Altium LLC (ALU) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Altium Limited Half Year Results Investor Call. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Kim Besharati, Chief of Staff and Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Altium Investor call. As mentioned, I'm Kim Besharati, Chief of Staff and Head of Investor Relations. Joining me on the call today is our CEO, Aram Mirkazemi; our Interim CFO, Richard Leon; President, Sergey Kostinsky; and our Chairman, Sam Weiss. Today, Altium released to the ASX the company's financial results for the half year ended 31 December 2023, and our investor presentation, which we will discuss with investors over the next few days. During this call, we will share details of the strong business performance for Altium for the half year. Aram will share details of our achievements over the past 6 months and how we have aligned our organization to take advantage of the opportunities that are ahead of us. Richard will provide a deep dive into some of the slides in our investor presentation that demonstrate our strong business and financial performance over the past 6 months. Please note, as a reminder, today's call and the Q&A section at the end may include forward-looking statements regarding Altium products, its future operations or financial performance. Any such statements are based on current assumptions by Altium management and are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual events and results to differ materially. Please note that the numbers are in U.S. dollars unless specified otherwise. Today's call is being recorded and will be made available on our website. I will now pass over to Aram.

Thank you, Kim, and hello, everyone. I'm pleased to be with you to discuss Altium's performance over the last 6 months. I also want to share with you our efforts in preparing the organization to capitalize on the significant opportunities we've created in recent years. This has been achieved through a consistent execution of our strategic vision, and now we're getting closer to converting this remarkable potential into tangible outcomes. But let me first speak to our first half revenue performance. Our revenue growth of 16% in the first half can perhaps best be appreciated with reference to a few key moving parts. First, the underlying strength of our design software business with ARR up by 30% to $162 million and revenue growing by 21%. This is really encouraging and is driven by healthy subscriber growth and an increase in the adoption of our higher-value products. These pleasing results for our design software business was achieved despite a short-term headwind created by a faster-than-expected transition from perpetual to term-based licensing. This transition is now well progressed and perpetual licenses will soon become a minor part of our business. We did, however, experience some weakness in China during the half, as we transition our license compliance business into a direct model. This is an important step to allow our business to transition from the old software compliance model to a future that will be based on cloud and SaaS value proposition in China. During the half, the biggest drag to our performance came from Octopart. As foreshadowed, we experienced a decline in click volume and revenue due to cyclical weakness in the electronics supply chain. We are pleased that the globalization and localization initiatives, which were implemented in the first half for Octopart, are seeing early positive results in the second half. In that regard, average daily clicks are up 21% in the second half to date versus the average sale in the first half. On the expenses side, we continued to invest in the key areas of the business in the first half. This, alongside these short-term headwinds to revenue, has had some dampening effect on our margins. I expect our profit growth to normalize as these revenue headwinds abate and reverse in the second half. At a personal level, I'm most impressed and excited by our enterprise business and its recent growth and its as yet untapped potential. After what seems like a tough few years of going from 0 to 1, I believe we have finally broken through. Not only has our enterprise revenue grown by 61% year-on-year, but we are seeing a rapid adoption of higher-level subscription products. This is increasing the lifetime value of our customers, increasing the quality of our revenue as many customers are now dependent on our platform and on term-based licensing, driving our recurring revenue up to 81% of total revenue. After a few years of development and growing strong adoption of our Cloud Platform, with imminent commercial launch, I'm also excited to see Altium 365 move from adoption to monetization phase. We have further enhanced our Altium 365 offering through GovCloud for customers who require specialist security for data in the cloud; introduced BOMPortal that brings engineering and procurement together to streamline Bill of Materials management. And we have integrated Altium 365 with SiliconExpert and Z2Data for unmatched access to electronic components data. As mentioned, we are now focused on launching our first business up on Altium 365 following the acquisition of Valispace. I would now like to turn to how we have been positioning Altium to set ourselves up for a strong growth towards our $500 million revenue target in FY '26. The first and most important thing to note is that Altium is evolving from a product to a platform company. This being in the era of cloud computing, it also means Altium is evolving from being a software-first to a cloud-first company. This fundamental transition to platform and cloud is providing a unique opportunity for Altium to expand its reach and dominance into the enterprise market. And of course, there is the recent announcement of the proposed acquisition of Altium by Renesas Electronics Corporation, Renesas' ongoing partnership with Altium and its proposed acquisition of Altium would provide further opportunities to propel our enterprise and cloud businesses to new heights, which will accelerate the execution of our recently announced Route 66 strategy for industry transformation. To appreciate the nature of Altium's strong performance in the first half and to set expectations for our future performance, I would like to share with you as to just how we have been expanding our executive operating model and strengthening our business. First and foremost, we have been expanding our executive management team over the past 12 months by bringing in specialist capability and high-end talent. This is in the area of enterprise sales SaaS go-to-market M&A and expansion of our digital sales. We have been scaling our enterprise sales organization, both in terms of new capabilities as well as account management capacity to further drive our impressive enterprise business growth. We have been building our SaaS platform to the next level with secure access to meet the needs of leading commercial enterprises. We have been restructuring our product and go-to-market organizations to streamline the integration of tuck-in acquisitions for direct monetization of Altium 365 through business apps. To this point, we recently acquired Valispace, an AI-powered system and requirements engineering start-up to become the first business app on Altium 365. We are bringing systematization and scale to our mid-market digital sales that has been at the vanguard of our dominance in PCB design. And finally, we have brought in M&A capabilities and have been strengthening our back office to better service the needs of our cloud and enterprise businesses. With our new executive management on the heel of delivering the first half performance, myself and our long-standing C-suite were able to fully engage with Renesas over the last few months in the lead up to the recent announcement. While this engagement puts some attention away from our short-term performance, I'm happy with what the new executive team delivered in the first outing. Over the past 6 months, we have also been deep in the throes of implementing a new operating model at Altium that can support our digital and enterprise go-to-market strategy to significantly grow our software and cloud businesses. We're out in to go beyond our revenue target of $500 million and aspire to become a $1 billion revenue class company, it is my strong conviction that Altium needs to scale and transition from being a capable organization with intelligent individuals to an intelligent organization with capable individuals. To this end, our new operating model introduces an omnichannel go-to-market approach to enterprise, digital and SaaS sales with sophisticated organizational structure that can deliver a multitier value proposition matched with multitier developments of key product lines that comprise our product platform and industry solutions. It is through this carefully orchestrated operating model that Altium can fully execute against this growing market opportunity to deliver high performance and strong margin. Having shared with you how we have been transforming Altium to capitalize on the next wave of growth, it is useful to also recognize Altium's 3 category-leading assets that are unique in the electronics industry: our #1 design software Altium designer for printed circuit boards, with the largest professional user base, over 100,000 active users and over 62,000 commercial subscribers; our #1 cloud platform, Altium 365 for electronics hardware development, with over 46,300 active users and over 14,600 active accounts; our #1 search website Octopart for electronic parts sourcing, with over 20 million monthly page views, covering 13 million unique parts and 7 million visitors per month. Armed with our new operating model, we intend to leverage these unique assets to drive both volume and value from market dominance and transformation through a strong user adoption of our cloud platform and high-value subscriptions. This, in turn, allows us -- allows business apps on Altium 365 into adjacent engineering domains and supply chain and manufacturing. And ultimately, industry transformation will be achieved through delivering industry solutions to large enterprises to connect to same users and professionals in the broader electronics ecosystem that we already serve. The proposed coming together of Altium and Renesas has the potential to significantly enhance and accelerate the realization of our vision for industry transformation as we combine the power of our design software and cloud platform with Renesas' advanced hardware platform to create a groundbreaking and disruptive model to democratize the use of advanced electronics within the industry at large. Altium remains committed to its vision to transform the global electronics industry through the cloud enablement of all industry processes involved in the creation of electronics hardware and to deliver its aspirational fiscal 2026 target of USD 500 million revenue, underlying EBITDA margin of 38% to 40% and 100,000 software sales and subscription. Due to the proposed acquisition of Altium by Renesas through a scheme implementation agreement, Altium team has, however, suspended the practice of providing forward-looking guidance. We will continue to drive the business strongly through this scheme period. And as I mentioned, we remain committed to our aspirational FY '26 targets. I will now hand over to Richard.

Thank you, Aram. Good morning, everyone. I will briefly go through the following slides as a page turn to give a bit more color. Beginning on Slide 12, our 2 divisions of Design Software and Cloud Platform together delivered group revenue of $138.6 million, up 16% from the previous corresponding period. Our Design Software business performed strongly, growing revenue by 21% to $110.6 million. As Aram mentioned, given the events during the half year, a very credible effort by our dedicated team under our new executive management. Cloud Platform revenue was flat, closing at $28 million, and I will speak further to this. Sticky recurring revenue continues to improve, increasing to 81% of total revenue, up from 79%. This was supported by the continued migration from perpetual licenses to term-based licenses. Staying with Design Software on Slide 13, we show how each of our regions there in relation to the revenue for the 6 months. Aram had already mentioned that China performed below expectations as we experienced some transitory adjustments to a new master distributor intended to allow us to focus on launching our SaaS business in China. Rest Of The World was flat as we build local capabilities within these regions. By far, the highlights were our Northern Hemisphere regions. Americas revenue up 22% to $47.7 million and EMEA, up 29% to $44.6 million compared to the previous corresponding period. As you can see by the darker shading, both these regions contributed the bulk of the stellar 61% growth in enterprise revenue. And to top this off, the take up of professional-level offering grew revenue by 72%. Slide 14, annual recurring revenue, or ARR, as defined in our glossary at the back of this pack, is the total annualized contracted value of all license on a term base and subscription service and fundamentally recurring in nature. So this excludes one-off perpetual licenses or services and it helps cut through any dislocation that may arise from revenue recognition norms. With this context, at group level, ARR grew an impressive 30% to $162.2 million. Three key factors gave rise to this result: firstly, a move from perpetual to TBL that I touched on earlier; secondly, increase in seats on subscription, which grew 8% compared to the previous period; and finally, a shift to higher-value offerings. As mentioned in the previous slide, and again, you can see in this slide with the shading, the take-up of pro and enterprise drove our ASSP up by 20%, an indicator of our strong pricing power. Slide 15 sets subscription supplements the ARR line. And once again, the call-out is a product mix as the take-up of professional and enterprise-level platform capabilities continues at a good cadence. Slide 16 looks at new seat decline during the half. Americas and EMEA delivered record levels of new seats, achieving new seat growth of 53% and 45%, respectively. China, as mentioned, is working through the transitory impact of the change in business model and the Rest Of the World continues to fill the effects of the loss market in Russia. These last 4 slides relative to software design are our key metrics. Let me take some time now to put all this together starting with enterprise. During the half, a successful campaign was executed to upgrade several customers from Altium's mainstream product offering to our enterprise solutions. Our enterprise subscriber count was up 61% year-on-year to 4,917 and enterprise ARR grew 74%, driven in part by steady growth in average seat value across our enterprise footprint. ARR churn within our enterprise business remains exceedingly low, with first half gross ARR churn of just 0.8% on an annualized basis. Not only are we adding new enterprise logos at an accelerated rate, our existing enterprise customers continue to expand their use of our software with net ARR retention exceeding 130% on a last 12-month basis. The number of enterprise customers spending more than $200,000 ARR with us grew to 28, up from 17 in the prior corresponding period. And we are thrilled to report significant success with inspiring customers such as Anduril, Joby Aviation and Hitachi. The demonstrated achievements of our enterprise land and expand sales motion underwrites our runway for growth among the many beachheads we continue to establish within this attractive target market. Furthermore, with the expansion of our year land and cloud product portfolio that Aram spoke to now well underway, our opportunity space is growing in both depth and breadth. Let me take a moment to talk about the rapid change in Altium licensing model, which has created a short-term headwind to our reported revenue but is a demonstrably positive development for the business going forward. Perpetual license continues to shrink in our overall sales mix. And in the first half, 54% of our new licenses sold was in term-based products, which is up 40% from just 1 year ago. In nominal terms, perpetual license revenue for Altium design has declined by around 30% since the first half of FY '20. And because the rest of the business is growing, the perpetual revenue has shrunk even more in our overall sales mix falling from 36% in revenue in 1H '20 to now under 15% of revenue in the first half of FY '24. That's a lot of data, but the significance is this: The significance of this phenomenon can be appreciated with reference to our design software ARR growth rate. Our ARR base grew by 30% in the half and, as perpetual licenses revenue rapidly reflects a smaller portion of our revenue or ARR growth, will become the dominant forward striving our financial performance. We can now look forward to the exciting part of this transition. While the majority of our new license sales are churn-based licenses, the vast majority of existing subscriber base are still on maintenance subscription from the perpetual license model. Therefore, we still retain the upside on transitioning some 4/5, 80%, of our total subscriber from maintenance subscriptions to term-based license, a shift which is highly accretive to revenue per subscriber. What's more, we have the perfect catalyst to drive this uplift. The full capability of our commercial cloud offering will only be available to customers on term-based licenses. For example, when a perpetual maintenance subscriber wishes to access our cloud application or enjoy the enhanced security and performance guarantee of our Secure Access Altium 365 platform, they will need to purchase a term-based license. On to Slide 17. As many of you likely know, the global electronic supply chain is currently experiencing a cyclical downturn, which is negatively impacting Octopart click's volumes in our more mature market geographies. While these macro conditions drove a [ 7% ] decline in Octopart's first half revenue to $25 million, our team worked diligently to establish and accelerate fresh growth drivers for the business. Significant investment was made to better localize the user experience for particular markets and languages and we are already seeing pleasing results in the second half to date. Enhancements to Octopart's Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese and Korean language sites delivered an increase in traffic and transactional activities in their related markets, with click volumes growing despite continued softness with the broader electronics industry. As Aram mentioned, daily clicks are up 21% on a global basis in the second half to date versus what the business saw in the first half. The Octopart team is monitoring our growth initiatives closely, ensure that we deliver quality leads to our partners. And early reports are encouraging, with new users exhibiting high-intent behaviors on our platform. We will continue to implement enhancements and optimizations within Octopart to generate durable, product-led growth and plan to introduce new capabilities within our supply chain portfolio that will establish differentiated revenue models within this segment of our business. It is fair to say that the near to midterm road map for Octopart and our broader supply chain offering has elements to excite both engineers and procurement professionals. Octopart's CPC, cost per click, was firm in the first half and we expect the CPC growth rate to moderate as we progress through FY '24. While Octopart was significantly attracted to our group performance in the first half, we view these cyclical industry headwinds as temporary and our strong market position, Aram referred to this as one of our 3 category-leading assets in the electronic industry, provides us with opportunities to overcome these challenges through internal execution. Slide 18 depicts the strong -- the continued strong adoption of Altium 365 and growing network effect, attracting users from outside our traditional designer user base and is primed for the next phase of our cloud platform and go-to-market strategy. On to Slide 19, operating expenses, the difference between our revenue in EBITDA increased by 23% to $93.9 million. Much of this investment was committed in FY '23. And back then, as foreshadowed, we are seeing its impact this fiscal year. Investments covered all areas from G&A, R&D and sales. We expanded our executive marketing management team and having seen the tailwinds through the take-up of high-value offerings in Pro and Enterprise, and adoption of term-based license over perpetual license, we remain steadfast with our investment strategy, including M&A, the suite of our significant goals that we have created in recent years. Speaking of M&A on to Slide 20, our balance sheet closed for the year with a cash balance of $180 million after a cash payment of $15.6 million to close out the acquisition of Valispace, a leader in engineering requirements management software. Altium continues to have 0 debt. Moving quickly along to Slide 21, while cash receipts from customers grew by near 15%, these were offset by increase in business I spoke about in our cloud platform and enterprise growth market strategies. The cash conversion of EBITDA to operating cash flow for the first half was lower as a result of unbilled receivables driven by our large-value enterprise multiyear contracts. Essentially, the upfront revenue recognition of these large multiyear contracts are often higher than the billing cycles. As referenced before, our strong growing ARR provides a clearer indicator of the recurring value generated by these large high-value multiyear deals. In summary, Altium delivered another half of solid top line growth; term-based license sales are overtaking perpetual licenses; and the take-up of high-value offerings in both Pro and Enterprise continue with strong trajectory, driving up our ARR. This wraps up the formal part of this call, and I will now pass over to Q&A.

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from Lucy Huang from UBS.

I've got 3 questions, if possible. Just with the EBITDA margin in the first half of 32%, just wondering, I guess, what drivers or levers there are to drive margins back up to that kind of 36% range that you were previously guiding to? And how fast can we get there? And then just as my second question that comment on the working capital impact from higher enterprise revenues that are booked versus billing. Is that expected to unwind coming into the second half? And then just on that $900-odd millions of cloud revenues that you booked now, can you give us some color in terms of the pricing model or like the business model that's been trialed to generate first revenue?

Thank you. Let me take the first 2. The first one was EBITDA and how do we think about getting that margin up. It's a good question because this is always a delicate balance between investments with the opportunities that we've created and we see in front of us versus the actual run rate. Aram mentioned that we need to turn our capabilities, we'll focus on building our capabilities, and that's what we're going to do. We feel fairly confident that we could sequence our investments in such a way that we could achieve EBITDA margins that are either set internally or by the market. But it's always a delicate balance in how we think about the speed of the sequencing of those investments, if that makes sense. On the working capital, what that is fundamentally with the accelerated successes we're seeing in not only enterprise but in pro-level offerings, we are now selling term-based licenses and not just 1 year. Some of these are now 3 years, many of the enterprise now are 5 years, which is a great commitment from our customers. Our billing cycle is annual. So what happens with the revenue recognition is that, say, for example, we had a $1 million annual ARR. It's a 5-year deal. That's a $5 million total contract value. The revenue recognition recognized is a significant part of that upfront, but then we only bill for 1 year. That creates some kind of a lag effect on the working capital. Your specific question is about whether that would likely disappear after the first half, that's also an interesting one because the trajectory of our successes in enterprise may continue to drive that, but I think the key takeaway is that we need to now look at annual recurring revenue. That in of itself is a key indicator of our free cash flow going forward. As to the cloud question, we've only achieved, I think, about $900,000, less than $1 million. It's kind of nascent. There's a couple of different sales in there, a couple of GovCloud, which is a very good traction. We're seeing a pipeline growing there. These are our customers that have a compliance focus. They may be working with government organization that needs to be sure that the security of information that they have is sufficient to the government's requirements that we're seeing will take up there. And I think everything else as far as the Altium 365 platform is just starting to blossom. So it's probably too early to say too much about them.

The next question comes from Nick Basile with CLSA.

Just a couple of questions. Could you talk a little bit more about that new license arrangement in China and what's sort of going on there? And then just on Slide 19, just interested in a bit more color on the expense growth. Obviously, you're making some investments in future infrastructure; you're building out an M&A team. How much of that is sort of somewhat one-off or potentially now that's done, you don't need to keep increasing it in the short term?

So China is a fairly straightforward story. We've been operating in China under what we call as license compliance framework for many, many years. And license compliance, as many know, is kind of like a police action where we try to make true any users that have a [ proprietary ] software in the past. It's a fairly lengthy laborious task. And we've been successfully carrying that on for many years through a reseller distributor channel. The decision to move into one master distributor agreement was to do a couple of things. One is to concentrate efforts through a very trusted distributor that we've been working for in multiple years. But the main one is to free us up to focus on where we think would be the higher value-generating aspect of our business, which is introducing the cloud platform into China. What we're seeing here is, as I mentioned, a transitory phenomenon of moving from what we've been doing in the past into new hands. So it's really teething problems as far as we see. It's the same license compliance model, but it's just under new management, for want of a better word. To your question on the investments, we look at our investments that then add into concept internally, we use as cost run rate. So these aren't the concepts of indeed a one big infrastructure cost, one-off, and that's it. These are more like we hire people. We hire people with capabilities that we need, and they form type of an annual cost run rate. At the moment, as I mentioned, we did a lot of this back in FY '23, in the second half of '23 to be clear. And what we're seeing now is that playing through this year. As I mentioned in the previous question, it now comes down to the sequencing of that investment. We could either have more investment as we see opportunities in front of us or we could slow that down. It is one of those delicate parts.

If I could also add, Nick, that in terms of our EBITDA for the full year, we've got to hit our revenue numbers. And if you hit our revenue numbers, we'll get there. So it's really that is a key driver. But if our numbers for revenue for whatever reason don't quite get there, we're not going to slow down investment. That's what Richard will be saying in terms of possible better commit because FY '25 or FY '26, if we hit our revenue targets, then our EBITDA should be where it needs to be.

The next question comes from Roger Samuel from Jefferies Australia.

I've got a question about your tax dispute with the ATO. You mentioned in Note 11 annual result that the -- there's no -- like you will continue to contest the matter with the ATO. And I'm just wondering, how would you plan to settle this with the ATO given that your scheme document with Renesas requires you to settle an ongoing dispute?

Roger, thanks for your question. There's a couple of things with this. In the SIA, Renesas have allowed us with -- through consultation to take particular actions. As you know, we've been dealing with this case for a while. And of recent times, we have put ourselves in a very strong position, having word with expert witnesses and as such to get ourselves in a position to make several moves. So the question for us now, again, is timing because it will need management bandwidth in everything else as to which direction we go with the tax office. As we showed in our report and the Board is quite adamant that we're going to fight this vigorously.

Okay. Got it. And maybe a question around the business. Are you still thinking about raising prices for bolt-on systems product this year? Or it's more around upgrading customers from standard to Pro and Enterprise?

There is no price increase that is planned for rest of this year. If there would be one, it would be just incremental on a small amount to cover inflation and things, but there is no price increase that is planned for the rest of this year.

The next question comes from Josh Kannourakis from Barrenjoey.

Just a question around the model. So just to confirm, you were saying that for some of your clients or customers on perpetual only licenses, whereas when they could sort of previously moved to a subscription model, you're saying now they would need to move to the full term-based model rather -- including license rather than just a subscription payment. Is that correct? And is that a change that sort of taken effect already?