On Wednesday, February 12th, Tucows issued a news release reporting its financial results for the fourth quarter ended December 31st, 2019. That news release, and the Company's financial statements, are available on the company's website at tucows.com. under the Investors section.
Please note that the following discussion may include forward-looking statements, which, as such, are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. These risk factors are described in detail in the Company's documents filed with the SEC, specifically the most recent reports on the Forms 10-K and 10-Q.
The company urges you to read its security filings for a full description of the risk factors applicable for its business. I would now like to turn the call over to Tucows' President and Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Elliot Noss..
our passed addresses, year-over-year, are up 60%. And even with the additional organizational work and delays from our central office construction, serviceable addresses have grown nearly 30% year-over-year. And our pipeline remains full.
Year-over-year, our potential serviceable address list increased by 53%, as we continue to add new Ting towns to our roster. And that's before we account for Cedar Networks, adding even more serviceable addresses. Plus we have no shortage of prospects.
Cities, counties and residents continue to approach us asking for Ting Internet to build in their communities, and much of our work goes into growing our capacity to accommodate as many new opportunities as we can successfully manage.
Heading into 2020, it feels more clear than ever that we entered this business at the right time, and for the right reasons.
We brought core competencies from our ISP roots, from Domains and from Ting Mobile, and most importantly, we continue to learn, and evolve the operation in order to scale, and to set the stage for the long-term growth trajectory of the Ting Internet business.
I'd now like to turn the call over to our CFO, Dave Singh, to review our financial results for the quarter in greater detail.
Dave?.
Excluding the impact from the acquisition of Ascio on March 18th, workforce and third-party workforce-related expenses, decreased by $0.9 million, driven primarily by a $1.3 million cumulative adjustment for capitalizing development costs associated with our domains platform work.
In the past our domain platform work was focused on maintenance, bug fixes, and minor upgrades. With the significant work and new tools being built, we determined capitalizing a portion of these costs was appropriate. The adjustment this quarter represents the full impact of the 2019 costs and going forward the impact will be reflected quarterly.
This reduction was offset by a workforce expense increase related to the growth in Internet subscribers and the Ting Internet footprint. Ascio related expenses added $0.9 million to the quarter, of which $0.6 million were workforce related and $0.3 million were related to facilities, and technology.
Marketing costs decreased by $0.8 million, primarily related to Ting Mobile and Roam mobility relating to a reduction in marketing credits issued, due to lower subscriber additions, and lower digital marketing expenditures. I should note for the full-year, our overall marketing expenditures were comparable year-over-year.
Amortization of intangible assets increased by $0.8 million, which related primarily to the setup of intangible assets related to the Ascio brand, customer relationships, and technology totaling $15.1 million. Note that these assets will be amortized over seven years.
Other expenses, including facility costs, travel and professional fees decreased $0.3 million. And lastly, there was a $1.1 million net decrease in expenses related to foreign exchange impacts.
Specifically, we had a gain of $100,000 in Q4 2019 related to mark-to-market remeasurements for our forward currency contracts that do not qualify for hedge accounting, compared to a loss of $0.2 million in Q4 of last year, resulting in a year-over-year expense decrease of just under $0.3 million.
In addition, we experienced a foreign exchange gain on the revaluation of foreign denominated monetary assets and liabilities of $0.1 million, compared to a loss of $0.7 million in the fourth quarter of 2018, which had the impact of decreasing our expenses $0.8 million on a year-over-year basis.
As a percentage of revenue, total operating expenses decreased to 19% from 20%. Net income for the fourth quarter of 2019 was $5.8 million, or $0.55 per share, compared with $4.4 million, or $0.42 per share, for the same period last year, driven by a lower effective tax rate in Q4 2019.
Adjusted EBITDA was $16.2 million, down slightly from $16.6 million for Q4 of 2018. As I mentioned earlier, the impact of the fair value adjustments on deferred revenue related to the Ascio acquisition was about $0.5 million this quarter. For the full-year, our adjusted EBITDA was $51.9 million as compared to $50.1 million in 2018.
Turning to our balance sheet and cash flows, cash and cash equivalents at the end of the fourth quarter of 2019 was $20.4 million, up from $12 million at the end of the third quarter of 2019, and up from $12.6 million at the end of the fourth quarter of 2018.
During the quarter, we generated $13.2 million in cash from operations and advanced $12.0 million on our loan facility, mostly to fund the acquisition of Cedar networks which closed on January 1st, 2020, which were partially offset by our investment of an additional $12.9 million in property and equipment, primarily related to the Ting Internet build out, as well as a $3.5 million repayment of our loan facility.
Deferred revenue at the end of the fourth quarter was $149 million, down from $154 million at the end of the third quarter of this year, and up from $144 million at the end of the fourth quarter of last year. The year-over-year increase is due primarily to the acquisition of Ascio in March of 2019.
That concludes my remarks, I'll now turn the call back to Elliot..
Thanks Dave. There were no share repurchases in the fourth quarter, which means our total repurchases for the year were roughly $5 million, representing nearly 102,000 shares at $48.95 a share. Today, we announced another open market buyback -- our 13th since 2007.
This year's program has the same terms as that of last year, allowing us to repurchase up to $40 million of our shares through the next 12 months. Last quarter, I provided a high level view of our outlook for 2020.
As a reminder, I discussed the impact of our exit from our Domains Portfolio business and the benefit of the changes to our Ting Mobile carrier relationships roughly offsetting each other, and that otherwise, we expect the Domains and Ting Mobile businesses to be more or less flat.
With that noted, we are providing adjusted EBITDA guidance for 2020 of $50 million. To be clear, that's adjusted EBITDA, not cash EBITDA, which is the metric we've used to provide guidance until now. For reasons discussed too many times now, it is a regulatory burden to discuss cash EBITDA, so this year we are making the change.
Really, the only material distinction between the two is the net deferred revenue provided by the Domain Name business. In 2020, that is expected to be in the range of $1.5 million to $2 million, meaning the year will be essentially flat to 2019.
At a high level, the growth in mobile is due primarily to the absence of excessive carrier penalties making up for the end of portfolio sales. Fiber contribution will improve from 2019 as well, but will still be a negative contributor before moving to materially contributing in 2021 and 2022.
Most importantly, Fiber is meeting all of our lofty expectations both on an aggregate and market-by-market basis. We believe that fiber will be ubiquitously deployed as future-proof communications infrastructure and that fiber, by virtue of its technical superiority, will dominate the broadband category.
We believe both the smart money and the data supports this. In our February commentary, I am usually talking through the year ahead. In February 2020, I want to take this opportunity to briefly look at the decade ahead and share some thoughts about what February, 2030 might look like in telecom.
We enter 2020 with clear signs of significant change in US telecom. With the Sprint-T-Mobile merger getting the green light this week, Dish is poised to become a fourth competitor with loads of spectrum and nothing to lose.
In fixed Internet we see a bidding war for Cincinnati Bell, a looming bankruptcy hearing for Frontier, discord between Windstream and Uniti, and the cable incumbents looking to extend the life of coax as long as possible. We see more and more private equity and infrastructure funds seizing the opportunity by buying and building fiber assets.
And overriding both is the drive to end the separation between fixed and mobile Internet. In the next decade we fully expect to see the table flipped over, and the US telecom environment looking very different in February 2030.
In thinking about our role in this world, more and more it looks like our platform will be as important as our customer relationships. The further we get into the exercise, the more it becomes clear that our biggest competitive advantage lies in our telecom software stack.
It appears to be providing significant advantages in operating expense relative to current operators, in both fixed and mobile. It is important to remember that we are talking about the coming decade so please don't ask me about opportunities in this regard for the next quarter.
We do believe that the software that telecom operators currently use is archaic and inefficient, like banks or insurance companies. And we believe that the advantage a modern platform provides at an operating level is a sustainable competitive advantage, like that provided by any platform that has leadership.
At the start of a new decade, and as we move closer toward Ting Internet materially contributing to the business in 2021 and beyond, the macro environment for US telecom, and the micro benefits of our current competitive situation have us more excited than ever for what is to come.
And with that, I look forward to your written questions and exploring areas that interest you in greater detail. Again, please send your questions to ir@tucows.com, and look for our recorded audio response and transcript to be posted to the Tucows website on Tuesday, February 25th at approximately 4 p.m. eastern time. Thank you..
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