Haivision Systems Inc

TSX:HAI

Earnings Call Transcript 2023-Q3

[Operator]

Hello, and welcome to the Haivision 3Q 2023 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions] I will now turn the conference over to Mirko Wicha. Please go ahead.

[Miroslav Wicha, executive]

Thank you, Sarah, and good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us today to discuss our third quarter results in the first 9 months of our fiscal year 2023. As demonstrated by the results we announced earlier today, demand for our products not only remained strong but our business fundamentals have never been better. We achieved a record Q3 revenue of $35 million, which represents an 18.2% growth over Q3 of last year.

As we continue to deliver top line, right, is inclusive of the revenue reduction we took because of exiting the house of worship vertical. Now we also achieved a record first 9 months revenue of $104.2 million, which represents an 18.6% growth over last year first month -- 9 months. Again, this is inclusive of the revenue reduction of the house of worship vertical that we have now completely exited from.

And our gross profit for Q3 grew 30% from last year's Q3, which is pretty impressive. And we delivered an adjusted EBITDA of $4.3 million for Q3, which represents a 12.4% operating margin. And this is compared to last year's Q3 adjusted EBITDA loss of $1.5 million, this represents an increase of 387%. Now for the first 9 months of the year, our adjusted EBITDA was $9.1 million, representing an increase of 193% from last year's 9 months performance.

As a reminder, we have always said that it's typical for our OpEx to be front-loaded, and we expect a much stronger EBITDA and operating margin performance in the second half of the year, which the Q3 results have clearly demonstrated. We expect Q4 to follow this trend. Now in addition, our gross margins in Q3 have increased to 71.9% from last year's Q3 of 66.1%. As we mentioned several times on our previous earnings calls, this was always our 2023 plan, and I'm very happy to say that we delivered what we said we would.

And I believe that this is only the beginning of what's to come in the future quarters. Our focus has been and continues to be profitability and EBITDA performance. And we clearly made the right decision last October to exit the house of worship managed services market, which has been successfully completed end of April and has now started to show in our P&L as promised. I should, however, mention the strong Q3 we just announced did include a significant $2.5 million U.S. government programmatic order that was originally scheduled to come into our Q4 as part of our government year-end planning.

Obviously, it's always good news when orders come earlier than expected. With this movement, we do expect our Q4 to be adjusted by this amount than previously planned, meaning we won't be seeing a typical hockey-stick effect to our Q4, and we remain confident with our year-end projections that Dan will be discussing. Now Q4 has always been the highest quarter by far in all of our fiscal years.

In fact, last year's Q4 was very, very high. In fact, if I recall, it was almost $39 million, due to an unusually strong U.S. government quarter. Now interestingly enough, this year, we have seen a more balanced and consistent quarterly performance. Infact, in Q1 of this year, if you remember, we did $34 million. In Q2, we did $35 million. And now in Q3, we delivered again $35 million. I expect this to continue into 2024 as we are finding that our 3 main verticals, our defense, our broadcast and enterprise balance each other out globally and give us better business predictability.

In addition, it's interesting to note the U.S. government has been slowly moving to a multi-quarter purchasing cycle and not only depending on the year-end September, October time frame, which always falls in our Q4. And we are also seeing strong demand for our global security operational centers within the global financial banking industry, cybersecurity, police centers, federal installations, public safety and all defense sectors. The needs to have real-time mission-critical and secure access to all your video sources and assets for real-time analysis or situational awareness is becoming more paramount.

And we are now the leading vendor delivering the entire contribution, distribution and visualization ecosystem in this critical area. And we believe that our company has a bright future ahead, and we are committed to maximizing long-term value for all our shareholders. We are confident in our ability to execute on our strategic plan and deliver continued growth and success.

Now In closing, despite the economic headwinds and continued supply chain challenges we keep hearing about from other companies, I believe that Haivision has weathered the storm better than most. And we expect our Q4 to be strong and consistent with our strategic plan and feel very comfortable with our year-end projections. Dan will discuss our guidance for the remainder of the year shortly.

And we are also very confident in our strategic plan and expect to demonstrate revenue growth and significant profitability growth in 2024. And finally, as we previously mentioned, we are moving quickly towards achieving our longer-term goal of delivering 20% EBITDA performance. With this, Dan, please continue with the financial details.

[Dan Rabinowitz, executive]

Thank you, Mirko. So let's talk numbers. Revenue for this third quarter of fiscal 2023 was $35 million. That's an increase of $5.4 million or 18.2% from the prior year comparative period. The revenue increase is notable for a number of reasons. First of all, the revenue comparison is an apples-to-apples comparison as revenue from Aviwest is included in both periods. Revenue from just the products increased by 28.8% in the quarter. This impact also was reflective of the $1.9 million decrease in cloud solution revenue when compared to last year.

We saw a fantastic revenue growth despite our decision to exit the managed services space that's focused on the house of worship market. Even our maintenance and support revenue saw double-digit growth, growing 15% year-over-year. This recent quarter did represent a record performance in terms of third quarter revenue, which historically tended to be a slower period for the company.

Hope to see more of these types of records in fiscal year 2024 and beyond. Revenue for the 9 months ended July 31 was $104.2 million. That's an increase of $16.3 million or 18.6% from the prior year comparative period. Note that year-to-date results included Aviwest performance for the entire 9 months, whereas in the prior year comparative period, year-to-date results included Aviwest for only 4 months.

On the other hand, this year-to-year performance reflects our exit from the managed services market in April. For the 9-month period, we saw cloud solution revenue declined by $2.8 million when compared to the prior year period. But with that said, we are seeing huge growth, and we see huge growth in maintenance and support revenue, which also grew by 23% year-over-year.

Recurring revenue, which we define as our cloud solutions and our maintenance and support, was $5.6 million or about 16% of total revenue in this recent third quarter, and it was about $20.3 million or 19% of total revenue on a year-to-date basis. We anticipated that our recurring revenue would decrease as a percentage of our total revenue once we exited the managed services business.

With that said, we do expect maintenance and support revenues to continue to grow robustly going forward. For this quarter, our gross margins were 71.9%, and that compares to 66.1% in the prior year comparable period. Further, this quarter's gross margin were an improvement from the 68.9% realized last quarter, that's our second quarter this fiscal year, and an increase from the 66% in the quarter before that, our first quarter this fiscal year.

As discussed in our last earnings call, we anticipated margins to improve in this third quarter and even suggested that the impact could be as much as 200 basis points. Well, we certainly exceeded that expectation. The managed services business had about $600,000 in fixed costs related to platform license fees, third-party add-ons and minimum bandwidth commitments. Said another way, the managed service business tended to be a below the average performer in terms of gross margin.

Further, supply chains appear to be reverting to more normal delivery schedules. We did incur just over $300,000 in additional costs related to hard-to-procure componentry that was consumed in the quarter. On a year-to-date basis, the additional cost for this in componentry was approximately $950,000 or about 100 basis points. These extra costs were approximately half of the costs that we incurred last year, which impacted margins by over 200 basis points.

We expect this extra expense to continue to dissipate going forward with the next year expectation for these costs to be half of the cost that we incurred this year. And just to complete the thought, there really wasn't much variation in overall mix throughout the year. Thus, these gross margin improvements are real improvements.

Total expenses for this quarter were $25.6 million, an increase of $1.2 million when compared to the same period in the prior year. However, in this quarter, total expenses included a nonrecurring restructuring cost of $1.5 million. We essentially completed the restructuring exercise that was initiated in the fourth quarter last year. The result is that we ended the quarter with 374 employees compared to 418 employees a year ago, and that compares to the 389 employees at the end of second quarter.

Generally speaking, approximately 75% of our cost structure is related to compensation expenses and related social charges that you can put the math together. I should mention that since the most recent restructuring was largely completed in the second half of this quarter, there may be additional opportunities for OpEx savings in this fourth quarter.

However -- excuse me, next week is our second largest trade show, the International Broadcasting Convention, or IBC, and it may result in incremental marketing spend in this fourth quarter. On a year-to-date basis, total expenses were $74.4 million, an increase of $9.1 million when compared to the year earlier period. As a reminder, the Aviwest transaction was consummated in April of 2022, which implies it was only part of our cost structure for 4 months in the comparable period last year.

Thus, it is impacting year-over-year comparisons. Aviwest added approximately 80 people last year. If we were to isolate the reason for the increase, compensation-related expenses added approximately $4 million in total expenses, most of which would be attributable to the timing of the Aviwest acquisition. Increases in depreciation and amortization expenses related to acquired assets and intangibles added an incremental $2.3 million in total expenses.

Increased travel expenses added an incremental $1.5 million and the Canadian dollars exchange rate impact on U.S. dollar-denominated assets and liabilities added an incremental $1 million to total expenses. When we normalize total expenses for share-based payments, depreciation of fixed assets, the amortization of intangibles and restructuring costs, total expenses were $20.8 million, a decrease of $400,000 from the prior year.

The result of the higher revenues, better gross margins and a decrease in OpEx is that adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was $4.3 million. That's an increase of $5.9 million when compared to the adjusted EBITDA loss of $1.5 million for the same period in the prior year. The adjusted EBITDA margin for this quarter was 12.4%. That margin compares quite positively to the 7.5% in the prior quarter and the 6.2% in the quarter prior to that.

In prior calls, we had certainly been signaling our belief that the third quarter would be somewhat of a watershed event. I believe now you are beginning to see the full benefit of our restructuring plan. And as there's still some additional opportunities to increase EBITDA margins going forward, we should see this continuing. We should see gross margins continue as we absorb the remaining higher cost componentry and as we continue to migrate the 2 acquisitions to a common ERP platform.

And as I explained earlier, we should see additional OpEx savings in the fourth quarter based on the timing of our restructuring exercise completed in June, albeit with this cautionary note that we do have our second largest trade show in this fourth quarter as well. Adjusted EBITDA for the 9-month period was $9.1 million, that's an increase of $5.9 million when compared to adjusted EBITDA of $3.1 million for the prior comparable period.

The adjusted EBITDA margin for this 9-month period was 8.7%, but that compares quite favorably to 3.6% for the prior year comparable periods. We also saw a significant improvement in the net loss for the quarter. The net loss for this quarter was only $900,000 compared to a net loss of $4.2 million for the same period in the prior year. That $3.4 million improvement is largely related to the [ $5.1 million ] increase in revenue and the improvement in gross margin, contributing $5.6 million in incremental gross profit.

Now these increases were offset by the $1.2 million in incremental expenses, and we did get some benefit from income tax recoveries of $900,000. Net loss on a year-to-date basis was $3.8 million, but that, too, compares quite favorably to the net loss of $5.1 million for the prior year comparative period.

With respect to the balance sheet, we ended the quarter with a cash balance of $7.5 million, a modest increase of $200,000 from the prior quarter end. However, we also ended the quarter with only $5.5 million outstanding on the credit facility, that's a reduction of $4.5 million from prior quarter end, and we reduced our term loans by an additional $1 million. Total assets at July 31 were $133.9 million. That is a decrease of $14.7 million from the end of fiscal year 2022, and the decrease in assets in the 9-month period largely related to a $7.6 million reduction in trade and other receivables, a $5.8 million reduction in intangible assets and a $2.4 million reduction in inventory.

These decreases were offset by the $1.7 million increase in our cash balance this fiscal year. Total liabilities at quarter end were $46.1 million. That's a decrease of $12.2 million from the end of fiscal 2022. The decrease in total liabilities for the 9-month period included a $5.5 million decrease in the line of credit, a $4.8 million decrease in trade and other payables, $1.2 million decrease in our lease liabilities and again, $1 million reduction in the amount of term loans outstanding.

With respect to the remaining integration plans, for Aviwest, we have completed the move of Aviwest to a common accounting system, and we just completed Aviwest move to a common ERP system. With this enhanced visibility to Aviwest inventory, we hope to increase the flexibility of Aviwest's supply chain and reduce direct product costs to increase gross margins. Our focus in the near term will be to sell more of Aviwest's products into North America.

At Haivision MCS, progress is also accelerating. Our current focus is to fully integrate development teams, and we expect this to be completed this month. Our next major focus is integrating its production capabilities and migrating MCS' ERP system to a common platform. The pace of integration is increasing over the remainder of the year. Just on an aside, this week, we also had our 12th ISO 9001 audit, and we're pleased to say that once again, the auditors found our quality management system to be fully effective, in fact, with outstanding ratings on most benchmarked activities.

In terms of expectations for the remainder of the year, we have completely transitioned out of the house of worship market. And even after losing that revenue, our overall revenues continue to show growth. Thus, our revenue guidance for the full year, which factors in the reduction in our managed services revenue, is now expected to be a bit higher. We had suggested that revenue for the year would be between $130 million and $135 million, but at the high end of that range being increasingly insight.

We are now forecasting revenue for the full fiscal year to be somewhere between $135 million and $140 million this year. We also expect to see continued expansion of our adjusted EBITDA margin as we continue to exploit synergistic opportunities and achieving double-digit adjusted EBITDA margins. That concludes my prepared remarks. So I'm passing the microphone back to you, Mirko, and then we'll open the floor to questions.

[Miroslav Wicha, executive]

Thank you, Dan. I guess we can look at some questions at the moment.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Nick Corcoran with Acumen Capital Partners.

[Nick Corcoran, analyst]

This is Nick Corcoran from Acumen Capital Partners. Congrats on a great quarter. Just a couple of questions for me. First, with Aviwest, you've talked about sales in North America. Can you maybe talk about the traction you've been getting and whether or not the writer strike in Hollywood has increased the demand for either the products from Aviwest or your kind of legacy products?

[Miroslav Wicha, executive]

Sure. Yes, I'll take that. I mean, right now, the attraction we're getting is -- has actually been pretty solid. Again, a number of that Aviwest was very, very low or weak, I would say, in the North American coverage. And obviously, Haivision is very, very strong in North America. So our whole push has been, for the last years, to get not only get up to speed but get all of our clients, testing equipment, getting their hands on the equipment and just seeing how it works with the legacy systems.

So I think we not only made great progress I think there's a lot more opportunity yet to come. And so I'm pretty optimistic from a lot of our key, key broadcast clients, which have basically materials everywhere to really get on the bandwagon of the PRO Series. So we do have already some wins. And I think we're looking for a huge growth there in fiscal 2024. I don't think the -- I'm not hearing at all anything about the writers strike that's affecting our business. The majority of our business, honestly, is live sports, and that's pretty healthy. It's doing very, very well for us globally.

[Nick Corcoran, analyst]

Great. And then maybe thinking about the adjusted EBITDA margins, how should we think about the progression to 20%? And how should we think about the fourth quarter relative to the third quarter?

[Dan Rabinowitz, executive]

Well, Nick, thank you for the question. We see opportunity to lower our OpEx in the fourth quarter. We also see opportunity to improve our gross margin in the fourth quarter. And hopefully, that's going to translate to a higher EBITDA margin. I think we've been forecasting that we should be in the double digits for the full year based on current performance. And so we do see some expansion in the fourth quarter compared to where we were in the third quarter.

[Nick Corcoran, analyst]

And taking longer -- kind of longer-term, what do you think the time lines get to 20%?

[Dan Rabinowitz, executive]

I'm sorry, I didn't hear the last part of that question.

[Nick Corcoran, analyst]

Yes. I'm thinking about timelines that you get from the adjusted EBITDA margins you had in the third quarter to 20%?

[Dan Rabinowitz, executive]

So I think what we sort of forecasted is that in 2024, we will see a 20% EBITDA margin in one of our quarters. I'm not ready to commit. I don't think we will get to 20% for the full year. I'm not suggesting that it's out of question. But our goal right now is to demonstrate 20% growth in at least one of our quarters -- 20% EBITDA margins in one of quarters.

[Nick Corcoran, analyst]

That's helpful. And how should we think about the conversion of free cash flow from adjusted EBITDA?

[Dan Rabinowitz, executive]

Well, I try to sort of give you a way to look at the equation here. Our adjusted EBITDA was about $4.3 million. And as I kind of pointed out, between the cash balance and the line of credit, we were able to reduce our line of credit by $4.5 million. We were able to reduce our debt by $1 million. That should give you a sense that adjusted EBITDA is a fairly good indicator of what our cash generating ability might be.

[Nick Corcoran, analyst]

Great. And then the last question for me, just as you sort of generate more free cash flow, what are your capital allocation priorities between paying down debt, share buybacks, M&A and any other users?

[Dan Rabinowitz, executive]

I'm not sure I heard what your first sub-point was. I think we're right now focused on integration -- fully integrating these 2 properties, demonstrating our EBITDA margin. We have been quite successful in M&A. All of our acquisitions thus far have been very successful, and it's something that we would probably be looking to at the future, but we're not looking for anything that's distracting us from this goal of demonstrating the earning capability of the business.

[Nick Corcoran, analyst]

And have share buybacks -- something you've contemplated?

[Dan Rabinowitz, executive]

Not really. No, not at this juncture. It's not something we think about. I think we -- with $7 million in the bank right now, I don't think it's an opportunity for us to be buying back shares at this juncture.

[Operator]

Your next question comes from the line of Daniel Rosenberg with Paradigm Capital.

[Daniel Rosenberg, analyst]

Congrats on a very strong quarter. My first question goes to the levers that you were speaking to on lowering OpEx. And so I was just curious to hear specifics around what areas are you able to achieve this? And then is it the scale that you guys are -- the operating leverage and economies of scale that's helping drive the confidence in your statements around getting to 20% next year?

[Dan Rabinowitz, executive]

Good question. So the way that I look at the equation, we started this restructuring effort in the fourth quarter of last year. Now remind you, we had purchased Aviwest in April of 2022. And so that fourth quarter was the first quarter that we were able to see what the excess burden would be of that entity and how the teams were working together. We recognized really quickly that we have to right size our R&D efforts because we've done a number of acquisitions in the last few years, and many of those acquisitions included a significant number of engineers to help build products for us.

So as we're going through the exercise, we are focusing on having everyone working on a common platforms, using common technologies, common methodologies, and that's what's resulted in the headcount decrease in last year. Now in this current period, our focus was a little bit different. We wanted to see what products have legs, what products we had opportunity going forward. And we realigned our development teams to be more focused on those products that generate the most revenue for the business.

And that resulted in an additional headcount reduction of about 15 people. So we've now reprioritized the business, focusing on those new products, focusing on the opportunities going forward. And we're able to make some pretty decisive decisions that I think are going to generate additional EBITDA going forward.

[Daniel Rosenberg, analyst]

Okay. Appreciate that. And in terms of the debt pay down, I'm just curious to hear if there's anything specific around the timing or structure, that spark you wanting to pay down in this quarter or any targets in terms of leverage ratios that you think are the right ones to have for this company?

[Dan Rabinowitz, executive]

If you're talking about just trade -- I'm sorry, regular debt, term loans, we assume those term loans as part of the Aviwest transaction, and those term loans were very favorably priced. Some of them were as low as 1% interest rates and what have you. We're not looking to accelerate our payments against those debt instruments rather this just happens to be the timing of repayment for these instruments. Nothing is leading us to accelerate that at all.

With respect to the line of credit, it's just happenstance. We have no obligation to pay it down. We are not looking to pay it down, but what are we going to do with excess cash rather than paying interest rates on and we decided to pay it down. Now mind you, we still have this line of credit, a $35 million line of credit with the accordion expansion feature for 25 additional million dollars. So we could pay it down and then we reuse it if we wanted to.

[Daniel Rosenberg, analyst]

Okay. And last one for me. So a number of product launches and industry recognition around products and awards. Just curious what excites -- or what are the new product areas that are exciting and growth potential for you, the ones that get you most excited, let's say?

[Miroslav Wicha, executive]

Yes, great question. I mean there's a several, in fact. Right now, we're in the middle of, I think, 3 separate shows going on this week and next week. IBC is the second largest broadcast show, and we're actually showing some pretty good technology there. We're also showcasing an -- another -- actually, a defense show, is a Command 360. I just found out top players. We just won an award -- a show award for that as one of the best products, which is our Command 360 visual collaboration systems. I think that's one of the ones that we're the most excited about. We just start rolling that out.

There's a tremendous potential. We're seeing a huge potential in all of these global secure operation centers, interestingly enough from all sectors. Believe it or not, the banking sector, which we're extremely strong in, we are the leader in that sector, and they just can't get enough of our stuff. So that's cool. Cybersecurity is going bananas with our systems. So we're seeing it in state and local, police, fire, emergency response and not to mention, all of the defense groups that we deal with.

So the Command 360 is the one that really is getting us excited and it's by far the big growth engine going forward. So that's cool. There are some new changes. We're actually launching a couple of new Makitos, which is our core product, and that's exciting. We'll be launching a couple more in the next 2 quarters, different variations. We did a single channel Makito, which was the first time ever we launched that in a different form factor. And then we're also doing a soft launch showcasing kind of an early adoption beta program for our HUB 360, which is our cloud system to connect all of our devices -- edge devices for our broadcast workflow.

So we did a sneak preview at NAB. We're doing a little more than a sneak preview at IBC this week or starting this week, I should say. Then that is scheduled to be GA or generally available at the end of the calendar year kind of first quarter of 2024 calendar where we expect that to bring on more speed from a total solution itself. So you've got the cloud platform, HUB 360, Command 360 and some of the Makito stuff. And we're really reenergizing the PRO Series transmitters in the North America market, where I see a huge opportunity.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] Your next question comes from the line of Robert Young with Canaccord.

[Robert Young, analyst]

I was hoping to dig a little bit into gross margins and the outlook. You said that the gross margins were maybe a little better than expected, given the house of worship impact no longer a drag, supply chain improvement, maybe a little bit of integration. And I think you suggested that gross margins can continue to get better as you move -- integrate -- or integrate the recent acquisitions and put them on a common ERP and then further supply chain benefits. And so it seems -- should we be thinking of 71%, 72% being a base? Like will it improve from here? Or are there any negative things that we should be considering?

[Dan Rabinowitz, executive]

Well, Robert, nice to hear from you again. I'm not sure I'd be as optimistic as you are. But maybe I'm just a very conservative -- tend to be fairly conservative. The one area that's fairly defined is the cost of this componentry that we spent some incremental monies to be able to obtain, to be able to serve our customers. Last year, those incremental costs were about 210 basis points. And we've seen that number be cut in half this year. It's about 110 basis points. That's impacted our financial statements.

And we anticipate that to actually be reduced in half next year as well. So that's a real tangible benefit you can look at. Now when it comes to the ERP and the migration of the 2 entities, that speaks to an opportunity, but we've got some work to do to make sure that we can exploit it. I've got a lot of confidence in our supply chain people. As Mirko kind of alluded to, we weathered this global shortage better than many of our competitors out there. There was not a single customer that we could not deliver products to because of the way that we were able to handle our supply chains.

So I am confident that being on a common platform with the common tools that we use to be able to manage our cost of goods sold will be able to impact MCS' business and Aviwest's business going forward. So if you were -- if -- conservatively speaking, I would maybe look at a 0.5 point improvement next year and another 0.5 point improvement the year after that and another 0.5% improvement thereafter, but we are certainly going to strive to better that as well.

[Robert Young, analyst]

Okay. Great. And then, I mean, looking at OpEx, the restructuring exercise, you said it completed in June. So there's some residual impact there. To get to the EBITDA margin expansion, would it be -- are there some -- is it mostly driven by top line growth? Or will there be some additional OpEx benefit in addition to the growth you just talked about?

[Dan Rabinowitz, executive]

I'm anticipating a little bit more OpEx benefit as a result of the timing of the last restructuring. If you think about it, we did the restructuring at the second half of June. So our second quarter -- third quarter financials had fully loaded cost for those individuals for both the month of May and June. Those expenses aren't going to be part of our fourth quarter equation.

Again, I'm cautioning that we do have a -- one of our big trade shows in the fourth quarter that's going to go the opposite direction. But overall, I do believe we're going to be seeing some incremental benefit. Now in terms of revenue, Mirko kind of mentioned that we're seeing more of a flattening of our revenue curve. It used to be that our fourth quarter was a very large quarter. It was in concert with the U.S. year-end, but we're seeing that even that business seems to come in more ratably throughout the year.

And we did have a surprise opportunity where a programmatic deal came into the third quarter that we firmly expected to see in the fourth quarter. So we're probably seeing flat revenue in the fourth quarter, give or take.

[Robert Young, analyst]

Okay. And so actually, that was my next question. The government program, I think it was $2.5 million. Is that full $2.5 million? Is that the pull forward? Or was that the size of the program and it was pulled forward?

[Dan Rabinowitz, executive]

That was the amount of revenue recognition in the third quarter that we thought was going to be a fourth quarter event.

[Operator]

Your next question comes from the line of Daniel H. Baldini with Oberon Asset Management.

[Daniel Baldini, analyst]

I have a question that relates really to the U.S. portion of your broadcast business. And that is -- in recent weeks, we observed a standoff between Charter and Disney. And the settlement appears to basically have accelerated the demise of the cable bundle here in the U.S. And I'm just curious, how could you grow your U.S. broadcast business in a world where there's just fewer cable channels out there and fewer local affiliates producing local news as time goes on?

[Miroslav Wicha, executive]

Okay. Well, I mean, thank you for the question. Well, let me just explain what we actually do in broadcast and where our systems are sold. And we're predominantly in live sports, right? And which means we get -- we work with the affiliates and with the main broadcasting companies, but also that deal with people like the NFL, people like the Fox News -- sorry, Sports, not -- FOX Sports, ESPN and then they work with people like the NCAAs, I mean they go down and down in the different sporting leagues for instant replays, for live monitoring of games, practice fields, et cetera, golf events. So we're not really competing -- or I'd say competing, we're not looking for cable network type of news business is evolving.

We're seeing that live sports is actually growing globally, not just the U.S., right? Now for us, what we -- as a company, we've never been involved in wireless or cellular bonded type of solutions and [indiscernible] solutions. We've all been fixed in Iraq at events. But Aviwest technology brings us the capability to do 5G wireless, cellular bonding technology, where if you think -- as an example, think of PDA and golf and the guys with the backpacks following the golfers, right? I mean that stuff we've never played with before.

Now we are involved in that heavily. So for us, we're seeing our business potentially increasing because we're doing both wired and wireless, and that's a pickup for us, right? That's pick up market share that we were never involved in. So from a North American broadcast perspective, it's been pretty strong. I mean we also benefited from the big COVID bubble, right, which is tremendous. Everybody doing remote production, everybody doing everything remote. But we haven't seen a slowdown of live sports, which is really what we do very well. Does that help?

[Daniel Baldini, analyst]

All right. Yes, that's helpful.

[Operator]

And there are no further questions at this time. I will turn the call over to Mirko Wicha.

[Miroslav Wicha, executive]

Okay. Well, thank you, Sarah. So I just want to basically thank everybody and all our shareholders and analysts on the line today for the continued support of Haivision, and we look forward to speaking with all of you in January when we plan to be discussing our full year 2023 results. So that's going to be sometime late January as always and really look forward to be able to talk about the whole year results. So thanks again, and we'll see everybody in January. Bye.

[Operator]

This concludes today's conference call. We thank you for joining. You may now disconnect your lines.