Datatec Limited (DTC) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good day, and welcome to Westcon International's presentation to Datatec's investment community. Westcon International is a specialist information distribution organization and solutions provider. As you can see from the slide, we buy and sell products and services from world-class leading vendors in some very specialist vertical markets, primarily in cybersecurity and data networking. Our role is to take these products and services and add our own capability and then sell them on to a group of channel partners. These are organizations that are principally global service providers, systems integrators, who ultimately service the end user of this technology in their own enterprise organizations. We're a specialist distributor quite different from a broadliner, which means that we have a deep domain expertise in the technologies that we sell, a strong alignment to a very small group of world-class vendors. So specifically, the top 8 of our vendor relationships generate around about 80 -- 75% of our revenues. Distribution, two-tier route to market remains the principal way of engagement for the vast majority of the vendors in our IT space. A minimum of 75% of their revenues are generated by their solutions flowing through distribution into the systems integrator and service provider channels and then into that end-user community. And in fact, in the changing world in which we operate, and the changing market dynamic that we'll talk about later today, there is an increasing requirement for distribution to be used in the fulfillment of software, subscriptions and services, and our role in the aggregation and orchestration of those solutions is becoming ever more essential. Our goals and strategies for the next 5-year plan has been built out of the initial operating plan that we developed back in 2018. And as we reach the successful conclusion of that initial plan, we wanted to make sure that we steered a successful course for all of our stakeholders. As you can see, we anticipate continuing to drive compound average growth of over 8% to move to being a $6 billion gross revenues organization. Our focus on the new models of subscription, software and support contracts and their renewals means that we will drive to, we believe, 65% of those gross sales coming from those recurring offers. The continued investments that we are making in IT in systems, process automation, and improving our productivity means that as we become a more profitable and more efficient business, we'll drive over 35% of our gross margins to EBITDA. And indeed, this continued investment in the automation and process improvement means that we believe over 90% of all of our transactions will be somewhat digitally enabled in our organization. With all of that, we are continually committed to achieving all of our responsible business goals, whether that relates to the inclusion within our DI&E policy or indeed our sustainability objectives. All of these goals are supported by our five foundational strategic pillars, and everything that we do within the organization has to directly link to one of our strategic foundations. Obviously, if something we're doing doesn't, we have to ask ourselves why we're undertaking that activity. But this approach is particularly important to all of our stakeholders and our employees, in particular, so that they can see what they do links directly through our strategic foundations and into achieving our goals. So now let's move to look at our business in greater detail. As of today, we are something over 3,500 employees, supporting 12,000 customers or business partners in over 50 countries. And we are primarily focused on cybersecurity, agile network infrastructure solutions in making sure that we can continue to drive our business. I'd like to hand over now to Callum, our CFO, to talk through some of the fantastic results and shareholder value increases we've seen over the last few years. Callum?

Thank you, David. Hi, everyone. Yes. So this Slide 4 of the presentation deals, on the left, with Westcon's full history since inception. On the right is sort of the snapshot of the company today. In the middle is the financial information for the last 5 years, which is really the period since the formation of Westcon International in fiscal year 2018. That is just post the sale of the well-published Westcon Americas business. And what you'll see is a steady and sustained improvement in the financial performance of the company. Over the next two slides, I'll dive into that a little bit. So on Page 5, we've set out the 5-year performance for the company from FY '18 through to the current half year of FY '23. In reviewing our performance, you will see that we've had steady and sustained improvement in the performance of the business. I think it's helpful to remind ourselves of the -- some of the key events that happened over the last 5 years, and I sort of break our last 5 years into a number of phases. The first period was the, what I call, the recovery or the back-to-basics phase. This was following our business process outsourcing project in FY '18, which didn't go well. We made a decision to exit the BPO relationship and essentially get back in control of the transaction. And we did that through most of FY '18 and well into FY '19. And you can see the business started to recover at that point. Through FY '20, we -- the business was becoming stable. However, we were having to deal with Brexit, which was quite an isolated event. It was contained to the U.K. and some contagion in Europe. And you can see from our growth rates, which are the year-on-year growth rate percentages that in H2 of FY '20, there was a small decline overall in the group, and that was mainly the impact in the U.K. and Western Europe. Very shortly after that, the COVID pandemic arrived in March of 2020 and it turns out we were largely sort of right place, right time. All of the solutions that we sell and specialize in were needed as the whole world moved to remote working. And since that period, as the move -- as the world returned to work in a hybrid or fully back to work configuration, the drivers and the solutions needed to enable that are all of the things that we sell in our portfolio. And we've really benefited over the last 2.5 years as you can see by the top line revenue growth. On the adjusted EBITDA, sort of a similar set of themes. We had one small blip in FY '19 that was really the tail end of the period dealing with the recovery just before the business became stable. And again, in every single period since then, we've had sequential improvement in the performance of the business. The one callout I'd like to make is just to remind you, if you remember from Datatec's half year FY '23 results announcement, the $65 million adjusted EBITDA reported for that period for Westcon International included significant unrealized gains from foreign exchange and those are not likely to recur in H2 of FY '23. If I move to Slide 6 and just deal with the -- some of the net working capital highlights very quickly. This, for me, is really probably the standout performance. You will note that the shape of the net working capital investment is very closely correlated as expected with revenues. As our business shrinks and grows, the working capital required naturally shrinks and grows. But you will see that over the years, the same period FY '18 to FY '23, we've reduced the amount of working capital required to fund the business. To fully appreciate this performance, one has to consider sort of gross revenue volumes flowing through the business, so the throughput through our business. And since fiscal year '19, we've added over $1.2 billion of gross revenues, which we've done with less working capital stuck on the balance sheet. So all in all, a very pleasing sort of performance over the last 5 years. And I'll hand back to David.

Thank you, Callum, and a great story, solid recovery and fantastic progress towards our longer-term profitability and cash flow goals. To continue the overview of our operations, our footprint is a great place to start. We operate in over 50 countries and ship to 120 countries globally. We're really pleased that all of our operations have grown as we've continued to deliver balanced and improved results. We've seen particularly impressive growth from Asia Pac as we firstly started to restore Australia to the levels of contribution that a market of that scale should deliver and continue to capitalize on the growth in the Asian markets. Europe remains the largest single operation but even our Middle East and Africa business also has continued to grow. In terms of our technology segments, in 2018, when we put together our first midterm plan, we identified that cybersecurity and agile enterprise networking were the technologies that we believed would provide us with the strongest future growth opportunities. Of course, the current environment where we are seeing flexible and hybrid working and geopolitical instability continues to drive enterprise investment and focus on these areas. There is absolutely no doubt that in the last 3 years, the C-suite executive teams have seen the power that technology has delivered to helping them manage their organizations through COVID and global disruption. Even if these growth curves flatten slightly, we believe that this sector will remain resilient and in the highest demand of all technology segments. As we started to look at our business growth, we are particularly pleased with the real success story in terms of the growth of our cybersecurity vendor investments and relationships. Not only have we continued to build with our core vendors, but we've established new and preferred relationships with organizations such as Splunk, CrowdStrike, Zscaler Proofpoint and AttackIQ. And these organizations will now, we believe, continue to grow not only to make a considerable contribution to our P&L, but also improve our brand equity and drive a halo effect for other investments. These strong partnerships and industry-leading vendor relationships are highlighted in terms of how we categorize our vendor segmentation, not just by the technology, but in terms of our global coverage and the scale of the relationships. Our foundation partnerships, which represent something in the order of 10 of our highest contributing vendors, were represented in every market in which we operate. And as you can see, we focus not only on those global relationships, but also on the next generation of high-growth cyber and also on some strong local relationships where we have a particularly poignant and valuable contribution from those local engagements. Looking at our customers, I referenced earlier that we routinely trade with around 12,000 customers or channel partners each year. Our partners are generally the global service providers and systems integrators and then the large regional SPs and SIs as well as then enterprise value-added resellers and IT resellers. Our vendor portfolio is generally enterprise and mid-market biased and therefore, as a consequence, our partner community matches this profile. In the last few years, this mid-market and enterprise orientation has served us extremely well, both from a market resilience perspective, but also the benefits of our digital investments being able to be reciprocated by both our vendors and a number of our partners. We also do not suffer from any particular customer concentration. 45% of our revenues come from our top 50 partners, and no single partner represents more than 5% of our global gross sales. Putting these partners and therefore, our customers into some form of context, you'll be able to see the names that in many cases are household and recognizable, but also particularly strong in some of the regional markets in which we operate. We're seeing a significant change now in our market. We're witnessing a real shift in how our vendor solutions are delivered. Previously, vendors would have devices with embedded functionality and solutions, but we're seeing now a move to these devices becoming simply a platform for the vendors on which they deliver subscription and solution functionality. Pure software subscriptions are often remotely delivered potentially via a cloud model, but this model creates a greater need for solution design, and delivery orchestration and aggregation and therefore, is driving a greater requirement for distribution involvement in the supply chain. This solution change migration has been accelerated in the last few years by both the COVID impact of remote working and the lack of ability to deploy premise solutions and also the vendor's ambition to move away from device and semiconductor-oriented solutions. Clearly, that supply chain constraint has impacted the entire IT channel. So it's this disaggregation of solutions, which results in a greater segmentation in the sales motion. I'll talk more about that in the coming slides. But these sales motions are also not now managed as much through intuition of the sales teams, but driven by data and events which require a much greater process automation. Along with this change that we're seeing in the vendor delivery, Gartner is also forecasting that more and more of the business-to-business engagement will be driven by digital interactions and by 2025, 80% of all business-to-business transactions will be digitally enabled between end users and their channel. We've identified both of these drivers within our market. And as a result, the continuation of wave 2 of our digital transformation investments will position Westcon as the most complete distributor for supporting this channel life cycle solution management. This isn't just our opinion in terms of the channel transformation that we're seeing. The Technology Services Industry Association, a technology industry thought leader, has categorized and demonstrated this new sales motion into four principal steps. Land, which is the initial sale that we'd all be familiar with as we close out on a normal opportunity. Adoption, which is when that functionality and subscription has been sold, ensuring that the end user is deploying all of the licensees sold. This is generally the CX and customer experience motion that we hear so much about. Expand is about making sure that the full portfolio of the solution is sold to the end user. So that would be portfolio maximization, making sure that, that full stack is absorbed. And then finally, renewal, which is the resigning of subscriptions and support contracts to make sure that the end user can maintain full functionality. From our perspective, nearly all of our major vendors are members of the TSIA and subscribe to this thinking and are building it into their own go-to-market model and sales motions. We have piloted with Palo Alto Networks this approach and validated that from our perspective, we can make sure that as we grow our business, we are inserted in this new process, supporting both the vendors and also the channel partners to make sure that they can continue to maximize their sales. There is no doubt that distributors and technology providers of the future are going to require much more automation and a stronger digital capability. In order to talk through Westcon's response and investments to making sure that we can bring to life these new go-to-market models, I'd like to introduce Rakesh, our CTO, to talk through our investments and capabilities.

Thank you, David. And as you pointed out, we've got these changes in both the market dynamics as well as the sales motions that are taking place as a result of the land, adopt, expand, renew model. And if we look at these, we have to change our capabilities internally to adapt to these new sales motions. So as we talk about subscriptions, driving adoption, as you mentioned, customer experience, the expansion of solutions or tech refresh options as well as renewals and resigning, this requires a significant amount of data, both from our vendors and the historic sales data that we have that we need to be able to present to our partners and our sellers at the right time ahead of the sales cycle so that this allows our partners and our people to be able to drive out the maximum value from these offerings. So if we look at how we are driving this, we have -- we are bringing this together under our e-commerce and cloud billing platform, which we brought into one location in the PartnerCentral. We're bringing our solutions life cycle pilot, which will be replacing our CRM tool and providing our sellers with all the data that they need within Microsoft Dynamics. And then both of these platforms are supported and enriched through the data and an analytics capability, which is really the foundation of our digital future. This graphic depicts the core pillars of our digital ecosystem, and it's underpinned by the first wave of our digital transformation journey, which is to deploy a single instance of SAP across all of our operations globally and which we have integrated with our vendors and also built our custom CPQ, so configure, price and quoting tools around. We're in the second wave of that journey now, which is about enabling the digital experience for our partners and our people, and all four components are highly interrelated to achieving this. If we zoom into the vendor section, this has been the work over the last 3 to 4 years, and will continue as our vendors enable new points of integration and capabilities that we can use and take advantage of. Integrations with the vendors allow us to transact at speed. We use them to automate certain tasks such as quoting, order placement. And these also assist with accuracy, which is key for us to be able to transact the volumes that we do. We're now in a phase of obtaining additional data from vendors, which we can pull into our systems. As we expand that journey of subscriptions and services, areas such as telemetry data and usage of the solutions are becoming even more important to enable that solutions life cycle management. Data is the lifeblood of our business and over the last 3 years, we've heavily invested in our data and analytics capabilities. This is a combination of tools to give us the ability to bring multiple sources of data together and as well as a dedicated team of specialists to help our teams across the globe to be able to manage and use it. These data sources are our transactional data. They are data from our vendors as well as market and industry feeds. And our teams today can get deep insights into our partners and the vendors at their fingertips, which allows them to spend more time on the strategic conversations. Our intelligent demand capabilities are allowing us to identify new areas of opportunities for our partners, ultimately helping them to grow their businesses with our support. And as we're moving more and more into the predictive selling motions, where we can take historical data, combined with that market data and telemetry, helps us spot the next opportunities in the life cycle of these technology solutions. So as the market changes, as I mentioned before, so is our selling process. We created sales process optimization as a strategic focus in this last year to enable a new way of working. SPO, as we refer to it internally, is the combination of sales automation tools, some that we've built and some of that we purchased, and combined with our intellectual property. That's the data, the industry expertise and the relationships that we have. We have a number of these tools already in place for a while that support our people in quoting and ordering. But the real transformation is the project we have underway around implementing Microsoft Dynamics. This is not just a CRM replacement, but the enabler of our changing way of working. The foundation for the way we are deploying Dynamics is the layer model that David referred to earlier. And this is about moving from intuition-based selling to data-driven sales. So it's about taking that data that we have, providing it with the -- to our people at the right time with the right information to trigger appropriate activities. And that's key for a better experience for our partners and allowing our people to be more efficient. And finally, as we take all of these components together, vendors, data and our sales process, it's about surfacing this to our partners. So PartnerCentral is our marketplace for our partners; a digital gateway into our business where they can self-serve, leverage the complex quoting capabilities and view their own insights into the data and opportunities that we have. We've gone live with this in three pilot markets in November last year, and we'll be doing the global rollout early in our Q1. So I'd like to hand over to Callum to take us through our enterprise and responsible business approach.

Thank you, Rak. This next slide is helpful to just reestablish or remind everyone that even as we go about making these investments strategically in the platforms that we have and executing against that next iteration of our 5-year strategic framework that David alluded to, we have a really strong desire to do that in a responsible way. Under the guidance of Datatec, we have formalized an ESG team when we're investing appropriately so that as and when the regulations around the reporting in this ESG area, which are becoming more formalized, if and when they become enacted, we will be in a position to be able to comply. Many of these things we've been doing already for many years. But as the -- as particularly the climate regulations become enacted, we want to make sure that we are ready to be able to respond. We're very fortunate to have been recognized by our vendor partners in the industry for our progress in the last year. Some of this comes through these accolades and awards that we've been given across multiple geographies from both our vendors and from media institutions as well as industry bodies. I think this really is a testament to the efforts and the work that our people are doing and the close relationships that they have with their partners and our vendors in order that we're recognized as a leading distributor in this space. As we look at Slide 22, this competitive positioning, you will recognize many of the names of the companies that we compete with and we position -- where we position ourselves relative to them and their performance. In reality, if you looked at Westcon-Comstor versus, say, ScanSource and Exclusive Networks, we're all ballpark similar-sized revenues. The key takeaways from this slide are really two things we wanted to leave you with. Number one is there is not a single one of these, despite us competing against all of these names across the geographies in which we operate, not a single one of them competes with the matching footprint. And I think that positions us quite uniquely. And in the latter part of the last 5 years, as we've got our business under control, we've shifted our gaze externally, especially to the companies where we are able to get financial information, and we've begun routinely and formally comparing our performance to that of our competition. And that's really also what's galvanizing us and help inform the goals we are aiming for as part of our next 5-year strategic framework.

Thank you, Callum, and thank you, Rak. I think what we've managed to demonstrate today is that not only have we delivered significant and effective financial turnaround, but the business is now well positioned for continuing future growth. The growth of the business, of course, and the support to our customers comes from the over 3,500 employees that we have across the globe. But it's the leadership team that provides the direction to those individuals. The length of service and the experience around our leadership table is unparalleled. But rather than continuing to use their experience to drive a continuation of everything that we've learned, we continue to push the boundaries to drive change to capture the new opportunities in the changing market we've talked about today. Thank you very much, indeed.