ContextVision AB (publ) (CONTX) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Welcome to ContextVision and our Q4 and full year webcast. Today, as always, with Richard and myself, Gerald. On the agenda for today, short business update. I'll then hand over to Richard on the year financials, and we'll close with a short summary and outlook. Without any further ado, let's jump into highlights of the fourth quarter and the full year. During the quarter, we attended RSNA, world's biggest radiology conference in Chicago where we launched 2 new products. And overall, we understood quite a strong interest in quantitative imaging, which really confirms our journey into data quality with our POCUS venture. With customers, we had fantastic discussions on the show, but also seeing good progress in the quarter on collaborations, meaning we're co-creating new products leading to professional services sales from the beginning and later on turning into new products in image quality. For data quality and POCUS, also good progress actually coding and experimenting and we're seeing first in vitro results that are very promising. For those of you who are disappointed on ContextVision not paying a dividend in 2024, towards the end of the quarter, we launched and executed a share buyback program. So in times with good cash position, good cash flow and perceived under evaluation of the company, probably the right thing to execute -- resulted in 1.2 million shares at a price of NOK 6.5 per share. So overall, I think a well-executed and positive program towards the end of the year. Looking a little bit more into the financial highlights of the quarter. Revenue landed at SEK 34.1 million, which is a record quarter for us, and I'm very proud of the team for that year-end race which then also made the year to end at SEK 130.7 million. Now it may look like a flat year. However, I'm extremely happy on the growth of the underlying license business because we had a one-off impact in Q3, Q4 previous year. So if you compare numbers, the trend in Q4 plus the growth in the underlying business for the total year is extremely positive and makes us looking very positively into next year. Looking into cash flow. I'm also pretty happy on the SEK 9.1 million compared to previous year. And that despite one-off costs we had this quarter for the share buyback program, but also compared to an office relocation, which you can see here in the background, not only with the new logo, but a new office in the background. So well-executed office move in December as well. Now those costs obviously impact EBITDA, which you see now at SEK 9.1 million in total for Q4 and an adjusted EBITDA margin of 33.4%. And that takes into account, as planned, SEK 2.3 million investments into our POCUS venture. So also there, we're ramping up the operations as planned. If we summarize the development, you can see top line trailing now at SEK 131 million rolling 12 and that illustrates, again, an 8.4% compound annual growth rate. For those of you who love to do extrapolations in the future, this is a great result from the past. Looking into our EBITDA margin, 35% rolling 12 adjusted describes also a good pick up in our image quality business while at the same time, executing our investments into the POCUS venture. So overall, pretty happy with that overview. Now if I may take a few minutes and dive more into our operational highlights, I mentioned we participated at RSNA in November. Now first of all, the show was very well visited. A lot of customer meetings we went there with quite a big crew fully booked, which is a good signal for the momentum in the imaging industry but also very interesting that despite the China crisis that we perceived in our business this year 2024, we saw quite a lot of Chinese OEMs participating on the show, which again makes us looking positive into the recovery of the Chinese market going forward. Now the other topic I also mentioned is the strong interest in quantitative imaging, which underpins our strategy into data quality and the POCUS venture that we have set up. So a broader interest in the entire imaging industry. I don't want to mention that also in image quality, which is our strong revenue footprint as of today. We launched 2 new products, Rivent Mobile and smart noise reduction for Altumira. Very well perceived on the market and makes us also looking positively into future license revenues, both in ultrasound as well as in X-ray. Now if we look into the image quality or I should say, OEM discussions that we're having, we're seeing more and more opportunities for collaboration. And what we mean by collaboration are in fact, co-creation. So services that we can deliver to support our OEMs, which gives us an opportunity to commercialize into products later on. So a good progress on that axis as well. Now diving a little bit more into the POCUS venture I mentioned we're showing good progress on conducting tests and measurements and experiments. So that's well on track. But keep in mind that groundbreaking innovation, which in that case is really what we're going after requires a good ecosystem. And good ecosystem means we need excellent, if not the world's best partners alongside with our engineering teams. And I'm extremely happy and it took a while. I know we started talking about it mid-2024, and it came in right after closing the quarter, but still in time for this webcast. We have signed the agreement with the University of Washington in Seattle, to partner with us on the development of our first POCUS products. And that really gives us an opportunity to take our developments out of the in vitro environment in our R&D labs in Linköping into clinical practice and research in the clinical environment and get patient data and patient scans in to build our data quality products. So extremely happy to talk about the progress in our POCUS venture. Now without spending more time on the financial -- operational highlights, let's jump into the financial highlights, Richard. And please share your perspective on the progress.

Right. Thank you, Gerald. Looking at our sales development, we saw an increase of 2.8% compared to quarter 4 of last year, with revenues reaching SEK 34.1 million. First of all, it's worth mentioning that quarter 4 sales last year were impacted by nonrecurring sales of services and license of SEK 1.8 million by product we decided not to market. However, the increase this quarter can be explained by a positive FX effect on 2.4% on sales, and then one of our customers in Asia made a sales push towards the end of the quarter. We've also seen a positive sales trend for each month during the quarter. For the full year, our revenues slightly decreased by 1.2% to SEK 130.7 million. Currency exchange rates had a flat effect during 2024. Note that the full year effect on the project we decided not to market in 2023 amounted to SEK 4.7 million. As Gerald mentioned, we're very hopeful our current discussions about collaborations with key customers will translate into future revenues, but as we mentioned before, it takes time for collaborations and sales to translate into revenues. Now looking at our profitability. Our EBITDA adjusted for investment in POCUS came in at SEK 11.4 million with an adjusted EBITDA margin of 33.4%, an increase from quarter 4 of last year. The main reason for this is that it was an update on our capitalization policy effect in quarter 4 in 2023 and that we had a positive FX effect of SEK 2.8 million year-on-year. Besides that, we've had a bit higher admin costs this quarter compared to the previous ones. This is because of the share buyback, the LTIP and also an office relocation that are nonrecurring. The office location will, however, lower our cost going forward. For the full year, we see some effect on our profitability as a natural consequence of our upscaling for growth. Now looking at our cash flow and financial position. Our cash flow came in at a negative SEK 2.3 million, with cash flow from operating activities reaching SEK 9.1 million in the quarter. In December, we also launched a share buyback of SEK 7.9 million, still giving us a cash position by the end of the year at SEK 74.4 million. For the full year, we had a positive cash flow of SEK 16.2 million and operating cash flow of SEK 32.9 million. To sum up, we have a strong cash position. This gives us opportunities to increase growth in both image quality and data quality, but also to be open for M&A. And with that, Gerald, I hand it over back to you for some closing words.

Yes, many good things that happened in Q4, but also looking back into the entire year 2024. I think it's been a tough but very successful journey. Now summarizing Q4, we really see a strong interest in ContextVision, especially regarding quantitative imaging and our setup in data quality and POCUS. We should be extremely proud of 2 new products that we released on to the market on the road map, as I mentioned or indicated in image quality even more to come as we're spreading out across the imaging chain. And very instrumental in those discussions, our OEM Tier 1 collaborations that we see good progress in. Then clearly, I'll highlight the partnership agreement with the University of Washington, that we have signed and that we see extremely quick pickup now into building and testing our digital organ biomarker for liver fat. And I can just say stay tuned for more exciting news, both on our POCUS venture as well as on image quality to come. And I hope we connect or you can read more before we meet again next webcast. Thank you for your attention and stay tuned.

Thank you.