to leasehold improvements of our new corporate headquarter in Israel.

Speaker 3

We expect CapEx to remain elevated in the Q2, after which we expect this line item to return to historical levels. Day sales outstanding as of March 31, 2024, were 100 days. In December 2023, we received court approval in Israel to purchase up to an aggregate amount of $20,000,000 of additional ordinary shares. The court approval also permits us to declare a dividend of any part of this amount. The approval is valid through June 18, 2024.

Speaker 3

During the quarter, we acquired 302,000 of our ordinary shares for a total consideration of approximately $3,600,000 As of March 31, 2024, we had $10,200,000 available under the approval for the repurchase of shares and or declaration of cash dividends. On February 6, we declared a cash dividend of $0.18 per share. The dividend in aggregate amount of approximately $5,500,000 was paid on March 6, 2024. We have recently embarked on the second phase of cost reduction plans that involves reduction our headcount by approximately 6%. This program is expected to result in $6,000,000 annualized cost saving with full run rate expected in the beginning of the Q3 2024.

Speaker 3

We are updating our guidance for full year 2024 as follows. We now expect revenues in the range of $240,000,000 to $250,000,000 and non GAAP diluted net income per share of $0.85 to $1 I will now turn the call back over to Shabdai.

Speaker 2

Thank you, Niran. Our Q1 2024 results were highlighted by healthy revenue growth of 1.5% year over year and executing on our strategic plan to evolve the company to become a leader in voice services in the U. K. S. And C.

Speaker 2

S. Markets. We continued the transition of our business to a recurring revenue model and transformation from a network equipment vendor to software and services company. On the other end, while growing nicely in strategic business lines such as Microsoft Teams, the customer experience market and conversational AI applications, we saw continued decline in our legacy gateway networking business in the Q1 of 2024, similar to trends seen in 2023. As reported by other communication equipment vendors, we believe that the high interest rate environment continues to have an impact on muted business spending, especially when it relates to Hadoop products.

Speaker 2

These two factors transition to a recurring business model and larger and earlier than anticipated decline in legacy gateway business of above 25% year over year led to sequential quarterly revenue decline of 5.5%, about 2.5% lower than anticipated earlier in the year. Coming back to discuss the positive developments in the quarter, we enjoyed a very substantial positive cash flow from operations, dollars 15,000,000 and strength in our live managed services operation in which annual recurring revenue grew 45% in the quarter. We have also enjoyed increased services backlog. These developments in the quarter provide us with a conviction about our growth prospects and puts us solidly on a track to successfully transform efforts to focus on software and services in our markets. In terms of key growth areas, our Q1 Microsoft and Teams business grew 8% and 9.6% respectively year over year.

Speaker 2

Customer experience business grew 15% year over year and conversational AI bookings grew around 50% year over year. Another sign of continued strength in core areas where we focus is the marked increase in our pipeline or created opportunities. For example, within Microsoft Ecosystem, which makes up close to 60% of our business, Our pipeline reached an all time record, up over 30% year over year and over 20% sequentially. We believe the secular trend of unified communication customer experience convergence is cementing our already strong competitive mode in UC Voice and driving additional opportunities in customer experience within the Microsoft Teams ecosystem. We are now the leading Microsoft Teams phone partner to lead a complete Microsoft Teams calling and contact center combined offering.

Speaker 2

A lot of you already know that we are the number 1 Microsoft Teams phone partner, enabling a significant share of the current 20,000,000 plus TIMSSONE PSTN sits. What make it less clear I'm sorry, what may be less clear is that Voca CAC, our Teams based contact center as a service platform is now recognized to be best in class, having recently been awarded the best Microsoft Teams contact center solution by CX today based on majority votes of customer experience industry experts. Our unique Teams based UCCX offering is increasingly getting more market awareness as evidenced by the buzz we receive about our complete Microsoft Teams calling and contact center offering at Enterprise Connect in March 2024, one of the largest UCCX industry trade show events. Regarding the weakness in top line in the quarter and why we believe it is short term in nature, I'd like to know the following. Ongoing software spending due to macro uncertainty and continued elevated interest rates likely caused enterprises and service provider to underspend in the context of annual budget in the early part of the year.

Speaker 2

The surface spending impacted mainly legacy and hardware portions of our business, where sales of legacy products such as gateways declined above 25% year over year. We believe that this is similar phenomenon to what we saw in 2023, in which our Q1 2020 3 Gateway business was low out of the gate, with stronger spending to come over the course of the year, as customers look to put unallocated annual budget to work. As discussed, growth in strategic major business such as Microsoft Customer Experience and Conversational AI continue to be healthy. We believe that our growth in software and services

Speaker 4

and then

Speaker 2

Conversational AI related solution, which drew again above 50% year over year, should fully offset declines in legacy pieces of the business starting in 2025. I should point out that 2024 is a year in which we are continuing strong growth in our live builds for Microsoft Teams, which grew around 45% year over year in the quarter. In addition, with our new Voca CRC solution enabling us to be the 1st in the industry to offer a complete Microsoft Teams calling and contact center combined offering, we're looking to proactively cross sell our subscription based Voca CIC team certified CCaaS to already significant Microsoft Teams installed base of customers. The other factor contributing to muted growth at this stage is the shift in our revenue model, which trends increasingly towards recurring revenue in layer of historical CapEx model. This obviously impacts our near term revenue growth and creates headwinds.

Speaker 2

I should mention, though, that this shift is clearly accretive to our long term top line growth. Shifting gears to services. Services revenue overall accounted for 52.5 percent of revenues and grew 3% year over year on top of strong services revenue generation in the year ago period. Importantly, our professional services booking remains strong and up 24% year over year, which potent reacceleration of services growth over the balance of the year. While it's fueled our ongoing momentum in services is headlined by our live subscription business, which ended the Q1 at EUR 53,000,000 annual recurring revenue, putting us on track to achieve our guidance for the year of EUR 64,000,000 to EUR 70,000,000 exiting 2024.

Speaker 2

Another positive development on the life services front is the emergence of new life CX services for the past 2, 3 quarters. This new area of activity for us in the CX market seems to represent growing potential connected to the continued shift of enterprises to C cash in the CX industry. Other positive developments in the quarter were continued strength in our SBC product line, which grew 15% year over year and where we kept our top leading position with more than 25% market share in enterprise space. Most notably, growth came mainly from increasing our SBC managed services, should further cement our strength in this market. And then we saw very nice progress in the Conversational AI business.

Speaker 2

Live bookings grew above 50%. And basically, we see that growth in the future. Reference our profitability metrics. Our Q1 2024 non GAAP EPS was $0.17 which was below our internal budget, primarily on lower revenues. Our non GAAP gross margin in the quarter was came at 65.2%, lower than the 65% to 68% long term range and compared to 67.6% in the Q4 of 20 23 and 62.1% in Q1 of 20 23.

Speaker 2

The sequential margin decline is primarily attributable to last favorable product mix. 1st quarter non GAAP OpEx was $32,900,000 in line with our planning and expectation. Net cash provided by operating activities was $15,000,000 We ended the quarter with headcount of 959 employees, up from 950 employees in the 4th quarter and compares to 978 employees in the Q1 of 2023. We expect our headcount figures to come down from current levels. So our second phase of cost reduction initiative takes effect in 2nd and third quarter 2024.

Speaker 2

Now to budget streaming. Let me discuss steps we have already initiated and are taking as part of our long term commitment to drive significant margin expansion and operating leverage. In the Q1 of 2024, operating expenses were in line with the original budget for the year. Anticipating now further industry muted business spending in 2024 and continued transition in our revenue model from CapEx into recurring business model, We took budget cut steps to adjust our operational expenses to lower forecast of revenues in 2024. We have recently initiated the 2nd phase of the cost reduction measures that we previously communicated a few quarters ago.

Speaker 2

This current phase encompass headcount resolution of more than 6%, primarily related to R and D functions dedicated to legacy areas such as gateways and multi service administrators. Once fully implemented, which is expected to occur by mid Q3 2024, this program is expected to yield EUR 1,500,000 dollars of quarterly run rate savings or $6,000,000 annually. This action does not impact R and D spending on core strategic areas of our business, such as Microsoft Teams, CX and Conversational AI, which continue to be robust. In fact, while reducing position in legacy related R and D, we kept hiring and growing our R and D, product management, marketing and sales resources in our live and conversational AI operations. On the guidance front, as Niran suggested, in view of the continued decline in our legacy gateway revenue and market outlook, I'm sorry, for the rest of 2024 in our market segments, we are updating our 2024 guidance as earlier stated by Niran.

Speaker 2

We believe that the continued shift to software and services capital with cost cutting measures we took already in Q1 2024 should allow us to continue to expand our margins and grow earnings by about 15% compared to 2023. The top line outlook assumes continued success in our UCaaS, CCaaS and conversational AI operations in line with the growth that we have demonstrated already throughout the whole 2023 and during the Q1 of 2024. In terms of our key business line, I'll touch a few areas. Microsoft, as discussed previously, Microsoft Business increased 8% year over year in the Q1. Microsoft Teams Business grew higher, reaching 9.6 growth year over year.

Speaker 2

Scaffold business continued to decline close to 20% to a rather very low level of about $1,000,000 a core. As such, solutions for Microsoft Teams consist now 97% of Microsoft quarterly revenue. Exit Q1 2024, Life for Teams annual recurring revenues reached a level of 53,000,000 dollars in line with our plans. We're thus confident that we are on track to achieve our stated goal of achieving live annual recurring revenue of 64 dollars to $70,000,000 for the whole year. Live managed services for Teams represent now nearly 45% of Microsoft Teams business compared to just 25% in the year ago quarter.

Speaker 2

And thus, we believe that the impact of the shift to recurring revenue model should ease in coming quarters. We have also enjoyed growth in total contract value of Life Services, which grew above 45% year over year. From geo perspective, EMEA bookings registered modest growth for the first time in multiple course, while North America experienced steady growth. Given the robust growth in our pipeline or credit opportunities, we remain optimistic about the long term growth potential for our Microsoft business. In addition to the multiyear opportunity of Teams Fund connectivity, we can see clear signs of growing potential for a new source of revenue based on voice related business application.

Speaker 2

Among this, they include components such as Voca CIC as a contact center solution for the Teams environment, Smart App 360 as a compliance recording solution for the Teams environment and Meeting Insta, this is a central hub solution for capturing and sharing meeting information across the organization. Moving to CX and Conversational AI. 1st quarter contact center business grew 15% year over year, led by North America and the Asia Pacific regions. Conversational AI, as I've mentioned before, conversational AI bookings grew over 50% year over year. Voice services for enterprise CCaaS deployments continue to be the center of our activity.

Speaker 2

With the integration of our Live platform into these opportunities, we see a steady rise of revenues associated with our Live CX activity. We now see strength in the CX CAI on all fronts, emanating from sales of our solution in support of enterprise customers and leading vendors of customer experience platform and cross sell for own AI first Voca CRC contact center platform to the Teams phone installed base. Staying on the topic of Voca CRC, over the past 12 months, we have significantly set up our product development resources and investment into the Teams contact center solution, highlighted by our recent addition of the omni channel capabilities. We are thrilled that the industry analysts and market alike are starting to notice, as evidenced by us, having recently being awarded by CX today the best Microsoft Teams contact center solution based on the evaluation of 16 top industry experts. While still a small portion still small percentage of our business, we expect Vaca CAC to be a major growth catalyst, a growth pillar for CX and overall long term future, arising from both direct revenue contribution and pull through of the rest of the conversational AI business lines such as Smart App Compliance Recoding and Meeting Insights for Teams is an enterprise grade software as a service solution that enables the organization to capture, analyze and share business meeting information across the company.

Speaker 2

It provides a comprehensive set of tools and conversational AI technologies for recording, transcribing, indexing and analysis, making it easy to search and retrieve information from past meetings. With meeting insights users can quickly find and review key points and decision from previous meetings for improving collaboration and decision making across the organization. In the Q1 of 2024, we have achieved a key development milestone where the solution was upgraded to become a cloud based true SaaS solution providing multi tenant service to enterprises. Roadmap for the solution in 2024 includes, among others, additions of automation capabilities, more languages, European languages, enhanced mobile operation and extend extending the function of meeting insight to more U. K.

Speaker 2

Solutions. As for sales, we have seen nice growth in new accounts in the UK and U. S. Adopting the tool for their ongoing daily operations. On Smart App, in Q2 2024, we plan to launch Smart App also as a SaaS solution for enterprises, a platform that will expand our go to market opportunities, enabling service provider and resellers to offer their own branded recording services powered by other codes.

Speaker 2

This new platform shares the same infrastructure as Meeting Insights, and we have plans to unify the services in 2024, given growing synergies between these two business lines. To wrap up our discussion, relying on the nice progress we see in our strategic clients around Microsoft Teams, CX and conversational AI. And despite the slower than expected start of the year due to legacy decline, we have strong conviction about our long term business fundamentals and have made significant progress in our transformation to a software and services company with strong profitability. This optimism is supported by record pipeline of greatest opportunity in the Q1 2024, particularly in the Microsoft and contact center environments, growing momentum of Voca CRC as a major long term growth driver for the company and ongoing strong annual recurring revenue growth for the live managed services for the company. And with that, I've concluded my section of the call, and I'd like to move the call to the operator.

Operator

Thank you very much. We will now be conducting our question and answer Thank you. Your first question is coming from Samad Samana of Jefferies. Samad, your line is live.

Speaker 4

Hi, this is Mason Marion on for Samad. Thanks for taking our questions. So I want to start with guidance. So of the $15,000,000 reduction to the full year revenues, what amounts from lower than expected gateway revenue? Did you lower revenue expectations for any other products or services as well?

Speaker 2

Okay. Well, we've seen about $3,000,000 decline in the 1st quarter. As just relying on the experience we had from 2023, we believe that we will not see major improvements throughout the year. So taking $3,000,000 for our core, we took $12,000,000 for the full year for the gateway decline. And then based on our assessment of the ongoing continued slowdown in the market and muted spending in the market, we left room for another $3,000,000

Speaker 4

Understood. Thank you, Shabtai. And then so you've been talking about this transition towards more recurring revenue for several years now. Are we reaching an inflection point? How big is your legacy business still?

Speaker 4

And when could we start to see your total revenue growth more closely reflect your recurring revenue growth?

Speaker 2

Right. Okay. So let me repeat some of the stat I mentioned before. The most important business when you try to analyze recurring business versus CapEx is Microsoft Teams. Now what I've stated is in this Q1 of 2024, recurring revenues, TIM's recurring revenues reached 45% compared to just 25% a year ago.

Speaker 2

So my our expectations are that within the next 2, 3 months, the decline of, I would say, CapEx teams will be substantially less meaningful. So in general, we view 2023, 2024 and probably the first half of twenty twenty five as the years of transitioning our revenues from a CapEx model to an OpEx model. So we do expect that this quarter, maybe another quarter of 2, we'll still suffer from that. But I think entering towards the end of this year and early 2025, think we'll have a very strong base of ongoing accumulated pipeline for our recurring revenues. And therefore, I believe that we should be safe from that point and all.

Speaker 4

All right. Thank you.

Operator

Thank you very much. Your next question is coming from Ryan McWilliams of Barclays. Ryan, your line is live.

Speaker 5

Hi, thanks for taking the question. This is Pete Newton on for Ryan McWilliams. Just

Speaker 2

I'm trying

Speaker 5

to look into what dynamics you're seeing right now in terms of CCaaS versus UCaaS driven demand. And how would you characterize those demands for both and if that's similar to what you saw in 2023?

Speaker 2

So actually, we do see a shift. I mean, I think the turning point was probably somewhere in the beginning of 2023. Until then, I think UCaaS was primarily the biggest market and CCaaS was less. We all believe and I think anybody who attends industry trade shows and events such as Enterprise Connect and figure out that UCaaS is kind of taking a slower growth path, although still big and strong. However, the majority of the interest and I think this is mainly due to the impact of AI and Gen AI and conversational AI technologies.

Speaker 2

We definitely see substantially more opportunities in CCaaS. Also take the fact that the CCaaS market is substantially more fragmented compared to UCaaS. UCaaS, just take the top three accounts, it's Microsoft Teams and Cisco WebEx and Zoom. And maybe you have another one player or 2. That's comprised about 70%, 80% of the market.

Speaker 2

So the opportunities there are becoming kind of narrow and limited. While the CX industry is growing fast, substantially higher rate and is substantially more fragmented and also broken into different functionalities and solution. So our ability to take our deep technology base and experience and expertise in many networking and cognitive services and conversational AI technologies. This will allow us to substantially be a more creative and successful. So for us, starting 2023 and this year more, definitely the CX the CCaaS industry is much more interesting for us and this is where we will put most of our efforts.

Speaker 5

Great. That's very helpful. Thank you, Shabdai. And then just maybe following up. How should we think about the shape of product and service revenue for the rest of FY 2024, just given the commentary around the legacy business and then also the service pipeline looking good?

Speaker 5

Just anything you can talk about in terms of shape of revenue for products and services for the rest of this year?

Speaker 2

So just like on the heels of 2023, we believe services will continue growing. Last year, I think we ended around 50%. This year, we'll probably grow probably towards the 52%, 55%. Product portion of our sales will always come down, also due to the fact that there's still very high impact from the high interest rates. So we may see further product decline.

Speaker 2

But in essence, we have crossed the line where products are as important as they were back in our history. Services is now any new project we are initiating, be it in UCaaS, in CCaaS, and so conversational AI tends to be services and long term bookings. So the shift is occurring. So I would expect, just as we provided in our guidance, that we will either keep or even grow beyond where we are in the Q1.

Speaker 5

Very helpful. Thanks, guys.

Operator

Thank you very much. Our next question is coming from Ryan Coons of Needham and Company. Ryan, your line is live.

Speaker 6

Great. Thanks for the questions. I wanted to ask about generally the exposure to service providers here, traditional service providers. Weakness in gateways, I assume is due to that exposure. And beyond just their weakness in cloud, I'm sorry, their weakness in CapEx, they're also putting up some pretty awful growth numbers in their wholesale and business services that seems to be an accelerated decline.

Speaker 6

So I assume that that's also an impact on the gateway business there. Can you confirm?

Speaker 2

Yes. That is indeed what has hurt our gateway business back in 2023 and now. In essence, we definitely view the giants in the software industry capable of investing and growing their offering, therefore, spending more and allowing enterprise to be beneficial. Service provider, according to what we see, are playing a very safe and minimal play, trying to hold where they are, but we cannot see any growth from that side of the business.

Speaker 6

Right. Okay. And then when it comes to Teams, it seems like their growth numbers on PSTN ads are continue to be real healthy, if any accelerating in that 20,000,000 subscriber or seat number. How do you read your attach rate there for the Teams ads? Is this primarily through service provider solutions where they're struggling a bit to stay relevant relative to the new Teams deployments?

Speaker 2

Okay. So yes, well, Microsoft Teams phone business seems to be growing nicely about a few millions every year. We are definitely enjoying that trend. When we cite growth in our live managed services growth of 45% growth, that is attached to business in the Microsoft Phone business. And therefore, yes, we definitely benefit from that.

Speaker 2

We actually see growth. Our backlog is growing. Our live services are growing. Bigger companies who just did the first step of deploying a project now enter a more meaningful phase of moving. We also believe that GenAI CoPilot and others will drive more use of Teams phone simply because once you get those great analytics capabilities from Copilot on meetings and calls, that would definitely drive, we believe, phone users from legacy telephony systems to move to Teams phone in order to be able to benefit from the capabilities Copilot brings.

Speaker 2

So yes, we believe Teams Phone is growing nicely or business is attached to it. And I can definitely see a very long runway for this activity.

Speaker 6

That's helpful. And one last quick one, if I could, on Voca for Teams. What are you seeing as your use cases there? Is this primarily in the kind of Tier 2 use cases? A lot of companies, your peers that roll out early contact center products, early generation products are using are seeing internal use cases and kind of the 2nd tier use cases, is that similar for Voca or what sort of use cases are you seeing?

Speaker 6

Thank you.

Speaker 2

Yes, indeed. With Voca CIC being a new entrant, obviously, we need to go for the lower hanging fruit. So, yes, lower number of seats, contact center that serve internal desks and or small offices. But then I can tell you we just won end of 20 23, a huge project with one of the leading universities in the U. S.

Speaker 2

This university has tens of 1000, more than 50,000 students. All in all, with staff and other functionalities on the campus, I think they all in all have like above 150,000 users. But that means that contact center is going to be using variety of application within that campus. And in many cases, you have many, let's say, one application that is serving about 25 contact center out of substantially larger number in that campus. So Voca definitely serves that need.

Speaker 2

So we are growing. We are investing. We just said, as I've mentioned, omni channel capabilities on top of voice where we already achieved 90% coverage of what's needed. So yes, we're gaining a lot of the fact is that due to the fact that we have such a very large installed base of customers in Microsoft Teams And because the solution is Azure native, relies heavily on the state of the art, the deepest level of technology available for Microsoft Azure, which is not available in other contexts as a solution in the market, makes our solution for Microsoft Teams and Azure substantially more advanced and preferable. So the solution is very unique in that environment, and we believe we're gaining a lot of traction in that space.

Speaker 6

Thanks for all that, Shabtai.

Operator

Thank you

Speaker 5

very much, Shabtai.

Operator

Thank you very much. Well, that appears to be the end of our question and answer

Speaker 2

I would like to thank everyone who attended our conference call today. With continued good business momentum in our enterprise operations and good underlying market trends in UCaaS, CCaaS and Gen AI growing, we believe we are transitioning the business towards continued growth and prosperity in the future. We look forward to your participation in our next quarterly conference calls. Thank you very much for being with us today. Have a nice day.

Operator

Thank you very much, Sabtai. This does conclude today's conference. You may disconnect your phone lines at

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Key Takeaways

  • AudioCodes reported Q1 revenues of $60.1 million, up 1.5% year-over-year, with GAAP operating income of $3.3 million versus a loss last year and non-GAAP gross margin improving to 65.2%.
  • Services now account for 52.5% of revenues and live managed services ARR grew 45% to €53 million, while Microsoft Teams business rose 9.6%, customer experience solutions grew 15%, and conversational AI bookings jumped about 50%.
  • Legacy gateway and hardware sales declined over 25% year-over-year, reflecting a shift from CapEx to subscription-based software and services as AudioCodes accelerates its transformation.
  • The company initiated a second phase of cost reductions, cutting headcount by approximately 6% to achieve $6 million of annualized savings by Q3 2024, without reducing R&D in strategic areas.
  • AudioCodes narrowed its full-year guidance to $240–250 million in revenues and non-GAAP EPS of $0.85–1.00, ended Q1 with $106 million of cash and equivalents, and returned capital via a $0.18 per-share dividend and $3.6 million of share repurchases.
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Earnings Conference Call
AudioCodes Q1 2024
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