Huddly AS (HDLY) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Welcome to Q4 2024 presentation from Huddly. My name is Rosa Stensen, and together with me, I have my CFO, Abhijit Banik. In Q4, we started to deliver on our business case, and we are seeing change in trends with reported revenue of NOK 51 million and gross margin of 59%. In Q4, we announced that we entered into a new strategic partnership. And in January, we informed you that, that partner is Shure. Huddly Crew has also been chosen as Microsoft large room meeting room standard, and Huddly Crew has also been certified for Microsoft Teams for the 5-camera setup. In December, we successfully concluded a private placement and are at present planning for a subsequent repair offering now in March. We are keeping the business case outlook as presented in December 2024. So what is Huddly Crew? Huddly Crew is a new category of multi-camera systems that is easy to deploy and easy to set up and gives everyone the opportunity to have a live video production into all of their meeting rooms. And we are pleased to see that the growth in Huddly Crew is increasing. As you see by these numbers, from Q3 and Q4, we have seen a significant adoption in Huddly Crew, not only in number of units sold, but also in number of units per order and per customer. These numbers give us a belief and faith in that Huddly Crew is here to stay and has definitely proven that Huddly Crew is for stay. One of the cases we would like to present to you today is our case with BDO. BDO is a large Huddly customer and has from before a lot of our IQ and L1 cameras. They have also chosen Huddly Crew for their large meeting rooms. And as I say, they have chosen Huddly due to the flexibility and the ease of installation or the plug-and-play, as I mentioned. And as Bogdan himself describes it, it's an absolutely outstanding experience. And if you would like to know more about the BDO U.K. success story with Huddly, you can see more in our web page. In Q4, we were also very pleased to inform you that Microsoft themselves have chosen Huddly to be their vendor for their large meeting room rollouts. They have chosen Huddly Crew as they believe that multi-camera is here to stay. And why have they chosen Huddly Crew? What Sam Albert has highlighted is that Huddly Crew is easy to install. It comes straight out of the box and it kind of checks all their boxes, as he says. Microsoft has also certified our 5-camera kit. And what does that mean? That means that Huddly Crew is not only certified for medium and large rooms, but also for the large and extra-large rooms, which increases the total addressable market for Huddly Crew even further. And as Ilya Bukshteyn says, Microsoft, again, they believe that every space will have multi-cameras. So we believe that Huddly Crew is very well positioned for that to come. And as I mentioned, Shure is our new strategic partner. And as many of you might not know who Shure are, but most of you are familiar with the Beatles or Taylor Swift. And if you have been in Taylor Swift's Eras concerts, the audio you've heard is delivered by Shure. Shure is one of the world's leading audio vendors, and we couldn't be more prouder than to show the world and to start to ship the bundles we have with them, the IntelliMix bundles that go from the small, medium and large rooms with our Huddly IQ, Huddly L1 and Huddly Crew in the mix. And why is that strategic partnership also important for Huddly? It gives us a way larger reach for our go-to-market and our marketing and brand awareness. And as you can see from the photos on this slide, Shure is significantly promoting the IntelliMix bundles, which includes the Huddly products. And to our road map. As we presented in the business case in December, 2024 has been the year of establishing the multi-camera category and starting to see the adoption of Huddly Crew. Going forward into 2025, we are going to be launching a product with audio and video. And further into '26 and '27, we are coming out with the satellite devices. And a bit more to the C1 product. Huddly is only going to be delivering that product with exceptional video, as you would expect from Huddly. But in addition, we are going to be delivering an exceptional AI audio as well. And we were so lucky to be able to introduce the product to 250 customers and partners at ISE with great feedback. And why is it important for Huddly to have an all-in-one solution? It gives us a better addressable market in the small and medium room spaces, but also gives us a complete solutions that we can deploy in your bring-your-own-device form or if you would like to match it up with the compute for your MTR environment. And we are planning to launch the product at InfoComm this year, starting to ship it in the second half of the year. And then with that, I will give the word over to Abhi.

Thank you very much, Rosa. So we have previously announced a strategic review in the company, and that was announced back on 9th of November 2023. And back then, that was following the interest from a global industrial player and was aimed at evaluating the company's long-term direction and partnerships. The company has prolonged the strategic review process as it was not possible to reach a conclusion before the product placement in Q4 '24. But currently, the company is in active and formal discussions with several global industrial players. The Board of Directors expects to conclude the strategic review in Q2 this year, but there is no certainty as to whether or when any transaction initiative or event will materialize. I'd like to now summarize a bit on what we've been talking so far in this presentation. We maintain the outlook that we provided in December of 2024, and we keep our 3 main strategic priorities. Number one, grow strategic partner and channel revenue. As we have presented in this presentation, we have just recently announced Shure as a new strategic partner and working towards adding new partners. We are also leveraging the existing and future product portfolio to attract new strategic partners. And in addition to that, we have also a very strong alignment with Microsoft in terms of product vision alignment. Second, maintaining healthy gross margin by monetizing on AI-enabled products. We will continue to deliver innovation and differentiation as exemplified by Huddly Crew and the C1 videobar, which we're planning to launch in second half of this year. And finally, disciplined investments and cost control. In December last year, we announced a cost-saving program of NOK 12 billion on an annual basis, and we have just recently implemented this plan, and we expect to keep the cost base at a stable level going forward, while at the same time delivering on our product road map and increasing revenue. And this translates into the graphs on the right-hand side, which are our growth ambitions. We plan to double revenue in '25 before another doubling in 2026, before getting to a level of around NOK 650 million to NOK 700 million. We also expect the gross margin to be at a level of around 50%. With a relatively stable cost base, we expect to be cash flow positive towards the end of this year, have a full year '26 with cash flow positive before starting to have a strong cash generation from 2027. We are maintaining this plan as provided in the investor presentation in December last year. That concludes the business review of this quarterly presentation, and I will now go into the financial details and provide further flavor into the numbers. Starting with revenue, we arrived at NOK 51 million in Q4, and that is a doubling compared to Q3 2024 and a 15% increase compared to the same quarter 2023. This was mainly contributed by increased sales in channels and in particular, by the increased adoption of Huddly Crew with the correspondingly higher shares of large-scale orders. Strategic revenue in Q4 was relatively low and stayed at the same level as in Q3 2024. However, this is expected to pick up significantly into 2025, as we will see increasing revenues from Shure, and we are actively pursuing new strategic partners into the mix in 2025. Gross margin was 59%, and that is a very strong gross margin, and we have to go all the way back to Q2 2020 to see a similar level of profitability. This is mainly driven by the Huddly Crew, which provides a unique and differentiated experience to our customers, which shows the ability to monetize on AI and software innovation. It's also important to note that we had a very high share of channel sales in Q4, and that is also driving up the total and blended gross margin in Q4. Finally, I'd like to note that in Q4, we didn't have any significant gross margin-reducing effects such as scrapping or any other items, which we had in Q3. And hence, in Q4, the 59% gross margin really reflects the operational realities of the company. Looking at the summarized P&L statement, we do see improved operational efficiency. I've already talked about the revenue. So let me focus a bit more about the cost level. The cost basis on a cash cost basis reduced by 5% in '24 compared to 2023 full year. And we expect to see increased cost savings in 2025 as we are implementing the cost savings program. I will get back into details of that in the next few slides. Looking at the EBITDA level, EBITDA in Q4 2024 was NOK 7 million, and that is a reduction from the NOK 25 million in Q4 2023. We have a very exciting product road map, and we are continuing to deliver on that. And that is enabled by the great organization that we have with strong and highly competent engineers working with AI, software and hardware. So the investments that we put into this company in terms of R&D and capitalized R&D, that goes into product development, and we will see tangible proof of that with the C1 launch in second half of this year and by adding new software features into our product portfolio. So this will lead to a continued defended position that we have out in the market and the capitalized R&D is expected to be around at a similar level going forward. Going back to the cost base. We announced in December a cost savings program of NOK 12 million on an annual basis, and that is mainly attributed to a reduction in FTEs. End of 2024, we had 116 employees in the company and end of 2025, we plan to have 109 FTEs in the company. So we have implemented the savings, and we expect this to primarily take effect from May 2025. With this restructuring, we haven't only done cost savings, but we also reallocated the resources from relatively lower profitable regions to more profitable regions. So it's also a matter of rationalization and improving the organization as a whole. This program will not affect or limit the product road map going forward, and we will continue to deliver on the product road map as explained by Rosa earlier in this presentation. Finally, going over to the cash flow statement. Q4 cash-wise was challenging for Huddly. However, we had a very strong and successful equity raise where we raised NOK 130 million in a private placement. The private placement received strong confirmation and strong support from existing and new shareholders, and we are currently planning of raising additional NOK 25 million in a subsequent repair offering. With this capital raise, we have funded the company towards cash flow positive, and we are maintaining our ambitions and our plans as communicated during this presentation and in December last year. And that concludes the quarterly presentation, and we will now go over to a Q&A session where we welcome questions from the audience.

Thank you for that, Abhi. And together with us in the Q&A session, we also have with us our new Chair of the Board, Jon Oyvind Eriksen. Welcome, Jon.

Thank you.

So I think we'll just dive right into it. We have already received one question during the presentation. You see that -- you say that Q4 was a turning point for Huddly. Could you be more specific? And I think there are 3 main factors driving why we are saying that. So the first 2 are we are starting to deliver on our business plan as presented, first and foremost, with the increase of the strategic revenue and signing offshore. We also see that the multi-camera as a category, in general, is growing, and we see that adoption of Huddly Crew is demonstrating that Huddly Crew is right positioned. And thirdly, we had a successful private placement securing funding towards cash flow breakeven. And then there is a second question. The last 2 quarters, there have been practically no sales to Crestron and Google. Do you still consider them as a strategic partner? Yes, we do still consider them as strategic partners. So even though the sales to Crestron and Google are lower than they were at their historical high, they are still very valued and a good collaboration partner for Huddly. And then comes a question on what is the quarterly cash burn, and I will hand that question over to you, Abhi.

Thank you very much. So if you look into the cash flow statement, you typically look at the operational and investment side of the cash flow. And historically, that number has been around NOK 40 million to NOK 50 million per quarter. However, that number will narrow down and decrease towards 0 as we plan and maintain our business outlook towards cash flow positive towards the end of 2025.

And then there is a follow-up question. So you still view them as important strategic partners. When can we expect to see new strategic sales to Google and Crestron? Obviously, I can't comment on that directly on any direct relationships we have. However, we know that we have previously reported on the supply chain, and we expect, as the market starts to stabilize and increase, that inventory levels with those partners will gradually adjust. Then there's a question about how will American trade barriers affect sales. I think equally as everyone else, both in our industry, but in generally in Europe and U.S. as well are quite excited to -- waiting to see what actually will come through. However, on Huddly's side, we do have our main production and our entire production in the EU. And we do follow continuously together with our contract manufacturer, the situation and have some mitigation planned in case for various scenarios. So it's too early to say how exactly, but we are continuously monitoring the situation. And with that, I think we take the final question. The final question is why do you think hybrid work and video in meeting rooms will be popular when many large companies force their employees back to the office? We see that meeting room equipment is not only used between people at the home office and in the office. We see that people are equally as much using the equipment to talk within, in large companies, between either companies or between -- within their company. So both the market -- all market research and the market as we see it is not going to be heavily impacted. However, might be a positive trend because then it's going to be driving the multi-camera category even further with more larger meeting rooms in place. And with that, I think we end the Q&A. And if there are any additional questions, please let us know, and we will come back to you in personally and answer to those. Thank you.