Integrated Research Limited (IRI) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Integrated Research Limited FY '24 Results Investor Conference Call. All participants are in a listen-only mode. There will be a presentation followed by a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to hand the conference over to John Ruthven, Chief Executive Officer. Please go ahead.

Thanks, operator. Good morning, and welcome to the full year FY '24 results briefing for Integrated Research. My name is John Ruthven, and I'm the CEO of IR. With me today is Christian Shaw, our CFO. I will open the presentation and then hand over to Christian to take us through a detailed financial review. He will then hand back to me to talk through strategy and priorities for FY '25. At the conclusion of the presentation, we will open it up for questions. This morning, we posted our results presentation to the ASX website, which we will be referring to during this call. You can also find a copy of it in the Investor Relations section of our website at ir.com. Moving to Slide 2. Integrated Research, or IR, as we are better known is a global software company providing performance and experience monitoring solutions for critical business systems. We have 3 product lines: Collaborate for Unified Communications and UCaaS or Unified Communications as a Service, Transact, which sits in the payment space and our infrastructure product for Hewlett Packard Enterprise, or HP non-stock environment. Common to the customer use cases that we support are complexity, mission criticality and scale. Slide 3 highlights the underlying strength of IR's business model, our customer base. Our customers are large global enterprises across a range of industries, including technology, telecommunications, financial services, government, health care, higher education and retail, key to our business model, a multiyear, non-cancelable contracts with mission-critical requirements. I'm now on Slide 4, CEO key messages. FY '24 provided a critical turning point for IR in restoring the working capital of the business, with revenue growth of 19% on the prior year, a very strong NPAT result of AUD 27.1 million and cash generation from operations of AUD 13 million. Foundational to this result was a turnaround performance in the Americas, underpinned by a solid renewal base. Notably, whilst the prevailing collaborate churn headwinds continued, they slowed in FY '24, and this remains a goal for the company moving forward. Balancing the top line result with good cost discipline further reinforces the opportunity and strategic shift to product-led growth. This also paves the way for a CEO transition to leverage experience in driving this change. FY '25 will leverage the foundation established in FY '24 to prioritize the deployment of capital for growth, whilst maintaining a focus on operating efficiencies. On Slide 5, we summarize our statutory results. The company achieved profit after tax for the year of AUD 27.1 million, statutory revenue for the year was AUD 83.3 million, up 19% over the prior year. The strong performance was a result of continued improvement in sales execution, a solid renewal book and new customer wins in the Americas. Cash receipts from customers totaled AUD 72.4 million, down 5% from the prior year, whilst the ending cash position was AUD 31.9 million, up 72%. The company continues to benefit from term-based non-cancelable license contracts at a high-quality customer base, driving the increase in cash at bank, which continues due to a strong focus on cash management to fund growth. Now on Slide 6 and switching to pro forma results. The key sales performance indicator total contract value was 83.9% for the year, up 22% on the prior year, reflecting both a strong renewals year, but also pleasingly an increasing win rate for the business, particularly in the Americas. We continue to report revenue on a pro forma basis, which we believe is more reflective of the long-term underlying performance of the business. Pro forma revenues for the year was AUD 74.8 million, down 1%. Revenue increased from services and testing, partially offsetting the period-on-period decrease in total pro forma subscription revenue, which was the result of softer new business sales and churn in Collaborate. Pro forma EBITDA dropped 5% as a result of lower recurring revenue and currency exchange losses in spite of costs containment. Our cash conversion rate for the year remained high at 97% as a result of strong cash collections. Slide 7 provides an executive summary of FY '24 progress against key priorities. Strong sales performance in the Americas up nearly 50% and Europe when adjusted for the Fiserv deal also had good growth. The result was underpinned by a solid renewals book leading to 22% TCV growth for the full year. We won 23 new customers in FY '24, which was behind our expectations. We continue to experience customer churn weighted to smaller Collaborate customers. Good sales execution on renewals continued with NRR or net revenue retention improving 1% to 96%. Retention headwinds persist in Collaborate. Expenses were down AUD 12.9 million for the year on a like-for-like basis as a result of ongoing rigorous cost management. We maintained our customer-centered approach to product development throughout FY '24 and launched [Release 13] in June, one of our most feature-rich releases for some time. At the same time, we have readied for the next phase of product-led growth with the launch of IR Labs, a new business incubator. And our working capital position has further improved throughout the year with a net profit of AUD 27.1 million and AUD 31.9 million cash at bank. Before I hand over to Christian, I'd like to highlight some key customer wins for the year, starting with our Collaborate portfolio. A major U.S. government agency with 135,000 seats came on-board as a new customer, the catalyst being the end-of-life for the Cisco PCO product. This, coupled with a technology refresh and increasing demands from an ease of use and reporting standpoint, led to the adoption of the full suite of IR's Collaborate solution. We added another state government as a new customer, continuing our success with the U.S. public sector, a large Cisco environment with complex requirements and increasing demands to do more with less, led to the adoption of a rich suite of our products in our Collaborate portfolio. Rounding out a good new business performance in the Americas, we want a newly established MSP or managed service provider where they will leverage our Collaborate solutions to administer and monitor their UC or unified communication customers. On Slide 9, we profile a couple of Transact infrastructure wins in FY '24. In Chile, we were successful in a strategic customer win back, where several years ago, the customer had not renewed our transacting infrastructure contract. During this period, the criticality of our solutions used to monitor credit card processing and ATM networks became clear and the customer re-signed with IR through a partner. A signature win in India, where a major commercial bank is now leveraging our solution to monitor their high-volume payment transaction environment. Replacing a complex set of third-party tools and scripts, they now have a modern, easy-to-use solution, that was rapidly deployed. I would now like to hand over to Christian to take us through a detailed financial review.

Thanks, John. Slide 11 shows the linkage between statutory revenue, pro forma revenue and annual recurring revenue. It's worth discussing this for a moment. Statutory revenue, the dark blue bar, is revenue recognized per the accounting standard. This has a strong upfront revenue recognition with less revenue recognized over the life of the contract. This reflects the prominence that buy us term software license component and the fact that this is required to be recognized at the point in time that IR delivers a software license key to a client. As a consequence, there's a strong alignment with TCV. Pro forma revenue, the middle purple bar, provides a non-statutory alternative view of underlying performance by restating term license fee revenue to be on the recurring subscription basis, that is over-time rather than upfront at the commencement of a contract per the statutory view. Other recurring revenues, such as maintenance fees and cloud services as well as other non-recurring revenue streams such as perpetual license fees, professional services and one-time testing services are treated consistently as part of pro forma and statutory revenue views. Annual recurring revenue, the light blue bar is the end of period recurring revenue multiplied by 12 and best represents the ongoing recurring value in the revenue stream. This chart highlights that while there is more volatility in statutory revenue and by extension, non unshown TCV, there is more consistency in the revenue streams over-time as represented by pro forma and recurring revenue. Furthermore, while statutory revenue may grow, pro forma and recurring revenue can be flat or even decline as renewals and new business are more than offset by churn and downsell. The key point to note from this slide is the ongoing recent relative stability of pro forma and ARR compared to the volatility of statutory revenue, highlighting that the growth of pro forma ARR occurs as new clients added to the renewal base and the renewal base is extended through price increase, offsetting any lost revenue through client exits and downsell, adjusted for foreign exchange movement. Slide 12 presents our statutory revenue, pro forma revenue and annual recurring revenue by geographic region and by product set. Points to highlight include the Americas chart relating to IR's largest region shows ongoing stabilization in pro forma and ARR results against an uplifted statutory revenue, driven by a higher renewals period. Collaborate headwinds continue on both lead and lag measures. Large Transact renewals in Americas and APAC were driven by upsell and capacity and Europe's new business outcomes disappointed. We're on Slide 13. This slide focuses on the key metric underpinning value, namely the change in the components of annual recurring revenue. Total ARR declined by 1% to AUD 66.6 million, albeit this was impacted by adverse foreign currency movements. On a constant currency basis, new logos in Collaborate, Upsell and Collaborate and Transact and Infrastructure from new capacity and price increases modestly outperformed the loss of clients and downsell through price reductions in Collaborate and Transact. Collaborate continues experiencing headwinds in all geographies. Turning to Slide 14, total operating costs. IR has continued to manage costs tightly. Costs have decreased 18% on the prior period, continuing the trend in recent years. This is a result of ongoing headcount and active cost management, reflecting a disciplined approach to product and technology investments, particularly. Natural attrition continued through the period as the market for technology staff remain competitive, albeit IR continues to fill critical roles quickly with high-caliber candidates. We're on Slide 15. This slide focuses on additional metrics underpinning value, namely the level of recurring revenue, the contract length and the proportion of new business to renewals in the period. Recurring revenue has remained almost constant as a proportion over the prior period. Contract length has remained steady year-on-year with an average length of contract written in the period slightly increasing to 3.1 years. Renewals dominated the year with circa AUD 61 million in renewal TCV, up from AUD 41 million in the prior year. Slide 16. Cash flow is illustrated on Slide 16, with cash at bank increasing AUD 13.3 million or 72% over the year. Significant focus was paid in FY '24 to the continued buildup of a strong foundation for future growth, through a combination of a reduced cost base, disciplined cost control and stringent receivables collection to below 60 days. Income tax payments were low. We're on Slide 17. While the company has statutory EBITDA of AUD 24.6 million, AUD 13 million of cash was generated from operations. The primary drivers of this difference are over-time revenue, cash conversion compared to statutory upfront recognition, combined with historic debtor factoring of AUD 2.1 million, which is now concluded. Working capital and income taxes paid. We should emphasize that the company is not factoring any receivables and the current factoring completed in December 2023. The key point here being that pro forma EBITDA, the blue bar is a reasonable proxy for operating cash generation, albeit that in future years, payments for income tax to grow as we've utilized the accumulated carry-forward R&D tax credits to reduce our effective tax rate. Slide 18. The balance sheet shown on Slide 18 shows a strong 48% lift in net assets to AUD 88.4 million. Cash and trade receivables increased AUD 23.3 million on the prior year. Receivables remain a strong source of cash flow in the current and future years and the company remains free of debt. I will now pass back to John.

Thanks, Christian. Coming into FY '25, there are 4 key elements to our strategy reset. Firstly, accelerate and refocus of our go-to-market to the sweet-spot for our solutions, high-value complex customer environments. This is expected to deliver both growth and reduce churn. Secondly, same time, focus the product and engineering teams on fewer high-yield product enhancements to our existing Collaborate and Transact customers. Thirdly, continue the optimization of the organization to support the effort outlined in 1 and 2 with the objective of generating cash to fund growth. And finally, implement a capital management plan to balance investments for growth with shareholder returns, including assessment of both organic and inorganic growth opportunities. Now on Slide 21. As has been emphasized already, IR now stands on a solid capital platform in mature low-growth markets. We require innovation and investment across the existing platform and product set as well as in new revenue streams outside of our product lines today that address specific customer needs, as such our capital allocation priorities will include organic growth and targeted M&A. In the medium term, we are committed to reinvesting additional R&D capital for organic growth of up to 10% of the company's annual TCV. This will increase our product offering and competitive position in markets with our target of a 3- to 5-year payback. This has, in fact, commenced that the recent establishment and seating of IR labs in the U.S. where the focus will be on next-generation product advancement. Our M&A targeting efforts are ongoing as we continue working with retained advisers. We are targeting rightsized, synergistic opportunities to enter adjacent growth markets. Given IR doesn't have a strong M&A track record to draw from, we are trading somewhat cautiously with gaining momentum. Acknowledging our shareholders' ongoing support and with an objective of being balanced in our capital allocation priorities, a fully franked dividend of AUD 0.02 per share has been declared. Further details are available on the Australian Securities Exchange website. Moving to the final section and Slide 23. FY '25 is a significant transition year for IR. Under new leadership and Board direction, the company embarks on its next phase of growth to execute the product-led growth strategy, 4 priorities at front and center. Firstly, refocusing the field organization and go-to-market to the sweet-spot of larger complex customers where our value proposition and price point is most relevant. Secondly, aligning our product and engineering teams to fewer high-yield product extensions to exploit product-led growth opportunities in our existing markets. Thirdly, optimizing our sales, product and engineering teams to best support the go-to-market focus of our market sweet-spot, whilst delivering high yield product innovations to service this market segment. Part of this has been the move from a regional sales structure to a single global structure. And last, the introduction of a capital management plan to most effectively and efficiently deploy our cash for growth, both organic and inorganic as well as returns to shareholders. Moving to the final slide of today's presentation. We make several observations about FY '25. Key to our business model is the renewals book, which is lighter than the prior year and weighted towards the second half. On a product basis, the renewals are skewed towards Transact and Infrastructure customers. Second, we anticipate that a churn in Collaborate will persist as customers migrate to a UCaaS environment and is more likely in smaller customers. Third, when reviewing our pipeline coming into FY '25, new business and upsell pipeline is up on the prior year and is weighted to Collaborate. As referenced in our priority section, our increased focus on larger enterprise customers is expected to improve pipeline conversion. And last, we also note that the effective tax rate is expected to normalize in FY '25, given cessation of unused brought forward R&D tax credits. This will be my final earnings presentation for IR, and I'd like to thank our customers, employees, the Board and shareholders for their support over my time at IR. I wish you all the very best of success in the future. Operator, that concludes the presentation. We can now open it up for questions.

Thank you. [Operator Instructions] The first question today comes from [Peter Cooper] from Teaminvest.

Just a couple of questions, if I may. In your financial report, for last year, there were payments for about AUD 7.5 million of capitalized development costs. I see there's none there this year. Are there any similar costs that are just being expensed straight through the P&L? That's my first question.

The answer to that is yes, there are. And a similar level of expenditure was indeed expensed through the FY '24 set of books. And a large part of that relates to the product and technology headcount and infrastructure that we have here at IR. And so the answer to that is absolutely yes, and that will continue to be the case in FY '25.

Okay. My next question really, this one is for you, John. You talked about concentrating on a narrower set of customers in FY '25 and beyond. How many customers are available in the IR universe to sign up these new customers over the next, say, 1 to 3 years. And as you're going to market for customers, what other issues in getting price increases or rate increases through from the customers?

I'll take the second part first, Peter. We do an annual price increase, which over the last several years has ranged anywhere between 4% and 7%. I would say that we are increasingly become better at achieving price realization through good sales discipline. It doesn't mean that you don't face pretty healthy negotiations when renewals come around. But I believe that as an organization, we're much more disciplined and able to achieve that price realization. In terms of the available market in terms of winning new customers, I think the balanced way to answer that is that the problems that we solve for Collaborate, Transact and Infrastructure customers are not necessarily new problems, so that companies are using something. But as one of the win examples I used in the Collaborate space, we replaced a set of third-party tools, internal scripts, et cetera. with a much more modern, easy to use, easier to report against. So that's where our real value proposition is, is to help modernize large enterprise environments where many of them are pushing on being able to do more with less.

[Operator Instructions] The next question comes from Stella Wang, Private Investor.

I've got 2 questions, if I may. Firstly, with Collaborate's continued trend, how much of the existing customer base are still likely to migrate to a full start model, therefore, kind of at risk for further change. Is it possible to fill that out?

It's a very difficult thing to quantify, but it also speaks to the strategic shift to target larger enterprises. It's much less likely that large complex organizations, global organizations will move their entire communications infrastructure to a UCaaS environment, and it's much more likely that they will be what we refer to as hybrid, meaning that they will have potentially Teams, Zoom, et cetera, as part of their overall environment, but they will still have quite significant on-premise components to their communications infrastructure. There is also an industry theme to that. Some industries like health care in the U.S., military, et cetera, for the foreseeable future are going to have significant on-premise infrastructure components to that environment.

Okay. Secondly, regarding the new refocused product development under the new leadership. Just conscious the company previously invest heavily on product development, but we did not see a really strong return on that. Can you please speak to what lessons we learned from that experience and how the new CEO's experience, track record speak to the strategy and whether do we no longer target those full start environment product. But now just focused on the hybrid multi-vendor or club environment now?

Well, that's a fairly complex question. So the new CEO comes on board on October 1, and I don't want to steal his thunder. But the Board, and you've seen that we've had quite a refresh in our Board. I think the Board has been very diligent around working through the lessons learned as you've already highlighted. And ensuring that there is a balanced approach, we certainly referenced that in our commentary around the capital management plan that there is a balanced approach to both organic and inorganic growth. And one of the exciting things we also referenced was the launch of IR Labs, which is an internal incubator to accelerate ideation in the process. But my sense would be that you're going to have a very diligent oversight from the Board and executive management in terms of how we deploy our capital for growth.

And so now the refocused development strategy is more targeting the hybrid complex multi-vendor environment instead of previously we try to do the full SAP environment product. Is that right way to think?

I think probably the best way to answer is to say that the product and development effort is very focused on customer use cases where we can determine that there is value not only for 1 customer, but for a broad set of customers, so that the magic source in a software model is around build at once and sell it many times. And I think that, that's core to this statement we make around product-led growth.

[Operator Instructions] The next question comes from [indiscernible].

Yeah. My question was around churn, which I think you've answered. But maybe you can just highlight, is there any other particular reason for such a large churn in the Collaborate product that hasn't been addressed yet?

I don't think so. I think we've over the last several earnings periods being reasonably explicit about the Collaborate headwinds, the color to that is that we're seeing that it's more impactful with smaller customers. And our response to that has been the refactoring of our go-to-market to target larger, more complex organizations where our value proposition is stronger. We think that that's the right path. And then in terms of the second piece that we talked about in the strategy slide around targeted extensions and where our products address new or emerging use cases that the modern communications environment in larger enterprise bring to life.

Thank you. At this time, we're showing no further questions. That does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.