Datalex plc (DLE) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, and welcome to Datalex's 2023 Annual Results Call. 2023 was a year where we begin to build back Datalex as a market leader in airline technology markets. Firstly, for those of you who I have not met, I am Jonathan Rockett, CEO of Datalex. I'm delighted to be joined on the call this morning by Steven Moloney, our recently appointed CFO. As this is my first external presentation for Datalex, I would like to thank the Chairman, the Board, the Datalex team and the shareholders for their warm welcome and introduction to Datalex. I joined in November 2023. And now some 7 months later, I'm happy to say I can see and understand the opportunity that Datalex has within the airline market and our ability to drive growth and unlock value for our airlines. We will discuss that in a little bit more detail towards the end of the presentation. There are 2 items on the agenda for today, both Steven and I will take you through 2023. I will cover some strategic and operational highlights, and Steven will dive in to the numbers and metrics. And then I will share more detail on our future growth plans. When we look at 2023, we start to see a number of building blocks that have laid the foundation for future growth. Contract renewals, a number of new contracts were signed with our airline partners. We are particularly pleased that Aer Lingus, Edelweiss and Air China will be migrating to Datalex's newest platform products. These renewals, along with the relating investment by these airlines to migrate to Datalex's latest product suite, are not only a testament to the value of our long-standing partnerships with customers, but are also a vote of confidence in where Datalex's [ bringing ] products over the next 3 to 5 years. The new platform. The new platform will be Datalex's anchor solution as we transition our airlines to a world of 100% legacy-free technology. It is also built with a product [ mindset ]. As such, we are building capabilities once and looking to activate these across the airlines who are on our platform. In terms of new business, easyJet had its first activation in late 2023 with the go-live of our Merchandiser products. This represents only the tip of the iceberg of the level of activations and the pace of delivery that is building with easyJet. Additionally, in December, we signed Air Macau, who will be taking a similar product to Air China. Both easyJet and Air Macau will be joining the latest product suite. Within 2023, we also need to acknowledge that Virgin Australia and SAS left our portfolio for different reasons, external to Datalex. This means that there was an element of nonrecurring revenue within the 2023 results that Steven would jump into in a moment. Overall, where there's a lot of work to do, I'm pleased to say that after a number of COVID-impacted years, 2023 was a year where top line revenue growth has returned and then we now have line of sight into EBITDA and cash flow growth, albeit not in the immediate term. I will now hand over to Steven, who will bring us through our 2023 results in detail.

Thanks, Jonathan. I'm pleased to share the FY '23 financial results for Datalex plc. 2023 was a year in which we made considerable progress in a number of areas. From a financial point of view, we saw a very strong gross profit growth. We saw a meaningful reduction in our EBITDA losses. Let me bring you to financial metrics in a little bit more detail. Starting with revenue. Datalex delivered revenue of $28.9 million in 2023, a year-on-year growth of 23%. Our services revenue grew 25% year-on-year to $14.1 million, evidencing a strong year for activation budgets. This is due to several new customer implementation projects during the year and migration of a number of existing customers to our new technology platform. Platform revenue, which is made up of software license fees [ post ] transaction revenue, grew 17% year-on-year to $12.9 million. This was primarily due to higher transactions volumes, notably because of recovery in Asian markets. Importantly, 2023 saw contract renewals with a number of key customers. Air China, Air Transat, JetBlue, Edelweiss and Aer Lingus. In December, we entered into a new 5-year partnership with Air Macau for Datalex's Shopping and Pricing product. As previously disclosed, we also signed a partnership with easyJet in December 2022. They went live with Datalex Merchandising product on time in 2023. However, whilst we made positive progress in a number of areas, it wasn't year without setbacks. 2023 set a loss of 2 customers. Following an internal review, Virgin Australia saw a change in strategic priorities with respect to its Next Generation Retail program, impacting Datalex and several order vendors. And SAS filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the U.S., resulting in them not proceeding with the Datalex's NDC product. In our P&L, our other revenue line includes one-off termination fees of $1 million associated with Virgin Australia. So key points to call out as we look ahead, we expect to see continued platform revenue growth as we complete further customer activations and migrate customers to our SaaS revenue model. Our platform revenue will become the largest share of revenue for 2024, the trend we expect to continue. This mix shift [indiscernible] services to platform revenue will continue to support gross margin expansion over time as platform margin is typically higher than services revenue margin. In terms of challenges, $3.5 million of revenue recorded in 2023 is from terminated customers and will therefore not reoccur in 2024, as referenced by Jonathan. Gross profit amounted to $9.7 million in 2023, represented significant growth year-on-year of 52%. This gross profit growth was driven by a combination of top line revenue growth and gross margin expansion. Gross margin percentage grew from 27% in 2022 with 7 percentage points to 34% in 2023. This expansion in gross margin is driven by increase in transaction revenue, which is typically higher margin and services revenue. Activation work completed in FY '23 was of higher-margin projects completed in 2022. The margin also benefited from the one-off termination fees we previously referenced. Excluding the benefit of the onetime termination fees, in order to represent a bigger review of growing gross profit growth, the adjusted gross margin percentage would have been 31%, representing 4 percentage points expansion year-on-year, and our gross profit growth would remain very strong at [ 36% ] year-on-year. Moving on to operating expenses. Operating expenses in 2023 amounted to $12.6 million, growing 8% year-on-year. Significant amount of the growth [ distributed ] by FX losses and [ full-time ] adjustments. If we exclude the FX losses, the year-on-year grows closer to 3%. We're representing very tight cost management in the context of our gross profit growth. Moving on to EBITDA. From an EBITDA perspective, we're showing a loss of 2023 of minus $2.9 million. While this is certainly not where we want to be as a business, we have shown meaningful reduction in the losses year-on-year, improving by 45%. In terms of group priorities, it is our ambition to return to generate positive EBITDA in 2025 and return to cash flow positive growth in 2026. Beyond EBITDA, the group is showing a loss after tax of minus $9 million. Depreciation and amortization of $2.6 million is showing a more normalized run rate when compared to the prior year. Interest charge of $2 million has increased year-on-year as a result of driving the additional funds from our loan facility. We drew around $8.6 million in additional loan in 2024, bringing the total loan principal drawn down to $14.4 million at the end of 2022. Other [ line ] amounts to $1.5 million, included share-based payments and one-off exceptional costs, is relatively flat year-on-year. Moving on to the balance sheet. Attached is a snapshot of our balance sheet. We will walk through every line over in detail, but we want to draw your attention to the most significant line items. Firstly is our cash position. Your cash on hand at the end of December, $5.8 million. This decreased only modestly from $6.5 million in 2022. Additional funds from borrowings were mostly offset by cash used for operations and investments. Secondly, we have a [ PAYE ] warehouse debt of $6.25 million. A phased payment arrangement, as agreed with the Irish tax entirety, and we will begin repaying the volumes from May 2024 over a period of 7 years on monthly equal repayments. Thirdly, I want to highlight our borrowings, which have increased from $6.4 million in 2022 to [ $78.3 million ] in 2023. The bulk of this is driven by the additional [ drawdown ] on our existing loan facility, bringing the total loan loan balance, including capital and accrued interest, to [ $16.2 million ] from 31st of December 2023. A key near-term priority is strengthening the group's balance sheet. The intention is to complete a capital raise to repay the existing facility and form business growth. If Datalex requires additional funding in advance of raising capital, our lender has committed to extending the repayment date of our existing loan facility and providing additional loan facility, if required, of up to $10 million. To summarize our financial metrics, we delivered year-on-year revenue growth of 23% and delivered significant gross margin growth of 52% year-on-year, with meaningful gross margin expansion. And while still loss-making, we made significant progress in meaningfully reducing our losses, improving our loss by 45% year-on-year. Now before I hand you over to Jonathan, I just want to say, I am happy to have joined Datalex. I'm very excited about the future growth potential of the business. Now I hand you over to Jonathan, who will talk to you a little bit more about Datalex future [ growth ]. Thank you.

Thank you, Steven. It is really encouraging that we're seeing growth in our core business after a number of COVID-impacted years. As we activate our solutions, particularly on our new platform, during 2024 and into 2025, we expect that this top line growth will continue and be particularly evident in 2025. There are certain fundamentals that our company needs in order to return to sustainable growth, both top and bottom line, funding for growth. We are in a position that we have a very supportive shareholder base, and in particular, the IIU Group. As Datalex and the airline market tackle the extended difficulties of COVID-19, their support was on [ unwavering ]. Without their support, we would not be in a position to discuss the plans for the future here today. We are also conscious that our current capital structure is not a sustainable model for Datalex. Our intention is to work with our shareholders and kick off an equity raise in 2024 to bring sufficient capital to Datalex in order to, firstly, repay the loans provided by Tireragh and secondly, provides efficient working capital to grow our product capabilities and deliver top line revenue growth. We're delighted that our main shareholder is again supportive of this approach and has confirmed their participation in the equity raise. On the operational front, there are a number of areas that we are looking to achieve and legacy hurdles that we are looking to address, which happened in previously. We are now actively leaning into these hurdles to facilitate growth in the company. It is important to note we deal with legacy [ admin ] systems, sometimes 15, 16 years old. This will always be complex, but we need to find a way that we do not add to our [ complexity ]. Our delivery model, we needed a delivery model that is efficient and effective at activating our product solutions. At the start of the year, we analyzed what we wanted to deliver in 2024 and 2025. However, set up to date to deliver these goals and after sales if it was fit for purpose. On the back of that review, we have removed some of the bottlenecks. We have removed some of the product handovers that have held the company back and streamlined our delivery model. This is largely complete, but we will continue to look to enhance and optimize as we evolve our thinking on product offerings. Our tech stack, we've invested a substantial amount in building out our new platform and enhanced capabilities that are linked to this. As we continue to add new capabilities, we will look to [ break ] up the existing tech stack into a more modular approach. This will enhance the ease of activation of our solutions and will also allow us to be substantially more agile in our ability to go to market with innovative solutions. Customer migrations, I touched on this at the start, and Steven referenced it earlier. We've renewed several deals during 2023. During 2024, we are now actively working with these airlines to launch on our new platform. This is crucially important as it allows us to properly move to our new product suites and will be a catalyst to drive activation enhancements as we build ones what activate across the airlines in our product portfolio. Strategically, as we continue to build out this platform, it creates the opportunities to bring new airlines into our portfolio as we have a more mature product for the journey to one offer at 100% legacy-free technology. So the delivery model combined with tech modularization results in enhanced ease of activation, something that has been hampered [indiscernible] in the past. The customer migrations provide growth and scalability that we did not have with their own tech stack to really see margin uplift in the future. And the equity raise allows us to align our capital structure with the strategy of the business and provide headroom for growth. Datalex's USP is our ability to deal with the legacy airline technology and remove the hurdles that exist to allow airlines apps and websites bring their passengers through an effective retaining in e-commerce journey. We sit as an orchestration here of both the legacy systems, and we drive that technology into the modern day so that airlines websites and apps can drive growth with lower costs and enhance revenue opportunities. Every release we do for an airline is diluting the importance of the legacy systems and unlocking new capabilities for airlines to grow their flight [ booking ] conversion or increase their ancillary revenues. Over time, we will bring airlines to a clip, where they're in a position that they can shut down these legacy systems and properly move to a world of 100% legacy-free. A modern product suite known in the industry has been [ ordered ]. This solution is our anchor product, the transition to 100% offers and orders. For base anchor product, we have signed or in progress in migrating a number of airlines. Aer Lingus, Edelweiss, Air China have invested in migration from the older or bespoke product development to our latest product suite and platform. easyJet signed in December 2022, with the first activation in November 2023, and many more activations are planned in 2024 and into 2025. And they will be joined by Air Macau, who signed in December 2023. These strategically become the cornerstone for our future growth and plans. Additionally, Air Transat, JetBlue, Trailfinders, we will continue to work really closely with these, but they remain on the different technologies stack for now, with Air Transat on the site hybrid model for some of their solutions. By aligning ourselves to these top airlines, we're building out a solution that is globally agnostic, PSS/legacy system agnostic and will continue to drive revenue opportunities for our airlines. The product enhancements we do for our cornerstone airlines will also position ourselves to tackle new opportunities as they appear. We expect that the RFPs that we will participate in will be focused on the transition journey to a legacy-free offers in [ orders world ]. Airlines are now more than ever looking at front and not behind in identifying how and where they should invest. It is estimated that airlines will be investing between $3 billion to $15 billion over the next 10 years as they look to move away from the legacy technology. They are doing this to drive the next-generation retailing opportunity, which is the lead to be a $40 billion market by 2030, which equates to an additional $7 per passenger. The prize is big for airlines that make this transition, and Datalex is positioned to drive that transition for them. White Datalex is positioned well here, this is what we do today. We have a head start of our portfolio of airlines as we're bring them on the journey away from legacy technology. Not only have we started, we are doing this at scale. Our airlines represent 200 million (sic) [ 219 million ] passengers per year and generate over $25 billion in revenue. We are already operating at scale, and the majority of these passengers and revenues are flowing through Datalex software today. When we look at the position Datalex plays within the ecosystem of the airline, we have a unique opportunity to add additional value for our airlines. We mentioned the scale that we already have and are operating it, with 219 million passengers or $25 billion of revenue going through our software. This also points to the opportunity that we can try to tap into by adding additional value-add solutions that complement our anchor solution. As such, we are evaluating areas of capabilities that we can [ dot ] today [ where ] that we could be more proactive in our approach. These include payment orchestration, ancillary revenue catalog and expansion of our go-to-market plans around pricing and pricing AI. While enough for the near term, these capabilities also have the potential to create a new pipeline of opportunities for Datalex. It could become the Trojan Horse that we are able to activate, go live with, drive value for our airline and then upsell to other group solutions. As we execute against our strategy,we expect there to be various milestones along the way. Our balance sheet will be strengthened by an equity raise. We expect in 2025 to start to see new product revenue, margin expansion. This will accelerate into 2026 as we're able to add new airlines to the portfolio and also start to bring new capabilities to market. Our ambition is to be EBITDA positive by FY '25, followed by cash flow positive in FY '26. Datalex has a great opportunity to be a leading player in the airline technology market and therefore, drive real shareholder value over the next number of years. This is my #1 goal. We will do this by actively leaning into some of the hurdles that have held back the company, having a consistent pursuit of operational excellence as we raise the bar on the standard that we set for ourselves. Nurturing the talent we have in the business today and complementing back with new skill sets to plan for the future, and ensuring that our products are easily activated and drive real value for our airlines. We have a plan, and we look forward to continue to keep you updated as we execute against our strategy and deliver the milestones we set out. Thank you for joining, and we look forward to speaking with you again, too. In the meantime, we are available for questions, and you can contact us by e-mailing the e-mail address on the screen.