Airthings ASA

OSE:AIRX

Earnings Call Transcript 2022-Q2

[Oyvind Birkenes, executive]

Hello, and welcome to the second quarter presentation from Airthings. I'm Oyvind Birkenes, the CEO. And with me today, I have Jeremy Gerst, who is the CFO. You can ask questions in the chat. There's about 20 second delay from you enter the question until we see it, so make sure to put it in before we come to the Q&A.

First, I just want to remind everybody about the purpose of Airthings, which is to empower the world to breathe better. We are very focused on our purpose and Airthings should be good for people, good for planet and good for business. And the air we breath has much bigger impact on our health and well-being than what most people think.

So we have been growing rapidly over many years. Our plan is to continue this growth path, even though there are some short-term challenges. If you look at our split now between Americas and Europe and rest of the world, it's about the same. It's 65% of our business coming from North America. We have some new partners, and that we'll talk about a bit more later in the presentations. And also, we see rapidly increased brand awareness.

We have had a challenging second quarter and sales revenues of $6.9 million, which is down about 10% year-over-year. We have had significant inventory adjustments from our retail and channel partners in the Consumer segment. And despite this, we still see very good growth and end demand growth for our consumer products, where we have seen a 34% year-over-year growth in the second quarter. I'll come back to this data and how we measure the end demand in the consumer segment.

Gross profit margin came in at 61%, which excludes the inventory impairment of the write-down of Airtight. For the third quarter, we have a wide guiding range of $7 million to $11 million. And the reason for this is basically that we see an increased market uncertainty with weaker consumer confidence reported globally as we've seen in the second quarter. And this is not specific to Airthings, but we are more precautious when we're guiding due to the macroeconomic factors.

We really believe that the inventory levels now being lowered at our channel partners in the consumer segment that new orders, revenue generating orders for Airthings will come in the third quarter, but we are a bit precautious. We also see large potential orders in -- for Airthings business, which if they are materialized, could happen in the third quarter, but there's also risk that it's being pushed to the fourth quarter. So this also is a reason for why we have such a wide guiding range for the third quarter.

Some of the highlights from the second quarter, certainly that we had 34% growth in our consumer device registrations. So whenever a consumer buys a device -- Airthings device, one of our smart products, and they connect it with the app, we can measure these numbers and whenever that happens. And this is something we monitor on a daily basis. And we have seen strong growth in the second quarter and even actually stronger than in the first quarter. We will start to report this now. So you can also follow the trends in the end consumer demand for old Airthings smarter products.

For Airthings for business, we also see very strong year-over-year growth with 72% revenue growth. And we're also highlighting here a municipality, but this is just an example that shows Airthings in this type of the market. Airthings is in more than 80 municipalities around the world in our key markets and a lot of them in Norway. And this case from Nordre Follo here in Norway shows that we are able to win tenders and we have a great partner model. And in this case, we won this tender together with ATEA. We also are adding several new key partners for Airthings for Business, and you see here, Elta Group and Westlab, which are new partners for Airthings in Australia. And also, we have another partner here from France. So we're really growing in existing markets and in new geographies.

We also see strengthening geographical footprint within the consumer segment. So we see here now B&Q. We've been rolling out on that. We have mentioned it before. Now we are in the stores and also with Officeworks in Australia. We talked about that this is something that will happen. Now it has actually happened, and we've started to sell from their stores throughout Australia.

An important thing I also want to mention is that Airthings is really starting to disrupt the building automation market by now controlling also the HVAC system of more and more buildings. We're doing this utilizing our full system and cloud-based systems by controlling the HVAC and the building directly. This is improving air quality in the building, but also the energy efficiency of the buildings. There is going to be more about this in the coming quarters, and we'll talk more in detail on how we're doing this.

On the lower side of the second quarter is certainly the challenging consumer market where we see that our partners, channel partners and retail partners are really taking down inventories. They have been building up inventories because of supply chain issues post-COVID. And now with the weakened consumer sentiment, and you can see press releases from a lot of these channel partners around the world that they are taking precautions to take down their own inventories of -- especially of consumer electronics and consumer goods.

So this is certainly hitting our revenue, but the good thing that we see is that our end demand is still growing at a good rate. We have also been optimizing our cost base and working capital in the second quarter and have put in place several actions that we have worked through in the second quarter.

So looking more into the device registrations in the consumer segment. So here, we have normalized it or indexed it. So that first quarter of 2020 was normalized or indexed to 100 units just because we don't want to report any absolute numbers on this, but with 100 at first quarter of 2020, we could see that in the second quarter of 2022, we ended at 200. So these numbers is really a proxy for the true end demand of our smart consumer products. So whenever a consumer have bought this in a retail store or online somewhere, take it home, connect it to the network, registered with the Airthings app, we measure these registrations. And we do this on a daily basis.

You can clearly in this graph also see our seasonal variations where we certainly see that fourth quarter and first quarter of every year is certainly the strongest for device registrations. And the good thing here is that we see even despite a challenging revenue for Airthings, the consumer segment in the second quarter, we still see strong growth with 34% up year-over-year on consumer device registration in the second quarter.

We do some of the same here in -- for Airthings for Business where we also indexed to 100 back in the third quarter of 2020. And we see now year-over-year, we have about 200% growth in active devices in the field for Airthings for Business. So these are devices with service revenue running and that are active in the field. So we'll continue to also report these numbers on an ongoing basis.

Airthings, we have really built up inventory, and we have a significant amount of cash dedicated to this inventory. Most of this inventory is finished goods, but there are also some inventory of key components. And we have built this inventory because of the component shortage that we've been working through and also to have enough to supply our future growth plans. So this has been really a strategic decision. But what we see now, it's time to bring this down to more normal levels. Today, the inventory is over a year, and the goal is to bring it down to about half a year over the coming quarters.

And the plan we have is to have enough cash to support our organic growth plans over the coming years. Full focus is certainly on revenue growth and also focusing our resources on the high potential areas and especially in the consumer segment and Airthings for Business. We have taken a range of actions during the second quarter. We have been restructuring the organization. We have done cost saving initiatives. We have done temporary hiring freeze with some exceptions. And we have done about 10% reduction in our overall headcount. And moving forward, we really think we are in a very good and solid position to get back to profitability as we planned to be positive during 2023.

I'll go into the segments, starting with the Consumer segment and Airthings for Business and a short update on Pro. So for the Consumer segment, we had revenues of $4.4 million, which is down 19% year-over-year. This is despite we're seeing the true end demand of our smart products is growing with more than 30%. Gross profit margin was 58% in the quarter. And we see the decline in revenue is really because of our retail and channel partners are taking down their inventories. We see that we are furthering strengthening the geographical retail footprint with our new retail partners, and we're adding two more stores with existing ones.

We're adding new retail partners in existing regions, but also in new regions. We also see that there is still uncertainties in the macroeconomic factors and especially for consumer electronics moving forward. And we are, therefore, a bit precautious when it comes to guiding over the coming quarter.

Airthings for Business. Sales revenue is up to $2 million in the second quarter, which is 72%, up year-over-year. And we had gross profit margin at 63% when we exclude the impairment of the inventory of Airtight, which had an effect of $0.2 million in the second quarter. We see that Airthings for Business is increasing to grow the share of the overall business of Airthings.

And we see that the underlying business of Airthings for Business is growing consecutively every quarter. You can see it on the graph here, where we show the onetime effect of the very strong order from Quebec, which is also generating recurring revenues over the next 10 years. But if you look at the broad range of customers that we are growing and with our broad partner network, we see continued growth every quarter.

We also have done a restructuring of the Airthings for Business team in the U.S., and we talked about that in the last quarter. And we are now really starting to see some very positive effects of the new team that we built up there.

I want to talk a little bit more about Airthings for Business and some of the key potentials we see. If you look on the global scale, I mean, 40% of the global energy consumption comes from buildings. And if you look at 4 out of the 5 buildings that are built and are there today, they are still going to exist in 2050. And Airthings, we have really unique solutions that can be easily retrofitted in existing buildings. That's really our focus. We don't focus on new buildings. We're really focused on retrofitting existing buildings.

We make existing buildings smarter by doing this, and we are able to prolong lifetime of many buildings. And we also make existing buildings smarter, we make them more energy efficient, and we create healthier environments for those in the building.

I'll show a few examples on how Airthings for Business is saving the environment and also costs. For example, Angarde they installed more than 500 sensors from Airthings in a building to reduce energy costs and improve the air quality in the building, also to improve the way facility management is done and to have a better overview of what's going on in the building. And Angarde is commercial real estate company in Norway and owns a range of buildings.

So the 20-year-old building, we talked about here was estimated to cost more than NOK 200 million to refurbish. And with Airthings, it only ended up costing a fraction and we are saving about 50 tonnes of CO2 on a yearly basis now by running this building much smarter and fully controlling the HVAC system, utilizing the Airthings systems.

You can also see here, we show a case study with Toma, which is another commercial real estate company in Norway where they saved 26% of the energy utilizing Airthings for Business. We see the same examples in schools in the U.S. and with other commercial real estate companies in Norway such a Frydenbo. And this is just the beginning. Most of our customers today are just monitoring the air, utilizing Airthings, but we see more and more of our customers and partners are utilizing the system to also control HVAC and make the building smarter and more energy efficient.

So going over to the Pro segment. Sales revenues there ended up at only $0.5 million for the second quarter, which is a decline of about 52%. You see that this market is still very challenging, the home inspector market, and it's leading to really slow sales in the segment. We've still very good gross profit margins in Pro, but we are now also very cautious on how we guide the revenue growth in this segment over the coming quarter.

Looking at our ARR, we came in at $3.2 million, which is up 64% year-over-year. It's -- we just hit below our guiding revenue, and it was really because we had a decline in the ARR from the Pro segment. So now it's the first time we showed the split between Pro and Airthings for Business part of our total ARR of Airthings. We have more than 80% gross margins from our ARR, and we now also guide the ARR in the third quarter for $3.3 million to $3.7 million. And this is mainly driven by growth in Airthings for Business, but some headwind that could happen in Pro and also some headwind because of exchange rate headwinds. It could be even very strengthened U.S. dollar. And for Airthings for Business, we have a lot of the service revenues in euros or in kroners, which then creates some headwind when the U.S. dollar is as strong as now.

We continue to grow our brand awareness, and we have had coverage in some really leading publications around the world, and we also see a lot more in EU countries like in France, for example. There's also a new report from EEA. And this report indicates now that air pollutions cause more than 10% of all cancer cases in Europe. So I think you'll see that Airthings is part of a mega trend to improve health and well-being by really visualizing the air that people breathe. And you will see that this market will get a lot more attention over the coming quarters and years.

So we see in the second quarter also that Airthings had 137% growth year-over-year in unique web visitors. We are really getting more and more attention as a brand and also on our focus on improving air quality and creating awareness around that.

Then I will just hand it over to Jeremy to go through some of the financials.

[Jeremy Gerst, executive]

Thank you, Oyvind. Looking first at the income statement. As Oyvind mentioned, sales revenues came in at USD 6.9 million in the quarter, which is down approximately 10%. Year-to-date USD 15.9 million, which is up around 14%. Gross margin came in at 58% in the second quarter. But if you extract the inventory impairment of Airtight and look at the underlying operations of the business, gross margins were around 61%. EBITDA Came in at minus USD 5.4 million. There were a number of one-off costs in the quarter, which are detailed on the next slide, and we'll go in detail on.

And then in terms of EBITDA or EBIT, there was an impairment, including a derecognition of the Airtight Technology of USD 1.5 million, which led to EBITDA -- EBIT coming in at minus USD 7.3 million. So as I mentioned, there was a number of one-off costs in the quarter. There was both a write-down of the Airtight solution. In terms of EBITDA and its effect on EBITDA, that's captured in the USD 0.23 million of COGS that we had in the Airtight solution in inventory. In addition, we had the transition to the main listing exchange. Those costs were around USD 0.31 million. We have costs associated with the restructuring efforts we've undertaken that Oyvind mentioned, those came in, and we've taken accruals for that of USD 0.64 million. And then we had some other various one-off costs that amounted to USD 0.35 million, including a write-down of bad debt.

So if you look at these one-off costs and you take the EBITDA that we have on the income statement of minus USD 5.38 million and take these out, you result in an EBITDA of minus USD 3.85 million, so a fairly sizable effect of these one-off costs.

Turning now to the balance sheet and looking first at the change in assets. We see here -- the notable changes here, we see an increase in the deferred tax asset. We also see that inventories have increased substantially. As Oyvind mentioned, this was due to a strategic decision given the global component situation that came into effect towards the tail end of 2020 and throughout 2021 and into 2022.

Now that we see that, that is -- appears to be normalizing, it's going to be a focus area going forward to reduce days of inventory and have a heightened focus on our inventory levels. We've also seen a modest increase in trade receivables and cash, we've seen a decline, both due to profitability also due to working capital, as mentioned, there's been a lot of cash that's been converted into working capital. And as we reduce inventory levels and as we work focus on this area, there will be a conversion back into cash and then exchange rates.

So there's a lot of unrealized foreign exchange differences here that we'll mention also on the cash flow statement because most of the cash we hold is in NOK, but we present in U.S. dollars.

In terms of the change in liabilities, there's been a decline in the equity. A significant portion of this is also due to the strengthening of the U.S. dollar. Our functional accounting currency is Norwegian kroners, but our presentation currency is U.S. dollar. So when we see this type of strengthening of the U.S. dollar that we've seen of late, this results in declines in the equity position due to these exchange rates.

There's also been a decline in long-term liabilities overall. Accounts payable are somewhat up, and other current liabilities have seen some increase due to accrued subscription revenue and accrued expenses.

Moving on to the cash flow statement. Cash flow from operating activities was minus USD 7.3 million. This is mostly driven by operating losses in the quarter and also due to conversion of cash into net working capital and primarily inventories in the quarter. There were also some modest declines from investment activities of USD 0.6 million and some modest declines due to financing activities of USD 0.2 million.

And there is a -- has been, as mentioned on the prior side, some unrealized foreign exchange differences, which resulted in minus USD 4.4 million. I want to stress that these are unrealized. Most of our OpEx is in Norwegian kroner, most of the cash we hold is in Norwegian kroner. So it's -- on paper, it results in a minus USD 4.4 million decline, but these are unrealized.

Yes. I'll give it back to Oyvind.

[Oyvind Birkenes, executive]

Thank you, Jeremy. I'll provide a summary and outlook. And so we ended the quarter at $6.9 million, which is down year-over-year. And we have headwinds in the consumer segment with retailers and channel partners significantly reducing the overall inventories in the quarter. Despite this, we see strong growth in end demand in the consumer segment when we measure the registrations of customers buying our consumer devices and register them in the consumer app.

We had gross profit margin of 61%, and that excludes the inventory impairment of Airtight. Airthings for Business is continuing to grow strongly with 72% year-over-year growth in the quarter. And the focus is really to grow the revenues and optimize our cost base and also focusing on the working capital to accelerate the path to profitability for the company.

So the outlook for the third quarter. As we talked about previously, we have a wide guiding range because of the macroeconomic effects that we see right now. And we have the guiding range of revenues between $7 million to $11 million. And ARR, also where we have some headwind in the Pro segment and also some foreign exchange rate effects, and we guided to $3.3 million to $3.7 million for the third quarter.

We still have a very exciting long-term outlook for the company. There are some short-term headwinds that we see now in the consumer segment. But our long-term outlook stands despite that. We are a global leader in inter air quality monitoring for homes and for businesses. We're going to come with new and exciting products and solutions for our customers moving forward and continue to grow with our existing products.

So our goal stands as they are. We are still having the goal of $100 million of revenues in 2024 with ARR of $20 million. Also, our long-term EBITDA goal is to be more than 25%. And if you look why we say this is that our business is really supported by lasting factors and really mega trends in the world today. This is around Health Tech around Smart Home in the Consumer segment, it's about sustainability, energy efficiency and regulations in the Business segment. And it's all a part of ensuring that and empowering the world to really breathe better.

So with this, I'll open up for any questions.

[Jeremy Gerst, executive]

Yes. First question, 2 questions, sort of on the same topic, it's in regards to the large potential orders that may materialize in Q3 or in the second half of the year. Are we -- Are these orders that we are confident in, but the timing is uncertain. And how large are these potential orders?

[Oyvind Birkenes, executive]

Yes. I cannot go into any of those details. We continuously work with large projects. And typically, things take a bit longer time than what we see sometimes in the commercial and in Airthings for Business but I cannot give any more details to any of the projects we're working on.

[Jeremy Gerst, executive]

Given the current revenue guidance, are you expecting inventories to have peaked in the second quarter of 2022? Or will you continue to build inventories into the next quarter?

[Oyvind Birkenes, executive]

So our plan is to start to bring down the inventories moving forward. I mean the main driver for that is certainly to continue to grow our revenues but we are certainly taking actions to ensure that we don't produce products that we have enough inventory of.

[Jeremy Gerst, executive]

Can you give any additional details on expected cash flow effects from your cost savings in the short and medium term?

[Oyvind Birkenes, executive]

No. If you don't want to add some to that?

[Jeremy Gerst, executive]

I mean, I think it ties a little bit into the next question, the headcount reduction and some clarifications in terms of the headcount and that we've done that now in the second quarter. So going forward, that will result in some reductions in the OpEx in terms of headcount, and there will also be focus on the marketing expenditures. So we expect some improvements in terms of the cash flow and less losses in the short...

[Oyvind Birkenes, executive]

For the second half.

[Jeremy Gerst, executive]

And so on that point to Christian -- to a question that was posed, just to be clear on the road to profitability, you will reduce the overall headcount from today with about 10% correct. But there will be some high end of key talent you find in the market, so 10% on a net basis. And what should we expect in total OpEx reduction over the next 12 months? Will your marketing expenses come down as well? Or should -- or how should we think about other OpEx?

[Oyvind Birkenes, executive]

Yes. So when it comes to headcount, so we are continuing to add headcount in the areas where we really need. Let's say, we have still added people, for example, for Airthings for Business in the U.S. and in some other areas, we're continuing to hire people. And that's really required for our continued growth moving forward. And we've also been moving people a bit around some from support functions to more sales positions. And we have had some temporary hiring freeze. But certainly, we're going to go back to hiring moving forward. I would say that our overall headcount will in the third quarter be about what it was end of 2021. Did we answer all those questions or...

[Jeremy Gerst, executive]

I think so. I guess, in terms of marketing expenses and other OpEx?

[Oyvind Birkenes, executive]

Yes, marketing expenses, I mean, we are certainly cautious with spending but also marketing translates also directly to sales, a lot of the marketing. So we don't want to slow down sales generating investments for sure. So we are more cautious on spending, that's for sure. But marketing is important for Airthings to -- both to sell and also to continue to build a strong brand.

[Jeremy Gerst, executive]

Next question. Do you expect to reach 25% EBITDA margin earlier now that you reiterate the USD 100 million revenue target while also taking down the hiring/investment plan?

[Oyvind Birkenes, executive]

So part of the $100 million revenue plan is also to grow our headcount. So that's part of the plan over the coming years.

[Jeremy Gerst, executive]

Could you please provide some comfort on how you expect to reach your revenue target when investments will be scaled down? Like how many employees do you need to be to support such a revenue base? And how much marketing expenses do you expect are needed to sustain this level?

[Oyvind Birkenes, executive]

So we have been growing our headcount very fast over the last few years with Airthings. And we have certainly an amazing team that's able to deliver on the growth plans we have over the coming quarters. And we'll also continue to hire new talent to the team. So -- and there is some effects now in the second quarter that was required as we saw a decline in revenues. But we are fit for fight and the teams are super engaged and motivated to deliver over the coming quarters.

[Jeremy Gerst, executive]

Next question. Given the current investment climate for nonprofitable growth companies, have you considered to increase the disclosure going forward to regain more investor confidence?

[Oyvind Birkenes, executive]

Yes, disclosure of what?

[Jeremy Gerst, executive]

It's not specified.

[Oyvind Birkenes, executive]

So we are disclosing more numbers right now, like what we are disclosing also is consumer device registrations. We have been asked about that before. It's very sensitive information as well. But now we have normalized it and indexed it in a way that you cannot read out exactly how many devices there is in absolute numbers. But I think showing the numbers like this gives more perspective and it makes it easier to actually show the performance of the business.

[Jeremy Gerst, executive]

Can you share your -- how your sales from your website compared on a year-over-year and quarter-over-quarter basis?

[Oyvind Birkenes, executive]

Yes. Our web shop is not a very big sales channel, but it's growing very fast. So it has much higher growth than most of our other sales channels. I cannot say exactly how much it is. It's certainly among our top 5 or so channels, but -- and it's certainly growing faster than the rest.

[Jeremy Gerst, executive]

And the final questions in so far, given the headcount cuts going forward, and again, I think this might be a misunderstanding because the headcounts have already have happened, the cuts have happened...

[Oyvind Birkenes, executive]

Yes. That's already done. The headcount reductions are finished.

[Jeremy Gerst, executive]

So to the rest of the question, can you confirm that you're lagging the business plan in terms of USD 100 million by 2024? Or was the required investment expectations at the IPO just too high?

[Oyvind Birkenes, executive]

I'm not sure what to answer to that.

[Jeremy Gerst, executive]

I think we've reaffirmed that the goals for the 2024, the revenues. And then in terms of the required investment expectations, the IPO being too high.

[Oyvind Birkenes, executive]

I mean there's certainly a different sentiment in the market right now, but we believe this is like a short-term headwind that's happening right now in the market. And you can see that in companies all around the world. So of course, we have to control our business and look at overall market trends when there's headwinds like we've seen in the second quarter. But the good thing is that we see that end demand is still there, and we don't believe that the world is falling apart. We think that there's not going to be less focus on healthy air moving forward.

[Jeremy Gerst, executive]

Good. Those were all the questions.

[Oyvind Birkenes, executive]

All right. Thank you very much, and we are really looking forward to the next quarterly update.