Thursday, March 24, 2016

52nd AIM Student Equity Update: by Daniel Fernandez Guerra. Open Text Corporation (OTEX): “FYI OTEX is a GR8 Stock"

Open Text Corp. (OTEX, $48.99): “O’TEXT me maybe?”
By: Daniel Fernandez Guerra, AIM student at Marquette University


Disclosure: The AIM International Equity Fund currently holds this position. This article was written by myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it and I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article.

Image result for open text logo

 Summary

Open Text Corp. (NASDAQ:OTEX) provides software products and services that assist organizations in finding, utilizing, and sharing business information from any device in the Unites States, Canada, Europe, and Japan.

• OTEX experienced a robust increase on product revenues derived by important contracts and strong license revenue growth.

• Mark Barrenechea became the new CEO of Open Text at the beginning of the year. He previously served as president of the company from 2012-2016 until his announcement.

• Management has indicated and forecasted gains in the market share as competitors have experienced a damaged and disorganized administration space.

• OTEX expects to reach new 52-week highs as the company has shifted its focus to a recurring revenue model.

Key points: Open Text Corp has a positive outlook. Open Text reported a significant upside to earnings for its fiscal Q2 extending its string of upside performance. OTEX made a significant jumped in value after beating estimates, as software license revenue rose 8.6% from previous year.

Management has shifted its corporate strategy of FY 2016 into a digital transformation business. The landscape within the industry has been continuously changing recently and companies have no choice but to adopt digitalization to survive. Therefore, OTEX will focus on adopting strategic mergers and acquisitions to continue their growth and on acquiring value-based assets in order to maximizing returns to shareholders.

Within this shift, Open Text will center on five functional pillars to drive growth and expansion in FY16. 1) Expand their Enterprise Information Management (EIM) market leadership by attracting/winning new customers, and competitive replacements. 2)  Develop cloud services since it has been the fastest growing segment, achieving new customers and new revenues offering a long-term growth opportunity for FY16 and beyond. 3) Introduction of Analytics. With the acquisition of Actuate, OTEX will be able to provide customers with a new analytics as a service application. 4) Consolidation of their inside and outside resources (Go-to-Market), with the purpose of capturing the total life-time value of their customers and providing them the best and integrated EIM cloud service. 5) Strengthening the financial performance. 

Enabled by their new Open Text Intelligent Growth System (OTIGS).
This is expected to make an impact for FY16 and beyond. As a percent of total revenues, recurring revenues and cloud revenues are expected to increase, while slowly lowering license and professional services revenues. For non-GAAP operating margin, the forecast target for FY16 is between 30 to 34%, while providing a longer-term aspirational goal of 34% to 38%.

What has the stock done lately?
After OTEX released their fiscal Q2 results on February 9, 2016, the company jumped from $42.85 to $50.54 in a week. An impressive ~18% increased caused by an increase in total revenue, recurring revenue, license revenue, cloud services and subscriptions, and an remarkable jump on operating margin of almost 400 basis points. This positive performance along with their restructuring plan expects to outperform the software market in 2016.

Past Year Performance: OTEX has decreased 9.38% in value over the last 52 weeks; however, it has provided an impressive 84.24% since it has added to the fund on December 8, 2008. Most international technology companies have struggled over the past year, and the software sector has not been an exception. Open Text fell 35% in the first six months of 2015, but it has recovered 30% since the end of July 2015. Investors, along with the strong performance that the company is showing lately, expect that the company will continue with the positive trend.

Source: FactSet

My Takeaway
Open Text has proven to be a very profitable company since it was added to the portfolio and has continuously shifted its focus in order to keep growing. The company is present in the most important regions of the world which help them to achieve important markets while reducing risk. With the strategic shift by management, along with the important projects and partnership that OTEX has ensured for future years, I believe OTEX’s stock price will be reach new all-time highs throughout 2016 as it gains market share.