Brightcove Inc. (NASDAQ:BCOV) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript May 9, 2024
Brightcove Inc. isn’t one of the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds at the end of the third quarter (see the details here).
Marc DeBevoise: Thank you all for joining today to discuss our First Quarter Results. I am Marc DeBevoise, Brightcove’s CEO. And with me today is Brightcove’s new CFO, John Wagner. First, I’d like to say we’re thrilled to welcome John to Brightcove. He’s a seasoned executive with more than two decades of experience in the technology industry, most recently as the CFO of online insurance marketplace, EverQuote. Before that, John held senior leadership roles at Carbonite, Constant Contact, NuoDB and Salesnet. John has an impressive track record delivering improvements in growth and profitability, and I’m excited to add his expertise to our leadership team. You’ll hear more on the numbers from John in a few moments, but I’ll begin with a quick overview of our high-level financial results for Q1.
Total revenue for Q1 was $50.5 million, which exceeded the high end of our guidance range and represents 3% year-over-year revenue growth. Revenue, excluding overages, which we believe is the most helpful way for investors to evaluate our performance was $49.4 million and grew even faster at 3.6%. Adjusted EBITDA was $5 million at the high end of our guidance and delivered the third consecutive quarter of double-digit adjusted EBITDA margin. And finally, we ended the quarter with $22.9 million in cash and cash equivalents, up $4.3 million sequentially. This reflects better-than-expected operating cash flow performance in our typically seasonally lowest quarter, and the proceeds from a strategic decision to monetize a portion of our patent portfolio.
Going a little deeper on the strategic transaction. During the quarter, we successfully monetized a portion of our patent portfolio with a leading publicly traded firm for $6 million. This included approximately 40% of our 150 plus patents and approximately 30% of our patent families. We believe this was a meaningful value-enhancing transaction for several reasons. First, by monetizing this portion of our patent portfolio, we meaningfully increased the amount of cash on our balance sheet, an attractive way for us to realize previously unrealized and typically unrealizable value. Second, we received a perpetual license back to all of our patents as part of the deal. This enables us to continue using all of the technology covered by these patents in our products for all of our current and future customers.
So no changes in terms of the benefits we received from owning these patents and no changes to our product capabilities or the value we deliver to and for our customers. Third, by executing this transaction, we will benefit from the acquirer potentially pursuing licensing and/or enforcement activities in the market with our competitors and/or non-Brightcove users, which like most companies in our position, we have not previously pursued historically. So this transaction effectively serves as a way to realize the value of a portion of our patent portfolio upfront, while also potentially providing the benefits of patent enforcement in the marketplace that we would not otherwise pursue. Finally, we continue to have an extensive remaining patent portfolio and an R&D team that generates new products and patents, all that we believe continue to differentiate us, can generate additional business opportunities, help defend our recurring revenue base and may deliver us more capital and return on investment in the future.
We believe this transaction is a great example of how we will pursue creative opportunities to unlock value for shareholders while also strengthening our business. We also believe it is yet another factor in demonstrating the continued rationality of our current market valuation. With the stock currently trading at less than 0.4x enterprise value to forward revenue and below 4x enterprise value to forward adjusted EBITDA, we believe our market capitalization is completely disconnected from our intrinsic value. We believe the core asset value of our intellectual property, our customer base and our software alone exceeds our current market value. And add to that our nearly $200 million of annual revenue, the overwhelming majority of it recurring, a record backlog of over $185 million and an efficient and profitable business model, and this disconnect becomes even more apparent.
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