Bambuser AB

STO:BUSER

Earnings Call Transcript 2022-Q3

[Maryam Ghahremani, executive]

Hi, everyone. My name is Maryam Ghahremani, and I'm the CEO of Bambuser. I want to welcome you to this Q3 report that will be held by myself and our acting CFO, Jonas Lagerstrom.

Today's agenda is a brief company overview for those who are new to Bambuser. I will go through the key highlights of the quarter, and then Jonas will guide you through our SaaS KPIs and financials. We will wrap this session with a Q&A in the end.

Bambuser is the global leading live shopping company. We work with more than 300 brands that leverage our technology on a daily basis. To mention a few of them is QVC, Saks Fifth Avenue, [indiscernible]. We have offices in Stockholm, New York, London, Tokyo and Turku. We have customers in 56 countries. We broadcast into 72 countries, and we have more than 25 languages in our player.

What I'm the most proud of is our diversity and inclusion as a tech company, 60% of our senior management is female. We are 34 nationalities, and we speak 29 languages.

Bambuser launched the current live video SaaS service in January 2020. We have since then had a very strong ARR momentum that we are very proud of. We're just forming up for continued growth.

Bambuser offers two main products. The first one is our one-to-many and our current flagship product, representing over 90% of our ARR. The product allows our customers to stream a show on their own website, but also push the stream out to social platform such as YouTube.

If I just go through the product very briefly, not only our customers stream from a smartphone, but you can also use external cameras for more professional shows. In the player, we have interactive features such as chat and like, we have -- when you push a product you would like to watch then you will be redirected into the native check-out of the retailer. Our platform is agnostic, and we do social media and multicasting.

Our second product is our one-to-one that we launched in 2021. By adding one-to-one as a customer service tool, we enable brands to invite customers into private shoppable video calls with sales staff. There is two ways of entering a one-to-one call, either it's a drop-in or a scheduled meeting with the clients. It's a face-to-face and a two-way audio and video. We have some of the best-in-class features in this product. This also is the same as the one-to-many. So you have a native add to cart and a check out. And normally, you connect the one to one to your booking and CRM systems.

We sell our product in three tiers and what differentiates our tiers is features, customer service and SLAs. The typical contract duration is 12 months, and our revenue model is based on three pillars. We have a fixed onetime fee for onboarding and setup. Then we have the fixed SaaS license fee. And then we have the usage fee that is a variable fee. If you look to the one-to-many, it is based on streamed hours, which is how many people who watch the show and how long they stay in the show. And the one-to-one usage fee is driven by the number of agents.

Bambuser Plus was launched 1st of September this year. This is the result of us merging relatable a social media agency that we acquired last year and our own professional services. We now have a new offering covering four areas: strategy and creative, influencer marketing, production and education. The way we charge for Bambuser Plus is either a retailer or by project. This is a key differentiator for us at Bambuser to be able to support our customers in the live shopping journey, with Bambuser Plus, we shorten their time to success.

As you can see, we're truly a global company with customers and partners across Americas, EMEA and APAC. Then I will walk you through the key highlights of Q3, starting with Hugo Boss. Hugo Boss has been a pioneer in fashion since 1924. They're headquartered in Metzingen, and they have over 1,100 stores worldwide. They have been a customer for hours since September 2021.

They broadcasted their fall and winter 2022 show from Milan Fashion Week across 13 sites globally. They used our simulcast feature, making product hydration possible for all 13 countries for our long event across each site. No brand have ever attempted to stream like this and also make it shoppable. The average viewing time was 15 minutes, and they had 12,000 viewers during the live.

Moving on to U.S. and Bloomingdale's. So we got the pleasure of using the Bambuser Plus production team on site for this iconic live stream. They streamed live from their store in New York. This show has the highest number of live viewers and attributed sales for a single Bloomingdale live event to date. The average viewing time was 11 minutes and they had a 477% ROI on the show.

So this was the first time for us attending Dreamforce. We had the U.S. team and our dedicated sales force partner managers represented. Bambuser was featured as one of three partners on their main commerce keynote, they have more than 7,000 partners globally. So we were very proud of being one of those. A fun note is that we have a joint sticker, as you can see here, at Astro together, and we are actually the first partner ever to have a joint sticker. We truly believe that Salesforce will be a key partner for us. Bambuser will be live on their app exchange in Q4, and this will unlock massive potential for us.

And lastly, we partnered with Perfect Corp. to offer virtual trans in our one-to-one shopping experience. This solution was premiered with our joint client Perfume Christian Dior. Perfect Corp is the industry leader for virtual trials in makeup, and together, we create a unique and very powerful digital shopping experience for our end consumers. Perfume Christian Dior is live in France and U.K. and next up is the U.S. market.

With that, I will leave it over to Jonas.

[Jonas Lagerstrom, executive]

Yes. Thank you very much. So I would like to start to give you a little brief of what happened in the company this quarter when some of our strategic review.

We had a strategic review of our go-to-market strategy, which has now resulted in that we are three distinct regions that faces our customers where we have sales, marketing and customer service. They use the power and scale of our HQ functions where we can see CRM, controlling, billing and so forth.

This also meant that we rightsize the company and resulted in annual cost savings in excess of SEK 30 million that we will see the start-up the next coming quarter. We saw some of it this quarter as well.

User adoption. So our flagship product, one-to-many, so a strong year-to-year growth when it comes to unique viewers and a number of shows. We start to see some seasonality in the figures. As you can see, we did have a decline from last quarter. That is mainly driven by that we have a number of real estate customers that do produce quite many shows. And Q2 was -- sorry, Q3 was a quite slow season.

Looking at our one-to-one. And this is our smallest product in our product suite, but yet growing. So we had a really, really strong number of cost growth, even though they came from quite small numbers, but they are mainly driven by customers within the electronics industry.

All right. So let's go into the SaaS KPIs and the financials. First of all, before we go into this, I think it's very important that we want to view understand how we define our customers as that is extremely central in how we calculate our SaaS KPIs.

So customer group is the sort of ultimate customer in our customer hierarchy. We have customers with quite complex legal structures where we typically sign an MSA with a master service agreement. They, in turn, do not use the product instead of their subsidiaries are using it, which we signed individual agreements with. That can be due to that they are divided by different brands, different markets or a combination.

And then the paying customers have merchants, those are the retailers that the end consumer is facing. We use merchants sometimes when we describe, for example, how many countries we are active in, as an example. So in this context, customer -- if a customer group is added, we will post it as new business. If customer A would churn, it will be a downsell. If customer B would add a product, it would consequently be an upsell. So I think this is very essential for everybody to understand.

And this quarter was strong. We added down 38 new customer groups and had successful renewal and expansion with 26 customers. Looking more at our SaaS KPIs, we saw a strong growth of 98% year-over-year, landing at SEK 142.4 million in ARR this quarter.

Looking at the GRR, we are not super happy with 78%. Of course, but we also do realize that one of the reasons why we do see that high share is that we had a number of customers that joined us during the pandemic that we're in perhaps the right customer long term, and we also see some small and medium enterprise customers that currently don't have the budget or the resources to sort of be active within the live woody shopping space.

However, looking at the NRR, which was 94% again, 94% is nothing we want to be proud of, we should for sure be over 100%. However, if we look at our enterprise customers, we had a very strong NRR of 138%. So that is very satisfying. And as you can see here, we had 285 customer groups and 355 logos and the logos would be the ones that would represent merchants, if you remember the last slide. And also, we had 17 of our customers that had ARR over SEK 1 million.

Moving over to our ARR bridge. In January, this year was the first year we could record data on this granular level. So we are pleased to show you the bridge for the three last quarters. As you can see, we had strong business, strong new business in all quarters. The churn improves here in the last quarter. But we also had some tailwind from the weak Swedish krona, which created a positive FX effect for us, especially in the last quarter.

So going forward, this is -- we want to show you the ARR bridge on the last 12 months. But as of now, we only have data for the last 9 months. So that's why this report shows this. If we look at the ARR by customer, this is just a chart that describes the previous slide. But as you can see, we ended this quarter with 285 customer groups which we're very proud of because you can see that it's a very strong growing trend where we add new customer groups every quarter. But most importantly is that we also grow our average ARR per customer group, and that is a true strength. So we are now at a SEK 500 million in average ARR.

Moving forward with the ARR split amongst our products. So we have our flagship product, one-to-many, stands for 93%, one-to-one stands for 6% and others, which is our legacy business that we're now sunsetting is 1%. And the legacy business in this context is our old broadcasting service that we have a few customers left them.

If we move into our regions, Americas came in strong this quarter with a year-over-year growth of 168%. APAC also had a very strong growth year-over-year with 196%. EMEA had a solid quarter and remains as our largest region. As you can see here, they are almost 50% of our total ARR. However, the U.S.A., United States is our largest country.

Net sales. So the Lilac bars are our net sales per sauce that continue to grow. This includes license, onboarding and usage. And as you may have already noticed, there is a lag in our net sales growth sorry, there's a discrepancy between our net sales growth and our ARR growth. And the main reason for that is that we did have some onboarding discounting this quarter that we used and also that it's a timing thing. A lot of these contracts came in quite late in September. So they have not been able to be revenue recognized as much for this quarter. And that is very typical timing issue when it comes to the SaaS business.

Professional services is still in its transition and to move over to the entire Bambuser Plus offering. So -- but we do see, as a highlight this quarter is that the blend in the net sales was more healthy from our point of view because it included more of the total Bambuser Plus offering.

Let's look at the gross margin. So this was the first quarter or this is the first quarter where we show you our gross margin. And this is also the first step of us actually publishing a functional-based P&L that we aim to do. I will not give you the exact timing, but seems to be in Q1 '23.

So the gross margin for SaaS, the cost of revenue there, which is the base for the calculation includes our onboarding team, the customer success team that works with retention and then all software that is used to run the platform. We also made adjustment this quarter, a year-to-date adjustment of SEK 1.7 million that affected this gross margin negatively. And that was mainly due to that we reidentified reclassified some software costs from OpEx up to cost of revenue.

We also believe that the gross margin will improve over time as we do see that a lot of these costs are fixed and that they will not grow in par with our net sales growth. Professional Services had a negative gross margin of 17%. So what is very important for everybody to understand is that the way we have sort of defined our gross margin for professional services is that we include everything in cost of revenue, including all salaries. So the salaries, all costs associated with our assignments, everything. So you can say that this is quite equivalent to our EBITDA.

Speaking of EBITDA and more specifically, the adjusted EBITDA, we did see improvement this quarter compared to last quarter or last quarters. And what is also positive is that the EBITDA margin in percentage also improves. And this is of course, a result of our net sales growth, but also better cost control. And I mean we talked about the program of SEK 30 million. That's one thing. But ongoingly, we also have a strict cost control. So we are very dedicated to improve these emerging going forward.

I would also like to highlight that in this quarter, we did have a one-off impact, a one-off cost related to some of the layoffs that we did of SEK 2.3 million. And it was not cash flow, it did not impact the cash flow this quarter, but it will the two following quarters.

And the last slide for this presentation is our cash balance. So we closed at SEK 401 million this quarter. We reiterate that we strongly believe that the cash balance is sufficient to take us to positive cash flow. And we can also see from our free cash flow chart to the very right that we had a quite strong improvement this quarter. And that is again, mainly due to improved cost control, but also that we have been more successful in getting more months paid upfront from our customers.

So with that said, I'm leaving over to our Q&A session.

[Unknown Analyst]

It's Eric at KP Capital. First of all, thanks all your hard work for shareholders. And thanks for providing the ARR bridge. I think it's very helpful and also for the back quarters earlier this year. I was wondering if you could maybe help us discuss a little bit more the different components, so we understand how to think about them going forward. If we look at new business, it accelerated through the year, SEK 14 million first quarter, now SEK 21 million. I understand it's a lumpy number, but what sort of level would you be pleased with going forward, if we think about the next 2, 3 quarters on average, SEK 20 million a good number? Or was that a bit high? Could it come down? Or do you think you could actually do more? That would be my first question.

And then one question on churn as well. Churn has been quite tricky to estimate. If we think -- talk about the absolute numbers, it was SEK 5 million first quarter, SEK 9 million and down to SEK 5 million, again. What level of churn do you think? And again, I know it's lumpy, but what level of churn would you hope to achieved going forward, 5% of your ARR on an annualized basis, 10%, 20%, just some kind of ambition there would be helpful to understand what you're aiming for?

[Jonas Lagerstrom, executive]

Yes. Thank you for those questions. In terms of the new business, what we would be comfortable with going forward. I mean we're still in a new space. So we are very careful on giving future outlooking sort of guidance. So we will refrain from doing that to give you any explicit numbers. But what I can tell you is that what you see in the ARR bridge is that it's -- that is, how should I put it, a comfortable growth that we would be satisfied with if that would continue, if I can address it like that.

And then for the churn, I would say that, that is something that we would consider improve, of course, over time. We don't think that we will see any drastic moves quarter-over-quarter, but it will improve over time. If we can be somewhere around that would be comfortable when we can go up to 95%, I'm not sure. Again, I still think that this is a quite new space. So we are learning a lot about the customers and trying to find that ideal customer profile.

But what we do see where we have found that where we ideal customer profile that we currently work with, those enterprise customers There, we have a very low churn. And as you can see, we had a very positive NRR. So it may be a bit of a fluffy answer, but I'm trying to not give you too precise guidance because we are -- we do not feel that we are comfortable doing that right now.

[Maryam Ghahremani, executive]

I can just add to Jonas also. So I think the churn, as Jonas said, it's hard, but I would say that it is because we onboarded a lot of smaller businesses that doesn't have -- actually, the budget, I would say, isn't the biggest issue. It's the resources. They don't have the resources to do the live show. So that's where we're seeing churn and looking at our enterprise customers, I mean, this is what we are learning as we grow, and this is where we -- our focus is now. And we believe that, that is going to continue going forward.

[Unknown Analyst]

That's very helpful. Maybe one question on new business and not discussing numbers, but where would you say going forward right now in your discussions and when you talk to prospective clients are the biggest opportunities, in particular industry or any particular geography where you see wow, here is a lot of opportunity over the next 12 months?

[Maryam Ghahremani, executive]

I would say where we have the strongest is fashion and beauty. That's where we started, and that's where we have great traction. Then we have a couple of verticals that is growing for us, which I would say is consumer electronics, home interior, [indiscernible], it's small, but we think that, that is a vertical that is -- they are on the, I'd say, going to digitalize the next coming years. So they will move over to this type of way of selling.

I would say that there is -- if you look to the one-to-one, it is very strong within the consumer electronics rather than fashion and beauty. So we also see different verticals working for the two different products. That would be my answer, if you have anything to add.

[Jonas Lagerstrom, executive]

Yes. I mean I can just add, if we look at geographies. So I mean, we are -- Americas is very strong for us, and we can also see that there are plenty of customers there that will really suit our profile at this very point. Of course, EMEA as well. But I would expect growth mostly in Americas and EMEA going forward because that's also where -- which is a bit strange, but we are based in Japan in Apex, obviously, we are quite Japan-centric. But you want to think that Japan is more on trend when it comes to, for example, liability shopping, but in that sense, they're a bit more hesitant in comparison to EMEA and Americas. So those are the two regions we would see would be most important for us.

[Maryam Ghahremani, executive]

But also, we have our smallest team in APAC or in Japan. So if you look to the number of employees, the U.S. team is the most the biggest one, but also in terms of looking at how long they have been here. That team has been up and running for almost 2 years now, and it takes time to employ and get people up to speed. So I would say that is why we are having that success in the U.S. because we will -- that was the first market out of Stockholm that we really started to employ and add team members. So their full-scale team experienced. And I would say EMEA is the next one, and then we have the APAC team that is the newest team and the fewest employees.

[Unknown Analyst]

That's very helpful. Maybe one more question, if I may, just on the cost side. If you look at just the total cost base for the company, it was I think if I have my numbers right, SEK 117 million in Q1, SEK 170 million in Q2, so stability and then SEK 123 million this quarter. And if we adjust that for the extraordinary costs that Jonas mentioned, the SEK 2.3 million is sort of, let's say, call it, SEK 120 million, so up a couple of million, but relative stability here.

If we look over the next few quarters and with the cost saving program in mind, how should we think about the cost? Is it sort of stable at this level, SEK 120 million? Or do you think it will keep growing because we have a lot of inflation even though you're saving costs, it will go up or could it actually come down? Just trying to understand which trajectory it will happen that will be helpful.

[Jonas Lagerstrom, executive]

Of course. So first of all, the annual cost saving is something we wanted to inform you about because it's obviously a material thing. However, I would not consider it as a net cost saving over time because we will add more talent to the company where needed. However, we are very focused on our adjusted EBITDA. So whether that means that we will have more revenue that will, in that sense, compensate for higher cost base, that's something that we cannot really tell you here and now. But those SEK 30 million that we announced will basically be a gradual cost saving becoming, I would say, 12 months. And in terms of -- if we expect our cost base to grow specifically, no, I would not say that.

However, again, we are more obsessed with adjusted EBITDA rather than the cost base. So I mean, it is a relation between revenue and cost. So I don't know if that answers your question, but at least it gives you more about idea of how we sort of see our business from a financial point of view.

[Unknown Analyst]

Yes, I understand. Maybe I could just ask in a different way, just headcount in the next 2, 3 quarters, is it going up or down, you think, from the current level?

[Jonas Lagerstrom, executive]

I would say it would be -- it could perhaps fluctuate because there's always a snapshot we have chosen to do in the period reporting when it comes to our employees and not average. But I would say that this figure, roughly 200 employees is -- will likely not decrease extremely much and likely not increase extremely either. So it will hover around that plus or minus a few.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] There are no questions at this time. So I hand the conference back to the speakers for web questions or any closing comments.

[Maryam Ghahremani, executive]

So we want to thank everyone who listened in today. And yes, we will end this session.

[Jonas Lagerstrom, executive]

Yes, we don't seem to have any web questions. So thank you very much for listening, and see you next quarter.

[Maryam Ghahremani, executive]

Yes. Thank you.

[Jonas Lagerstrom, executive]

Thank you.