Dropsuite Ltd

ASX:DSE

Earnings Call Analysis

Dropsuite Q4 Achieves Solid Growth, Launches New Service

In Q4 2023, Dropsuite witnessed strong performance, adding over 90,000 gross paid users, with a net increase of 55,000 after deactivations. They expanded their partner base by 260 and launched 'partner serve', a managed migration service. The company saw a 7% constant currency quarter-on-quarter ARR growth (34% year-on-year) and a slight ARPU increase of 2% quarter-on-quarter. Gross margin improved by 200 basis points to 70%. Despite a legacy partner churn, overall partner churn was contained at 3%, excluding the legacy deactivations. Operating cash flow for the quarter was positive at $270,000, totaling $2.3 million for the year, with cash on hand at $24.3 million. Dropsuite remains focused on investing in growth, promising further initiatives in the upcoming year.

Introduction to Dropsuite's Fourth Quarter 2023 Performance

Dropsuite, a company specializing in data protection services, brought in key executives including CEO Charif El-Ansari and CFO Bill Kyriacou for the fourth quarter of 2023 investor presentation.

Significant Achievements and Product Enhancements

The quarter was remarkable with over 90,000 additional paid users and the addition of approximately 260 new transacting partners. The launch of 'partner serve', a managed service, and various product updates reinforced Dropsuite's commitment to innovation and customer service.

Financial Highlights and Growth Metrics

Financially, Dropsuite hit a 7% quarter-on-quarter growth rate in constant currency, translating to a 34% year-on-year growth, although nominal growth was slightly lower at 3% due to currency appreciation. A significant 93,000 gross paid users were added, resulting in a net addition of 55,000 paid users after accounting for churn. Gross margins improved to 70%, up 200 basis points from the previous quarter, with a positive cash flow generation of $270,000 for Q4 and $2.3 million for the year. Dropsuite ended the quarter with $24.3 million in cash, affirming its reinvestment strategy for expanding the business.

Strategic Investment Insights and Future Focus

The company aims to leverage its solid foundation, focusing on enablers of growth such as expanding the partner network to cross-sell and upsell additional products and services. Additionally, Dropsuite plans to introduce new products, specifically targeting existing markets such as government cloud, and potentially pursue acquisitions to further grow its annual recurring revenue (ARR).

Understanding Competitor Dynamics and Market Opportunities

Dropsuite remains focused on the MSP (Managed Service Provider) channel and believes that the majority of their growth comes from 'white space' — areas where backup services are not yet utilized. Competitor-related dynamics, such as Microsoft's Syntex product launch, are monitored, but Dropsuite feels confident in its own products' differentiation and market position.

Operational Tactics and Long-Term Aspirations

While the firm continues to scale, operational leverage is crucial. Despite substantial investments in talent recruitment and product development, the team strives to maintain financial efficiency and cash flow positivity. Despite not being a $50 million ARR business yet, the company anticipates that it is on track to achieve this milestone in the future without the need for specific long-term ARR targets.

Concluding Remarks

Management concluded the presentation with a statement of gratitude towards investors for their support and the aspiration to share positive updates throughout 2024 and beyond.

Earnings Call Transcript 2023-Q4

[Craig Sainsbury]

Good morning, everybody, and welcome to Dropsuite's fourth quarter 2023 Investor Presentation and update. With me today, Charif El-Ansari, CEO; Bill Kyriacou, who is the CFO, and we've also got Mark Kirstein joining in from the State, who is the Chief Product Officer. Charif and Bill will be giving a brief presentation today, followed by a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions]

Charif, with that, I will now turn across to you.

[Charif Elansari, executive]

Thank you, Craig. I'm unmuted. I want to thank everyone for joining us today. I want to wish everybody a belated Happy New Year, given that we're still in January. I will start with some high-level commentary about the quarter, and then I'll let Bill talk about the financials before I conclude and open it up for Q&A.

We had a really solid Q4. Q4 means the December quarter. We had a record number of gross additional paid users north of 90,000. We added a significant amount of new transacting partners, about 260 partners were added, which is a very strong number. We also launched a service -- a fully managed service called partner serve, which really helps our managed service provider partners to migrate data from other backup providers in the Dropsuite. We saw a big need and the big interest in using -- in partners using Dropsuite, but they simply didn't have time and resources to do so. So we decided to do that and also charge for it.

The great thing about it is that this is a fully managed service. We make some money out of it, but the more important thing is that it brings forward some of the ARR and some of the paid seats from partners that really wanted to use Dropsuite but never had a chance to do so. So we're really excited about this new service that we introduced in beta in Q4, and we expect to do a full launch in the coming several weeks.

We also, as always, we did multiple updates and future enhancements for our -- both the end user products as well as for the partner portals, including some meaningful security and scalability enhancements for the product that were rolled out in Q4 and will continue to be rolling out in Q1, which is the March quarter. We also launched -- with existing strategic distributors, we launched U.S. government cloud for Office 365 in Q4, which really bodes well for 2024 in terms of our focus on this important opportunity in the U.S. government, state and local as well.

And then lastly and importantly, we are really happy to have onboarded Eric Martorano as the new Non-executive Director who's based in the Seattle area. People with this caliber don't join any company as directors. So we are very privileged to have Eric on the board, starting January this month. He's a phenomenon executive, super deep go-to-market expertise in the markets that we serve and has a notable and successful track record at Microsoft for more than 15 years.

With that, I will let Bill cover the -- all the financials, and will conclude myself before M&A. Thank you.

[Bill Kyriacou, executive]

Thanks, Craig, and thanks, Charif, and thank you to all attendees for your time today. In the financial overview, we will present the key business metrics and the cash flow. As we exit the December quarter, we continued our ARR momentum with solid growth quarter-on-quarter, where we added USD 1.5 million ARR on a quarter-on-quarter percentage basis. On a consistent constant currency, growth was 7% quarter-on-quarter and 34% growth year-on-year, with the actual growth a bit lower at 3% quarter-on-quarter, which was affected by the appreciation of the AUD in the quarter.

As Charif touched on, we had record gross paid user growth. We added 93,000 gross paid users in Q4, which is up 8% quarter-on-quarter, where we exited the December quarter with a circa $1.16 million of paid users. Our net paid seats added were 55,000 for the quarter, and this included the deactivation of 38,000 seats by the low ARPU legacy partner during the period. We now confirm the final seats for this partner were deactivated during that quarter.

Despite the legacy partner churn, Dropsuite has maintained a growth rate in overall users, continue to increase our ARPU, and we delivered partner churn of the low 3% excluding this legacy partner deactivation. When we include that, the partner churn was just shy of 6% on that basis. Our ARPU increased 2% quarter-on-quarter on a constant currency basis against the corrected Q3 ARPU. There was a slight miscalculation error in Q3 when we factored in the deactivations from that legacy partner.

Gross margin improved in December quarter. So it was up 200 basis points from prior quarter, which is in line with the December '22, exited 70%. And we continue to optimize our storage tiers along the way. We will see some slight fluctuations on a quarterly basis as we add capacity and revenue, and capacity to accommodate all of that revenue growth. We do expect gross margin percentages to stay steady on a year-on-year basis.

For our operating cash flow, we generated a positive $270,000 in cash flows for Q4, which ended the year at circa $2.3 million generated for the full 2023 year, which is more than double what we generated in 2022 at $930,000. Our key takeaways on our key charts remain as consistent growth each quarter across ARR and ARPU and paid user growth along with driving cash receipts in line with ARR growth and steady OpEx to revenue ratio.

Our growth and profit trajectory are checking well. We're scaling OpEx across all functions with the focus on R&D and support and managing to scale cash flow at the same time. With regards to our cash flow generation for the fourth quarter, this is broadly in line with our expectations and also in line with prior year quarter as well. Our cash assets were as per expectations with Q3, including some delayed Q2 receipts. We previously noted Q4 receipts would be lower than Q3 in the last quarterly update.

There was also some impact from -- on the AUD cash receipts with the AUD appreciating 4% against the USD over the last quarter with the majority of our cash receipts collected in USD that did have an impact on our cash receipts on that basis. Another factor in a lower cash flow that we had in the record prior quarter has been an increase in payments to our suppliers and staff during the quarter, which were up 12% on prior quarter.

So with the operating cash flow outperformance for the year 2023, we did have a good feel of where Q4 cash flow was going to end up and we brought forward some payments for marketing and software, which is also in line with what we typically do at the end of the year.

Within Q4, we also paid to M&A consultants, lawyers and travel for an acquisition opportunity in the quarter, which did not eventuate in the end. And we do know there will still be seasonally high payments to suppliers in Q1 this year, and that's in line with prior year, and that includes annual insurances and annual performance bonuses as well.

Overall, our cash on hand actually reduced Q4 versus the prior quarter. There's a material impact, negative impact of $520,000 from the effect of movements of the exchange rates on the cash held with our U.S. cash balances impacted by the AUD appreciation. With our consistent cash flow generation, Dropsuite continues to reinvest in scaling the business for future profitable growth, where we do find high conviction areas for OpEx investment, we will proceed, and we do know that this can fluctuate by quarter as we've noted, we look to manage on an annual basis rather than a quarter basis. We remain well capitalized to invest for our strategy with $24.3 million cash on hand, and we continue reinvestment in 2024 for growth in existing partners and opportunities to further invest in our ARR. Thanks, Charif.

[Charif Elansari, executive]

Thank you, Bill, for the financial overview. If you can skip a couple of slides. This is a very familiar slide for many of you joining on the call. So I think sometimes the petition is really important. We see significant and continue to see significant enablers of growth. Most foremost is the continued tailwinds when it comes to all forms of data protection. If you recall, again, in many other sessions, there is such a big white space in the data protection space. And that is expected to continue for the foreseeable future.

Two, we continue leading with phenomenal product and phenomenal support and with the phenomenal reputation that we have in the market. We added almost 1,000 partners -- new partners in 2024 and that type of growth enables us to cross-sell and upsell additional products and additional services, and that's another reason for reinvestment. And of course, we built a team with a very strong culture and a team that is really passionate for success, but also passionate for the well-being and the security of our partners.

So with that, the concept remains the same, the framework remains the same. We generate ARR and revenue. We have profit. We take part -- a big chunk -- a big part of that profit, and we reinvest it while maintaining profitability and positive cash flow. We have further defined where we will and we are making the investment to continue delivering materially above industry average growth. The first is we continue to be super excited about our existing partner base, our existing products. We're talking about managed service providers. We're talking about mostly Office 365 backup and archiving and to a certain extent, Google Workspace as well. That's an area that we continue to invest in, and you can see the results from the Q4 ARR and gross user adds that we had there, right?

We want to continue expanding into new markets. Examples would be government cloud that we're quite excited about for 2024. We're looking into other opportunities as well. So basically, same products but new markets also through our MSP partners. The third opportunity, which is going to be both organic as well as through M&A is to introduce new products -- brand new products to our existing channel. So again, to benefit from the fact that we have almost north of 4,000 transacting partners, and obviously, we expect this number to continue growing in 2024.

These are the 3 main quadrants that we want to continue investing in and again, the core investment continues to be in defending and growing the core business because there's still so much white space and so many opportunities in that area.

And finally, again, this is a familiar slide. We covered the tailwinds earlier in cybersecurity and regulation. We continue to lead from the front with a phenomenal reputation in the marketplace. We continue to building a phenomenal team with a strong culture about achievement and success. As Bill alluded to, we continue to be busy with M&A. Unfortunately, nothing has panned out, but it doesn't mean that -- there's a lot of good and promising work happening on the M&A front. We expect to continue to see ARR growth to justify the reinvestments that we're making in the business, and that's something will be really important for us to drive continued growth in the foreseeable future.

With this, I end the presentation and Bill, myself and Mark would be happy to answer any of your questions. Thank you.

[Craig Sainsbury]

Thanks, Charif . Thanks, Bill. [Operator Instructions] Charif, Bill, there has been a few that are already coming around margins, and I'll structure into 2 questions. One, can you provide a little bit more background as to the increase in the margin up to that 70% level over the past quarter. And the second question is, should that 70% level be thought of as a new structural baseline for the business going forward.

[Bill Kyriacou, executive]

Yes. Thanks, Craig. I can take the first part of that question. So yes, we did see an improvement of 200 basis points on last quarter up to 70%. And this is down to us optimizing the storage tiers that we have. As I previously noted, there will still be continuing fluctuations on a quarter-on-quarter basis. As we add more revenue, we also add the associated capacity on that to accommodate that growth. So that's where these fluctuations will come from.

We do note that we expect gross margin percentage to remain steady when we look at year-on-year basis. And we are looking at a more multi-cloud approach, which may provide us with some further future benefits. That's more down the track for us.

[Charif Elansari, executive]

Yes. So I mean, just to add a little bit on the structural piece, we are exploring a structural change to the gross margin that would be in 2025, not in 2024, and that's why Bill was clear about expectation of margin in 2024 to be in line with 2023.

[Craig Sainsbury]

And just a follow-up on that 1 and just trying to draw you out a bit more, I guess, is how much higher do you think the Dropsuite margins can actually -- the GP margin can structurally rise to over time?

[Charif Elansari, executive]

Let me give you an example of a company that's larger than us that was publicly listed until it was acquired. So Datto is one of the big players in data backup and security in the MSP space. And their gross margin was in the 75-plus percent. So that would be an example of a company in our space and the underlying gross margin that they had when they were public, and the information was there.

[Craig Sainsbury]

Great. Next question is on investment in 2024. You've mentioned that the investment will there be balancing it out to keep the cash flow and profitability in line with 2023. The question is should we be thinking about that in dollar terms? Or should we be thinking that as percentage terms of revenue?

[Charif Elansari, executive]

Yes. I mean, the more important number for us is the -- in this case, is the actual dollar number. And I want to paint a picture here in terms of when we talk about reinvestment or internal investment, it's really a lot more nuanced than this, right? So on the one hand, you need to continue reinvesting just to take care of your existing growth in demand and in the new partners. For example, we added 930 partners in 2024. Well, this means that we need to add a certain amount of support team members. We also need to add a certain amount of sales, customer success people as well in the company. And of course, we also need to make sure that we have all the ancillary departments supporting this growth.

Now the great news about our business model is that it's so scalable that you need a minimal amount of additional investment to support that growth. But that still needs to happen. So that's one piece of the equation. The other piece of the equation, we want to continue expanding through introducing -- either introducing new products or solidifying existing new-ish products like Google Workspace would be an example or a government cloud would be another one, right? So that's the second one.

And the third one is to introduce new products -- completely new products in 2024, which is in plan for the second half of 2024. And then finally, expanding our global TS footprint. In -- we continue working in OECD countries for the most part, as we've always been. And we -- occasionally, we'll need more boots on the ground in specific strategic locations so we can grow certain geographies. So this is -- these are the areas we're investing in. Now on top of that, we are becoming more -- in terms of the size, we're becoming more of a -- like an enterprise company, and we are like -- we are basically protecting critical data for our customers.

So we have to invest in enterprise quality and world-class quality enterprise software to protect our customers to scale our business processes as well. So all of these things are happening all at the same time and hence, the reinvestment in the business. And just to close that specific and really important part of the questions coming from our shareholders and investors, we have all the enablers of growth that I mentioned earlier, starting with being at the right time at the right place. And that's something that's really important to keep in mind as we continue reinvesting responsibly for the future, and this is something that we continue revisiting on an annual basis as well.

[Craig Sainsbury]

Follow-up -- there's a follow-up -- or several follow-up questions to that, which I'll lump into really one is, how do you balance that incremental increase in reinvestments and consensus is looking at that potentially being around $7 million of more investment this year into R&D than last. How do you balance it out versus allowing operational leverage to effectively build profits and cash flow within the business.

[Charif Elansari, executive]

Yes. This is a combination of art and science. I'm sure everybody on the call understands that. Our viewpoint on the management as well as on the Board side is, given the tailwinds, given the growth of partner network, it's better to err on being more aggressive, responsibly, but more aggressive on reinvestment than being less aggressive because of all these enablers of growth that you mentioned.

And there's 2 things here. One is that, this is not something that we just set and forget and we say, okay, we're going to revisit after 3 or 4 years. This is something that we are critically looking at on an annual basis and then making a decision accordingly. So from where we're sitting today, we've said that we expect this to continue until 2025, okay? This doesn't mean that by the end of 2024 we don't make any adjustments if things are not working in the way that we intend them to work, okay?

But where we stand today, where we see massive opportunities in the business with data protection. I mean 1 of the studies that we did mention was Mackenzie expecting data protection to be a $2 trillion business. in the next decade or so with a 90% white space. When you look at these figures, when you look at the validation every day in the market, you really want to be making sure that you're reinvesting and focusing on reinvestment as opposed to expanding EBITDA, which can definitely wait given also the small size of the business that we are. We are not even a $50 million ARR business today.

[Craig Sainsbury]

A couple of questions around headcount. One, can you just update the audience to what the head count was at the end of December. And then the second 1 is looking at annual recurring revenue to full-time employees, that metric is down over the last several quarters. Is that something that we will continue to see that trend? Or is that just a faster investing ahead of the curve and you would expect that ratio to improve over coming quarters?

[Charif Elansari, executive]

Yes. So this is a great observation. So first of all, I think we ended about 115 team members by the end of the year or thereabouts. One thing to note is that we actually ended up going on a strong hiding motion in Q4, taking advantage of some really high talented set of engineers that we saw in Indonesia, where we have our -- the majority of our engineering team. We were very opportunistic in taking advantage of certain layoffs that happened in some of these big e-commerce companies in Indonesia, and we ended up actually hiring several phenomenal and highly talented people in Q4, while taking advantage of Indonesia being a low-cost location.

So actually, our numbers went higher than we were planning because of this opportunity that popped up in Q4. So this is something that you need to understand about us is that we don't try to micromanage a quarterly results, and we try to really look at an annual basis or beyond as we make our investments.

So that basically made some impact on the -- in the FTE productivity that was beyond our original plan at the end of 2023, beginning of 2024. But this is the beauty of having the flexibility to do what you believe is right for the short, medium and long-term benefits of the business as opposed to micromanaging on a quarterly basis.

Now just to be clear, again, given the size of the business, of course, we want to get more productivity. But at the same time, we have to balance with continuous investments as we add new products, as we add new services and as we expand to new geographies. It's a best in act that it requires a combination of art and science and not to be completely black and write about these metrics.

[Craig Sainsbury]

Just a follow-up question that's coming on the back of both the investment in R&D and an increase in sales staff that we've been talking about. We mentioned that there's an acceleration of top line growth expected from that investment. The question is how do we think about that? Is that in dollar ARR rate? Or is that in a percentage growth rate?

[Charif Elansari, executive]

Yes. To be very accurate here, I think the best metric from for sales productivity, obviously, is revenue, obviously, right? But the underlying 1 that really is the 1 that we measure in terms of sales, impact is the number of seats added per month and per quarter. And if you see what happened in Q3 and Q4, basically the October and December quarter of 2023, you saw an improvement in the gross seat adds. And that is in no small part coming from this capacity that we added in the first few months of 2023. And we're seeing it already panning out in 2023. And of course, we expect more of this to pan out in 2024.

[Craig Sainsbury]

Maybe drilling down into that a little bit more. The question here is, what percentage of your user growth is driven by migrating of an incumbent versus an MSP offering a new product or adding a new client into business.

[Charif Elansari, executive]

Yes, this is a good question and this is where we always talk about the white space in the market. The white space means that our #1 competitor continues to be nonconsumption or white space or people doing nothing. So that is still really high, I would say, about 80% plus continues to be that white space. But we still see some really good opportunities in the 15% to 20% space, and that's why we introduced professional services or partner services. So we can accelerate in some cases, the migration of data from competitors to Dropsuite to support the MSP's desire to work with us.

[Craig Sainsbury]

And can you explain a little bit more of the exact customer proposition that's seeing you gain that market share from your competitors?

[Charif Elansari, executive]

Yes. The value proposition is really straightforward. We provide the best user experience. That means no matter how inexperienced the MSP employees are they can deal with our product. They don't need the PhD in back up to deal with the product like other competitors, right? We combine back up with compliance and archiving, which is very unique. We are totally woven into their workflows through integrations into their ERP systems or through their desired distributor partner that they work with, right? And we have absolutely world-class support. I mean our CSAT scores, our velocity by which we respond to partners and we resolve their issues is just like it's another league. It's a league by itself.

And that combination really works well for our MSPs who are always stuck between "a rock and a hard place". On the 1 hand, they have a demanding client, the end customer who needs a resolution. On the other hand, most of the challenges are -- cannot be resolved by the MSP. The MSP is depending on a vendor to resolve the issue, right? So we are that vendor that MSPs love to work with for the reasons I outlined earlier.

[Craig Sainsbury]

Right. Can you just give a bit of update on how some of those new products rolling out, in particular, GovCloud place?

[Charif Elansari, executive]

Yes. So we launched 2 products in 2023. One was accounting software backup, which is called QuickBooks Online. The other 1 was government cloud. So QuickBooks Online is still slow going. And frankly, I don't expect a material impact on the business in the coming year or so. The reason for that is, unfortunately, the owner of QuickBooks called -- a company called Intuit has substantially reduced their focus on the MSP partner existence that we really focused on as a company.

Now this doesn't mean that we're not seeing growth. We already have hundreds of licenses being backed up. We expect more to happen in 2024, but I don't expect this to be material. That's on QuickBooks. On government cloud, as I mentioned in Q4, December quarter, we launched with 2 existing strategic partners. So we continue to be a lot more excited about GovCloud. The addressable market in the United States on government, and again, remember, we're talking about state and local and we're talking about education as well -- public education as well, is massive. And it's about us executing well in 2024, so we can see some solid results of that new product and new investment that we made in 2023.

[Craig Sainsbury]

Great. And the follow-up question here, which you answered to a degree with QuickBooks, but not necessarily as GovCloud. Are you still using that same MSP approach that you have with the core product for the new products in particularly GovCloud.

[Charif Elansari, executive]

Yes. This is -- if you look at how we're looking into existing markets or new markets, existing products or new products, we are predominantly -- when I say predominantly, I'm talking about 95% plus an MSP business, right? So we're focusing on the MSP. We're taking care of the MSP. We're selling products and building products that resonate with the MSP community. And we are doing this without chasing any other shiny objects because I think focus is really important here, so we can be successful in this channel, which is massive. I mean we talked earlier before about how there's at least 130,000 MSPs in OECD countries. We are working with 4,000 MSPs.

So we still have a massive area to grow, and we continue to be focused on that channel. Now, the reason why I'm double clicking here is because, for example, when it comes to QuickBooks Online back up, we can -- I mean, relatively speaking, easily go and start selling it in the Intuit marketplace, which is where a lot of action happens. But we are deliberately not doing that because we're going to continue being MSP focused. And I think that is the right strategy for us both short term and long term.

[Craig Sainsbury]

Next one is what are the main bottlenecks to growth for Dropsuite?

[Charif Elansari, executive]

Yes. I mean 1 is we are always balancing between making sure we're cash flow positive and making sure our investments pan out in a relatively speaking, short to medium term, right? That's one that we believe is the right approach. because as a Board and as an executive digital team and the company, we do have a moderate risk appetite. So we don't want to go and break the bank. And that's by design. So that's 1 area that obviously will be a bottom line.

The other area is simply sometimes the MSP business effort take more time not because our product is not so as difficult to onboard, we can onboard the customer in 2 minutes. But sometimes we have to wait for the MSP to transform their business into a cloud business, into a recurring revenue business, and that takes some time, right? These are the 2 things.

The third one is we have some big distribution partners that we -- we have signed recently in the last 3, 4 months, and we signed more obviously, in 2024. And those obviously take time to activate and go deeper. And we expect, again, good results in 2024 and 2025, for things that we've done in late 2023 or early 2024.

[Craig Sainsbury]

A topical question, Microsoft backup and archiving. Are you seeing or hearing anything that you can share with the market in terms of how that's been rolled out?

[Charif Elansari, executive]

Yes. I mean, I'm going to give this question to the expert. So Mark Kirstein is our Chief Product Officer. And he did spend 2 days in a Syntex Microsoft event recently. So he'll be able to give you the best update ever on Syntex. So over to you, Mark.

[Mark Kirstein, executive]

Thank you, Charif. Thank you, everyone. I appreciate being here. Yes. So Microsoft has recently provided more information. They've recently launched a public preview with a fully available product offering later in 2024. We remain bullish on this, and there's a couple of different reasons why. One, Charif mentioned kind of the white space and the size of white space that we anticipate or see. When Microsoft did this, they really helped us in terms of highlighting the need in the market for people to back up their products and eases the education burden that we have.

The other thing is we're always -- while we're bullish or confident that the opportunities continue to exist for us, we're always mindful. Some things to keep in mind when it comes to Microsoft products, is they're not necessarily the same in terms of what we look at or how we think of it. Microsoft part of their announcement launched an archiving product. It may sound similar to our archiving product, but Syntex' archiving product is not related to compliance that supports lightly regulated industries like ours.

Their's is focused on what we call taking unused data and putting into a deep archive or cold storage. So the solution is, in fact, not something that directly competes with us. Their backup solution while compelling in a number of ways, does not necessarily address the needs of the market that we directly go after. Their backup solution currently today limits themselves to a 1-year retention policy. Obviously -- and not only that, but they're also predominantly focused on the enterprise market.

It is not a partner-built product. And that's where we continue to stay focused on our core strengths of being partner focused, a portal where partners can easily manage hundreds of customers or tenants from a single view, that ease of use, the integration that we have with the partner ecosystem really continues to create differentiated value for us. The last thing I'll say is that Microsoft has announced pricing. And when we look at it and we look at what a typical customer is and the amount of storage that a customer has with us, the Microsoft product will cost a customer anywhere from $4.5 to even upwards of $6 or $7 a user a month. So it is really a premium price for the solution. With some of those things in mind, we continue to remain confident with where we're at.

And obviously, as I said earlier, we'll continue to be mindful of what Microsoft is doing. But it does -- it helps greatly by just continuing to highlight in the marketing industry, the need for additional third-party solutions.

[Craig Sainsbury]

Thanks, Mark. And maybe just another question for you, that's dropped in by there. Are you seeing any impacts from artificial intelligence? And do you think this could potentially be a benefit for Dropsuite's business going forward?

[Mark Kirstein, executive]

Yes. I mean, always, I think with the business that we're in, in terms of protecting our customers' data, we continue to look at and evaluate artificial intelligence solutions and how we might be able to bring those to our customers and our partners to make it easier for them to support and enable their customers -- their customers' data would also accelerate their ability to provide meaningful value and service to their customers.

So those are things that we continue to look at and something we're very eager evaluating in the future.

[Craig Sainsbury]

Thanks, Mark. Charif , probably back to you for these ones, I'd suggest. Are you able to share any more color on the target that you pursued from an M&A activity in 2023? And any more color on why that did not go ahead. Was that price? Was that anything else that you found in through due diligence such as a few more run, a bit more detail there, please.

[Charif Elansari, executive]

Yes, absolutely. So to answer the first question, it is very much in line with what we've outlined before, in terms of, obviously, data protection. So we talked about backup and archiving. We talked about governance as well as part of the things that we look at. This specific opportunity was more on the governance side and data loss protection side, which was highly complementary to what we are doing today. So it didn't pan out, and this is to answer the first part of the question.

So exactly bull's eye on where we want to be obviously. It was a product for MSPs as well. So it wasn't like built for non-MSPs. So it was just the right product. Unfortunately, we entered the arena as a second bidder or part of the first one, and we ended up losing out to the first builder who was so protective of this opportunity to the point where they offer them a significant last minute premium on the condition that they don't -- they have to get back to them. They have to do this immediately on the spot. So they were not able to come back to us and ask us for our view on the update evaluation, and we ended up losing that opportunity.

Now this is going to happen. And the more you spend in the arena -- time you spend in arena, you're going to be bruised once in a while. But this also means that we're being active, the muscle of M&A and utilities is being exercised quite vigorously. I have extreme confidence in Mark and Bill to lead these opportunities as they've done in Q4, and we'll eventually pull 1 out for sure.

[Craig Sainsbury]

Right. Thank you, Charif. Last question is here at the moment. We've stated aim at growing of 2x units average through to 2025. As we enter 2024, that's a year away. Any thoughts of updating our medium- and long-term targets for growth and putting some particular ARR targets out of the market.

[Charif Elansari, executive]

Yes. I mean we -- I mean even the 2x that we have is really a number that is -- each MLS has the own number of what that number is. So I think the idea here is aspirationally, we want to be growing at a significant premium to the market as we have been. Now obviously, 2023 was a bit more challenge, especially with churn that we saw with our legacy partners, so that impacted the growth as well. But generally speaking, if you look at it from a growth standpoint, that theme continues to pan out. We don't have any plans to put any long-term ARR numbers. I mean, we are still in the micro small cap space. We're still a small company. We're sub-$50 million ARR. To put this kind of chip on our shoulder right now, I don't think serves -- not only serves us but serves the shareholders, and we're really one of the same. I mean, all of our employees, our shareholders as well.

So I don't think this is the right approach for us at this side. Now of course, 10 years later, we're big. The industry is mature, growing at single digit or low double digits, that's another story, right? But in the foreseeable future, we're going to continue having a high bar of what we expect in terms of growth, and we're going to be reinvesting in the business and again, revisiting this on a regular basis means on an annual basis as well.

[Craig Sainsbury]

Right. Last question that comes in with I think just want to draw out on the same theme here. So the same question asked a slightly different way. Gross user adds grew 8% quarter-on-quarter last year. The question here is if you roll that forward to next year, that should support roughly about a 30% top line growth. Is that a reasonable starting base, given all of the growth opportunities that Dropsuite has.

[Charif Elansari, executive]

Yes. I mean, technically, we're not supposed to give outlook because we don't have that in the public space. But obviously, when we talk about 2x industry growth, the implication is that we want to do a really good job with that and deliver strong results. But I'm going to be -- I'm going to avoid the temptation to give specific percentage numbers.

[Craig Sainsbury]

Fantastic. Charif , Bill, Mark, that's all for the questions now. Thank you very much for your time. And Charif, any last comments before we leave the call.

[Charif Elansari, executive]

Well, I mean, I just want to thank everybody for joining us. I know January is a lot of time off for folks in Australia. I'm glad to see this strong attendance. I'm grateful for your support throughout our journey, and we continue looking forward to updating you with solid results throughout 2024 and beyond. Thank you.