Tungsten Share Discussion Threads

[dollarzpounds] 21/12/2016 14:13

Has the bank been officially sold yet ?!!

[manics] 21/12/2016 13:05

Those chunky trades seemingly partly explained by Artemis adding.

TUNG IR site has them at 5,095m.

[manics] 20/12/2016 16:40

Big trades are big.

[andrewdbl] 20/12/2016 13:16

EJ

s/might/will/ on 17 breakeven, 18 real profit (not the ebitda rubbish)
- short of the collapse of western civilisation.

However - a divi in 19.... I will ask santa.

[chemistdude] 20/12/2016 11:33

From the conference call transcript:
"We are leading with a invoice data capture capability that lets Tungsten get its arms around 100% of the invoices of our perspective and existing customers as we migrate them on a path towards a fully digital environment."

So does that mean that TUNG can capture paper invoices over the network and offer ISS on that enabling TEP/finance on standard invoices?

[bs76] 20/12/2016 09:41

yes :)

51p for 100,000

[edwardt] 20/12/2016 09:37

good for the chairman.

[alamaison] 18/12/2016 15:56

TUNG: Not over sold yet, nope.

[alamaison] 18/12/2016 15:46

JL9: I have my first entry point at 45p then 35p (second tranche) , but the sell of the bank can happen at anytime and this will change the pattern.
I may never reach my target...

[jl9] 16/12/2016 13:51

Now entering on that long, slow grind down to 4p. Good luck to all.

[chemistdude] 15/12/2016 14:27

Looking at FCA website, bank physical address has changed to new one.

[manics] 15/12/2016 09:23

52p though -must be delayed otherwise we'd have surely cratered. Not impossible it's a buy from yesterday..?

[manics] 15/12/2016 09:22

..or Edi's cash4shares.com outfit selling a few.

[edwardt] 15/12/2016 09:06

fiver says that 1m print was odey capitulating right at the bottom...

[1gw] 14/12/2016 21:25

Numeric Investors llc back on the disclosed shorts list with 0.81% as of 9th December.

[manics] 14/12/2016 15:57

Probably one more RNS this year then as the bank sale completes.

[chemistdude] 14/12/2016 14:54

Tungsten Corp. (OTCPK:TUNG) Q2 2017 Results Earnings Conference Call December 14, 2016 4:00 AM ET

Executives

Rick Hurwitz - CEO

David Williams - CFO

Analysts

Andrew Mitchell - Edison Investment Research

Ben Williams - Trium Capital

Operator

Good morning and welcome ladies and gentlemen to the Tungsten Corporation 2017 Interim Results Call. My name is Indy, and I'll be your coordinator for today’s event.

For the duration of the call, your lines will be on listen-only. However, there will be an opportunity to ask questions by the phone lines or alternatively you may submit questions online via the Q&A function found beneath the presentation. [Operator Instructions]

I’m now handing you over to your host, Rick Hurwitz, CEO, to begin today's conference. Thank you.

Rick Hurwitz

Good morning, all. I am delighted that you joined us this morning to hear some further color on the earnings announcement that we released earlier today. With me is Tungsten's CFO, David Williams and after some brief remarks, we'll be happy to take your questions.

As you'll remember, at Tungsten we've been weighing a balance between repair and growth and today's results reflect a clear tip towards growth. We've produced a strong set of numbers and are fulfilling the commitments we've made to our shareholders.

We've grown our revenues 20% period-over- period, while keeping our cost flat. The result is a reduction in EBITDA loss of £1.9 million. This should be viewed in the context of flat performance in each of the prior two periods.

Today's results are the first that we reported with the full contingent of individuals that make up Tungsten's executive core, since announcing our new strategic plan back in February. I couldn't be more pleased with the manner in which these talented executives have taken ownership over their areas of responsibility and begun to deliver.

We've organized ourselves to let them do so with end-to-end ownership making individuals more effective and accountable. We've filled our ranks with needed skills to reach our desired outcomes and to grow profitably.

But the major structural components of our transformation are complete with the sale of Tungsten Bank in process and final completion of the sale of those assets scheduled for 21 December.

Operating momentum is building and our customers recognize the value we are creating for them as our retention rates and are sustainable price lift continues to reflect. Our customers are showing confidence in the changes here at Tungsten and are leading us towards development of new products and help penetrate their P2P processes in terms of automation more deeply.

Let's see; both our suppliers and our buyers are enthusiastic about our repositioned financing offering and we have listened to what they want and brought in some truly exceptional talent to deliver on our promise to grow a very successful invoice financing business. We are excited about resolving so much so quickly and we see clearly our path to profitable growth.

Let me take a minute to highlight a few initiatives that show us continuing to move the tail of major change through this organization and deliver the kind of results that we see.

With respect to our foundational activities of the Tungsten network, a couple of things; in this period we have launched a new supplier portal. So we've invigorated the look and feel of our -- in our product manifests itself in the real estate the Thompson's portal.

We've invigorated that look and feel. We've made it a much more sales oriented space from an execution one and that is letting us to engage more fully, more deeply with our customer base.

We have worked very hard to elevate our relationships with distribution channels to make those much more coordinated and in doing so, deliver greater results with greater velocity and that in fact is happening.

We've seen that through the PNC channel with a series of sales both in the period and subsequent to it and we're seeing it as well with a much more quarter relationship with a set of BPOs with whom we are now developing sales pipelines in an all day, every day, manner.

With respect to operating here at Tungsten more efficiently, the first thing I would like to highlight there is Tungsten is now eating its own cooking. So we made use of our workflow, software, all of our procurement activity is delivered through that capability.

We're operating as a result much more efficiently and are making use of the same solutions that we sell to our customer base. So to Tungsten's supply chain is now delivering invoices to us over the Tungsten network and that as well is letting us reduce cost and headcount.

With respect to invoice financing, over the period, we focused on the operational underpinnings that would let us grow that business to scale. We focus too on the recruitment of talent that comes from the trade financing business led by Prabhat Vira who joined us just in April.

So in a very short time, we've made wholesale change, major change that we expect will let us grow this business very meaningfully. Not only off of the Tungsten early payment utility that we've had in place now for some time, in fact placing £60 million of invoice financing through it over the period, but through other product sets as well and I will speak more to that in a moment.

With respect to other adjacent service that enhances the value of the Tungsten network, during the period we fulfilled on the promise to deliver in that way by releasing an FX conversion capability at our portal. We partnered with Pioneer and in doing so and in the early returns, we are finding take up in Mexico and in Singapore as we begin to expand more broadly across the globe.

With respect to Tungsten's invoice financing business just such an adjacent service, we remain extremely confident that Tungsten has a unique opportunity to leverage its proprietary network as a means of creating financing opportunities.

And that will come not only in the supplier-centric capability that we've had out there for some time, Tungsten Network's early payment tool, but also through these deep relationships that we have cultivated with our buyer organization who all are looking to manage working capital effectively as well.

And we have introduced products to them both on the back of the relationship that we have enhanced with our primary funder, Bank of New York Mellon's insights, but also through other funding partners and other capabilities as well and over the coming months, we look forward to sharing more with respect to those additional products.

So with that backdrop said, let me turn the podium over to David Williams, who will take us through the numbers in more detail. David?

David Williams

Thanks Rick and good morning, everybody. As Rick said, we've come out with a set of results, which we believe reflect a lot of the hard work that is being done and its ongoing in the business, but also reflects what we told our shareholders was what we were going to do in the first half of the financial year.

Our revenues up 20% on a reported basis, it doesn’t tell the full story, because currency has played a significant impact across the business this year.

About half of our revenues are denominated in U.S. dollars, but we also have a similar amount as cost in U.S. dollars and likewise with Euros, our revenues and cost approximately offset, but our results do need to be understood both as reported -- on a reported basis, but also in the context of the constant currency movements.

So our revenue that was up 20% was up 11% on a constant currency basis, but another nuance to it is that it doesn’t include the revenues from Tungsten Bank.

As Rick said, the sale of Tungsten Bank is almost complete and the cash for that will -- the final cost for that will flow on the 21st of December. So in order to present our business a little bit more clearly, we've now discontinued the operations of Tungsten Bank and therefore that quarter of million of revenue has been removed from our headline presentation.

So the £15.5 million of revenue reflects substantially the revenues from Tungsten Network and that includes growth in our buyer revenues of 33%, which is up 22% on a constant currency basis and supplier revenue growth of 11% up 4% for the constant currency basis.

The increase in buyers reflects what Rick was talking about the good work that's being done by our sales force in renegotiating contracts with our buyers on the basis of the value that they're receiving and therefore securing price increases from them.

Our EBITDA loss was down 23% that again excludes the loss in Tungsten Bank as does the comparative. I'll come on in a moment to talk a little bit about the operating cost base in order to see what impact would that would have on the reduction of our losses.

Our statutory loss after tax reduced from £19.5 to £4.5 million pounds in the period and this loss does include the discontinued operations at Tungsten Bank. It's important to note that we had a positive currency impact on a statutory loss basis because of the retranslation of balances into Sterling.

Finally our cash as at the end of the period excluding the cash in Tungsten Bank was £2.6 million and that compared to £9.3 million at the start of the period, so a little over a £1 million are now consistent with the EBITDA loss in the period.

So when you look at loss for the period, you can see the impact that the finance costs of the positive impact of £4.8 million have on our bottom line profit for the period. You can also see the loss at Tungsten Bank of £1.5 million for the period, which compares with an £8.1 million loss in the same period in prior years albeit that included a significant impairment charge writing down the value of the asset at Tungsten Bank to approximately the sale of proceeds that we're going to receive.

Our adjusted operating expenses were up 3% on a reported basis from £21.2 million to £21.8 million, but actually on a like-for-like basis came down by 1% and importantly the nature of those costs have changed significantly and more of that to come shortly.

As I said, the majority of the revenue growth and the revenues remain from Tungsten Network. The revenue at Tungsten Network grew from £13 million in the prior year comparable to £13.1 million. It was pretty stagnant in the following six months and what we've seen in the first half of 2017 is a result -- in the result of a loss of the work that have been done with our buyers, with our suppliers on pricing, on bringing new customers on to the network on up-selling additional products to our customers, seeing the momentum of the loss of those sales activity starting to come through our numbers.

That help reduce the EBITDA loss in Tungsten Network, £2.2 million in the period albeit there are -- there continues to be one-offs in that number as we take the actions required to fix the cost base in the future and that continues to be targeted expenditure in that number where we believe there is an appropriate payback on a revenue order cost basis to spending that money.

Invoices have grown 7.4% on the 12 monthly basis, 6.3% in the period. Invoice value, which we no longer report as a KPI value partly because of the fluctuations in currency that impact the value, but partly also because actually it doesn’t drive the revenues in our business.

However it continues to grow and grew 11% in the 12-month period and we added a net three buyers. We added four buyers. One buyer left the network with very immaterial revenues and subsequent to the period end, another two buyers have joined. Also in the period we added 10,000 new suppliers of which 560 were the high revenue generating integrated suppliers.

Tungsten Network finance has reported de minimis revenues and that’s because the revenue from our financing activities, which totaled a £0.25 million was primarily reflected in our Tungsten Bank segment, which is being discontinued and so actually total revenues from financing whilst still very modest have grown half year on half year from £84,000 to £96,000 to £0.25 million in this period.

There is still a long way to go in terms of the revenue performance we want from this segment but very importantly, these revenues do not reflect the revised agreement that we now have with our funding partner Insight Investment, which will result in us receiving a great -- a significantly greater share of the revenues derived from our agreement with them that have previously been received.

As importantly from our Tungsten Network finance business, is the evolution of its cost base, in the second half of last year, the cost base of Tungsten Network finance was £2.5 million. In the first half of this year it was £800,000.

We do have a lot of work to identify redundant systems, identify areas where we have people that when required and we bought in some very talented, but fewer people into that business as part of the work required, the operational change, the strategic change required to restart that business, which just happened in the last couple of weeks.

I mentioned that we've been reshaping our cost base. In the same period in the prior year, we reported £22.5 million of adjusted operating expenses that is operating expenses excluding the non-cash items of amortization and depreciation and share-based payment.

In this reporting period we reported £21.8 million, so that’s a decline of £700,000 but the third part of that decline is the discontinuance of Tungsten Bank of £1.4 million. So as I said previously, our reported cost have gone up slightly that marks the impact of currency movements whereby our Euro and U.S. denominated costs when translated back into sterling are reported at a higher level.

But it also marks the reduction in costs in our Tungsten Network finance business and some of the strong work that’s being done by our procurement team who have delivered annualized £1.4 million worth of procurements in cost control savings of which impacted about £0.5 million in the first half.

In order to deliver some of the overall savings of the business, we've had one-off costs. We've written off some of the capitalized investments. We had redundancy costs and again they are -- they’ve impacted on the numbers. They were as a result of your management team taking the actions that they believe are required in order to right size the cost base of the business, but get reported through the core numbers.

And we also said at the year-end that we intended to identify areas where the appropriate thing to do was to increase our expenditure particularly around systems and development cost. Our development team is focused on delivering new products that will drive incremental revenues and is focused on delivering the automation solutions in our business, which will reduce costs.

We have a robust process to identify the impact and prioritize, which products will support us in the near term and we spent about £1.5 million of incremental costs in the period on those projects.

We have repeated our guidance in this period, which we are targeting EBITDA breakeven by the end of calendar year 2017 and I want to take you through a few of the important parts of the actions that we're taking in order to achieve breakeven and it's important to hear that actually on a number of these, we are well progressed even not already having delivered those actions, which will now come through in the numbers.

On the revenue side, pricing plays an important role. Our process of pricing to value with our buyer customers, which resulted in over 60% like-for-like price increases last year, year to date are at 47%, which actually this year are above our expectations for the year.

The results of that flow right through to the bottom line and will continue to add monthly incremental revenue and we are continuing to add customers on a net basis without adding to the cost base of the business. Year-to-date we had six new buyers that includes two at the period end and by the end of October, we find up as I've said, earlier 560 new integrated solutions suppliers, which are the high value ones.

And we have a lot of product that is being launched or is in the pipeline in order to sell to current and new customers. Not least the impact of our restart in Tungsten Network finance.

But it is not just on the revenue side, on the cost side as I said, our development team are working on a number of the projects in order to support operational efficiencies. They are building the automation that we need within the business. We're currently incurring double running costs within finance as we move to a shared service environment in a lower cost location, which will result in a net significant reduction in the headcount and the cost of providing the finance and the HR services to the business.

We have identified in procurements and spend management £1.4 million of annualized savings, but we have a whole program that is ongoing with other vendors in order to get services that have significantly better value into the business.

So we have within our sight the steps that are required to achieve breakeven and remain fully committed to delivering on each of those steps over the course of 2017 in order to achieve our breakeven target.

Rick Hurwitz

David, thank you very much. Before I take a moment to reiterate the guidance that we had given at the beginning of the fiscal year and speak a bit about where we go from here, I would like to refocus again on the people at Tungsten.

We work very hard to put talent in place both at the senior executive level and deep within our organization and it's worth noting that in the period, three of those senior executives have purchased stock in Tungsten and so too the two of our Board Directors.

These people are committed to growing this business profitably. They work well together and they believe and I also feel that they're very well aligned with the interests of our shareholders.

With respect to guidance, we believe that we remain on track to deliver revenues in excess of £30 million pounds and EBITDA loss now excluding the discontinued Tungsten Bank operations of less than €13 million. You'll remember I guided £12 million to £14 million less the bank. So we believe we will earn a loss of less than £13 million and arrive at year end with a cash position in excess of £20 million.

We remain committed as David had indicated to achieving profitability within the calendar year and in fact we see quite clearly, the path that we need to follow to achieve that and are pursuing those steps actively.

I'd like to highlight once again our expectations around Tungsten's Invoice Financing business, it's worth noting that it was just on November 28 when we re-launched this business. We did so with a set of new financing parameters with a new set of economics in partnership with our funding partner and with a new set of individuals who are guiding us forward.

These pieces are now intact and what we've seen in just the last two weeks in terms of business development are a set of green shoots that make us highly encouraged that we are on the right track. So we look forward to focusing on that subject with you in the coming months.

Where do we go from here? We've had a great period. We've accomplished a lot, yet there is still quite a lot to do. We will focus on our core and that is to expand the connections in the transactions embedded within the Tungsten network, while allowing and putting ourselves in position to do that more effectively and more efficiently, so indeed we can do it with profitable revenues.

We will restart Tungsten Network Finance and grow that into being an economic contributor in the fiscal year and as David briefly alluded to, we intend to grow moving forward on the back of a new set of products that we will launch in the coming weeks.

We are leading with a invoice data capture capability that lets Tungsten get its arms around 100% of the invoices of our perspective and existing customers as we migrate them on a path towards a fully digital environment.

We have not yet launched this invoice data capture product, but have already sold it two times. So we're very encouraged that we're on the right track with respect to that leading offering, but we have two other products to follow in the coming weeks as we reinvigorated the innovative spirit here at Tungsten.

We see to grow in the coming months and years ahead not just through our organic activities, but in partnership with external parties as well that’s well reflected in the launch of our FX conversion capability that we've done with Pioneer. It's also well reflected in the enhanced sales activity that we're seen through the PNC channel and we have a systematic approach that we are taking to best understand our customer's needs and our ecosystem and how best to deliver on both.

And then lastly, we are working very hard to deliver with inside of this organization, the same sort of digital efficiencies that we deliver to our clients and that pursuit will continue in earnest. There is a host of technical development taking place at Tungsten that’s not only making our core network more reliable and durable and scalable, but it's letting us do it in a more efficient manner that's not on reducing costs here but providing a better service outside.

When we next meet, our balance sheet will be strengthened and again we see clear path towards profitability. So let me finish with that and turn the mic over to you where we'll be happy to answer any questions that you may have.

Thank you. Operator if you would take the questions.

Question-and-Answer Session

Operator

Thank you. [Operator Instructions] A question has come through is from the line of Andrew Mitchell from Edison. Please go ahead with your question.

Andrew Mitchell

Yes. Good morning. I wonder if I could ask you about the-- you mentioned the one-offs you're incurring in the cost reduction exercise. I wonder if you could sort of run through what those are and how much we should think of dropping out in the following year?

David Williams

Yes, that’s a good question Andrew. Good morning. I want to present one-off as extraordinary because on the basis that every business always has one-offs every period. What I did want to do is give some clarity to have the cost base as changing.

Some more visibility on that €1.2 million more than half of it is a result of writing off some capitalized items and incurring challenges to terminate onerous contracts and as part of the procurement work that’s ongoing, it's the repair work that Rick spoke to.

We've really, some of the legacy contracts that existed in this business, which is inappropriate either for a business of the size and scale at Tungsten or just not appropriate commercials. We've also incurred a couple of 100,000 of redundancy costs as we've identified areas in the business where we can decrease the headcount.

There is also a similar amount of just write-offs, other write-offs from the balance sheet as we're going through, as we're looking into every covers in Tungsten. The reality is the harder we look, there are things that we find and we want to clean them up.

So these are genuine one-offs. I am not going to say that there aren’t going to be other one-offs as we go through these processes, but as a fact did want to give some more color about just the nature of them and how our cost base is changing despite these one-offs costs that we're incurring.

Andrew Mitchell

Thanks very much on that. Just on the price increases, which are coming through very encouragingly, would it be right to think that as you move into the second half negotiations, is the base higher and therefore we should think that the -- for those further customers, think of smaller percentage increases than you've recorded so far.

Rick Hurwitz

I wouldn’t encourage you necessarily to do that. In fact our budgeted David had indicated as a lower levels from those that we're realizing and that's because it's just the nature of the contracts that are being renewed in this fiscal year are at of a different sort of size and scope than where they were last year.

But it does I believe reflect the increased confidence our customers have and what we're provided to them. I think it's worth noting that in all instances those renewal moments in time represent an opportunity to talk more about expansion.

So not only are we seeing that lift across the existing set of facts with that customer, but it is a lift that will be experienced as we grow business more invoice volume, more products sold, more suppliers, more countries. So there's an imbedded growth rate inherent in that.

Andrew Mitchell

So that actually leads on to my last question, which was on the invoice growth figure, which I think was 6.3%. Is that less than you might have expected? I don’t know, is that more incumbent as you say you've refined those service, made it more efficient. Is there a lag before we see that flowing through to that number?

Rick Hurwitz

That’s how we're thinking about it. That has one area that we recounted would be a little disappointed in, but it is a lagging indicator in the sense that there's a whole host of initiatives, commitments, contracts, resources put in place to integrate to release suppliers, to develop campaigns, to put the software and to let you bring even more on again.

And that just takes time to begin to see those suppliers process invoices. So we remain comfortable that we'll see that metric grow to the levels that we had anticipated.

Andrew Mitchell

Okay. Thanks very much.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question is from the line of [Garrote Evans]. Please go ahead with your question.

UnidentifiedAnalyst

Good morning, guys. Two questions for me if may. First of all in terms of the buyers and obviously it's good to see the ongoing net growth you're getting there, but I would be interested in terms of what's the next tier or the next wave of those buyer customers? Where do you see it coming from? Is it many geographies? Is it niche verticals or you able to now to move down downscale in terms of slightly smaller buyers? Sorry go ahead.

Rick Hurwitz

If it's any question associated with the first before you put it…

UnidentifiedAnalyst

It's a separate question.

Rick Hurwitz

All right. Why don’t I answer the first and then you could come back with the second. Look we as I've indicated are in this delicate balance between repair and road here at Tungsten. So we see lots of green water, blue water, whatever you want to say in front of opportunity.

Yet we're not yet able to address it fully as we would like to because there are still quite a bit to fix and one area that we're facing is in affecting a higher velocity set of sales activity. So we've made some fairly meaningful changes in that area that’s actually causes not to be participating as many deal opportunities as we like to be.

So the first place we're going to see that buyer growth is from increased awareness around this brand, better market fulfillment activities that have us see qualified leads and participate in more opportunities. That is our intent and that's what we seek to deliver upon.

The second it as you may remember, Tungsten acquired Workflow Business and today has a series of customers that use that software whom are not yet members of the Tungsten Network. They represent great opportunity for us, again that notion of the embedded opportunity associated with the existing buyer base is very real.

And here's a segment of it that we have a set of discrete initiatives around de-supporting also software that lets us create a moment in time to have the holistic conversation about Tungsten could be doing for those buyers and we expect to see growth of the core network sales in the ancillary products that we now are beginning to bring to the market in that customer base.

UnidentifiedAnalyst

That’s great. Thank you. And the second question was also around I suppose the revenue opportunity. What degree of commonality you're starting to see in terms of suppliers in the network working with more than one of your buyer customers?

Clearly there could be or should be a network effect that could kick in over time, but it's a big world. So I am interested to hear and understand what level of commonality you're starting to see?

Rick Hurwitz

Yeah very astute comment in the sense that that network effect is exactly what is going on inside of the Tungsten Network and one that we want to enhance very meaningfully. So we recognize the places in which we have opportunity to expose the existing supply chain to other of their customers.

And so we are doing a host of things to realize that opportunity and it starts by us better understanding our customer base. So we've spent a lot of time here at Tungsten over the last six months really slicing and dicing our customer base so that we are providing discrete approaches and initiatives around different types of segments.

And we're also making use, you've heard a big theme here is automation is making better use of technology as a means of decoupling revenue growth with cost growth and so to as we enhance that portal.

You've heard today that we've now launched a fundamentally new portal. There's a lot more to come with respect to that and a big piece of what will come in that notion of conductivity and is automation and we've created an essence of LinkedIn that allows the supplier to identify a buyer and off goes a LinkedIn type message where the buyer could click to accept that connection.

And so we have those kinds of things in motion right now and we look forward to speaking to the results, but it's a great point and one we're very focused on.

UnidentifiedAnalyst

That's great. Thank you very much.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question is from the line of Ben Williams from Trium Capital. Please go ahead with your question.

Ben Williams

Good morning, gentlemen. Couple of quickies really on -- particularly on supplier revenues, obviously growth in integration suppliers is it's a massive revenue driver within your supply revenues, now that's like the number was something that whatever 4%, 5%.

Clearly your hope would be that you're beating those sort of growth rates going forward. So I would be interested in just understanding really as a long time buyer how are you resourcing that efforts? So that's question one.

And then the second one is you made a comment in the release about your buyers are ready for us to on-board supplies, but then turned out not to be and there is some sort of delay there and again I'm just trying to understand what resources you're addressing that and what do you think the timeframe is to resolve that? Thank you.

Rick Hurwitz

Thank you, Ben. Look what I would -- again context is relevant. So in that context of repair versus growth, in the context of we just released a new strategic plan in February of this year in the context of we hadn’t had a fully formed management team until really late May of this year when appointed Kevin Wilbur to lead our AP Automation activities.

We've actually accomplished quite a lot with respect to those suppliers while maybe weaker and we acknowledged that in release and where we wanted to be. It's important to recognize it's significantly higher than year-over-year and it's the first evidence of growth in multiple periods.

So it's going in the right direction even if not quite at the pace that we anticipated that it will be. And I feel like it's a little bit like that lag we talked about in an earlier question where we are engaging with these buyers in a much more fulsome manner.

We're going to realize that enhanced relationship through new products. We're realizing that enhanced relationship through the competence as we've said in the release and the announcement of given our supplier releases.

Now we are doing a whole lot to make our factory more efficient. We're doing a whole lot to increase the conversion rates of those suppliers. Those things are beginning to happen. Yet we haven't fully tipped to growth.

So there's a few things here that we haven't quite seen through a lot of it around our digital engagement, that we believe are going to go a long way towards improving those conversion rates. But in the meantime we added -- we sold 11,600 new suppliers net I think David announced this 10,000, right.

So it's going there, but we have a lot of steps in place in the factory that allowed us deliver on that a lot more. And then I just would point you to one other dynamic going on here at Tungsten that's relevant to the question around supplier and supplier levels.

And that is Tungsten as an organization is engaging with those suppliers in a way it never had before. We know who they are. We are interacting with them besides the technical connection and that's taking the form of an enhanced invoice financing business, Tungsten Early Payment, the portal for that is a customer experience event, not an execution one any longer.

And so too with the FX conversion capability and then ultimately the digital touch points that we will start delivering as we're making this tip and the technical work here lets us do that more fully. So it's an area we remain exceedingly hopeful and think is promising.

Ben Williams

Thank you.

David Williams

We have a question from the web regarding the launch of our e-invoicing services in India. That's one of my interests. So I'll answer that one. So we have spent a lot of time over a number of years working first of all with the Indian Government in their process to legalize e-invoicing in India and that is on a state by state basis.

And the reason why we invested in that is because our clients are there. A significant number of our clients have particularly shared service centers there and it represents a great opportunity for us.

Now there is a slight nuance that the Indian Government has said they're going to introduce GST in the first half of 2017, but actually haven't codified that yet. So no one knows what that looks like. So we're working through our contacts there because we need to build that into our e-invoicing process.

But our product and everything else that support our product is almost ready to go. The first quarter of calendar year 2017, we will be not only technically live and ready, one of the repair versus growth aspect that we found in Tungsten is actually the momentum to take something to technical capability also needs to be pushed through commercial capability and not only where we have been technically live in the first quarter of 2017.

But also we will be commercially live and able to actually offer that services to our buyers, actually implement them on our network and actually that their Indian entity and actually start interacting with their suppliers.

Whether or not we will be able to achieve that in the first quarter really depends on the clarity around GST and that at the moment is potentially holding up our buyers from making any change until they have more clarity about the GST treatment. So there is an awful lot of things happening in this business.

A lot of step forward and India is one that has the potential, as with so many things in this business has the potential to really start moving the needle and we are ready to take advantage of that when we can.

David Williams

Operator are you seeing any other questions?

Operator

No we have no further questions on the phone line. Thank you.

Rick Hurwitz

And we are not seeing any here online. So unless someone has a last-minute question, we will conclude the call. Hearing none, I thank you all very much for joining us and we look forward to speaking to you again soon.

Operator

Thank you for joining today's event, ladies and gentlemen, you may now replace your handsets.

Source - SeekingAlpha

[keyno] 14/12/2016 13:04

Me first........

[dollarzpounds] 14/12/2016 12:56

I will take that where do I sign ??!

[edwardt] 14/12/2016 12:48

well that to date has been a complete waste of time so far as tung is concerned . that said, on today's valuation you don't get many stocks with such 'potential' trading at such low levels . for pete's sake look at skyscanner sale which went for 12 times revenue!!

[keyno] 14/12/2016 12:37

Here's hoping you're correct in your positive slant, edwardt.

[edwardt] 14/12/2016 12:30

or you could argue we have a better network effect whereas before there was a real barrier to it, ie they could not offer the product to lots of clients which will be the main conduit for us as shareholders to make some filthy luga.

[keyno] 14/12/2016 12:10

Thanks for response edwardt. Sounds like the cake will be sliced ever more thinly.