Newtopia Inc

XTSX:NEWU

Earnings Call Transcript 2022-Q3

[Operator]

Good afternoon, and welcome to the Newtopia Inc. Third Quarter 2022 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions] Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Kimberly Esterkin, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

[Kimberly Esterkin]

Good evening, and welcome to Newtopia's Third Quarter 2022 Earnings Conference Call. Joining me today are Jeff Ruby, Founder and Chief Executive Officer; Collin Swenson, Chief Financial Officer; and Lara Dodo, Chief Growth and Operating Officer.

Please note that today's call is being broadcast live over the Internet and will also be archived for both telephone and online listening upon completion of the call. Details on how to access the replays are available in the company's third quarter press release issued this afternoon and can be found on the Investors section of Newtopia's website at www.newtopia.com.

Before we begin, let me remind you that certain matters discussed during today's call or answers that may be provided to questions during the Q&A portion of the call. could constitute forward-looking statements, which are subject to certain risks and uncertainties related to Newtopia's future financial and business performance. Actual results could, therefore, differ materially from those anticipated in such forward-looking statements. Newtopia is under no obligation to update any forward-looking statements discussed today, and investors are cautioned not to place undue reliance upon these statements. The risk factors that may affect results are detailed in Newtopia's periodic results and registration statements, which you can access via the SEDAR website at www.sedar.com.

Also please note that all figures stated on today's call are in Canadian dollars unless otherwise noted.

I would now like to turn the call over to Jeff Ruby, Founder and CEO of Newtopia. Please go ahead, Jeff.

[Jeffrey Ruby, executive]

Thank you, Kimberly, and thanks for everyone for joining us today on our Third Quarter 2022 earnings conference call. I'll begin today's call with an overview of our financial performance and operational highlights for the quarter. I'll then turn the call over to Collin Swenson, our Chief Financial Officer, for a more detailed discussion of the third quarter results and outlook. Lara Dodo, our Chief Growth and Operating Officer, will conclude today's discussion with commentary on our overall growth trajectory.

Newtopia continued to make progress during what was a challenging third quarter in which many macro conditions have changed. We do, however, see momentum as we head into the final months of 2022. For the third quarter, revenues totaled $2.7 million, up 5% sequentially. Year-to-date revenues of $8.1 million were consistent with the first 9 months of 2021. As we improve our service ratio efficiencies, gross profit margin improved to 55% for the quarter, up from 50% in the prior year period and 47% in the second quarter of 2022. On a year-to-date basis, gross margin totaled approximately 50% compared to 48% for the same period last year. Engagement numbers remain strong, with a total number of engagements, reaching 113,100 participants for the first 9 months of the year, up 13% compared to the prior year period.

These levels of engagement bode well for the remainder of the year and even more so looking into 2023. Still, we do not necessarily run our business nor expect growth on a traditional quarterly basis as we are tied to our clients' implementation and benefit cycles, which take place seasonally throughout the year. Case in point is a larger implementation in Q3 of 2021 that did not repeat in Q3 of this year. Collin will speak to that further later on in today's call. Engagement and revenue figures can therefore fluctuate based on these implementations rather than necessarily every 90 days when we report our results.

We continue to demonstrate industry-leading participant retention and low churn rates. Case in point, 70% of our participants remain engaged after 12 months and 58% remain engaged after 24 months. For clarity purposes, engagement rates represent participant retention. When we incorporate innovative behavioral economic design into our offering, the stats are even more impressive at 86% engaged after 12 months and a remarkable 83% engaged after 24 months. The more engaged our participants, the more effective our platform is in reducing costs and generating value-added revenue for our clients, while at the same time, helping to prevent slow and reverse chronic disease for our participants and help them live their best lives.

As we discussed on our last call, Newtopia is sitting at an inflection point. In the third quarter, we moved even closer to the finish line in negotiations with a new set of health plans and employers, and we expect our enhanced platform, when rolled out across our entire client base will enable us to fully capitalize on these opportunities. That said, macroeconomic conditions remain challenging. And so we have taken a deeper look at the efficiency of our business model. In some ways, you can say that we've had a shift in our mindset.

For the past several years, we've been operating as a health tech growth company, obsessed with generating the highest quality outcomes for an ever-expanding set of innovative health insurers with our site set on profitability down the road. That is clearly no longer acceptable. And accordingly, we must hold our operations even more responsible by reducing our costs and drive greater efficiencies while maintaining quality outcomes in order to reach profitability quicker. As such, commencing in the third quarter and throughout the fourth quarter, we are eliminating costs that do not drive successful business development as well as those that will not enhance our margins or our operational efficiencies.

In other words, we are making cuts to our expenses to push our business toward profitability sooner. With the launch of our new technology platform, we will naturally see cuts in our technology expenses. Over time, that platform will also help drive efficiencies in our tech-enabled service ratio of Inspirator to participants, getting us closer to our goal of 1 Inspirator to 350 or more participants. Nonetheless, we want to get a jump start on bringing these efficiencies to our operations. Rather than wait for the platform alone to drive those improvements, we are redesigning utilization models while proactively making cost cuts.

Keep in mind that one of Newtopia's significant differentiators is our tailored one-on-one coaching efforts. We are not a one-size-fits-all solution. With that said, none of the expense reductions we are making will, in any way, hamper the quality service we provide to our clients or our participant base. Collin will speak to these cuts and the associated cost savings shortly, but I want to highlight this strategic reset, which is truly focused on driving margins, efficiencies, and profitability for Newtopia. We are eliminating only those costs, which aren't translating into wins for the business and look forward to the benefits these actions will bring to our operations over the coming quarters.

As we look to simplify our expense structure, we will continue to actively pursue new wins for the business, both by expanding our client base as well as growing organically within our current portfolio. Just post-quarter end in October, we expanded our relationship with one of our current Fortune 50 clients and began rolling out the Newtopia platform to their employee base in a major new geographic region. The reports from our clients so far have been positive with new participants enrolling daily and welcome kits being actively sent out. This expanded relationship will help drive our fourth quarter revenue as well as serve as a harbinger for a strong 2023. Additionally, as we further demonstrate engagement and outcome success to clients, we expect continued growth within our very large addressable market, the vast majority of which is untapped.

Speaking of demonstrating validity, we recently announced that Newtopia's alternative diabetes prevention program has received the highest Full-Plus recognition from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. While Lara will discuss this honor in further detail shortly, I'd be remiss if I did not express how thrilled we are to have received this recognition. It is a true testament to the sustained success of Newtopia's approach to preventing, slowing, and reversing type 2 diabetes through highly personalized habit change. I'd like to congratulate our entire team for all of your hard work without which Newtopia would not have received such an honor.

Overall, Q3 was a solid quarter. We are confident our business is building momentum, but we are also cognizant of the fact that we must initiate strategic actions to streamline our cost structure and push the business toward improved efficiency, margins, and profitability. Thus far, in the fourth quarter, key metrics, including new participant registrations are trending well, and we remain optimistic in the strength of our pipeline.

With that, I'll turn the call over to our CFO, Collin Swenson, to speak to our third quarter results, discuss these strategic cost cuts further and provide context on our outlook for the remainder of the year.

Collin, over to you.

[Collin Swenson, executive]

Thanks, Jeff. It's great to speak with everyone today. Our results for the third quarter were in line with our expectations. Revenue on a year-to-date basis of $8.1 million was consistent with the first 9 months of 2021. For the quarter, revenue totaled $2.7 million, up 5% sequentially and down 9% year-over-year. The year-over-year revenue decline was primarily a result of an expanded marketing opportunity with the Fortune 50 Health Services client granted in the third quarter of 2021 that did not repeat in the third quarter of 2022.

Additionally, as our new customer launches do not necessarily follow a quarter-by-quarter cycle, we did see some of the expected top-line growth in the third quarter pushed into Q4. Enrollment fee revenue or revenue related to lower-margin welcome kits was approximately 8% of total consolidated revenue for the third quarter as compared to 16% in the prior year period. We expect that enrollment fee revenue will increase as we wrap up the year. As previously discussed, starting in Q4, we're expanding our relationship with the Fortune 50 client, and the new registration numbers thus far have been encouraging.

As Jeff noted earlier, retention and engagement remains strong with participant engagements totaling 113,100 year-to-date, an increase of 13% over the first 9 months of 2021. Gross profit totaled $1.5 million for the third quarter of 2022, up 22% sequentially and up slightly from the prior year period. As a percentage of revenue, gross profit was 55% compared with 47% in the second quarter of 2022 and 50% in Q3 of 2021. Improvement in our gross profit margin was the result of less enrollment fee revenue, which carries lower margins as well as improvement in our participant to Inspirator ratios. We continue to see our gross margin percentage trend positively in the fourth quarter. It's important to keep in mind, however, that we experienced some seasonality in our gross margins.

The first and fourth quarters typically see a decline in gross margin as new participants on board and an increased number of welcome kits with their lower margin are sent out. The second and third quarters generally see a boost in margin with fewer welcome kits and more engagement revenue. As such, the bump in gross margin percentage we're currently seeing in Q4 is not likely to repeat in future fourth quarters.

From an expense standpoint, selling, general and administrative expenses totaled approximately $2.0 million for the third quarter, which included roughly $645,000 in sales and marketing expenses and another $1.3 million in G&A. Sales and marketing expense was consistent with the prior year period, while general and administrative expense increased 32% versus the third quarter of 2021, due in part to increases in professional fees, compensation and expenses related to our first Annual General Meeting held in September. With the operating expense cuts Jeff noted previously, we do expect that compensation expenses will decrease significantly in the fourth quarter.

In addition, even with this increase in expenses, given the consistency in our sales and marketing efforts, we continue to yield a higher activity return per dollar spent. Technology and development expenses totaled roughly $1.3 million for the third quarter as compared to $716,000 in the prior year period. This increase is primarily the result of the development and launch of our new engagement platform and brand refresh. Of note, we expect technology and development expenses to significantly decrease in the fourth quarter, reducing to a monthly maintenance fee.

Adjusted operating expenses, which exclude share-based compensation, increased by 37% to total $3.3 million for the quarter compared to $2.4 million in the prior year period. Capital expenditures totaled $86,000 for the quarter and were primarily made on the aforementioned engagement platform. This number is down significantly from prior quarters. Net loss was $2.3 million for the quarter or a loss of $0.02 per diluted share compared to a net loss of $1.1 million or a loss of $0.01 per diluted share in the prior year period.

As discussed, this increase in net loss was primarily driven by planned technology and development investments for our new engagement platform. Before turning to our balance sheet, I'd like to spend some time discussing the expense cuts Jeff spoke to earlier. We are pivoting our expense structure to reflect current macro conditions and set our business up for a profitable growth profile.

In order to achieve cash flow positivity, we're following a three-pronged approach that focuses on, one, our pipeline through which will drive top line growth. Two, our participant platform through which will drive margin improvement. And three, tight control of operating expenses.

We continue on a trajectory toward cash flow positivity and anticipate we'll reach that milestone midway through 2023. Before we get there, however, we're taking certain costs out of our business, the largest of these being headcount reductions of roughly 30% and doing away with our office lease now that the vast majority of our employees work remotely post-COVID. We anticipate that the headcount reductions, combined with vastly reduced rent expenses will result in roughly $3 million to $4 million in annualized cost savings. These savings will help us bridge the gap to profitability. We also expect that with a more efficient participant platform, not only will we experience improvement in our gross margin, but we will also be able to maintain a more lean, yet highly productive operating structure going forward.

Now back to our balance sheet. Cash as of September 30, 2022, was approximately $0.4 million. We continue to have access to the $3.5 million in equity raised via a private placement at the end of April, in addition to a $7.5 million revolving credit facility, of which we have over $2.6 million undrawn. We feel comfortable with our cash position and available credit in order to maintain operations. And with the operating expense reductions in motion, we'll see an additional improvement to our cash flow moving forward.

Turning to guidance. While there will be some larger shifts at Newtopia to align our business model with the new expense structure in the fourth quarter, we continue to anticipate full year revenue growth for 2022 over 2021. Q4 revenue, in particular, is expected to benefit nicely from the organic expansion Jeff spoke about earlier. We are also seeing some initial positive engagement figures from October that bode well for the business.

Thanks again for your time. I'll now turn the call over to Lara.

[Lara Dodo, executive]

Thanks, Collin. I recently came back from a number of industry conferences, including the Health Plan Innovation Roundtable in Dallas, Texas. We were very well embraced by an intimate cohort of some of the leading U.S. health plans who recognized us by industry-leading retention and engagement metrics. Health plans remain impressed with Newtopia's ability to deliver evidence-based outcomes and are intrigued with how we do it, specifically our secret source of personality matching participants to Inspirators and our secret weapon of behavior genetics that enables us to personalize our offering and enhance the engagement.

I share the story as a background to provide a key example of the work we are actively engaging in to broaden our pipeline of new business and are making progress against each of our 3 main growth drivers, albeit at a slower pace than we had hoped for.

As a reminder, our 3 growth drivers include: one, adding new distribution with employers, health plans and alternate risk-bearing entities; two, growing our existing employer clients; and three, increasing our product density.

That said, given the overall macro conditions Jeff spoke to, along with the bureaucracy inherent to the corporate world, we remain excited and somewhat frustrated as we navigate legal and IT security contracting with various health plans. We had initially anticipated some of these new leads would be completed in the third quarter, but we are now seeing them pushed out into Q4. Rest assured, these are genuine leads with proposals that are making their way through the chains of approval.

As we work through contracting, we continue to actively expand with our current base of clients. At the start of the fourth quarter, we began to successfully roll out our program into a new geographic market with a key Fortune 50 client. Early reviews of this launch have been positive with healthy enrollment levels. Importantly, even with this new state launch, there remains significant opportunity to expand our business with this particular client throughout the United States. We look forward to continuing to find ways to enhance our partnership for years to come.

Also at the end of September, Newtopia was awarded the highest Full-Plus recognition from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC, for our diabetes prevention program. This is a 5-year recognition, which is reserved for diabetes prevention programs that effectively deliver quality, evidence-based components that meet all CDC standards. For those of you who may not be familiar, the CDC has its own set of guidelines when validating a diabetes prevention program. According to the CDC standards, all that a prevention program must provide is 16 weeks of classes with content based on a specific curriculum. The classes do not need to be customized per individual nor do they need to involve any one-on-one engagement between the student and instructor. There are 96 million Americans with prediabetes and a cost base program is simply not the ideal answer to reducing that figure.

Instead, Newtopia has always been steadfast in the belief that our program, which combines a one-on-one coaching with technology to create sustainable habit change is more effective than the standardized classroom-based approach. Our approach goes beyond one-size-fits-all and uses behavior-based genetics and personality algorithms to match each participant with the Ideal Health Coach or Inspirator whose goal is to help that specific individual prevent slow or reverse chronic disease through habit change over time.

Newtopia has been submitting data to the CDC annually for the past 5 years on our sustained positive outcomes. Each year, we undergo a rigorous review and analysis of our data in order to be awarded an annual renewal. This year, not only was Newtopia status renewed, but we were awarded with a 5-year Full-Plus recognition. This pinnacle of acknowledgment is proof that our alternative approach is not only meeting CDC standards but exceeding them. Indeed, to have the CDC note that Newtopia is turning the tide in the fight against the epidemic of type 2 diabetes, it truly is an honor.

Overall, we remain very bullish on our future and are already seeing positive results early in the fourth quarter with existing client expansions, pending health plan deals, and a growing 2023 pipeline.

With that, I'll turn it back to Jeff to close out the call.

[Jeffrey Ruby, executive]

Thanks, Lara. You are certainly correct. It has been challenging, but I believe we are now well-positioned to turn the tides around and place Newtopia on a path to profitable growth. Thank you all for joining us today. We appreciate your continued support. I also want to thank our entire team at Newtopia for your hard work this past quarter. You are what takes Newtopia the innovator that we are.

With that, we will now open up the call to your questions. Operator?

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] It appears we do not have any questions at this time. I would now like to turn the conference over to Jeff Ruby for any closing remarks. Please go ahead, sir.

[Jeffrey Ruby, executive]

Thank you very much for joining us this evening. The fourth quarter is starting off strong, and we really look forward to speaking with you more about our progress on our Q4 call. Have a terrific evening.

[Operator]

The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect your lines.