CNVS Cineverse Corp.

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Cineverse Corp. Q2 F2027 Earnings Call Transcript

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Conference Operator
Operator
Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us, and welcome to the Cineverse second quarter fiscal year 2027 earnings call. After today's prepared remarks, we will host a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 to raise your hand. To withdraw your question, press star 1 again. I will now hand the conference over to Gary Loffredo, Chief Legal Officer, Secretary, and Senior Advisor. Gary, please go ahead.
Gary Loffredo
Chief Legal Officer, Secretary, and Senior Advisor
Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us for Cineverse's second quarter fiscal year 2027 financial results conference call. The press release announcing Cineverse's results for the fiscal second quarter ended September 30th, 2026 is available at the investor section of the company's website at www.cineverse.com. A replay of this broadcast will also be made available on Centerverse's website after the conclusion of this call. Before we begin, I would like to point out that certain statements made on today's call contain forward-looking statements. These statements are based on management's current expectations and are subject to risks, uncertainties, and assumptions. The company's periodic reports that are filed with the SEC describe potential risks and uncertainties that could cause the company's business and financial results to differ materially from these forward-looking statements. All the information discussed in this call is as of today, November 13th, 2026. And Cineverse does not assume any obligation to update any of these forward-looking statements except as required by law. In addition, certain financial information presented in this call represents non-GAAP financial measures, and we encourage you to read our disclosures and the reconciliation tables to applicable GAAP measures and our earnings release carefully as you consider these metrics. I'm Gary Loffredo, Chief Legal Officer, Secretary, and Senior Advisor at Cineverse. With me today are Chris McGurk, Chairman and CEO, Erick Opeka, President and Chief Strategy Officer, Sean McCabe, Chief Financial Officer, Yolanda Macias, Chief Motion Pictures Officer, and Mark Torres, Chief People Officer, all of whom will be available for questions following the prepared remarks. On today's call, Chris will briefly discuss our second quarter fiscal year 2027 business highlights. Then Sean will follow with a review of our financial results, and Eric will provide further details on our two recent acquisitions. I will now turn the call over to Chris McGurk to begin.
Chris McGurk
Chairman and CEO
Thank you, Gary, and thanks everyone for joining us on this call today. We recorded another very strong quarter, both operationally and financially. Our revenues increased by 110% versus the prior year, driven in large part by the significant positive impact of the two key acquisitions we made toward the end of our last fiscal year, Giant Worldwide and IndieCube. Net income was $3.2 million or 11 cents per share, a 42 cent per share increase over the prior year quarter. Adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was $1.7 million, a $5.4 million increase in our third consecutive quarter with positive and growing adjusted EBITDA results. Importantly, we delivered these strong results during one of our seasonally slowest periods of the year, across all our businesses. And even more importantly, our momentum is continuing going forward. In September, we generated over $10 million in consolidated revenues and estimate on a preliminary basis that we will record approximately $15 million in revenues in the month of October, our biggest revenue month since the release of Terrifier 3 two years ago. These revenues will be booked in our fiscal third quarter. Very clearly, the promise, synergies, and financial impact of the acquisitions of Giant Worldwide and IndieQ are now being realized across the entire company. As a result, our technology business now solidly represents the majority of our revenue and growth. We've already seen enormous value and synergies from the technology, customer base, business relationships, and expert leadership brought to Centiverse through these acquisitions. with ad tech and media services representing the largest factor in our more than doubling our quarterly revenue versus last year. Additionally, our successful targeted content acquisition and distribution strategy continues to deliver results. The most recent example of this was the October 9th Fathom event release of Guillermo del Toro's 20th anniversary edition of Pan's Labyrinth, one of the most acclaimed films of all time, which is also a very worthy addition to our film library and will be a profitable title as well. Combined with the continued growth of our streaming channels and podcast businesses, as well as the significant cost saving initiatives we continue to implement, we remain very bullish about our competitive position in the evolving entertainment, media and technology ecosystem. As such, and given our strong forward operational and financial momentum, We reaffirm our full year fiscal 2027 guidance of $115 to $120 million in total revenues and $10 to $20 million in adjusted EBITDA. Adding to that forward momentum, this morning, which just so happens to be Friday the 13th, we announced that we have secured long-term rights to the latest feature film in the Jason Universe franchise. bringing back to the big screen one of the biggest and most successful horror film icons of all time, the legendary Jason Voorhees. This highly anticipated sequel, the 13th in the series, should be another high impact theatrical and ancillary market release for us and a tremendous addition to our library as we have all rights in all media in North America for 25 years on the title. Importantly, despite the high profile and highly anticipated nature of this new Jason franchise property, which we plan to widely release in the theatrical market, we intend to fully fund it internally with no third-party capital. That is because of the unique aspects of our theatrical business model, the low risk, high potential return on investment approach we employ, and also the low out-of-pocket economics of our marketing ecosystem. And by the way, all six of our last wide film releases including Pan's Labyrinth will be profitable, add value to our library and drive viewers and subscribers to our streaming channels, which is our overall objective with this business. Expect a lot more news with additional specifics on the plans for this exciting high potential Jason franchise film release in the near future. And even before this potentially huge franchise film edition, Cineverse's film library was just valued at approximately $45 million. more than seven times higher than its current book value. That's just another indication of how we continue to believe the company's equity is vastly undervalued at present. Finally, we're very pleased to nominate Dr. Samrat Ganguly for election to our board of directors at our upcoming annual meeting of stockholders. Dr. Ganguly, a former long-term Apple global infrastructure leader with a distinguished decades-long technology and academic career, is the technology pioneer and founder behind our industry-leading MatchPoint platform. Dr. Ganguly is now an AI infrastructure entrepreneur. We look forward for Dr. Ganguly. We look for Dr. Ganguly to help Centiverse plan and execute both our technology and our AI future. And with that, I'll now turn things over to Sean.
Sean McCabe
Chief Financial Officer
Sean? Thank you, Chris. To provide a few highlights from our second fiscal quarter, revenues were $26 million, 110% from the $12.4 million in the same quarter last year. This was primarily driven by our new ad tech and media services revenue streams. Our direct operating margin for the quarter was 38%, down from the prior quarter as of 58%, as anticipated following our Q4 acquisitions of IndieQ and Giant. This quarter's margin, however, represents a 300 basis point improvement over our first quarters, despite a decline in revenue during our seasonally slow period. We expect to continue to see direct operating margins improve in the second half of the year as the company benefits from seasonal and theatrical revenue increases and we complete our cost rationalization initiatives. Thanks to these cost rationalization initiatives and overall cost discipline, our reported SG&A for the quarter of $10.1 million is now lower than it was in the prior quarter, even after adding the overhead associated with two substantial acquisitions and now with revenue more than doubled since. Adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was $1.7 million, an increase of $5.4 million over the prior year quarter, an increase of $1.2 million over just last quarter. This is continued progress during our seasonally slowest quarter and also the third consecutive quarter of positive and improving adjusted EBITDA, with only one theatrical release during this time period. This improvement in our operating performance can also be seen by the $17 million improvement in our cash flow from operations compared to the prior to date, despite an increase in content advances of $4 million. Net income attributable to common stockholders for the quarter was $3.2 million, an $8.8 million improvement over the same quarter last year. In addition to the items included within adjusted EBITDA, $7 million of this increase was driven by non-recurring decrease in the valuation of our acquisition-related liabilities, which was partially offset by higher depreciation and amortization of $1.6 million driven by purchase price accounting from our Q4 acquisitions and $0.6 million in interest costs from higher utilization of our line of credit and convertible note interest. The second half of the year includes the US midterm elections, holiday shopping season, our three theatrical releases, with more than 1.5 in theatrical marketing for these films already incurred during the first fiscal two quarters. With these lifts to revenue and our cost rationalization program in full swing, which has already actioned $9 million in annualized savings to date, we look ahead to an exciting second half of the year, which enables us to reaffirm our previously announced guidance of 115 to 120 million of revenue and 10 to $20 million of adjusted EBITDA for fiscal year 2027. From a liquidity standpoint, we ended the quarter with $3.6 million of cash and our line of credit still effective. Our reported network and capital as of September 30th was negative 9.7. However, the company has the right to settle 8 million of this amount in equity. During the quarter, the company also secured a $3 million loan from Bondit for Pan's Labyrinth to better align the timing of our theatrical commitments and the related revenue so that we can maintain the pace of investment in our company's initiatives to promote growth and profitability. We have also settled the vast majority of our cash-based M&A liabilities with more than 4 million paid as of today. and only $0.4 million remaining to be paid in January. As Chris mentioned, even though the new Jason Voorhees film we will be distributing is part of one of the biggest and highest profile horror franchises, we believe we will fully fund our investment in the film's release internally and do not foresee a need for outside financing on the project. With that, I'll turn it over to Erick to discuss our operating highlights in greater detail.
Erick Opeka
President and Chief Strategy Officer
Thanks, Sean. So last quarter, my comments focused on our execution, integrating the acquired businesses and taking out costs. So today I want to cover four things. First, the market environment, which is building in our favor and is the reason we built the company the way we did. Second, how those initiatives are already showing up in our cost structure. Third, the five levers we're pulling to keep expanding margin from here. And fourth, where we stand on the cost rationalization program and in streaming. So let me start with the market. So we see three forces converging. The first being restructuring. So as we all know, in the recent past, Lionsgate separated from Starz, Comcast spinning its cable networks into Versant, and then most recently, Paramount closed its $110 billion acquisition of Warner Brothers Discovery. So there are many other examples, and everyone is either creating a separation or an integration. and behind each one sits years of library reversioning and redelivery that has now has to be done much faster and less costly than it was done before. The second is AI readiness. There was a recent Adobe 2026 media survey that found nearly half of media companies are describing their content supply chain as largely linear and resource intensive. and a separate industry survey found that 94% of media executives expect AI to be the biggest operational change this year while most say they're not ready to deploy it at scale. So the gap between those two numbers is our market and you can't put AI on top of supply chain that still moves by hand. So the third is scale. US connected TV advertising expected to reach approximately 38 billion this year. Political spend for the current quarter was about $2.7 billion in this cycle, more than double the 2022 midterms. Omdia expects global CTV ad revenue to double again to $81 billion by 2030. There's more channels, more versions, more ad decisionings, more need for ad execution and software in volumes that manual operations just can't keep up with. So all three point to the same requirement, a platform that automates and orchestrates how content and advertising move and interact. So that's Matchpoint, and we believe it's the best in its class. And these acquisitions gave us the customer scale and monetization level to put that all to work. An example that scales, you can see it in our SG&A. Over the past year, we added more than 120 people. We took on operations in Poland through these acquisitions, expanded our team in India, absorbed these two new businesses and carried the full marketing amount behind our theatrical slate. but despite all of that cost base, SG&A came in at 10.1 million. That's a million three below the same quarter a year ago and roughly a million and a half behind the first quarter of fiscal 27. And that was with revenue seasonally lower by 4.6 million. Meanwhile, adjusted EBITDA tripled to 1.7 million. So our direct operating margin expanded 300 basis points despite the lower revenue. We've built the company to work this way, and it's starting to show up ahead of our strongest seasonal quarters. We're going to keep pressing on margin because that's where the next step up in EBITDA is going to come from. There's five levers that we're focused on. The first is price. Our subscription services on third party platforms had not been substantially repriced since before COVID. But between late October and last week, we raised prices across every single service with increases averaging 25 to 40%. We expect a meaningful lift in subscription revenue that will far outweigh any temporary churn. Second, our ad supported footprint. We're intending to double our podcast network revenue over the next six to nine months. And we're also putting our apps and bloody disgusting to work, driving film views and ad impressions across our own properties. So really ramping the ad footprint on those properties. Third, automation. During the quarter, a major broadcaster became our first scale enterprise customer running fully automated on Matchpoint. That work carried software margins, and because the workflow is now built, every subsequent order from that customer is going to carry the same economics. Two of our longest-spanning customers under our giant are moving into this model next. And this is the margin transition we described last quarter is now starting to show up in real workflows. And fourth, where the work's getting done. We have close to 200 people across India, Poland, Moldova. Poland is expected to double and is moving into a larger facility. And over time, the majority of the work and the hiring in our tech business is going to be in those regions. Poland also is a beachhead in Europe, which is a very small part of our revenue today and won't stay that way. And then the last is technology. We now launched a new version of IndieQ platform during the September We'll leave the specifics there as the design is proprietary, but it is working demonstrably well. And on Vodio, the technical trials have gone very well. We've signed four scale supply and demand customers during the trial, and we expect a wide rollout beginning in our fiscal fourth quarter. Now on to the cost rationalization program. So we expanded it by another million to 14 million annualized with over 9 million implemented. Some of that will be organizational, but most of what's remaining is contractual. So we have existing long-term technology agreements with cloud providers and other partners. Those contracts set the timing and that's why much of the remaining savings left is going to land in the third and fourth quarters and we expect to exit the fiscal year at that full 14 million run rate. Normal attrition shifting roles to our offshore campuses are going to add further benefit next fiscal year and put together SGN growth should stay very modest even as revenue continues to ramp. A few highlights from streaming where the same discipline applies. Our total minutes in the period grew 8% year-over-year to 4 billion, 4.05 billion, and 36%, excluding three channels that wound off during the quarter. Dove delivered its most watched quarter on record, up 80% to 854 million minutes, with its audience up 43% and minutes per viewer up 26%. People aren't just finding Dove, they're staying on Dove. and the Dog Whisperer and Yu-Gi-Oh! channels also set records, and our Midnight Pulp Cult channel grew 280% on its co-pilot launch. On subscription, our flagship Cineverse channel hit another all-time high, up 60% year-over-year and growing every month since January 25. Retro Crush set a new high as well. Roku subscribers across our channels are up 62% over the year. We ended the quarter at 1.44 million subscribers, up around 2%. With repricing in place, our focus for the coming year is revenue and margin per scriber, not subscriber counts for its own sake. So put simply, the market is moving towards automation, and we own the best-in-class state-of-the-art platform. The cost base is set, the margin levers are in motion, and then this back half is bringing the political advertising, as Chris previewed, plus our film slate and strongest seasonal quarters. We are exactly where we want to be. So with that operator, we can open up the line for questions.
Conference Operator
Operator
Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. If you are muted locally, please remember to unmute your device. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Your first question comes from the line of Dan Kernos with Stonex. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Dan Kernos
Analyst, StoneX
Yeah, great. Thanks. Good morning. Terrific results, guys. I guess first, just on Jason on Friday the 13th. Very cute, Chris. I think the question just is, you guys have been steadily de-risking, you know, the film slate side of the portfolio. Obviously, the family is Producing and financing the film. You guys have distribution rights on this thing. So maybe just talk about sort of the view on capital allocation process and clearly the 25-year North American media rights, all rights media, et cetera, is gonna clearly help continue the streak of profitable films. So maybe just start there and then I've got some tech questions.
Chris McGurk
Chairman and CEO
Okay, thanks, Dan. And that's the first time someone has said what I said was cute, but good for you. We're very pleased with this Jason deal. I can't get into too many specifics, but you know it's one of the biggest horror franchises in history and everyone has been waiting for the next movie. But what we've been able to do with our film slate and performance in the marketplace is based on the performance of our movies and particularly the terrifiers, the way we cut our deals where we share the back end with our producers and kind of the low out-of-pocket spending that we do from a marketing standpoint, we've been able to attract smart producers and directors Guillermo del Toro is an example, and the Barsamians are another example who really look at the economics, don't want to work in the studio system, and understand they have much bigger upside working with us, particularly if we can perform like we performed on Terrifier. So what I will say on this movie without getting too specific is that even though the producers are financing it and the budget is higher than Terrifier 3, our all-in investment is going to be much lower than Terrifier 3. And so we're very excited about that. There's a huge appetite out there in the marketplace that, you know, obviously Buddy Disgusting and others have been tracking for this movie and they've got a TV series that's very, very successful. And we think this can be a big franchise property for us with virtually de minimis risk on our part. This model now on this movie is something that we want to try to apply even more and more going forward because, again, as I've said, our objective with this business is not to try to compete with the major studios or anything. It's really to add value to our library and have properties that are going to drive subscribers and viewers to our channels. I think Jason is going to be a perfect example of that.
Dan Kernos
Analyst, StoneX
Got it. That's helpful. Just trying to keep you on your toes, Chris. No, I appreciate the Friday the 13th announcement. Erick, maybe for you, look, it sounds like Giant and IndieQ are going really well right now. Obviously, political was a boost, but it seems like the underlying trends are also strong. So maybe just kind of and so forth.
Erick Opeka
President and Chief Strategy Officer
You're correct. So we had an incredibly strong ramp up into and through the political season. And as you would expect, following the third, obviously you don't sustain those rates. But we're still seeing... We've been working incredibly hard on this. to increase margins out of the platform, which we think will be reflected in this quarter. And on top of that, focus on the top-line growth by adding new, strong demand nodes and partner nodes on the SaaS side. We announced yesterday, or the prior day, a deal with Canela DC. There are about $8 billion worth of media spend over the years for pretty large advertisers. So that's a very welcome addition to the roster and should make a substantial difference in our results next year. But beyond that, also continuing to improve the supply footprint by strengthening our relationships with our existing OEM partners and labels that we've been adding. So it's all... We've been in technical trials and working with partners to get that product fully ready for deployment by the end of this fiscal year to early Q4, hopefully in January is the target. So we think that will be A contributor to Q4 in this fiscal year and a big pillar of growth into the next fiscal year. So all in all, lots of very strong and positive elements. And then on the giant side, obviously, we love the way things have broke out with COVID. Skydance, in terms of our positioning with our media services business, we fit right in the sweet spot of where we believe that business's expectations are, which is being able to do more at a lower price. That's our entire thesis. On top of that, we like the team that we've been working with is the continuity team over there. So we feel very strongly that there's significant opportunities there. We've also been expanding our relationships with several of the other studios pretty dramatically over the last quarter in terms of volume. And look, we see the whole industry moving towards a volume-based, you know, given... Your next question comes from the line of Brian Kinslinger with Alliance Global Partners. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Kevin
Analyst, Alliance Global Partners (for Brian Kinslinger)
Hi, thanks. You just spoke a little bit about Giant, but I guess the follow-up is, as you leverage Giant's relationships to sell the MatchPoint into the major studios, how is the sales cycle and consumer adoption progressing? Eric, you want to take that?
Erick Opeka
President and Chief Strategy Officer
Sure. So there's really two different routes in working with large-scale enterprise partners. As you know, any large-scale Fortune 500 enterprise deployment is a longer sales cycle just due to lots of decision makers, budget cycles, compliance and other factors. But what's interesting for us is we really have have the managed services lever where somebody could sign a contract, start working with us in a few days, leveraging the benefits of the platform without having a SaaS contract. and effectively we manage the deployment of their assets or business on our platform without them having to license or deploy it in a seat-based model. So we do both. We're getting benefits and I think typically What I think the long-term vision is those servicing agreements that allow us to operate at incredibly high margins using the platform really becomes a strong demonstrable sales pitch for them moving on other enterprise products that we have. So we think that sort of dual punch as part of the reason why we we acquired Giant in the first place was, you know, I wouldn't call it a Trojan horse because it's it's but it's it's a way into these organizations, allow them to see and demonstrate the technology, us generate high margin, scalable revenue while doing so. And then, you know, land and expand and sell other products. So I think that cycle is very short. The longer SaaS cycle is typical for these big deployments, six to 12 months. So that's sort of the mix you're looking at.
Kevin
Analyst, Alliance Global Partners (for Brian Kinslinger)
Got it. Thanks. This is Kevin. I'm for Brian, by the way. And then can you give us some more color on recent CPN trends across the AVOD business arc? Are you seeing improvement in pricing, fill rates, or advertising demand? And how are you thinking about the trajectory into 2027?
Erick Opeka
President and Chief Strategy Officer
Yeah, so this is really a tale of two stories, obviously, because when you have the political season, everything is exaggerated. Thank you for joining us. I think we've seen those trends start to stabilize and revert in some buckets, in some categories, as the market is, you know, you're still seeing double-digit growth in that segment relative to television. So we think ultimately... CPMs are stabilizing. Inventory expansion, especially on the OEMs, is not moving as fast as it was a few years ago. It's allowing prices to start to stabilize and increase. So I think obviously we're seeing seasonal lift. I think the long-term trends are we've seen the lower and mid-ends of the market kind of bottom out. They're still at the higher end. Your top-tier premium is still commanding very high CPMs. But I think generally speaking, we're seeing We're seeing the trends going in a positive direction.
Conference Operator
Operator
Your next question comes from the line of Laura Martin with Needham & Co. Your line is open. Please go ahead. Good morning.
Laura Martin
Analyst, Needham & Company
A couple things. One is, you know, I know you guys are shifting to a technology-based company, so I'm really surprised to hear you talking about adding people in Poland and and other countries. I think Wall Street's looking for people to be replaced with technology. So, and since you're a tech company now, why are we adding people and not replacing people with tech platforms? That's my first. My second is pricing on your subscriptions up like 40% says to me, strategically, you're getting out of that business. Since I assume even if demand is inelastic, it feels like you're gonna, make a little more money, but you're going to lose a lot of subs with that kind of big price increase. So I'm interested in strategically where that business fits in your future. And then I really want to talk about this working capital numbers. So $9.7 million use of working capital and the total revenue is like $26 million. Could we go into what's happening in the working capital components that's driving such a big use of cash? Thank you.
Chris McGurk
Chairman and CEO
Thanks, Laura. This is Chris. Thanks for joining the call. I'll take the first question that you asked, and I'll let Eric and maybe Sean take the next two. We're not adding bodies. As you can see by our results on SG&A, the costs are coming down. What we're doing is we're shifting bodies from the U.S. to lower-cost positions in India and Poland and Moldova. while we automate more and more and more and save more money. So as Eric said, you're going to continue to see significant cost savings going forward. We realized about $9 million in total right now. Our full target, including contractual stuff above the organizational savings, is going to be $14 million. So we're not adding headcount. were shifting some headcount to much lower cost operating centers overseas. Eric, do you want to take the second question?
Erick Opeka
President and Chief Strategy Officer
Yeah, sure. So, you know, we, you know, Thank you for joining us. The price increase is market-wide, so we were pretty dramatically under market on pricing. Some of our services were as cheap as $3 or $4 subscriptions. So on a relative basis, they're still going to be very cheap. We're just doing a lot of catch-up. Rather than graduating it, we're accelerating it. We're not planning to exit the subscription side of the business. In fact, we're making improvements and investments in that business in terms of better content, better technology to attract more users. But, you know, we've we already, you know, did a, you know, even though our DTC side of our revenue is a smaller base relative to our third party distribution, we already inert those those those price changes there. Thank you for joining us. that maybe one would expect. Ultimately, we'll see how that plays out with the third-party services. But some of these services were going from $5 to $7 and so on, or $3 to $5 and so on. So we're coming from an extremely low base already. And then, Sean, I think you can discuss the working capital question.
Sean McCabe
Chief Financial Officer
Yes yeah so just I mean I guess so working capital the position on the balance sheet just a just a baseline is uh it's 19 negative 19 million last quarter that's negative 9.7 million this quarter we highlighted that uh 8 billion of this relates to the valuation of our deferred consideration and inert out liabilities which will be We have the right to settle in equity. So with the 1.7 that's remaining, I'd say right now we're building towards theatrical releases, which happened in the second half of the year. So that means marketing, content, content, spend. So before we are incurring those costs in advance of the revenue, and I'd say on the cash flow from operation side of things, The number there is negative 4 million, which is actually very in line with our content, the growth in our content advances.
Conference Operator
Operator
There are no further questions at this time. I will now turn the call back to Chris McGurk for closing remarks.
Chris McGurk
Chairman and CEO
So thank you all for joining us today. And if you have any further questions, please feel free to reach out to Michael McHugh with those questions. And we look forward to speaking with you all again on our next quarterly call. Thank you very much.
Conference Operator
Operator
This concludes today's call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.