ContextVision AB

OSE:CONTX

Earnings Call Analysis

Earnings Call Transcript 2024-Q1

[Gerald Potzsch, executive]

Welcome to ContextVision and our quarterly webcast today with Richard and myself, Gerald, and we'll focus on the Q1 results.

Before we go there, let's remind ourselves that in the last webcast, we celebrated a fantastic year 2023, but we've also received some critical comments and questions on the Q4 results. So in that respect, let me just reiterate that we're extremely happy that we're able to execute, short term, on growth opportunities related to professional services that we invested into, and now that we're focusing for midterm growth by transforming our image enhancement business to deliver more sustainable growth, including faster release cycles and differently structured offerings. So some more -- deeper going transformation that we're having.

And at the same time, that we're pretty confident in executing on our long-term strategy by entering into the image quality business and the POCUS program.

So those are also the topics that we will focus more on today. So if we look to the agenda, we'll have a brief Q1 business update. But then we'll go more into details on the POCUS program, a little bit more technical details in the background. But then back to the Q1 financial development. And we'll close up with a brief summary and outlook into the coming quarter and year.

So let's get started by looking into the highlights for Q1. On the operational side, certainly, a big topic for us is to participate at ECR in Vienna, like every year, a unique customer event this year and quarter celebrating 25 years of a partnership with one of our leading OEMs.

At the same time, internally, progressing well on the new product development and release process towards more frequent and agile software releases. And I'm impressed, I must say, personally, by the progress that the POCUS program team is delivering on this exciting strategic move for us.

On the financial side, for Q1, we've reached SEK 34.7 million, which is 7% above last year. So continuing a growth rate substantially above market growth rate.

On the EBITDA side, adjusted now for POCUS investments, we're having a result of 40%.

And finally, if we look to cash flow, we're well positive with SEK 7 million, more than 2x above last year.

So pretty strong first quarter, I must say.

Now what you've noticed in its little footprint there is that we're going to report from now on an adjusted results for the POCUS business and that will allow us to better track both the investments into our long-term POCUS effort as well as into monitoring the transformation of our existing image enhancement business. So from now on, results will be adjusted for our POCUS investments.

Now diving a little bit more into Q1 business, and I like really this first chart that gives you an overview both on the development of net sales top line as well as the EBITDA percentage bottom line. And you see, again, that we continue the growth on the top line with many consecutive quarters in a row now, rolling 12 months now trailing at SEK 134 million, which already now is SEK 2 million above last year's result of SEK 132 million.

Similar on the bottom line, if we now adjust for the investments into POCUS, we're trailing at 38% rolling 12, which is in line with our previous performance.

So all in all, I think a good continuation of our journey with the Q1 results.

Now if we look a little bit into what happened on the customer side, the two highlights that we pick out for this webcast is our participation at ECR in Vienna early this year. And it's still one of the biggest shows in the world, the biggest in Europe, certainly. And it's been fantastic commercially for us on the X-ray side, especially the new products that we have launched end of last year, where we now have more commercial discussion with our customers.

But likewise, always a good opportunity whole Context also with our ultrasound customers at this event.

And then I'm extremely proud to be -- to have the honor to participate in a fantastic celebration of a 25-year partnership with one of our OEMs. So that's almost a generation of mankind in business. And that really shows two things, right? Number one is that we continuously have to prove our cutting-edge whenever release cycles or contracts are up for renewal over such a long period of time. But at the same time, it shows how relevant trust and people that know each other is important in integrating our products into the core image processing chain.

Now let me share the flip side of that. This quarter, we also celebrated the win of a new customer that we have been working on for 20 years. So the flip side of the equation of trust is it is a pretty stable business and customer base. At the same time, it's quite a long investment into winning over new customers.

If we look more to the operational side of things, in Q1, we are getting ready for more agile and frequent product releases and that required us to change both structure in the software as well as adjusting the organization. And we've hired respective talent to make these things happen. And I'm pretty happy on the progress that we're seeing internally.

Similarly, on the POCUS side, our growth program, we hired a U.S.-based POCUS program lead and that was really due to the fact that we will increase our presence in the U.S., both commercially but also in terms of our R&D footprint. So stay tuned for announcing our first clinical partner, mid-May, for the POCUS program.

So having that said, let's maybe dive a little bit more into the POCUS program. And that's back to some of the questions that we've received after the last publication to really shed a bit more light on the motivation and the technology behind the POCUS program. So let's start a little bit where we left our Q1 discussion on trends -- or megatrends that we observed while being at ECR earlier this year. And as you can guess, the dominating trend in the entire industry and show was the use of artificial intelligence. In that case, more the patient-centric use of AI.

So what is our response on the ContextVision side? Well, since many years, we have succeeded in combining both man-made algorithms with superior performance and then also with specific AI-driven and -powered algorithms for specific clinical tasks. So nothing new really for us.

What could be new, however, is that we are ready to include even patient data into the image processing chain. So make the use of AI even more patient-centric in the future.

The second trend that was obvious to see is that the transformation in the health care sector is accelerating. So we see things happening at a faster pace and it's mainly to cope with the increased burden of an aging population and also the chronic diseases. So in a nutshell for us, the request is to make imaging less user dependent and more cost-effective.

And point of care and quantification technologies are really prone to meet this demand. So for us, really a confirmation of the strategy to step into the data quality business, which made me happy coming home from ECR, obviously.

And then the third, more of a reminder is how relevant sustainability is on our agenda. And I think we're in a good position to dramatically increase accessibility for the population globally, especially when it comes to chronic diseases that have a high incidence rate in the general population.

So both with image quality and data quality business, we're making good steps to make an impact on the sustainability side.

Now keep those megatrends in mind and let's look into more detail how we respond with our POCUS program. So number one is that quantification will be added to ultrasound-based imaging. So technically already today in our R&D team we can see relevant data in an ultrasound acquisition, so beyond what can be seen on an image by a human. So examples are, for instance, backscatter, attenuation, speed of sound. So really technical parameters that will add a lot of value, especially once we're able to tune and enhance the data acquisition process inside an ultrasound system.

And that information like backscatter, attenuation that can then be provided to OEMs that then build out digital biomarkers, for instance, that will lead to quantifying the progress of diseases or therapies.

So what I'm describing here is that the data quality business will really coexist in the future with our image quality business and simply for that reason that humans want to verify the result of quantification by looking at an image.

So in the future, we'll be able to provide both transformational quantification as data quality business as well as superior image enhancement business. So I think that's important to keep in mind when we now look into how we build out our Point of Care Ultrasound program and how we're tapping into the data quality opportunity.

So number one, as you can see on this very complex slide, is that we first decided on a use case for this data quality business and that will be Point of Care Ultrasound. So ultrasound systems that can be used in a point-of-care setting. So technically, that could be all systems, high-end cart-based systems, compact system or handheld mobile systems. So the POCUS program essentially addresses the entire segment of or breadth of ultrasound systems.

However, we will start with the premium cart-based systems because of technical requirements and then we'll move over into the sweet spot of compact systems and can also leverage today our beachhead in handheld systems with Rivent Mobile.

Second message here, we've decided to focus on general internal medicine basically on the use case of metabolic diseases. In our case, we've decided to work on MASLD or fatty liver disease. And that's a dramatic increase in the general population. However, treatment options are available. So it is a very attractive market to provide digital biomarkers, i.e., quantification.

And that will also lead and allow us to generate revenue rather quickly, so if we have solutions that will help on enhancing image quality for fatty liver disease and building out data quality to deliver digital biomarkers that will help quantify and stage the disease, both for diagnostic and treatment purposes. We do have a reasonable time to revenue while at the same time building out the data quality business overall.

So I hope I was able to give a little bit more light on what's happening under the hood in our POCUS program and that you also can see that both business, image quality and data quality, are dependent on each other.

But let's go back a little bit more into the here and now, and let's look as deep into our first quarter financial results, Richard.

[Richard Hallstrom, executive]

Right. Thank you, Gerald. Well, looking into our sales development. In the first quarter, we increased our sales with 7%, and this was primarily driven by favorable timing of new orders.

We also had actually no impact of FX almost, which was quite new to us, looking back at the previous quarters.

We are trailing slightly above the previous quarters in terms of sales. However, we noticed some tendencies of lower sales in some of our customer platforms and this may affect us as well going forward.

Looking at our profitability, our EBITDA adjusted for investment in POCUS came in at SEK 14 million or an EBITDA margin of 40.3%. The higher profit was primarily driven by increased sales, favorable transactional FX, partly offset by increased cost for new recruits and consultants.

Also noteworthy that in 2023, we had a favorable bad debt release, which didn't occur this year, and this is good to know for comparison reasons.

Looking into our cash flow and financial position. We managed to strengthen our cash position from SEK 58 million to SEK 65 million. This means that we had a favorable cash flow of almost SEK 7 million. And we continued to manage our cash position to further support our investments into POCUS and other growth initiatives.

And really to sum up, we had a good start to the year.

[Gerald Potzsch, executive]

Completely, Richard. So what else should I add to the summary? Maybe a brief outlook in the coming quarters where we can mention that we expect a slightly different seasonality compared to previous year to some of the effects that Richard mentioned like pull-ins and the scheduled annual deliveries that we already see.

And for the full year, we continue to execute both the transformation of our image quality business as well as the planned investments into our long-term growth program with POCUS.

So stay tuned for updates that are coming. We have our Annual General Meeting in a couple of days. And we will also announce updates on our Point of Care Ultrasound business with respect to our clinical partners.

Thank you for today, and talk soon.

[Richard Hallstrom, executive]

Thank you.