Reklaim Ltd

XTSX:MYID

Earnings Call Transcript 2023-Q2

[Neil Sweeney, executive]

Okay. So 4:05, let's get started. Thanks, everybody, for taking some time out of your day to quickly go over some of these numbers. Lots of familiar names that we're seeing here. Lots of -- some new faces as well. So if you're new to the stock, welcome; and if you've been here for a while, I'm sure you're happy with the direction that these numbers are going in.

What I would say is I'll go through the presentation. Feel free to write in any questions that you might have. And then we'll spend time at the end of the presentation to dig into any of the particular numbers.

Okay. So again, for maybe some of you that are not totally familiar with Reklaim or new to what we're doing here, the whole philosophy of Reklaim since we started this company 3, 4 years ago was really based on this premise that the 8 billion consumers in the world today have a data profile. That data profile is worth approximately $10,000 per year. It's powering thousands of companies around the world. And while those companies are generating profits from that, you as a consumer really have no visibility, compensation or optionality around this data.

So Reklaim was created to create a portal to allow consumers to view, access, consent and option their data and really give them the seat at the table. And I think what we've also been doing is we've been making a pretty large bet on this notion that the world is increasingly moving towards privacy-compliant data. What that means is having consumers more involved in the decisioning around how their data is actually being used. And what we're seeing right now is there is an inflection point in the privacy market, specifically in the United States, which is the largest data in the market -- data market in the world by a long shot. This is now inflecting. And we're seeing almost, on a monthly basis, new state legislation coming into effect that is actually asking or requiring explicit opt-in from individual consumers.

We've sort of talked about this, this idea there that, first and foremost, let's give consumers access to their data, let's let them edit that data, add to that data and then consent to that data. And when a brand or an agency or a platform uses that data, an individual can accept that order, deny that order and receive compensation. Compensation takes the form of crypto coins, dollars, gift cards and product and other things in the future as well.

So just kind of quickly at the numbers. This is the first $1 million a quarter that we've had. So that was up 62% from Q2 2022, so total revenue, $1.043 million. The operating expenses were down 49% from Q2 '22, so $580,000. Gross margin was up to 80%. Year-over-year, we were actually operating at a negative 1% margin. So we've gone from negative 1% to 80% over the course of the year. A lot of this has really been really based on this premise that we talked about for quite some time, was that, first, we needed to build the infrastructure, scale the product and then operationalize the business. Just to manage everybody's expectations, the gross margin isn't going to go from 80% to 92%. But I think everybody should be pretty happy that we moved from minus 1% to 80-plus percent.

Rolling 4 quarters of revenue, this is a fourth straight quarter of record growth for us actually, and it's the first quarter where we've actually gone over $1 million. So $606,000 to $719,000 to $728,000 to $1.043 million, so 19%, 1% to 43% growth over the last 4 quarters.

There's a couple of things to kind of keep in mind here. The first is there is seasonality in this business. Q4 is usually the highest quarter of the year. Q1 is usually the lowest quarter. So if you're looking for some directional guidance here, the fact that you were doing record revenue in Q1 of '23 bodes well for Q2, Q3 and most importantly, Q4. So we're happy that we've kind of gotten over this $1 million mark. I've always believed that when building the business, first, you've got to generate $1 million in a year. Then, you have to generate $1 million in a quarter. Then, you've got to learn how to generate $1 million a month. Then, you've got to learn how to generate $1 million a week, and then you got to learn how to generate $1 million a day.

Kind of hitting each of those individual inflection points is not trivial, but we passed the first 2, that being $1 million in a year and now $1 million in a quarter. So how do we grow this business to start doing $1 million a month? That's the next hop that we're working on.

The platform revenue makes up about 68% of our total revenue. It grew by 67% compared to 2022 last year. Platform revenue, think of it. I always use the analogy of grocery stores. Platform revenue is where we put Reklaim data on the shelf to be used by Fortune 500 companies in the grocery store of their choice. I'd say what we've done a very good job of is we have pretty much ubiquitous distribution. If you would like to buy Reklaim data, you can do so in Amazon, Google, The Trade Desk, LiveRamp, Lotame, 25 to 30 other platforms.

Identity revenue is when a platform is coming to us looking to buy additional data points such as age and gender or to actually buy specifically consent. It represents about 32% of our total revenue, improved by about 40%. Again, if you're looking for some direction here, the platform revenue, which is really made up of brands and agencies, that's our bread and butter. Expect that to grow at a faster rate than the identity revenue. The identity revenue is great, longer sales cycle for sure, so I think as time goes on, we are increasingly moving more towards that platform revenue. So I suspect the platform revenue will continue to increase and make up more and more of our business while identity revenue becomes probably a bit of a smaller part of our business.

So year-over-year comparison, $645,000 in Q2 last year to over $1 million this year, so 62% growth year-over-year in the quarter. Cost of services, this has been crashing. We talked for quite some time with this notion of actually streamlining the costs. So from Q3 '22 to Q2 '23, we've moved from $505,000 to $209,000. I would say that, as I mentioned earlier, you should expect the margins to stay pretty much consistent at this point. We're not going to go to 90-plus percent margin.

I'd say one of the other bigger things that we've done here is in streamlining our infrastructure as we did eliminate one vendor. That's represented here in the blue bars. They represented 38% and 47% of total costs in 2022, which was a bit of a nightmare to be honest, but they're now gone. And as a consequence of that, not surprisingly, our cost structure is a lot more efficient.

The other thing that the team has done a very good job on is we've really operationalized our cloud infrastructure. If you're not careful with cloud -- everybody talks about cloud being super elastic and super efficient. It's also super expensive if you're not paying attention. And so I think we've done a really good job about being very efficient as it relates to the cloud infrastructure and streamlining that. We've made some massive, massive gains there. But again, you're never going to get cloud hosting and infrastructure down to 0, but it's now at a much more manageable pace.

So I think this sums it up. You've gone from $651,000 down to $209,000 in a year-over-year comparison. A big chunk of that obviously comes from eliminating that one individual vendor.

Rolling gross margin, 17% to 26% to 71% to 80-plus percent. More importantly, you're moving from minus 1% gross margin to over -- to about 80%. We expect this to be where it is going forward, but we think we can make lots of money at 80% margin. That's for sure.

This is translating into the net income and the net loss. We are now no longer a company that's burning cash and constantly out raising money. We're now a company that is actually generating cash and actually making money. That takes a lot of pressure off of me, in particular, but it takes a lot of pressure off of the business. We would have liked to have done this a little bit sooner. I would have liked this to have actually happened in Q1 of '23. Didn't happen. It's happening now in Q2 '23. We expect this to be the -- this -- we expect this to be the new norm kind of going forward. Don't really have any interest or intention of going out into the market and raising any more money. We actually think that we can continue to build this business off of the revenue and the cash flow that we're actually driving today.

So as a consequence, when you look at this from Q2 '22 to Q2 '23, we are burning over $800,000 in Q2 of '22, definitely a low point to a highlight of '23, where we're actually making over $250,000. So again, I think about that with some seasonality. If you can make $250,000 in the second quarter, bodes well for future quarters. So you can do a bit of a run rate on that as to where you think that that's going to land and how it's going to manifest in the individual stock.

Maybe a little bit too much detail, but why not? Gives you a little bit of a breakout specifically by function. I'd say the theme here is everything is down. Marketing is down. Selling and business development costs are down. R&D is down. G&A is also down. This -- again, similar to margin, there's only so far that this can go. I think we've squeezed this. The company is pretty lean. I think what you should probably expect is if there are going to be additional costs in this business, it will probably actually help -- happen specifically probably in the selling and the business development line.

We have been adding increasingly more people there to actually drive the -- to drive the revenue and increase the number of clients that we're working with. But again, I don't expect any material changes on this, but again, you shouldn't be expecting any material changes to the downside as well.

Comparison, 55% reduction year-over-year from Q2 '22 to Q2 '23. Two other -- one other quick thing that I wanted to mention because this has come up a couple of times. I'm not sure if all of you have read the MD&A that we've actually put out, but we had about $1.4 million in payables in Q2 of '23. A large part of this was because of an ongoing dispute that we had with a vendor who thought we owed them more money than we did. That is now actually resolved. And so that $1.4 million is now down to $900,000, and so you will see a reduction in payables by approximately CAD 506,000. So it makes -- obviously, it makes the financial statement look a lot better with that not being there. Sometimes people ask me that, so I thought I'd put it in there.

One other thing to kind of keep in mind as well, and this, I think, is similar to what we are doing specifically as it relates to the payables. I just think that we just have a higher level of hygiene as it relates to how we're taking care of the P&L and the balance sheet. So the same way that we were able to eliminate that $500,000, I think that you should be expecting there to be a continued effort on the debt reduction. So we did a capital raise over a year ago, where we raised $1.6 million. This is now down 26% after we converted a portion of this into actual equity. We expect to continue to chip away at this pretty much on each quarter.

One other thing to kind of keep in mind here is a big part of this debt is me. So this is primarily 2 people that are involved in this debt, and they're both quite friendly to the business, me being one of them. So I think that's probably about as friendly as you can get.

Two quick things that I just wanted to get on everybody's radar specifically. It's just this notion of what's referred to as sensitive personal information. And I just bring this up in relation to my comments around there being more and more of an inflection point, specifically around the privacy landscape. Sensitive personal information, which actually sounds much more daunting, has very quickly become one of the most competitive areas for Reklaim. It has probably become one of the biggest differentiators that we have. And the reason for this is that under the new state-level legislation in the United States, sensitive personal information requires an explicit opt-in.

That is not an assumed opt-in. An assumed opt-in is what you see when you get a cookie notification when visiting a website. An explicit opt-in is where the publisher or the brand is asking you specifically to share information and for what use they're planning on using that data. This has typically been the domain of health care information in the United States, but it has recently expanded to now include things such as financial data, location data, ethnicity and sexuality. Due to the nature of Reklaim having a one-by-one relationship with the individual consumer, consumers, when they decide to share ethnicities such as African American, Asian or Hispanic are -- we do have an explicit opt-in and the prompts that make us compliant under all this legislation.

I think our philosophy here is that there isn't going to be a national or a federal privacy law in the United States. I don't personally think that there needs to be. But what we're seeing is that things are changing at the individual state level and how they're changing is that they're taking variables of data that were normally in the traditional general bucket and moving them into the sensitive personal information bucket. We think that the sensitive personal information bucket is only going to grow, and it's going to grow by data variables or types of data being reclassified as sensitive personal information. And when it is reclassified as sensitive personal information, it needs to have an explicit opt-in.

To give you some context here as to where we think the opportunity is, is that every Fortune 500 company today is currently running a multicultural campaign targeting African Americans, Hispanics, Asians, et cetera. Part of this is due to the fact that individual brands want to be more diverse, inclusive, equal. But what they were doing in 2023, they can now no longer do in -- what they were doing in 2022, they can now no longer do in 2023. That has forced every single Fortune 500 brand that is looking to target multicultural to find a new data partner that can satisfy the explicit opt-in that is required under SPI.

Failure to do so exposes that brand, that agency, that platform to litigation from every individual state that currently has this enforced. So you can see this is something that we think we can obviously take advantage of. And the same thing is for sexuality. If you were trying to target LGBTQ, if you're trying to target health information or you're trying to target cannabis information, which has now been reclassified as health care information, you have to have the explicit opt-in.

So I only bring this up because Reklaim's differentiation in the market has really been around those categories of data that require this higher level of compliance. We think that this bucket of data is only growing. Just that example of multicultural marketing, for instance, in the United States, I'm pretty certain we could spend all of our time on just that vertical, and we would never be able to satisfy it because we're not big enough.

So there's endless amounts of opportunity here as it relates to Reklaim on the revenue side of the equation. And I've said this multiple times. We do not have a demand problem. That is for certain. We have -- we're a small company trying to grow quickly. We probably have more of a capacity problem than anything else.

And then just visually, this is kind of what it looks like. These first 3 states on the left, California, Iowa and Utah, you have to provide consumers with a chance to opt out. But Colorado, Connecticut, Virginia, Indiana, Montana, Tennessee, Texas and now Oregon, there's one that's actually recently passed, this is where SPI and the big consent is actually required.

One thing I would just say just to finish on this statement, you don't really need to know who has opt-in and who doesn't. The fact is if one has opt-in, you have to either exclude that state from your campaign or you have to run the same compliance across every state. And what we found is that most brands are benchmarking against the most onerous privacy regulation and then knowing that they will kind of -- that they'll be able to run across any individual state. So I think one thing to keep in mind as it relates to Reklaim, what is happening at the individual state level in the United States as a recourse. Privacy is definitely wind in our sails and a tailwind for us as a business.

This is also manifesting in some of the changes that we are actually seeing in the market as it relates to the OEMs. We're all familiar with the modal window in the iPhone that asks you if you would like to share your location information with other applications. That is a prompt that most of consumers up to 90% say no to. That has dropped -- that has reduced signals coming from that -- from the iPhone by 90% in the market.

Similar things are happening around the IP address being designated as private or sensitive personal information. That's important because it powers really all streaming and all CTV. If that gets reclassified as SPI, that's a huge opportunity for us at Reklaim. And then we also are waiting for the deprecation of the third-party cookie from Google, which will require everybody to find new data partners, which we think, again, at Reklaim, we can participate in.

So with that, I'll pause there, open it up to the floor. [Operator Instructions] Okay. If no questions, this recording will be available on our Investor Relations site. You can also reach out to us at Investor Relations at reklaimyours if you'd like a copy of the presentation or you have any other questions. So if nobody has any questions, happy to give everybody back a few minutes of the half hour. Thanks again. And thanks again. I know everybody has choices in the market. We appreciate you continuing to support Reklaim. Bye-bye.