Cirata plc (CRTA) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

We announced the largest LiveData Migrator contract for Cirata since we began our journey to rescue the company back in March 2023. Both technically and commercially, the Cirata team have risen to the challenge and delivered a product to a really valued customer. This is the largest contract in the company's history for LDM in financial services vertical and the largest implementation through the IBM Big Replicate platform. Demonstrating that we can land 7-figure contracts is an important signal that we are approaching the end of the recovery process. It's an important day for Cirata. In tandem with this announcement, we are withdrawing guidance. Our Q4 cash overhead is running at circa $5 million, which is slightly better than planned. Our cash burn for Q4 will be dependent on the final outcome for bookings and cash collections in the quarter. We, therefore, anticipate our cash burn in Q4 will show further improvement on Q3. There is much work to do to close out Q4 and management will update the market on the final outturn for Q4 in mid-January. We will return to the process by which we set and communicate guidance a little later in this video. I think it's important to take a moment to remind investors of the journey so far that we've undertaken to get to this point. Let's break down the challenge we were set back in FY '23 and examine the scorecard of progress and challenges. We'll publish our summary chart to the investors on the Investor Relations landing page. But simply put, there are 9 KPIs that we set ourselves internally to improve, to monitor and disclose. These highlight both the progress and the challenges for our company, in line with our policy to provide the highest level of transparency for our investors. We are certainly not done yet, but we have come a long way along the path to recovery. And then the next phase is the all-important growth phase. So taking each of these KPIs in turn. We exited FY '22 with a Q4 quarterly cash overhead north of $11 million, and we expect that to be circa $5 million in Q4 as we exit FY '24. Our cash burn in Q1 FY '23 was $11 million. Our cash burn in Q3 FY '24, our last reported quarter, was circa $3 million. We expect our cash burn to show a further significant improvement over the period as we exit Q4. The direction of travel on this particular metric is clear towards cash flow breakeven. However, as I have said before, in the extreme, there are 2 types of software company. You either grow fast or you die slowly. And in the long term, you cannot cut your way to growth. So now turning to our core growth product, Data Migrator. Our announcement today, we believe, is a big vote of confidence in the product, the improvements we have made and in our product road map. Data integration year-on-year product growth in Q1 FY '23 was a minus 87%. Since then, we have seen a steady quarterly improvement in year-on-year growth through each consecutive quarter. And in our last reported quarter, Q3 FY '24, we saw data integration product growth of positive 180% year-on-year. And for Q4 FY '24, we expect a year-on-year growth for data integration. We would expect data integration to continue triple-digit growth trajectory as we move forward. The quantum of sales is still not where we need them to be, but the activity levels are up significantly over the last 12 months. We signed 8 data integration contracts in Q3 FY '24 versus 2 in the same period a year earlier. In addition, the land and expand strategy is working, where we plant Acorns that grow into multiyear deep relationships with enterprise customers. Our partnerships are an important part of our strategy, and we work really hard to rebuild their trust over the last several quarters, resolving legacy issues related to unspent prepaids, better alignment with our product road map and working proactively with our partners to build a qualified pipeline. And finally, lead generation and product discovery. Many of you that follow the company will note significant changes to our digital marketing cadence over the last several quarters, together with a wholesale change to our website and product positioning. This is leading to a significant improvement in inbound organic lead generation with over 35 inbound inquiries in the last few months from virtually 0 previously. Obviously, there is always more to do and improve on. But I think the scorecard is moving clearly in the right direction, and we're looking forward to building on these foundations as we get ready for FY '25. So with today's announcement, our focus now turns to closing out December as successfully as we can. And therefore, management time is going to be working flat out on closing business with partners and customers. And we'll come back and share the results of that work with all our investors in mid-January when we come back with the Q4 trading update. Thank you.

Stephen, hello again. A lot going on today. What's the key message for investors and why today for video communication?

We are landing big 7-figure contracts into challenging environments with the largest customers in the world, just 6 quarters after a near death experience for the company. This is the largest contract to date for LDM in financial services and the largest single implementation on IBM Big Replicate. And it validates the hard work we put into rebuilding the IBM relationship and partnership, which was announced in Q3. So today, we demonstrate that we have an enterprise-ready LDM product, and we are going to market with a reinvigorated IBM partnership. I will be blunt and to the point, this was a broken company on every metric, and we're fixing it from the ground up and have created the foundations for sustainable growth.

And Stephen, you have withdrawn guidance today. That must be disappointing.

Of course, it is a disappointment. And as I've alluded to in the presentation, there's a much bigger picture here, and I'm pleased with our progress on the metrics that we care about in rebuilding the business and demonstrating that for our investors. We do have a diligent process for setting the guidance. And with today's announcement of the 1-year term, the booking value reflects that. Accordingly, the guidance needed to be revised.

So still on the subject of guidance, can you explain how that is set?

Yes. It's important. And the guidance we set quarterly by internal committee of the CFO, Head of Investor Relations and the CEO, and it's driven by what we see in the pipeline and our best estimation of when business will close and how it will close. We review that when we have material -- actionable information. We don't and indeed cannot give a running commentary on that guide and can only change it when the inputs change. We then share this information with the Board of Directors. And it's very, very fair to say that we take our regulatory and governance responsibilities extremely seriously, particularly given the history of the company. We know we're rightly rigid and disciplined in our communication, and we understand sometimes the frustration given where we are in the process of the recovery. However, we make no apologies for the protocols that we've adopted that drives the highest levels of transparency. This protects the company, its current shareholders and sends a positive signal to future investors. We aim to share all material information with all investors as and when it becomes available.

Now the deal you announced today is through your partnership with IBM on their OEM platform, Big Replicate. What's the significance of that?

When we arrived, we had some legacy issues with all the partners. Generally, the trust and the relationships were broken. We've been working through those issues since the time we came together, and we have been solving them over the past few months. It's a matter of public record that in Q3, we renewed the OEM agreement with IBM, and we're able to remove the liability on Cirata of the $1.7 million prepaid. Actually, there seems to be some confusion on this issue, particularly with the retail investor base. To be clear, the retirement of the $1.7 million prepaid is a massive benefit to Cirata. The prepaid was like started a race miles back from the start line. With the new IBM agreement announced in Q3, it's a new start based on a win-win. This clearly is good for the customer, good for Cirata, good for IBM and good for shareholders and really marks a new chapter in our relationship with IBM.

So Stephen, what gives you the confidence that the strategy is working?

I just presented in one slide the sort of main key investor KPIs we're monitoring to determine we're on the right tracks. My key conclusion is that the KPIs show the company is tracking on cost structure, on product road map, on customer wins and fundamentals on sustainability, they're all moving in the right direction. I've acknowledged the initial rescue that was FY '23 and then the recovery phase FY '24 have taken longer than I desired. As we exit FY '24 and the recovery phase, we're firmly focused on the growth phase, the future. Today is a good day for Cirata and its recovery. And tomorrow, we roll up our sleeves and go again on the growth phase looking into next year.