Audiocodes (NASDAQ:AUDC) Q2 2026 Earnings Call

0:00 Greetings. Welcome to the AudioCodes Second Quarter twenty twenty six Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. Please

0:22 note this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to your host, Roger Chuchin, Vice President of Investor Relations. You may begin. Thank you, operator. Hosting the call today are Shabtai Avasberg, President and Chief Executive Officer and Aram Baruch, Vice President of Finance and Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that information provided during this call may contain forward looking statements relating to AudioCodes business outlook, future economic performance, product introductions, plans and objectives related thereto And statements concerning assumptions made or expectations as to any future events, conditions, performance or other matters are forward looking statements as the term is defined under U. S. Federal securities laws.

1:09 Forward looking statements are subject to various risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those stated in such statements. These risks, uncertainties and factors include, but are not limited to the following: the effect of global economic conditions in general and conditions in AudioCodes industry and target markets in particular, including governmental undertakings to address such conditions, shifts in supply and demand, market acceptance of new products and the demand for existing products, the impact of competitive products and pricing on AudioCodes and its customers' products and markets, timely product and technology development upgrades, the advent of artificial intelligence and ability to manage changes in market conditions and involving regulatory regimes as applicable possible need for additional financing the ability to satisfy covenants in AudioCodes financing agreements possible impacts and disruptions from AudioCodes acquisitions, including the ability of AudioCodes to successfully integrate the products and operations of acquired companies into AudioCodes business possible adverse impacts attributable to any pandemic or other public health crisis on our business and results of operations.

2:27 The effects of the current and any future

2:29 hostilities involving Israel, including in the regions in which we or our counterparties operate, which may affect our operations and may limit our ability to produce and sell our solutions. Any disruption in our operations by the obligations of our personnel to perform military service as a result of current or future military actions involving Israel and any other factors described in AudioCodes filings made with the U. S. Securities and Exchange Commission from time to time. AudioCodes assumes no obligation to update the information. In addition, during the call AudioCodes will refer to non GAAP net income and net income per share. AudioCodes has provided a full reconciliation of the non GAAP net income and net income per share to its net income and net income per share according to GAAP in the press release that is posted on its website. Before I turn the call over to management, I'd like to remind everyone that this call is being recorded. An archived webcast will be made available on the Investor

3:30 Relations section of the company's website at the conclusion of the call. With all that said, I'd like to turn the call over to Shabtai. Shabtai, please go ahead. Thank you, Roger. Good morning and good afternoon, everybody. I would like to welcome all to our second quarter twenty twenty six conference call. With me this morning is Niran Baruch, Chief Financial Officer and Vice President of Finance of AudioCodes. Niran will start off by presenting a financial overview of the quarter. I will then review the business highlights and summary for the quarter and discuss trends and developments in our business and industry. We will then turn it into the Q and A session. Niran?

4:20 Thank you, Shabtai, and hello, everyone. Before I start my formal remarks, I would like to remind everyone that in conjunction with our earnings release this morning, we will post shortly on our Investor Relations website an earnings supplemental deck. On today's call, we will be referring to both GAAP and non GAAP financial results. The earnings press release that we issued earlier this morning contains a reconciliation of the supplemental non GAAP financial information that I will be discussing on this call. Revenues for the second quarter were $63,000,000 an increase of 3.1% over the $61,100,000 reported in the second quarter of last year. Services revenues for the second quarter were $34,600,000 an increase of 6.2% over the year ago period.

5:13 Services revenues in the second quarter accounted for 54.9% of total revenues. Revenue by geographic region was as follows: North America 50% EMEA 33% Asia Pacific 14% and Central And Latin America 3%. Our top 15 customers represented an aggregate of 55% of our revenues in the second quarter, of which 37% was attributed to our 10 largest distributors. GAAP results are as follows. Gross margin for the quarter was 65.7% compared to 64.1% in Q2 twenty twenty five. Operating income for the second quarter was $3,200,000 or 5.1% of revenues compared to operating income of $2,600,000 or 4.3 percent of revenues in Q2 twenty twenty five.

6:14 Net income for the quarter was $500,000 or $02 per diluted share compared to net income of $300,000 or $01 per diluted share for Q2 twenty twenty five. Non GAAP results are as follows. Non GAAP gross margin for the quarter was 65.8% compared to 64.5% in Q2 twenty twenty five. Non GAAP operating income for the second quarter was $4,600,000 or 7.4% of revenues compared to $4,400,000 or 7.2% of revenues in Q2 twenty twenty one. Non GAAP net income for the second quarter was $3,900,000 or $0.15 per diluted share compared to $4,100,000 or $0.14 per diluted share in Q2 twenty twenty five.

7:09 At the end of June twenty twenty six, cash, cash equivalents, short term bank deposits, short term marketable securities and long term financial investment totaled 64,200,000 Net cash provided by operating activities was $6,100,000 for the second quarter of twenty twenty six. Day sales outstanding as of 06/30/2026 were one hundred and seven days.

7:36 In May 2026, we received court approval in Israel to purchase up to an aggregate amount of $25,000,000 of additional ordinary shares. The court approval also permits us to declare a dividend of any part of this amount. The approval is valid through 11/12/2026. During the quarter, we acquired 950,000 of our ordinary shares for a total consideration of approximately $8,900,000 Earlier this morning, we also declared a cash dividend of $0.20 per share. The aggregate amount of the dividend is approximately $4,800,000 The dividend will be paid on September 3 to all of our shareholders of record at the close of trading of August 19.

8:30 Now to provide an update on our guidance. We reiterate our guidance for non GAAP diluted net income per share for 2026 to be in the range of $0.60 to $0.75 We are now raising our revenue guidance to a range of $251,000,000 to $256,000,000 compared to the previous range of $247,000,000 to $255,000,000 I will now turn the call over to Champ. Thank you, Nuran. Second quarter financials results were solid. Most important, they reflect steady progress on our strategic initiative to transform and reposition AudioCodes as a value AI driven cloud and edge software and services company.

9:27 Our top line growth has maintained its track, driven by ongoing momentum in two primary growth engines, our live managed services and Voice AI. Combined, these two units contributed to $84,000,000 annual recurring revenue exit second quarter twenty twenty six, growing 20% year over year and highlighting the increasing contribution of recurring high quality revenue to our model. Annual recurring revenue has doubled in the last three years that provides a strong foundation for future growth. We delivered strong performance in the Microsoft Teams Phone business In addition to achieving 5% year over year growth, we saw pipeline expansion, increasing momentum in newly created opportunities and growth in the total contract value of opportunities signed.

10:25 Performance across our two primary segments was in line with expectations, with our strong cash generating connectivity business showing stability and voice.ai business revenue growing again over 50% year over year. The strong growth puts us on track to achieve our stated goal of 40% to 50% growth year over year for the voice.ai segment for the full year of 2026, targeting to reach $50,000,000 by the end of twenty twenty eight. Notably, the strong momentum in voice.ai business with new opportunities, new emerging applications and delivering state of the art solution ahead of competition provides us with further incentive to continue to increase investments in this area.

11:21 Now to highlights of the second quarter, revenue growth accelerated to 3.1% year over year. Enterprise accounted to over 90% of revenues led by five percent growth in the Microsoft Teams phone business, with a healthy mix of live managed services bookings across Microsoft and contact center connectivity. Connectivity business comprised of the business lines of gateways, SBCs and CPE has held nicely in terms of revenue. Services grew 6.2%, now represents roughly 55% of total revenues. Product revenues were about flat. Strengths came from our dual growth engines, the Live family of UCC and CX, Connectivity Services and Conversational AI.

12:15 Backlog reached nearly $90,000,000 up 23% from $73,000,000 a year ago. The growing Live and Managed Services backlog converts to revenue in coming quarters, keeping top line visibility robust. Together, this dynamic supports continued Life Services annual recurring revenue momentum. Stepping back from the quarter, I'd like to spend a few minutes discussing one of the key trends shaping our industry. As generative AI continues to advance and with Agenetic AI emerging as key trend in recent years, we are seeing growing evidence that voice is becoming the most natural, comfortable and preferred medium for humans to interact with large language models in order to automate verbal communications.

13:12 This shift is accelerating the adoption of conversational AI across the enterprise with virtual agents and agency solution emerging as some of the fastest growing use cases. This trend further underlines our pursuit of expanding our business by adding investment in conversational AI technology and solution on top of our traditional voice connectivity business. AudioCodes is uniquely positioned to capitalize on this opportunity. Our long standing leadership in voice infrastructure, including gateways and session border controls is complemented by deep expertise in orchestration and application layers that convert and connect enterprise voice environments with AI services.

13:59 This unique combination enables organizations to seamlessly integrate AI capability into existing communication environments while maintaining the reliability, security, and compliance requirements of enterprise voice networks. At the core for our Voice AI agents and agent assist offering is Voice AI Connect, a mature and field proven technology and platform built through years of innovation and customer deployments. Built on our market leading SBC technology, VoiceAir Connect enables enterprises to connect virtually any voice or telephony environment with leading cognitive voice services and bot frameworks.

14:45 As innovation across the conversational AI ecosystem continues at a rapid pace, enterprises increasingly requires flexibility to support a tremendous environment consisting of bot frameworks and cognitive services from various vendors. Voice AI Connect is uniquely positioned to address this need as the leading pure play voice AI orchestration platform in the market. It offers the industry most comprehensive libraries of pre integrated APIs and connectors and multiple of deployment options. No no matter whether it's deployed on prem, private, public cloud. This enables customers to rapidly and flexibly deploy and evolve voice AI solution without being tied to a single AI vendor or architecture.

15:37 This open flexible approach aligns well with the dynamic nature of conversational AI landscape and plays directly into AudioCodes strengths, involves interoperability, orchestration, enterprise communication. Now to, the activity in the Microsoft space. You know, do remember, please, that, you know, last year, we ended with revenues of about $2.45 while revenues from the Microsoft area were about 160. So this is our major business activity and therefore understanding how that has been evolving and developing in the second quarter does give you some idea as to the future.

16:29 So we exited 2025 with Microsoft Teams revenue above 160. In the second quarter of twenty twenty six, revenue grew 5% year over year and first half growth reached 5.6%, putting us on track for roughly $170,000,000 by year end, about 66% of our total company planned revenue. Pipeline momentum was equally encouraging. New created opportunities in the space grew 14% year over year, pointing to a healthy demand environment ahead. Total contract value tied to Microsoft Teams activity rose 73% year over year to more than $20,000,000 in the second quarter, a strong evidence of the potential in this segment.

17:21 I'm also pleased to report that a higher than $10,000,000 plus opportunity that we won several years ago with our strongest channels in The U. S. Has finally gone into production, adding several millions of those product every year over the next three years. Meaning, the level of revenue coming from connectivity, from gateways, and other stuff is going substantially up with, like, another 3 or 4,000,000 every year. Overall, the Microsoft Teams voice ecosystem remains healthy. Teams phones still accounts for only a small share of the more than three twenty million monthly active Teams user. And as voice grows more central to an AI driven Copilot workplace, we believe our long term outlook in this market remains favorable.

18:25 Some representative wins in the quarter include the following. One in the area of higher education, you receive follow on purchase orders with a major state university with over then 50 campuses totaling over 1,000,000 consisting of live pro teams, many services, professional services, and CapEx purchases for phones and video conferencing systems. This amount represents the latest wave of commitment of additional schools as part of the master agreement signed with the IT administrator. In another area, and, you know, we signed a contract with a global logistics company in conjunction with the renewal of Teams Life Services, a long standing global logistic customer located in Europe, has broadened its engagement by adopting WebRTC technology globally in place of traditional toll free numbers.

19:26 This expanded deployment is expected to generate meaningful cost savings and improve customer service outcomes.

19:37 Now to conversational AI activity, which was very strong in the second quarter. Glad to report that we have successfully executed our Voice AI growth strategy, delivering another quarter of more than 50% growth year over year. In fact, first half twenty twenty six revenue grew close to 100% over first half twenty twenty five. This level of performance brings us closer to achieving our target of growing close to 50% for the overall 2026. Our success in the Conversational AI segment reflects the strength of our large enterprise customer base and our unique combination of expertise across telephony, networking, security, cloud, and edge computing, collaboration technologies and AI driven solutions.

20:26 Let me now turn to a more detailed discussion of the major business line within this segment. Let's begin with the Voice AI Connect and Live Hub area. Getting back to it, we delivered a record breaking quarter driven by continued strong growth in Voceana Connect solution in our live app sales service cloud platform. Momentum was broad based, supported by an accelerating pipeline, setting new logo wins and meaningful expansion across our existing customer base. Revenue growth in first half twenty twenty six supports our target to grow this line of business over 50% year over year, similar to the growth achieved in previous year in 2025. Growth in the quarter was primarily driven by significant capacity expansion from existing customers, underscoring the scalability and mission critical nature of our platform.

21:23 A key highlight was a Tier one healthcare provider in The U. S, where we have supported the steady ramp in virtual agent and agent assist deployments over the past three years. During the quarter, we secured a purchase order that more than doubled their existing capability, driven largely by increased adoption of Virtual Agents. We also saw a follow on win with a major North American retail conglomerate, which selected Voice AI Connect to power virtual agent experiences for its primary business unit. This builds on the success we reported last quarter with one of its subsidiaries and reflects growing enterprise wide adoption.

22:08 This wins reinforce our view that GenAI enabled virtual agent and agent assist solution have reached enterprise grade maturity and may now be entering the beginning of a broader adoption accelerating cycle. To summarize this section, our pipeline continues to build with large, more strategic deployments. Sales cycles for new opportunities have shortened, in some cases, to approximately six months compared to historical range of twelve to twenty four months, which points to the maturity of, the overall space. And existing customers are expanding capacity in an increasing pace.

22:55 Next, for

22:58 AI first contact center solution for Microsoft Teams. The product is called VocaCIC. We continue to experience strong operational momentum in the quarter driven by new customer wins, expansion with our current existing customers and growing adoption of AI powered solution. Expanding presence in the financial services, following the Swiss banking Microsoft Teams contact center win highlighted last quarter, our VocaC AC contact center solution was selected by a leading Asian bank, replacing a major legacy incumbent. This competitive win underscores the maturity of our platform and its ability to meet the stringent security compliance and data protection requirements.

23:48 It also highlights the broader opportunity in this vertical as financial services organization increasingly standardized on Microsoft Teams creating a significant potential for voice VocacyAC. We are seeing an increasing number of existing customer who originally adopted VocacyAC as part of their migration from legacy contact center, to the cloud, now expands their engagement with us by adding AI capabilities. This dynamic represents a significant increase in revenue potential of each enterprise customer. One example from the core, a major European airport logistics provider added our agent insights and omnichannel capabilities as part of a renewal significantly increasing the total contract value of the engagement.

24:41 Several months ago, we launched VocaCIC AI Receptionist, a new solution, targeting, the small businesses, an AI powered solution that support multiple voice platform, including, Microsoft Teams, etcetera. Customer interest has been encouraging, particularly among organizations taking to modernize customer interaction as part of a broader contact center strategy. As part of this initiative, Microsoft announced Teams Phone agent at the Infocom two thousand twenty six trade show in June, opening Teams Phone to third party voice agents based on CoPilot. AudioCodes was the only third party solution naming Microsoft announcement with our voice agent generally available at launch.

25:31 This recognition underscores our position as a category leader in the Microsoft Teams customer experience and our deep expertise in the Teams phone ecosystem. While AI receptionist is multiplatform by design, it goes deepest on Microsoft Teams where our installed base and partnerships are strongest. Short after that, VocaC AC became the first solution listed under Microsoft new Teams Voice Agent certification program. VocaC AC was already certified by Microsoft as a team contract center on the unified integration model with the second certification. VocaC AC now owns Microsoft certification for both a Microsoft Teams contact center and an AI voice agent that sits in front of it.

26:24 As of today, we know of no other vendor that is listed with both like us. At the heart of this offering is Microsoft Teams specific version of AI receptionist delivered under Vocus AAC and build end to end on the Microsoft technology. Microsoft Call Automation orchestrates this interaction, and Microsoft Copilot is the AI agent driving the voice agent. The entire call path runs the Microsoft stack for enterprises building their cloud and AI strategy on Microsoft that removes a lot of friction. One technology stack, one security and compliance review, one accountable provider for implementing an ongoing support under a fully managed service.

27:14 Together, these two milestones extend our leadership position in the Microsoft Teams customer experience category with AudioCodes LLC. Microsoft Teams phone continues to expand its footprint in the enterprise, and every Teams phone seat is potentially home for both Teams native contact center and a Teams native voice agent. We expect this to translate into a stronger pipeline as enterprises move from evaluating AI voice agents to deploying them at scale. Moving on to Meeting Insights Cloud Edition. Meeting Insights Cloud Edition maintained strong momentum during the quarter with continued growth across key operating metrics. Meeting volume was has doubled basically over the year ago quarter.

28:04 Monthly recurring revenues grew close to a 150%, and the active users number reached a new record level growing 50% year over year. The sales focus of Meeting ESAT until now has primarily been concentrated to two or three countries. We now plan to expand the sales activity into substantially more markets, which as you can imagine can substantially grow revenues substantially further. Exit second quarter twenty twenty six, meeting Insight is a mature and field proven cloud platform built through years of innovation and customer deployments. Our strategy of delivering tailored workflow solution for specific vertical markets continues to gain traction and is translating into meaningful commercial and operational momentum.

28:58 On the product innovation front, we further enhanced this platform with automatic language, multi language operation and smart search, which enables users to query a meeting inside using natural language. These capabilities improve the effectiveness of the solution to management teams and help customers extract greater value and intelligence from their meeting data. Moving on to miaEdge. MIHA Edge is our next generation MIHA OP, MIHA On Prem, which provides secured meeting analysis and intelligence extraction. MIHA OP has proved market demand for error gap of cloud and secured meeting insights, intelligent extraction targeting mainly government and defense use cases.

29:48 We have also found much interest in this unique solution in the health care and finance sector seeking increased security. Currently, it supports cloud, on premise, hybrid, and air gap deployment models. Mia Edge has been designed for regulated customers that cannot use AI on public clouds. It was designed to provide ultimate ownership and access control, data sovereignty, and not less the ability to control AI operation costs, which amounting these days as the result of the ever growing use of AI workloads by organization year over year. One key effort in second quarter and ongoing is the alignment of the solution to feed different customer environments such as Microsoft Teams, Cisco Jabra, Skype for Business, Google Meet to Zoom, and phone calls. At this stage, we have more than 25 acting accounts with 10 in production, and the rest in proof of concepts and implementation.

30:57 And with that, I'd like to wrap up my presentation, just to say that we had a good operational momentum in the second quarter of twenty twenty six, particularly with the continued strong growth for our two primary engines, the live family of managed services and Voice AI. With the progress we are making in increasing our recurring revenues, we are on track with our target of delivering improved healthy top line growth in 2026 and beyond. And with that, I'd like to move the call to the Q and A session. Operator? Certainly. You.

33:21 We have reached the end of the question and answer session. And I will now turn the call over to Shabtai for closing remarks. Thank you, operator. I would like to thank everyone who attended our conference call today with continued good business momentum in our UCaaS and CCaaS operations and continued growth in our emerging Voice AI business. We believe we are on track to continue our growth in next coming years. We look forward to your participation in our next quarterly conference call. Thank you all. Have a nice day. This concludes today's conference and you may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.