Pexip Holding ASA

OSE:PEXIP

Earnings Call Transcript 2023-Q1

[Trond Johannessen, executive]

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Pexip's First Quarter Presentation. My name is Trond Johannessen, and I'm the CEO. Together with me today, I have Oystein Hem, our CFO. I have Asmund Fodstad, our Chief Revenue Officer; and Christine Arnesen, our Head of Investor Relations. Together, we'll take you through the highlights of the first quarter and what we're focusing on going forward.The standard disclaimers and notices apply as always.First, let's take a look at the highlights. Over the last quarters, we have been through a major transformation in Pexip. This has resulted in a focused strategy where we drive technology leadership in the markets where we believe we can be unique and differentiated. It has also resulted in a more efficient organization and a significantly reduced cost base. The results of this are now clearly visible in our first quarter results. Revenues came in at NOK261 million for the quarter, which is 17% up year-over-year. ARR ended at $98.3 million, which is down 7% from the first quarter last year and just slightly down from the fourth quarter last year. EBITDA ended at NOK35 million, which is an improvement of NOK87 million since the first quarter last year. We added NOK47 million to our bank account during the quarter and ended with a cash position of NOK466 million. Recently, also, we announced a new partnership with Poly, a major player in the collaboration market. And this relationship, this new partnership will have impact both on the Secure and Custom area and on the Connected Spaces business area. We also recently announced our FedRAMP authorization, which will enable U.S. federal agencies to more easily deploy Pexip's technology through Pexip's Government Cloud. Financial targets remain unchanged after only 1 quarter, although some of the targets may look a bit conservative in light of the Q1 performance and recent announcements.Now, let's get into some more detail. Pexip is a technology company built on unique technology. Centralized data processing or transcoding, together with our ability to set up a full-fledged video collaboration solution on-premise, in any data center or a private cloud setting is what distinguishes us from other players in the market. We enable everything from business communication to secure government meetings, doctors' appointments and court proceedings, flexible deployment in the whole range of the usage areas. This proven and unique technology attracts partnerships with some of the world's leading technology companies. And as you know, we already work with Microsoft and Google and others in this area. This is also what has triggered our most recent partnership with the HP company, Poly, formerly Polycom, a giant in the collaboration world for decades. Our target is to have Pexip technology, powering even more partnerships and human interactions going forward. Internally, we are inspired by companies like Intel that take a very collaborative approach in their markets.A few more words on the partnership with Poly that we are really excited about. This partnership means that Pexip will be Poly's provider of 3 new video infrastructure solutions that will replace the RealConnect and Clariti offerings that they sell today. The 3 products, Poly PrivateConnect, Poly CloudConnect and Poly FedConnect will all be powered by Pexip and branded as such. For Pexip, this means that we, over time, will increase our market share in the Connected Spaces area. Together, Poly and Pexip will now offer a competitive bundle as an alternative to Cisco in the market. In practice, it will now only be Poly, Pexip and Cisco offering CVI services for Microsoft Teams interoperability in the market.Within the Secure and Custom segment, we will significantly broaden our reach in the market. The market for self-hosted solutions is developing positively, and Poly is working with some of the most security-conscious organizations in the world. Organizations that will now be offered a Pexip-powered solution in the future.In the federal government space in the U.S., we also see potential for growth, building on our recent FedRAMP approval that I will get back to in a second. All in all, we see a lot of opportunities for this new partnership going forward, and I look forward to keeping you posted on those developments going forward.FedRAMP authorization is a big deal. It has taken a huge effort in terms of money and resource to reach this milestone. And we have been thoroughly scrutinized by U.S. authorities for many months. The result is a stamp of approval on our company and our technology that makes it possible for federal agencies in the U.S. to consume Pexip's Government Cloud without doing any further security review. It's also worth noticing here that we are the only provider in the market providing a FedRAMP authorized Connected Spaces offering.In Q1, we have been keeping really busy in our engineering and R&D departments, introducing a lot of new products and features into the market. I cannot go through them all here, but let me mention a couple of highlights. SIP Guest Join is a great feature that enables any Pexip Connected Spaces customer to join any Teams meeting regardless of whether the one inviting to the meeting is a Pexip customer or not. This hugely broadens the usage area for Pexip. Genesys is a world-leading provider of call center solutions. And in many situations in the call center, there is a need to escalate from a voice call to a video call. Pexip can now enable this functionality for Genesys customers and that new feature is available for purchase in Genesys marketplace called the AppFoundry. RealWear is a provider of head cameras for use in situations where you require someone remote to follow and guide the person in the field. This can be remote maintenance. It can be an ambulance worker responding to an emergency or similar use cases. Pexip technology is well suited for these applications, and a full RealWear integration is now available. Finally, we have also launched Version 31 of our Pexip Infinity platform, and it has a lots of new and updated features and functionalities to it, including now end-to-end encryption, which has been demanded for a while.Pexip takes a collaborative approach to our ecosystem, and we aim to be partnering with leading technology companies globally to complement their solutions and broaden the reach for Pexip's technology. I strongly believe that Pexip's market positions have been strengthened during the first quarter, both within Connected Spaces and the Secure and the Custom area. Within Connected Spaces, the new features launched, the FedRAMP approval and the Poly partnership have solidified our position as a leader in this market. Within the Secure and Custom area, the uniqueness of our flexible hosting functionality, the new integration with RealWear and Genesys and, again, the relationship with Poly gives us confidence that we're well positioned for further growth and success in this market.Since Q2 last year, Pexip has been through a major transformation. As a result, we now have a focused strategy and a cost base that is adapted to our revenues. The result of our cost program is visible in the first quarter EBITDA result. Here, we delivered NOK35 million, up from the minus NOK52 million we had in the first quarter last year, an improvement of NOK87 million. And with this, we are on track to meeting our EBITDA targets for the year.Now, I hand it to Asmund to give you some insights into what we have been up to on the commercial side during the quarter.

[Åsmund Fodstad, executive]

Excellent. Thank you, Trond. Let me take you through the sales update. So as Trond explained, the numbers are also reflecting the transition we've been through the last year. Pexip has a stronger market position, and we are more and more relevant to solving customer pain points. And we are, with the enhancement of our product portfolio, bringing more value, providing stronger business outcomes for our customers. So if you look at the numbers, the underlying ARR continues to be strong. We have a stable mix of our leading market solution, Pexip self-hosted, as well as Pexip as-a-service. The Pexip self-hosted platform is becoming increasingly popular with customers as the only viable solution for sovereignty and protection of data. Americas and EMEA remains strong in our geographical split.Looking at the breakdown of the AR development. The breakdown is the same as before, churn mainly impacted by the one-off large U.S. Government contract from last year, as well as our legacy areas as expected. Downsell is now slightly better than before, mainly impacted by customers rightsizing the capacity needed. Pexip has several initiatives like the price increase to positively impact upsell in 2023.Let's look at the different spaces. So a couple of key takeaways from Connected Spaces. Number 1, we have again strengthened our product offering in this space with both the Microsoft Teams-like experience and the new SIP Guest Join. We hear from Microsoft leadership that you guys have a real advantage here. It's the closest thing to Teams without really being there.Let me give a couple of examples of how big multinational organizations increased their success with Pexip and Microsoft and why that matters. One of the leading pharmaceutical manufacturers transitioned to the Pexip-powered Cloud Video Interop, also called CVI, and went from 0 to 5,000 monthly meetings on Teams-powered by Pexip. They basically replaced their existing CVI and instantly gained new capabilities. And best of all, they did that over 1 single weekend from 0 to 5,000. Another example is a leading global producer of dairy products, transitioned also to the Pexip-powered CVI and increased their meeting success with 236%. This is why Microsoft and Pexip work so well together. We both win and the customers get the experience that they prefer.Second takeaway is that, Pexip continue to win major accounts in connection with Microsoft Teams. In Q1, some of the examples are large government institutions, like Social Security Administration in the U.S. and one of the major U.S.-based aerospace and defense system integrators. We also added 2 more Fortune 500 companies. In fact, they are top 10 to the Pexip customer lists. And thirdly, like Trond explained, the HP Poly partnership is a new and important strategic partnership for Pexip, especially in Connected Spaces. And in addition to the one that we already -- ones that we already have with Microsoft and Google. These customers and HP Poly are a stamp of approval that Pexip Technology is market-leading for interoperability.Shifting [ gears ] a bit and coming into Secure and Customer Solutions. This segment continues to be a growth segment for us and with a year-over-year growth of 69%. In Q1, we secured a large service provider within TeleHealth, as well as Trafikverket in Sweden. As said initially, the market for private and data sovereign solutions is increasing and Pexip is the leading player. We continue to strengthen our product offering through the partnership with Genesys, which is a world-leading provider of call center solutions, and they are trusted by thousands of customers globally. We also strengthened our engagement with RealWear for remote engineering and frontline worker solutions. And in Q1, we have also finalized renewals with upsell to all our 4 largest global customers, and they all sort in this Secure and Custom space. Again, them renewing is the best proof stamp to our technology and the Pexip team behind it.And with that, I'm going to leave the financials to Oystein.

[Øystein Hem, executive]

Thank you, Asmund. As Trond outlined in his introduction, we're showing clear progress on both revenue and profitability. In Q1, revenues grew 17% to NOK261 million. 11 percentage points of this growth is driven by currency effects as the Norwegian kroner has a weaker exchange rate versus both the dollar, euro and pound, that are the main invoicing currencies for Pexip. On the other hand, that also means that underlying growth was around 6%.For EBITDA, most of our costs are also in foreign currency. And so, the positive impact on revenues are, to some extent, balanced out by also that currency impact on our cost base. Still, due to the cost reductions that we have done throughout 2022, we have a solid improvement on EBITDA, going up NOK87 million to now NOK35 million for Q1.Looking closer at the 2 business areas, Connected Spaces and Secure and Custom Solutions, we have split out both the revenues and cost of goods sold for these 2 segments. We see, in line with ARR, that we have stronger revenue development in Secure and Custom Solutions, growing 40% year-on-year. We also see that the growth on a Connected Spaces is relatively flat, in line with the ARR development, up 6% year-on-year.On the gross margin side, due to a higher share of software revenues, we have a higher margin in the Secure and Custom Solutions. And we also have a very healthy margin within Connected Spaces of 88% of revenues. Most of the cost of goods sold is related to our hosting costs for our cloud service, and we have a higher share of cloud services within the Connected Spaces area and more software revenues in Secure and Custom Solutions. The revenues split both the split between the segments and the margins will be impacted by how this is by the revenue development during the different quarters. And especially as software revenues fluctuate, we do expect some fluctuation on this between the different quarters.Looking closer at our cost development, we continue to improve both our salary and personnel expenses and our other OpEx. The main driver behind the reduction in salary and personnel expenses is the staff reductions that we did, both in Q2 of last year and in Q4. The Q4 reductions are now mostly realized in the Q1 results, although some of it was realized already in Q4, as well as some of it being realized now going forward in Q2. On other OpEx, we have a positive development of 26% if you compare it to Q1 of last year. Most of this reduction is due to the main cost categories within other OpEx for Pexip being tied to sales and marketing costs, software costs, both to our testing facilities, as well as powering all of the employee services, as well as for external services and consultants. Across all categories, we see a currency effect of approximately 5 percentage points, a higher cost base compared to a constant currency route.The resulting cash flow is a net positive of NOK47 million. The main driver behind this is the positive EBITDA, excluding share-based IFRS costs. And we also have a positive impact from net working capital. Q4 is a big revenue and invoicing quarter for Pexip, and hence, we collect that cash now in Q1. That also gives us a positive impact on -- from net gain on currency effects as we collect that cash at a higher exchange rate than what we booked the revenue on back in 2022.On the negative side, we have higher CapEx this quarter due to a severance or an earn out from an acquisition in the end of 2021. And we also have NOK15 million in severance payments that also negatively impact the cash flow for Q1. All in all, though, very happy with the NOK47 million in overall cash flow, which puts us in a great position to reach our targets for 2023.In summary, we have positive development on revenues, positive development on cost of goods sold, salary and personnel expenses and other OpEx, which in total gives us a very healthy improvement in EBITDA and profit before tax. It's also worth highlighting the positive impact on exchange differences, which is the main driver behind the strong profit before tax, if you compare it to the operating profit. All in all, a good quarter for Pexip and in line with our plan to get back to a more healthy and more profitable company than what we were in 2022.With that, I give the word back to Trond.

[Trond Johannessen, executive]

Thank you, Oystein. Looking at our business overall, we are generally optimistic, and we have a positive market outlook across our business areas. The Poly partnership and the recent FedRAMP authorization provide additional positive momentum into the second half of the year. One quarter into the year, we are on track towards meeting our revenue and EBITDA targets. For revenues, this means that to reach our targets for the year, we aim to return to growth during the next couple of quarters.For cash flow, we are in the comfortable position of being significantly ahead of our plan. And I can also share the positive news with you that we had a positive start for cash flow also in the second quarter.As usual, we'll shed some light on how we think about our ARR development in the quarter that we are currently in the second quarter. Our best estimate here is that, we will end the second quarter with an ARR in the range of USD97 million to USD100 million.With that and the last point before we go to Q&A, we will present our second quarter and first half information on August 10. And Christine, are we up for Q&A?

[Christine Arnesen, executive]

Yes. We'll start with the questions from the analysts that have joined us live, and we have with us Kristoffer Haugland from Arctic Securities. Kristoffer, any questions from you?

[Trond Johannessen, executive]

He probably ask difficult questions, so we have muted him remotely from here.[Audio Gap]

[Øystein Hem, executive]

We'll try to dial back in.

[Christine Arnesen, executive]

We can start with the question we received on e-mail. The salary expenses looks to have remained at a high -- relatively high level compared to previous quarters, considering the significant reduction in employees. Can you shed some light on the reasons for this? And how we should think about this number for the rest of the year?

[Øystein Hem, executive]

No, absolutely. I think if you look at the average reduction in employees compared to Q1 last year, we're down roughly 40% compared to where we were. If you look at just salary and holiday pay, in U.S. dollars, that's down 33% or so, which means that the underlying reduction is more or less in line with the staff reduction, although somewhat balanced in part also by market in line with what we've seen in the rest of the market, salary increases that we did between December and January.The other large component of that is, of course, currency. So in Norwegian kroner, that salary -- the salary expenses will be somewhat higher due to currency. We also have our commission costs that are accounted for on the P&L in line with the contract period from when they were sold, which means that the change in commission costs over the P&L, the impact there will be somewhat slower than what you see on just pure salary costs, which are accounted for on a monthly basis. Those are the main differences.It's also worth highlighting the impact that we see from share-based compensation, which has given us a somewhat of a positive impact during 2022 in part as some of those options and RSUs were avoided as people left, but also as a result of when you have a falling share price, you have somewhat less social security costs that we need to accrue for. So those are the main differences between what we see on the P&L on salary and personnel expenses and the reduction in staff.

[Christine Arnesen, executive]

I believe we have Kristoffer back with us.

[Kristoffer Haugland, analyst]

Yes, can you hear me now?

[Trond Johannessen, executive]

Yes.

[Christine Arnesen, executive]

Perfect.

[Kristoffer Haugland, analyst]

Perfect. So, Poly seemed quite excited about your partnership and the possibilities within the Secure Spaces, and not only what's in from related. How should one think about the potential in this segment? Can you share some thoughts about that?

[Trond Johannessen, executive]

Asmund, do you want to comment on that?

[Åsmund Fodstad, executive]

I'm happy to comment on it. It's a good question. Number 1, I think we will start seeing impact of the partnership at the second half of this year, maybe on a good day even in Q2. Of course, Poly and Polycom, which they used to be their name has been in this space for many, many years and also been a somewhat of a competitor to exit for a period of time that I know start selling our solutions to both their installed base and potentially new ones is something we're very optimistic about. But we want to skip a couple of quarters [ under the belt ] be a bit more precise on this. We'll be optimistic about the partnership.

[Trond Johannessen, executive]

And adding to that, as I also said during the presentation, Poly has been working and is working with some of the largest organizations in the world, many of them being very security-conscious. So they have a pretty good understanding of this whole self-hosted market for video collaborating, and that's also why they see potentially now bringing a much better, more modern, updated solution to the market than the one they're currently offering.

[Åsmund Fodstad, executive]

As an example, North America, federal space in North America is a huge installed base for Poly.

[Kristoffer Haugland, analyst]

And in the extension of that question, you -- how should we think about these types of partnerships going forward? Are you actively targeting these models? So could you see another one with another major player within the interop space?

[Øystein Hem, executive]

So I think this is a -- we are actively working to form new partnerships. Although I think it's important for us to have rather a few really large and deep partnerships that we work very closely with, as we do with Microsoft, as we will do with Poly, more than having many light-touch partnerships because we see that. When we really invest together, we create really, really good results. We know how to do this. So Microsoft, Google, now Poly are definitely within that category. And -- but we're also working with the likes of Genesys with the likes of RealWear. And I do expect to see other such partnerships come online both during this year and hopefully in the years to come.

[Trond Johannessen, executive]

I think you're muted, Kristoffer. You're on mute or --. We can't hear you.

[Øystein Hem, executive]

We don't know what happened now.

[Trond Johannessen, executive]

You have too many devices. You're switching between the -- go to speaker phone.

[Åsmund Fodstad, executive]

Do we have more questions in the meantime? No, we're good. We give Kristoffer another 30 seconds.

[Trond Johannessen, executive]

Yes. This is why everyone should have Pexip as their solution for connecting to these sessions, meeting room devices that you don't have problems like that.

[Åsmund Fodstad, executive]

I think he has too many headsets at the same time, but...

[Trond Johannessen, executive]

Yes. Anything else you want to comment on while we are...

[Øystein Hem, executive]

I think from our side, we have covered the main messages in the presentation, or at least we hope to have done so. If there are any follow-up questions, do feel free to reach out us also at [e-mail], and we'll get to those as quickly as we receive them.

[Trond Johannessen, executive]

Yes. I think we'll end it here then.

[Åsmund Fodstad, executive]

Yes. Okay. Thank you.

[Trond Johannessen, executive]

Thank you very much.

[Øystein Hem, executive]

Thank you, everyone.