Exasol AG (EXL) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Thank you very much. Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for joining our earnings call in which we're going to cover our preliminary 2023 figures and we will also provide some strategic updates on our business as well as a perspective on where we think 2024 is going to develop for Exasol. Today, I will start the conversation. So my name is Jörg Tewes. I'm the CEO of Exasol. And I will cover the business and financial results as well as some of the strategic updates. And then our Chief Financial Officer, Jan-Dirk Henrich, who -- will take over and walk you through the details of our financial results. So here's our disclaimer. Please take a moment to look at it and read it. Okay, thank you, so let's start with the recap of 2023. It's been my first full year in Exasol, so I'm proud of the results that we accomplished. So we got overall ARR increase 18% year-over-year in difficult financial times, so we ended the year with a total ARR of EUR 41.7 million. We had a very strong Q4 in which we -- our ARR came in. And we ended up at the top of the guided range which was EUR 40 million to EUR 42 million this year. So we had a couple of larger deals that we're going to talk a bit [indiscernible] on the next slide. Our overall revenue increased by 7% to EUR 35.4 million. Our adjusted EBITDA or the preliminary number ended at minus EUR 5.4 million, which is an improvement of 6% over the same period in 2022 where we lost [ in the ] EUR 13.4 million. And we are confirming the plan or the path towards breakeven in the first half of 2024. Our liquid funds at the end of the year were at EUR 13.3 million, which is increased over our liquid funds in December 31, 2022. Now remember we had done a capital increase in June of 2023. We launched -- as we already talked about in our last webcast, we launched our Espresso new product initiative successfully in early November of 2023. And we are actually seeing some first successes and are in the process of gradually building pipeline due to this initiative. And today, we also announced the extension of Espresso, Espresso AI, which adds AI capabilities to our current product offering. There was a press release today. We also shared some more information on our website that I would recommend to go to. In addition, we have a new and updated video footage for that release as well. Let's look at 2024 and how we see the business developing. We did see some churn in 2023 due to ongoing difficult market environments, specifically in Europe, both in U.K., Nordics as well as our core Central European region. And so we saw higher churn rates. We do think that will improve in the second half of this year. However, in the first half of this year, so Q1, Q2, we still expect to see some more churn with some customers [ out there ]. For this year, we therefore expect to grow in the range of 0% to 10%, pending how these anticipated churns actually turn out while at the same time also on how fast our new logo business picks up. We will see an overall revenue growth of 10% to 15%, which is the effect of the large deals that we were able to close last year. We remain confident that we will be EBITDA positive for the full year, so reaching the break-even point in first half and staying positive for the full year, which also means that our liquid funds will stay above EUR 10 million by the end of the year or for the end of the year. Let me walk you through some of our updated company strategy that we articulated and also share with you what we're doing and how we're going to do things. So our new company vision is be a leading company helping customers on their analytics journey into an AI-driven world. So customers that work on data analytics solutions, this is our core sweet spot. And all of these customers are currently thinking on, "How can I participate from all the developments that happen in the AI world?" the massive [ feasibility ] that gen AI, ChatGPT-like interfaces have, so we are helping customers on their journey into that new AI world to basically unlock better insights faster, more efficiently. So that's our mission and -- focusing on helping customers get insights on their data, on their key business information; and do this in a fastest possible way and be very efficient for them. Our strategy is threefold. So we're focusing or continuing to focus on our core business, which is the data -- or business intelligence acceleration through our Espresso product. We have significantly improved internal processes but also our customer of these customer success management, so driving excellence internally but also externally, outward facing to our customers. And we are investing in expansions to our business. So today, we're going to speak about AI, but we also continue to invest in our automated data -- warehouse automation towards Yotilla. I shared last time that we have articulated new core values. I think it's very important that we have this foundation for the company. These core values are trust, love to grow, live customer centricity, deliver results and take ownership. And then some key outcomes that we're measuring and that we're also going to speak today is ARR growth. It's focusing on retaining existing customers but, even more importantly this year also, to generate new ARR with new customers, so new logos. The profitability target is very important for us, so making sure that we are a company that is no longer losing money. Then customer satisfaction; and inbound facing, engaging our team, engaging our employees; and also making sure that we are able to continue to attract top talent into our organization. We've been able to actually bring a new sales leader for Europe onboard. His name is Henrik Jorgensen. He joined on December 1. And he's the former Head of Sales of Tableau, who's the -- leading business intelligence tool in Central Europe. So he helped Tableau grow from 1 million, 2 million revenue, over a span of 10 years, into close to 100 million revenue here in the Central European organization. So he joined our team in December and he's now leading all of our sales activities across Europe. It fits really well into our Espresso story, into our Espresso narrative that we have because obviously we're helping Tableau customers to improve their performance. So let's go. Our -- what are the pain points that we're actually solving for our customers? And we've basically segmented that into 3 areas. The first one is the problem of customers that are using BI tools such as Tableau or MicroStrategy or Power BI that have a spinning wheel problem with their BI tool. Spinning wheel problem means performance. Just a query takes too long. Anything that takes longer than 5 seconds is usually not acceptable by end users, so whenever customers have that problem, here we are with our Exasol Espresso product solving and help the customers solve that problem. The other key pain point we're addressing is that when customers have overall database performance and/or cost issues. So we are helping them with our solution with putting a consumption layer over their existing data warehouse, but then last but not least, we're also able to provide a full data warehouse functionality to our customers. So we have large customers doing that, using Exasol as the single enterprise data warehouse. So as you can see, as I just explained, we're helping customers on their analytics journey. Espresso is our door opener. It's basically the first part of our land-and-expand strategy, how we get into a company and to a customer by solving that spinning wheel problem. And then with Espresso plus and our Exasol data warehouse, we have 2 additional products where we can basically scale up and provide performance and scalable solutions for our customers as they grow their data analytics and BI stack. So on Espresso. We talked about this in our last earnings call, focusing, as I just said, on removing the spinning wheel problem in existing data stacks. We've actually seen good traction through the Espresso launch by now. So we launched the program on November 7. We've been able to generate 13 new sales opportunities directly attributed to that launch. We closed 5 deals at the end of 2023, with over EUR 3 million new ARR in Q4, which we're very proud of. And 1 of these deals was actually the largest single new business win in our company's history. And significant driver of those wins come from the financial industry, so we're focusing on that market segment. And I think what helps us, what plays into our hands is that a lot of the players in the financial industry are regulated and they are still operating most of their data analytics on premise in their own data center. And this is an area where our product really shines over competitors in the market, so we continue to focus on that segment and we've seen a good traction in that space. Now what you might have seen today, we announced our AI strategy. And let me maybe take a little second: Why are we doing this? And which use cases are we addressing? And why does Exasol have the right to play in that space? So all enterprises today are currently trying to understand how they can marry their structured and unstructured corporate data with the power of gen AI to gain better insights and better decision-making support. That's very important to understand. I think we probably all have been using AI tools like ChatGPT, but that data isn't enterprise specific, all right? So in an enterprise, companies want to marry that -- their data, their own production data, customer data with the -- with large language models. And that's a trend that we're going to see is going to gain speed and momentum over the next year, 2 years, 3 years, 5 years. I personally think it has a similar impact to the tech industry overall and to us as a society than the Internet that basically came up 25 years ago. Exasol is nicely positioned to participate in that trend. Our existing, our core assets or in-memory MPP architecture is a key building block that enables enterprises to gain AI insights on large data sets, so we helping different users in an enterprise on their journey into this new AI-driven world. How are we going to do that short term? So right now we're actually helping customers through a couple of initiatives that we started about half a year ago, and the first results of that work comes into play now. There are 3 areas. First of all, it's augmenting business intelligence reports through natural language queries and machine learning predictions, so in a way, customers are going to be able to use a ChatGPT-like interface on their analytics database. That, we're doing with a cooperation or with a technology partner, a company, Veezoo. We also enable data scientists to leverage Exasol for AI use case and help data scientists to auto -- to generate auto-machine learning models. That, we do with a cooperation with TurinTech, which has technology in that space. And we're also building vertical gen AI-powered business solutions. That, we're doing through a cooperation with Deloitte. So that's the activities that we're doing right now. And we continue to work and invest on a mid- to long-term strategy where we extend the core Exasol engine to natively integrate and execute AI use cases with unmatched speed and scalability. That includes, for example, deeper integration support for GPUs that includes new interfaces to the existing Exasol database. So I'm very excited to be where I am right now; and leading Exasol into that next chapter, where we're going. I think, as we say here on the slide, we're uniquely positioned with our core technology, with the talent that we have in the organization to build a compelling AI strategy that helps our customers on their way and on their journey into that AI -- new AI world. With that, I'll hand over to JD, who's going to walk you through in more detail the financial results 2023 and also share some updates on the 2024 numbers. JD? Thank you.

Thank you, Jörg. And also a big welcome from my side. Let me now provide you with an update on 2023 from a financial perspective, as well as an outlook to 2024. We finished the year well within our revised guidance, as Jörg mentioned, along the 3 metrics we focus on ARR, EBITDA and liquidity, but let's take it step by step, starting with a perspective on quarterly development of our ARR numbers. Now as Jörg mentioned, we ended 2023 with a 12-month growth performance of around 18% or EUR 6.5 million net new ARR. And if we look at the quarter-by-quarter dynamics of that number, we see that 2023 exhibited an even stronger year-end heaviness in terms of new business than prior years. As you can see, almost 75% of the net new business in 2023 was generated in Q4. And this reflects also an increasing alignment of our customer contracts with of -- in the existing customer base with calendar year durations, which is a trend that we've seen for a while now. This also in turn implies that any churns or downsells that occur in our existing customer base tend to materialize dominantly in Q1 of the -- of any given year since contracts expire with year-end of the prior year. And this pattern also influences the expected ARR development in 2024, which I will explain in more detail later in the presentation. If we analyze the drivers of ARR growth in more detail in the past year. Upselling to existing customers continued to be the dominant driver of growth. A key driver in our upsell performance were the 2 biggest upsell deals in the company's history that we closed in Q4 which summed up to a total of more than EUR 3 million in total upsell value alone. And as a consequence, the gross upsell rate increased to 123% versus a value of 118% in the year before. Now as Jörg mentioned as well, our ARR in churn in value terms has increased from 4% to 9% last year. As we will see, this is driven by an increased churn in the EMEA region, which we expect to persist through the first half of 2024. A driver for this development is a significant compression of IT budgets with many customers resulting in the consolidation of tech stacks and a general reduction of specialty software applications. And by comparison, we see less of that pressure on U.S. budgets and in the U.S. market, but I'll get to that on the next page and also make some more comments on this in our outlook for next year. On a net basis, the increased gross upsell rate and the increased churn rate canceled each other out last year, resulting in a stable net revenue retention rate compared to prior year's at the level of 115%, so on a net basis, the upsell performance was in line with what we had historically. From a new customer growth perspective, new customer ARR contributed EUR 1.2 million of growth in 2023, which is -- as we've mentioned in prior webcasts is not on the level that we aspire for and will be the main focus of improvement in 2024. With the Espresso initiative that we launched end of 2023 and the additional push into the AI space launched as of today, we are confident to achieve this, with these effects then gaining full traction in the second half of the year. Now before I comment on the regional ARRs, let me also point your attention to adjustments that we will make to the ARR number for the baseline value that we start into 2024 with. One is the compulsory FX adjustment that we always do at the beginning of the year. As you know, during the year, we report ARR numbers at constant FX rates to reflect the actual business performance or development of business throughout the year. With the start into the new year, we adjust to the average FX rate at the end of 2023, as we did last year. And since the value of the dollar over the year devalued compared to the rate we've been using, this results in a downward adjustment of EUR 400,000, which is coming from our U.S. business. The other adjustment that we are making is a small methodological adjustment. Now basically, since IPO, we've been reporting the ARR number in a way that multiyear contracts which have a built-in price increase are reported, at the average value across the contract duration. And we are changing this now to the ARR number at any given point in time, reflecting the currently prevailing price. The reason why we're doing this is because we wanted to bring the ARR number that we are reporting closer to the recurring revenue number that is actually being observed in the P&L in order to have a better alignment between these 2 numbers. So as a consequence, this just short of EUR 500,000 effect will gradually come back into the metric over the next 2 years, but we feel the number that we are reporting as a result is closer to the P&L reality and better aligned with a representation of where we stand as of today. Now if we go into the regions and look at those performances in more detail. In 2023, we've seen a clear difference in performance in terms of absolute growth -- sorry, in relative growth and also the underlying subscription metrics between the 2 regions, EMEA and U.S. So as you can see, EMEA growth came in at 14%, with both a slightly decreased upsell rate compared to last year and an increased churn of 10% resulting in a net revenue retention of 112%, which is also lower than the year before. And this is despite the relatively big upsells that we made. As in comparison, in the U.S. we grew overall by 40%, obviously from a lower base, but we increased our business there by slightly more than EUR 2 million ARR. Net revenue retention stood at 127%, driven by both an elevated upsell rate of 132% and an ARR churn rate as we've historically observed it at 5% in our business. Now as mentioned, looking ahead. The churn will further increase in the coming 6 months before improving in the second half of the year, with many existing contracts being up for renewal in Q1 this year due to the seasonality pattern of our customer base. And in addition, this expected peak in churn before the recovery in the second half is also driven by 2 larger discretionary risks that we are facing in the EMEA region. One is an overall reduction of business with our largest customer, which is related to an overall reduction of the data analytics budget in that company. And the other one is a bigger churn in -- expected churn in the U.K. region, which we are reflecting in our guidance in the second quarter, so -- and these 2 discretionary risks elevate, will elevate the churn rate in the first half of the year before we go back to kind of the more normal levels in the second half of the year. Looking at our P&L performance in 2023, we're happy that we were able to continue to improve our profitability significantly. Both full year EBITDA and Q4 EBITDA were well above the comparable period in the prior year. Q4 EBITDA showed an improvement of almost 75% compared to same quarter last year, which puts us on a good footing to achieve breakeven in the first half of this year which is and remain our clear goal in 2024. And this was achieved by a combination of 2 factors: obviously, continued top line growth, although the revenue growth in P&L was rather moderate last year, which is related to the fact that the majority chunk of our new business materialized in Q4. So the revenue recognition from that uptick in business was not strong and will mostly hit our P&L now in 2024. The other is a further improved cost base by approximately EUR 4 million compared to the year before. And that's related to savings in marketing due to the [ stopped ] sports marketing activities and reduced other costs. And those reductions more than offset slight increases in personnel expenses and which had an additional effect, which I comment on in a moment; as well as slightly higher IT infrastructure costs, which is mostly related to higher electricity prices, for our server infrastructure that we need to operate our business. As you know, we limit our EBITDA adjustment to effects caused by IPO-related stock programs as well as costs related to financing measures. As such, the adjusted EBITDA shown on this page does not include the approximately EUR 300,000 costs associated with the capital raise which we conducted end of June. In addition, while not part of the formal adjustments, I'd like to point out 2 additional nonrecurring effects that have affected our 2023 results but which have basically offset each other. First of all, personnel costs, as shown here, included roughly EUR 1.5 million of severance payments for changes we made in various parts of the organization throughout the year, particularly in the EMEA sales organization; as well as key management functions such as our new Chief People Officer who came onboard, our new Chief Marketing Officer, both coming onboard early in the year, and now the new SVP, EMEA Sales who came in towards the end of the year that Jörg already talked about. So this negative effect was offset by a total of EUR 1.8 million positive one-off effect in other operating income, which is here reflected within our gross profit. It is related to research subsidies that have retroactively been granted to us by the federal government for the development of our technology. And as mentioned in the last webcast, this program promotes innovative products and grants a subsidy of 25% on the personnel costs incurred for such projects. And the amount that I just mentioned covers the projects that we conducted in the years 2020 to 2022, retroactively. So overall, the adjusted EBITDA as shown here was, if we net out these 2 effects, positively impacted by roughly EUR 300,000 of one-off effects. And while we do not formally adjust for such effects, I nevertheless wanted to point them out to you. If we go on and review the cash results of the past year, we can see that the adjusted EBITDA of minus EUR 5.4 million was accompanied by a net cash burn on a like-for-like basis of EUR 4.3 million, which excludes then the one-off effect of the final one-off payments of EUR 1.9 million, the third tranche of the IPO-related stock program that we've been talking about in our past webcasts as well; and then obviously the net EUR 6.8 million cash injection that resulted from the capital increase [indiscernible] equity increase that we conducted in the first half of the year. And including these 2 effects, our cash position has slightly increased, compared to end of last year, by EUR 0.6 million, resulting in the EUR 13.3 million of cash that Jörg already mentioned. So our overall operational cash conversion remains on a strong level, which was achieved in an overall adversarial market environment with in general significantly worsened payment behavior across the board, but -- so it's the way the EBITDA, as we report it, is and remains a quite good indicator on seasonally adjusted full year operational cash flow. And with the quarterly EBITDA improving further in the coming quarters, our operational cash performance will likewise further improve and trend towards break-even level, which also becomes clear if we look a little bit at the quarter-by-quarter development of both metrics over time. For Q1, if you see that or if you look at this, both the cash outflow in Q4, compared to same quarter last year, and then obviously the EBITDA, compared to same quarter last year, improved significantly. And for Q1 in 2024, we now expect an increase in liquid funds again, as we have seen in the previous year with a large share of our existing customers paying their annual subscription fees at the beginning of the year; and then also the significant new business gains in the fourth quarter of the past year being invoiced and then, hopefully, also cashed in as soon as possible with our customers. So with the quarterly EBITDA continuing its positive trend and expected to break even in the first half of 2024, this cash position then provides us with sufficient runway to carry us into profitability, which brings me to the outlook for 2024. Now despite the expected -- the strong -- or no. The -- despite the actual strong Q4 performance in ARR, our overall growth dynamic in 2023 was not as we expected and planned it to be. And as explained, this was in large part driven by 2 factors: one, a still relatively sluggish new logo acquisition, which has not yet been showing impact from the revised market positioning that we started end of last year; and then also an overall increased churn dynamic in EMEA, which is expected to continue and peak out in the coming 6 months before changing dynamic. Jörg has provided you with an update on our running initiatives for new customer acquisition based on our 3 product pillars Espresso, Espresso AI and Yotilla. And while we see first successes of these initiatives, the prevailing sales cycles of 6 to 12 months in our business will only bring these initiatives to full effect in the second half of 2024. At the same time, as you've seen in 2023, our upsell business with existing customers likewise has a clear Q3, Q4 seasonality and focus based on the run times and renewal dates of existing contracts. And in total, this results in an expected ARR development for 2024 characterized by a dip in the first half of the year, followed by net growth in the second. And depending on the speeds with which our current initiatives gain tractions, we then expect a full year net ARR growth of up to 10% for the full year, depending on how the risks that we've included into the budget with a certain weighting materialize in -- over the next 6 months. In terms of P&L revenues, however, we have a higher amount of visibility. Based on the Q4 2023 business materializing in the P&L, we therefore expect a 10% to 15% increase in P&L revenues. And based on this development, that's likewise the driver for further improvement in EBITDA which we expect to be positive on a full year basis, with quarterly EBITDA turning positive in the first half of the year. With respect to liquidity, we aim -- on this basis, we aim to keep it stable at a level of well above EUR 10 million minimum cash buffer. And in conclusion, therefore, 2024 is a year for us where our full focus is on bringing the new positioning of the company and the journey into the AI space to fruition and traction on the basis of an overall consolidated balance sheet and a stabilized bottom line. This would conclude my financial update. As always, we look forward to meeting and interacting with you through our different channels during the year; and hopefully, meet also in person, at the very least at the spring conference and the equity forum in Frankfurt. Christoph and I are also in the midst of preparing and thinking about some additional instances which give you the opportunity to interact personally with us, which we will update you on as soon as we finalize our planning. And with that, thank you for your attention, so far. And we look forward to getting your questions.

[Operator Instructions] And the first question comes from Robert-Jan van der Horst from Warburg Research.

I actually have a question on the ARR outlook to -- just to better understand how the dynamics between the different variables will work out. So the main reason, as I understood you, is that you expect a higher churn, especially in H1, so I was asking myself. What do you expect relatively for the new business gains and potentially also new logos gains? So with, I think, EUR 9.5 million last year, do you expect this number to be stable, to go down or to even go up but then be overshadowed by an even higher churn rate? Or is also the pipeline kind of slowing down compared to what we saw last year?

Jörg, do you want to pick that up? Should I take a first swing at it?

Yes. Maybe I'll take a first swing and you'll chime in. Robert, thanks for your question. Our new logo business, we actually see increasing this year. So we had a total of new ARR coming from new customers in 2023 of roughly EUR 1.2 million to EUR 1.3 million, and we're targeting to reach EUR 2 million new logo ARR this year.

Yes. So I think, Robert, on your overall question how the, let's call it, gross new business number of EUR 9.5 million will evolve. I think I mentioned it in the presentation that we had this very, very huge upsell as part of that number in the past year. I think overall we see a range of 3 to 4 customers which theoretically have the potential of seeing similar upsells again, but in principle it's not a given that such a mega deal is immediately repeatable, so while we obviously aim for it, it's not a given that it happens. And I would say repeating the EUR 9.5 million gross new business that we've seen last year will depend on 2 factors. One is the traction of the new logo business that you have talked about, which will mostly take hold then in the second half; and then also whether we are able to develop one of these opportunities for again a very large upsell opportunity to fruition within the year. So I would say, if we are able to, based on these 2 factors materializing, repeat the gross new generation of last year, that would bring us into the upper end of the guidance that we've indicated, but the reason why we've set the bracket for the guidance the way we said it is because in the end where we land within that space depends on how much of the churn risks that we're seeing actually materializes, versus whether we are able to get close to these mega deals again that we were able to materialize last year.

Okay, perfect. That's very helpful. One follow-up question, if I may, on the churn that you saw last year and that you're expecting this year. Can you somewhat tell me about those customers? Across the board, is it especially smaller customers new customers? So is there any characterization for those churn rates and maybe what explains them other than just the general market condition?

I would split that in 2 halves. One is what I've talked about, the generally higher churn rate that we're seeing in the EMEA business in particular, which is related to especially small customers consolidating their tech stacks and IT budgets being compressed. The peak-out in the first half of the year that we've talked about is related to 2 additional discretionary risks that basically come on top of that, and one is related to a reduction of business in actually our biggest customer. The other one is a churn in our U.K. business with a larger customer and which is at risk because they're thinking about insourcing their tech stack. So both cases are actually not cases where we've lost out to competition. It's a way how these companies have changed their data strategy and their analytics strategy and how to deal with how -- and the role that external providers play in there, but this is basically the reason why the elevated churn that we've seen last year of 8% or 9% will have a temporary peak then in the first half of the year before then, in the second half, slowing down and calming down, yes. Jörg, do you want to build on that from a competitiveness product perspective?

No. I think you summed it up well. I think what we are seeing is, like I said, the mix of some financial pressure here in the European market specifically. And I think it's worth saying that, again, we don't see that financial pressure in our U.S. market as well. So last year, we actually grew nicely in the U.S. market, but here specifically in Central Europe but also in the U.K. we still see some, well, cost pressure and insolvencies that impact our overall business.

[Operator Instructions] And the next question comes from Lukas Spang from Tigris Capital GmbH.

I would like to follow up on, on the ARR topic. So first of all, you gave us the up to 10% EBITDA -- ARR growth for this year, so just for understanding it better: Where is up to -- this, your definition of "up to" beginning, is it from 0%? Or what is your minimum size of ARR growth if you say "up to?"

From 0%. So we used the word growth. And we wouldn't consider negative as growth, so it means 0% to 10%.

Okay. And then if you talk about the, let's say, bridge to ARR in 2024. Maybe I missed it, but I think you didn't mention it. And what is your expected churn? And is churn -- and if I follow on that, is churn the only point of reducing ARR? Because if we look at the 2023 bridge, there's also the same amount in downsell. So you only mentioned lost customers or churn, but is that the only reason for lowering ARR, or is it also downsell? And if we put that together, how much do you expect for 2024?

So maybe -- yes, let me pick up on that. So first of all, yes, my apologies. I was not clear in the wording. So when I talk about churn for 2024, I mean lost ARR. And that's going to be again a mixture of downsell and churn, yes. So if you take what I mentioned about the business reduction in our biggest customer in the portfolio, that's obviously a downsell and not churn, quite the contrary, because we actually got confirmation for them that we remain a strategic component in their tech stacks. It's just that they've changed their overall strategy which relates to their e-commerce business, which also then translates into a amount of reduced activities in the analytics space and e-marketing space which is an area that [ we've ] historically been strong at. So that's downsell, so it's going to be a mixture of both. If you talk about the total number. If you look back at our churn last year, we came in at 3.5 million, roughly, so -- and obviously a risk is a risk. And how it materializes is still a matter of question, but the potential materialized churn can be anywhere between, again, the 3.5 million and 5.5 million. And how -- where we land in that bracket is obviously part of our efforts right now on managing that. And that gives you an indication of where the range of gross new business will have to land in order to get to the 0% to 10%, yes. So if you say at the -- let's say, the upper end, we repeat our performance of last year with a EUR 9.5 million to EUR 10 million gross new that would get us in the range of the 10% growth.

Yes. And to make it clear: Is that a risk you see? Or do you have also the confirmation from your customer that this will happen?

[ Part ]. So the way we look at it, we -- when we have written confirmation, that's obviously factored into the lower number of the churn that I've indicated to you, yes. And where we have a high confidence in the range that I've given you, that's the part where we do not have any material evidence yet that it's going to happen in that amount or whether it's going to happen at all. And what we've also seen sometimes in the past is that renewal opportunities become either a churn or sometimes even an upsell if we are able to prevent it, so it's a very digital situation sometimes, yes, but this is basically the churn range that I've given you is basically reflecting the amount that we see as relatively certain versus the amount that we can still influence.

Sure, okay. And then last question. The EUR 4.7 million in new ARR in Q4 2023, how much of this is upsell? And how much of this is new customer?

So from the top of my head, that should be roughly EUR 800,000 new logo business versus EUR 4 million from upsells.

So it seems -- we have one more question from Finn Kemper from HAIB.

I have 2 questions. And one thing is has there been any feedback, [ so far, you're getting ] regarding the effectiveness or performance of the newly implemented AI solutions. And the second question I would have is that the cash inflow from the deals you secured in Q4. Would it be evenly spread out across all quarters? And how much can we expect of that in Q1? Maybe you could shed some light on this.

Finn, would you mind maybe repeating your question? I had some challenges understanding -- JD, I don't know if you understood better...

Yes, I did. So first -- second question was on cash and the timing of the liquidity inflow from the Q4 business. First question was on whether we have already indicative evidence or -- of our AI solution and the way -- and customer feedback on that. So maybe I'll get the cash question out of the way. And then I hand over to you for the AI question. So in terms of the new business that was closed in Q4, I would expect between 60% and 70% to inflow in the course of Q1, with the rest falling into contracts which have a quarterly settlement schedule, yes, but in general, the EUR 4.7 million that we closed in Q4 will lead to a significant cash impact in Q1.

Okay. And on the...

Does -- Finn, does that answer your cash question, or do you have a follow-up on -- okay.

Yes, absolutely, very helpful.

Finn, on the AI question, there's not a clear-cut answer. I mean what we -- basically we announced what we're doing short term and, I explained, actually today, all right? So it's very fresh. And I think it shows our clear commitment to move into this space. We're actually -- what we're actually doing right now is we talk to our existing customers and we're meeting with them. We have our CTO visit them. And we're working with them on their journey, which I think has a twofold effect. First, we understand their needs better. And second, this also gives us [indiscernible] opportunities to work with them and potential upsell, but I would say it's too early at this point in time to say, in terms of, let's say, ARR, "This is what it's going to do." I think it's an important conversation we have to have with our customers, with existing customers, but it's also a door opener with potentially new customers because, like I said, everybody is currently thinking about, "What is my journey into this new AI world?" So -- but I think it's going to take some time to materialize what that really means in terms of ARR growth.

I think, Jörg, one thing worth mentioning is that already today we have roughly 15 customers who are already using our product in a data science machine learning environment. This has basically been the starting point from which we started to build out what Jörg has described on his page as the short-term measures that we are now engaging in to bolster that position, [ flagged ] by the collaboration partners that we've picked in order to build out a more systematic product offering around that, yes, so we're not starting from 0. We're starting from a base of roughly 15 customers, if I recall correctly, in our overall portfolio of roughly 200 customers which are already using us up in that space and basically building a more systemic value proposition towards the market from that, on the basis that what we're simply seeing, as what Jörg mentioned, is that every analytics department out there is now starting to busy itself with the question, "What the hell do I do with this AI thing? And how can I make sense of my data with AI?" yes. So -- and that provides us with a good starting point in building the proposition in that space and leverage that trend.

So it seems that there are no further questions at this time. And I hand back to Jörg Tewes, CEO, for any closing remarks.

Okay, yes. Thank you, everybody, for your interest and your time today. And looking forward to working with you on Exasol. And see you either in person in our road show or in-between or at the next results. Thank you very much and have a nice day.