illumin Holdings Inc

TSX:ILLM

Earnings Call Analysis

Earnings Call Transcript 2024-Q2

[Operator]

Good morning, everyone. Before we begin the official remarks, I will read the cautionary note regarding forward-looking information. Certain information to be discussed during this call contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable security laws, including, among others, statements concerning the company's objectives, the company's strategy to achieve those objectives as well as statements with respect to management's beliefs, plans, estimates and intentions and similar statements concerning anticipated future events, results, circumstances, performance or expectations that are not historical facts.

Such forward-looking statements reflect management's current beliefs and are based on information currently available to management and are subject to a number of significant risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated. Please refer to the cautionary statement and risk factors identified in our filings with SEDAR for a more detailed explanation of the inherent risks and uncertainties that could affect such forward-looking statements. Following the presentation, we will conduct a Q&A session.

I would now like to turn the conference call over to Mr. Simon Cairns, Chief Executive Officer.

[Simon Cairns, executive]

Welcome, everyone, and thank you for joining today's second quarter 2024 earnings call. Today, I'll start with a brief recap of highlights from the quarter, talk about where we did well such as our illumin self-service business and the steps we're taking to reposition ourselves in areas where we see opportunity for future revenue growth, like our managed services business. Then I'll turn the call over to our Chief Financial Officer, Elliot Muchnik, who will walk you through the highlights of our second quarter 2024 financial and operating results. After that, we'll be happy to take your questions.

For the second quarter, we reported total revenue of $29.2 million, which include illumin self-service revenue of $8.8 million, a 61% increase compared to Q2 2023. At the same time, total operating expenses were 14% lower year-over-year even as adjusted EBITDA rose 11% compared to the same period in 2023. The second quarter was extremely strong for illumin self-service business. As I already mentioned, during the quarter, illumin self-service revenue grew substantially by 61% compared to last year's second quarter. It also accounted for 30% of total revenue compared to just 16% in the same period last year. Perhaps most importantly, this growth was driven by customer relationships that were new to the company.

In the second quarter, we onboarded 33 net new illumin self-service clients. This reflects the success of recent changes that we have made to our sales activities to accelerate our sales cycle as well as within our illumin self-service go-to-market strategy. We have been refining our sales initiatives, looking for ways to make them more productive, and we've been targeting higher spend customers, which should contribute to increasing revenue.

In addition to our successful sales efforts, today's results indicate that more advertisers are recognizing the emerging value of the illumin platform. In particular, how it enables our customers to see the impact of their advertising spend on just one canvas across the entire consumer journey. The customers' feedback we've received has a consistent theme. The visibility illumin offers enables our customers to gauge the results of their campaigns and to dynamically adjust activities in real time, allowing them to maximize their return on investment.

This is extremely important to advertisers and marketers, particularly in today's macroeconomic environment where getting the most out of our advertising spend is vital. As these results show, revenue from our self-service platform continues to grow at a good pace, both year-over-year and as a percentage of total revenue. Also even with the growth we're seeing today, the platform is still largely in the early stages and represents an emerging growth opportunity for us.

As I mentioned on our last call, I see customers currently utilizing the platform as early adopters. We can learn a great deal from their feedback and prove ourselves to be better to better serve their needs and in doing so, increase the growth that we're already seeing on this side of the business.

So in short, we are pleased with the growth of our illumin self-service platform, which is part of our strategic shift in our business, transitioning our focus from a transactional revenue model with no contractual commitment to a more sustainable, recurring self-service model with longer-term contracts. Over time, we believe this should give us the ability to deliver a more consistent revenue growth and profitability.

Turning to managed services side of our business. Our second quarter results were in line with expectations, improving on a sequential basis. Similar to last quarter, managed services revenue reflected a decline in programmatic revenue, primarily in Latin America. As mentioned on our last call, this was something we expected. On our last call, I also talked about how I viewed managed services as an area where our customers consistently tell us they value our services.

Since then, we have continued increasing our managed services sales efficiency to remove friction. We are implementing a number of initiatives, as we refine our sales approach and reorganize our sales and marketing activities, including recommitting to managed services, simplifying our go-to-market steps, testing different market segments as underserviced, along with focusing on how our team supports customers along the various service points in our managed services workflows.

To this end, we are excited to announce that we have brought on a new Chief Revenue Officer, Liz Ritzcovan, who brings over 20 years of print, digital media software sales experience with industry-leading organizations to illumin. Before joining us, Liz served as Chief Revenue Officer at Hustle and was responsible for leading Hustle's go-to-market organization, including sales, market development, sales organizations, client services and marketing. Previously, Liz served as Global Chief Revenue Officer at Namagoo, Foursquare, Bazaarvoice, Sizmek and Parade Media Group. Prior to that, she served as Vice President at Yahoo! and Time. We are thrilled to have her join us and look forward to her contributing to illumin's continued growth.

Also joining in August is Bridget Westerholz, our new Senior Vice President of Marketing. Bridget is a global marketing leader with over 20 years of experience inside advertising agencies and inside brands, the same 2 sides of our customer base. She has both built and managed high-performance teams, crafted brand strategies for leading clients and successfully planned and operated campaigns with clients in the U.S., Canada and the U.K. and elsewhere. We are excited to welcome her to the illumin team. Together, we believe these key hires as well as the actions we're taking in managed services and self-serve will drive our long-term revenue growth and improve our profitability.

In the midst of all this recent activity, I want to be clear that we have been carefully managing our expenses, and we have been reallocating those resources in order to improve efficiencies and to bolster revenue, focusing on the areas where we see the most growth potential. This is also reflected in our second quarter results. You'll notice that even while our sales and marketing spending fell year-over-year, our illumin self-service revenue still grew rapidly as our sales efforts have become more productive.

Also, while our gross margin remained consistent at 48% on a year-over-year basis, as I noted earlier, total operating expenses were lower, while our adjusted EBITDA increased 11% compared to the same period in 2023. This was mainly due to our improved sales productivity and reduced operating costs. It's now been nearly 4 months since I joined illumin. I'm proud of the progress we've made, but we are still in the early stages of returning to growth, so there is a lot of work still to be done.

Based on our progress to date, the strength and growth we've experienced with our illumin self-service revenue and the opportunities ahead of us, we currently expect to return the company to year-over-year revenue growth in the third quarter of this year. We're continuing to look at how we can do things differently and more effectively so we can capitalize on our current growth drivers like our illumin self-service platform and make sure we are fully benefiting from the products and services that we already have available to us.

At the same time, we are exploring new opportunities for growth in our managed services. We are continuing to invest in areas that represent the greatest return on investment, including improving our product road map, our AI and our algorithms, simplifying the user experience of the illumin platform and strengthening our sales and customer service steps. We are setting clear and achievable targets for ourselves, reviewing them constantly and holding ourselves accountable to making them.

By continuing on this course, I believe we will enhance productivity, make our sales efforts more effective, increase revenues and ultimately drive illumin's long-term growth.

With that, let me turn the call over to Elliot to give a detailed review of our financial results.

[Elliot Muchnik, executive]

Thank you, Simon, and good morning, everyone, and thank you again for joining our second quarter 2024 earnings call.

Today, we reported second quarter results, which included a strong illumin Self-Serve revenue growth, reduced total operating expenses and adjusted EBITDA improvement of 11% compared to the same period last year. Our second quarter revenue was $29.2 million. The year-over-year difference reflects a decline in managed service revenue and programmatic revenue, primarily in Latin America. This was partially offset by an increase in illumin self-service revenue.

Turning to our illumin Self-Serve business, illumin Self-Serve revenue was $8.8 million in the second quarter, up 61% compared to $5.4 million in Q2 2023 and is now representing 30% of total revenue compared to 16% in last year's second quarter. This year-over-year growth was driven largely by new customer relationships.

As mentioned earlier, we onboarded 33 new illumin Self-Serve clients during the quarter, resulting from sales initiatives targeting higher spend customers. In sum, the Self-Serve revenue results speak to the success of our sales initiatives as well as the traction this platform is gaining in the marketplace. What's even more impressive is that this growth was achieved even with the normal seasonality we typically see in the second quarter.

And now I'll give a more detailed review of our financial results. As I mentioned earlier, second quarter revenue was $29.2 million compared to $33.2 million in Q2 2023. This decline was mainly driven by a decision to reduce activity in Argentina at the end of last year in order to reduce the risk of a rapidly changing and unsteady economic environment and inflationary pressure. Growth in Self-Serve of 61% offset the decline partially. This growth was primarily driven by new clients as well as higher utilization of the platform by our existing clients. Gross profit or net revenue for the second quarter was $14.0 million compared to $15.9 million in Q2 2023 reflecting lower sales in the quarter.

Gross margin was 48%, consistent with the same period in 2023 despite the change in our revenue mix towards self-serve. Total operating expenses for the second quarter of 2024 were $16.5 million, a decrease of 14% compared to $19.2 million during the same period last year. We continue to be focused on operational discipline and implementing our strategic cost management initiatives, which contributed to this year-over-year expense decline.

As I mentioned earlier in my opening comment, we saw an adjusted EBITDA improvement during the quarter of 11% compared to the same period last year. For the quarter, adjusted EBITDA was $515,000 compared to $465,000 in Q2 2023. And this improvement, despite lower revenues, demonstrates our ongoing focus on operational efficiency and cost control.

Net loss for the second quarter of 2024 was $1 million, a considerable improvement compared to net loss of $5.6 million in the same period last year, again, illustrating our lower operating costs on a year-over-year basis, a net foreign exchange gain versus a loss in the prior year period and lower income taxes.

As previously announced, in June 2024, the company uplisted the trading of its common shares from the OTC Pink Market to the OTCQB Venture Market or OTCQB as it is known in the United States. We began trading on the OTCQB on June 7 under the ticker symbol ILLMF. As of March 6, 2024, we are also fully deregistered from the SEC.

The majority of the savings from the NASDAQ deregistration will be fully realized in 2025. However, we will expect to see some impact in the second half of 2024 from reduction in related costs such as insurance. The company shares continue to be listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange in Canada under the trading symbol ILLM. And we are very pleased with this OTCQB upgrade as we believe it will provide shareholders and investors with improved accessibility and liquidity.

On November 13, 2023, the company commenced a new normal course issuer bid or NCIB for the purchase of cancellation of up to 4.3 million of its outstanding common shares. During the 3 and the 6 months ended June 30, 2024, the company purchased and canceled 1.3 million and 2.5 million of its common shares under the NCIB at an average price of $1.64 and $1.65 per share, totaling $2.2 million and $4.1 million in consideration, respectively.

In total, by the end of Q2 of this year, we have acquired 2.9 million shares at an average price of $1.63 for a total cost of $4.8 million. And since the end of Q2, we have continued the program and purchased an additional 556,000 shares at an average price of $1.62. Therefore, since inception, we've acquired 81% of our allotted limit of 4.3 million shares with an average cost of $1.63 per share and a total spend of $5.7 million.

The NCIB can remain active and continue until November 12, 2024 or until we reach our target repurchase limit. This initiative is part of our broader strategy to optimize our capital structure while maintaining the flexibility to invest in growth opportunities as they arise.

As of June 30, 2024, our cash and cash equivalents stood at $51.6 million, a decrease from $55.5 million at the end of 2023. And this decrease was primarily attributable to the repurchase of the company's shares, investments in our platform and property and equipment and payments on leases. This was partially offset by positive cash provided by operating activities before changes in working capital, income taxes paid and interest paid and from timing of noncash operating working capital in the period. As of June 30, 2024, the total number of outstanding common shares stood at 51,405,952, following a series of strategic adjustments to our share structure, which was compared to the 56,185,631 shares on June 30, 2023. And this figure includes the impact of our recent share repurchases under the NCIB, partially offset by a modest number of shares issued through the exercise of restricted share units and other vested equity instruments.

And in conclusion, during the second quarter, we saw strong sequential illumin self-serve revenue growth despite the quarter typically being seasonally lower. This uptick in self-serve revenue speaks of the recognition that this innovative platform is gaining in the marketplace. And at the same time, we continue to be focused on our operational discipline and this focus led to a further year-over-year reduction in our expenses.

And aside from our improved operating efficiencies, our long-term focus remains on generating strong, sustainable revenue growth in both managed service and illumin Self-Serve, and we have implemented a number of sales initiatives to accomplish this, which should produce year-over-year revenue growth in the third quarter of this year. And with that, I'd like to turn the call back to Simon for his closing remarks.

[Simon Cairns, executive]

Thank you, Elliot. In summary, our second quarter results reflect another quarter of growth in our illumin self-service business despite normal quarterly seasonality and macroeconomic concerns. This growth was driven by new customers to illumin, showing the success of our refined sales initiatives and the growing recognition of our advertising journey platform is gaining in the marketplace.

Looking forward, we will continue to advance our growth plans for both illumin self-service as well as managed services, which we consider to be an area with great promise. We are carefully managing our cost structure while improving productivity to make sure we are working effectively and maximizing revenue opportunities. We are excited about our future and confident in reaching these goals. We look forward to delivering further growth and generating long-term value for our shareholders.

Thank you all for your time today. This concludes our formal remarks. We look forward to answering any questions you may have.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] We will now begin our Q&A. Gentlemen, your first question comes from Drew McReynolds. Excuse me, just 1 second. Just a moment please. So it appears this morning, we have no direct questions for management. I guess the presentation was nice, clear and concise. Hold on 1 second. We have a question coming in after all. And once again, our first question comes from Drew McReynolds of RBC Securities. Drew, please proceed with your question when you are ready.

It looks like there might be some difficulty with Drew's connection perhaps. So it looks like we are back to the no questions. Unfortunately, we were not able to bring Drew into the platform.

So with that, I would like to thank Simon and Elliot and our participants this morning. Please join us next time as we present our Q3 financial and operating results. Goodbye for now.