Catapult Sports Ltd (CAT) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Catapult Group International Ltd. First Half Fiscal Year 2025 Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to hand the call over to Mr. Will Lopes, Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director. Please go ahead, sir.

Good morning, and welcome to Catapult's investor conference call for our first half of FY '25 results. I have with me Bob Cruickshank, Catapult's Chief Financial Officer. This morning, Bob and I will present our results, our strategy and outlook and then take questions from participants on the call. I'm pleased to present another strong set of results for Catapult. But before we dive in, I want to take a moment to reaffirm our commitment to setting the standards in elite sports. Today, Catapult supports over 4,400 teams across 40 sports, spanning more than 100 countries. That's an increase of more than 200 teams in just the last half year. Our clients compete at the highest level and some have been with Catapult for more than a decade, highlighting the deep trusted relationships we've cultivated in the industry and the expertise we've developed over time. We've earned our reputation as a dependable partner to the world's most elite teams and athletes, a standing build through decades of service. As we look forward, we remain dedicated to maintaining and building on this legacy for many years to come. Now turning to our results. I'd like to note that all figures presented today are in U.S. dollars and reflect actual reported numbers. Our year-over-year growth rates, however, are shown in constant currency to eliminate the effects of foreign exchange fluctuations. The first half of FY '25 continued the momentum we built in FY '24. As highlighted on Slide 6, our key leading indicator of future revenue, annualized contract value, or ACV, rose by 20% year-over-year, a robust increase that was the main driver behind our 19% year-over-year total revenue growth, which now has reached close to USD 58 million. At the close of FY '24, we projected increased free cash flow as our business continues to scale in FY '25. And I am pleased to share that our top line growth is indeed translating into higher free cash flow with USD 4.8 million generated in the first half alone. This is not only significantly above the $1.4 million recorded in the same period last year, but it also surpasses the entire free cash flow achieved in the entirety of FY '24. This is a significant accomplishment that continues to strengthen Catapult's financial position. Catapult's SaaS engine remains exceptionally robust, as seen on Slide 7. Our ACV retention rate of 96.2% continues to be strong on par with the top retention rates seen among the world's most successful enterprise software companies. I'm also pleased to highlight that our ACV per Pro Team, this is our core ARPU metric, rose by 11% year-over-year, up from the 7% reported at this time last year. The strong performance is directly linked to the impressive 80% increase in multi-vertical Pro Teams. Over the past 12 months, nearly 300 single vertical teams transitioned to becoming multi-vertical teams, showcasing our increasing ability to succeed in cross-selling, which in turn is driving the outstanding unit economics we are reporting today. Slide 8 highlights the significant operating leverage within our business and the strength of our unit economics. Our incremental profit margins are a core measure of our strategy for driving profitable growth. As we exited our growth investment phase in FY '23, our goal was to retain at least 30% of every additional dollar in revenue as profit. In FY '24, we exceeded this target, achieving 43% of incremental profit margin, a result that we were very pleased with. In the first half of FY '25, we built on these efficiencies to deliver an exceptional set of results. As shown on this slide, our year-over-year incremental profit margin reached 75%, meaning we retained $0.75 of each additional dollar of revenue we generated as profit. This remarkable achievement strengthens our confidence that our incremental profit margin for FY '25 will surpass that of FY '24, underscoring the accelerating profitability we can achieve as we scale and capitalize on the efficiencies of a global business. Before I hand it over to Bob to delve deeper into the drivers of these results, I want to highlight the innovations we've continued to deliver for our customers over the past 6 months outlined on Slide 9. As many of you know, we launched a groundbreaking Sideline Video product, Focus Live for American Football just before our FY '24 results. For the first time, the NCAA, this is the governing body for U.S. collegiate sports, approved Sideline Video analysis during American Football games. To seize on this unique opportunity, we developed the most advanced sideline analysis product, specifically for American Football, leveraging the sophisticated code base from our Formula 1 race analysis technology. We've partnered exclusively with the SEC. This is the largest collegiate league in the U.S., making them the first to integrate our new product across all teams. This integration provided SEC coaches and players a significant game day advantage over non-SEC opponents. So how has it performed? The initial success of our Sideline Video product has been remarkable. Week-after-week, our solution is deployed across 16 games, live capturing and logging over 48 video angles with content being distributed live over 300 tablets. The system supports more than 400 coaching staff and over 1,000 athletes, enabling them to review video and make critical in-game adjustments. The feedback has been outstanding. And since the season start in August, we've been refining both the software and the operational procedures to further enhance the experience for our teams and athletes. We also introduced new presentation tools that continue to improve how coaches share key moments, enabling our customers to seamlessly share video, view and edit presentations across all 3 Pro video suite apps. This includes MatchTracker, Focus and Hub. In collaboration with UEFA, we automated live workflows within MatchTracker for the EURO in 2024, enabling live insights and essential data to pundits and decision-makers for every game, including insights for the Man of the Match, a top commercial priority during the EUROs. Our commitment to R&D continued as demonstrated by the new algorithms we developed for our Vector devices. These include metabolic power measurement, a new sport-specific parameters for basketball, rugby and tennis. Our new rugby lineout algorithm, launched earlier this year, was a key factor in the England Rugby Football Union awarding Catapult a multiyear contract to support their national and premiership men's and women's team, which began last month. We also delivered live performance data from our Vector Pro devices for broadcast enhancement in the French Rugby League. Additionally, we expanded our Vector Core product, commonly used by academy teams into more sports and added new language support, including French, Spanish, Portuguese and Japanese. In summary, we've entered FY '25 in excellent shape, continuing the momentum we built in FY '24. Our SaaS business remains strong, driving top line growth that, in turn, is boosting free cash flow and delivering substantial incremental profit margin. Our R&D investments are producing innovative solutions that enhance the customer experience and continues to deepen Catapult's integration into their daily workflows. Quite honestly, it's an exciting time to be at Catapult. With that, I'm going to hand it over to Bob to walk you through the financials in more detail.

Thank you, Will, and good morning, afternoon and evening, everyone. Today, I'll begin with an overview of our key SaaS metrics before taking you through our financial performance in more detail, and then I will hand it back to Will to talk about our strategy and outlook. I would like to reiterate that all the numbers we are presenting today 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. As Will mentioned, today, I am pleased to report another strong results -- set of results for Catapult. I will begin by focusing on our primary metric on Slide 11, our annualized contract value, or ACV, in which we had the largest increase of any half year period in our history. We closed the first half of FY '25 at USD 96.8 million, which represents 20% growth on a constant currency basis year-over-year and just as impressively, an increment of $10 million just in this half year period, setting us up very well for the full year. The strong growth was driven by the performance of both core SaaS verticals, which can be seen on Slide 12. I'll start with the P&H vertical, which includes our wearables business and continues to be a reliable and predictable growth engine. It yet again delivered an excellent growth rate, growing by 22%, driven particularly by success signing league-wide deals in soccer across EMEA and Asia and continued growth from college sport across North America. This performance again reinforces that Catapult remains the partner of choice when teams and leagues are evaluating the best available solution for athlete monitoring, management and recovery and that there remains a significant addressable market in our P&H segment. And perhaps even more exciting, on the right hand of that slide, you can see that our T&C vertical, which includes our video solutions, experienced 18% growth in ACV, an acceleration from 12% growth the previous year, again, another strong performance. This was driven by the continued strong growth of our new video solutions, which grew by 42% and is becoming an increasingly significant portion of our total T&C ACV. In fact, ACV from new video has more than doubled over the last 2 years. Our groundbreaking Sideline Video solution delivered strong growth in North America, and this was supported by continued growth from new and existing customers in soccer and motorsport. As we continue to drive growth in our new video solution ACV, this will have a greater and greater impact on our overall T&C growth rate. As you can see on Slide 13, our ACV per team continues to expand, primarily driven by our success in cross-selling. Average ACV per Pro Team has accelerated, increasing by 11% year-over-year, meaning that average ACV is now over USD 26,000 per Pro Team. And it's worth calling out that our success over a longer -- it's worth calling out our success over a longer period where we've grown our average ACV by 22% over the last 2 years, a great validation of our land and expand strategy. This fantastic progress was driven by a combination of cross-selling, upselling and pricing with cross-selling our new video solutions having the largest impact. As more of our customers add a new video solution to an existing contract, you should expect to see our average ACV per Pro Team continue to trend in an upward direction. The chart on the right of this slide expands on the cross-selling success. I'm very pleased to report that we have experienced an 80% increase in the number of Pro Teams who are using products from 2 of our verticals. This is fantastic progress year-over-year and really validates the investment we've been making in our new video solutions. Please note that we are no longer including run-off products in this chart for the simple reason that we have now end-of-life those products. Further enhancing the strength of our ACV metrics, we've also continued to exceed our retention targets, as shown on Slide 12, despite the first half of FY '25 being the largest renewal period in our history. We target churn rates of less than 5%, which by any measure would be considered best-in-class for a SaaS business. And as you can see, we've consistently been below this target, coming in at 3.8% at the end of this half. Our ability to sustain such low churn rates is testament to the relationship we have with our customers and the superiority of our technology. We are a trusted and indispensable partner, helping them make better decisions through our comprehensive all-in-one technology solutions. Slide 15 provides a great summary of the SaaS metrics we have spoken about this morning. These are the leading indicators of our future growth, and they continue to move in the right direction. There are 2 additional numbers to also call out on this slide. First is Lifetime Duration, which has increased from 7.1 years to 7.6 years, a 7% increase during a period in which we added a total of more than 300 new teams. It is a great sign that even though we are signing new teams, we are building longer and longer tenure into our customer base. And second is our Pro Team count, which increased 8% year-on-year. We are now approaching almost 3,500 Pro Teams as customers, a significant global footprint. And as a reminder, the Pro Team count is different from the 4,400 total teams mentioned earlier by Will, which includes non-Pro customers. And as I wrap up my comments on our SaaS metrics, I want to call out that starting in the second half of FY '25, Russian customers will be excluded from ACV. As a result of increasing restrictions in export and banking regulations, we have decided to cease operations in the region. The impact of this decision to our future revenue is less than 1%. Now turning to our financial results. On Slide 16, you can see the impact that our strong ACV growth and best-in-class customer retention is having on our P&L. Our SaaS revenue, which is derived from our ACV balance, grew an impressive 21% year-over-year and forms the vast majority of our recurring revenue. Our recurring revenue, which includes our SaaS revenue and revenue from our Media business, exceeded USD 50 million for the first time in a half year period, a tremendous milestone and represents 92% of our overall revenue, up from 90% this time last year. This recurring revenue base allows us to grow more efficiently as our cost of growth continues to decline toward our long-term targets. On Slide 17, you will see our variable cost buckets as they contribute to our contribution margin percentage, which is the measurement of profitability after COGS, delivery and sales and marketing expenses. These are the costs of growth that will continue to grow in absolute dollar terms while our revenue while also declining as a percentage of revenue as we gain efficiencies and our business scales. As you can see, we continue to make progress on this metric and year-over-year our variable costs decreased as a percentage of revenue from 56% to 52%. This corresponds to an improvement in contribution margin from 44% to 48%. This improvement was driven by strong revenue growth in conjunction with driving significant efficiencies from our delivery and sales and marketing teams, and we are now only 7 percentage points away from reaching our long-term target of 45%. Understandably, we are really pleased with our progress on this in the last 12 months. As we grow at scale, we continue to see our fixed costs declining as a percentage of revenue toward our long-term target of 25%, as you can see on Slide 18. Fixed costs are made up of our G&A and R&D expenses. And it is important to note that our measurement of R&D costs here include all R&D spend, both expensed and capitalized. Our fixed costs declined in absolute terms by 2% year-over-year to $21.3 million in the first half of the year as we leveraged efficiencies from the investments in systems and automation made over the prior periods. Similar to variable costs, our fixed costs fell by 6 percentage points as a percentage of revenue year-over-year, and we are making progress toward our long-term goal here as well. And these concepts all come together on Slide 19, which highlights how our leverage is accelerating the growth in our profit margin. We crossed an inflection point last year and OpEx, which includes variable and fixed costs as a percentage of revenue is now below 100% and this results in a positive operating profit margin, our Management EBITDA margin. As revenue grows and our variable and fixed costs continue to approach their long-term targets, our operating margin is expected to increase. And on Slide 20, you can see how the growth of our profit margin is contributing to an expansion of our free cash flow. We generated $4.8 million in free cash flow in the first half of FY '25, an increase of $3.4 million year-over-year. As Will mentioned earlier, not only is this well above the $1.4 million we reported at the first half result last year, this is already above the $4.6 million we reported for all of FY '24. This is an outstanding result and a fantastic turnaround when considering the $21.6 million of negative free cash flow we experienced not so long ago in FY '23. Finally, moving to our profit and loss summary on Slide 21. We have already touched on a few of these numbers, so I will make a few observations on those we have not. You will note that our gross margin declined slightly by 0.7% year-over-year. This was impacted by the revenue contribution of our Media business, which increased by 16% year-over-year, up from 6% in the first half of FY '24. This business has a marginally lower gross margin profile than our P&H and T&C verticals. Now turning to Management EBITDA, which climbed to $6.2 million, an improvement of $6 million year-over-year, driven by the strong revenue growth and cost efficiencies that I walked through a few moments ago. As many of you know, Management EBITDA is Catapult's measurement of profitability because we believe it is the most accurate representation of our performance. And as a reminder, this measure is inclusive of all capitalized development costs. There was an increase in share-based payments this year -- year-over-year. And I want to make sure that everyone understands this is not reflective of an increase in shareholder dilution, rather the cost increase is due to changes in the accounting valuation methodology for this expense as we outlined at the FY '24 result, along with a significant year-over-year increase in our share price. Finally, the increase in interest, taxes and other is a result of foreign exchange movements, which had a net positive impact in the first half of FY '24, but a net negative impact in the first half of FY '25. This contributed $1.4 million to the negative variance. Before I pass it back to Will, I also want to highlight some great news in our announcement this morning that during the first half of FY '25, we further reduced debt on our balance sheet by making a net repayment of USD 6 million on our debt facility. This leaves us with an existing debt balance of $5 million, down from our peak of $15.7 million at the end of FY '23. This not only strengthens our balance sheet, but it also ensures that we have a solid foundation as we continue executing on our objective of delivering profitable growth. In closing, we have had a great start to FY '25. All our key metrics and targets are heading in the right direction, and Catapult continues to deliver a financial performance consistent with some of the best SaaS businesses we benchmark ourselves against. I'm extremely pleased and proud with the progress we continue to make. With that, I will hand it back to Will to discuss our strategy and outlook further.

Thanks, Bob. Today's results clearly show that we are effectively executing on our strategy, giving us confidence that we can keep delivering outstanding results for our customers, which in turn is translating to strong returns for our shareholders. Slide 23 underscores the tremendous market opportunity ahead for us. The professional sports technology market is projected to exceed USD 40 billion by 2026, spanning over 20,000 Pro Teams worldwide. With live sports remaining one of the last true bastions of live entertainment, we expect sustained growth and investment in our industry. The recent decision by the NFL to permit private equity investments highlight the scale of this trend. Today, the average NFL team is valued at USD 6.5 billion, up from USD 3 billion just 4 years ago. And for anyone who witnessed the opening game of the baseball World Series, the emotional and cultural significance of sport is undeniable. Investment in sport is booming and as a recognized global leader, Catapult is uniquely positioned to capitalize on this powerful tailwind. But alongside the increased investment in our industry, we're also benefiting from the growing professionalization of women's sport, which is creating significant new opportunities for us. Back in May, we shared a few examples of this trend, and it has only continued to gain momentum. The WNBA experienced record-breaking viewership, merchandise sales and attendance this year with TV audiences rising by an impressive 87% across networks. Similarly, halfway through the season, the National Women's Soccer League, the NWSL, TV viewership was up an extraordinary 95%. The surge in fan engagement is driving unprecedented sponsorship interest, which translates to increased budget in women's sport, a positive development for Catapult. We're now seeing opportunities to sign contracts with both men and women's teams within the same club and federation as we recently did with Rugby Football Union in England. With this context, let's turn to Slide 24 to discuss how we're capitalizing on this market opportunity. Our growth strategy centers on delivering a unique value-driven platform that empowers our teams to make better decisions through an all-in-one technology solution. This platform not only saves teams time, but also contextualizes data to provide meaningful, actionable workflows that enhances accessibility and increases decision-making across the entire organization. Slide 25 showcases the extensive range of our product solution available on our platform. This breadth was recently expanded with the launch of Focus Live in American Football at the start of the season. We provide integrated solutions across all our verticals, giving teams the most comprehensive view of performance. However, what truly sets our technology apart is that it's purpose-built for sport, enabling us to deeply understand and address the unique needs of our customers. Our go-to-market strategy outlined on Slide 26 is highly focused with clear midterm targets. First, we land by securing new clients with our Performance & Health solutions, where we hold a unique globally leading position. Two, we expand our relationships through cross-selling integrated solutions in our platform. And when this involves adding a new video solution, it typically enhances our gross margins as these solutions carry margins above 90%. Three, we retain clients at a world-class retention rate by continually investing in support and services. Our retention rate has consistently exceeded 96%, reflecting the success we have in this area. Lastly, we optimize by driving efficiencies as we scale, enhancing the integration of our solutions so it delivers significant profit margin. I'd like to expand on this final point on Slide 27. Our business is designed for profitable growth at scale. As Bob mentioned, we categorize our cost base into 2 main areas: variable and fixed costs. Performance in these areas directly impact both contribution margin and our profit margin, which is our Management EBITDA. Our long-term target is to achieve a contribution margin of 55% by continually optimizing variable costs through innovation and sales and marketing productivity. Having already built a fixed cost base that supports scalable growth, we expect only modest increase in fixed costs, positioning us to reach a profit margin of 30% over time. As I mentioned in today's announcement, the Rule of 40 serves as an important benchmark for measuring our progress as a SaaS business. This rule states that top-performing SaaS companies achieve a combined rate of 40% when adding their top line growth rate and profit margin. As shown on Slide 28, we continue to make great strides towards this metric. Internally, we use ACV growth as our growth metric and Management EBITDA as our profit metric. Our progress on this benchmark since FY '23 is substantial. As we exited a multiyear investment phase, we were negative on this benchmark. Now as we scaled, we already reached 31% at the end of this half. That's a 44 percentage point improvement. As we highlighted today, this progress is reflected in our free cash flow, shown on the right side of the slide, which now has improved by USD 18.2 million over this period. Turning to our outlook on Slide 29. Our objective remains to deliver on our strategic priorities, emphasizing profitable growth. For the entirety of FY '25, we continue to expect ACV growth to remain strong with low churn, continued improvement in our cost margins towards our long-term targets and higher free cash flow as our business continues to scale. So to recap, Catapult is in an exceptionally strong position. With a disciplined focus on our strategy, we are achieving incremental profit margins that rival the best software companies worldwide. Our SaaS engine, which empowers our growth, is in excellent shape, and our business model is driving sustained free cash flow. These factors gives us confidence in our ability to continue to deliver on these priorities and continue to generate profitable growth. I would like to thank all of you for listening, and I'm now going to hand it back to the operator for any questions.

[Operator Instructions] And the first question will come from Julian Mulcahy with E&P.

Will, excellent set of numbers. I don't normally compliment countries on their results, but I've covered it for a while, and it's really pleasing. I wonder if you could maybe just talk about the cash flow. It was very strong. Has there been any kind of change in terms on collections? Or is this the new norm going forward?

Yes. Thanks, Julian. I appreciate the compliment. I'm going to let Bob take that question.

Yes. I mean, Julian, it's Bob. I think free cash flow is always subject to the nuances of timing, particularly with some of our contracts, which tend to be larger in nature. I will say that since I got here about 1.5 years ago, one of the many initiatives I've been working on is really starting to build automation and build process around some of these functions. And so, certainly, cash collections has been one of the areas of focus, one of the areas that have greatly benefited from it. But again, it's timing. We're really working on collecting faster and kind of managing our working capital as best we can. But I guess, in terms of the new norm, yes, I hope it is the new norm. I think there is seasonality to our business. So we will see seasonal fluctuations between the halves. But I think in general, in terms of strong collections and a solid working capital position on our balance sheet is where we're heading.

And also with the video cross-sell, that medium-term target of 2,500, I mean, the rates been increasing quite dramatically. So are we now at that kind of hockey stick sort of point? And what's your definition of medium term?

Yes. I think the definition of medium term continues to be around 2 to 3 years. I think we're -- I don't know if we're at the hockey stick inflection point. I think it's probably a bit too early to kind of claim that. But I think the first half of this fiscal year, we could not be more pleased. We went from about 360 clients with multi teams -- sorry, multi-verticals to over 650, over 80% growth. So it was just tremendous. I think it was really, really strong results, particularly within our soccer space. And hopefully, we continue to deliver the momentum in the next half.

And just finally, so when you've done the cross-sell of video, initially, you have to displace Hudl, so teams kept the component. Is that becoming less of an issue now and they just sort of see the benefit of your product and they don't worry about Hudl at all?

Well, I think the results are a great reflection of that. And I think the fact that we're growing at 80% in terms of multi-verticals, I think, is showing that we're having great success in really cross-selling our products.

The next question will come from Owen Humphries with Canaccord.

Best results I've seen since IPO. Just a question here. Just obviously, wearables was the strongest it's been in the half. Can you just guide us through some of the drivers behind that? I've got a couple of questions, but that's my first one.

Yes. Quite honestly, I think it's just continued delivery on the focus of expanding, particularly in Eastern and Northern Europe, I think continue to expand in the collegiate space in the U.S. And then we had some really great success in Latin America. I'd be remiss to not call out the fact that we signed the Brazil national football team. As a Brazilian, it's been quite a chase for us for some time. But I think it's really been particularly around the global European football scene -- soccer scene and then collegiate space.

Sounds pretty broad-based. And then just around capital management now. Are you now guided by the Rule of 40, where your reinvestments only comes with growth? Just to understand now that you're profitable, the balance sheet is in good stead, your growth rate is strong. Just to understand how you think about reinvestment going from here?

Yes. Look, I think 2 things to know at this stage. One, I think we're still not fully independent of our debt facility. I think we like to be fully independent. And I think until we get there, that's our focus from a working capital perspective. I think, 2, I want to make sure that we get to those -- that Rule of 40. And then I think once we get there, the conversation will be, can we accelerate the top line in any form. But I want to make sure that we stay within that range.

[Operator Instructions] Our next question will come from Chris Savage with Bell Potter.

Can I just focus on Sideline for a bit? So you said, Will, you're exclusive with the SEC. How long is that exclusivity period? And when would you hope or expect to be adding other conferences as well?

Yes. We don't share -- due to confidential nature of the contracts, we don't share sort of the terms on it, but it's multiyear, I think we said in the past. And we're hopefully that we continue to expand on the relationship we have with them. In terms of other conferences, similarly, I think they signed multiyear deals with the replay solution that was in the market. We anticipate that probably within the next 12 to 24 months, there are probably opportunities for us to find our way into other conferences. And I think the progress we made, particularly with the features that we built in the software, I think it really has sort of raised eyebrows on conferences that are not using our solution. I think the one thing to know Chris is that, teams are using our video solution in American Football 6 days a week. And what the Sideline Video solution did was actually brought the seventh day, which is game day for them to use it. So even the teams that are in conferences that aren't using our solution, they're touching us 6 days a week, and I think they're looking at that lack of efficiency on the seventh day that they're seeing their competitors and the SEC with a little bit of envy. So we're hoping that, that will drive some really positive conversations for us in the next 12 to 24 months.

And not asking you to speculate, but how close do you think the NFL is to adopting this as well?

I know they're monitoring it pretty closely.

But obviously, they wouldn't make a decision on that until the next off season, I'm presuming?

I can't speculate on it at this stage.

And just last question. Obviously, the ACV for T&C grew strongly, $5 million like year-on-year. How much of that was due to Sideline?

Yes. We don't break that down. But I think we're -- it was definitely a significant portion of our growth. But we have not historically breaking T&C on it. I think our -- really our, I think, excitement in this year is that at this point, we've nearly doubled, I think, as Bob mentioned, on new video from just 2 years ago, right? So we're close to, I think, $11 million now on it. I think when we did the acquisition of SBG, the entire ACV that they carried at that time was about $4 million, or $4.2 million, I think. So it's been a great acquisition. I think it's been a great integration to the company. And I think as you're seeing, just in terms of the multi-vertical growth, which -- that is primarily being driven by teams and not a conference, we're very, very pleased with it.

This will conclude our question-and-answer session as well as our conference call for today. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.