Acxiom Corp. of Little Rock reported a $1.5 million second-quarter loss on Monday, down from a $9.8 million profit in the same quarter last year.
The loss came amid expected declines in the data and analytics firm’s IT infrastructure management operations, expenses associated with business separation and transformation activities, and other costs.
The loss per share attributable to the company fell to 2 cents, down from an earnings of 12 cents per share in the same quarter last year.
Total revenue also fell, down 3 percent to $260 million.
Acxiom has been restructuring its business, and costs associated with those moves affected earnings per share by 20 cents during the second quarter.
The company also noted unusual items that affected profitability, including separation and transformation initiatives and acquisition costs related to LiveRamp, the digital marketing service it purchased earlier this year for $310 million.
LiveRamp is also a component of Acxiom’s Audience Operating System, which it began rolling out last year. The product is intended to improve the company’s marketing data. CEO Scott Howe has said the system will allow marketers, agencies and publishers to have “one-to-one marketing capabilities at scale across all channels and devices.”
On Monday, Acxiom reported AOS revenue of about $15 million. Gross media ad spent through the unit was about $37 million, up 32 percent from the first quarter.
“While we remain hard at work rebuilding our U.S. Marketing and Data Services pipeline, we are excited that AOS adoption continues to accelerate,” Howe said in a news release. “The second quarter was our best quarter to date. We signed 15 new AOS agreements during the quarter and gross media spend through the platform was up over 30 percent sequentially.
“With the addition of LiveRamp, our partner network expanded substantially,” he said. “Advertisers can now connect their data to over 120 marketing applications.”
Acxiom said it signed 15 new AOS agreements in the quarter, with companies including AT&T Inc., Toyota Motor Co., and two “major credit card issues” that it did not name.
During the quarter, Acxiom repurchased 529,000 shares for $9.9 million.
Looking ahead, Acxiom said it expects revenue from continuing operations for the fiscal year to be down about 4 percent from the previous year.
“The decline in revenue is primarily due to the impact of lost IT Infrastructure Management customers and the exit of our analog paper survey business in Europe,” the company said.
It expects earnings per share in the range of 73 to 78 cents.
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