Descartes Systems Group Inc

TSX:DSG

Earnings Call Transcript 2019-Q1

[Operator]

Hello, and welcome. This is the Descartes quarterly results conference call. My name is Maisha. I will be your operator for today's call. [Operator Instructions] Please note, this conference is being recorded.I would now turn the call over to Scott Pagan. Scott Pagan, you may begin.

[J. Scott Pagan, President & COO]

Thanks very much, and good afternoon, everyone. Joining me on the call today are Ed Ryan, CEO; and Allan Brett, CFO. I trust that everyone has received a copy of our financial results press release that was issued earlier today.Portions of today's call, other than historical performance, include statements of forward-looking information within the meaning of applicable securities laws. These statements are made under the safe harbor provisions of those laws. These forward-looking statements include statements related to Descartes' operating performance, financial results and conditions; Descartes' gross margins and any growth on those gross margins; cash flow and use of cash; business outlook; baseline revenues, baseline operating expenses and baseline calibration; anticipated and potential revenue losses and gains; anticipated recognition and expensing of specific revenues and expenses; potential acquisitions and acquisitions strategy; cost reduction and integration initiatives; and other matters that may constitute forward-looking statements.These forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, assumptions and other factors that may cause the actual results, performance or achievements of Descartes to differ materially from the anticipated results, performance or achievements implied by such forward-looking statements. These factors are outlined in the press release and in the section entitled Certain Factors That May Affect Future Results in documents filed and furnished with the SEC, the OSC and other securities commissions across Canada, including our management's discussion and analysis filed today.We provide forward-looking statements solely for the purpose of providing information about management's current expectations and plans relating to the future. You're cautioned that such information may not be appropriate for other purposes. We don't undertake or accept any obligation or undertaking to release publicly any updates or revisions to any forward-looking statements to reflect any change in our expectations or any change in events, conditions, assumptions or circumstances on which any such statement is based, except as is required by law.And with that, let me turn the call over to Ed.

[Edward J. Ryan, CEO & Director]

Okay. Great. Thanks, Scott. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the call. Thank you for joining us today. We had another great quarter to kick off our new fiscal year, and I'm looking forward to taking you through some of the highlights of the quarter. The demand for our Global Logistics Network continues to grow as the global business environment gets more and more demanding. Combination of increasingly dynamic regulatory environment and a consumer-driven change in the way companies need to set up their supply chains and augment their delivery capabilities means that things are more and more complicated than ever. However, this also means that there are more and more opportunities for companies to differentiate themselves if they invest in their supply chains and logistics operations. It wasn't too long ago that we had to convince many of our customers that having access to real-time information across their business was a worthwhile investment. The market's changed. The Amazon effect on the consumer market has made its way to the business-to-business commerce, and with the consumer expectation of being able to track packages to your door, the business-to-business market is increasingly looking for the same visibility and delivery certainty as consumers are. As a result, the market for our solutions is picking up steam. And that's reflected in our financial results as we deliver another record quarter to you today. We continue to add more solutions and connected parties to the Global Logistics Network. Our customers trust us with more of their business as a result. On today's call, I'll walk you through some of the highlights of what we're seeing in the market and the investments we're making to help our customers stay ahead of that curve. After that, Allan will go through our financial results in detail, and I'll finish up with some comments about our calibration for Q2 and our operating plans moving forward. But first, let's start by going over some of the key financial highlights for the first quarter of fiscal 2019. We had another record quarter of revenue, and we're happy with our key metrics. Our adjusted EBITDA continues to grow in line with our plans of 10% to 15% per year. For the last quarter, we generated $22.1 million of adjusted EBITDA, an increase of 16% over Q1 of last year. Revenue for the quarter was up 23% from Q1 of last year, coming in at $67 million. We converted 85% of our adjusted EBITDA into cash, generating $18.9 million of cash in the quarter. And consistent with our long-term operating plans, we've been investing cash back into our business through focused R&D investments and by combining with complementary businesses. So to summarize, it's a great quarter to start the year. We're really happy about where the business is at the moment. With that, I'd like to take you through some of the trends and opportunities we're seeing in the market. As I mentioned off the top, increasingly demanding consumer buying expectations continue to impact the business-to-business market. Companies need to adapt this increased complexity -- adapt to this increased complexity to remain competitive. Our Global Logistics Network helps isolate customers from this complexity by giving them one place to access their trading partner community, research and plan shipments and then execute and monitor those shipments in realtime. We've been building out our platform for a number of years, and we've been helping our customers navigate this changing environment by giving them more and more integrated tools they can access in one place and increasingly growing the community of shippers, transportation carriers, logistics intermediaries and government agencies that they can interact with in realtime. This is driving increased adoption in both the number of solutions our customers are using with us and the number of customers and connected parties on the network. So let's take a look at a few of the areas we're investing in to meet the strong demand for our solutions going forward. Let's start with what some people call the backhaul opportunity and how to leverage predictive capacity to improve the efficiency of fleet operations. So what do we mean by the backhaul opportunity? It's estimated that more than 15% of miles driven in the U.S. are empty miles. This is in part -- in large part due to trucks returning from their outbound delivery back to base being in part or entirely empty at some massively inefficient process. It impacts our environment, and it impacts the bottom line. Billions and billions of dollars are wasted every year in our economy as a result. But it's not really an easy problem to solve. To do so, you need to have visibility into where the assets are, and that visibility needs to be aligned or matched up with upcoming freight moves. A critical mass of assets that can be aligned with upcoming moves are most likely not available to you unless you're prepared to share information with other parties. It's a classic network scenario, with more information now available about the location of assets and the upcoming freight demand that are allowing you to provide better results for customers. This is an area we've been investing heavily in with our MacroPoint team, and we recently launched our solution at the TIA event in April, which generated a ton of interest. Our initial focus is to help freight brokers and logistic service providers leverage real-time capacity matching to better identify carrier capacity inside their own network and based on an opt-in model, the capacity co-op, we call it, with other consenting freight brokers. Customers will be able to opt-in to make their capacity available to key partners of their choice. It's up to each customer to determine who they want to share information with and how. It's not an open load board of capacity portal or marketplace. Like many other solutions Descartes provides, our MacroPoint capacity matching solution is designed to support broker and logistic service provider business models, not compete with them. We already have customers piloting the solution right now. We think this is an area with a lot of potential as we look to the future. Speaking of MacroPoint more generally, it's always a hot topic for questions, so I'll provide a quick update on that as well. The business continues to grow in line with our plans, and we're really happy with the performance of the business and the team that we have here at Descartes. One area that looks set to pick up the pace further is with our partner community. Partner interest for MacroPoint has been very strong. For instance, SAP has been investing time and resources to accelerate their integration with MacroPoint, so it can really be a showcase at the SAP SAPPHIRE conference next week in Orlando. We're pretty excited to see how this develops over time, and we'll keep you posted on future calls. The next area of our business that I'd like to speak to is e-commerce. As we've talked about in previous calls, we made a number of investments over the past few years to broaden our e-commerce solution footprint. This area of our business is really humming, fits very well with our partner strategy, and we're seeing increased demand across partner and direct channels as we continue to improve how our various products work together. We now have a comprehensive omnichannel solution that helps small- and medium-sized businesses deal with the life cycle of e-commerce shipments from capturing the initial order through the management of fulfillment process and then executing and tracking the partial shipments. To give you an example, our customers can integrate with front-end e-commerce systems, collect order information, translate that into a mobile-driven pick-and-pack process within the warehouse and initiate the shipment to the customer with seamless package labeling, rating, tracking and postage park processing. This is a highly differentiated offering. Our competitors provide pieces of the solution, but we can offer customers more -- a more and more holistic approach, and that holistic approach also includes the ability to plan, execute and monitor shipments that don't fit in a parcel or maybe that shouldn't be sent as a single parcel in the first instance. For example, by integrating with our broader transportation management portfolio, customers can take a wider view and look at their delivery capabilities differently. Sometimes it makes sense to pull shipments together for a portion of the trip and then break them down to a later point for individual deliveries. We think we can help our omnichannel and e-commerce customers save a lot of money while improving their customer satisfaction levels. And with the current trajectory of e-commerce, we see a lot of runway to sell more solutions to our existing customers as well as add new customers to our network.Another area of our business that has been greatly impacted by the explosion of e-commerce is our routing, mobile and telematics offering. Because at the end of the day, someone needs to actually make deliveries. Our solutions help private and dedicated fleet owners do just that. Our routing, mobile and telematics offering supports both omnichannel retailers that own their own fleet as well as transportation carriers for home delivery of their product. The biggest opportunity we see here remains for larger retailers, helping them create an efficient omnichannel program based on our state-of-the-art home delivery solutions. In many cases, these retailers may be competing with the same small- to medium-sized businesses that we just talked about who are using our e-commerce solutions depending on the size of the goods. But either way, they're almost certainly competing with the likes of Amazon, and they need to meet the bar that has been set for delivery and service. What that means is they need to have the same capabilities and provide great customer experience. Customers may be going into the shop to look at some goods, but if they buy it on the web, they want it delivered quickly, in the time that's convenient for them with mobile monitoring and tracking and all at a good price. This is exactly what we can help them do. And the customers we're helping aren't just the retailers who run their own fleets. Many people outsource their deliveries to transportation carriers, and we can also help those carriers offer their customers premium service levels that can include delivery slots and real-time tracking. We strongly believe that we have the premier routing and delivery scheduling solution in the market to help customers with these more complex delivery problems, and we will continue to invest in this part of our business for continued growth. Before wrapping up this section of the call, the final piece I'd like to talk about is the current regulatory environment, the impact it has on our customers every day and what we're doing about it. So it's been a few calls since we've talked about this, but just to be clear, it's not because we're idle on this topic. This is a consistent area of investment for us and will always be due to the dynamic nature of global trade. Every day, we hear about potential major changes in the news that could stem from NAFTA negotiation, Brexit, trade wars, the new sanctions on Iran. Things are changing for our customers literally every day. We have a team of people at Descartes dedicated to stay on top of the rules and regulations on a daily basis. For instance, as things change, customers who use our content solutions can be sure that they have up-to-date information about duties, taxes and restricted parties around the world. This timely data is critical for company's managing large international supply chains. Equally, customers that are using our customs filing solutions to send their information to governments every day can take comfort in the knowledge that our team of domain experts is continuously liasoning with government agencies to make sure our solutions are maintained in accordance with the latest requirements from local authorities and being powered with up-to-date duties and tax content. This stuff is pretty complicated. It's our job to isolate our customers from that complexity. It's what we do, what we'll continue to do to make sure our customers can operate efficiently secure and compliant supply chains. Before handing the call over to Allan to talk a little bit more about the financials, I'd like to thank some of the people that continue to contribute to the strength of our business. So thanks to our employees for all the hard work they put in to make sure our customers get results. Our customers continue to get results, and that's why we have a successful business. Thank you to our customers who continue to place confidence in Descartes as their network of choice, and thanks to those who made the trip to our Global User Conference in March. Thank you to our partners for helping us continue to expand our ecosystem, and thank you to our shareholders for continuing to have confidence in Descartes. And with that, I'll turn the call over to Allan.

[Allan J. Brett, Chief Financial Officer]

Okay. Thanks, Ed. So as indicated, I'm going to walk you through our financial highlights for the first quarter ended April 30. We are pleased to report record quarterly revenues of $67.0 million this quarter, up 23% from revenues of $54.5 million in Q1 of last year. Looking at our revenue segment. Starting this quarter, we have decided to further break out professional service and other revenues from the other revenue streams of our business. Our revenue mix continues to be very strong with services revenue representing $57.8 million this quarter, up 24% from $46.7 million in the same quarter last year. As a percentage of revenue, of total revenue, services revenue in both Q1 of this year and last year accounted for 86% of total revenues. License revenues came in at $1.9 million or 3% of total sales in the quarter, up slightly from license revenue of $1.7 million in Q1 of last year. And it's well consistent at 3% of total revenues, while professional service and other revenue came in at $7.3 million this quarter, up 20% from revenue of $6.1 million in the first quarter of last year, in both quarters, consistent at 11% of total revenues. Although revenue in the professional service and other segment will fluctuate from quarter-to-quarter, in part from some minor seasonality trends related to vacation periods that impact our professional services revenue as well as a potential for lumpiness from hardware revenue that is included in this segment, we continue to expect that our revenue mix will remain reasonably consistent from quarter-to-quarter as we move forward. Gross margin was solid at 72.3% of revenue for the quarter compared to 73.6% of revenue in the first quarter of last year. This decrease is mainly due to an increased proportion of hardware revenues in the first quarter, which generally have a lower margin. Gross margin in the large service revenue segment remained constant at 76% of revenue for the quarter when compared to -- and in consistent with the same quarter last year. Despite continued planned investments in product development this quarter as well as additional sales and marketing activities including hosting our annual user group this quarter, with continued recurring revenue growth and leverage from our acquisition strategy, we continue to see strong adjusted EBITDA growth of 16% to $22.1 million or 33% of revenue compared to $19.0 million or 35% of revenue in the same period last year. As a result of these solid operating results, cash flow generated from operations came in at $18.9 million or approximately 85% of adjusted EBITDA in the first quarter this year compared to operating cash flow of $16.5 million or 87% of adjusted EBITDA in Q1 last year. Going forward, subject to unusual events and quarterly fluctuations, we continue to see solid operating cash flow conversion of approximately 80% to 90% of our annual adjusted EBITDA for the balance of fiscal 2019. From a GAAP earnings perspective, net income came in at $7.0 million or $0.09 per diluted common share in the first quarter, an increase from net income of $6.9 million or $0.09 per diluted common share in the first quarter last year. Overall, we are pleased with the solid operating results in the first quarter as revenue growth allowed us to make increased investments in our business while maintaining our overall growth target of adjusted EBITDA and in cash flow from operations. If we look at the balance sheet, our cash balances totaled $36.2 million at the end of the first quarter, while borrowings under our credit facility were $51.2 million for a net debt position of approximately $15 million at the end of Q1. We borrowed approximately $33 million on our credit facility to complete the Aljex acquisition at the beginning of the first quarter, while our cash flow from operations allowed us to repay $17.6 million on the credit facility during the balance of the quarter. As a result, we continue to have approximately $99 million that we can borrow under our credit facility. And while our base shelf prospectus from 2016 recently expired, we just recently filed a new base shelf prospectus, which, when approved, will allow us to offer and issue up to $750 million in additional capital as required. In short, we continue to be very well capitalized to allow us to consider a wide variety of acquisition opportunities in our market consistent with our business plan. As we look to the second quarter of this year, we should note the following. After incurring approximately $1 million in capital additions in Q1, we expect to incur approximately $4 million to $6 million of additional capital expenditures for the balance of this year, with this balance expected to include further investments in our network security and infrastructure. We expect amortization expense will be approximately $28 million for the balance of FY '19, with this figure being subject to adjustment for FX changes and future acquisitions. Our tax rate came in at approximately 24.5% in the first quarter, which was just a little higher than expected as the benefits of the new tax reform in the United States were more than offset by the impact of changes in accounting policies related to income taxes. Going forward, we would expect our tax rate will continue to trend in the range of 23% to 26% of pretax income over the balance of the year, although, as always, we should add that our tax rate may fluctuate from quarter-to-quarter from 1x tax items that may arise as we operate internationally across multiple jurisdictions. Finally, we expect stock-based compensation will be approximately $3 million for the balance of fiscal 2019 subject to any forfeiture of stock options or share units.I will now turn it back over to Ed to wrap up with our baseline calibration.

[Edward J. Ryan, CEO & Director]

Okay, great. Thanks, Allan. Before talking about calibration, I'd like to take a moment to talk about our Global User Group event in Q1. If you recall, we hosted our last conference call from our Descartes Evolution user group event in Florida. For those of you that were there, hopefully, you'll agree with me that it was a truly incredible event. It was our biggest event by far and really proud of how the team planned and executed it. It's very rewarding to see so many customers engage in discussions, sometimes with their competitors, about how they're using Descartes solutions to improve their business. The event was such a success that we need to move it to a larger location next year. And you can save the date in your calendars already. So Descartes Evolution 2019 will be held at the Naples Grande Beach Resort in Naples, Florida from Tuesday, March 26, to Thursday, March 28, 2019. More information will be coming to our website and in the upcoming calls, and we hope to see you all there. Please book early. I think there are discounts if you do so. So please get on it. So with that, let's move to our calibration for Q2. Similar to previous quarters, we don't provide guidance, but we use our baseline calibration as the key metric relating to the ongoing health and strength of our business. Our calibration for Q2 assumes the following exchange rates: a CAD 0.78, a EUR 1.20 to U.S. dollar and a GDP 1.36 to U.S. dollar. With that, our calibration for Q2 is $36.0 million in visible, recurring contracted revenues, otherwise our baseline revenues. We had $44.9 million in baseline operating expenses. This gives us a baseline calibration of $18.1 million for adjusted EBITDA for Q2. Some other key points related to how we're positioned for the remainder of fiscal 2019. One, we're very well capitalized. We have a healthy business that's well calibrated, and as Allan mentioned, we also have a very healthy balance sheet. We are profitable and generating cash. We have low capital needs within our organic business. Our primary uses of capital are for continued use in acquisitions. We've completed 39 acquisitions since 2006. And we have access to additional capital should we need it. Allan mentioned that we have about $51 million drawn on our line of credit of $150 million. We have the ability to expand that line of credit to around $225 million. And we just filed a new preliminary shelf prospectus for up to $750 million if capital was needed to be raised by other mechanisms. We have a strong acquisition pipeline. You've seen there continues to be a lot of industry activity right now with the consolidation continuing in our market. With this capital capacity and our execution capabilities, there are still a number of acquisition opportunities to expand the global reach, functional capabilities, trade date and content or community of participants on our network. We continue to see a lot of interesting opportunities out there to continue or even accelerate our pace of profitable growth. We're seeing both larger and smaller opportunities, and while we review everything as it comes our way, we're not buyers for buyer's sake. The fact that we have an acquisition line of credit and a shelf filing in place doesn't change how we view acquisitions. We intend to continue to be prudent on valuations, but we're confident on our ability to deploy capital effectively. As a reminder for our plans for the remainder of FY '18, we continue to target 10% to 15% annual adjusted EBITDA and adjusted EBITDA per share growth. As in the past, we intend to invest any over performance back in the business. Our growth is planned to come through a combination of organic and inorganic activities. And as always, acquisitions are not incremental to this plan. We intend to continue to focus on recurring revenue and deemphasize onetime license sales. Our planned operating margin range remains 32% to 37% given the current performance of the business and being mindful of the FX environment, that remains our target range. But please keep in mind, this could vary if we buy other businesses that needs fixing up, which would impact that metric in the short run. And finally and as always, we continue to make ourselves available to shareholders to answer any questions they may have. We think we've got a great business. We want to be available to help people learn about our business. We continue to spend time and resources to get the word out, and we hope you'll do the same. So with that, let's open the call up for questions. Operator, if you could go ahead.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] Our first question is Steven Li with Raymond James.

[Steven Li, Senior Vice President]

The margins was a little off year-over-year. Is that all hardware related? I think Allan mentioned hardware. So is the mix -- was the mix a little bit different? Or is that something else?

[Allan J. Brett, Chief Financial Officer]

Yes. Steven, as you know, we don't have a lot of -- typically have a lot of hardware revenue in our business. It's something we have planned not to have. From time to time, we will have hardware. This quarter, there was a little bit more related to certain deals we had. And the margin on that is lower. So the cost increase -- the impact of extra hardware cost was in the numbers, and that did affect the gross margin. And that was the predominant reason for the margin, gross margin, being off a little bit.

[Steven Li, Senior Vice President]

Can you say how much hardware revenues was there, Allan?

[Allan J. Brett, Chief Financial Officer]

Yes. Typically, it would be less than $200,000. We were probably 800-ish in the quarter. So -- and typically, hardware -- again, we're not in the hardware business typically, but we experience very, very low margins on our hardware piece.

[Steven Li, Senior Vice President]

Okay. Perfect. That helps. And also, if you can, the FX benefit on your top line this quarter.

[Allan J. Brett, Chief Financial Officer]

Yes. Compared to the fourth quarter, sequentially, very, very minor. FX rates were fairly stable. Compared to the first quarter last year, it was somewhere under $2 million of a positive impact. So excluding FX, excluding acquisitions, our business grew nicely for the quarter.

[Steven Li, Senior Vice President]

And so I was going to ask, you say excluding -- so that organic growth, what was it in the quarter excluding FX?

[Allan J. Brett, Chief Financial Officer]

Yes. And as we've always mentioned, it's very, very difficult. We run an integrated, consolidated business. We integrate the acquisitions pretty much from day 1. But if we were to guess at that, we always talk about a range in that 4% to 6% range, probably a little bit on the higher end of that, definitely in the higher end of that range this quarter.

[Steven Li, Senior Vice President]

Okay. Perfect. And I guess maybe for Ed, are you seeing anything in the macro that would prevent you to stay at that level of organic growth for the rest of the year?

[Edward J. Ryan, CEO & Director]

I think our business is performing well. We're seeing our networks performing well. You can see that in the results that we just released. We don't know what the future will bring, but it's certainly looking good right now.

[Steven Li, Senior Vice President]

Okay. And Ed, can you repeat the calibration for revenue for Q2? Is it $63 million?

[Edward J. Ryan, CEO & Director]

It was $63.0 million, yes.

[Allan J. Brett, Chief Financial Officer]

$63.0 million and $18.1 million for calibrated adjusted EBITDA.

[Operator]

Our next question is Brian Essex with Morgan Stanley.

[Brian Lee Essex, Equity Analyst]

I guess, Ed, just wanted to ask about the volume-related business or volume-related revenue across your network. And relative to subscription, how that's trending. And if you're starting to see more pull before because of the network or some of the other factors like omnichannel and broader industry factors are driving growth outside of that?

[Edward J. Ryan, CEO & Director]

Well, our network's performing as well as it ever did. We had a couple of record months in the quarter that we just released. So that's great. Comparing the transaction revenue to subscription revenue changes the dynamic a bit, but I think they're both doing pretty well though, frankly. But our network, if you look at the last couple of months, has been the highest ever. And I think that's largely attributable to our customers doing well and our network being in a good place for them to transact business. And those 2 things come together, that has put enough some pretty good numbers.

[Brian Lee Essex, Equity Analyst]

Okay. And in terms of revenue growth, I mean, how much comes from pool from your supply chain partners like SAP? And how much from your own sales efforts? And is that dynamic changing as you see some of the market dynamics changing?

[Edward J. Ryan, CEO & Director]

Yes, I mean, the vast majority is still coming from our own direct efforts. But increasingly, the SAPs and Oracles and a handful of others are contributing at a higher level than they used to in the past. You heard me mention some stuff with MacroPoint at the beginning, about how MacroPoint is doing pretty well. SAP and really Oracle, as soon as we bought MacroPoint, were both calling us that same day going, how do I get a partnership in place with these guys. We've been talking about this for a while. They were a small company. We couldn't get our arms around it, but our customers want this. And all of a sudden, Descartes buys it, and they go, "Oh, this makes it easy for me. Now I already have a partnership with Descartes. Now how do I get this in the hands of my sales reps as quickly as possible?" So I don't want to overstate it. That's still a relatively small part of our overall revenue, but it's growing, and it's increasingly more important to us.

[Brian Lee Essex, Equity Analyst]

Got it. And then maybe, Allan. In terms of OpEx, I mean, certainly R&D and sales and marketing grew a little bit faster than I had expected this quarter, particularly relative to revenue growth. So was that more M&A-driven? And can we expect scale for the rest of the year? Or maybe are there certain dynamics in the quarter that may have caused those to be a little bit elevated?

[Allan J. Brett, Chief Financial Officer]

Yes, it's actually a mixed bag. There's -- certainly from the acquisition perspective, there's some aspect of that in the, let's say, the most recent acquisition, Aljex, certain cost structure there that impacted as well as MacroPoint. There are conscious investments we are making in our business. We are making investments for the long term. We're running a business for the long term, and certainly, the better the business performs, the more we can look at certain levels of investment in additional [ areas of ] the business. But yes, it's a combination of those that's impacting, and that's driven up the ratios ever so slightly in sales and marketing and R&D as you mentioned.

[Brian Lee Essex, Equity Analyst]

Got it. Maybe I can sneak one quick one in. Someone asked a question on FX for revenue. What about on the cost side?

[Allan J. Brett, Chief Financial Officer]

Yes. For the most part, both sequentially from Q4 and quarter-over-quarter in Q1, the FX impact on adjusted EBITDA is very, very minor. In fact, one was slightly positive and one was slightly negative, but I can't remember. It's that small.

[Operator]

Our next question is from Matt Pfau with William Blair.

[Matthew Charles Pfau, Analyst]

First one to start off on the backhaul opportunity, and Ed, maybe you can just give some more details on that in terms of how does it work? Are you going out and selling to the carriers? Or is it the brokers that you're selling to? And how does the monetization of that model work? And then I guess, from the carriers' perspective, what do they have to do to get connected into this backhaul system that you've created?

[Edward J. Ryan, CEO & Director]

Yes. So we just finished our first pilot. We're now in the second phase of piloting this with a bigger audience. And it's the brokers we're focused on, right? The brokers are the ones that are sharing their capacity and sharing the location of their drivers with other brokers so that they can match that capacity up and find the trucking company or the truck driver that's best positioned to take those loads. From the broker's perspective, that works out great because you're able to find an efficiency by finding a driver that is already going to be in that location on Thursday when you need that order picked up or that shipment picked up. From the carriers' perspective, it's great because they don't have to drive 300, 400 mile backhauls or repositioning -- to reposition themselves to pick up a load. So to me, it's a situation where everyone kind of wins. The broker wins because they created an efficiency by using the MacroPoint network to figure out the location of all the trucks on the network and determine who's best positioned to make that next move. From the carriers' perspective, they eliminated a lot of unwanted or wasted miles. And from the customers' perspective, it's probably good because it's probably ultimately results in a lower cost of service.

[Matthew Charles Pfau, Analyst]

Got it. And then may be on the acquisition pipeline. Can you just talk a little bit about what the pipeline looks like? And then as the increase in shelf, any indication that maybe you're seeing larger interest in deals in the pipeline?

[Edward J. Ryan, CEO & Director]

I don't know that the pipeline's changed. It's been pretty good for the last several years. There's a lot of stuff for sale. There's a lot of people in the market willing to spend more money sometimes than we think things are worth, so we have to be kind of be prudent investors, especially on the bigger deals where a lot of people show up. And be smarter than our competitors in terms of going out and finding the small and medium size deals that are good fits for our network and trying to get those businesses to become part of the Global Logistics Network. The shelf is not directly related to that. I mean, we have a shelf because we want to be in a position to act quickly if need be. Those shelves last 25 months, and they expire, and ours is about to expire, so we have to re-up it. Our last shelf was for $500 million. And our business has grown considerably since 25 months ago. So when we went to refile the shelf, we filed for a slightly higher amount of $750 million. That's because the government or the regulatory authorities make us identify an amount. At least in Canada, they do. In the U.S., they don't. So we did. And I don't think it's something directly behind it. As always, I would expect we'll always have a shelf in place as long as we're as acquisitive as we are.

[Matthew Charles Pfau, Analyst]

Got it. And then last one from me. Allan, just wanted to touch on the hardware revenue that you saw in the quarter. Is that all related to the routing and telematics business? Or is there any hardware associated with MacroPoint? And I guess, what I'm tried to get at is as we think about the gross margin impact going forward, was this more of a onetime situation? Or is it a situation where we might see an elevated level of hardware revenue going forward?

[Allan J. Brett, Chief Financial Officer]

Yes. It predominantly relates to the routing space. Most of our hardware revenue, as small as it is, will relate to that space, and very little, if nothing, in most of the other product lines or core product areas, pillars of our business. Was it typical? No, I would say this was an atypical quarter. From time to time, we get larger deals. They require some level of hardware and sometimes some installation-related revenue. Those are things we have to do to get the subscription revenue and license revenue that we get from those larger deals. So I would say it's not typical. It would certainly be an atypical unusual quarter in that regard.

[Edward J. Ryan, CEO & Director]

And really nothing to do with MacroPoint, to answer your specific question.

[Operator]

Our next question is from Paul Treiber with RBC.

[Paul Treiber, Associate]

Just wanted to going back to your prepared remarks on the opportunities you outlined. The one that you didn't speak about is blockchain. And I was just hoping if you could just provide some comments in terms of if you're doing any internal work there, development there. And also, on the M&A side, are there any blockchain companies that you have looked at or consider looking at?

[Edward J. Ryan, CEO & Director]

Yes. No, I didn't mention it because I think it's the same sized opportunity or even close as the other ones that I mentioned. We are involved in a number of blockchain pilots with a bunch of customers. The hype around blockchain I think far outweighs the actual real volume of transactions going through it. Certainly, in the supply chain space, there are almost none. There's a few pilots going on, that may amount to something, but I don't think you're going to see it take over the world. If you remember, I made some comments on this at Descartes Evolution a month or 2 ago. About every 5 to 10 years, there is another standard that comes out where everyone says something like the following. If everyone just did this, we could all communicate seamlessly with each other. And the only problem is you'll never find a standard that everyone just does, right? There are people on every version of every standard back 40 years or different ways to communicate, and blockchain is the newest one. And there'll be a blockchain 2 and a blockchain 3 or something else that you and I don't even understand yet, will come out some day. And someone is going to go, if everyone just did this, we would all be able to communicate seamlessly with each other. And I know from past experience, the world will never work that way. There will always be a guy that goes, well, I use this flavor of XML, or I'm still on traditional EDI, or I use these flat file structures that we invented back in the late '80s, and that's the way I want to communicate. And the problem is that guy will have to communicate with everyone else regardless of what standards they want to use, and that's where we come in. We run this network that says, hey, you can talk to me in whatever language you want, and you can talk to me, you can call a 40-foot container, anything you'd like to call it, just call it the same thing every time, and I will make sure that when I am communicating that to some other customer, that I will use his word for 40-foot container when I'm sending a message to him, and your word for a 40-foot container when I'm sending it back to you. And that is the beauty of our network. It's why it exists. It's why it makes it easy for our customers. And we view -- our job is to insulate them from all of these various standards that exists and everyone's desire to work on one standard or the other. We want to just help them communicate with each other. And that's the strength of our network. That's what we focus on. And I don't see blockchain providing an enormous opportunity. I see it providing a new way for some people to communicate, and our job is to help those people communicate with their trading partners whatever standard they use. And I think you'll see our network continue to do that for some time to come.

[Paul Treiber, Associate]

Okay. The other comments you made on the backhaul capacity sharing solution and also with regards to your parcel business or e-commerce business. What's the time line for those newer products coming out into the market?

[Edward J. Ryan, CEO & Director]

Yes, they continue to -- the backhaul one, as I've said, in the Phase 2 of a pilot right now. We're just now having customers share capacity amongst each other, which was a big step for us. We first started doing this, we started looking at the customers and going, are they going to be willing to share that capacity, because there's a big opportunity for them if they do. If you refuse to share your capacity with everyone else, you're only going to be as good as your own network. If you participate in a network that shares capacity across participants on the network, you're in potentially a much, much better situation. And over the course of the first phase of the pilot, we talked to our customers about that. We spent some time talking about the efficiencies that could be gained if you all decided to work together, and got the initial group and now the second group, or let's say larger group, to agree to do it that way. I don't know exactly when we're going to be rolling it out for general availability, but this next phase of the pilot runs several months, and we're looking to prove it out with a much bigger audience and then take a much bigger step after that, and more to come when we do that. This is really a standard -- this is the same problem your family has with babysitters, right? Do I want to share the name of my babysitter with all my friends? Because I may want that babysitter to work for me on Saturday night, and if I told all my friends about it, they won't be available for me. And so we had a little hurdle there with our customers to get them over that, but told them, "Hey, if you all share the location of your truck drivers, you'll actually all be a lot better off." And eventually we got all the participants in the pilot to agree to that, and I think it's going to be a much more successful solution as a result.

[Paul Treiber, Associate]

Just one last one from me. Allan, I think the MD&A had mentioned that there's a $400,000 benefit from ASC 606 on EBITDA. Is that all related to sales, which leads in sales commission? Or was there any tailwind or headwind to revenue this quarter?

[Allan J. Brett, Chief Financial Officer]

Yes, I think we put that in the MD&A. I think in the press release, we indicated there's barely any impact, a very, very small impact to revenue. Approximately $400,000 impact to our sales and marketing expenses and $400,000 impact to net income is I believe what the numbers look like coming out of 606. And the resulting change in segment disclosure, which really caused us to break out the professional service and other segment line in revenue.

[Operator]

Our next question is Stephanie Price with CIBC.

[Stephanie Doris Price]

Ed, you mentioned that customers are trusting Descartes with more of their businesses. I was wondering if you could talk about the areas you're seeing the most cross-selling and whether you have any metrics around the average number of products per customer.

[Edward J. Ryan, CEO & Director]

Well, I don't know if we have really specific metrics about it. We have customers with up to 30 -- I think one of the biggest ones now have 32 different solutions that they use of ours. It depends on the area. And if we're talking with the freight boarding space, guys sitting in the middle, intermediaries, freight brokers, they tend to have more of our products because we have a lot of products that work for them. When you're talking about the carriers in the other side of those transactions, they tend to have 5, 6, 7 products versus 10, 15 products because there's only so many things they can do on our network. They're mostly there to communicate with the trading partners, so we have some value-added services for them but maybe not as much as we'd have for those transportation intermediaries. And then the big retailers and manufacturers similarly, good one has 5 to 10, I think we have a couple with something like 12 or 13 different solution sets, because again, they don't do everything in logistics. So unlike an intermediary, they might not quite have as many as a DHL or a Panalpina or a Kuehne + Nagel, who can use a lot of the services that we offer. Some of the ones that are often cross-sell, most of them are participants on our network. They'll be buying on top of that our transportation management solutions, our freight forwarding packages. A lot of people also buy then our customs and tariff and duty databases, access to our denied party screen databases, access to our Datamyne solution that has bill of lading from around the world that you can access and do competitive searches on. Pretty recent one now is MacroPoint, where we do business with a lot of retailers and manufacturers that are relatively new customer base for MacroPoint. And as Descartes does business with a lot of those guys already, we're running around to them now saying, "Hey, here's this MacroPoint solution, not only can you get status messages back on these trucks, but you can actually track them mile by mile to the final destination, and get a dynamic ETA, while you're doing that." That's often very attractive to those customers, and it's early days for that. We've only owned MacroPoint 6 or 7 months now, and -- but we're getting a lot of traction with using our customer base on it.

[Stephanie Doris Price]

Great. You mentioned Datamyne, and you've had that for about a little over a year now. I was wondering if you could talk about how you envision that solution and whether you've been able to find ways to use the solution to glean information from the GLN?

[Edward J. Ryan, CEO & Director]

We have. We just released an air product a couple of months ago that takes aggregated air information off of the Global Logistics Network with our customers' permission and supplements data that exists on the Datamyne data content service, in hopes that participants on the forwarding side and the airlines side and our airspace would find value in that and knowing their position in the market in things like this. So we're just rolling that out right now, but we're pretty excited about it. It can provide a big advantage to our customers and a unique service that really no one else in the industry offers at the moment. And we're able to do that because of the fact that we own Datamyne and the Global Logistics Network, and bringing all of the things that the 2 of those solutions together would tell you about the data that's moving in the world's air supply chain.

[Operator]

Our next question is Paul Steep with Scotia.

[Paul Steep, Analyst]

Ed, can you maybe talk just a little bit about MacroPoint. Obviously, lots of excitement at the conference about it. How should we think about the sales conversion cycle on that product and the upsell there in terms of the lag from sale to, actually, implementation and the conversion there?

[Edward J. Ryan, CEO & Director]

It's a fairly quick sales process relative to some of the other more sophisticated solutions we offer. People can usually sign up in a month or 2, and for a small customer, they might take even less time than that. There's, obviously, very large brokers, the C. H. Robinsons of the world types that might take a while to roll out to make sure we get all of their truckers on the network. So it might take them some time to roll out across all of their available capacity that they might buy space from. We continue to invest in that activation role. I don't think that investment will continue at the rapid pace that it is at right now forever, because eventually, we're going to get all the truckers in North America on this. But at the moment, we continue to get customers at such a pace that they basically demand, hey, you need to get every truck driver that I have. And it's great that I started with you guys, and you have 60% right out of the gate, that makes us a lot better than our competitors. But if we're really going to do the job for them, we need to get the other 40% so that every load that they are -- have under management is actually able to be tracked on behalf of their customers.

[Paul Steep, Analyst]

Great. Just on regulatory for a second. ACAS actually threatens to finally come to an end, I guess, at the end of July. What type of uplift -- we haven't really talked about the split between ocean and air, and I'm assuming ocean at this point still a heavier weight in the network. But is there a little bit of an uptick there that may actually come once we finally get through the end of the pilot process in the U.S.?

[Edward J. Ryan, CEO & Director]

Yes, I think, as with every standard that comes out, when a new government comes in and says, you got to do something, they put that burden on our customers. And then we go and build software that helps them deal with that standard and then we go around and sell it to them. And oftentimes, there's a pilot process as you can see with ACAS here, no different. And yes, usually when they go live, there's an uptick. And on ACAS', there's a lot of people that were -- because of the way they did it, there were a lot of people that were able to participate in the pilot. So you're already seeing some of that going through our network. I think when they finally go live and they -- going live really means when you're going to go into the penalty enforcement phase because that's when everyone has to do it. You'll see an uptick on that. I don't know that it will be -- as with any of the standards we do, there's so many of them. I don't know that it will be material enough that you'll go, ho, Descartes' numbers changed materially because of this. But it's always good news for us, right? Once -- I've never really seen a government say they were going to do one of these initiatives and not go through with it. I've seen plenty of them delay. Various governments have different ways of slowing things down when the industry complains that, "Hey, we're not going to be ready on time." Some governments say, "Great. We'll give you all the time you need." Some governments like the U.S. might say, "Hey, great. I'll give you 60 days or 90 days to comply." Governments like Japan in the past have just said, "What did you not understand about the date that I gave you?" That's the day that's rolling out, and if you're not ready, you'll be paying penalties for it. But on those days, it usually ends up being a good thing for our business, more volume and more revenue. But each one -- there's no one initiative that's of a size that's going to materially impact our revenue. It's just generally good news for us.

[Paul Steep, Analyst]

Okay. I guess just the last quick one here to clarify. Allan, you've called out the quarter-to-quarter fluctuation both in the MDA and the script. How should we think about the magnitude of that step down Q1 to Q2 on PS with -- recognizing there's vacations in the summer in northern hemispheres?

[Allan J. Brett, Chief Financial Officer]

Yes, it's not big. It's just that it is one area of our business, as you know, we've put a lot of energy and effort into making our business as predictable and consistent as possible. It's the one area we have some level of fluctuation. I would be surprised to see fluctuations of more than 10%, so $700,000 quarter-to-quarter when it comes to professional service and other revenue, but it can happen.

[Operator]

Our next question is from [ Edison Li ] [indiscernible].

[Unknown Analyst]

So you talked about the Oracle and SAP partnership. I was wondering if you can add some comments whether there are opportunities for others?

[Edward J. Ryan, CEO & Director]

Well, we have, I don't know, a lot more partners, 100 and some other partners. I often talk about SAP and Oracle because they tend to generate the most traffic. They also tend to drive the most revenue on our network because of their size. There's lots of other important ones that we deal with. The handset providers -- a lot of times we're selling mobile handheld tools. And those handset providers and their authorized resellers are oftentimes big partners of ours and important. They're not household names like SAP and Oracle so maybe talking about them on this call is not as meaningful, but they're also all great partners. We also have a number of resellers around the world that do a great job of reselling our services in various jurisdictions where we don't have our own people on the street. And they're all important to us. Probably talked about SAP and Oracle more on this call because of their size and their potential to impact our revenue.

[Unknown Analyst]

Perfect. And then just a follow-up question on MacroPoint. I was wondering if you can add some color whether there's international opportunities for that going forward.

[Edward J. Ryan, CEO & Director]

There are. We don't spend a lot of time talking about it publicly right now because there's a lot of work to be done to get this to work in other locations. Someone asked earlier on the call about hardware and MacroPoint. There is no hardware that we sell in MacroPoint. Everyone is using their cellphone or a telematics solution that they procure on their own. They just send us the information. You know the jurisdictions to get those cellphones to work, you got to have partnerships in place with the various cellphone plants. Because of the GDPR stuff and the data privacy rules around the world, we have some issues we've got to contend with there in various jurisdictions. So as a network, we kind of know when you're rolling out a service, you can't just go willy-nilly and just roll it out and pray that everything is going to work right. We're not up for offering a service that's not of a very high quality our customers have come to expect from us. And I think you'd seen us take the same cautious approach with MacroPoint. There are some language barriers, and the software is in English, and how do I get it to work. Which country should I go to first? But we're certainly taking a look at Europe right now because of our presence in Europe. When we bought MacroPoint, the service didn't exist over there. And I do believe that some point in the near future, it will start to exist over there. So we're looking forward to that day, but we got a lot of work to do to get there.

[Operator]

Our next question is from Thanos Moschopoulos with BMO Capital Markets.

[Thanos Moschopoulos, VP & Analyst]

Ed, can you provide a bit more color on what you're seeing from a regional perspective? If I look at your segmented revenue, it seems like you're seeing healthy organic growth in North America. Although looking at EMEA, it seems like that was significantly slower, if I just add for constant currency. And is that maybe just quarterly noise? Or are there discernible differences as far as what you're seeing in terms of solution adoption across the regions?

[Edward J. Ryan, CEO & Director]

Well, a couple of years ago, Europe was in a real recession as the U.S. was coming -- U.S. and North America were coming out of one. Actually, I know we segment report the revenues based on the country that the customers are located in, and that provides you with some relevant information. But it also may create a bit of a misnomer. If you look at the transactions on our network, it's more closely split 1/3, 1/3, 1/3 across North America, EMEA and Asia Pac. We certainly see a couple of things. One, North America continues to perform very well. We have seen some modest improvements in the European theater over the last couple of years as they've come out of recession. More deals getting done, more transactions getting processed. As our customers do better over there, we tend to get dragged along with them. Asia is an interesting one because people over the last couple of years talked about recessions in various areas in Asia. Overall, we've seen it performed fairly well, not the high growth we've seen in North America, but we see an interesting trend where a lot of the manufacturing processes are moving from one country to another. So a lot of the low-end manufacturing processes that maybe 20 years ago got started off in Asia, or starting in China specifically, are now moving to Southeast Asia. And as China has gotten better in some of the higher-end stuff, making cellphones and things of that nature, they’re losing the low-end stuff, the -- I'll pick on like yo-yos and toy lights and things like that, that didn't require nearly as much skill, and were the first things that China took on, now they moved to cheaper jurisdictions as China's economy becomes stronger and stronger, and the employees demand more and more money. For us, that's doesn't matter so much, right? I don't really care where the shipment comes from. If you're in any one of those countries, it might matter to you, but in terms of our broader network, it doesn't make much difference, right, as long as the shipment's moving overseas and getting moved by air or by ocean or by truck, it's a good thing for our Global Logistics Network.

[Allan J. Brett, Chief Financial Officer]

And just to add -- sorry, Thanos, just to add, there can be some quarterly fluctuations. You got to be careful not to get caught up in the year-over-year. Although we have very little license revenue, it can happen where the license revenue was in Europe 1 quarter and in this first quarter, in North America. So we don't -- just to support that there is some quarterly lumpiness that happens there.

[Thanos Moschopoulos, VP & Analyst]

And sorry for the macro comments. Would it be fair to say that if we look at some of your highest growth solutions, that maybe they're more weighted towards North America, where maybe the adoption of the partial solutions and certainly things like MacroPoint, which you just acquired recently, don't have that same level of European exposure?

[Edward J. Ryan, CEO & Director]

Yes. For sure, some of the stuff you see growing quickly, the ShipRushes, the MacroPoints, the Customs Info, MK Data, Datamyne, some of the stuff that's grown faster on our container network spaces is more focused on North America, has a stronger foothold here, and so that could be contributing to what you're seeing.

[Operator]

We have no further questions at this time. I'd like to hand it to Ed Ryan and Scott Pagan for closing remarks.

[Edward J. Ryan, CEO & Director]

Hey, great. Guys, thanks for your time this afternoon. We appreciate you joining us on today's call, and we look forward to reporting back to you next quarter. Have a great evening.

[Operator]

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. This concludes today's conference. Thank you all for your participation. You may now disconnect.