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Earnings Call Transcript 2024-Q3

[Emma Tryti, executive]

So good morning, and welcome, everyone. Happy to see so many of you here in the room, and also hi to everyone on -- following online. I'm Emma, and today, me and my co-pilot Magnus will present our third quarter results to you.

So let's start out with the highlights. So firstly, we see continued strong demand. People are increasingly aware of their personal health. And indoor air quality is a part of it. And as a result, we see 21% year-on-year growth in revenues from our Consumer segment. And this quarter, the main contributor was the retail channel. And I'm pleased to report a successful restructuring of the company in line with our plans announced in connection with the strategy update in August. So all targets are reached, and we are on track building what we internally call One Airthings. It's a customer-centric, commercially strong, lean organization, providing Airthings to people at home, at work and at school. And each people will lead to engaging user experiences.

And thirdly, we launched Wave Enhance, a compact monitor perfect for bedrooms and home offices. And that's an early sign of more engaging user experiences across software and hardware. And in total, revenues came in at USD 10 million, on par with the equivalent quarter last year despite a 42% decline in the Business segment. And that sounds a lot. But in fact, if we exclude one large deal of USD 1.4 million from the third quarter last year, we're actually slightly up also in the Business segment.

Gross profit margin, it was down 3 percentage points compared to the equivalent quarter last year. That is due to 2 factors. The first one is pretty obvious. A significantly larger share of the revenues came from the Consumer segment with lower margins compared to the Business segment. And the second factor, within the Consumer segment, a larger share of the revenues came from retail due to a rapid increase in demand, resulting in large volumes in the high velocity events.

And ARR came in at USD 4.3 million, up 6% year-on-year. And that's supported by increased software sales and continued low churn, I would say, in the Business segment.

So focus throughout the organization is now to execute on our updated strategy, concentrating all efforts on one united value proposition. And you may recall this slide from the Q2 presentation. Airthings will capitalize on increased awareness amongst health, positioning ourselves as a health tech company. And we will invest in indoor air quality for consumers and businesses, leveraging direct channels and our partner ecosystem to provide quality air, both at home, at work and at school. And as we said in the strategy update, within the Business segment, we will focus on large clients with high return on investment, and we will enable our partners to sell and grow building control.

And we are executing on the updated strategy. We are progressing according to plan. 20% workforce reduction is completed, reducing operating expenses by about USD 2.5 million next year as planned. A leaner organization and operating model is established, and that has also led to increased management capacity to follow up the implementation of the updated strategy. USD 0.9 million is charged in restructuring costs in the third quarter. We continue to focus on progressing our path to profitability through execution of the updated strategy. And I'm looking forward to continue to update you on the progress on that.

So let's dig a little bit deeper into the growth in the Consumer segment for the third quarter. So we have 3 entry points to health-driven indoor air quality: that's safety, its wellness and its performance. And in the third quarter, we saw especially strong demand for safety products such as radon monitoring. And in the summer months of July and August, people tend to spend most of their time outdoor, not on online shopping, thus impacting digital sales. So airthings.com did not contribute to as large share of the consumer sales in the third quarter as it did in the second quarter. However, it still grew by 42% compared to the equivalent quarter last year. And at the same time, we saw increased activity in retail as there are several high-velocity events such as Prime Day and Fire and Safety. So therefore, retail stood out as the main contributor to the growth in the third quarter.

And one of our 3 strategic pillars is all about strengthening the customer relationship. And when we sell products to our customers and distribution partners, we generate revenue, that we call sell-in. And when our products are entering the hands of our customers, then they are registered, starting to send data. Then that's what we call sell-through. And both sell-in and sell-through measure demand, so it's important to track. But it does not make sense to compare sell-in and sell-through on a quarterly basis, because the lead time between sell-in and sell-through differs depending on the channel mix and the channel mix differs from one quarter to the other. So we have steady growth in device registrations over time.

But in this particular quarter, as you can see from the graph here, the increase in new devices was slightly lower than the increase in the equivalent quarter last year. And in fact, we actually saw an increase in sell-through at Amazon and retail. But we chose to prioritize to sell as much as possible of our product called Corentium Home, which is not connected, just to ensure that we manage to meet the increased demand for radon monitoring products. And as Corentium Home is not connected, that affects the number of device registrations. And going forward, we will consider to rather report on the number of active users in our applications. And repeat sales continue to account for above 25%, 27% for this quarter, on par with Q3 last year, and that's confirming customer satisfaction and loyalty. As I've said before, 25-ish percent is the perfect share at this place of our growth journey.

And View Plus continue to be the most popular second purchase. And increasingly, our products and services get positive reviews by media and retailers alike. And Wave Enhance, as I said, our latest proof of Airthings innovative power. That is one example. And it should be no surprise that I'm already an engaged user. So the first thing I do in the morning when I wake up is to check my sleep score and then I check how the air quality impacted my sleep. And I want to draw your attention on this slide to this upper right corner. We have had more than 10,000 ratings of our product Corentium Home at Amazon with an average rating of 4.6. It should be no surprise that we are selling as much of it.

We saw, I would say, an interesting development in the Business segment in the third quarter. We had positive momentum with several midsized deals from existing large clients, indicating repeat sales and strong customer loyalty. And we report growth compared to the first and the second quarter this year. And as I said, it's a 42% decline compared to the third quarter last year, but excluding that one large deal, we're slightly up, 6% up.

And let me give you some additional comments to what's actually going on in the market for business sales. It continues to be pretty slow. But we see a positive post-COVID correction. So inflated values are corrected. And although it will continue to be slow for a while, we expect it to take place in a much more structured way. And we are involved in all the right discussions. We are in the right tenders at the right places. And we are building a healthy underlying run rate. And I am confident that the increased demand that we see amongst consumers that will help drive the business sales over time. But here, we need to be patient. And with a more focused strategy, we are adopting a much healthier approach, focusing on return on investments.

And as shared in the Q2 reporting, 1 out of our 3 key findings from the strategy review conducted over the last 6 months was that schools and large enterprises represent the highest return on investments in the Business segments. So that's where we need to focus to adapt to this post-COVID correction. It gives us more bang for the bucks, and it builds a healthy underlying run rate. And on that note, I'm pretty happy to share that we, in Q3, completed sensor deployments at 4 Fortune 500 companies, 2 big tech firms, leading financial institution, leading health care global company. And that's really good for building healthy future repeat sales. And that's the driver for that increase that you see here of 25% in the quarter.

We report steady sales at pretty modest levels in the Professional segment, no big changes there. And as I said at the very beginning, ARR increases by 6% year-on-year, pretty much driven by the Business segment.

And with that, I leave it to you, Magnus, to dig a bit deeper into the financials.

[Magnus Bekkelund, executive]

Thank you, Emma. Yes. As Emma mentioned, we recognized revenues of USD 10 million for the third quarter, down 1% year-on-year. And the revenues for the first 9 months came in at USD 28.2 million, which is up 7% compared to 2023.

Gross margin for the quarter was 59%, which is down 3 percentage points compared to the same quarter last year due to a larger share of revenues from consumer sales and due to the channel mix within the Consumer segment. I will cover the margins in more detail on the next slide.

We saw an EBITDA loss of USD 1.3 million negative for the third quarter, resulting to an EBITDA margin of negative 13% compared to a slightly positive EBITDA last year.

OpEx is up 16%, and this is mainly due to a one-off restructuring cost of USD 900,000. Adjusted for this, operational cost is flat compared to last year.

In terms of EBIT, it came in at negative USD 1.9 million for the quarter. The reported loss for the quarter was USD 1.8 million.

Gross margin came in at 59%, down 3 percentage points compared to previous quarters. The margin in the Consumer segment will always flat with seasonality, channel mix and product mix in the segment. And gross profit in Consumer came in at 54%, down 5 percentage points from Q3 '23, negatively impacted by the channel mix with a larger share of sales from retail this quarter. Gross margins from the Business segment have increased compared to Q3 '23 due to larger share of subscription compared to hardware sales, and this is mainly due to the large deal in Q3 last year.

Turning to the inventory situation, and this is a key focus area for the company. Total inventories are down USD 200,000 from the second quarter, which represents a reduction of 13 days from 346 to 333 days. And this reflects a significant ramp-up of production of radon products in the quarter for big events in the fourth quarter. We still aim to reduce the inventory down to 250 days at year-end.

Moving to the balance sheet and looking first at significant changes to assets. The deferred tax asset is up due to the losses in the last 12 months. And discussed on the previous slide, inventories are down USD 1.8 million. Trade receivables is flat compared to Q3 last year, and cash will be covered on the next slide. Liabilities is unchanged compared to Q3 last year and the equity ratio is 79%.

Looking at the cash flow statement, we reported a cash balance of USD 9 million, down USD 2.2 million from the second quarter. And this is mainly driven by negative cash flow from operating activities due to the losses. In terms of cash flow from investment activities, this was negative USD 292,000, mostly related to R&D and internally generated intangible assets, offset by interest received on our cash balance. Cash flow from financing activities was modest USD 235,000 with a positive net foreign exchange difference of USD 255,000. In addition, we have an undrawn revolving credit facility with Danske Bank of USD 6 million.

With that, I leave the word back to you, Emma, for the outlook.

[Emma Tryti, executive]

Thank you, Magnus. So we expect continued growth. We actually do entering into the peak season of the last fourth quarter of the year, expect strong growth rates in the Consumer segment. And we expect underlying growth in the Business segment as we have seen now. So overall to be stable. However, while mentioning, we expect revenues from the Business segment to be lower than the equivalent quarter last year due to one significant large deal last year.

So for the fourth quarter, we guide on revenues in the range from USD 9.5 million to USD 12 million and ARR of -- in the range of $4.3 million to $4.5 million. In addition, we have a potential product liability that could impact Q4 revenues. Total revenues in Q4 may be impacted by a possible buyback of inventory due to defective batteries in one product. This is limited to one product, one batch of batteries delivered in 2022 in a legacy product. And total revenues may be reduced up to USD 1.2 million, but this is still uncertain. So assessments are ongoing, and you can read all the details around that in the Note 15 of the accounts.

So with that, we are summing it up and opening up for questions from people here in the room or from online.

[Unknown Executive]

There are no questions online.

[Emma Tryti, executive]

Any questions from the room?

No? Then we say thank you so much for your attention, and have a pretty good day.