Monster Worldwide's CEO Discusses Q1 2012 Results - Earnings Call Transcript

Bookings in Europe were up 13%, excluding the DWP that was down 16%. Economic indicators in Europe throughout the quarter were weaker than was generally forecasted. Euro area unemployment was an all-time high. According to Eurostat, and it is widely believed that many countries within Europe sank set into recession. We believe that the decline in Monsters' European bookings reflected this economic uncertainty and does not reflect a competitive concern.

Bookings in Asia-Pac were flat year-over-year despite the general cooling of Asian economy. While bookings of our Korean business declined 3%, the business continues to be extremely profitable and is well positioned to retain its growth, when the Korean economy picks up. Bookings in China increased by 4% and India, 2%.

Consolidated revenue was down 3%. EPS was $0.04 versus our guidance of $0.00 to $0.04. During the first quarter, we largely completed our restructuring, and as anticipated, began the redeployment of expense dollars into marketing. During the quarter, we purchased 4.4 million shares at an average cost of $7.58, deploying $33 million.

As I mentioned at the recent Baird conference, and as many of you are able to observe, at our recent Innovation Day, we are very focused on bringing our new products to our customers on a global basis. We are aggressively pursuing market share gains in all of our key markets and are supporting this asset with increased B2B marketing dollars.

Client interest in 6Sense technology, PRS and SeeMore continues to increase. A number of our current government contracts, including DWP, ohiomeansjobs and V Aid for vets [ph] have PRS and SeeMore embedded in the solution. And the 6Sense functionality was a critical ingredient in securing those transactions. In addition, our enterprise pipeline has essentially doubled during the quarter and interest within our Staffing vertical, in particular, have significantly increased.

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