USA Technologies Inc. took a 15.2% revenue hit for the fourth quarter ending June 30, but its $32.6 million managed to beat estimates by $1.67 million, according to Seeking Alpha analysts.

Thursday's stock price was $8.49 against a 52-week high of $9.25 for the company, a cashless payments and software services provider for the self-service retail market.

Losses for this year's fourth quarter were steeper than last year's quarter, according to Thursday's earnings report, but earnings showed some improvement due to cost decreases.

Net loss for the fourth quarter was $11.4 million or 18 cents per basic share compared to net loss of $9.9 million or 16 cents per basic share in the prior year period.

Adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization for the fourth quarter was a negative $100,000 compared to a negative $4.6 million in the prior year period.

Equipment revenue fell 13% to $4.8 million, primarily as a result of the impact of COVID-19 on sales and shipments, R. Wayne Jackson, chief financial officer, said during the earnings call.

The company is expecting a range of $170 million to $180 million in revenue for fiscal 2021, CEO Sean Feeney said in the earnings call.

"As many of you know, COVID still raises a lot of uncertainty," Feeney said. "So this range assumes no further unforeseen COVID-related impacts, which could create substantial economic duress later this year and into calendar year 2021."

Through the summer, customer transactions were down somewhere 10%-15% of on a weekly basis, quarter-over-quarter, Feeney said.

"We have worked very hard this quarter to put all the pieces in place that are necessary to move the company forward towards delivering the right financial results and growing the core business," Feeney said in a prepared statement. "Despite the fact that COVID-19 is still having an impact, we have been able to control costs and make organizational and operational changes needed to position USAT for long-term growth and profitability.

"With a completely new executive team now in place, a reorganized business structure, a realigned salesforce and redesigned customer service team, as well as a stronger capital structure, we have an unbelievable opportunity to build something great on this strong foundation during fiscal year 2021 and beyond," he said.

Chief Revenue Officer Anant Agrawal during the earnings call referenced a company study that found over 60% of operator sales in July of 2020 were actually made with cashless payments, up from 53% in January of this year.

"That's a huge shift in consumer preference of cashless over cash in a very short amount of time. And two, these trends are important to the industry because on average, consumers spend more when they pay with cashless versus cash," he said. "In fact, our data says that approximately 43% more. As such as locations open back up safely in a post-COVID world, we believe these trends will encourage operators to accept cashless on more of their machines and our existing cashless devices will have higher volumes of processing than we have seen in the past."

The company reported 35,000 new connections for a total of 1.32 million connections.

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