QuoteMedia, Inc  (OTCMKTS: QMCI) Q1 2020 Earnings Call Transcript

QuoteMedia, Inc  (QMCI) Q1 2020 earnings call dated May 14, 2020

Corporate Participants:

Brendan Hopkins — Investor Relations

Dave Shworan — Director, President and Chief Executive Officer

Keith J. Randall — President, Chief Executive Officer and Chief Financial Officer

Analysts:

Michael Kupinski — Noble Capital Markets — Analyst

Collyn Gilbert — KBW — Analyst

Jonathan Jetson — Analyst

Richard Houchin — Analyst

Joel Marquez — Analyst

Presentation:

Operator

Good day, everyone. And welcome to today’s QuoteMedia Q1 2020 Results. [Operator Instructions] Later, you will have the opportunity to ask questions during the question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions]

Please note this call may be recorded. [Operator Instructions] It is now my pleasure to turn the program over to Brendan Hopkins. Please go ahead.

Brendan Hopkins — Investor Relations

Hi, good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for joining us. We have a brief Safe Harbor and then we’ll get started. Except for historical information contained herein, the statements in this conference call are forward-looking statements that are made pursuant to the Safe Harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties which may cause our actual results in future periods to differ materially from forecasted results.

That said, I’d like to turn the call over to Dave Shworan, CEO of QuoteMedia.

Dave Shworan — Director, President and Chief Executive Officer

Thanks, Brendan. Welcome everybody, and thank you for joining us. While not a lot has changed since we had our year-end call just over a month ago. Most of the companies still working from home, and I think it will be a while until we make any changes to that policy. But that said, we’re managing quite well and business is moving along. We certainly did see a slowdown as the pandemic changed the world, and many companies had to focus on restructuring and reorganizing. And as a result, we only achieved 3% increase in business in the quarter. But as I stated on the last call, I predicted that once companies got organized, business would start to pick up again, and we’re certainly seeing that.

We did see some pause — client pause their services and even some closed their doors as they couldn’t continue their businesses. But the general trend that we’re experiencing is that new client discussions are improving as companies now establish a pretty decent remote business process. But I do still see that companies are moving slower and many are still worried about what the future will bring. So we’re definitely noticing that firms are being more cautious and taking more time in their decision making. But even through all of this, we are continuing down our path to become one of the largest market data providers.

As a company, we’re not slowing down. We are continuing our plan to release more and more products this year. We’re spending more on staff, data collection, development. And even with the current state of the world, we’re pleased that we haven’t strayed from our plan. And we are continuing to be confident that our investments will position us to realize substantial growth in the future.

So I’ll now pass the mic over to Keith Randall, so he can take us through the numbers for the last quarter and then we can answer any questions that you guys may have. Go ahead, Keith.

Keith J. Randall — President, Chief Executive Officer and Chief Financial Officer

Thank you, Dave, and welcome everyone. Overall, we had a solid quarter. As Dave mentioned, our revenue increased 3% over the comparative 2019 quarter despite the current economic climate. Breaking down our revenue, interactive content revenue which is web display content increased 10% due to an increase in average revenue per client contract. This increase in average revenue per client indicates that we continue to sign larger deals with larger more established clients. Corporate Quotestream revenue, on the other hand, decreased by 3%. The decrease is entirely due to one of our larger client contracts terminated.

Without this client seizing services, we would have seen a modest increase in Corporate Quotestream revenue as a number of clients increased from the comparative period. We believe the increase in clients is attributable in part to the constant improvements and upgrades we have made to our Quotestream portfolio management products. Individual Quotestream revenue also decreased by 3%. Individual Quotestream revenue has been relatively flat over the past few years. That’s where we’re putting more attention on growing our other revenue streams. And we didn’t have a lot of focus on individual Quotestream marketing and sales.

However, in February of this year, we did start a new Quotestream marketing program and we’ve seen good results so far with increases in individual Quotestream subscriptions for both March and April. We believe this uptick in sales is attributable to both the increase in NAV for our services for customers working remotely during the COVID-19 process as well as success from our new marketing program.

31% of our revenue and 33% of our expenses are denominated in Canadian dollars. On average, the Canadian dollar depreciated by approximately 1% versus the comparative period slightly reducing both our total revenue and expenses once translated into US dollars. The Canadian dollar continues to fall however, so we expect it to have a more significant impact on our financial results going forward. But because of our Canadian dollar revenue and expenses are so closely matched, we expect any exchange rate fluctuations to have a minimal impact on our bottom line.

Our cost of revenue increased 3% mainly due to increased amortization of development costs resulting from increased spending on product development and data collection. We also had a new data feeds, new research information and new analytics data as we continue to expand our product lines. Despite these cost increases, our gross margin remains unchanged from the comparative period at 49%.

Our total operating expenses increased 25% for the quarter. As mentioned, we’ve made significant investments to expand our product lines and improve our infrastructure to lay the foundation for future growth. To this end, we’ve hired additional sales, development, and administrative staff, resulting in increased personnel costs versus the comparative period. We also incurred a significant increase in receivable balances written off the bad debts during the quarter primarily due to the impact of COVID-19.

In anticipation of future bad debts associated with COVID-19, we increased our allowance for doubtful accounts from 80,000 at year-end to 100,000 at March 31. As a result, our bad debt expense increased $75,000 from the comparative period. Finally, we increased our Investor Relations spending versus the comparative period. We hired a dedicated Investor Relations professional in April of 2019 and attended more investor conferences that we had in the comparative period.

We incurred a loss for the quarter of $117,000 and adjusted EBITDA was approximately $191,000. Please refer to the reconciliation included in our press release from the calculations of adjusted EBITDA. Turning now to our balance sheet and cash flow statement, our cash remains relatively unchanged for the quarter totaling $803,000 at quarter end, a decrease of $13,000 for the quarter. Our cash flow from operations was $383,000 for the quarter, while net cash used in investing activities was $386,000 due to spending on infrastructure and product development.

In early May, we received a loan of $133,000 under the Paycheck Protection Program, which was established as part of the CARES Act. The loan is fully forgivable if the company meets certain payroll and other expenditure requirements during the eight week period following the receipt of the funds. As we intend to maintain our current staffing levels, we expect the use of the loan proceeds will make the conditions for forgiveness. Looking forward, based on clients currently under contract, we expect our positive revenue growth to continue for the remainder of 2020 despite current market conditions. And while it’s difficult to predict how long the impact of COVID-19 might be felt, the strength of our balance sheet with no debt and substantial cash reserves leaves us well prepared to weather any foreseeable adverse economic conditions.

Thank you, and I’ll now pass it back to Dave.

Dave Shworan — Director, President and Chief Executive Officer

Thank you, Keith. Okay. So I’m happy to now open up the call for any questions that you may have. And if there is any future questions after the call, please remember you can reach out to Brendan Hopkins which is bhopkins@quotemedia.com. So I’m open to questions.

Questions and Answers:

Operator

[Operator Instructions] And we’ll take our first question from Michael Kupinski. Please go ahead, your line is open.

Michael Kupinski — Noble Capital Markets — Analyst

Thank you. Well, that was a solid quarter in light of all that that’s going on with COVID. So just a couple of questions. Can you talk a little bit about whether or not how much the revenue impact might have been with COVID? Have you been able to identify that? Revenue has been a little bit stronger that we didn’t see that — those issues? And then more broadly, I guess on a more macro level. The thought process has always been that given that you are the low cost provider of data feeds and so forth that you might be able to see some sort of acceleration in growth as companies kind of realign their expenses or maybe try to lower their expenses.

I was just wondering, given your outlook for full year 2020 of having positive revenue growth, are you starting to see some of that benefit you at this point? Or is that still too early given the disruptions that we’re seeing right now?

Dave Shworan — Director, President and Chief Executive Officer

Yeah. So, hi, Michael. Yeah, absolutely. So looking — well looking at your second question regarding the companies that are looking to save money or watch their expense is definitely that is coming along here. There is quite a few firms that are talking to us because they are interested in saving money. And so we are seeing that that is kind of a commonality that’s out there. And I think with us going down a path of doing a lot of data collection ourselves and being able to provide data straight out of QuoteMedia without going through third parties and licensing third-party data, and then distributing that. And then where there is not a lot of margin and things like that.

Our new model is to collect as much information as possible ourselves. And then, with that, we can price ourselves wherever we need to price ourselves. So if a company is very, very interested in saving money they’re struggling. There is a reason that they’re needing to switch. We can certainly comply with that and put in tiered pricing or anything that needs to be done. So for sure that’s the case.

With your first question, well that was regards to our people, what would — what we have seen if COVID-19 didn’t hit? So as you can see we had a loss for the quarter. It was predicted that we would be pretty much breakeven even spending all of this money to go down this new path. And so we would have probably been breakeven rather than a loss, but at the same time, while there are some clients that have either gone under or cancelled services or delayed services or all kinds of these bad things that have happened to them. We’ve had quite a bit of good come in.

Now in the first month or two, obviously, it was very slow. It was everybody was scrambling, everybody was trying to figure out how to work from home. It was nobody was really looking to sign a deal for switching data doing a contract using new applications, whatever. But now we’re seeing that completely changing. We had a sales meeting last week and people are busier than they’ve ever been. So I think what we’ve noticed is that the world just had to catch up, people had to get used to it. And it sounds like there is a lot of things in the world that our people are getting used to this and maybe this is not a bad way to go to have some people working from home, better productivity, better focus all kinds of things.

So, who knows what’s going to happen as far as brick-and-mortar businesses as this goes forward, but we’re seeing better growth now. We’re seeing more and more clients coming to the table and we’re busy. We’re very busy now. So it’s looking good for the future.

Michael Kupinski — Noble Capital Markets — Analyst

And in terms of the new sales staff. Can you just kind of give us an idea of how many people you’ve added since the last quarter? And I guess just give us a little thought about how many people that you plan to add for the balance of the year? And then my other question would be, I know that you’re working on new products, and you’ve added some a little color on those products, but I was wondering if you can add a little bit more color on what — where you’re spending your software development costs for the quarter was a little higher than expected. I was wondering if you can give us a good run rate for the balance of the year on that line item. And maybe or the cadence of that expense growth going forward.

Dave Shworan — Director, President and Chief Executive Officer

Yeah, I’ll answer the first half of the question, and then Keith can answer the second half of the expense going forward. So essentially, we hired quite a few different areas in the company, but it’s kind of more over the last maybe six months and then the last quarter as well, but we’ve hired two or two new salespeople. One senior, one junior. One that’s been in the industry for over 10 years, who was the Head of Sales of another firm. And so now he has joined our top Head of Salespeople as more of the head of the hunters as we call them, people that are out there hunting for the new business.

We’ve got — also quite a bit of a remote people for [indecipherable] under contract. So our goal there is for data collection and going to other countries is much more cost effective and so we’ve built teams in other countries for that or contracted teams in other countries for doing a lot of the data collection work, aggregation work, things that we’re looking for. That is a lot of datasets that we get from all kinds of different third parties, and it’s, yeah, know when you’re first starting out, that’s a very easy way to go to just start bringing in data from third parties but eventually in order to compete with all the big players in the industry, you want to have ownership 100% ownership of all your data do whatever you want with and charge whatever you want. And so we’ve gone down that path and we probably have teams of — it surges because if we need more work done then more people get added to the team. And if we need less work done then less work is added to the team.

So that team ranges anywhere from say 30 to 100 people that we have in action doing data collection. And Keith, do you want to take over now?

Keith J. Randall — President, Chief Executive Officer and Chief Financial Officer

Sure. Michael, can you repeat the second question, please?

Michael Kupinski — Noble Capital Markets — Analyst

Yeah, sure, Keith. Yeah, it was about the software development costs in the quarter was a lot higher than I was expecting, and I was wondering is that a good run rate for the balance of the year or can you talk a little bit about the cadence of that expense going forward?

Keith J. Randall — President, Chief Executive Officer and Chief Financial Officer

Well, a lot of the development has to do with our — the project that we, our team in India is working on. So the data collection and also development of the mutual funds. But and going forward that’s going to continue for the short term, but eventually those costs, we’re going to be replacing other data costs. So we’ll see an impact on our cash flow in the short term, but not the long-term.

Michael Kupinski — Noble Capital Markets — Analyst

And then if you could just kind of give us a sense of how revenues are performing in the second quarter. Certainly like maybe if you can just give us a thought about how April performed and maybe how May is looking, are you still seeing the positive trends that you saw in terms of your interactive content and data applications business. Are we still seeing kind of negative growth for your portfolio management systems? Just kind of give us a sense of the direction of how the revenues are going in the quarter.

Keith J. Randall — President, Chief Executive Officer and Chief Financial Officer

Well, as we previously mentioned, we’ve actually seen an uptick in our individual Quotestream subscribers for March and April, which we are hoping for but in this current environment, who knows. And our April’s surprised us, it was surprisingly good. May it’s too early to — we haven’t compiled those numbers yet. So we’re definitely heading the right direction.

Michael Kupinski — Noble Capital Markets — Analyst

Great. That’s all I have for now. Thank you.

Keith J. Randall — President, Chief Executive Officer and Chief Financial Officer

Welcome.

Operator

And we’ll go next to Collyn Gilbert. Please go ahead, your line is open.

Collyn Gilbert — KBW — Analyst

Good morning, everybody. I hope everybody is surviving this latest part of our lives. My question basically is turning to the stock side. Years ago, and I’ve been an investor in this little project for about 18 years, fairly sizable amount. We had few large clients and revenues were small, but the stock traded in the $0.40 to $0.50 range. Now we have a very strong group of clients, a very good program and forms and our product seems to be really being accepted. The basic question is, are we being held back because of some of the new restrictions on investors i.e., professional investors, stock brokers, fund runners that would be able to at — in the old days, invest in the company that wasn’t shall we say, on the NASDAQ versus where we are today, where probably the minimum requirement would be that we would be needed to be on the NASDAQ for these people to invest in our company.

Dave Shworan — Director, President and Chief Executive Officer

Yes. Hi, Collyn. Yeah, absolutely, you’re right. I think things have changed a lot in over the years as far as willing to invest in firms that are listed on the OTC. That does definitely make us harder to get more firms to invest in us. And so that’s why we’ve got a game plan to go forward. We do want to go on to the NASDAQ, we actually have pretty much hit all of our targets as far as requirements. I mean, there will have to be some restructuring and some things done. But as far as our company and our growth and our profitability and all of these things, we’re doing very well.

I think we’re very excited about the second half of the year and I think that’s going to show us that a move to a bigger exchange is definitely going to be in the cards. So that is in the works. And that certainly will make it easier for people to invest in us. And I do think that there is quite a bit of hold back because there is such a limited audience that can invest in an OTC company. So you’re right.

Collyn Gilbert — KBW — Analyst

Thank you very much for your work and effort.

Dave Shworan — Director, President and Chief Executive Officer

You bet.

Operator

And we’ll take our next question from Jonathan Jetson [Phonetic]. Please go ahead, your line is open.

Jonathan Jetson — Analyst

Hey guys, thanks for hosting the call today and for questions. First one, I saw you all’s release recently about partnering with NASDAQ for their Basic Canada streaming information. I was just kind of wondering because it was like a pretty big program there in US and for everyone else. Kind of wondering if you could quantify the potential revenue impact from that?

Dave Shworan — Director, President and Chief Executive Officer

Sure. Yeah, the NASDAQ Canada is Nasdaq Basic Canada is a new product that NASDAQ has released. And we were one of the earlier adopters of their Nasdaq Basic US. And, but it’s basically a lower cost data feed for professionals or firms to use that has less cost per user. And so they’re releasing this, so they came straight to us because we do partner with them on other things and they are a client of ours. And they said, we want you guys to take this to market with us and it’s, they’re just releasing it, they’ve just — they just announced that they’re going to give it with no cost to companies until I think September.

And they interviewed me and then they needed to delay the interview, because I said it in my interview and they needed to announce that first before they would put out the interview, where I said it. So, yeah, it’s a partnership where we can take another lower cost data solution to the Canadian market, and it’s always nice to have different data levels for clients. And so the impact will be going to market with NASDAQ, they’re meeting with many firms and they want to get there — their new data set into the different banks and brokerage firms. So we’re kind of going along side with them. So it’s very beneficial. And I think the next thing they’re going to do is a big billboard in Times Square with QuoteMedia on it. So, I’ll certainly be sending that out to our IR list when we get a picture of that.

Jonathan Jetson — Analyst

Awesome, that’s great to hear. And then kind of just shifting over to the individual Quotestream, I know we’ve kind of talked about how that hasn’t been as bigger priority over the past year or so. But now kind of with the unexpected tailwind of the pandemic benefiting that you all — what you all thoughts around potentially being more aggressive around marketing that product now that there’s more retail investors home who are interested in getting involved in the market and kind of finally have the time to do so.

Dave Shworan — Director, President and Chief Executive Officer

Yes. So we did, we did go down the path of the marketing plan, which we actually were working on already. So it was, I hate to say it, but it was kind of good timing. So we did start the marketing plan, we did get it out there. And certainly the — with people working from home, they needed access to their market data for trading for whatever they needed, they didn’t — they couldn’t go to their offices. So we are seeing, over the last two months, we are seeing increases in sales of the product and it’s probably for both reasons. They are finding it, the marketing is working and they are using us as the place to sign up and to get their data. So yeah, we are seeing increase over the last couple of months and hopefully that continues forward.

Jonathan Jetson — Analyst

Okay, got it, thanks. And then final two questions. So I know you — you all kind of spoken how now that you’ve got a stronger balance sheet or higher revenue level, that you can start working for bigger customers, I just kind of wondering, and I’m sure things got put on pause here for a few months, but are you all starting to see all really kind of meaningfully move into the sales cycle of some of these larger players make meaningful progress.

Dave Shworan — Director, President and Chief Executive Officer

Absolutely, and that’s probably the biggest thing that I noticed is that firms are now coming to us and we are being invited to the table against the major $1 billion firms in this industry. And we’re sitting at the table, there is only three of us at the table and it’s pretty unbelievable that QuoteMedia is being put into that bucket. So, yeah, absolutely. Every day, there is bigger and bigger firms coming along. We’re negotiating with them. Looking at what they’re spending. Looking at what we can do for them.

We’ve had some firms come and say, look here’s the dataset that we collect or that we get from X company, it cost us $1 million a year. What can you do? And prices like that, we haven’t seen that. So it’s very interesting and we’re — yeah, I would say that we’re just going to continue working with bigger and bigger firms. We also do have some big firms using us. So that helps obviously, when you can rattle off some of the names of who uses QuoteMedia. It does make people feel at ease. So we’ve, we’re constantly getting bigger firms.

Jonathan Jetson — Analyst

Okay, cool. And then final question, it sounds like the business has been relatively stable compared to most — the economy doing this, but kind of looking over the next 13 weeks maybe to the end of the year, how do you all feel in terms of the rate of cash you’re collecting from your customers and kind of, in terms of cash flow needs of working capital in your current cash balance, kind of how do you all feel about your resources right now and if there would potentially be any need to raise money?

Dave Shworan — Director, President and Chief Executive Officer

No, I don’t think so. Not for running the company or the activities that we’re doing. We’ve kind of finished adding more people and adding more projects until we wrap these ones up. So we’ve got a bunch of projects that are on the go for the next few months. And so our expenses are going to kind of stay where they’re at, and just allow the growth of the company now to catch up a little bit, but I don’t think that there is a need, there is no need to raise money. The only thing is, if we change anything as far as acquisitions are going down the path like that we might, we might look at something like that, but not for current workload. [Speech Overlap]

Keith J. Randall — President, Chief Executive Officer and Chief Financial Officer

We have also got the — sorry, Dave if I can just add to that something.

Dave Shworan — Director, President and Chief Executive Officer

Go ahead, yeah.

Keith J. Randall — President, Chief Executive Officer and Chief Financial Officer

We also got our Payroll Protection Program loan to $133,000 in May. So, which we don’t believe — which we believe will be fully forgiven. So that was a little added cash injection as well.

Jonathan Jetson — Analyst

Yeah awesome. Well, great quarter guys. That’s all I had.

Dave Shworan — Director, President and Chief Executive Officer

Thank you.

Operator

And we’ll take our next question from Richard Houchin [Phonetic]. Please go ahead, your line is open.

Richard Houchin — Analyst

Hi, congratulations on a — it looks like an okay quarter. My question is, I’ve been an investor quite a long time, and I used to wonder, when you guys are going to break the $10 million mark. And you did, now you’re up to what $11 million, $12 million. My question is, when do you think you’ll — you operate to $20 million mark.

Dave Shworan — Director, President and Chief Executive Officer

That’s a very good question. I don’t know if we can answer that, but I guess the fun thing is that, you never know what’s going to come in the door, right. So like I said when companies come to us and they’re spending over $1 million. You can see how there could be some pretty big elephants that could take our revenue up very quickly. And I guess that’s the, that’s the exciting thing about what we’re doing is every once in a while you sure you’re closing some what we call ham and egg deals, and then you’ve got these other ones that come in that are a lot bigger and then there is a bigger partnerships that you start forming which allows broad release of data.

So I guess as we grow, we’re seeing every year, our cost, or sorry our revenue per client is increasing, which means we are getting bigger deals, bigger clients, etc. And just assuming that’s going to keep going forward and that’s going to keep getting bigger and bigger and it looks like that’s the angle. And I think having a lot of ownership of our own data and not using too many third parties is also going to be beneficial because we can roll that all together and change our structure of pricing sometimes for clients that work a little limited certain — at certain times. So, yeah, it’s looking pretty good. Ready for questions?

Operator

It looks like we’ll take a question from Joel Marquez [Phonetic]. Please go ahead, your line is open.

Joel Marquez — Analyst

Yeah, hi. Congratulations on a really good quarter considering what’s going on in the world. Basically two comments on what a caller said, maybe two or three quarters ago. If you look at OTC markets, our stock in our company is Penny Stock Exempt. So basically you can solicit customers to buy this, you know without any restriction whatsoever. So basically I find it quite easy to recommend the stock to my clients on a continuous basis, because it is Penny Stock Exempt.

So number two, I just want to bring up and maybe, and I hope this is appropriate. I’m going to bring up an analog, 75 years of age. I mean I was seeing pretty much almost everything in the market, and I also have another company that’s a long-term holding and that company does you know totally. totally different line business. They believe it or not make recyclable plastic pallets and about a year ago, they basically started to invest grading their assembly lines, upgrading their technology and quarter-by-quarter the expenses you know did eat into the bottom line because it wasn’t only bringing in the new technology, it was obviously retraining people, expenses of installation, etc, etc. And this went on for a quarter or two and people got antsy, they were waiting, when are we going to see top line growth, when are we going to see bottom line growth.

Well I mean, to make a long story short that company did reap the rewards of the investment and that stock is now up about 300% and it’s been a hugely successful investment and exactly the same thing is going to happen with this company and the stock. I mean I’m thrilled that you’re investing in the long term to upgrade your products, to improve your products. And even though that investment may temporarily impact the bottom line to a small extent, there will come a time, that will happen quickly and you know it — I don’t mean to say unexpectedly because I expect this to happen. But all of a sudden this company will reap the rewards of their labor and what they’re doing.

And I think you know revenues and earnings will absolutely explode to the upside as they did in this other company. So I congratulate you on what you’re doing. I totally, totally support what you’re doing. Basically you’re building for the future and even if you know the price of the stock doesn’t reflect that right now. It absolutely will in the intermediate and long-term. So thank you for what you’re doing. Congratulations. And I’m absolutely thrilled to be a major shareholder.

Dave Shworan — Director, President and Chief Executive Officer

Thank you, sir. I appreciate that.

Operator

And it appears we have a follow-up question from Michael Kupinski. Please go ahead, your line is open.

Michael Kupinski — Noble Capital Markets — Analyst

Thank you. Just a couple of quick ones. You mentioned the M&A environment in that — know that given the fact that we’ve had some businesses not performed very well in this COVID environment. I was wondering it has M&A interest picked up for you. And I was wondering if I could just get your thought process currently on M&A. And then just going back to the question I had earlier regarding the trajectory of revenue growth. I know that these investment spend is going to hit your second quarter, but was just wondering your investments in your international data feeds and obviously that was a weak point for the company and I was wondering if you can just talk a little bit about how big the target market might be for you in offering some of those international data feeds and then also the mutual funds I believe that you’re trying to develop.

Can you just talk a little bit about the prospect of seeing additional clients and what that might look like in terms of your quiet growth in the second half of the year?

Dave Shworan — Director, President and Chief Executive Officer

Yeah, you bet. So your first question was M&A and our thoughts on M&A. So we are doing some analysis and looking at some options going forward there. I think it’s still a little bit of an unknown world right now, where we don’t want to make any mistakes. So it’s one of these things, where I think as maybe another couple of weeks to a month goes by, we will get to see how the world is progressing and I think then M&A activities is probably going to be something that we look into a little bit deeper. But it is something that we are looking at this year.

There are some, some companies on the radar and some that were — have been even in discussion in the last year. And so it’s just preparing for when is the right time to do these things and I think we might have even done something had this crisis not happened by now. But I think we’re probably just going to leave it a little bit of time to see how things shake out and not make any mistakes.

And then regarding the feeds like you were talking about in the investment in new datasets and analytics and funds and international data and all these things that we’re doing. The size of the market in any of those areas is hundreds of millions. So the — that’s why we’re doing it. I mean it’s probably a year and a half in the works now, release dates are now around the corner within a month for some data, two months, three months for other data, it’s all happening now. So that — and this is all a year of work, a year and a half of work, six months of work. All these different groups and teams and data scientists and collection people and all kinds of things that we’ve been doing.

So, and then of course sourcing other feeds like the international feeds and stuff like that. So yeah, the reason we’re doing it is because a lot of companies over the years have come to us for data that we either don’t have or it’s very expensive to get from third parties. It’s a lot of work to get and some of these big firms have teams of hundreds that are working for them, collecting data. And so with new technologies, new systems, new delivery mechanisms for the different firms that we’re working with all of this now is, is — it’s still a lot of work. It’s still like very expensive to do all of this, but it’s doable now by a company like us.

So I think going into these markets where it’s hundreds of millions of spend for these other datasets, these analytics areas, the funds areas, the ETFs areas, the international, the growth could be phenomenal. And that’s what makes me most excited because this is a big venture and we decided quite a while back, that we’re going to do it. We’re going to do the spend and we’re going to collect and collect and collect, and go head to head with all the big players. And so now we are, and so I’m very excited about that.

Michael Kupinski — Noble Capital Markets — Analyst

Okay. Thanks for the color, I appreciate that.

Operator

And it appears we have no further questions in queue at this time.

Dave Shworan — Director, President and Chief Executive Officer

Okay. All right, well thank you everybody. And we’ll talk to you the next quarter, I guess, and if there’s any questions or things for the future, feel free to reach out to me or Brendan Hopkins and we’ll talk to you next time. Thanks everybody. Bye-bye.

Operator

[Operator Closing Remarks]