A Closer look at Kofax's half-year numbers

Lot of interesting stuff in Kofax's report regarding its half year numbers .

First off, the Irvine, CA-based ISV's numbers were down fairly significantly:

• total revenue for the quarter was $63.7 million, which represented a decline of approximately 8% in constant currency from the previous year's second quarter (Kofax fiscal year ends on June 30, so its 2013 Q2 ended Dec. 31)
• software license sales were down significantly  - 24% - compared to the Q2 numbers for fiscal 2012. For Q2 2013, license revenue was just $25 million.

As usual, Kofax had plenty of reasons for this shortfall:

•  Apparently 2012 fiscal first half was unusually strong. CEO Reynolds Bish. "We noted that the prior year period had a very significant record. So the revenues for the first half of last fiscal year were significantly ahead of anything we had reported for that period in the past."
• That said, Bish gave two reasons why Q2 2013 revenue was lower than anticipated:

1. "We had a very large mid-seven-figure transaction slip out of the quarter into a future quarter. We still expect to close that at some point, but are not able to accurately forecast that."
2. "Our software license revenues in the Americas was also lower than we anticipated, principally because of all the changes that we began implementing in our overall sales organization during October."

Okay, so that's most of the bad news. Kofax EBITDA was also down almost 40%, but the company still managed to generate $15 million in cash through the first half of the year and has $87 million in cash in the bank.

Lot more interesting stuff that we'll get into some more details on in our upcoming issue of DIR, but basically Kofax hired Forrester to double-check some of Harvey Spencer Associates' numbers of the capture market. While Forrester's market size number were actually slightly larger than HSA's, their growth figures for capture were somewhat lower. And Bish blamed the Q2 software license decline squarely on Kofax's traditional capture business, while in the meantime spinning Kofax's future direction toward the newly defined SPA (smart process application) market.

SPA basically combines mobile and traditional capture with BPM and analytics to create high-end vertical applications. Forrester listed SPA as just a $600 million market in 2012, but with CAGR of close to 60% through 2016 - a much higher growth figure than it has for the individual capture and BPM spaces.

Bish concluded that he is optimistic in Kofax's immediate prospects for improving results, in part due to a revamped sales structure (we'll get into more detail in DIR), as well as, well, less than stellar Q3 2012 results that will be easy to improve on: "So, we certainly expect to report relatively significant year-over-year growth during the current quarter, expect that to continue into the half-year, and as a result of that, we have a pretty high level of confidence of returning to reporting more consistent software license and total revenue growth."

At last check, Kofax stock was trading at less than two and three-quarters British pounds per share on the London Stock Exchange, a drop of about 15% from what it was trading previous to the half year results being announced.