Infomedia Ltd (BGLOBAL.BO) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining the Infomedia Limited First Half FY 2023 Results Presentation. We will begin with a presentation by the Infomedia management team followed by Q&A. During Q&A, please select the Q&A button to submit text questions at the bottom of your Zoom screen. Now over to Infomedia's CEO, Jens Monsees.

Yes. Thank you, [ Jara ]. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Infomedia's first half year results for financial year 2023. My name is Jens Monsees. I am the CEO and Managing Director of Infomedia, and I am joined today by Infomedia's CFO, Gareth Turner. I would like to thank you for your interest in Infomedia and for spending time with us today. If you have joined through the weblink, you will see the presentation, which was released earlier on the ASX, and I will refer to the slide numbers as we move through. As customary, please note the disclaimer page on Slide #2. Before diving into our half year results, I'd like to take the opportunity to welcome 2 new directors, Lisa Harker, and Ms. Edwina Gilbert. And I'd like to thank Anne, who will retire at the end of March 2023 for her great guidance and support since I joined the team at the end of May 2022. Moving now to our agenda of our half year results on Slide #4 in this presentation. We will provide an update on the progress we have made on executing our new strategy and the initiatives we are driving. Gareth will cover the financial section in more detail, followed by my comments on our outlook for the full year. We welcome your questions after we have gone through the presentation. The appendix contains a high-level overview of Infomedia. Moving to Slide #6. If I can use 1 phrase to describe Infomedia's first half FY '23 results, it would be driving change. We are implementing a new vision, a new strategy, a new leadership team, a new product road map and a new operating model. Our fundamental core strengths of providing mission-critical solutions to our long-term partners is leading in the industry. And we are 100% focused on executing and our profitability -- and our growing profitability business further -- of growing our profitability -- profitable business further. The numbers represent here support this, and you will find these common themes throughout today's presentation. In the first half of 2023, our recurring revenue grew by 9.8% year-over-year. We have also achieved strong growth in our exit ARR of 10.8% over the last 12 months from December 2021. We are focused on driving recurring revenue. This is the core of our new strategy to build scalable solutions, evolving to become a product-led company and actively moving away from one-off revenue. Underlying cash EBITDA is in line with the second half of 2022, despite the lower one-off revenue this half. I would especially like to point out the slowdown in operating cost growth as our operating excellence initiatives begin to deliver benefits. Our net cash position of $57 million remains very strong despite the payment of 2 earn-outs for SimplePart and for Nidasu. For Nidasu, it was the last payout. The large dividend declared in the second half of 2022 and notable outflows related to the bid costs and the redundancies. The Board has declared a dividend of $0.022 per share franked at 36% or roughly $8.3 million in cash. I would like now to comment on notable achievements in this first half, which will produce long-term financial benefits for our business and for U.S. shareholders. Infomedia started the year with a slim sales pipeline. I am happy now to report that our sales pipeline since then is much improved. The incremental $15 million potential ARR relates to the RFIs and RFQs that we have currently in the business. I am also pleased that SimplePart is regaining momentum. A cornerstone of our new vision and strategy is to tap into new sales channels with our data assets and our customer experience solutions. Currently, data and CX sit within Infodrive and represents 21% of our total recurring revenue in the first half '23. Infodrive is growing at over 25% year-over-year. Infomedia is well-known for providing innovative products to our customers, our newest tablet EPC version launched in October 2023 is adding value to the dealerships -- sorry, October 2022 is adding value to the dealerships and to over 200,000 Microcat users. EPC mobility provides our customers a higher level of flexibility and usability without sacrificing speed and accuracy. Innovative products are a key building block for our strategy to grow recurring revenue, strong evidence as a partnership with Amazon, where Infomedia is providing connected car solution on global scale, generating a strong sales pipeline and additional revenue is even better than it is profitable. Therefore, a big part of our new strategy is improving operating excellence. Let me touch base on the first positive outcomes of our initiatives. The team has made a big step forward towards getting our costs under better control. In the first half of 2023, we have reduced 5% in our FTEs. We have delayered our management structures and improved our IT infrastructure costs by 10% in constant currency. In order to further improve our costs, we implement a new -- we implemented a new operating model. The Biz-Dev-Ops structure is now fully operational. This allows us to drive higher level of agility and efficiency across 3 key areas: the product, the development and the operation. Our product delivery will be faster and more profitable. Moving to Slide 7. You can see the trend of our ARR growth since 2016. The exit ARR is up 6.5% in the last 6 months and up 10.8% in the last year. To have a more detailed view on our region, please go to Slide #8. Recurring revenue is growing across all regions and all products. In APAC, our recurring revenue is up 15%. SimplePart is being well received by many of our existing customers. We have, not only signed new contracts, but have also started earning subscription revenue. Our cross and upsell strategy for e-commerce is working well in APAC and also in EMEA. I will come to this later. We continue to drive double-digit growth in the Americas region. This can be attributed to SimplePart's healthy growth and further Microcat sales in the region. In EMEA, our recurring revenue growth was positive despite some churn in the Hyundai Europe. The global rollout of Infodrive solutions is gaining further traction in EMEA. Also here, we are getting traction for SimplePart, as I stated. On Slide #9, how is the execution of our new strategy progressing? I have already updated you on our much improved sales pipeline. It is worth explaining that signing a new contract normally takes us 3 to 6 months from RFI or RFQs. From a signed contract to a fully implemented solution and first recurring revenue being recognized, it will take us normally additionally 3 to 12 months for our sticky solutions. In addition to our existing clients using more and more of our products, which will drive recurring revenue, we also have new selling contracts, which are in the process of implementing. That will add an incremental ARR of around $1 billion or over $1 million. Dealership management systems or DMS integration is a key successful factor and our push for scale and growth in the Americas market. We are on target to deliver integration with Dealertrack, which is one of the leading mid-tier DMS providers with 2,500 dealerships in the U.S. Other DMS providers will be following that example. Our enterprise data platform, EDP is progressing as planned. This will further fuel our data monetization strategy. Switching to operational excellence. I am pleased that our initiatives are delivering initial benefits and bringing the historical cost growth under better control. On this slide, you see a summary of all the initiatives that we are currently driving. We expect these measures to deliver further gain in the future. The cost growth in this half was only 3.5% compared to an 8.8% increase in the last half before. I would like to focus now on our offshoring initiative that is progressing well as the initial analysis completed. We understand what is required to deliver on this impactful initiative in the medium-term. We are moving into the next page. Before I hand over to Gareth, I want to say, by looking back over the last few months since we began our journey that I am satisfied with the initial results that the team has achieved. There is a lot of work ahead of us still, and we are further challenging the legacy cost structures. We have identified certain system gaps that we are fixing and I am confident about where the business is currently tracking. Gareth, over to you.

Thank you, Jens, and good morning, everyone. Turning to Slide 11. This is a snapshot of the key items from our interim financial report that was launched with the ASX this morning. Infomedia's strong recurring revenue continues -- strong recurring revenue growth continues. Exit ARR was $127 million at December '22, up 6.5% in the 6 months from June '22 and up 10.8% in the 12 months from December '21. First half reported recurring revenue of $62.3 million was up 8.4% on 2H '22 and up 9.8% on 1H '22. As Jens mentioned earlier, the core of our new strategy shifts focus to recurring revenue and being a more product-led business. We have started to standardize our operating model, ways of doing business and contracting. And as planned, one-off revenue has reached to $0.6 million. As Jens mentioned earlier, cost growth has begun to slow as our operating excellence initiatives have started to produce results. First half underlying cash EBITDA of $11.5 million was in line with our most recent half 2H '22 despite a $2 million decrease in one-off revenue reflecting the slowing cost growth this half. 1H '23 cost growth was 3.5% on 2H '22 versus 8.8% for 2H '22 over 1H '22. Infomedia's balance sheet remains robust with net assets of $142 million, cash on hand of $57 million and no debt. Our Board has declared an interim dividend of $0.022 per share, franked at 36%. In summary, the key message for Infomedia's first half is that, our transformation journey has begun and is starting to show benefits. Turning to Slide 12. This shows Infomedia's recurring revenue powering on through the 7.5 years presented here. 1H '23, reported recurring revenue was 9.8%, above 1H '22 with equivalent growth in constant currency being 9.2%. Turning to Slide 13. This highlights Infomedia's revenue diversity and strong ARR contribution from each region across the globe. ARR is split approximately 1/3 between each of our 3 regions. This global diversity remains a key strength of the business, showing Infomedia's global reach and reduced regional concentration risk. Turning to Slide 14. This highlights Infomedia's pedigree of growing product diversification. Over time, Infomedia has been able to leverage its strong existing market positions to add to its table of solutions that meet more and more of our customer needs. This in turn fosters stronger and deeper customer relationships and a stickier long-term recurring revenue profile. Let's explore that a bit further. Turning to Slide 15. This is a new piece of analysis we are sharing with investors for the first time that highlights the stickiness of Infomedia's recurring revenue profile, but also the strategic opportunity that this presents. The slide shows the cohort analysis of Infomedia's ARR excluding SimplePart in constant currency over the 2.5 years from June '20 to December '22. At June '20, ARR from all customers was $89 million. By December '22, some of these customers were no longer with Infomedia representing churn over that 2.5-year period. The analysis shows that $10 million of ARR at June '20 was lost to churn by December '22, which is represented by the dark blue layer in the chart. A very large proportion of customers at June '20 remained with Infomedia throughout the period. The analysis shows that $79 million of that $89 million ARR at June '20 endured through to December '22, represented by the gray layer in the chart. Not only did it endure but the value of ARR from this enduring cohort of customers actually increased by $11 million to be $91 million ARR by December '22. That $11 million ARR increase represents cross-sell, upsell, price increases and additional usage from this enduring cohorts of customers. Importantly, the analysis shows that this $11 million more than offsets the $10 million of ARR lost to churn in that same period. ARR driven by new customers, those that were not in the opening cohort at June '20, lifted total ARR by $90 million over the 2.5-year period to December '22, represented by the light blue layer in the chart. In summary, the analysis shows that Infomedia is enduring ARR from the opening customer cohorts, lifts through cross-sell, upsell price increases and additional usage by more than any ARR loss to churn. And new ARR from our new customer wins is essentially cream on top. This provides a key strategic insight, driving scalable product improvements enables further cross-sell and upsell opportunities, as well as driving new business for Infomedia. Turning to Slide 16. The key message here is that, Infomedia is actively moving away from one-time one-off revenue by focusing on being more product-led rather than being project-led. This in turn is driving a positive behavioral shift within the business. We still seek upfront cash contributions from customers as is normal industry practice. As we move to our new operating model, standardized ways of doing business and contracting, this naturally results in reduced one-off revenue recognition as we've discussed earlier. Turning to Slide 17. Here, we see annual recurring revenue or ARR and a new key metric for us, annual recurring costs or ARC, [ quoted ] on the same chart. Annual recurring costs have been calculated in the same way as underlying operating costs detailed in our segment notes, Note 3 in the accounts. The annual recurring cost line gives a sense of the annualized cost run rate at each point in time. These are mainly recurring people and technology costs. After a period of above-trend cost growth, the graph shows that operating costs have slowed at the end of 1H '23 after initial benefits from our operating excellence initiatives have started to show results, specifically the recent management delayering and cost-out programs Jens referred to. The [ large ] dip in December '22 is driven by annual leave accrual reductions through our festive period office shutdown in Australia. This is expected to be temporary with the ARC line returning to its trend in January '23. The strong ARR performance remains visible with this line continuing on above-trend at the end of 1H '23. These key metrics inform business decisions that will improve business performance. As the gap between ARR and ARC grows, we expect this to deliver growing underlying cash EBITDA in the long-term. In a subsequent slide in the outlook section, Jens will zoom into some of the more recent trends in these key metrics, and will provide some commentary on our targets for the future. Moving to Slide 18. Here, we show Infomedia's summary reported financial results, but a focus on recurring numbers. Recurring underlying cash EBITDA margins are important for us going forward. And as this table shows, margins have started to improve from 15% in 2H '22 back to 17% in 1H '23. Moving to Slide 19. Infomedia continues to have a robust balance sheet at December '22 with net assets of $142 million, $57 million of cash on hand and no debt. Employee benefit liabilities have decreased significantly in the period, reflecting the payout of earn-out [indiscernible] in the next slide, analyzing our cash flows. The reduction in retained earnings reflects the payments of the final FY '22 dividend during the period. Moving to Slide 20. There were some significant one-off items in the first half that impacted the true view of Infomedia's underlying operating cash flows. As we've detailed on the slide, SimplePart and Nidasu earn-out payments totaled $7.4 million and other non-underlying expense payments of $2.3 million related to cash outflows for bid response costs and redundancy payouts in the half. Normalizing these items out, Infomedia generated $10.7 million of free cash flow in this half. 1H '23 cash generated by operating activities was 14% up on 1H '22 and down 6% on 2H '22, which had included a $2.2 million tax refund in the second half of '22. I'll now hand back to Jens. Thank you.

Thank you, Gareth. Let me now turn to our outlook for financial year 2023. On Slide 22, we reaffirm our guidance. We expect our total revenue for financial year 2023 to be $127 million to $131 million. We have shifted up our focus towards building ARR. Exit ARR is the key metric we use to forecast the performance of our business for the next 12 months. We expect 30 June 2023 exit ARR to be between USD129 million and USD132 million. Moving to our last slide on Page 23. I would like to conclude by highlighting our strategic focus going forward. As you can see, ARR and ARC are beginning to trend in the right direction. First, growing our ARR pipeline is the centerpiece of a product-led B2B company. I am happy that we are generating a much bigger sales pipeline that we will now convert into signed contracts. Second, we are getting our costs under better control by leveraging our operational excellence initiatives. Third, our new positioning allows us to tap into new market segment, especially on data and customer experience, supported by our scalable product road maps. Last but not least, our Biz-Dev-Ops model enables our talented people to lead the way for innovative and future-proof software solutions. We are further integrating into an exciting data-driven automotive ecosystem. We move forward today with strong confidence in executing our strategy to create long-term value for our customers and most importantly, for our shareholders. I would like to thank the Infomedia team, our customers and you, our shareholders, for your trust and continuing support. Jara, I now hand back to you and starting our Q&A session. Thank you.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Tim Plumbe. The question is, good initial signs in terms of sales pipeline? Can you please give some more color around the composition of the opportunities, product type, et cetera? And how we should think about the timing between pitching, winning and revenue generation?

Yes. Thank you, Tim. I already explained. So we are currently signing and negotiating these contracts, which will take the next 3 to 6 months. And then from that point out, when we have signed the contract, we obviously need another 3 to 12 months to actually implement. When you look at the current pipeline, we have very chunky, big opportunities in there. Some are related to our tablet EPC. Some are related to our cross and upsell strategy of bringing SimplePart into APAC and EMEA. The SimplePart pipeline alone is around $8 million. And then when you think about innovation, there are a few very interesting RFIs in our pipeline, which allow us to even build a new solution group. I cannot talk about it too much because it's still confidential, but if one of these contracts is landing, then we have a very nice future opportunity that we're, not only rolling out into one client, but we can then leverage globally. The last thing I would like to point out is that, our data and customer experience solutions are making a lot of fun because we see now that the whole market is turning more into data into customer insights. And there is also some chunky pieces sitting across all the 3 regions, and that is fueling further our double-digit growth in these areas.

Our next question comes from Elijah Mayr. Have there been any increases across the product portfolio in the first quarter of 2023? And do you have anything planned for the second half of 2023? Sorry, that should be first half and second half.

Yes. So when we started, we announced a new positioning for Infomedia, where we can see the full customer and vehicle life cycle. We did several road shows now. We were at the NADA conference in the U.S. We talked to the Japanese headquarters and also to the EMEA headquarters. And we can say that our new positioning is spot on, especially on the marketing as a service and the connected car. And I think it's a big proof of what we are doing when a giant tech company like Amazon is asking for a partnership with us because they are very selective of what partner they are globally working with.

We also have a follow-up question from Elijah Mayr. SimplePart performance outside of the U.S., timing on new regions, please?

Yes. So I have to say, after the first big hype during COVID, where e-commerce was just exploding, we were seeing a more stable development in the second period. Now we see that our cross and upsell opportunities are actually bearing fruits. And we have already SimplePart programs live in APAC, and we have also signed contracts in EMEA. So this is very inspiring. And also at the [ home ] market in the U.S., we have huge opportunities in the future that we can leverage. It's a question how fast we can implement and how fast we can get in the U.S. future contracts signed on double scale.

Our next question comes from Nicholas Sundich. Are you content with the current product suite? Is there any chance that further M&A might be considered in the medium-term?

Yes. We are always looking at M&A opportunities. I have some very interesting interaction when I am flying out tomorrow to Europe. I, obviously, don't want to talk in public about it, but we talked about an ecosystem. We are building this ecosystem. We have very strong solution groups already plotted out and with our customer experience platform, our data platform, we are gaining a lot of traction. But that is not the end of the journey. It's the beginning. So there is more opportunity to enhance our portfolio. Digital businesses are all about critical mass. So the more data, the more products, more solutions you have, the more partnerships you have, the more you understand what clients really wants, the better you can then improve loyalty for the clients of our customers. And the better you can then adapt your products and then it's a [ vicious ] circle, and that is what we try to create.

Our next question comes from Carlos Gil. Do you expect to hold ARC steady? And what is your medium-term cash EBITDA margin target?

So we are growing a global, very profitable tech business. I am not prepared to keep the cost where it is because that means that we might have a very nice run in for 2, 3 years, but then we are not innovative anymore. I am a strong believer that we need further innovations. But what we are currently doing is, getting the historical very high-cost growth under control. And our long-term target to steer the company is that, costs should always grow 3% less than our revenue curve. This is the long-term goal, and this is how we -- in a key metric steering the company going forward.

Our next question comes from [ Olivier Coulomb ]. Slowdown in the growth of -- sorry, slowdown in the growth was pleasing in the second half of 2022 and the first half of 2023. What sort of percentage growth should we be thinking about from the first half of 2023 to the second half of 2023, given the reduction in FTEs and IT infra done late in the half?

Well, first, the reduction in IT and in FTEs has nothing to do with our growth. So our cost measures and the new and more agile and more flexible Biz-Dev-Ops model is helping us actually to deploy faster and more flexible resources where we need them to build our innovative product road maps and also to further fast and improve our delivery. So that's that thing. On the go-to-market and on the growth side, when we started here, the sales pipeline was pretty thin. And I also were already describing that after a hyper growth of SimplePart, we had a gap or a pause of the growth curve. Now as we have talked to many clients and customers, we have very chunky full sales pipeline, but this needs to be implemented. So it will not be implemented in the next week or so. It will be implemented over time. And it's important that we look at the long-term success of the business and not as we did probably in the past with one-time revenue that was pulled forward out of the future into the presence. That's what we are not doing anymore and actively moving away from. And therefore, I have a very positive view on the mid- and long-term development of our growth and pipelines.

Our next question comes from Chris Savage. At the AGM, Jens, you said it will be more challenging to increase underlying cash EBITDA this year. Do you have any update on that comment? Or has it changed? Does it remain unchanged?

Well, we are in a cleanup phase, in a transformation phase. This phase, as I mentioned earlier, is going until July, August 2023. And then we have a very fast chip, and we can go for further profitability gains. But I would say that it would be stupid to go on short-term measures in the second half of FY '23. We need to look at the business mid- and long-term, and we have to get our cost base in order and that sometimes also needs one-off investments or one-off costs where we have to structure or restructure the business and fill the gaps that we have inherited. So I think we should look midterm in FY '24 for a very strong opportunity to further grow profitable the business. And I have to say that I am very, very pleased if you refer to Page #23, you can see that the long-term trends in our business and it's a recurring business. So we need to look at long-term trends. It's actually very positive. We already gained benefits out of the first measures that we put in place and the cost curve and the revenue curve are currently doing what we like them to do.

Our next question comes from Adam Dellaverde. When will you, from an operating/systems perspective, be in a position to deploy some of the cash on M&A? What are the important characteristics for a target bolt-on? What target IRR or strategic qualities?

Yes. We have a very detailed list of our criteria for further acquisitions. And I think we can look from different dimensions to it. We have obviously a regional dimension. I think that the U.S. but also EMEA are still subscale. We could bring in another beachhead into this business. So it's a geographical point of view. A portfolio point of view would be that we are further strengthening our customer and vehicle life cycle with more data, more analytics. So obviously, when we look at a potential acquisition, we are looking what kind of data and solution portfolio we are acquiring. When we look from a brand perspective, we are very strong in the APAC HQs, but we are also strong with, for example, Ford or here in APAC also with BMW brands, or Volkswagen brand. So we should think of more the Stellantis, the GM and Vauxhall and Opel brands that we are currently not doing so much business with, and we should focus on acquisition targets that are bringing new potential brands into our portfolio. And then you can also say we should look from a dealer footprint perspective. So I said everything below 1,000 dealers is not an attractive target because when you bring in another 1,000 dealers into our ecosystem, then we can bring in all our other solutions, and we already discussed that cross-sell, upsell really works well in our business. And lastly, I would like to mention in terms of M&A is also a very important cultural fit, and there is obviously a very, very important lens from a financial point of view. We want to acquire businesses which are showing similar profitability, similar growth curves. And therefore, we also exclude a lot of the targets which are not ROI positive or not even breakeven. So that's where we are looking at. We have a very strong history of finding the right bolt-on targets in different regions. We demonstrated this with Nidasu, but also now with SimplePart, and I am excited to have a few more calls with some exciting acquisition possibilities in Europe, as well as in the U.S. But obviously, in a public forum, I cannot talk about it in detail.

Our next question comes from Olivier Coulomb. Can you please comment on the status of Hyundai Europe territory losses? Are you having any successes selling Microcat direct to dealers in these territories?

Yes. So we are looking at a $1 million ARR impact on revenue for Hyundai Europe. We hear from the Hyundai dealers that they are not very happy with their in-house solution. They are begging us to keep the lights on, even if the headquarter was canceling their contracts. So again, I would like to look at this mid- and long-term. We had a few other OEs that have the fantastic idea to do some of the EPC in-house. And then 2 or 3 years later, they came back like Infomedia, can you please help us? We cannot get our things in order. So I see it as a very local European thing, and we are in a constant exchange with the Mobis headquarter in Seoul. And what we hear from there is that, they are very, very positive with the Infomedia solutions, and they are not happy with the different ways that the Hyundai people in Europe are going their own way. So I think overall, it's not -- it's a worry, but it's not a big worry from my perspective. I think we can win them back.

Our next question comes from Tim Plumbe. Dealertrack, can you please talk through that opportunity? Is this offering Superservice and Infodrive? Is there a specific market strategy in place to actively target their 2,500 dealerships? Or does their sales team just incorporate it into the existing product portfolio, and we see a slow burn in uplift? How meaningful could this be? And how many dealerships do you currently directly have in the U.S. today?

So there's lots of questions. So Dealertrack has 2,500 dealerships. So it's a chunky bit. But it's also a clear mid-tier DMS provider. So my view is, let's first start with the mid-tier DMS. Let's integrate. Let's see if everything is working well, and we have already lined up the 3 big DMS providers, which is Cox Automotive and the CDK business and Reynolds and Reynolds. We have discussions in NADA, and we are integrating with further big DMS providers very shortly. And the Superservice business will profit from this. We obviously will not win every client. But I think we are winning 1/3 of these additional leaderships that are coming in that would be very good to see.

Thank you, Jens. That brings Q&A to a close. I'll hand it back to you for the wrap-up remarks.

No, thank you. I just want to thank the team. I think we did very heavy lifting with our new strategy and our transformation that we are currently implementing in the business. Everybody is obviously a bit stretched because it's a new way. And if you think about your first driving lessons when you were sitting in a car, you were basically also very alerted and stressed, and you had to do new things. Now when we drive the car, we are basically doing a phone call or we are thinking about other things, but we are not thinking about the driving anymore. Everything that we are doing now has to be learned, has to be approved, has to be then scaled. And I just be very, very happy with the team, with the achievements that we could already demonstrate in our current presentation, and I am very confident of looking at the mid- and long-term success of this business because we have every ingredient at hand and our new strategy is working very well.

Thank you. That now brings the call to a close. Have a great day.