Beamtree Holdings Limited (BMT) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary
February 14, 2023
Earnings Call Speaker Segments
Operator
operatorOkay. Good morning, everybody. Thank you for joining us today, 15th of February 2023 to hear the executive team, Tim Kelsey and Mark McLellan present the first half results for Beamtree. Delighted to be able to do this early in the reporting season. So credit to the team for being ahead of the game and having all the information ready to disclose to the market, I think, goes to show that the guys have not only got a company sort of moving in the right direction that they're well in charge of all the administrative processes, and we signed all this off in the Board meeting yesterday, which was fantastic. I'll draw a couple of quick things to highlight your attention. There is an announcement on the trading highlights, which I think stepped out the first half. We have reiterated the first quarter that we released to the market in October and trying to be very consistent with methodology we've added the second half or essentially the second quarter highlights as well to the same. So you can see there the momentum in the business across all 4 parts of the business is really exciting to see. And the business pointed towards international growth that Tim and Mark will take you through the presentation slides. You'll see there's a huge amount of opportunity across the product set. And there's some very significant customers are following Beamtree and going through that either proof of concept or procurement or indeed already contracted to use the products of Beamtree. A couple of quick highlights, obviously, that we have announced through the course of the first half was the Abbott partnership. Tim will talk to the strength of that Abbott partnership, and he'll indeed mention that we have had the Abbott team out here in Australia. So I'll let Tim take you through what we're doing with Abbott and where we see that headed. As equally as important, the health roundtable agreement was signed for a 8-year extension, which is a significant part of the business and brings over 230 hospital health care groups together to share data, which is a really important part of the whole Beamtree story. Again, I'll let Tim and Mark talked to that. We've also announced through the past 12 months, really the momentum that the team is having in England through the NHS, and there's multiple NHS trusts that are taking up various products of Beamtree and again, I'll let our team who's best suited to talk to the strength of the NHS relationship and the extension of those our products across various trusts across the country. And also importantly, we called out in the trading highlights the work that the team is doing in the Middle East and indeed with Saudi Arabia and the lean partnership. And again, Tim will take you through some of the highlights that we're seeing from a company point of view in the extension of having our products move into countries like Saudi Arabia and further throughout the Middle East. So on that, I won't take too much of the lime light away from Tim and Mark, I'll allow them to turn the pages on the presentation. If there are questions that you have, please enter your question on either the chat or the Q&A tab on your screen. We'll endeavor to get to those questions either through the presentation as we see them more towards the end. So feel free to lodge a question and we look forward to responding to those. So over to you, Tim.
Tim Kelsey
executiveThanks, Mike. If I could just start by acknowledging the traditional Elders of the lands in which we collectively meet today, and pay my respects to Elders past present and emerging. So the story we're about to tell is a very strong first half, and I'd first like to thank the Board, obviously, for their continuing leadership, but also the team, the Beamtree team, which is growing rapidly. And responding to demand, which reflects the fact that health services globally are facing very much the same challenges. Those have workforce constraints, the fight against waste and inefficiency and services. And in many countries, the kind of the legacy of COVID in particular, the waiting list in relation to elective care, which is -- and in all 3 areas, Beamtree have very important services to provide. So what we're seeing is growth during the first half, just really reflecting that global focus on improving value in health care. So just to give you some quick highlights initially in terms of overview. I draw your attention to the overall growth of revenue, of course, to 20%, in line with what we heard forecast earlier this year in terms of recurring revenue, reported revenue up by 47% PCP. But probably most importantly is the increase in international revenue just reflecting the increasing pivot in terms of our overseas focus. So working in now more than 25 countries around the world, both directly and through partnerships with organizations like Abbott. Also just draw your attention to the box just down there on the left-hand side, which reports that recurring revenue as a proportion of overall revenues increased from 87% in the first half of FY '22 to now 98%. So the quality of revenues in the company is significantly enhanced. We report positive cash flow moving over to the right-hand side of the highlights table during the first half. And importantly, also, in the box, just under that cash flow figure, we report that net cash flow, excluding acquisitions, has also significantly improved PCP. So just highlights there on the financial performance of the company. Next slide, please, Mark. Key strategic highlights. As we've advised the company as Mike said, sorry, has 4 kind of business units. The first one, just to quickly remind you, diagnostics, where our flagship RippleDown platform supporting efficiency and quality outcomes in pathology and diagnostics more generally. Here, we're working, obviously, closely though not exclusively with Abbott, and we also work with Philips, but Abbott our principal partner in this space. And of course, during the course of the first half, we renegotiated our arrangements with Abbott, which really provide the basis for a much more coherent partnership. And as Mike said, we've had the pleasure of hosting Scott Safar, the Vice President of Abbott Digital Health Solutions in Sydney over the last few days and look forward to a very accelerated pipeline of both sort of smaller licensed arrangements and significantly larger co-sale opportunities in the pathology space. So a lot of excitement there. And in the first half, in fact, we've already increased the number of licenses issued by Beamtree to the Abbott client group by 9. So significant acceleration there in the number of licenses, just reflecting really the quality of the new commercial partnership. Analytics and Knowledge Networks, our second business domain. This obviously principally dominated by the -- our work with the Health Roundtable but we do have other partnerships in this sector as well, including Ability Roundtable. Health Roundtable though, the focus of the first half activities in terms of renegotiation of our contract to increase the terms to an 8-year and also the Health Roundtable injecting $1 million in a partnership to significantly modernize the digital infrastructure of the Roundtable and enhanced member services. We're very excited by that opportunity. We think it will both significantly enhanced value, as I mentioned, for existing members, but the very strong pull for new members to join the roundtable as they begin to see the quality of the benchmarking and support improvement services delivered. So that's been a very significant success for us in the first half. In relation to coding. And for those who are new to the business, let me just quickly explain what we do here. So this is where we have some very distinct propriety technology that supports the automation of clinical record classification. So this is the process by which clinical records in the hospital are converted into data points that can be used for billing and for analysis. And that process in almost all hospitals around the world, is managed by humans, and we have technology that supports the accuracy of their workflow, very important to ensuring the accurate reimbursement of hospitals. And of course, the accurate analysis of quality and outcome in those hospitals is the top priority for health [ services ] around the world, and we work in a number of countries to support them with the accuracy of that data. But we're particularly pleased to be developing a relationship with the government of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in partnership with Lean, our technology partner, Lean is a government-owned company in Saudi Arabia, I think it's fair to say, is the lead by far, the leading health technology innovator in the Kingdom, and we work with them to develop a series of opportunities and pipeline to service the requirements of the broader health system and in Saudi Arabia. So there'll be announcements about the fruit of that relationship over the coming in the second half, but just to say we've really embedded ourselves well in during the first half with Lean and the new agreement with them. And then hopefully, our both business division focused really on our AI and machine learning activity. And this is where we provide very advanced clinical decision support. Again, leveraging our RippleDown platform to do things like forecast the future condition of the patient through the Ainsoff deterioration index. And a lot of work has gone on there to in -- a number of countries to improve the -- to develop the efficacy of that technology and a landmark agreement in the NHS, which is one of the systems that we're working with in January with Milton Keynes University Hospital, which is one of the leading NHS hospital trusts to partner with them on creating a global center of excellence that will become a reference site for all those -- that family of products. So very excited by that development as well. So those are the key strategic highlights of the first half. Mark, next slide, please. So the outlook for the second half of the year, we are bullish. We are building on a very strong base of recurring revenue, as I've just described, and we still report a very, very high level of customer attention hardly any churn at all in any business domain. But just to say that we've absolutely stand by the outlook. We gauged the market last year at the AGM of the target of $60 million recurring revenue by 2026. We are also very confident that we're going to be achieving that sort of 20% recurrent growth rates for the full year as well as the -- obviously, for the half year. We are looking to be delivering a series of strategic projects, which are all very much in train and have been sort of set up during the first half. They should all come to creation during the second half. And obviously, those will be announced to the market as they are concluded. We've been very tied on cost in order to deliver that trajectory to profitability, which we are absolutely on. So cost management for the whole year, we're forecasting will be significantly less than 10% in terms of the growth of costs, and we continue our focus on improving the operating profit for the second half of the year as well. Next slide, please. So just to remind you that long-term growth trajectory, get a little bit more detail on its sort of breakdown. But as you can see, the principal focus of growth remains with our pathology sector, they work with Abbott and that new contract, giving us a very strong foundation for accelerated growth globally. We're going to face, in fact, on Europe, Middle East and Africa to start with, but this week have foundational pipeline discussions with the Abbott teams in Asia Pacific and in the U.S., and we're going to be entering the U.S. market during the calendar -- in the course of the calendar year, possibly towards the end of and or the beginning of the next financial year. We're also continuing, of course, with our direct RippleDown sales. We had good success -- we've had good success with a number of new sales over the last 12 months or so, and the pipeline continues to develop. So we're also focusing on direct sales. In the second wave there of growth, there's this pink one focused there on the Clinical Decision Support there. So envisaging that we will be taking the Ainsoff ADI, the deterioration index product to market already as you'll see later in the deck, in play in 2 major public hospitals now in Australia, but looking to embed that product and the range of health economies during the course of the second half and beyond. Third area of growth is our coding work. We anticipate taking the PICQ product, in particular, into a number of countries. And again, we will be announcing sort of first fruits in some of those countries during the second half of this year, but building confidence in the trajectory to 2026. As we've already discussed, the Health Roundtable 8-year contract is it's a very good platform for growth in Knowledge Networks across the period. So Mark, next slide, please. So just to turn briefly to our strategy and quickly remind those on the -- kind of the core mission of the business. The core mission of the business is this, we are a company that is here to support essentially automation and AI decision support. And we are demonstrating, as you'll see in a second, the efficacy of our platform to support the learning health system in countries across the world. Next slide, please. One of the distinctive characteristics of Beamtree is, of course, that although Beamtree about new brand and the group of companies that's brought together has been relatively new. Those companies have very long proven experience in delivery of these technology services in health care and in other countries. Next slide, please. And those 4 companies just to quickly remind you, Pacific Knowledge Systems, which was the original developer of RippleDown, Pavilion Health, which developed the PICQ and RISQ products Potential(x), which was the service provider to Health Roundtable and Ainsoff, which was the startup that had developed so brilliantly some of the AI applications, which we're now taking to market. Next slide, please. And today, we are operating in 25 countries, as I mentioned earlier. We have 175 clients, which, in some ways, is slightly missing because some of those clients are actually countries representing very large numbers of hospitals or indeed like health round table in Australia, equally sort of large networks and health providers. But we are -- this -- our ability to cross-sell is very important and provides us with a very important sort of basis for future growth. Next slide, please. And this is part of the heart of Beamtree mission and the driver of our core values. So we aspire the concept of the learning health system, and our platform is designed to provide -- to get providers a solution in all 3 of those domains. So the first dose going around the circle from the top clock-wise, relates to data quality and integrity. So this is just basically ensuring that the foundational decisions in health care is credible. And of course and as I mentioned before, we have both very well-established technology, very wide is in Australia now in other countries that supports the automation of data quality and health systems and now developing new technologies, which support the automation of actual clinical record coding altogether and very excitingly, have now launched or launching 2 pilots of that new technology, and we'll be able to report more on that in the second half at the end of the year results presentation. So that's the first domain of our activity. Second domain relates to then taking that data, that reliable data and turning that into insights. Which provides direction for health services to improve both the quality of their care and the value of and efficiency of the care provider. And that's where networks like Health round table becomes so important, really world-leading network collaboration of hospitals looking to continuously improve their outcomes by learning from each other. We've also, during the first half really galvanized the energy behind the Global Health comparators project, which is another program we run, which brings together international providers to compare performance and again, exchange views on improvement across the world. And in fact, that group is coming together for its first conference in Italy in March, which will again be a very important discussion about how that initiative can be shaped into the next phase. And then moving into the third area of our learning health system, which is taking those insights, understanding those issues a variation between providers and understanding what best looks like and turning those into rules that can actually support clinical and administrative activity on the front line so that you're continuously refreshing the intelligence of the system to act best in the interest of the patients and communities it serves. So those are the 3 core components of the Beamtree platform speaking to the learning health system in global health care. So next slide, please. Mark? And other sort of indicators, the problems we're solving a very real, very, very high-priority problems for international providers, international health systems. And those relate to the back of unwarranted variations, obviously, post the postcode loss in health care is clearly not what fund in publicly funded health systems or services to provide. It's also a very expensive an inefficient way of distributing resources. And so our products provide a means of identifying that variation, reducing it and ultimately managing scarce public resources and private resources more efficiently in the delivery of health outcomes. Next slide, please. I think we probably covered this quite a bit, but just in the deck for your review subsequently, but just very quickly, I mentioned the RippleDown products, the Decision Support platform, which automates the replication of human expertise and has done such an amazing job in pathology, which we're now through our work in clinical decision support, taking into the hospital with a layer of machine learning and AI to increase the predictive power of that platform. And then moving to the right-hand side, we have PICQ and RISQ in the coding family with other products like Activity BarCoding alongside those, and that is also an effect of significant new product development in relation to the automation of clinical record coding itself. And then finally, of course, we have analytics where we serve the -- a number of clients, including Health Roundtable and it builds to our table and directly manage ourselves networks like global health comparators. Next slide, please. Again, really just a review after the -- in the depth, but this just gives you a sense of what the relative return on investment is for each of these products. And in fact, one of the distinctive features of being why we are being so successful at the moment is because we're able to forecast the actual economic and clinical impact of our services in advance of the purchase taking place. So we run a program in many of the product areas where we will actually forecast that presale. And that obviously provides an important base for -- for the client understanding the relative benefit of the pricing we propose usually, as you can see on the far right-hand side based on a combination of a license and some kind of volume-based fee. So building confidence in the finally, the product is a really important foundation for our current success next slide, please. So just some -- I don't know if you have operational highlights in the first half. Next slide. You won't be able to read this. But just a couple of things. Some of the most important actually right -- on the right-hand side, so the agreement with the Health Roundtable, the agreement with Milton Keynes and so on other developments in the NHS there that I would point to the Abbott contract and it's -- and the renegotiation, which happened just before the holiday as a very important milestone in the first half. Next slide, please. And again, without going to enormous detail here. We've had great success in all areas of our activity. In RippleDown, we talked a bit about Abbott, which is really both a global and Australia has been a focus. In fact, the team in Australia and New Zealand, are sort of collaboration with Abbott here has been very successful as well, and we're now developing a very strong relationship with Helios, which is the second largest provider of pathology services in Australia and indeed beginning to open up the market directly in the U.K. as well. So that's been a development during the first half. In terms of the coding work, we've mentioned our partnership with Lean in Saudi Arabia, which is a big focus, but also just we completed our first coding audit in the U.K. now beginning to look at exporting PICQ into that market as well as into other [indiscernible] and to other related markets globally. Clinical Decision Support, I mentioned that the as of deterioration index, which has I'm sure people will be aware, been through clinical trial in Sydney is now being implemented in business as usual practice in 2 public hospitals in [indiscernible] Adelaide, [indiscernible]. And that has been a very important sort of milestone for us as we can see from here, we launched the service in other countries, and we've had particular success in Asia Pacific, where in one particular client engagement, we've been able to prove out very successfully the predicted power of the deterioration index for that client. And just -- and we've recently just completed our first data analysis in the U.K. and the NHS in England. So that we have a good confidence that we'll see significant growth in at the ADI as a product when we launched that formally in June. Health Roundtable, we talked about the Health Roundtable contract itself and the modernization of the data platform. So some significant developments across all domains. Next slide, please, Mark. And just to highlight a couple of things, which I know have been a significant interest to shareholders. And so first, there's the other contracts, some very significant enhancements commercially as well as from other perspectives. So I'd point to the fact that historically, Abbott has distributed RippleDown as a white label product within its digital health portfolio, that is branded AlinIQ. And Abbott has a footprint of around 18,000 [indiscernible] clients globally and AlinIQ has been retailing into a proportion of those clients, but has been retailing our product as a white label product. So the new agreement -- it foresees that being moving into a branded relations RippleDown to come in kind of a powered by RippleDown brand within the Abbott portfolio. We think that's a very important development for the -- for not just for the branded RippleDown but actually for the clients who now can see that this is the product that they connect them better to our whole training and after sell support service. In addition, we've agreed a revenue share for larger clients, which incentivizes both Abbott and Beamtree to develop and accelerate the pipeline of those clients as well. So some very significant developments in the Abbott partnership. In relation to Health Roundtable, I probably covered most of the key terms there, but the 8-year extension and the new injection of $1 million into the development of the data infrastructure program. Next slide, please. Lean talked through that a little bit. It's a very leading technology organization in health care in Saudi Arabia. We're very privileged to have been selected by Lean to be a partner. They're very excited by the opportunities for all our technologies actually in the Kingdom, but particularly our coding technologies, where the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is prioritizing under its new Vision 2030 reform program, the improvement of data in all the health systems that operate in the Kingdom and both Lean and Beamtree, of course, share the view that what we've been doing in Australia and in other countries can support that significantly in Saudi Arabia. Milton Keynes, very well-known center for digital innovation signed up to -- it really is a reference site for both our auto coding initiative and for the Ainsoff Deterioration Index. So very excited by that. developmental relationship and thank the team at Milton Keynes for the great quality of the collaboration. Next slide. So I'm going to hand over now to Mark just to take you through in a bit more detail the financial results, but happy to take any questions at the end of the presentation.
Mark McLellan
executiveThanks, Tim. Good morning, everybody. I'm going to spend a couple of minutes just going through the detailed financials, starting with the annual recurring revenue. So this is Slide 22, that shows the annual recurring revenue trend over the last 3 years. You can see the first half FY '21 being $6.5 million and a significant uptick in FY '22, really driven by the acquisition of Potential(x) about 18 months ago, coupled with some organic growth. And in terms of the current period that we're looking at, you can see we've gone from $16.8 million ARR up to $20.1 million that's $3.3 million or 20% organic growth. That most -- a lot of -- certainly, 60% of that organic growth has come from our diagnostics business supplemented with good growth across the other segments. Moving on to the reported revenue. Again, we've shown 3 years of the trend. You can see it's gone from $3.7 million to $7.1 million to $10.5 million, and we sought to identify some of the big blocks in there, what I would call out in the prior year number of reported revenue of $7.1 million. There was $0.8 million of revenue from a one-off Saudi advisory contract. So if you're comparing like with like, are really comparing $6.3 million against the $10.5 million. The main drivers of the uptick in growth have been Potential(x), which was in the prior period for only 3 months or the 6 months. So that represents a difference of $2.7 million, and then the organic growth of $1.5 million. So on a reported level, it's going up by 47% year-on-year. But when you strip out the impact of the Potential(x) acquisition, the growth -- the underlying growth is about 24%. That organic growth has really been driven by, as I said, the some of the success we got in the diagnostics side of the business, again, driven supplemented with the success we've had in both the coding and the Knowledge Network side as well. Moving on to our OpEx. So what we're seeing for OpEx has shown the last couple of years. Again, you can see if you look at FY '22 on a like-for-like basis, so adding 3 months of Potential(x) costs of $2.4 million, you're really comparing $10.9 million for the first half FY '22 versus the $11.4 million. So we made sure -- we're showing a reported growth of 33%, which is the $8.5 million versus $11.4 million but actually, the underlying cost increases actually $10.9 million to $11.4 million. So that is only 4.5% organic growth rate for cost versus the organic reported revenue growth of 24%. So we're really sort of focused on careful cost management within the business. We did a small restructure in September where we reduced some headcount. So the headcount stands about 90 full-time equivalents versus 100, 12 months ago. So you can see we're focused on the cost base and hence, the growth rate has only been 4.5%. Looking at how does that sort of translate into the improving profitability of the business. Looking at Slide 25, we've shown the last 5 quarters. You can see that what's happening from a revenue perspective, you can see the revenue tracking up, driven by organic growth and acquisition growth. You can see the revenue go up 47% as I talked about previously, looking at the operating profit or the losses that we've shown in the last 5 quarters, you can see where the business is really invested in the first half of FY '22 and the second half FY '22 to embark on this international growth strategy. So we did a significant amount of investment to implement that strategy, which obviously had an impact on our underlying profitability. You can see the benefit of that investment starting to play out in the first half of FY '22, where we've got strong growth rate. We've kept [ little ] cost and therefore, shown a significant improvement in the underlying profit trend in the business. So we've gone from $2.6 million in the second half of FY '22 to $0.9 million, so almost a 40% improvement in that period. On the right-hand side, I'm showing the reconciliation between what we deem -- what we call operating profit, which is what we target our management on and some of the nonoperating expenses in the business to bring you back down to reported EBITDA. In terms of these nonoperating expenses, we've again start to break them out between cash and noncash. The cash items, you can see are broadly minimal in FY '22. I think the main ones are our nonoperating or noncash nonoperating expenses. The 2 big ones would be around the share-based payment expenses. So we have seen an increase year-on-year driven by new issuances to execs and also the cost that we've incurred in the last 6 months to establish an employee share scheme. So that's a long-term investment for us. And then the other main change in that is that there is a fair value adjustment in relation to some deferred shares in relation to the Potential(x) acquisition. We revalue them at every period end. So if you look at first half FY '22, there was a positive impact of $0.3 million, but in the current period, first half FY '23, there's a negative impact because the share price of Beamtree increased. So that's a fair value adjustment of $0.6 million. So there's a [ 900 ] swing in just comparing first half FY '22 versus FY '23. So that's a big driver of why the reported EBITDA is going from minus $1 million to $2.1 million, that really is driven by the fair value adjustment movement. So you can bring that all together and look at the summary, profit and loss, you can see, as I said, reported revenues up 47%, with the underlying organic around ARR is around 20% growth. The costs, albeit reported is up 33%. The actual underlying trend is mid-single digits. So that's driving -- driving that significant improvement in operating performance of the business. And the other thing I would call out, I'll be through report EBITDA movement that's driven significantly by the fair value adjustment change. The depreciation and amortization has gone from $1.4 million to $2.4 million. That has been predominantly driven by the Potential(x) acquisition. There's probably about -- yes, just about [ $1 million ] of that driven by Potential(x) of which [ 700 ] relates to the customer list, which was on the balance sheet and amortizing over 5 years. Just moving on to cash. So cash is king in the business. It's been a very positive period from a cash flow perspective. We've seen the business moved from a negative operating cash flow this time last year, $2.2 million to a positive of $0.5 million. There was a benefit of -- we did receive some cash from an international customer during the period, which helped that position. We used a significant part of that to settle some other liabilities, but it certainly helped us in the cash flow in the first half. Looking at what we're investing in terms of the intangible payments for intangibles, that is our capitalized software development spend. You can see that's gone from $2.2 million to $1.2 million in the period. That's again driven by our focus on cost management and also tightening up of the spend that we're capitalizing. So that's a material decrease year-on-year. So that's why the overall sort of change in cash for this period was a reduction of $0.9 million versus the prior year of $7.1 million. And that $7.1 million did include a payment for an acquisition. So the table at the bottom of that Slide 27 shows the cash flows, excluding the acquisition payments, showing a significant improvement of $3.6 million. So the first half of FY '22, we had an outflow of $4.6 million from cash of our normal operating activities. So that is operating activities and the capitalized software spend. So as not full last year, $4.6 million. This year, it's about $1 million. a significant change and significant improvement in the cash flow management of the business. And at the end of December '22, our cash balance was $5.4 million. And Tim, I'll now hand over to you to just do a quick summary, and then we'll open to some questions.
Tim Kelsey
executiveThank you, Mark. Yes. So look, just to summarize very briefly. I think the focus of what we're really saying is that the first half has been a very important validation of our international growth strategy, in particular, whilst maintaining very positive growth in Australia and New Zealand and obviously a very high level of client retention in our base. But just to recap, really the international story is -- starts with Abbott and the new contract with Abbott giving us very strong confidence about the opportunities to promote RippleDown into pathology with an initial focus on EMEA, but also delivering in the first half some successes in terms of new contract wins within Australia and New Zealand with -- in partnership with Abbott. U.K., another key market focus for us now with 4 key hospital trust that's Milton Keynes, Coventry in Warwickshire, Lancashire, [indiscernible] Island-wide working with us as our kind of first wave on a variety of Beamtree products and services and obviously agreeing the new memorandum understanding with Milton Keynes as a core reference site. Work focused in Saudi Arabia, where we've had success with the agreement of the Lean partnership and developing a very strong pipeline, which we'll be bringing back to shareholders as contracts are agreed on the coming months and then work really with the Ainsoff Deterioration Index still in sort of premarketing phase but showing tremendous promise and now with contracts for trial implementation in Australia where it's moved into full-scale actual bus as usual implementation in a number of hospitals and in the NHS and with our first Asia Pacific clients. So giving a bit of an overview there of what we regard as a very successful first half. So with that, I will close the formal presentation and hand over back to Mark to moderate the questions. Thank you.
Michael Hastings Hill
executiveThanks, Tim. So I'm just going to read out these questions and then we will give them up between Tim and myself. So the first question is wise Beamtree not showing the profit for the first half of FY '23 when the pro forma FY '21 operational EBITDA presented to investors in the Potential(x) acquisition showed a positive $5.7 million? So I just want to show in terms of answering that question, if you go back to Slide 25, which I'm showing here is there we have invested in the business in the last 18 months to embark on this international growth strategy as well as invest in our clinical decision support business, our Ainsoff business. And you can see that investment happening in the business in FY '22 in particular. And we've also -- we called out when we did our FY '22 results. So that investment is starting to play out in terms of the numbers in FY '22. So we can see the revenue -- the international revenue growth going up 55% that is all organic growth. And then we've seen the pipeline across all the segments from an international perspective, really, really building over the last 18 months. So it's really driven by our investment in the business to embark on that international strategy and the benefits of that will come through in the future. Tim, anything you want to add to that?
Tim Kelsey
executiveNo. I think that's pretty much covered it.
Mark McLellan
executiveSecond question is regarding the Abbott contract, what defines a larger customer? Can you give an example? Have any of these customers being signed yet?
Tim Kelsey
executiveYes. Well, a larger customer is defined as a customer who -- where we think the revenue opportunities will be in excess of USD 300,000. And we have essentially so we have -- obviously, the contract being agreed in December, we're developing the pipeline for those opportunities now. Some actually are in the existing portfolio of current license holders. And the -- but we have secured the first one, which is with Helios in Australia, so that we would define as a larger customer with -- in the partnership with Abbott. So hopefully, that helps.
Mark McLellan
executiveI think I would encourage you to look at the ASX announcements around Abbott back in December because again, we'll give you a bit more insight into that question as well. Next question is around the long-term outlook than the ARR. Do you see the ARR growth and target on that -- on the long-term outlook as a minimum or a most likely outcome?
Tim Kelsey
executiveWell, can I go -- so this is -- to be honest with you, we think it's a prudent forecast. So I think there's -- when we look at the assumptions, which we're doing now, we probably would forecast significantly. There's a scenario which is significantly greater than that than the $60 million. But the -- but we -- there's a long sales cycle in health and even though demand is very strong, we're preferring to kind of give what we think is a prudent future outlook for you. Mark, I don't know if you want to add to that?
Mark McLellan
executiveYes. Look, I think I've been in this business for 9 months. It is evident to me that it is a long lead time for some of these sales. So I certainly believe that the building blocks are in place, and there's been lots of very, very good discussions with customers, but it takes a while for the -- for them to sign on the dotted line, just given they are hospitals and a lot of them are public alone. So I do see a lot of potential in that business and that's why we've come out with that $60 million ARR whether that's the right outcome, who knows. We kind of know that forecasts are always wrong. It's just by how much they're wrong, but it certainly does -- we feel given what we can see in the pipeline and what -- and the discussions we're having, that we're confident around that $60 million. Okay. Another question is Mark, great to see the positive operating cash flow. Just expanding that I mentioned, we received some cash from an international customer. Was that an upfront payment. What was the size of that payment, what would been an operating cash on a normalized basis? So good question, sir. So the -- that payment related to some of what we did in the prior year. So -- and the customer was slow in paying, but we've now got the money in. That amount was just over $2 million. As I said, I called out that we had a number of other one-off type liabilities that we used that to settle, we used that money to settle. So probably the net impact was about $1 million in that operating cash flow. So that's probably what it is on a normalized basis. Next question, how do you see the cash balance movements over the rest of the year? That's another good question. It's -- again, cash is king. We are continuing to focus on our cost base. There is -- you can see in the first half, we had the benefit of the $1 million sorry, $2 million from the customer, but the net outflow in the period was about $1 million, predominantly driven by our capitalized software spend. I see the catalyst software spend maybe on the same level in the second half, I mean you got slightly as we brought a couple of more engineers in to help that product development. I think there was a benefit in the first half. So from that international payments. So I would expect we'll continue to focus on it, but I would expect there will be still some cash flow in the second half. Okay. Next question is approximately what percentage of annual revenue would you expect to spend on software development going forward to drive growth targets? So I think I kind of -- we did $1.2 million in the first half. I'm expecting that to be slightly higher in the second half, so call it, $1.4 million, $1.5 million. So it's about in that $2.5 million to $3 million range for the full year. Next question, what is the level of investment, I think, putting the business through the first half? And how should we think about that going forward? Tim, I'm happy to talk about that. So the -- there is -- I suppose there's investment almost in all the segments. So if I take them individually the diagnostics, we're investing in our relationship. We are investing in a couple of additional engineers to drive the -- that product to make sure it's as relevant to our customers it can be. And we see that, as we called out in the long-term outlook that is a real growth engine for us. So hence, we put on -- we'll put a couple of additional engineers into that. The other investments, there's obviously within our CDS Ainsoff business, that is a start-up. So there's at least $1 million going into that per annum, if not more, to invest in that, that is around product owners, around developers and people engaging with to drive pilot or pilot trial. So there's a significant investment in doing that in relation to the coding business. There is a lot of investment going in around the international pipeline development. So we have got a number of resources dedicated to that. So all if you add up, there's a reasonable amount of investment going into all the segments. We've not sought to call that out. I don't quantify it, but it's -- we view that as a long-term investment for the benefit of the business. Tim, anything you'd add to that?
Tim Kelsey
executiveNo, I just -- in terms of the Ainsoff Deterioration, just to remind people, what we've done here. So we've got -- RippleDown is a very well-proven expert system, which has been operating pathology. We think there's just enormous opportunity there. That's the foundation really the Abbott agreement. But in addition, RippleDown has been used to develop much more cutting-edge applications that are in real value in the hospital setting. And so we've -- as shareholders remember, we bought the Ainsoff start-up last year, Ainsoff developed a series of applications using RippleDown, which bringing together with more modern machine learning technology to do things like identified patient deterioration in the word in the hospital, a really important pain point for hospitals around the world. We were very, very impressed with the quality of that technology and indeed with the results of the first clinical trial, which were published about a year ago and indicated some very important benefits of hospitals using that technology. So we're investing in that, both in terms of turning it into a kind of product that can be remotely distributed and also continuing to trial with a number of sort of pathfinder clients across the world, which I've mentioned already. So the -- we're now at a point where we are going to be sort of launching that as a product into the next financial year. So that's just to give people a bit of an overview of what that investment actually is all about. It's an incredibly exciting breakthrough technology, which is being received really well in the sort of trial sites where it's been operating. And that's the basis for our excitement about the giving support to that new product set.
Mark McLellan
executiveOkay. I've got a few more questions. And they're actually all really centered around the $60 million ARR target and what would be the EBITDA margin or the profit margin around that sort of $60 million. I think that's an inevitable question that people raised. I would say that as we're on that path to that $60 million, we will need to continue to invest in the business to drive that growth and that's in all segments. So I anticipate, as we -- any time we get additional income from sort of signing up a customer, we will kind of use that and reinvest it back into the business, certainly for the next couple of years to help us continue to expand into some of our core markets such as the U.K. and Saudi Arabia and other ones that we're looking at. So it will be a journey of continue investment in the next couple of years to drive that international growth. The other area is around Abbott and supporting that contract as well. We do need to help drive our partner and help with some of the sales certainly in the larger customers as well. So I would say, yes, the margin I think I would say that we're going to continue to invest. In terms of the margin, it is -- the underlying margin for some of these products is quite high. So RippleDown with 70%, ADI will be on similar trends, coding around PICQ should be at that level as well. So that gives you an indication about the underlying margin of the sales that we are making, but we will continue to invest in the business to take advantage of the opportunities that we see in front of us in a number of countries. Tim, anything you want to add to that around margin?
Tim Kelsey
executiveNo, that's good. Yes. I mean just to say, this is inherently a very, very high-margin business. We've been -- well, frankly, we're being -- we're in a very privileged position of just being in the absolute sweet spot of international health care demand. So we need to invest at this point in order to kind of win the first move [indiscernible] in those markets and build our position. But yes.
Mark McLellan
executiveI think the key thing is the underlying products are high gross margin product. So once they are installed, it is a very attractive recurring sticky revenue. Final question I've got is, will you need additional equity to meet your FY '26 target?
Tim Kelsey
executiveSo I think the answer to this question is that we always look at scenarios based on our estimation of pipeline and try and balance the sort of the opportunity with our existing cash flow. So I think we're constantly tracking around that sort of constantly looking at that. And currently, we're tracking around the position. So I think the question is this. We are, at the moment, quite confident we can manage within our current cash reserves, but the we're looking very carefully at market opportunity and how best we can really exploit that. Mike, I don't know if you have anything to add to that? You are on mute Mike?
Michael Hastings Hill
executiveI think you summarized it pretty well, Tim. It's top of mind question for both the executive team and the Board as we model scenarios, both short term and long term. I think at the moment, we've proven that we can deliver good growth, build those product sets into customer demand and manage our costs really carefully, and that's showing that improvement in cash flow is in favor towards the company at this point. We have been through the past previous sort of 18 months where the business has been investing to get us to where we are today. If Tim and the team turn up with 10 brand new contracts with big revenues that need boots on the ground in certain countries or that's a scenario or model out and look at but for the time being, it's business as usual, market is fought pretty firm on the cost structures. And Tim drives the revenue potential across the globe pretty hard. So that's a good -- it's a great partnership there between the 2 and extending that further to the rest of the Beamtree exec team, I think, goes to show that this set of results is we delivered what we said. And in fact, if you could see what's going on behind the scenes with the pipeline opportunities, which, as Tim said, sometimes is frustrating in health care because it does take a long time for these organizations to actually go from the verbal yes, to the signing the paper through their own organizations. But we are quietly optimistic about the potential for the Beamtree business to really achieve that aspirational $60 million in the short term and potentially -- there's potentially a lot more there should some of these products really gain momentum. As Tim mentioned, the ADI product and soft product could be a game changer in its own as could the Abbott contract with now the revenue share ability as could the expansion in the Middle East as could the NHS opportunities across multiple trusts in the NHS, and that's Tim's background where he worked before. He took the helm at Beamtree. So there's a huge amount of opportunity. And I think if it's not 1 part of the business that really fires, there's plenty of others that the guys have been working on and that extend the thanks to the team, the hard work. I mentioned it at the start. It's not just an admin going to get your results in order. But credit to the team for not only prosecuting the revenue and growth opportunity but managing the cost base and being able here early in the reporting season to get the results out to you guys. So I think in that, guys, we might wrap it up. The team is always available for more questions. We've had some good questions coming through today. I know the brokers supporting the company. I've got a bunch of one-on-one meetings and group meetings for the team. So we'll allow them to move on and deal with more questions as they go. But thank you, everyone, for joining.
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