Catapult Sports Ltd (CAT.AX) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, and thank you for joining us. I'm here with Bob Cruickshank, Catapult's Chief Financial Officer, to walk you through the incredibly exciting acquisition of Impect that we announced this morning. I'll walk you through who Impect is, what it does as well as the strategic rationale behind the acquisition. Then we'll provide some time at the end for Bob and I to take any questions from participants on the call. Impect is the global innovation leader in soccer scouting analytics and tactical insights. They've been trusted by some of the biggest soccer teams around the world. Founded in Germany in 2014, Impect started out as a vision to bring data-driven decision-making into an ecosystem of scouting analysis that was nascent, unstructured and not generating meaningful insights to teams or federations. Impect was founded to bring intelligence into this ecosystem. Today, Impect generates deep tactical insights for scouting from more than 40,000 matches in 25 countries for more than 150 teams and growing. They have become an end-to-end intelligence platform that encompasses player scouting, opponent analysis and internal benchmarking, utilizing data they collect and own. Their proprietary packing data provides a unique perspective on games, helping teams and federations generate deeper insights into player performance. Impect's scalable technology-first cloud-based SaaS business model is closely aligned with our strategy and our subscription business model. Regarding the transaction, we are acquiring Impect for an upfront consideration of EUR 40 million, which is approximately AUD 71 million or USD 46 million. This represents a multiple of 5.6x Impect's July ACV. In addition to the upfront consideration is $38 million (sic) EUR 38 million payable to the Impect shareholders over the next 4 years, comprising EUR 28 million in deferred equity and EUR 10 million that is subject to meeting performance hurdles. The upfront consideration and associated transaction costs will be funded through a fully underwritten institutional share placement of AUD 130 million. Incremental proceeds will be used to strengthen Catapult's balance sheet and provide capacity to pursue future strategic M&A opportunities. We also want to give our retail shareholders the opportunity to participate. So we will be extending an SPP to eligible investors in Australia and New Zealand after the institutional equity raise. We are targeting a completion by October 31, subject to conventional conditions precedent. Now let's pause for a moment and consider why this acquisition matters. We see a clear opportunity to expand our capabilities in a way that directly supports our customers' evolving needs. This is a natural extension of our current platform that aligns with what the market and our customers are demanding. With our scale and track record of innovation, our customers are looking for us to embed data-driven decisions into their workflow. The opportunity to combine scouting analytics with our existing video products is both strategic and intuitive. It enhances the value of what we already offer and creates a seamlessly experience for our users. At its core, this acquisition is about unlocking new capabilities and addressing a clear need in the market for our customers. In mapping the landscape of data providers, we found an ecosystem defined less by innovation and more by fragmentation, marked by gaps in quality, inconsistency in delivery and a general sense that no one had truly solved the problem. First, there is fragmentation with no standardized data or shared methodology. Teams are building their own manual frameworks with inconsistent data quality and comparability. The ecosystem is segregated with tactical context missing from video scouting tools. Video alone lacks context to understand the role, fit and movement of a player. And without overlaying data, player discovery and performance is very difficult to interpret. It is disconnected also with scouts, coaches and analysts all using different systems. This leads to a lack of shared metrics within an organization and a misalignment of targets and player selection. There is also data overload with no real insights. Scouts and coaching staff are working with too many dashboards, teams often subscribe to multiple tools and there is limited cross-provider data integration. And lastly, it's an ecosystem where subjective judgment still dominates. There remains a high reliance on gut instinct, which has low scalability given weak institutional memory. What became clear is that this corner of the market is waiting for someone like Catapult, an organization with the scale, credibility and creative rigor to turn fragmented data into real insights. Our track record of innovation position us to bring structure, accuracy and deeper analysis to a space that's long needed, helping teams make smarter, faster and more informed decisions. So how do we come to a decision to acquire Impect? Well, we explored every path with eyes -- with open eyes. Whether to build a product ourselves, partner with an existing provider or if something truly exceptional existed, bring it under the Catapult roof. Over the past year, we listened closely to our customers, we mapped the industry gaps and measure every option against what teams told us they needed most. And in the end, it was clear that Impect had built something remarkable. And as our conversation with the founders deepened, so did our conviction that these 2 companies both shaped by innovation and purpose belonged together. First, Impect has solved many of the gaps in the ecosystem. Impect offers centralized and standardized metrics, enabling cross-team benchmarking and insights using a differentiated and proprietary tactical intelligence for consistent player evaluation. Their advanced analytics seamlessly integrates with video analysis tool to enable contextualized role-specific player insights. Automated reporting and screening tools allows for talent discovery based on these insights, improving speed and quality of recruitment. Their streamlined cloud-based unified platform also delivers shared intelligence for all stakeholders, ensuring alignment with the decision-maker from a consistent evaluation method. They also have an easy-to-use data visualization, which provides the industry most comprehensive scouting database that bridges the data to intuitive language that is used by anyone of the team or Federation. And lastly, its embedded objective metrics across the scouting life cycle standardizes players' evaluation. Their data-driven decisions reduces reliance on the subjective -- subjectivity judgment. Now on the next slide, Impect isn't just delivering for its customers. Its customers are recognizing the difference. The result has been an exceptional growth and importantly, a profitable growth. Impect delivered a phenomenal 60% ACV growth, and that was coupled with a 13% management EBITDA margin for the last financial year ending in December 2024. This resulted in a Rule of 40 score of 73%, placing it in an elite group of SaaS companies globally. Not only is it an elite group of companies on the Rule of 40, it's unique in the industry for the way in which the business model works. One of the challenges we faced when we considered adding scouting data and analytics into our platform was the lack of profitability or low-margin nature of existing providers. We were seeing companies operating with 40%, maybe 50% gross profit margins, little if no operating profit and the idea that we want to...

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Thank you and apologies for the technical difficulties here. But as I was saying, not only is Impect in an elite group of companies under Rule of 40, it's unique in the industry for the way which their business model works. One of the challenges we faced when we considered adding scouting data and analytics into our platform was the lack of profitability or low-margin nature of the existing providers. We were seeing companies operating with 40% to 50% gross profit margins, little if no operating profit and the idea that we want to dilute our gross margin by acquiring a company in this industry wasn't attractive. Impect has built an incredibly successful business from a technical and a product perspective, but also a financial perspective. Their gross profit margins are well in excess of their peers and much closer to a SaaS profit margin. This is currently around 70%, reflecting their innovation and superiority of their technology. And we believe over time that this margin should get even better, consistent with the target we have for our overall gross margin profile of 80% or higher. And as you can see on the right-hand slide -- right-hand side of that slide, Impect's momentum is also strong, delivering a remarkable 68% ACV CAGR over the 2 years to July and scaling ACV from USD 2.8 million to USD 8.1 million during that period. So the natural question becomes, how does this acquisition align with Catapult's larger ambition, our long-term vision from where performance technology is headed. One, it expands our platform. We want to help teams make better decisions with a comprehensive all-in-one technology and adding a scalable scouting solution into our platform is broadening our technology solution. It also enables data-driven decision in our platform. Impect's globally unique and proprietary Packing metrics delivers advanced differentiated data analytics for better data-driven decision-making. It also helps strengthen our cross-selling. Offering a scouting solution in soccer strengthens our capability to be able to cross-sell our video solution into our existing soccer customers. It helps expand the share of wallet. By adding scouting to our existing T&C and P&H solutions, we are going deeper into the share of wallet with our customers. And lastly, it helps deliver profitable growth at scale. The acquisition is immediately accretive to our FY '25 ACV growth and the Rule of 40 metrics and as the previous slide demonstrated. Combining Impect with Catapult's athlete performance suite, Vector, ClearSky and Perch and our Pro Video analysis suite, MatchTracker, Focus, Hub, Thunder creates a unified intelligence platform representing a compelling value proposition to our customers. From scouting and recruitment to training and match analysis, the combination of Catapult and Impect is creating an intelligent, integrated and seamless platform for pro sports team. The founders have not only built a great company, but also a strong team and a great culture of innovation. Values that closely mirrored our own at Catapult. And in keeping with our philosophy of retaining founders in our business, upon transaction, all 4 Impect founders and Impect's employees will join Catapult as we come together and build out the most comprehensive platform for global pro sports teams. And as we outlined in our Investor Day in March, our aspiration is to increase ACV from $200 million in the medium term to $1 billion over the long term. This acquisition is consistent with the aspiration and it accelerates the path we are on to realize that goal. Before making some closing remarks, I'm going to hand it over to Bob for some comments on the financials. Bob?

Thank you, Will, and good morning and good evening to everyone. To stay on Impect for a moment, as Will mentioned, it's a fantastic business, and they are fantastic numbers for a CFO to be presenting as part of a transaction. As the transaction is targeted to close within the next 3 months, Impect's financial contribution to our FY '26 statutory accounts will be limited. On that basis, we are not providing formal guidance at this stage. We will share more details in May at year-end following integration. I want to reaffirm our financial strategy going forward. The acquisition does not change our unwavering focus on the Rule of 40. Impect brings to Catapult a mature, high-performing product with no need for a significant investment ramp-up. Hence, we do not expect the cost base to increase beyond the addition of Impect's existing operations. We remain very focused on our commitment to deliver sustainable, profitable growth and our Rule of 40 strategy. On to the trading update that we provided earlier today, and I will give some high-level comments on those numbers. I would like to reiterate that unless I state otherwise, all the numbers are actual reported numbers in U.S. dollars and that our growth rates, which compare our performance year-on-year are in constant currency, removing the impact of fluctuations in foreign exchange rates. Also, please bear in mind that these numbers are preliminary and remain subject to audit review. We're pleased to report another strong period of ACV growth. In the first half of FY '26, ACV grew by 19% year-over-year to between $115.3 million and $115.6 million. When adjusted to exclude the impact of the Perch acquisition and the contribution from our Russian operations, which ceased in the second half of FY '25, the underlying year-over-year growth rate stands at 18%, which is a great result. Our momentum in ACV growth carries through to the top line with total revenue of $67.2 million to $67.5 million for the half year period. This represents 15% to 16% growth and a clear indication that our business continues to scale with speed and consistency. Management EBITDA, our key measure of profitability, which is inclusive of capitalized development continues to demonstrate our profitable growth at scale, improving by more than 45% and driven by that strong revenue growth I just mentioned. This is despite our management EBITDA being impacted by a $2 million payroll tax expense related to vesting of share-based payments as part of our employee share scheme, which occurred in the first half. This increase in payroll tax expense is driven by the strong performance in our share price over the last 2 years. Finally, to free cash flow, where you can see we generated $3.7 million to $4.0 million in free cash flow for the half. We've included 2 numbers there so that we're transparent about the impact to our free cash flow of transaction costs in the first half, which predominantly reflects the $3 million cash settlement associated with the acquisition of Perch. Excluding those costs, free cash flow for the first half was between $7.2 million and $7.5 million. This demonstrates that aside from the acquisition expenses, we are continuing to grow our free cash flow in line with our guidance earlier this year. So we're very pleased with our performance in the first half, and we remain on track to deliver against our full year guidance as we've confirmed in our announcement today. That being that we continue to expect ACV growth to remain strong with low churn, continued improvement in cost margins toward targets and higher free cash flow as the business scales. And with that, Will, I'll hand it back to you for some closing remarks.

Apologies. This is the conference operator. It seems that we've lost connection with the speaker line. Please hold.

Can you hear me?

Yes, we have you back, Will. Please go ahead.

You would think unplugging the mute button at this stage would have been something we've learned by now. But thank you, Bob, and I agree. It's great to be sharing such a strong trading update today ahead of our half year results. We'll talk more about the drivers behind these metrics when we detail our first half FY '26 results next month. In closing, the acquisition of Impect moves us all meaningfully forward in our mission, that is to serve the world's best athletes and teams with unrivaled technology. That mission drives every product decision, every hire, every acquisition, and today is another step in fulfilling it. We are excited to bring Impect into the Catapult platform, and we're even more excited for what's ahead as we integrate their capabilities and introduce Impect to our customers in the months to come. With our all-in-one SaaS platform, purposely built for sports, we are now better positioned than ever to help teams and athletes unlock their potential and perform at their peak. With that, I'd like to thank you all for listening, and I will now turn it back to the operator for any questions.

[Operator Instructions] Your first question today comes from Damen Kloeckner with CLSA.

Just two for me. How does Impect compare with other prominent scouting solutions like Hudl -- and where do you feel like...

Sorry, I lost you after you said how does it compare. If you don't mind repeating that question.

No, not at all. So the question was how does Impect compare with other prominent scouting solutions like Hudl? And where do you feel it can establish its competitive advantage?

Yes. it's a good question. Thank you for asking. Primarily, I mean part of why I think we were really excited by Impect, I think it was from threefold. The first is that from a business model perspective, they're incredibly unique in the way they've designed how they actually create data event, but more importantly, how they create these proprietary unique metrics. So unlike any other scouting tool out in the market, they're generating about 14 -- almost 1,400 KPIs now that are unique to them, but incredibly meaningful to the industry. And they do it in a way that is from a profitability design, very much more similar to a software business than it is a content business. So we found both of those elements incredibly unique. I would say the other aspect of what they're doing here is that their integration or at least I should say, their ability to integrate that data into -- inside our video solution is going to create a completely new way of collaborating around scouting that we haven't seen any of the tools, whether it be at Hudl or anywhere else at this stage. So we're really, really excited for what we see with them. And I think one of the things to note is that the 150-or-so clients they have today are paying almost 50,000 ACV a year to have their tool and in some cases, alongside any other scouting tool that we're using in the market. So the value is there, and we're pretty excited to kind of extract it and combine it with our technology.

And then second question for me is what proportion of the [Technical Difficulty] I'm just thinking about the dynamic with T&C where there's...

Sorry, you keep breaking up. I don't know if it's me on your end there. I can't hear your question.

That's okay. Sorry, let me try again. What proportion of the 20,000 identified pro sports teams a similar...

Okay. You broke up at the very end, but I believe your question is out of the 20,000 teams, how many of them are available for this product? Is that where you were getting with the question?

Which of the teams currently use third parties and are all 20,000 teams [ addressable ] your mind?

Got it. Thank you. Yes. So at this stage, the tool is primarily designed for professional soccer. So out of the -- when we talk about 20,000 teams, we're including teams within other sports, right? So American football, basketball, ice hockey, rugby. So within the professional soccer market, I would say all teams are addressable with their product today. As a matter of fact, when you think of the professional soccer market, as a matter of fact, their product is probably more addressable to the bottom of the pyramid, the top of the pyramid. So one very unique thing about professional soccer is that outside of maybe the top 50, 100 elite teams, the remainder 95% of professional soccer teams are primarily generating their revenue from trading players either through buying or selling. And so what they have created in terms of helping teams identify diamonds in the rough, primarily finding the right player that you could build on is something that is incredibly advantageous and valuable for every professional soccer team. So I would say from a professional soccer team, every team in there is addressable. I don't have the number off the top of my head of how many of the 20,000 teams are professional soccer teams. But typically, it's -- our history has been, at least from a revenue base, about 1/3 of our revenue is driven by professional soccer. We do see their products over time expanding into other sports. We believe that we could turn that -- what they've created over time, particularly around flow sports and bring it into basketball, maybe ice hockey as well. And so we anticipate that we're going to make their product more and more addressable over time.

Your next question comes from Owen Humphries with Canaccord.

Can you hear me okay?

Yes, okay.

Well done. It appears to be a strong acquisition, both from a strategic and financial perspective, some of the Rule of 70 companies out there, so well done there. First question here, just on the ACV per team, you just said 50-plus per team. I guess it just follows on to the other question around the TAM, but this is -- you guys have -- I think it's like 1,500 soccer style customers or professional teams. The immediate opportunity here is the expectation here is that the 1,500 teams could afford this product? Is that the immediate TAM opportunity for this product?

Yes, absolutely. So I think the low-hanging fruit for us is basically combining this with our current Pro Video suite and ensuring that we continue to cross-sell that to about -- I think, as you mentioned, a little over 1,500 professional soccer teams that are currently wearables clients but are not yet a T&C client. And I think the other thing to note is that when we do that, we're also not just cross-selling them into the Impect product and as a stand-alone, but we're also cross-selling them into the Impect product and our product, which is a combination of both ACVs, right? So it's not being sold as an integration into the current contract that we have from those customers.

And I guess a follow-on question here is just the price per team. I mean now you guys have the opportunity to bundle the multiple products that you guys have, I guess $50,000 per team is probably not the right price, but is the expectation here that the price per team will probably come down as you look to bundle? And I guess the question is, are you looking to bundle this product into your other suite?

Yes, it's a bit too early to say. I think our expectation is that their average ACV when it combines with ours will probably come down if you look at it just from a stand-alone product. But I think when you look at it from our cross-selling combined product, it will be higher, right? So what I mean by that is, today, when we cross-sell a Pro video suite into a wearables client, we're typically gaining about $40,000 to $45,000 of ACV and they're getting about $50,000. So I think when you combine that, it's looking at $90,000, $95,000. We don't anticipate that's going to be the price point that we cross-sell, but it will definitely be north of where both of us are.

Good one. And just around operating leverage, obviously, high gross profit margins and fast growing company generating 13% of margin. It sounds like you'll be able to leverage your core sales and marketing and R&D within the core business here. Just to understand, is the expectation here that you'll see margin expansion within this business over the next 3 to 5 years?

Yes. There's 2 areas for us that I think we're -- we anticipate some synergies. And then I would say that the other aspect of it is, as we scale, their cost of goods, primarily sort of their data creation doesn't scale linearly. So the 2 areas that I think we see some synergies, I think, is one, you called it out, which is the sales and marketing side. They primarily have today a very tiny 2-person go-to-market team in compared to our almost 100-person go-to-market team, we anticipate that we could help them scale. And we don't need to create or bring new people into our team to push this out. So definitely some synergies there. I think the other one is really around customer success and support and sort of that delivery component to it, we anticipate over time for us to find some synergies and not have to grow their cost basis on that. But the other aspect, I think just to note is that the way they create data around a single match as an example, means that once you've created that data around and a profile around players, you don't have to do it again as the business scales and you grab more teams. So the gross margin, which sits around 70% as the business scales should start to come down because you're not having to recreate that data and that content over again.

[Operator Instructions] There are no further questions at this time. And that does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.