Participants

Jon Niermann; CEO, Co-Founder, Director; Loop Media, Inc.

Neil Watanabe; CFO; Loop Media, Inc.

Eric Wold; Analyst; B. Riley Securities

Darren Aftahi; Analyst; ROTH MKM Partners, LLC

David Marsh; Analyst; Singular Research

Presentation

Operator

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for participating in today's conference call to discuss Lu Media's financial results for the 2024 for fiscal fourth first quarter ended December 31st, 2023. Joining us today are Louis CEO, Mr. John Newman, and the Company CFO., Mr. Neil was talking about by now. Everyone should have access to the 2024 fiscal fourth quarter earnings press release the Company issued earlier today at approximately 4.05 P.M. Eastern time. The release is available in the Investor Relations section of Leap's website at w. w. w. dot glu dot TB. In addition, this call will be available for webcast replay on the company's website.
Following management's remarks, we'll open the call for your questions. Please note, there are two ways to ask questions during the Q&A. One, for those on the phone, please press star one on your telephone keypad to raise your hand and two. For those on the webcast, please select ask-a-question in the top right corner of the screen, enter your question and click Submit certain questions made on this conference call and webcast. Are considered forward-looking statements under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, and these forward-looking statements are subject to certain known and unknown risks and uncertainties as well as assumptions could cause actual results to differ materially from those reflected in these forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are also subject to risks and uncertainties that are described from time to time in the Company's filings with the SEC do not place undue reliance on any forward-looking statements, which are being made only as of the date of this call, except as required by law. The Company undertakes no obligation to revise or publicly release the results of any revision to any forward-looking statements.
The company's presentation also includes certain non-GAAP financial measures, including adjusted EBITDA as supplemental measures of performance of our business, All non-GAAP measures have been reconciled to the most directly comparable GAAP measures. In accordance with SEC rules. You'll find reconciliation charts and other important information in the earnings press release and Form eight K furnished to the SEC.
I would now like to turn the call over to Lew CEO, Mr. John NeoMagic.

Jon Niermann

Thank you, and good afternoon, everyone. After three quarters of just over $5 million in revenue, we once again exceeded the $10 million quarterly revenue mark. Unlike Q1 FY23, our Q. one FY24 revenue contain little to no political advertising spend and was purely organic revenue off our core business quarter over quarter growth increased 79% from $5.7 million in Q4 of FY23 to $10.2 million in Q1 of FY24. In addition to the strong revenue growth, we saw the impact of our focus on lowering operating costs and network efficiency, which resulted in a significantly reduced quarterly adjusted EBITDA loss by 69% or $1.5 million as compared to $4.8 million in Q4 23. As of December 31, 23, we had approximately 77,000 active blue players and partners screens across the loop platform, which includes 33,783 quarterly active loot players or QA use across our O&O platform, an increase of 26% for 6,880 QAUs over the 26,903 QAUs for Q1 FY23 and a slight decrease of 3,238 over the 37,021 QAU.s for Q4 FY23 and approximately 43,000 partner screens across our partner platforms, an increase of 153% or 26,000 over the 17,000 partner screens at the end of Q. one FY23 and 1,000 partner screens over the 42,000 partners screens announced for Q4 FY23. Our QA footprint for the first quarter of fiscal 24 was reduced as a result of natural attrition of Blue players that were not immediately replaced as we transition to a more targeted distribution model, pivoting our focus to certain designated advertising markets and geographies as well as more desirable out of home locations and venues, including convenience stores, restaurants, bars, and other retail establishments. We believe this targeted distribution plan will allow us to grow our active blu player numbers quarter on quarter and provide a more robust distribution platform for our advertising partners over time. In addition, a number of our new players experienced downtime in late September and early October 23 as a result of an operating program update and technical issues related to outdated WiFi in those venues. Not all of those new players returned to active performance in the first quarter of fiscal '24. We have now entered into tours the worst advertising quarter of the year between January and March, where we've learned to be more conservative in our expectations. But I am optimistic about the revenue ramp for the second half of 2024 and beyond. The increased awareness of the loop TV brand and the expansion of distribution over the past year on our platforms and screens demonstrate that our sales and marketing efforts are giving us new client wins. Our approach is to leverage our business model to continue to gain new customers on a consistent basis while focusing on the venues and markets that we know provide the best return on our investment and potential for revenue growth. Moreover, we will look to explore strategic M&A opportunities that can allow us to leverage our platforms and networks further to integrate our Company vertically. We will continue to focus on tightening the bottom line to achieve our goal of becoming cash flow positive as soon as possible. So that could mean further cost efficiencies. We will need to be realized whilst still being careful not to materially dampen future upside in growth. It's always a tricky balance to accomplish that, but we plan to keep a consistent eye on it.
With that, I will turn the call over to Neil to take you through our financial results. Neil?

Neil Watanabe

Thank you, John, and good afternoon, everyone. As we review our financial results, I want to remind everyone that all comparisons and variance commentary refer to the prior year's fiscal first quarter, unless otherwise specified in the 2024 fiscal first quarter revenue was $10.2 million compared to $14.8 million for the same period in fiscal 2023. Current Q1 revenue does not reflect any benefit from political advertising compared to Q1 last year. Additionally, we have improved productivity in our revenue channels through our various initiatives as our revenue growth in the current Q1 improved significantly over the last three quarters. In the 2024 fiscal first quarter gross profit was $3.6 million compared to $5.7 million for the same period in fiscal 2023 and the 2024 fiscal year first quarter gross margin rate was 35.6% compared to 38.4% for the same period in fiscal 2023. The decrease was primarily driven by revenue mix as the year ago period included a smaller portion of our partner platform business, which carries lower gross margin, but higher operating margin. Total sales, general and administrative expenses, excluding stock-based compensation, depreciation and amortization, impairment of goodwill and intangible assets and restructuring costs in the 2024 fiscal first quarter were $6.2 million compared to $8.0 million for the same period in fiscal 2023. The improvement was primarily due to a reduction in digital marketing spend, resulting in lower expenditures and decreased payroll and other compensation related expenses partially offset by increased capital raise costs and bad debt reserve from growth in our receivable base.
On revenue increases, we continue to focus on gaining efficiencies and SG&A, which we expect to be reflected throughout 2024.
Net loss in the 2024 fiscal first quarter was a loss of $5.3 million or a loss of $0.09 per share compared to a net loss of $5.3 million or $0.09 loss per share for the same period in fiscal 2023. Adjusted EBITDA in the 2024 fiscal first quarter was a loss of $1.5 million compared to a loss of $1.6 million for the same period in fiscal 2023 a slight improvement.
Turning to our balance sheet, cash and cash equivalents were $3.8 million on December 31st, 2023, compared to $3.1 million on September 30th, 2023. As of December 31st, 2023, we had a total net debt of $7.1 million compared to $7.5 million as of September 30th, 2023. Overall, we continue to focus on increasing our revenues, gross margins and leveraging our expenses in line with revenues as we plan to continue to reduce the adjusted EBITDA loss as we progress through the year.
I'd like to thank everyone for listening today, and we look forward to providing further updates on our next conference call.
This concludes our prepared remarks. We will now open it up for questions. Operator, back to you.

Question and Answer Session

Operator

Now we'll open the call for your questions.
As indicated at the beginning of the call.
There are two ways to ask questions. One for those on the phone, please press star one on your telephone keypad to raise your hand. To withdraw your question. Simply press star one again, two for those on the webcast, please select ask ask-a-question question in the top right corner of the screen, enter your question and click Submit up to three questions from those on the phone will be answered first and as time permits, a couple of questions from the webcast will be addressed.
Our first question comes from the line of Eric Wold with B. Riley. Please go ahead.

Eric Wold

Thanks.
Good afternoon, everybody. I'm introducing my questions. I've got two kind of questions. The first one has three parts to it, but I was really trying to make it quick. And the first question is really around the room, the reduction in the loop player in the quarter. I know you said that you the net, the net reduction is about 30 to 100 sequentially. Can you give us a little more color behind that in terms of how you added versus how many you I guess removed or did not replace? And then second part is, is this kind of a one quarter flush in the December quarter or should we expect kind of natural attrition like that throughout this year? And can you actually have a net gain again in placements in the second quarter? And then the last part is just more thoughts on why that reduction was made. I didn't want to get to more desirable venues and markets, but were these locations that were just not profitable? If you kind of thinking about all the efforts and sales around them, but they were not worth having in place anymore or is it more you can take those take that equipment out and kind of more efficiently put it put it somewhere else still using the same capital?

Jon Niermann

Thanks, Eric. I'll jump in on that. So we have two years of data behind us now. I think that's the most important thing and as we look to make sure that our bottom line is as tight as it can be, we have to make sure that we're getting the best return on investment. So what we understand now was what type of venues performed the best. I'm clearly not going to get into that just obviously for competitive reasons primarily. But we do know in terms of our performance, the types that we're going after. We mentioned some of those, but there clearly others. And at the other end of that, we know the ones that don't perform well. So there's a couple of things that have happened. Ones just like you have different technology with your phone. We're kind of in our whether it's third or fourth generation of a new player. You have different iterations. Each require updates if certain venues aren't strong enough to handle those updates and they don't push an update through and they're not generating enough airtime. It's really not worth our while to maintain those. So that's kind of where we have evolved in terms of that, what we'll call the natural attrition. So we learn better on targeting. But we also learned if there was a particular issue with our WiFi, for example, we're not going to put the investment into replacing that player because we're not going to get the return that we want.
So the second part of your question Can a net occur. Of course, we anticipate that we believe it will. We wanted to we know well. And but it's going to be a smarter net for us going forward. So I think there is a little bit here of us just time kind of coming our way to understand where these players are, how they're performing, the different geographies. When Bob's dealing with advertisers, he certainly knows the markets what they're going after and certain types of venues that they won as well. So just with all that information, we thought it was the best time at this stage, really just to kind of start paring those out and doubling down on the things that we believe are going to be fine. So even though we took a little hit there, we're very comfortable with where we're going to be 2024 of the growth of the players.

Eric Wold

Perfect. Okay. (multiple speakers)

Neil Watanabe

And then also like to add, just that John mentioned we're targeting a venue but done, as we've learned and analyzed the productivity of the player, we found that other players don't perform the same geographically. And so part of the original distribution was just put about wherever we can. And then as we started monitoring and measuring profitability. We found that advertisers really are looking for density in certain key DMA markets. And so we have been focusing more on those from a growth standpoint, which overall will tend to improve our profitability and our efforts have been work safer versus shotgun approach on geographic locations for that region.

Eric Wold

Okay.
That's helpful.
And just my last question is that I promise to be a shorter one. You noted that the quarter itself did not have or had minimal political ad spend benefits in it, and there's particular expecting a stronger recovery in the back half of the fiscal year after the kind of the Q two typical debt or kind of a slower period, what are you expecting for political ad spend I guess how much ad spend could you have a percent maybe or however you want to phrase it in the back half of the year and do all of your venues kind of have to opt in if they want to have political ad spend versus not integrated kind of view, allow them to show them or not want to show them.

Jon Niermann

Yes.
So for that, we just want to make sure and that's part of the eye that we used to make sure that venues are in slightly different than content that we show to family type venue, et cetera. So we're very careful with in terms of what ads and forcing things on people, obviously. So they always have that function not to do that. But just to your first part of your question is the previous quarter of last year when we had the 14.8, a large portion of that was political advertising and I think the point we were trying to make was the 10.2 this time would have been more just on the organic growth alone, and that was that quarter so which we think is a very encouraging sign for the core business.
So when you start to then layer on what we believe to be the future advertising, we think that's a we think that's good.

Eric Wold

Helpful.
Thank you, guys.
Appreciate it.

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Darren Aftahi with ROTH MKM.
Please go ahead.

Darren Aftahi

Guys. Thanks for taking my questions and nice job on the progress, John. So I just wanted to make sure I heard you correctly on your last comment that responded to Eric's question. So if you were to strip out political a year ago, you actually grew year over year. Is that correct?

Jon Niermann

Yes.
From the core business, yes.

Darren Aftahi

Okay. That's helpful. And then maybe another question on the attrition of the players. So there's always the attrition of a unit and then there's revenue attrition. So it sounds like a lot of the players didn't get upgrade cycles with technology, et cetera, or maybe weren't efficient yielding any kind of revenue. So I guess my question is there a way you can quantify what kind of revenue impact attrition there was with those 32,00 players.

Jon Niermann

Okay. And just based on those 3,000, it's I think a little difficult there to say exactly what that would be, but we know and I'm not as meaningful in the sense that we still maintain a majority of the players that are generating the revenue. So if these it's not like they put it this way, it's not like those that we lost were generating a ton of revenue and then the grand. So if that's kind of your question, it's basically is very, very minimal so those that were coming off are off for a reason primarily and they're either not using the player like they should or they're not the ideal location or demographic. So for us it. It's not a bad thing. It's really just kind of part of the natural growth process and evolution.

Darren Aftahi

Great job on your gross margin, it looks like that improved more curious on two things as it relates to that one with bringing on as large of a partner's you did last quarter, this is sort of the first full quarter of having that partner on and whatever [40,000 to 42,000] screens, one would assume based on the initial deal you did with your first partner gross margins maybe would have been lower. So I guess my question is, is your second partner having a different gross margin profile, then your first?
And did that have a over-indexed impact on gross profit in the quarter.

Jon Niermann

As we continue to grow distribution, our leverage grows and the opportunity to do better deals certainly happens. So any historic deal that we might have done a year and a half ago and a deal that we would do today wouldn't look the same. So I take it. Yes, we see a better impact on the bottom line and better share for us.

Neil Watanabe

(multiple speakers) It's a lot of Darren, that even though that we talked about expansion on the partner platform, it still carries on, you know, a lower margin, but less operating expense than other players so as we add that on it, pace is higher in a quarter than what our lead players is. From a sales standpoint, we're always going to have some of that rate percentage difference that will bring the rate down. But again, the profitability, as we've talked about is very similar to the partner platforms, only players, but a mix that we talked about on the discussion around the press releases, part of the reason for where that rate can sometimes be compressed a bit.

Jon Niermann

But it is a better rev share back the loop there and protect against the key thing.

Darren Aftahi

Got it.
That's helpful. And just if I could squeeze one more in local. I know you guys launched that. I think it was sort of piloted in the quarter we were in, I don't think any some local revenue contributor to the quarter, maybe correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm kind of curious about your aspirations thoughts and prospects for local as we go into calendar '24.

Jon Niermann

The rights for the quarter, nothing meaning pulls the kind of really full beta through the quarter kicking in now again towards the latter half of the year.
So I think you'll start to see it more in the second half, but we're certainly still very optimistic about it. We just want to make sure that it's working right? And it's being tested, which it is. And everything from the type of images that the use of video is. It's still there's just a lot of learnings that we're pulling out of the beta that will make it easier for us, and we'll be able to then I think, monetize it much better as we're going along.

Darren Aftahi

Great.
Appreciate it.
Thank you.

Jon Niermann

sir.

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of David Meyers with Singular Research. Please go ahead.

David Marsh

Yes, hi.
Thanks guys, for taking the questions and congrats on the quarter and it seems like some real improvement here. First, a quick housekeeping on what is the recurring nonrecurring expense of $257,000. and how long. Do you expect that to be popping up in the financials?

Neil Watanabe

No, David, that isn't expected to continue. We had some expenses that were related to on. We have some capital raise activities that we didn't consummate. So we recorded that as a sort of a one-time expense that we added back in that nonrecurring transaction line. But at this point, as you can go back merchant through or historic. So we haven't had much of the nonrecurring. So it's I think, an isolated situation, at least for that one quarter.

David Marsh

Okay.
That's really helpful.
And then just on transitioning more to the business fundamentals of last year, first calendar quarter, I mean, we kind of had like advertising nuclear winter, I'll call it. Can you just talk about how things are pacing this year with one month in the books and down, give us a sense of what it feels like year over year?

Jon Niermann

Well, I think the data, as we said, this quarter is always kind of odd as it starts or anyone that deals in advertising, you kind of look at January and then look past it. So for us. You know, that's we don't see any kind of I wouldn't say the nuclear winter, like you said, I think you see all the signs that the advertising industry is rebounding, et cetera, but quite simply, it's pacing as expected for us.

David Marsh

Okay, Tom, that's fair. And then have you I guess, have you seen anything in terms of political at this point or is it just too early in the markets where you're concentrated, you have seen it.

Jon Niermann

just starting to see it. So, you know, we think that it definitely could be an interesting election, right? So we're just kind of starting to see some of that trickle in, which is which is good. But again, second half of the year when you start to have conventions and everything like that, I think is going to get the majority of it, but it's certainly starting to it's certainly starting to come in.

David Marsh

Okay. And then just kind of lastly for me to talk about gross margin. I actually thought that the gross margin posted here in the first quarter was really strong given your mix of players that it's now on a more on the partner side versus the kind of KU side. And I just wanted to kind of get some color on that from you guys on how this gross margin can trend if partners is a bit heavier component to the mix as we go forward.

Neil Watanabe

Now David, you're on you're absolutely right in a week ended Q4 with 27.5% gross margin on a $5 million revenue number.
So I think improving 700 basis points quarter over quarter.
It kind of reflects that as we can get the revenue to certain levels, we can certainly leverage that on appropriately and going forward between on the mix and some of the opportunities we're doing to rationalize relationships and negotiate better on margin and do those type of efforts. And on looking that, we can certainly go north of in obviously, the 35% that we came in in Q1. So it's a bit revenue contention, but I think it proves that as we get to a certain level of revenue, we can leverage the cost of goods very well and they become portions of it fixed. And so we get the benefit of the margin rate expansion. So I think we've indicated in the past that we certainly think that our opportunity for margin rate is certainly enough can go north of what we just posted.

David Marsh

Okay. That's really helpful, guys. Again, congrats on the quarter. It's a really great sequential quarters. That's really nice.

Jon Niermann

Great.
Thanks, David. Appreciate that.

Operator

That concludes the Q&A session back to John Newman for closing remarks.

Jon Niermann

I just wanted to thank everyone for joining the call today, and we look forward to speaking to you with the update again next quarter. Thank you very much about.

Operator

This concludes today's call. You may now disconnect.