Pexip Holding ASA

OSE:PEXIP

Earnings Call Analysis

Earnings Call Transcript 2023-Q3

[Trond Johannessen, executive]

Good morning, and welcome to this presentation of Pexip's third quarter results. My name is Trond Johannessen, and I'm the CEO. Together with me here in our Pexip Studio at Lysaker, I have Oystein Hem, our CFO; and Åsmund Fodstad, our Chief Revenue Officer. Together, we will take you through the highlights of the third quarter and our focus going forward. Yes, the standard disclaimers apply as always.

First, let's take a look at the highlights. We have been through a significant transformation that has led us to a new leaner organization that delivers better financial results. There is still more to be done, so further optimizations were executed in Q3 and continues going forward. Revenues for the quarter came in at NOK 215 million, which is 14% up year-over-year, where currency is about 4% of this growth. ARR ended at NOK 99.8 million, which is NOK 1.1 million, up from the end of Q2. EBITDA adjusted for one-off restructuring costs of NOK 6 million came in at NOK 11 million, an improvement of NOK 67 million from Q3 last year. We had a negative cash flow of NOK 13 million and a cash balance of NOK 494 million, leaving the quarter.

Connected Spaces showed a positive development in the quarter, benefiting from the HP/Poly partnership, the BlueJeans sunset and the continued success of FedRamp. As a result of a solid financial position, positive cash flow and a favorable market outlook, we are in a position to recommend a new dividend policy of 50% to 100% of free cash flow to the Annual General Meeting next year.

In addition, we will propose an additional extraordinary dividend of NOK 0.5 per share to be paid together with the ordinary dividend. Our financial targets remain unchanged. And I'm happy to say we are on track to reaching them.

Pexip is a technology company, built on a unique technology platform. Centralized data processing or transcoding is at the core of our unique platform and enables interoperability and flexible deployment, which make us able to provide market-leading offerings in our core solution areas. We can connect almost any meeting room to any meeting, and we enable everything from business communication to ultra secure government meetings, doctors' appointments and court proceedings.

Our technology is also what attracts partnerships with some of the world's leading technology companies. As you know, we work closely with companies like Microsoft, Google, HP and others. Our technology also lends itself nicely to AI applications. And we work with NVIDIA to solve some real-life problems here. We will get back to that a bit later.

Pexip's mission is to make seamless video communication available to all organizations, regardless of technology platforms and security requirements. We have 2 main solution areas Pexip Connected Spaces and Pexip Secure & Custom Spaces. Connected Spaces is about video meeting interoperability. When several video technologies need to work seamlessly together. Here, we work with the major videoconferencing players to enable seamless connections to their services from any meeting room. I think it's fair to say that we are recognized as a technology leader in this space where only Pexip and Cisco provide solutions today after HP/Poly outsourced to Pexip and BlueJeans shut down their service.

In Secure & custom Spaces, we provide a full-fledged video meeting solution that can be self-hosted or placed in a private cloud. Pexip is often used as a complement to, for example, Teams for organizations with strict security or privacy requirements, often imposed through national regulations. In this space, the competitive landscape is also quite clear, with Cisco's on-prem meeting server and Skype for Business server being the main incumbent players. And Pexip is, as far as I know, the only provider that currently invests into improved functionality and user experience in this field.

In both these 2 solution areas or markets, Pexip sees attractive growth opportunities based on positive market trends. In Connected Spaces, we are looking at an approximate 15% annual growth in video conferencing devices spread across service-specific devices such as MTRs and standard SIP devices. For the recently consolidated market for SIP devices, Pexip targets to increase market share through product innovation and industry partnerships. Also for service-specific devices, such as Microsoft Teams room, MTRs, there is a need for high-quality interoperability solutions that can seamlessly connect the various meeting platforms. Pexip is now developing products in this area, and the first launch is Pexip Connect for Teams rooms, which you will hear more about from Åsmund a bit later.

In Secure & custom, we are looking at a clear trend where private clouds are emerging in several areas, both as sovereign, regional and other types of contained cloud environments. This market alone is expected to grow 30% annually in the coming years. In addition, the self-hosting market is back to some growth after some years in decline. A common use case in this area is where customers take advantage of a Pexip video meeting solution, self-hosted or in a private cloud as a complement to, for example, their Microsoft Teams solution. The complementary solution, Pexip, can be for special types of meetings or user groups. Typically, these organizations will have 2 meeting booking buttons to select between in their Outlook calendars. Åsmund will come back to a concrete example of this a bit later.

So based on this, it should be easy to understand why we at Pexip are excited about the dynamics we see in the markets we serve. Our engineering team continues to bring out great products and new features. This time, let me point out the actual deployment of the Teams-like layout on our sales platform, and the launch of our latest version of the Infinity software, where we have new features such as customer layouts, AI powered noise removal and breakout rooms, which are commonly used within sectors such as Justice and Health, where we have many customers.

As mentioned before, we also work closely with NVIDIA to securely enable AI functionality also for those organizations that cannot use a public cloud service. This is an area where our technology really shines. And where we, together with NVIDIA, see a significant market opportunity and where we, again, according to NVIDIA, are uniquely positioned. The first product we are working to pilot, together with some large customers is live translation functionality, including voice to voice. There is more to come in this area in the quarters ahead.

Product management is an area we have invested a lot into recently. This includes introduction of clear easy-to-buy product packages targeted at the various use cases we aim to serve within Connected Spaces and Secure & Custom Spaces. You can visit our website to learn more about the Pexip Connect product line and the Pexip Secure meeting products as well as the platform solutions we are in the process of rolling out.

A few words about financial performance. The transformation we have been through over the last quarters is now quite visible in our financial performance. Of course, there is still some way to go until we are at best practice performance, and we will continue to work hard every day to both drive growth, but also secure that profitability continues to improve and converts into solid cash flow.

But having said that, let me highlight some of the main changes in performance we have realized over the last quarters. For ARR, we have gone from negative changes quarter-by-quarter to delivering flat to now positive development. Our underlying ARR, the blue bars you see here is close to being all-time high. For EBITDA, we have gone from hugely negative quarters to now being positive 4 quarters in a row. Quarter-over-quarter, the improvement this quarter alone is NOK 67 million. Cash flow has also gone from negative to positive. And year-to-date, our cash flow is NOK 334 million better than last year. Again, we are far from done, but it's good to see that hard work pays off.

Now let me hand it over to Åsmund to give you a sales update.

[Åsmund Fodstad, executive]

Thank you for that, Trond. Good morning, everyone. Let's talk about sales. So let's look at the 2 key segments for Pexip in more detail and also to customer wins in the respective spaces. For Connected Spaces; first, Pexip is back to growth overall and also now in Connected Spaces. We keep on winning major Fortune 500 logos in this space. In Q3, we won key accounts in the energy, bank and finance and the pharmaceutical space.

Second, the sunset of BlueJeans and HP/Poly now selling Pexip technology enables Pexip to take a larger market share in this space, and we are starting to see strong results from this market development.

Thirdly, Pexip has a world-leading unique technology in this market category versus competition, which basically now is just Cisco. And we have started to see good traction for our new technology, SIP point-to-point, developed for teams rooms being the first innovation for what we call next-generation interoperability. Interoperability is here to stay.

Let's look at a customer win from Q3 with exactly that in mind. We're excited to announce that we have won our first customer with this new innovation, a large pharmaceutical company with more than USD 44 billion revenue, 85,000 employees and more than 3,000 meeting rooms with video equipment in them. This customer has a multiplatform strategy using both Microsoft Teams and Cisco Webex technologies. And their goal is to standardize every meeting room on the same functionality and user experience no matter the technology vendor placed in that room. With Pexip Connect, which Trond just mentioned, which enables SIP compatibility for Microsoft Teams rooms, employees can enter any meeting room with the confidence that it will simply just work. They don't have to think about what kind of technology meeting they are on.

We are seeing an increasingly large organization, embracing a multiplatform strategy to simplify employee experiences, protect existing investments and enable any-to-any meetings. It should simply just work.

For Secure & Custom, in today's geopolitical environment and the increased consciousness around compliance, data protection, privacy and security in the world, Pexip experienced an increased interest in our solution for video communication in this space. These segments continue to be growth segments for Pexip with 13% growth in Custom and 23% growth year-over-year in Secure. We're winning major accounts in defense, energy, government and we also see service providers building sovereign clouds for their customers. The market is experiencing a 30% growth in private clouds and more than 137 countries have enacted some sort of data protection or sovereignty laws that places Pexip in a great position as a unique provider for this space. Based on these market dynamics, Pexip sees a continued growth opportunity and a solid future in this space.

Let's use a Q3 win a customer as an example. GKN Aerospace is a world-leading aerospace innovator. They have more than 50,000 employees and manufacturing in more than 12 countries. And because of that, they are exposed to hard compliance requirements from every customer, all the vendors and partners that they are cooperating with. For GKN to be able to sell to these companies, GKN needs to be compliant, which sets requirements to who has access to their metadata and where the data stays. Mostly this needs to be in country and on-premises. GKN used Microsoft Teams for general meetings, but need defense compliant and Secure client support solution for meetings with customers and governments, who again has hard requirements around security.

So what is the solution then from Pexip? For GKN employees, they have an extra outlook plug in button illustrated on this slide, alongside with Microsoft Teams. They have an alternative meeting platform powered by Pexip when there is compliance and security requirements for who they are meeting with and the content of those meetings. Their employees simply just choose the GKN secure button powered by Pexip when booking or joining those kind of meetings. Easy, compliant and secure.

And with that, I'll hand it over to Oystein for the financial numbers.

[Øystein Hem, executive]

Thank you so much, Åsmund. Let's start off with ARR. And on ARR, we grew the ARR base with $1.1 million in Q3 to $99.8 million. Our underlying ARR, excluding legacy revenues, grew by $1.9 million. And Pexip-as-a-Service grew $0.7 million. With that, our ARR base is now almost 50-50 with regards to Software-as-a-Service and software licenses as a subscription.

In terms of geographies, the U.S. was driving most of our growth in Q3 and is now at 40% of our ARR base. The U.S. is the largest and most competitive video market and showing that Pexip's offering is highly competitive.

Looking at the development in the 2 business areas. We see that Connected Spaces and Legacy combined has a flat development in the quarter. We still have a substantial new sales in Connected Spaces and we have improved our net retention from Q2. Excluding Legacy, we have a net retention of 99% for the quarter. The dynamics in Secure & Custom are somewhat different. Lower sales to new customers, and the growth is mainly coming from growth of existing customers, growing the revenues with Pexip. Combined with a very low churn, this gives us a quarterly net retention ratio of 102%.

Moving over to the P&L and our headline numbers. We're continuing to show a clear improvement in profitability with substantially better EBITDA than the same quarter of last year. In Q3, revenues grew 14% to NOK 215 million. And the exchange rates that have been driving a lot of the revenue growth so far this year is less of a factor now in Q3. Still, around 4 percentage points of the growth is driven by a beneficial currency exchange rate, meaning that the underlying growth is around 10%. Quarter-on-quarter revenue is slightly down from Q2 due to lower software revenues. And this is the same expected seasonality that we had in 2022 and in the years before.

On EBITDA, we're continuing to deliver a solid improvement compared to 2022, with NOK 67 million higher adjusted EBITDA. And this is the result of underlying cost reductions over the last 12 months, although the underlying revenue increase is also contributing positively. We did large cost reductions both in Q2 and in Q4 of last year, and some of that impact was already reflected into the Q3 results of last year.

Continuing on that note and looking deeper at the development on operating expenses, you see that we continue to realize cost reductions. We have a reduction quarter-over-quarter in both salary and personnel expenses as well as in other OpEx.

In Q3, it's worth pointing out that we have a positive seasonal effect of holiday pay, reducing salary and personnel expenses with around NOK 10 million. Still, even adjusting for this, we continue to lower our underlying costs as we continuously seek to optimize our performance. In Q3, we also had other gains losses related to restructuring in the quarter, which is expected to give reduced costs going forward.

Looking at cash flow -- resulting cash flow for Q3 is a net negative of NOK 13 million. On the positive side, EBITDA, excluding share-based costs amounted to NOK 13 million while net working capital, which has been very positive for us this year was slightly negative in the quarter. CapEx is low at NOK 3 million, and this is partly due to received government R&D grants that are netted out against investments.

Overall, year-to-date, we are at NOK 72 million in free cash flow.

And summing up on the next page. We have a positive development on revenues and gross profits. On the cost side, we continue to have a significant improvement, giving us an EBITDA improvement of NOK 67 million. That being said, we still have a negative operating results. So there is continued work to be done on both driving growth and optimizing our cost base in the quarters and years ahead.

And with that, I give the word back to you, Trond.

[Trond Johannessen, executive]

Thank you, Oystein. Looking at our business overall, we are generally optimistic with the positive market outlook across the business areas. As explained, market trends are positive and present opportunities for Pexip. The HP/Poly partnership, industry consolidation, growth in private clouds as a result of the geopolitical situation and our FedRamp authorization are expected to continue to give positive momentum in the coming quarters. The financial targets remain unchanged, and we are on track to meeting them. However, the mix between the 2 solution areas might be somewhat different versus our initial target setting with Connected Spaces growing a bit more and Secure & custom a bit less, but with the total ARR development being on track. As usual, we will give some insight into how we think about our ARR development in the quarter we are in the fourth quarter. And our best estimate here is that we will end the year in the range of $100 million to $103 million in ARR.

Last main topic for today is about capital distribution. And first, a little bit of context. Pexip has successfully executed a change in strategy and will going forward, execute on a strategy of growing both top line and bottom line results. Pexip is cash flow positive, has a solid cash position no material interest-bearing debt and a positive market outlook. Based on this, the Board is introducing a new capital distribution policy and a dividend recommendation to the Annual General Meeting in 2024. As a general policy, the Board recommends to distribute 50% to 100% of free cash flow generated to shareholders as a dividend with the concrete recommendation to be presented and approved by the AGM every year. Specifically for the 2024 AGM, the Board recommends the following: an ordinary dividend in line with the above policy, meaning 50% to 100% of 2023 free cash flow. In addition, an extraordinary dividend of NOK 0.5 per share to be paid together with the ordinary dividend.

For Pexip, being in a position to pay dividends is a milestone in our development and something we hope the investor community will appreciate.

Finally, before we go to Q&A, we will present our Q4 on February 14 next year, and the AGM will be held on April 24. Q&A?

[Øystein Hem, executive]

Thank you so much, Trond. And we'll start as we usually do with questions from the analysts that are with us live. Oliver, I see you on the screen here, so I'll let you go first.

[Oliver Schüler Pisani, analyst]

Congrats with the quarter. So first question just to sort of be the devil's advocate, but you have NOK 500 million of cash on the balance sheet today. So why isn't the extraordinary dividend higher than the 1 you target here? And what are you going to do with the rest of the cash?

[Øystein Hem, executive]

So I think the extraordinary dividend is around NOK 50 million. And then if you take our free cash flow range, you would expect an ordinary dividend in addition in that range and the upwards to 200. And I think it's fair to say that we are still targeting having a very solid financial position, both in order to have room to maneuver and just also easing into sort the of that new phase for us as a company. So you are right in pointing out that we'll continue to have a very robust financial position.

[Oliver Schüler Pisani, analyst]

Okay. So there may be scope for further extraordinary dividends in the future. Is it not that you're planning on M&A or any other sort of capital allocation?

[Øystein Hem, executive]

No, that's correct. We don't have any -- there's no implied sort of investment plan either organically or inorganically, reflected in those numbers.

[Oliver Schüler Pisani, analyst]

Very clear. And then a second question on -- it seems like your working capital or net working capital is consistently better than I had expected at least. So what do you expect for net working capital dynamics in the coming years when we model that?

[Øystein Hem, executive]

So we have been able to throughout this year to reduce our overdue receivables and part of that is due to, I would say, some dynamics within the IT and video space where last year, a lot of our customers that are integrators had held up orders due to supply chain challenges, which caused them to have somewhat more overdue invoices towards us as well. During the first half, we were able to work that quite down, and the level of forwarded invoices is much, much more healthy at this point. So I expect that sort of boost that we got from working capital in Q1 and Q2 to sort of stabilize at this level. But of course, there's -- at some point, you won't have additional sort of free cash flow freed up from compressing that further.

[Oliver Schüler Pisani, analyst]

Makes sense, very clear. And then perhaps the last one for me. It seems like you say that the Secure & Custom is relevant today for so many customers and countries. But now you're also talking about this growing a bit less than expected. So what's missing here in order to accelerate growth in this vertical?

[Øystein Hem, executive]

To predict exactly the growth rate is, of course, difficult. I think it's easier to predict the direction and the direction has been according to what we -- to the targets we set. Generally, we're talking about relatively long sales cycles. Large organizations needed to make decisions often based on regulations and requirements in terms of compliance. So I think it's fair to say that it takes time to develop this market.

Having said that, the market opportunity that presents itself, as Åsmund explained today, with these large organizations having a differentiated set of video communication platforms, having one that is the compliant platform for those specific groups or specific meeting topics and having the standard solution operating next to it. We are seeing this solution as potentially becoming more of a standard solution for these large organizations. So that there will be growth in this area. There is no doubt whether it's going to be exactly this percentage or exactly that percentage, it is difficult to predict.

Kristian Spetalen from Arctic. I see you're with us as well.

[Kristian Spetalen, analyst]

Can you hear me?

[Øystein Hem, executive]

We can hear you loud and clear.

[Kristian Spetalen, analyst]

Good. Simple question to begin with. So the increased growth rate in Q4, is it fair to just assume that that's within -- or driven by Connected Spaces?

[Øystein Hem, executive]

So I think the increased growth in Q4, so the quarter we're in, I think we'll continue to be a good mix of Secure & Custom and Connected Spaces. And I think we're seeing in both quarters, a healthy amount of large opportunities in both those areas.

[Kristian Spetalen, analyst]

So both a bit better than Q3, so kind of overall improvements? Because I'm just struggling with the Poly partnership, which came into effect August 1. So that's kind of a high vacation month, so in practice on the September impacted Q3 with that regard slow, we should see a better growth in Connected Spaces standalone on that? And if you expect better growth in Secure & Custom as well, the guidance may come up as a bit conservative unless we're missing something on the Legacy areas.

[Øystein Hem, executive]

But just to clarify, the Poly -- HP/Poly partnership is both for Connected Spaces and Secure & Custom. So the of 2 -- there are different products in that portfolio where they resell or the co-branded HP/Poly solution, but that's in both these solution areas.

[Kristian Spetalen, analyst]

Yes. For the conversion of existing customers as well?

[Øystein Hem, executive]

Yes.

[Kristian Spetalen, analyst]

Okay.

[Øystein Hem, executive]

So it's a Secure meeting platform, which is replacing the clarity platform that the HP/Poly or Poly used to have historically and then there is the interop solution, which is replacing their solution in that area.

[Kristian Spetalen, analyst]

And then just if you have any more color on the BlueJeans sunset opportunity? I mean how large is the opportunity and what quarters -- for how long should we see positive effect from this?

[Åsmund Fodstad, executive]

I think on a good note, we saw quick both results in Q3, which is, again, coming back to that we have long sales cycles, both in the Connected Spaces and Secure. We did actually win quite some large logos in Q2 isolated. So that's a good sign. The pipeline is growing for us. But again, it's hard to say how long that's going to last, and we don't have insights in the entire portfolio for BlueJeans horizon either, but so far tracking good, then we've seen quick results of it.

[Øystein Hem, executive]

And in terms of the timing impact, we know that there's sunsetting their platform in Q1. And so I think you will expect a positive, at least the first order sort of existing customers needing to find another solution in Q4 and Q1. And then I think we'll also will benefit from the improved competitive dynamics with having one player less in the space also in the [Indiscernible].

[Kristian Spetalen, analyst]

And then third question, just what sort of headwinds do you see in video innovation right now? Is it competition or longer sales cycles?

[Åsmund Fodstad, executive]

That's a good question. I think we see more opportunities. But again, for video innovation what we like to call Custom is even longer sales cycle, right? So it's not that easy just to take quarter-by-quarter. It's kind of hard to see. So you need to see that on the longer scale. But I think that we are well positioned, especially in the combination with the Secure Solutions. So [those 2 goes] often hand-in-hand. There are many more competitors in this space. But again, I think we're well positioned with the Pexip technology and also with what we have future coming in 2024.

[Kristian Spetalen, analyst]

And then the last question, are there any large tenders or deals in the pipeline? And how is this accounted for in your Q4 guidance?

[Åsmund Fodstad, executive]

You're really on the fishing trip. I think we -- there's always large deals that we are sort of in the large tenders out there both in video -- in custom -- Secure & Custom and in Connected Spaces. So I don't think it's prudent to comment anymore on that, because that's part of our business.

[Øystein Hem, executive]

I think we can give some color on which I think we saw in Q3 as well that if you compare 2023 to 2022, there are more large deals in our pipeline at a more advanced stage now than it was a year ago. So the market dynamics feels somewhat different, not dramatically so, but somewhat more positive now than last year.

[Åsmund Fodstad, executive]

Agreed.

[Øystein Hem, executive]

Moving over to Jørgen Weidemann from Pareto. Jørgen, are you with us?

[Jørgen Weidemann, analyst]

Yes. Hello. Can you hear me?

[Øystein Hem, executive]

We hear you loud and clear.

[Jørgen Weidemann, analyst]

Great. I have one question to start with on well, this quarter and last quarter, you provided some information on NRR for your segments. And I'm wondering how has this been prior to these 2 quarters? Could you give us some context on how to understand this and also the trajectory and seasonality of those metrics?

[Øystein Hem, executive]

Yes. No, happy to. And I think we've shared some data on that on more on an annual basis in the past as well. I think what we've seen is that for Secure & Custom, we've had significantly lower churn than for Connected Spaces, which comes down a bit to the dynamic of the 2 products, where one is more of a platform that you really install and embed in your organization, while on Connected Spaces, it's a somewhat lighter integration. And so you have intrinsically more and more churn there, which I think we continue to see. So we do expect better net retention rates from securing customer over time. And that's what we've seen also if we go back to the last 2, 3 years than on Connected Spaces.

Then I think certainly since the end of the pandemic, we've seen, especially the Legacy areas and to some extent, on Connected Spaces, having a higher both churn and downsell as customers sort of adjust their volume expectations from not knowing and probably overshooting a bit on their estimates to the [indiscernible] observing their growth and -- tuning their capacity levels. And we've seen that, especially in 2022, and that's now been a much more stable rate now in 2023. I also think that with the Legacy part being a smaller and smaller part of the base, even though that segment still has a fairly substantial churn, the impact on the overall business is less and less.

[Jørgen Weidemann, analyst]

Great. And also on the EBITDA guidance, it's still quite wide with only 2 quarters left. Is this simply because you're not certain on what payments fall into '24? Or what's the reason for the quite wide guidance there?

[Øystein Hem, executive]

Yes. We've not reassessed our target for Q4. And I'll take that feedback. We could probably have narrowed that range somewhat now into Q4. But we didn't want to sort of pivot our targets as we get closer to the end of the year. That said, there is a bit of a wide range at the end because it does highly depend on which orders we do close in Q4. And obviously, if you get to the deal of $1 million, 31st of December versus the second of January, it has a fairly big impact on the EBITDA with a 97% gross margin.

Thank you so much. I believe those were the questions that we have. Thank you so much for listening. And if you have any other questions, please reach out us at [e-mail].

[Trond Johannessen, executive]

Thank you very much.

[Åsmund Fodstad, executive]

Thank you.