Cirata plc (CRTA) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hi. I'm Stephen Kelly. And today, I'm joined with Ijoma Maluza, and we're going to take you through the H1 Cirata numbers for FY '23. But before I start, I'd like to say I was an investor before I joined the company. And I think from the investor perspective, we looked at all the aspects of what makes a great enterprise software company on a growth journey. And it's like obviously a $1 billion-plus market. It's a really strong product market fit. It's a good team, engineering excellence and a differentiated product with supported with many patents. And I think with this company, when we looked at the company in detail and now from the inside, we just need to really fix the whole structure and the foundation, but especially in the go-to-market function. And we'll talk about our plan to do that and how we address. So I think it's fair to say I joined now almost to the day 4 months ago to work with Ken Lever, our Interim Chair and Ijoma. And early days, I think, a fantastic credit to Ken actually in terms of securing the company and its future. And obviously, on behalf of the whole Board and the management team, we want to thank our investors for your patience and commitment over the last really traumatic 4 months. So with that, I'd like to move on to present the outline for H1 FY '23. And as I said, it's been a traumatic time. The rescue phase really to save the company have been taken them. What this will give you a sense of is the speed, velocity at which we've been moving. A lot of things to be done very quickly but also very intelligently to make sure we make the right moves. We've completely refreshed the Board under Ken's leadership. And with Ijoma and myself, we've got some very experienced people in terms of technology turnarounds and growth companies. I think it's the case now that also we've done a lot of work on the go-to-market. There's more to do. I certainly wouldn't say that the job is done, and we've got a program to address that. But we've really cleaned up the pipeline. One of the positives though sitting here is the customers actually do convert very successfully. So 1 of the data points we have is 80% of our prospective customers who undergo a proof of concept then become customers of the company. And as well as that, what we wouldn't do is rightsize the cost base to make sure our path to cash flow breakeven was more assured. And we've effectively reduced the cost base by almost half. So from $41 million to a run rate of between $22 million and $23 million. Obviously, that's been painful for our colleagues because we reduced the number of colleagues from 192 to today, 112. But most of all, during that period, Ijoma myself and Ken have probably spent about 100 meetings with investors over the last 3 months. So I'm very pleased with that process that at the end of that, the company back at the end of July is the $30 million that was required to make sure that we not only win on as a going concern, but had sufficient growth capital to meet our ambitions and our plans. So since the work that we've done since June just 2023, we've done an awful lot of work. We're really, really engaged with our customers and our partners. And it's fair to say the trauma of the announcement on March 9, meant that many customers put the company on the watch list. And many partners paused activity, both marketing activity and sales activity with the company. In parallel with the rescue phase with the fundraise, we've been working hard to put the foundations in place to build the growth company and fix the go-to-market. I personally have actually spoken to the top dozen customers and the validation from them says that our technology is excellent and a really strong product market fit to their business and technology needs. In addition, I have spoken to some of our biggest partners, and we're very fortunate and the platform for partnerships with Microsoft, AWS, IBM, Oracle, Google, some of the best companies on the planet gives us great confidence of a growth future. So I'm also pleased to say that customers not only reengaged, but new customers are contracting with us. One example of that is General Motors, who recently contracted with the company for a continuous use case movement of data to support their ambitions around their data business and their own growth plans. So the last element that's worth sharing with you is there's a very structured turnaround plan in place with work streams. These work streams have an executive leader, each of whom report to me, and we'll share those with you during this presentation. But they set the platform for the growth engine that we're building into the company for FY '24. The second part of the overview since the last 90 days is all the actions are now in place not only to create the growth platform and the company, but also, we -- when we joined the company, wanted to create a real sense of transparency and highest-quality disclosure to our investor community. So for the first time today, we have some embryonic key performance indicators that we're sharing with you. And over time, I'm sure we'll be increasing those KPIs with qualitative indicators as well as -- and quite a big change as well as turning to the Board, the management team, we've changed the name of the company and launched Cirata. That's very excited, really the combination of cirrus, which is all about clouds and data which is essentially what we do for some of these largest Fortune 500 companies on the planet to help them move their data to fuel their ambitions and create the platform for their analytics and their artificial intelligence needs of the future. It's the case that Ijoma and I have only been working together for the last 4 months, but the partnership even at this stage, has been very strong. And we're certainly enjoying working with each other. And I'd love to hand over now to Ijoma to take you through the financials from H1 FY '23.

Thank you, Stephen, and hello, everyone. My name is Ijoma Maluza, and I'm the CFO of Cirata. I'm delighted to be here today, and I'm very pleased to present the first set of our results after our shares -- our share suspension had been lifted. As we've kind of talked about before, the first half of the year was heavily disrupted by the events that were uncovered in early March of this year. After the discovery of irregularities, we -- a lot of our customers understandably as well as partners, paused their commercial interactions with the company due to the uncertainty about the company's future. This had an impact on our ability to close deals during the first half as well as to advance opportunities through the pipeline, which I'll come back and talk about later. So the results that you see for the first half needs to be looked at with this context. Going into the numbers specifically. So revenues for the period was $3 million, which is around 50% below what we did in the prior period in 2022. This was driven by significantly lower bookings in the period of $2.8 million versus $7.3 million in H1 2022. Our cash overheads, which exclude amongst other things, the adviser costs relating to the investigation into the irregularities as well as the fundraising in July were $17.6 million compared to $19.5 million in the first half of last year. The slight improvement in cash overhead was -- reflects the impacts of the cost reductions that we had started during the half. Not all of that is -- came through in the first half and the run rate will come through as we move into H2 and 2024. Adjusted EBITDA loss was $14.8 million versus $14.1 million in the first half of 2022. Effectively, the lower cost base did not fully offset the lower revenue in the first half. The statutory loss was at $18.8 million. And the cash position at the end of June was $3.2 million. At the time we closed the first half, the company was less than a month -- had less than a month of cash runway until we raised more funding in the latter half of July 2023. Looking at revenues in a bit more detail in the first half of the year, application life cycle management revenues, ALM, accounted for the bulk of our revenue base at 77%, with the rest being made up of data integration. As we said before, data integration revenues are driven by lumpy contracts. So due to the reduction in a number of contracts that we signed in the first half of the year that had a big impact in terms of our debt integration revenues compared to the previous year. Looking at revenues by geography. The U.S. continues to make up a large proportion of our revenue base with over half our revenue back in the U.S., followed by Europe and Rest of the World. Our investment will therefore be aligned to this kind of split in terms of our go-to-market investments that we've talked about with most of the investment coming into the U.S. to take advantage of the opportunities that we see there. Now moving on to costs. On this chart, what I've tried to do is to split our cost base by function and by type as well as just to show the proportion of our overall expenses that has been allocated towards the advisory costs during the first half of the year. So starting with cash costs by function, about 37% of our cost in the first half of the year were in engineering and R&D. And that was followed by sales, customer success and marketing and then G&A. As we've said before, we have significantly reduced the cost base during the first half of the year. But as well as reducing their overall costs during the first half of the year, we're also looking to reallocate the emphasis in terms of [ needed ] areas that we're spending our investments. So you will see, as we move forward, some shift from -- as a percentage of the overall cost base from engineering and R&D towards the go-to-market functions, so sales and marketing and customer success to some extent. In terms of -- on a cost by type, about 70 -- over 70%, 77%, all of our costs are effectively people costs with the remainder in nonpeople costs. And finally, only about 14% of our cost base during the first half was associated with -- advisory costs associated with the investigation into irregularities as well as the fund raise that we do in the first half of the year. So talking about -- moving on to outlook. Just as a preamble, we -- both Stephen and I are very focused on being very conservative when it comes to our providing our outlook to you, investors. So I think when we talk to these numbers, you should have -- you should bear that in mind that we're being very confident and providing a conservative view on what we think the business should be able to achieve. We've been here 4 months. And we'll continue to build the processes in the business to allow us to be a lot more specific in future when we provide outlook to investors. In terms of specific numbers, we are forecasting between $4.3 and $6 million of bookings in the second half of the year. In terms of the pipeline, we have a very strong pipeline that underpins the top end of this range. We have strong opportunities with our partners that underpin this. However, the key risk to delivering the top end of this range, is around timing, given our relatively short tenure in the business and the relatively immature sales processes that we have in the business at the moment, it is very -- it is quite difficult to be very specific in terms of when specific opportunities are going to close over the next 3 to 4 months. Looking at the cash position at the year-end, we're currently forecasting a cash -- an ending cash balance of between $16 million and $16.5 million at the end of the year. Again, the big driver of that range is around when deals close. As deals closed towards the latter part of Q3 and Q4, the collection of cash associated with these deals will come in 2024. Overall, our focus for this half is really about building the pipeline into 2024, as well as closing the deals that underpin the forecast that we've just gone through. We still -- we're still focused on cash flow breakeven position towards the end of 2024 and into 2025. And that's what we are building the pipeline for as we move through [ CI ] and into next year.

Thank you, Ijoma. And what I'd like to cover now is the strategic and operational highlights. The first thing to start is, I guess is the investment case. And what attracted me and many other investors to the company is operating in a $1 billion-plus marketplace, growing at 10% per annum, and seeing the explosion of data, looking at Gartner data, they're seeing customers in the marketplace, in the verticals we operate, seeing their data compound increase every year, 30% to 60%. I was talking to a top U.S. bank only a couple of weeks ago. And again, their validation that they've seen an explosion of data in their corporation and the movement of data to really fuel better analytics and better insights around their customers as well as the embryonic artificial intelligence plan. So Fortune 500 customers, Global 1000 have got a strong need and we have got a strong product market fit with differentiated technology, engineering excellence, supported by a multitude of patents that really are meaningful, plus committed colleagues, high-quality strategic partners, some of the best companies on the planet. And the data integration use case is very, very, very critical to these businesses. As well as that, there's some regulatory changes around data that could play into our favor and create some tailwinds. So if we look at the foundations, that is the essence of the investment case. So the investment thesis is solid. But what's been missing? Most of them were around the go-to-market, but other things as well. Obviously, we tripped up through the announcement on March 9, and the governance and control environment needs dramatic improvement. And I'm pleased to say, even in the last 4 months, that's been put in place. We've updated 4 policies and introduced 9 new policies as well as that, we've introduced a code of conduct and business ethics that's been adopted throughout the company. We've introduced a compliance officer and also enhance the role of the Audit Committee to a broadened set of responsibilities. These programs, obviously, are fundamental, but they have to be lived and embedded within the culture of the organization. I'm pleased to say, as of now, this month, we're now starting to train and then certify our colleagues to ensure that we have the highest level of governance, a really excellent control environment and make sure that the integrity of our business is second to none. So once we have the foundation of strong governance, then it's important we really focus on the go-to-market. And 1 part of that is around fix in marketing. And we felt it was an imperative to rebrand the company, and I'm pleased with the new name of Cirata that speaks to the essence of moving large data sets for customers and many times to the cloud and really ensure that we provide them with a platform that allows them to exploit the opportunities of artificial intelligence and analytics. And the transition to the new company name and also the ticker symbol CRTA should be completed largely during October with a tail where everything gets wrapped up and completed by the end of December. Now the key thing around our turnaround plan, and I've highlighted this with the 8 work streams. It's very clear what we need to do. We need to fix the go-to-market function. So we have stronger pipeline, better engagement with partners, more engagement with customers and a really predictable growth engine that we feel confident takes advantage of the market opportunity. And there are some strategic aims that we highlight here that really underpin the turnaround plan. And these are then set out into 8 individual work streams. So I'd like to take you through. So each of these work streams in the turnaround plan are very clear and owned by 1 of my executives and reporting to me where I review personally with the executive every month on the outcomes being achieved month by month. I'd expect these work streams to be wrapped up and rolled into the business as usual as we exit FY '23. So they've become part of our DNA as we go into FY '24 and really, really put these foundations in place to exploit the opportunity for growth in the company as we track towards our cash flow breakeven goal. So I guess when we look at the problem for the company over almost the last decade is if we have great technology and a big market opportunity with talented colleagues and excellence in engineering, and a product market fit, then why are we struggling to grow consistently and predictably? Well, I think the answer lies in the go-to-market function. And what we found when I joined is I just asked simple questions like, can I see a sales compensation plan? Can I see a territory plan? Can I see an account plan? And what I found was sadly, many of the basics don't exist. And this slide just highlights some of the things we've put in place over the last 90 days around sales and marketing because, obviously, what we need to do is build through both the turnaround program and fixing the basics to make sure that we have a predictable sales cycle, and we have a marketing machine that really builds high-quality pipeline and elevates the brand to be what is relevant and critical to some of these Fortune 500 companies in solving their big data set requirements. So what can we say in terms of conclusion? Obviously, it's been a traumatic time for the company. And again, we thank our colleagues and our investors for your support patients. And most of all, the investors for your commitment with a $30 million fund raise. Now we're very focused on building the platform for growth and the work is taking place as we speak during the second half of this year that allows us to have a degree of confidence that moving into FY '24. It will be a growth story about Cirata and we've signaled that as we exit FY '24 we'd anticipate that we'll be achieving cash flow breakeven. Now there's a lot to play for here because I think we've got a tremendous market opportunity. We've got differentiated technology. We've got all the fundamentals in place for a successful growth company. But it's all about execution now. We've set the strategy. We put the plans in place and our responsibility to you is to make sure we execute flawlessly on those plans. And what you can be assured from this management team is we'll have a higher standard in terms of disclosures and transparency and within the company, a very high-quality governance and control environment. But most of all, we'll have fixed the go-to-market challenges the company has faced for the past to produce and provide a really high-growth successful, profitable company that can take advantage of the market opportunity and ultimately become a market and category leader globally.