Wednesday, May 7, 2014

Why inContact Inc. Shares Temporarily Soared Today

Although we don't believe in timing the market or panicking over market movements, we do like to keep an eye on big changes -- just in case they're material to our investing thesis.

What: Shares of inContact Inc. (NASDAQ: SAAS  ) rose more than 10% in Wednesday's early trading, and then gave back most of those gains to close up around 1% after the cloud contact center software provider released first-quarter results and announced an acquisition.

So what: Quarterly consolidated revenue rose 17% year over year to $37.1 million, which translated to a roughly flat net loss of $1.4 million, or $0.02 per share. Analysts, on average, were expecting a much wider net loss of $0.08 per share on sales of $36.53 million.

The likely culprit for the pullback was inContact's mostly stock acquisition of workforce optimization specialist CallCopy, which markets its products under the name "Uptivity." Specifically, inContact purchased Uptivity for $45.8 million, including $8.8 million in cash and $37 million in shares. Of the stock portion, $4 million is restricted to ensure retention of key Uptivity management. 

Now what: That's a relatively big chunk of shares for a company with a modest $440 million market capitalization. Still, inContact CEO Paul Jarman insisted during the subsequent conference call that Uptivity is a "strong competitive play that will extend our lead in the contact center space, and will open up an additional $1 billion opportunity in the under-penetrated WFO market for mid-sized contact centers."

Assuming all goes as planned, then, Uptivity may well be a great move for inContact shareholders over the long term. Still, I can't blame the market for giving back some of today's gains, given the outsized stock portion of the deal, and the fact that inContact isn't expected to turn a profit in the near future. For now, that's why I'm perfectly content watching inContact from the sidelines.

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