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.
