Digital Turbine Inc

NASDAQ:APPS

Q4-2025 Earnings Call

[Operator]

Good day, and welcome to the Digital Turbine reports fourth quarter and fiscal 2025 financial results conference call. [Operator Instructions] Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Mr. Brian Bartholomew, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.

[Brian Bartholomew, executive]

Thank you, Chuck. Good afternoon, and welcome to the Digital Turbine Fourth Quarter and Fiscal 2025 Earnings Conference Call. Joining me on the call today to discuss our results are CEO, Bill Stone; and CFO, Steve Lasher.

Before we get started, I would like to take this opportunity to remind you that our remarks today will include forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are based on our current assumptions, expectations and beliefs, including projected operating metrics, future products and services, anticipated market demand and other forward-looking topics. Although we believe that our assumptions are reasonable, they are not guarantees of future performance and some will inevitably prove to be incorrect.

Except as required by law, we undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statements. For a discussion of the risk factors that could cause our actual results to differ materially from those contemplated by our forward-looking statements, please refer to the documents we file with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Also during this call, we will discuss certain non-GAAP measures of our performance. Non-GAAP measures are not substitutes for GAAP measures. Please refer to today's press release for important information about the limitations of using non-GAAP measures as well as reconciliations of these non-GAAP financial results to the most comparable GAAP measures. Now I'd like to turn the call over to our CEO, Bill Stone.

[William Stone, executive]

Thanks, Brian, and thank you all for joining our call tonight. Before breaking down our specific operating results and commentary, I wanted to provide 3 important updates. First, our business has returned to year-over-year growth on both the top and bottom lines. Not only did our top line growth from March of this year compared to March of last year but our year-over-year EBITDA grew by 66%. Our improved execution and actions are now bearing fruit.

Secondly, the business continues to build on that momentum. Our current June quarter is trending positively, and we expect to show improved performance, both sequentially and year-over-year. And finally, we extended our credit facility with our bank group. We believe this extension, combined with our improved execution, will provide more opportunities to lower our cost of capital into the future.

To move to our fiscal '25 results, we achieved $119.1 million of revenue, $20.5 million of EBITDA and $0.10 of non-GAAP earnings per share. It was an important transition year to begin our return to growth as our investments in a variety of activities to set us up well for today and tomorrow. Specifically, our new version of Ignite, our material progress on managing and leveraging our first-party data into our AI machine learning platform, our launch of new improved bidding capabilities and many back-end corporate systems that are simplifying automating work, and all of these things are helping drive improved performance in the present and into the future.

For the March quarter on the On Device or ODS business, we showed double-digit year-on-year top line growth. Devices on our legacy U.S. partners declined year-over-year but was offset by new device launches from outside the U.S. The real highlight of our ODS growth was due to improved revenue per device, or RPD. Our RPDs were up more than 40% year-over-year in the U.S. and over 100% internationally year-over-year. This was driven by strong advertiser demand and improved monetization over the life of the device. And as we've discussed on prior calls, the opportunity for organic growth with improved international revenue per device has been a focus area for us, and I was really pleased to see us build upon our improved execution from the December quarter.

Our AGP business generated $33 million in revenue in the quarter. One of our AGP focus areas continues to be our investment in brands that want to leverage our first-party data to reach their existing and potential customers over our global network. As discussed on prior calls, it's a strategic objective for us and something we've invested in to differentiate us from other players. We're now in a great position to continue to grow, and we'll continue to invest here as we believe we are building a moat, given the high barriers to entry and work required to earn the trust of top brands and agencies looking to find digital channels for their audiences that are not just CTV or retail media.

One of our other top priorities for the AGP business is improving our performance advertising by better leveraging our own first-party data and AI machine learning platform on our Demand Side Platform, or DSP. On the supply side, our consolidated exchange, which we brand as DTX continues to return to growth as having focused on managing 1 versus multiple exchanges is paying dividends.

The legacy Fyber and AdColony exchange businesses were focused on waterfall bidding with third-party performance DSPs, primarily buying gaming and advertising inside gaming applications. And as expected, these DSPs have been executing their own supply path optimization strategies to vertically integrate their demand connected to their own supply. And for those companies without a strong mediation footprint, it has become largely a commoditized adtech gaming space for both iOS and Android.

We saw this risk years ago, and that's why we invested in our own brand and SDK bidding activities to mitigate that risk, increase our own first-party data activities on our own network and continue to invest in mediation. These activities are bearing fruit as our DTX business has returned to growth. We've also been able to expand our AGP supply from being largely dependent on game publishers to much more diversified over nongaming. To illustrate this point, our DTX revenues on nongaming applications have nearly doubled over the past year.

Turning to the future, our focus is continuing to build on our growth while building increased efficiency in our work. The keys to driving growth are more devices, improved performance from our legacy and new products, and a wider and deeper net of media and brand relationships. The key to efficiency is automation, aligning operating cost to gross profit, realigning our people, process and systems for maximum benefit. And we've been able to realize significant efficiencies in our transformation cost savings, but we still have more opportunities to add this fiscal year as we use AI to automate and simplify our operational processes and organizational structures and leverage our technology and system investments for greater efficiencies.

To drive faster growth, the first driver is expanding our device footprint. And despite the soft device sales here in the U.S. with our legacy partners, I'm pleased to announce that T-Mobile is now live with us in the U.S. on Ignite. And internationally, we continue to grow with more and deeper relationships with our international partners in Europe, Asia, and Latin America.

Our second growth driver is expanding our product portfolio for both our ODS and AGP businesses. On the ODS side, the launch of our new version of Ignite is an important milestone. It's now on over 100 million devices. It enables us to launch more services more quickly to generate revenue, be more efficient with our resources and most importantly, improve the overall quality of our offerings to our customers and partners. We've also made significant strides in our first-party data, leveraging our AI machine learning platform.

We've been busy over the past 2 years taking our rich data sets and getting the data organized into a scalable, usable and consistent format in our data lake. And with that work largely complete, we're ingesting over 1,000 different dimensions and more than 1,500 unique data events by which we now can build our sophisticated AI machine learning models upon. We've already seen conversion rate improvements from these efforts and expect this work to be a growth driver for our top and bottom lines this year as we drive better outcomes for publishers, advertisers and end customers.

Our other product priority is growing and scaling our alternative app efforts. We see alternative apps in a few different dimensions. First is through our alternative store. Though live here in the U.S. on many operators, including Verizon, and are working closely with many publishers, including Epic Games, King, and others to help in their distribution to a wider audience. Specifically, many of you may have seen Epic's announcement of 40 million installs of their alternative store where we are a major partner with them, leveraging our products such as SingleTap, Dynamic Installs, and others.

Another way is helping publishers distribute their billing to end customers where we can leverage our on-device footprint and products like such as SingleTap, AppMatch and so on. Here, we partner with both the app publisher and the payment partners to help them drive more users. We've seen the global regulatory and legal activity against Google and Apple accelerate over the past quarter, not just in the EU, but in other places such as Brazil, Japan, India, Turkey, and elsewhere here in the U.S.

Our final growth driver is broader and deeper media relationships. We continue to make positive progress with more brands and performance advertisers. A specific example here is Pinterest who we've had a nice relationship with on our ODS products for many years but recently expanded our relationship to include SingleTap licensing. We're also seeing new categories emerge such as the large AI model players trying to improve their distribution footprints. We've recently launched with one of them and see this as an interesting growth area into the future.

In conclusion, I want to give our team at DT a shout-out. Due to their hard work and focus, we've regained business momentum and growth. Building our momentum and growing our top and bottom lines remains a top priority of the company. We're confident we have the right strategy, partners, market opportunity, commercial models and products to have a very bright future as we're in the right space at the right time, which is critical for any technology company. And with that, I'll turn it over to Steve to take you through the numbers.

[Stephen Lasher, executive]

Thanks, Bill, and good afternoon, everyone. It's been a privilege to meet several of you during my time so far as CFO of Digital Turbine. And I look forward to engaging with many more of you in the near future as we continue building value together. Before we get into the results, I want to briefly reflect on my 3 months as CFO at Digital Turbine. I spent this time focused on strengthening financial execution, improving cash flow visibility, tightening working capital management and aligning more closely with our business and product teams to support smarter, more efficient growth. Importantly, we continue to make progress on our capital structure and adding stability as we move into fiscal year 2026.

Now turning to our performance in the fiscal fourth quarter and full year fiscal 2025. The fiscal fourth quarter marked a true inflection point for the company as we returned to year-over-year growth for both revenue and adjusted EBITDA. During the quarter, revenue of $119.2 million represented 6% growth year-over-year. At a segment level, revenue for our ODS segment was up 11% year-over-year, while our revenue for the AGP segment was down 3% year-over-year. The combination of renewed top line growth and the realization of expense savings via the enactment of our transformation program in late calendar 2025 led to more significant gains in EBITDA and free cash flow during the quarter.

Our fiscal fourth quarter adjusted EBITDA of $20.5 million represented 66% growth year-over-year. And perhaps more importantly, our positive free cash flow of $5.5 million in the March quarter represented an increase of more than $21 million as compared to the prior year period. We are pleased to be benefiting from the combination of renewed revenue growth and lower cash operating expenses and expect to realize additional expansion in adjusted EBITDA margins moving forward.

Non-GAAP gross margin expanded to 48% in the fiscal fourth quarter, up from 46% in the year-earlier period. This was primarily influenced by product mix changes in our ODS segment in addition to our continued focus on disciplined cost control measures. Our cash operating expenses in the March quarter were $36.1 million, representing a 7% decline year-over-year and a 4% decline on a sequential basis.

We have made real progress on a number of expense-related fronts, not merely with reduced headcount but also with the migration to more cost-effective platforms and the implementation of more streamlined day-to-day business automation processes. While we're happy with the progress made around our transformation cost savings, we continue to focus on expense optimization efficiencies while still making the necessary strategic investments in the business to maximize the profitability of our growth strategy in fiscal year 2026.

Turning now to the bottom portion of the income statement. We reported a GAAP net loss of $18.8 million or $0.18 per share in the fiscal fourth quarter. On a non-GAAP basis, we recorded net income of $10.1 million or $0.10 per share on 108 million shares outstanding in the fiscal fourth quarter. For the full fiscal year 2025, we generated total revenue of $490.5 million, representing a year-over-year decline of approximately 10% compared to the $544.5 million generated in fiscal year 2024. EBITDA for the full fiscal year 2025 totaled $72.3 million as compared to EBITDA of $92.4 million for the fiscal year 2024.

GAAP net loss for all of fiscal year 2025 was $92.1 million or $0.89 per share as compared to a GAAP net loss of $420.4 million or $4.15 per share in full fiscal year 2024. On a non-GAAP basis, net income for full fiscal year '25 totaled $36.1 million or $0.34 per share as compared to non-GAAP net income of $60.3 million or $0.58 per share recorded in fiscal year 2024.

Moving to the balance sheet. Our cash balance at the end of the quarter totaled $40.1 million, an increase of approximately $5 million as compared to the balance at the end of December quarter. We had no new borrowings in the March quarter, and our debt balance at the end of the quarter stood at $408.7 million. As Bill mentioned, we closed on a short-term extension of our credit facility with the existing bank group and are working on a more permanent debt solution with a variety of debt providers. And we feel confident in being able to deliver an attractive solution for stakeholders after these 2 most recent quarters, which point to the strength and stability of our core business. We'll share more of these details as appropriate.

Now let me turn to our outlook for fiscal year 2026. We expect revenue to be in the range of $515 million to $525 million for the fiscal year 2026, reflecting our continued trajectory and momentum we are seeing in the market. Additionally, we project non-GAAP adjusted EBITDA to between $85 million and $95 million as we continue to drive operational efficiencies and deliver value for our shareholders.

In closing, we are actively positioning the company for sustained growth in 2026 and beyond. Our business is showing encouraging signs of continued momentum, and we remain focused on execution, financial discipline and creating long-term value for our shareholders. With that, let me turn the call back to our operator, Chuck. Chuck, let's open it up for questions.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] And the first question will come from Anthony Stoss with Craig-Hallum.

[Anthony Stoss, analyst]

Nice execution, guys, and welcome aboard, Steve. First question, Bill. I just wanted to focus on your RPD was up quite a bit internationally. Can you talk about the opportunities that you're seeing? Are they with new device makers, new carriers or both? Any color would be helpful, and then I had a couple of follow-ups.

[William Stone, executive]

Yes. Thanks, Tony. Yes, on the international RPDs, as you know, we've been at this for a long time to really close the gap between what we see here in the U.S. and internationally. And it's really just pleased on a few fronts. One is our ability to take our international demand, whether that's coming from the U.S. to our international partners or from Asia or coming from Europe and then bringing on to our international footprint is really number one, increase in our breadth.

Number two is we've really improved our execution operationally to match a lot of the things that we do in terms of how things work in a market like Brazil or India or the U.K. versus how we've optimized it for here in the U.S., that execution has been better for us. And third is just increasing our distribution footprint to be able to cast a wider net to go after partners. So all of those 3 things together have really helped.

And then as we add more and more devices in these regions from partners like Motorola, Telefonica and so on, it adds to more density of that supply to -- where more demand partners want to be honest. So all of those things combined together really helped drive improved results for us.

[Anthony Stoss, analyst]

Got it. And then, Bill, you talked about the regulatory environment, definitely the trend heading your way. I'm just curious if you've seen an increase in activity from the app publishers. Interested in either SingleTap or your AppInstall technology. And maybe you could share with us the number of new licensees signed last quarter?

[William Stone, executive]

Yes. So the regulatory environment continues to be favorable for us. What we're seeing right now is people want to see a level playing field. They want to make sure that publishers have access to customers without having to go through some of the gatekeepers that we see, and that's a global phenomena. And the awareness continues to build.

I think it is important to separate out legislation from legal lawsuits. What we see here in the U.S., those are different things and have different implications. But regardless of them, those are things that are positive for us as they're just continuing to build awareness, an opportunity for us to distribute that. And one of the ways, as you mentioned, we distribute that is through our SingleTap licensing capabilities. And we've got a number of good partners. You heard me talk about Epic in my remarks. You heard me mention Pinterest on my remarks and a number of those we've talked about in the past.

We continue to see people wanting to figure out how can they reach consumers in a very scalable way in our device footprint that we've been building over many, many years as a way to go do that, and then combine that with the data that we've got access to is something that's got a lot of interest and excitement.

[Anthony Stoss, analyst]

Got you. And if I can include Steve, not to put him on the spot, but when you look at OpEx going forward, great adjusted EBITDA in the quarter and for the guide. Do you expect your expense level needs to change quite a bit or is it going to be held relatively flat going forward?

[Stephen Lasher, executive]

When we look at it, it'd be relatively flat going forward. You may see increases as we continue to grow the business, but for the most part, it'd be relatively flat.

[Anthony Stoss, analyst]

Perfect. Thanks for the color guys.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] This will conclude our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Mr. Bill Stone for any closing remarks. Please go ahead, sir.

[William Stone, executive]

Yes. Thanks, Chuck, and thanks, everyone, for joining the call today. We'll talk to you again in our fiscal '26 first quarter call in a few months. Thanks, and have a great night.

[Operator]

The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.