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

Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining the Infomedia Ltd Full Year Results Briefing. We will begin with a presentation by the Infomedia management team, followed by Q&A. [Operator Instructions] Now over to the Infomedia CEO, Jens Monsees. Jens?

Thank you, [ Jara ]. And good morning, everyone, from sunny Sydney, and welcome to Infomedia's full year results for financial year 2023. My name is Jens Monsees. I'm the CEO and Managing Director of Infomedia. I'm joined today by Chantell Revie for new -- our new CFO, who has been with Infomedia for 5 years. Firstly, I would like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which we meet today, the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. We pay our respect to the Elders, past, present and emerging and extend this acknowledgment and respect to the First Peoples in all countries which we operate. I would like to thank you for attending our results webcast today. You can follow the full year results presentation, which was released earlier on the ASX. I will refer to the slide numbers as we move through the presentation. Please note our legal disclaimer on Page #3. Before I take you through the agenda on Slide #4, I would like to share with you a personal note that I'm very proud of the refreshed leadership team and all the hard work and passion our entire Infomedia team put in during the last year. Despite the interruptions from external bids and the challenging macro environment, we successfully completed Phase 1 of our transformation strategy, which was changed, and delivered a strong result. On the agenda for today on Slide 4, I will share the key achievements in our first full year of our new vision and strategy. Chantell will cover the financial performance in more detail in part 2, followed by our outlook and revenue guidance for financial year 2024. The glossary provides definitions of many of the terms used in this presentation, and the appendix contains a high-level overview of Infomedia for those who are not yet familiar with our company. We welcome your questions after the presentation. Let's get started. Moving to Slide #6. In February, I mentioned to you that we were on track and slightly ahead of the schedule in our transformation. I'm pleased to say that we have already successfully completed our first phase change ahead of plan. I'm happy to report that we made sustainable improvements that helped deliver strong performance. Let me highlight a few of those. We made multiple trips to engage with our customers in all 3 regions. And by doing so, I'm pleased that we have revitalized our relationships across the globe with key clients and expanded our sales pipeline. We were able to reposition Infomedia as a global leader in the data-driven automotive ecosystem. In numerous client workshops, we were able to demonstrate our innovative sales leadership in the automotive sector. With our knowledge of the latest technology and the key trends of the industry, we were able to contribute value to OEMs, national sales companies and dealerships as well as to other third parties within the ecosystem. Our new product road map and the integrated solution offerings now put us in the leading position to enhance our role as our customers' long-term partner. As a result, we have been able to achieve double-digit recurring revenue growth. Our focus on data-driven solutions is enabling our customers to have meaningful interactions across the entire life cycle with their car owners. This can be seen in our high growth in Infodrive of 26% year-over-year. Infodrive CX, which means customer experience, is our flagship data-as-a-service solution, shortly DaaS, that includes the growing areas of connected car and marketing as a service. We have now started to expand these innovative offerings globally. In FY '23, we did a substantial refresh and consolidation of our leadership team. I would like to highlight that many of the leaders of the new executive team were promoted within the company. One is sitting right next to me here. Chantell, our new CFO, will present in a few minutes the positive impact we have on the business. Chantell was instrumental in implementing strong cost discipline and accountability throughout the organization. The result is sustainable improvement in our cost structure and a 3% decline in annual recurring revenue -- annual recurring cost, ARC. One of the first milestones we have established following our transformation strategy was to shift from a project-led to a true product-led organization. With our newly implemented Biz-Dev-Ops operating model, we can now flex resources in a scalable way when required. This is starting to drive faster delivery of our backlog and a more efficient way to deploy products for our customers. Finally, I'm pleased to report that we have signed an amendment purchase agreement fixing the final earn-out payment for SimplePart. This enables us to accelerate the integration of Americas operation of SimplePart in Atlanta and Infomedia Americas in Detroit. All constraints have been removed, and we have already started bringing the 2 business together. Let's move to Slide #7. In our highlights section, the numbers show the good progress we made -- we have achieved over the year. Our strategy has shifted our focus to recurring revenue, which delivered an increase of 11%. This is consistent with the nature of a sustainable SaaS business. Infomedia has achieved a 14% increase in our underlying cash EBITDA in 2023. Our net profit after tax is up 16%. We increased our underlying free cash flow by 31%, generating $28 million of cash. Our underlying cash EBITDA recurring margin lifted by 4 percentage points from 17% now to 21%, achieving positive leverage, bringing us closer to the Rule of 40. On the next slide, 8, I would like to give context to how we are tracking in the broader transformation strategy. At our Investor Day in December, we introduced our new vision and strategy to deliver profitable growth over the long term. The cornerstones of our strategic initiatives are the 4 Ps: people, product, performance and processes. The entire organization is orientated towards this framework as a guiding North Star in everything we do. On Slide 9, you can see what we have done completing the first phase. The strategic initiatives that drove our recurring revenue are: first, successful conversion of the sales pipeline; second, the cross-sell and upsell initiatives are delivering initial benefits. In APAC and in Americas, we achieved double-digit growth in recurring revenue. And third, leveraging our data assets is contributing substantially to the group's revenue growth and further diversifying our solution portfolio. Finally, fourth, we have switched to value-based pricing in alignment with our customers. On the right-hand side, I have listed the key operational excellence initiatives we have achieved so far. We improved our margin by shifting towards a scalable product road map. We reduced our IT infrastructure cost by 10% in constant currency. We further progressed on AI and machine learning programs and advanced the automated data altering and ingest process. We are just at the beginning of leveraging the full potential of AI in processing the large amount of data assets each day for our customers. The strong cost discipline we implemented is a perfect bridge to hand over to you, Chantell, to take you through the detailed financial performance of the year. I would like to thank my great team for their contribution and commitment to achieve the strong results in our first year together. Over to you, Chantell.

Thank you, Jens, and good morning, everyone. I'm pleased to join you today as CFO. Many of you will know me from before as Deputy CFO. It gives me great joy to present the results we have achieved in the past year due to Jens' fresh new vision and strategy. Starting on Slide 11. This is the graph we introduced at the half year results, which shows annual recurring revenue, or ARR, and annual recurring costs, or ARC, growth in comparison to one another over 3 years. For the prior 2 years, the ARC increased more than the increase in ARR, causing the lines to move closer together. In FY '23, we have managed to decrease the growth in the ARC due to our cost discipline and drive a steeper increase in the ARR, moving the lines further apart and opening them up, showing that we have generated positive operating leverage. In line with our strategy, we are using ARR and ARC as key metrics to inform business decisions that improve long-term business performance. This is how we are steering the business at every level. Moving on to Slide 12. The key metrics used in the business as part of our transformation are shown here. In constant currency, exit ARR is slightly above guidance at $132.3 million. ARC declined 3% against FY '22 due to the cost control measures put into place during the year. It is the first time I've seen the ARC decline here. Underlying cash EBITDA was $28.4 million, up 14% on FY '22 due to continuous growth in revenue and cost discipline. Also driving this performance was one-off growth from accelerated Superservice delivery, recurring growth from sales pipeline conversion, operational excellence and improved sales and commercial rigor. As conveyed in the half, we have shifted focus from project-led to product-led and as a result, have moved away from driving one-off revenue. Recurring revenue has increased by 11% and is now 99% of our total revenue. Total revenue delivered was $130 million, at the top end of our guidance range of $127 million to $131 million. Reported NPAT grew 16%, whilst underlying people costs increased by only 3%. Underlying cash EBITDA recurring margin, which is calculated as underlying cash EBITDA less one-off revenue over recurring revenue, has grown from 17% to 21% in FY '23. Underlying free cash flow was $28 million, up 31% on the previous corresponding period. Infomedia's balance sheet remains very strong with cash on hand of almost $65 million. Our directors have declared a final dividend of $0.018 per share franked to 100%. This brings the total dividend for the year to $0.04 per share. Moving now to Slide 13. This highlights Infomedia's revenue diversity and strong ARR contribution from each region across the globe. ARR [ is set ] approximately 1/3 between each of our 3 regions. This global diversity is a key strength of the business, showing Infomedia's balanced global reach. In FY '23, Infomedia had increased product offerings from Infodrive across the globe, driving the increase in revenue in all 3 regions as well as increasing each region's underlying cash EBITDA. On to Slide 14. Infomedia has had 12 years of ongoing revenue growth. The last 6 years have been characterized by the diversification of the product portfolio. This diversification and our data assets have been the foundation of our new strategy to create a data-driven ecosystem. We have been able to add to our core product solutions and develop new offerings, which have been underpinned by strong global relationships and sticky, [ enduring ] customers. Turning to Slide 15. Underlying cash EBITDA grew to $28 million driven by operating excellence initiatives, which included cost discipline, accelerated delivery of products, the flex of Biz-Dev-Ops and a focus on recurring revenue. You can see here that one-off revenue declined to $1.8 million compared to the $4.9 million in the prior year. Conversely, recurring revenue grew to $128 million, an 11% increase on FY '22. Overall, underlying cash EBITDA recurring margin grew from 17% to 21%, reflecting the shift to recurring revenue. Moving now to Slide 16. In FY '23, Jens introduced the concept of Biz-Dev-Ops to drive efficiency gains across the organization and enable the movement of resources across all products. As a result, development costs have been kept flat year-over-year while still delivering enhanced features, such as Microcat Pro. There has been a strong focus on innovation and automation using AI and machine learning. And this, combined with the introduction of Biz-Dev-Ops, has required less cost to be moved to the balance sheet and capitalized. Turning to Slide 17. Infomedia has approximately $65 million in cash at year-end and 0 debt, providing flexibility for growth across growth and investment in a scalable future. The decrease in assets is as a result of less capitalization of development costs and an impairment of the remaining value for the Nidasu brand name asset as we rebranded to Infodrive CX. The reduction in retained earnings reflects the payment of the final FY '22 dividend during the period. On to Slide 18. There were some significant one-off items in the first half of the year that impacted the true view of Infomedia's underlying operating cash flows. As detailed in this slide, SimplePart and Nidasu earn-out payments totaled $7.4 million. There were other non-underlying expense payments totaling $2.6 million, which related to cash outflows for [ Biz-Dev-Ops ] costs and redundancy payouts paid in the year. Normalizing these items out, we generated $28 million of free cash flow for this year. Moving finally now to Slide 19 for me. Infomedia is well positioned after the completion of Phase 1 of the transformation strategy, generating double-digit growth in recurring revenue, positive operating leverage, an improvement to the underlying cash EBITDA margin and strong generation of free cash flow. Infomedia has a robust balance sheet with no debt and is in a good position for future investment and M&A. I'm looking forward to what's ahead of us. I know I speak for the leadership team when I say we are all excited and energized to be moving into the next phase of the transformation strategy. Back over to you, Jens.

Thank you, Chantell, for the great insights you provided on our financials. In our next section, we will share our strategy going forward into FY '24 and our outlook. Moving to Slide 21. I would like to point out that we are implementing a consistent strategy for long-term profitable growth. Our initial plan was to complete the first phase by October 2023. The good news is that we are now ahead of our time and started already the second phase. For Phase 2, we are anticipating 15 to 18 months, and I'm confident that the successful changes that we have already implemented have built a great foundation to strengthen the business further. On Slide 22, you can see the 3 pillars of the second phase: first, focus on recurring revenue remains a cornerstone; second focus area is continue to drive operational excellence; and thirdly, we are expanding our global footprint further. We will create value by driving our recurring revenue growth by leveraging our data-driven ecosystem with new products and further integration of the several solution groups, investing to enter new channels with scalable products and shorten our delivery time of our existing backlog and the acceleration of the sales pipeline. We will drive efficiency by establishing a one -- an offshoring hub to scale up and down resources when required, accelerate the integration of SimplePart and Infomedia Americas, further investing in AI productivity tools and machine learning. As a tech company, the core of our business is to write and to test code and analyze data. I'm convinced that over time, we will experience additional efficiency gains from the rapid progress of AI and machine learning in general. The final driver of operational excellence is to upgrade and automate our enterprise systems. We will further expand our business on global scale and create critical mass of our ecosystem organically and inorganically by further growing our customer portfolio by adding new OE brands and geographies, as we recently did in Mexico where we won our first Infodrive client and in Canada where we rolled out our e-commerce solution. Finally, I'm seeing increasing inorganic opportunities as a result of the favorable market conditions. Our unlevered strong balance sheet with $65 million cash on hand enables us to pursue bolt-on acquisitions. As we are now focusing executing the strengthened phase of our transformation strategy, Infomedia is well placed to deliver a total revenue in the range of $135 million to $142 million in financial year 2024. I want to personally thank you to the entire -- sorry, I want to personally say thank you to the entire Infomedia team. We can be proud of what we have achieved together this year with full confidence we will drive the momentum we have created into financial year 2024. I want to thank our shareholders and the Board for your trust and your support. Finally, I would like to express my appreciation to our valued customers for their continuing support and business. I'm looking forward to an exciting journey ahead. Back to you, [ Jara ]. Thank you.

Thank you, Jens [Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Tim at UBS. Tim's question is sales pipeline was $15 million in the first half of 2023. How do we think about the conversion of that $15 million as of today? And then how big is the refresh in sales pipeline today, please?

Yes. Our more integrated offers, Tim, are helping us to then also be successful on converting some of the sales pipeline, and not only converting but also then accelerating the deployment and finally, come into revenue, which is a good thing to see. On the other side, I'm also excited by the number of requests coming in. So the sales pipeline is actually slightly up from the $15 million, and we see more revenue opportunities coming into our systems -- in our new CRM system, I have to say.

And can I just add to that, Tim, you can see from December to June, our ARR in constant currencies increased by $4.5 million. So that's also reflective of the conversion of the sales pipeline that was there at that time.

Thank you. An additional question we have from Tim is pricing increases in the year for EPC. How much of the portfolio got price increases? And how much do you think -- sorry, and how do you think about these average increases or range of price increases, please?

Yes. The good thing about our business, it's a recurring business. So the contracts are normally running 3 to 5 years over time. Whenever we have an opportunity to introduce, for example, Microcat Pro, which is our tablet version and other innovations, new UI, UX, we are also able then to increase the price. But I would rather talk about increase the value that we are driving to our customers. So when they are new or a contract is coming up for renewal, then we are driving further price increases, and that is in the range between 5% and 12%.

Thank you. And the last one from Tim is how do you think about the development cost in FY '25? Should this have a modest growth on the second half of '24?

Well, we are a growing business, and we also just announced that we see further profitable growth in FY '24. For Chantell and me, it's always important that the costs are supporting that growth long term. But we always have a very close eye on it that the costs are not growing faster than the revenue line. That's how we steer the business.

Next up, we've got 2 questions from [ Ray. Ray's ] first question is did Amazon approach IFM to consider -- sorry, to join its connected car partnership, or was it the other way around? And the second part of the question is how will IFM monetize the Amazon partnership?

So Amazon reached out to us. We are, I think, a significant client of AWS with our cloud services, and I see a very close partnership because we have, obviously, very valuable data in our systems. And as far as I understood, we are globally one of the few companies that can already generate use cases and value from the connected car, and that is because we are focusing on the touch points that the car owners have over time with the dealerships. So when you use the connected car data [ sets ], you will generate a very nice customer experience along the service line. And that's what we are doing, and that's where Amazon, obviously, sees also value in it. How do we monetize that in the future? We are seeing that the connected car fleets on the planet are growing rapidly now. Not only BMW or Tesla but also other OEMs are now putting out there more connected cars and more and more of these cars coming out of their production. And with that, there's obviously a great opportunity for us, but also for Amazon to drive further value for our clients.

Next up, we have a question from [ Olivier ]. ARR range implied by sales guidelines, please.

We are not giving guidance on ARR at the moment. We will look to give that at the half year. So we've given a total revenue guidance of $135 million to $142 million.

Yes. Maybe I'll just add, [ Jara ]. Look, we are always, for the full year, giving general revenue guidance. And at the half year, as we have experienced what happens in the next 6 months, we then go a more specific ARR guidance as well. That's how we would like to run it in the future, as Chantell pointed out. And from my point of view, in my more conservative German nature, I always like to put expectations out in the market that we can achieve or like this year, overachieve. And that's a better way than running after huge expectations to set in the market and then scrambling all the way after it. So I think it's the right way to do it like this.

Thank you. We do have another question from [ Olivier ]. Can you give us the latest on the Hyundai churn in Europe, [ the risk ] more countries get [ rolled ] into the OEM solution and the confidence can the campaign win dealers back, please?

Yes. So currently, we have some good news from Hyundai EMEA. We saw a churn, as we have announced, for example, from the Greece market, but the dealers were not happy with the now solutions. So the Greece dealership came back to us, and so we are in negotiation of a new contract. I don't want to go into details because that's still under negotiation. We also saw that Hyundai France and Hyundai, I think it was Norway, didn't churn. And that's a good sign that our solution, as we always pointed out, is superior for any in-house solution. And why that is the case? Because we are doing this business for 20 years. We are agile. We are also able to amortize the cost that we have across several brands and across the globe. And therefore, we believe that we have the stronger offering in this space. And therefore, we are also very pleased with the latest development that we see.

Next up, we have a question from [ Carlos ]. Do you have a significant -- sorry, you have a significant level of cash for some time, which drags down your ROE, please? And you're citing greater inorganic opportunities. What are the financial requisitions, sorry, for a potential acquisition?

Yes. So we admit that we have a quite lazy balance sheet, and we should leverage our cash at hand in a better way. We are working hard on that side. After the results presentation, I fly off again to Europe and to the U.S., talking to potential targets, but I would not like to share more at the moment. But we are very active in the market because we need to grow our critical mass, our ecosystem globally. And especially, the U.S. and also Europe are interesting areas to further grow our offerings and solution suite and also gaining more data into our system. So we are very active on that. And I think of the very few tech companies, we are having this cash at hand but are in difficult or challenging macroeconomic times, a good also to have as well.

Thank you, Jens. Next up, we've got a question from [ Adam ]. Can you please elaborate on the cost benefit flowing into FY '24, run rates for leases, reduce headcount and AI/ML pilot, also the expectations for SimplePart integration in the U.S., please?

Yes. So we are a growing business. And therefore, also our cost line will grow but to a lesser percentage than the top line. That's what we always said, and that's what we are consistently driving as a strategy in the market. But we, obviously, would like to further continue on innovations. We need to further invest in AI and machine learning because we have very promising pilots. And we also like to invest further in our footprint, as I pointed out, in Europe and in Americas. Finally, I'm very excited that we have now accelerated with the fixed terms and final signing of the integration of Infomedia Americas and SimplePart. And they have, for sure, some synergies that we are looking at to bring to both teams together. That's where we are currently. And I'm quite excited that the Americas this year, after some stagnation, showed now a very strong organic growth. And we already see that both business, when they go to market together, are more successful if they are on their own.

Next up, we have a question from [ Stuart ]. Can you please comment on any planned price increases for your products in FY '24?

Yes. So price increase seems to be a big topic. Like I said, we are a recurring business. So whenever there is a new contract or existing contract coming up for renewal, we are looking at this. We think not from a price perspective, more from the value perspective, the value that we are actually offering and driving for our clients and customers. And there, we see, obviously, strong opportunities to further drive value and therefore, also increasing our price. And that is currently happening quite successful, but we also need to have some patience because not the full portfolio of our contracts are coming up in one go. So I see the potential between 5% and 12% depending on the specific contract that we can renew on a higher price.

We've got a question from [ Chris ] about pricing as well. Jens, are acquisition pricing coming down, or are they remaining the same?

Yes. So that's what I put in my speech. I see favorable market conditions because the crazy valuation of some of the tech-related software businesses are coming more into an area where I see the real and realistic value, which is an opportunity for us. We just have to look also at the currency and FX effects with the weaker Australian dollar when we especially want to invest into the U.S. and into Europe. We have to find the right price and the realistic price and also the right conditions to do an acquisition in one of these -- those markets.

Next up, we've got a question from [ Eduardo ]. What explains the difference in growth rates of Superservice and Infodrive versus the Microcat, which is lower growth?

So Superservice and Infodrive, as we mentioned, Superservice had some accelerated delivery, so that drove some of that growth. In Infodrive, we added offerings that we put out across the regions. So that drove that growth. In Microcat, as you can see in the slide where we call out the different regions, that's where we had the churn happening in EMEA. And so that drove down some of the Microcat growth.

Thanks, Chantell. Next up, we've got a question from Tim. You have historically said that you would like to be able to grow cost at 3% less than revenue. Are we at this point yet in FY '24 year? Or is this more of an FY '25 year story?

So you can see our costs did grow less than 3% of our revenue for the full year, but that's because we're ahead of the plan. We certainly don't feel that we're there yet. This is more an FY '25 target. There is, as Jens has mentioned, some investment to do this year. So we'll monitor the cost growth against the revenue, but we are not going to -- or not aiming to achieve that differential in '24.

Yes. And every nice, profitable, growing business needs also some investment. And therefore, we will grow our cost line, but lower than the revenue line. That's what we promised, and that's what we are standing for.

Next up, we have a question from [ Olivier ]. Could you comment on the potential to expand channel distributions, e.g., Americas Superservice?

Sorry, I didn't get the question. Can you repeat, please?

Can you please comment on the potential to expand the channel distributions, e.g., the Americas Superservice?

Yes. So the good thing is when SimplePart and Infomedia and the Americas are coming together, we have very strong, reliable relation on both sides of the equation. And by bringing them together and cross and upsell these opportunities, we are on a much better overall market integration into these existing clients. And the other part is we are working now on the second DMS integration because with 3 DMS integration, you can cover 80% of all dealerships in the Americas. And I see here a big opportunity to further scale our Infodrive solutions, which are much -- generating much stronger value when they are fully integrated in the DMS, the dealer management systems, just for everybody who's not so familiar with that term.

Next up, we have a question from [ Eduardo ]. Is there an opportunity to drive higher group margins by shifting your mix to the higher-growth Superservice and Infodrive segments? And the second part of the question is are these lower segments -- sorry, are these lower-margin segments versus the slower growth Microcat segment?

No, we have in all of our solution groups very strong margins. So we are not singling out specific solutions. We will see that when we implement one of our solutions and after a short period, we can implement and build then on top of it and building that ecosystem approach. I'm a strong believer, especially when I look at the market consolidation on the vendor side that is currently going on, that we have a large opportunity to implement the full integrated ecosystem. And therefore, we are not steering our sales teams specifically on the margins of one or the other product. We believe that the overall approach of having a sticky and integrated ecosystem is driving the best value for our customers, and that's how we run the business.

Next up, we've got a question from [ Ray ]. Will future ARR contracts have an annual inflation clause built in?

The short answer is yes. And the longer answer is, yes, we probably didn't do it in all our contracts in the past, but we have some general terms implemented in all our contracts, which are standard. And in CPI term is in all our renewed contracts or new contracts.

Our next question comes from [ Gary ]. What was the FX benefit you achieved this year? It appears a tailwind within -- with Americas, plus 15% sales headlines, but it looks like 5% growth on the constant currency. He's just looking for clarification. Thank you.

That's right. So what's disclosed is the local currency is 5% growth. That takes out all FX impact. And the other thing is if you have a look at the ARR and ARC charts that we present, they're all in constant currency. There is no FX impact in those charts.

And let me add that we are very pleased with the current development of the Americas driving profitable growth. And also, we see acceleration and the integration that we see there.

Next up, we've got a question from Tim. Can you please talk about how the first DMS partnership in the U.S. is progressing? And when is the second one expected to go live? Can you give us a sense of scale relative to the first DMS?

Yes. So the first one, Tim, we choose for a smaller DMS integration. When we enter such a big market, we want to make sure that everything is running well. It is actually running very well. The second integration is then a big one that the team is currently working on. I will meet in the U.S. the CEO of that DMS, and then we will discuss if based on that, there are more and other partnerships. When we have the first big one implemented, which will be in about 4 to 5 months, then we will focus on the remaining 2 to cover the 80% of the U.S. market. And I think that, that will be achievable in the next 12 to 18 months.

Thank you, Jens. That brings our Q&A session to a close. Jens, I'll hand back to you for any closing remarks.

Yes. Thank you, [ Jara ]. I just want to, again, state that I'm very grateful for the executive leadership team in Infomedia, but also the whole team across the globe. We drove a lot of change. Everybody was doing their best accelerating our strategy. We are ahead of our plans. So I'm very pleased with the current status that Infomedia is in. And I know that sometimes I'm asking a lot from my team and I'm asking a lot from myself. But when I see how much we have achieved until now, we can be very proud of where we stand. And I think many, many other tech companies across the globe will envy Infomedia, not only for the big data assets, but also for the great culture and spirit of driving the business forward.

Thank you, Jens. That brings the session to a close. Have a lovely day.

Thank you, Jara.

Thank you.

Thanks a lot.