ARCpoint Inc. (ARC.V) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Thank you for standing by. This is the conference operator. Welcome to the ARCpoint Inc. Third Quarter 2024 Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] The conference is being recorded. [Operator Instructions] Unless otherwise specifically stated, all dollar amounts discussed during this call are in U.S. dollars. We wish to remind you that this call and responses to any questions may contain forward-looking information or statements that are based on expectations, estimates and long-term projections as of the date of this call. Information on this call is believed to be accurate at the time of this call and may be superseded by more current information. Except as required by law, the company does not undertake any obligation to update the information whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. Forward-looking information involves known and unknown risks, uncertainties, assumptions and other factors, which may cause the actual results, performance or achievements of ARCpoint to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking information. Accordingly, undue reliance should not be placed on these statements. Important additional information identifying risk, uncertainties and other factors is contained in the management's discussion and analysis portion of the company's most recently filed financial reports under the heading entitled Caution Regarding Forward-Looking Information and Risks and Uncertainties. These documents may be accessed on the SEDAR website. I would now like to turn the conference over to John Constantine, CEO of ARCpoint Inc. Please go ahead.

Thank you so much. I appreciate everybody joining today. And again, I'm John Constantine, CEO of ARCpoint Inc. I'm going to kick this call off in a little bit of a different manner than I have done this in the past. I'm going to get a little bit personal on how the ARCpoint ecosystem has improved my personal health. First off, I want to talk about the fact that we are a B2B company. So whether it's CRESSO Brands, which is a network of laboratories across the country, telehealth companies, brick-and-mortar physicians, pharmacies, we market our service to enable all of those health care stakeholders to have access to a health care ecosystem, making it easier for them to do things like laboratory testing for their customers. Because we stitch together systems that are typically separate from each other, we have a unique value proposition, not only to those telehealth providers, laboratories and health care adjacent organizations, also to their customers. And I'm a perfect example of that. Earlier, I had a health care test ran, sort of an annual checkup. It's a pretty standard test for a man my age in my mid-40s, just to see what was going on with me. And I did it because I wanted to test our first interface with a telehealth provider that we built a bidirectional interface with. Now the value that we present to these telehealth companies is that we provide them access to laboratory testing data on their patients, on their customers that they typically wouldn't have in the past. And that's the pull for them to join into the ecosystem. So in my case, I ran the test and I sent it over, through the interface, over to a telehealth provider. That telehealth provider jumped on with me. It was an easy process. I got an appointment scheduled time, talked to the doctor and the doctor was able to see my lab results. And the interesting thing about this is the doctor was surprised, one, at the amount of data that he had at his disposal of one of his customers. Remember, the telehealth doctors typically don't have access to this type of information. But he was also surprised by what my results were. In fact, I had an elevated calcium result. Now to me, not a practitioner, an elevated calcium result could be because I drink too many protein shakes in the morning or maybe too much milk and cookies at night. To him as a practitioner though, it meant something else. He started questioning whether or not I've had this previously. Now here's the thing, I went back and looked at my previous lab results and it turns out I've had elevated calcium since 2018. I've been passing that information over to my family practice doctor, who works for the health care system. And it's a big, typical hospital system that people in the United States use. And it hasn't been seen since 2018. So year-on-year, elevated calcium, it's not seen. Now this isn't to talk down about my family practice doctor. In fact, I love my family practice doctor. He's been amazing to work with on my health journey. I'm pretty proactive with my health. But he has a massive patient base, which means that he just can't focus on everything. And so this happens to be one of those things. It typically doesn't affect men my age. And so he never focused on it. However, when this telehealth doctor, who has more time on his hands than the traditional physician and is looking at unique data for him, saw my calcium result, he said, "Listen, this might be a problem." I'm going to short-circuit this to say that the laboratory test that I was able to gather was able to be passed over to a telehealth doctor. That telehealth doctor was able to interpret those results, identify a problem that I've been having for years that has been missed in the traditional health care system and then plug me back into the traditional health care system to get me taken care of. It turns out that I had a parathyroid issue. One of my parathyroid glands was overgrown, had a surgery, I had it removed. And the moral of the story is that I feel like $1 million. I have more energy. My body isn't as sore, my joints don't hurt and I'm just generally feeling like a younger person. I had no idea how awful I felt until I actually got this taken care of. And it's because of this health care ecosystem that we're building that, that was possible. We don't compete with the traditional health care system. We complement it by taking a system that is traditionally expensive, complicated and hard to access, simplifying it, making it easy to find locations and make it easy for people to access, pay a fair price upfront and get convenient access to practitioners. We say that 40% of consumers or patients in the United States are putting off health care conversations because of the unknown expense or because of the fact that 94% of U.S. citizens don't fully understand how the health care system works. That creates confusion, uneasiness and it makes people not want to access it. We make it easier for these telehealth doctors to provide more value for the laboratories that are a part of CRESSO Brands to provide better services, more convenient services and for health care-adjacent organizations to plug consumers in to drive those consumers both into the CRESSO Brand locations as well as into the telehealth markets as well. All right. So I wanted to start with that because I want to paint this picture of what it is that we're building. Now the third quarter was a pivotal moment for us. I'm going to turn the call over to Jason Tong, our CFO. He's going to go through the financial results, then I have a couple of bullet points on what we've accomplished throughout the third quarter. So Jason, take it away.

Thanks, John. I just want to remind, I'm going to go through the financial results of Q3. I just want to remind everybody that all amounts here are reported under IFRS and are in U.S. dollars. I would also like to note that the CRESSO transaction was concluded in the third quarter of 2024 on August 20, 2024. For all -- for accounting purposes, the company has deconsolidated subsidiary, ARCpoint Franchise Group, and now is recording its 29.5% interest in CRESSO as an equity investment starting August 20. And I would like to also ask the audience to read the unaudited Q3 interim financial statements here for more details. So going through the Q3 2024 financial results. Revenues in Q3 2024 was $1.2 million compared to $1.6 million in Q3 of 2023. The decrease in revenues was primarily due to decrease in royalties and franchising revenues as no royalties and brand fund revenues were included after the deconsolidation of ARCpoint Franchise Group and after the CRESSO transaction on August 20, 2024. Net income for Q3 2024 was $5.2 million versus a net loss of $1.5 million. The increase was primarily due to an accounting gain on deconsolidation, again due to the CRESSO transaction, of $6.3 million; decrease of cost and revenues of $800,000; decrease in salary and wages of $160,000; and decrease in sales and marketing costs. Operating cash flows for Q3 2024 was negative $600,000 compared to negative $1 million for Q3 2023. EBITDA for Q3 2024 was $5.5 million compared to negative $1.2 million in Q3 2023. Adjusted EBITDA in Q3 2024 was negative $600,000 compared to negative $400,000 in Q3 of 2023. I will now go through the 9 months and the results of year-to-date results for Q3. Total revenues for the 9 months ended was $4.5 million compared to $4.8 million in the prior period. Again, the decrease in revenues was primarily due to the CRESSO transaction, where starting August 20, we have deconsolidated ARCpoint Franchise Group, and we are no longer including its revenues in our financial statements. Net income for the 9 months ended was $2.3 million compared to a net loss of $6 million in 2023. The change was primarily due to an accounting gain on deconsolidation of $6.3 million; a decrease in cost of revenues of $1.1 million; decrease in salary and wages of $1 million; and decrease in software expenses of about $200,000; and decrease in sales and marketing about $240,000. Operating cash flows for the 9-month period was negative $2.5 million compared to negative $4 million for the prior period. EBITDA for the 9-month period was $3.3 million compared to negative $5 million for the prior period. And adjusted EBITDA for the 9-month period was negative $2.5 million compared to negative $3.2 million in the prior period. And I'll pass it on back to John.

Appreciate that, Jason. So the big joint venture that we completed on August 20 is obviously the big news for this quarter. With this strategic move, we've dramatically increased our distribution footprint, increasing our exposure from 135 locations to over 370 locations. Additionally, as part of that transaction, we signed a licensing agreement with CRESSO Brands between our software platform, MyARCpointLabs, or MAPL, and their locations to be the operational tool that will be used by all 370-plus locations that operate underneath CRESSO Brands and growing as they sell new franchise locations. Starting in the coming weeks, we'll be placing the first Any Lab Tests Now locations on the platform. And as additional locations begin using our platform, we expect to have a very positive impact on our financial performance in 2025. We're also refining the program in which we've interfaced bidirectionally with our first telehealth company. So as my story at the beginning of the call mentioned, I was able to electronically send my lab results that I got through ARCpoint over to a telehealth provider, so the doctor on the other side of the phone could see my lab results. We continue to refine that process and make it bidirectional. So now those physicians can now also order diagnostic testing on their own customer base, so allowing them to plug their customers into our ecosystem, thus making the ecosystem bigger and bigger. This is a huge step towards expanding our health care ecosystem. It will also help the CRESSO brand franchisees and other health care ecosystem constituents to better serve their customers by allowing them to offer consumer access to health and wellness care systems that are convenient, easy-to-access and cost-effective, basically becoming the spiderweb between all of these disparate systems so that they can start to use each other and we get the benefit of both the data as well as the fees through those transactions. Over the last several months, we've also been developing a large language model or an LLM system that combines them with an avatar that allows us to inform consumers of what their health data actually means. So in my example, I didn't know the calcium levels being high could present as a parathyroid issue. Our goal is to create a large language model that can help complement our health care constituents, like telehealth providers, direct primary care offices, CRESSO brand locations and various health care organizations that are part of the ecosystem, to help them educate their consumers on what their health care data actually means, helps with them walk through the health care journey of their consumers or their patients, and it really creates an educated consumer. All these additional services allow us to not only improve our service offering to the CRESSO brand locations but also to other telehealth companies and various stakeholders of the health care ecosystem. In addition, they represent additional revenue streams as we start to launch these new systems into those various stakeholders. 2025 will be the year that our health care ecosystem really takes shape. Our first focus is onboarding of the CRESSO locations that are currently not on our MyARCpointLabs platform. That's step number one. We're also working hard to add other partners and MAPL users to grow our ecosystem, such as telehealth providers and direct primary care offices. By doing this, we expect us to bring more consumers and business to CRESSO franchisees and directly into the ARCpoint Inc. ecosystem. With that, I'll turn it over for any questions.

[Operator Instructions] Since there are no questions, this concludes the question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to John Constantine for any closing remarks.

Very good. Thank you. And I want to mention an article that was in The Globe for our Canadian listeners today. It mentioned that a large percentage, I think 15% of emergency room visits could have been handled by family practice or general practitioners or even telehealth providers. It's a timely article because we don't operate in Canada. However, it's the same problem that we're facing in the United States. Doctors are overworked, their patient load is too large and they just don't have the opportunity to build a relationship with their customers, their patients to really dig in to what's happening with their health. I got caught in the middle of that. And our goal with the health care ecosystem that we're building is to solve that problem, solve it for the telehealth doctors, solve it for the direct primary care offices. The traditional health care system is complemented by a system like the ARCpoint ecosystem. So appreciate you joining today, listening. And we look forward to 2025, and have a great holiday season.

This brings to close today's conference call. You may disconnect your lines. Thank you for participating, and have a pleasant day.