Catapult Sports Ltd (CAT) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Catapult Group International Limited First Half FY '24 Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to hand the conference over to Will Lopes, Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director. Please go ahead.

Good morning, and welcome to Catapult's conference call for the results of our first half of FY '24. I have with me Bob Cruickshank, our Chief Financial Officer. This morning, Bob and I will present our half year results, our strategy, and outlook and then take any questions from the participants on the call. Today, I am pleased to outline another strong performance from Catapult. Before I get started, I'd like to point out that we continue to set the standards for data analytics in professional sports. We now work with more than 4,100 teams in over 100 countries and across 40 different sports. Our customers are at the highest level of professional sports leagues and include many of the national teams that have competed in this year's Soccer, Rugby and Cricket World Cups. And may I take the opportunity to say good luck to those teams in the semifinal of the Cricket World Cup, Australia, New Zealand, India and South Africa, who are all customers of Catapult. The first half of FY '24 sees Catapult in an incredibly strong position. All key metrics for the first half delivered or exceeded against our expectations. Our SaaS part of the business continues to be our growth engine, with our annualized contract value, or ACV, growing up 21% on a constant currency basis year-on-year and reaching nearly USD 80 million or AUD 124 million. This growth, coupled with record-level retention rate, meant that our SaaS revenue grew by 25% over the past 12 months. The result of such strong SaaS performance meant that during the half year, our total revenue delivered nearly USD 50 million or AUD 77 million, up 21% over this time last year. More impressive is that we were able to generate this growth while simultaneously reducing cost, significantly improving our margins and highlighting our operational leverage. This resulted in Catapult generating $1.4 million of free cash flow, a nearly $15 million improvement in just 12 months. Let's break down the drivers of our success a bit further on Slide 7. We had several successes in technology. We launched our new Vector Core product in our Performance & Health vertical, or P&H. This launch expanded our wearables solutions beyond the top teams, allowing us to operate product down to the academy level of our Pro clients. Vector Core simplified load management, with a design that enable teams to work from anywhere by a cloud-based experience. Further, we rolled out a new video solution targeted at soccer and football teams, enabling them to significantly save time with improved workflows. With our football solution, we introduced a new scouting software and the ability to integrate our legacy video application with our new video products, helping need the transition of our clients through our next-generation solution. We've also upgraded our heart rate monitoring system -- our monitoring capabilities with a new and improved next-generation Catapult vest, giving athletes more comfort while significantly increasing the accuracy of heart rate data. The investments in our products is underwriting our growth. As you can see on this slide, our SaaS growth came from our P&H vertical, which grew by 27%, and our new video solution in Tactics & Coaching, or T&C, which generated 41% growth year-on-year. Beyond ACV, we're also pleased to see the growth of new customers using our new video solution exceeds 70% during this time, with success coming from expansions in EMEA and North America. I'll let Bob talk more about that, but obviously, we are very pleased with the performance and now the recognition our new video product is beginning to gain in the market. We have accomplished a rare feat for any business for 2 consecutive reporting periods. We are driving growth while reducing costs. Our disciplined approach to cost, as outlined on the right side of Slide 7, meant that Catapult generated positive free cash flow in the first half. This is the first time since FY '21 we've generated positive free cash flow in a half. And it represents an important milestone for the inflection point I've been discussing for the past year. Our ability to generate positive free cash flow strengthened our financial position, and as such, we decided to repay some of our debt during this half. Our $4.7 million repayment leaves us with a balance of $11 million on our $20 million facility, leaving more than $8 million still available to us. And it sends a strong message on the confidence we have in our outlook and our financial position. During this half, we continue to see all of our leading indicators move in the positive direction, as you can see on Slide 8. Across the board, our leading indicators of future revenue growth remains strong and strengthened our outlook for the future. In summary, the first half of FY '24 has been a period of strong performance for Catapult. Our investment in R&D is supporting our current and future growth, enabling us to show the strong operating leverage we have in our business. We are now generating positive free cash flow, enabling us to support our organic growth on a sustainable basis in the future. And we are just at the beginning of our cash generation journey. With that, I'll hand it over to Bob to take you through the financial highlights for the first half in more detail.

Thank you, Will, and good morning and afternoon, everyone. Today, I'll begin with an overview of our key SaaS metrics before talking through our financial performance in more detail, and then I'll hand it back to Will to talk more about our outlook. I'd like to reiterate that all the numbers we are presenting today are actual reported numbers 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. We've done this to make it easier for our investors to both understand our results and understand the underlying performance of our business. As Will has already mentioned, the first half of FY '24 was a period of strong growth for Catapult not only at the top line, but also in the key operating metrics that we guide our business to. I'll begin with our primary metric on Slide 10, our ACV, which grew to $79.7 million as we reported earlier today. Removing the negative $800,000 impact of fluctuations in foreign exchange rates, this grew by 21% on a constant currency basis, driven by the performance of both our core SaaS verticals. This represents a consistently strong growth rate across our subscription business and, as a leading indicator, demonstrates that our business is in great shape. Turning to our 2 core SaaS verticals on Slide 11, and you can see how our top line growth is being driven by the performance from both our P&H and T&C verticals. P&H continues to be a reliable and dependable growth engine. It yet again delivered an excellent growth rate of 27%, and we reached a milestone for our P&H vertical. It is now a $50 million business in its own right. And not to be outdone, we also saw a really great performance in T&C from our new video solutions, which most of you would know as the technology we acquired with SBG Sports Software in 2021. As Will mentioned, you'll see that we've broken down our T&C vertical by legacy video solutions and new video solutions for the first time so that our investors can better understand what is driving or T&C growth. Our new video solutions grew 41% year-on-year, driving the overall T&C ACV growth rate to 12%, a step up from 7% in the prior year. We've seen great success in selling our new video solutions to customers in North America and Europe in both soccer and motorsport in the last 12 months. We're early in our journey of commercializing this technology, and we expect to see continued strong growth from our new video solutions in the future. As you can see in Slide 12, average ACV per Pro Team has also shown strong growth, increasing by 9.4% to be approaching $24,000 per team. When we think about our land-and-expand strategy, which many of you have heard us talk about before and something Will talks more about a little later this morning, we want to see our Pro Teams using more of our solutions. And an increasing average ACV per Pro Team is a strong indication that we are being successful in not only up-selling, but also cross-selling additional products to our customers. The chart on the right of this slide expands on that point. And we've seen a 33% increase in the number of Pro Teams who are using products from 2 or more of our verticals. We exclude one-off products from that growth rate so investors can understand the underlying growth from Pro Teams using products that we have invested in and will continue to support. We're really pleased with these year-on-year growth rates. And again, it's another indication that our land-and-expand strategy is working well. The true measure of the stickiness of your product is how high your retention rates are, and Catapult has some of the best-in-class retention rates across the software sector. Slide 13 shows that in the first half, our retention rates were excellent, with ACV churn of just 3.6%. This is at an all-time low level and is especially pleasing given the adjustment through our busiest renewal period. This shows the increasing value our customers are deriving from our products as a result of the investments we've made in our solutions. And while it's not on the slide, I think it's pretty important to call out our lifetime duration as well. which has increased from 6 years to 7.1 years over the last year, an 18% increase during a period in which we've added hundreds of new teams. So this is a really strong result and also demonstrates to what extent teams rely on our solutions. Turning now to revenue. SaaS revenue, which is derived from our ACV balance, is the engine that is driving our overall growth. As you can see on Slide 14, it impressively grew by 25% year-on-year and forms the vast majority of our recurring revenue. This is outpacing our overall revenue growth as nonrecurring revenue, or capital revenue, continues to be essentially flatline following our transition to a full SaaS business. And I note that the next slide, Slide 15, is something you will all be interested in. We are in a great position today such that I can reconfirm that we consistently said this year that we are on a track to graduate -- to generate positive free cash flow for FY '24. For the first time since FY '21, our SaaS growth and disciplined approach to our cost base has meant that Catapult has generated positive free cash flow of $1.4 million for the half, a significant $14.8 million turnaround from the free cash outflow of $13.4 million we experienced in the first half of fiscal '23. We are at an inflection point at Catapult after a period of investing in our business. We have laid the foundation for sustainable ACV growth and are now delivering on our commitment to generate positive free cash flow. For those of you who have followed Catapult for a while, you'll know that contribution margin, the measurement of profitability after variable costs, is one of our most important metrics. Variable costs are made up of COGS, delivery and sales and marketing expenses. And these are the costs that will continue to grow in absolute dollars as revenue grows, while also declining as a percentage of revenue as we gain efficiencies. On Slide 16, you'll see our variable cost of buckets as they contribute to our contribution margin percentage. We've shown significant progress on this metric in the last 12 months, and our contribution margin has increased from 23% to 44% in that period. This significant improvement was driven by a $4.1 million reduction in our variable costs while also maintaining strong revenue growth of 21%. This result reflects the decisions we made a year ago to reprioritize our investment programs and concentrate on key product verticals that are fundamental to our growth. Looking ahead, investors should take confidence in the fact that we expect variable costs to continue to grow at a slower rate than revenue as we continue to progress toward our long-term 55% contribution margin target. And now that we're at scale, our fixed costs will decline as a percentage of revenue toward our long-term target of 25%, and that's exactly what we are beginning to show, as Slide 17 demonstrates. Fixed costs are made up of our G&A and R&D expenses. And it's important to note that our measurement of R&D costs here are prior to any capitalized development. As a result of the reprioritization of the investments we made a year ago, fixed costs declined in absolute terms by $2.1 million or 8.9% to $21.6 million at the end of the half. Our fixed costs are now at a level to support the business at scale and you should expect to see these costs rise modestly in terms of absolute dollars and continue to decline as a percentage of our growing revenue number. Now moving on to the P&L on Slide 18. And given what we've just discussed, I'll go straight to management EBITDA, which we want everyone to understand is the way that we measure our operating performance. And it's important to highlight that this does not reflect any capitalized development, so it is a measurement that is close to a cash EBITDA. We delivered a significant improvement in the first half, generating positive management EBITDA of $200,000, a $13.5 million improvement from last year. We've made enormous progress toward profitability. And without stealing too much of Will's thunder in a moment, you'll see that we're doing pretty well on our target of incremental profitability now that we have exited a period of investment and reached this inflection point in the business. And further down in this table, we provided a reconciliation to reported EBITDA and net profit after taxes, which includes accounting for capitalized development, severance and share-based payments. In closing, the first half of fiscal '24 has seen a strong performance across the operating and financial metrics we benchmark ourselves against, reflecting the strength of our business model and our scalable, predictable subscription business. We're delivering returns on our investments, and we are in a strengthened financial position, which will enable us to generate long-term sustainable growth and generate positive free cash flow. We are in an incredibly strong position. And with that, I'll hand it back to Will to discuss our outlook further.

Thanks, Bob, and I agree, we are in an incredibly strong position. Now before I talk to our second half outlook, I want to spend some time focusing on our opportunity, how we win, our go-to-market approach and the unit economics of our strategy. There is a substantial market opportunity for Catapult as Slide 20 outlines. The pro sports technology market is expected to reach more than $40 billion in size in the next 3 years, with over 20,000 elite teams using many different types of sports technology. With live sports becoming one of the last vestiges of live entertainment, we expect continued growth and investment in our industry. Catapult, being an established global leader, is extremely well placed to benefit from this increased investment in market growth. Despite our global leadership, our current penetration of 20,000 teams is just 16%, making our greenfield very healthy. And it is important to note that our opportunity expands well beyond teams and major sporting leagues such as the NFL and the Premier League. It is much larger than that. Our opportunity expands into lower division and academy teams that feed into these major sporting leagues. Our opportunity also includes not just men's teams, but women's teams across the entire professional ecosystem along with national teams and Olympic Federations who take athletes from all levels. And another large opportunity for Catapult exists within the NCAA Athletics, which stands for the National College Athletic Association in the United States and Canada. The NCAA organizes college sports for more than 500,000 students annually in North America. College Sports is a big business there, with Division I athletics generating nearly USD 16 billion of revenue in 2020. Lastly, while they're not part of our strategy today, there is also exciting adjacent markets with use cases for our technology as shown in this slide. We have this huge opportunity. So let's talk about how we win on Slide 21. We win because we have a strong value proposition to help teams make better decisions through our comprehensive all-in-one technology platform. We save our clients valuable time, and we help identify meaningful insights that improve the quality of their decision. This is a strong and unique value proposition in our industry, and it is this differentiated technology, along with its purpose built for sports design that enables us to win, as you can see in Slide 22. We whether it be with our athlete monitoring solution or our video products or both, our integrated platform driving unique insights differentiate us from everyone else in the industry. Now let's talk to our focused go-to-market approach, and we've created Slide 23 to outline our strategy. I'll caveat that these are all midterm targets. First, we land new clients with our P&H solutions, where we are uniquely differentiated and the global leader. We see a midterm opportunity to land 5,000 professional teams. Secondly, we expand the contract value of our relationships by cross-selling integrated solutions within our platform. Our video products represent the most attractive opportunity, with an excellent gross margin of above 90% and a typical contract value 2x the size of our athlete monitoring solution. We aim to cross-sell to 50% of our pro customers in the midterm. Further, our aim is to retain our clients at a world-class retention rate of greater than 95%. And as you can see today, we're doing exceptionally well with a retention rate above 96%. This retention is supported by innovation and the dedication to customer support and success teams. Lastly, we aim to do all of this at scale and a deliberate profit margin of 30%, which reflects the benefits of a more productive workforce and the value of offering more integrated solutions to our customers over time. Our business model is focused on a scalable unit economic design that generates sustainable profit, as you can see on Slide 24. As Bob has walked you through, we think about our cost basis in 2 different buckets, variable and fixed, and how we perform in these 2 areas determine our contribution margin and our management EBITDA margin. This is a cash-based margin that is inclusive of CapEx. Our long-term target is to achieve a contribution margin of 55% by continually improving the variable cost of growth through product innovation and sales productivity. And having now established the G&A and R&D cost base that can support our growth at scale, we expect our fixed costs to rise modestly and not linear with our growth rate, helping us reach our long-term margin targets. Strong SaaS businesses will typically reach an inflection point where the fixed cost to run the business begins to quickly taper and the business begins to drive incredible profit margin on its incremental revenue. As you can see on Slide 25, we have crossed our inflection point, and we are doing very well in delivering profits against our incremental revenue. While we are targeting an annual incremental profit margin of 30%, our first half delivered an incremental profit margin of 19%. It is key to note that during our first half, our variable costs are seasonally higher, and we expect these incremental profit margins to improve during our second half of FY '24. This strong performance on incremental profit margin highlights Catapult's ability to now generate sustainable and profitable growth at scale. Now on to our outlook. On Slide 26, and as we said in our announcement today, our outlook for FY '24 remains unchanged. We continue to expect ACV growth to remain strong with high retention rates. We will maintain a disciplined approach to our cost base, driving our contribution and incremental profit margins towards our long-term targets, and we remain committed to generating positive free cash flow for the full year without the need to raise equity capital. And as our first half has shown, we are delivering on this commitment. So let's recap. Catapult is in an incredibly strong position. Our investment in our products is driving growth. Our operating leverage with our strong unit economics design means our business is now generating cash, and we are just at the beginning of our cash generation journey. With that, I would like to thank everyone for listening, and I will now hand it back to the operator for any questions on the call today.

[Operator Instructions] The first question today comes from Julian Mulcahy from E&P.

Will, just a few for me to start with. Firstly, can you just talk through the reclassification of some of the costs because the contribution margin is different to what was reported in the same half last year?

I don't think there's any reclassification of cost, Julian, that we've done that is different than last year. I think at the end of FY '23, there were some capitalized -- there were some COGS that got changed in the capitalization line. But beyond that, there's no other changes that have been made.

And like the reported contribution profit in the first half last year was 14.5. And today's presentation is showing that is 9.5.

I'm not sure where are you referring to?

Slide 18 versus Slide 29 of last year. And that's why the contribution margin was a lot less than what was reported last year. So I was wondering whether you just rebate something?

There isn't. We can certainly follow up on any particular component on it. Like I said, the only thing we've changed over the past 12 months was the capitalization of COGS for things that were being really hot swap, which is the second bullet point on that slide. But the contribution margin from a variable and -- from a variable cost perspective hasn't really changed.

Okay. And just in cash -- sorry.

We'll follow up on that.

Yes. And just in cash collection, has there been any change in the sort of timing because normally, the first half is a strong period, second half is weaker. Has there been some sort of change in the mix and that's why cash is probably a little bit less than I would have thought?

No. I think there was some timing in terms of collections in the first half that [ split ] a little bit to the second half. I think from a ratio perspective, we anticipate that typically, the second half of the year, we collect a little less than we do in the first half of the year. But I think 2 things have occurred. I think there's probably about $6 million of onetime costs that happened in the first half that we know will not be in the second half of outflows. And then two, I think we've crossed this point that our cost to run the business now is lower than our expected revenue. So we feel that our second half of the year will be free cash flow positive. We anticipate that the $1.4 million of free cash flow that we generated today is going to be our floor for the full year, and we'd be really disappointed if it wasn't above that number.

And what were those the $6 million onetime costs?

A lot to do with an inventory basis. But Bob, like, what...

Yes. I mean a fair amount of it is seasonal items, Julian, like things like inventory, variable costs associated with delivery and sales that are higher in the first half than the second half due to the seasonal nature of the business. Then there were other items that were sort of, I guess, call it, more onetime in nature that make up a small amount of the total.

Okay. And just finally, on the sort of product roll-out, particularly video, you launched basketball early this year. You have big fans there. When are we going to see some sort of traction on that?

We grew our new video solution by 41% year-on-year. And we're feeling really good about traction of that. I think we also added close to 72% of customers on it. I think motorsport and soccer outgained, I think, wins across the board. We had a lot of logo additions this past year that were within basketball. We didn't break that up, but that's in there.

Okay. Thanks, guys.

And sorry, Julian, before we jump into the next call, I think -- it just dawned on me the difference of the contribution margin that you're asking about. I think in the previous years, we've extracted noncore -- we extracted noncash-based payments on it, and we're now putting -- this is really cash margin, versus before which I think was EBITDA statutory margins. That's the difference.

That makes sense. Yes, that's cool. Thank you.

[Operator Instructions] The next question comes from Owen Humphries from Canaccord.

Well done on hitting your targets. Just a quick question for me, and I'm sure you get asked this a lot, but just to understand the 20-plus percent growth, how much of that was derived from pricing versus volume?

Yes. I would say the bulk of it was really between up-sell and cross-sell. But as we have done in the past year, whenever contracts are up for renewal, we will typically increase the price of the annual cost of that contract by 10%. So some of that was driven in there. But the bulk of it was really driven by the expansion of our P&H vertical that grew around 27%. And then what -- we are incredibly satisfied, which was the ACV and our new video solutions growing by 41%.

Sure. So basically, the 3-year-old contracts, is it kind of fair to say that pricing is kind of 3% to 5% of that 20%?

Yes, it's probably about right, yes, in that range right.

Good one. And then just on the new video. It added [ 1 mill ] of ACV in the first half. I guess the question here is, are we expecting some sort of acceleration going forward? Or are you going to have to do with that kind of run rate?

I think if we could stay around 41% growth annually, we'd be delighted. I think that's probably a little bit higher than we anticipate going forward. Some of that was driven by some really large deals that we did this year, particularly with NASCAR. But even if we remove motorsport out of the picture, our growth rate in new video was around 27%. So if we maintain that rate going forward, I think we'd be delighted with it.

And just a question around the new video cross-sell. Obviously, you guys have targeted a big number in the past at various strategy days. Do you have a time frame of when you would expect, call it, the 30% to 50% of teams taking up this video product?

I don't think we've given any guidance on that. I think when we say midterm, in my mind, typically, what I'm comparing it to is around 3 to 5 years.

Good one. So we expect kind of a strong acceleration in a couple of years?

That's correct.

[Operator Instructions] At this time, we're showing no further questions. That does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.