Celebrus Technologies plc (CLBS.L) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Celebrus Technologies plc Post-AGM Investor Q&A session. [Operator Instructions] Before we begin, we'd like to submit the following poll, and I'm sure the company will be most grateful for your participation. I'd now like to hand over the meeting to Non-Executive Chair, Tom Skelton. Good afternoon.

Thanks a lot, Mark. Appreciate that, and welcome, everybody. We're very excited to have you here today. Obviously, this morning, we conducted the formal AGM. This is the post-AGM Q&A, and it follows a period of tremendous change here for Celebrus, and we're very excited about the direction of the business and the strategy that we're pursuing, and we look forward to hearing from you all on the questions that you'd like us to address here today. I don't have anything in front of me now. So what I will do is I'll turn it over to you, Bill. Probably, it would be good to give a quick summary for our attendees today, and we'll then see what they've got for us in terms of questions.

Yes. So thanks, Tom. Obviously, for any of you that were following, obviously, all results passed. And I think the comment that I'll make around that is just thank you for the support. Obviously, this has, as Tom mentioned, been a time of transition in the business. In my opinion, an exciting time, as we've sort of shed some of the skin, so to speak, of some of the things that we thought were sort of holding the company back and not allowing us to focus 100% on our own software and IP and the growth therein. I think as we come through the first half results and have the new sort of revenue categorizations and breakdown and some of the story clearer and more transparent around things like Celebrus ARR and the things that we talked about in the results a little over a month ago. I think that will make the business much easier to understand. We, as a team, are energized and just very grateful for all of your support, not only in showing up today, but also in the support as we went through this transition and had that period of time where we were a bit quiet, as we were sorting through all of the communication and getting the sort of the market updates out through the analysts and things of that nature. It was also great to see many of you in person in London as well in July. And that's my thank you shield.

There's only one question in at the moment. So I guess I'll jump into that question. And then, if there's any others, please, by all means, feel free to shout. We know this is so close to the results that sometimes a lot of the questions have already been answered. But if there's anything top of mind, please feel free to drop that into the Q&A tab, and we'll get to it. The only question in there at the moment is, can you give a little bit of detail about the recent win announcement? I think it was about a couple of weeks ago now at this point in time, we announced yet another win. This is with the financial services business in the U.K. And it's following a very common theme that's happening across a lot of our markets at the moment, which is growing frustration with some of our key competitors. In this case, this organization had grown frustrated with Adobe, not just in terms of Adobe's cost, but also the features that were just lacking. One of the things that -- I think sometimes we take for granted on our side is that we have a development team that puts 2 major updates out a year in advancing the platform from a variety of perspectives, where we want to take it, obviously, but also feedback from our customers and partners. We're blessed with an incredible engineering team that does that, and that's not something that a lot of other marketing technology companies can hang their hat on. And we try to do our best to listen to customers. We try to do our best to innovate the platform. And in doing so, it gives us, in my humble opinion, a leg up in the marketplace. And that's exactly what happened here. There were several gaps and challenges that this organization was facing and several frustrations with regards to their data quality, their ability to capture digital customer journeys, their ability to know who the consumer was right then and there when they were on the site or the mobile app. And those were all things that through an intensive, I'd say, interview dating process, we were able to show that customer through live demonstrations POCs and things of that nature. So it was a great win for the business. And when we talk about it internally, it was a true team effort. When I say it was an interview process, there was -- every single department got involved from security to finance and the back-office teams to HR to obviously, sales, marketing and the executive staff as well. So that's a bit about that win. One of the other questions coming in, yes, I suppose we should have done this right out the gate for everybody, but let's go around. And obviously, you met Tom, our Chairman, and myself. I hope at this point, you all know who Ash is, but let's let each of the non-exec directors, if you don't mind, introduce yourselves. Peter, you're the first one on my screen. So we'll go left to right, Peter, Monika and then Helen.

Okay. Thanks, Bill. Hi, everybody, and again, thanks for taking the time to join us today. My name is Peter Whiting. My background is as a financial analyst. I finished my full-time career with UBS about 14 years ago. I've been a non-executive director on a number of Boards since then. I've been on the Celebrus Board now for about 7 years. So I'm one of the NEDs, and I share with you very best. Thanks.

Thank you, Peter. Monika?

Thank you, everyone. I'm on the Board of Celebrus since end of 2019. My background is technology, operations and commercials. I have done a lot of IP licensing and Copyright licensing. And I Chair the ESG Committee, of which Ash is also a member.

And Helen, over to you. Thank you, Monika.

So I'm Helen Gilder. My background is finance. I was CFO of an AIM-listed business, ZOO Digital Group, for many years. I left in 2018, and since then, I have had an executive -- a non-exec portfolio career. I've been with Celebrus for a couple of years now, and I'm Chair of Audit Committee.

Awesome. Thank you, all. One of the other questions coming through, let's see. What's the forward thinking in terms of getting ahead of the competition? It's not easy, but innovation is the key. I mean, that's really it, right? We have the benefit of having quite a few people that have been in this industry for quite a long period of time, myself included, that have worked with a lot of the competition, and in some cases, implemented them. So there's a lot of internal knowledge about what these platforms can do and what they can't do. I'd say the second area is clients are quite vocal, which goes into one of the other questions on here, which is what are the qualifying questions you ask for potential -- ask of potential customers? I've talked about this a little bit with investors, but it kind of ties into the innovation, right? When we're meeting with prospects, we're trying to find people that are frustrated with something. They know something is missing, and they know what they would do if that wasn't missing anymore, right? Whether that's having more complete digital data across their websites and mobile apps or one of the more common ones is being able to have a profile and understand who their customers are, even when they're not logged in or even one that I was on this morning just ahead of this call, which is purely focused on compliance. They don't want to send their data outside the organization anymore, and they want a platform that can enable that for them, which is right in our wheelhouse. So we do a lot of listening because candidly, the things that clients complain about or are frustrated with are prospects. Not all of them might be things that we could deliver today. A prime example of that is the -- are the analytics platforms that we've brought to life over the last 3 years. Those didn't exist 3 years ago. The reason that they existed was because we had several clients that had to move away from, at the time, Google Analytics in the States. They were healthcare customers as a result of HIPAA compliance, which is H-I-P-A-A for anybody that wants to Google that, it's like GDPR for healthcare. But ultimately, they had to shut off third-party platforms. And these clients came to us and said, can't you just do analytics? You're doing all of our -- you're creating all this data for us anyways. And that instantly became part of the roadmap and was live in about 3 months. Those are -- that's the type of speed that we're very fortunate to have a team that can work at. But it's also a key part of innovation. If we're innovating in the darkness and just thinking to ourselves and not taking external inputs from clients, partners, prospects and not listening to the things that are coming up at events when people are presenting on stage and the things that -- and the challenges that people talk about, we're constantly trying to listen because it's the only way that you can actually stay out in front of the competition. I'm not seeing any other questions coming in. Hopefully, that answers everybody else's questions. But I think -- I don't know, Tom, I guess, should we just go ahead and throw it back to Mark and wrap it up?

That's great, Bill, Tom. Unless there's any objection, what I'll do is I will redirect those attendees on today's call to give you feedback. So ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for your time. We will now redirect you for your thoughts and expectations, which I'm sure will be greatly valued by the company. Thank you very much indeed to all for your time and your engagement this afternoon. Good afternoon.