Mach7 Technologies Limited (M7T) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

I'm Francoise Dixon, and I'm Head of Investor Relations for Mach7. Today, our CEO, Mike Lampron, will provide an overview of our FY '24 results. We will then open it up for questions, which will be answered by Mike and our CFO, Dyan O'Herne. [Operator Instructions] I'll now hand over to Mike for the FY '24 update.

Thank you, Francoise, and welcome, everyone, to our FY '24 investor presentation. For those that are new to the story and just as a reminder, for those of you who have followed us for some time, Mach7 Technologies develops innovative image management and viewing solutions that form the core of an integrated enterprise imaging ecosystem. We'll get into this a little bit when we talk about the products, but it's very important to take out this message that we are an enterprise imaging solution built for more than just radiology. Today, we'll go through this agenda with a business overview; of course, our FY '24 results. We'll speak a bit about strategy and outlook into FY '25. So Mach7, one of the things we ask ourselves all the time is, why would anyone care if Mach7 existed tomorrow? Beyond those of you who are shareholders who are looking for financial benefit, beyond employees who are looking for a salary, what's the reason Mach7 really exists? And why would we care if we're still here a year from now? And this is encapsulated in our purpose, to enable exceptional patient care by empowering health care providers to make more informed decisions. This means a lot to us. And notice there's not a word called imaging in this purpose statement, right? What we're here to do is to provide information to the health care providers, so that they can provide the best outcomes for their patients. They can make the best informed decisions for you, for me, for our children, for our families, for everyone. And we can do that through our software. But really, the power of Mach7 is that we're agnostic and we really work hard to integrate and be able to interoperate with other people's software, so we can make other software packages better too because the whole idea here is to provide a better health care system for all of us. And Mach7 takes that very seriously, and we really are here to really try and help our health care providers out there to get the right data at the right time as they need it. That's our purpose. That's why we're here. Right now, we're doing that through offering innovative data storage, management, image viewing solutions for the health care enterprise. And that can expand to other things as we partner with other companies, as we provide more and more integrations, as the AI world starts to take a bigger foothold in health care, that offering expands. So from a value proposition perspective, I'll just kind of sum this up a little bit for all of you. We do have a modern solution in comparison to many of our competitors, like the Agfas of the world, the GEs, the Philips, these big large companies who have been doing this for 20, 30, 35 years since the early '90s. Their solution is a little long in the tooth, right, where our solution is a more modern technology stack. That's a big benefit to our customers and allowing them to grow and take advantage of new technologies as they're developed over time. And the other thing, and you'll see more about this from us when we talk a lot about customer intimacy going into FY '25, but being the size that we are, it does allow us to provide a more personalized touch to our customers and allows us to have a very focused customer experience. And it allows us to make sure we have good happy users and allows us to get feedback and interaction from those users. From a deployment flexibility perspective, again, at the end of the day, agnostic is the name of the game for us. And we want our customers to be able to take advantage of what they have. So as much as our solutions can be deployed in the cloud, private cloud, public cloud, if we have a customer who's made a recent investment of $2 million in new S3 storage, we want them to be able to take advantage of that existing investment. Again, we want to be value based. We want to show value to our customers. Not value in the way of cheaper pricing, but value in the way we're actually adding something to what our end users need, right? And that's investment, that's money. Hospitals are tight right now. Anywhere we can help to get an advantage is a capability for them to provide better care. That's what we're in this game for. On the far right, when we talk about our technology, we are a software-only solution. We don't sell hardware. We're not connected to a hardware vendor of any sort. We're not a modality vendor. That's really important. It helps us keep our neutrality. We are an enterprise imaging platform. We are about more than just radiology, even though a lot of imaging comes out of radiology. It's all the workflows associated with other departments that are becoming more and more important to hospitals. We've got an incredible universal viewing platform, and we're using that to enable EMRs, image-enabled EMRs, which is obviously a hot topic now. Support for telemedicine, teleradiology, that's been a topic for the last 10 years now. And look, we're a product that allows for that integration of all these great AI platforms and algorithms that have been built over the last few years and will continue to be built over the next few years. So to encapsulate sort of our product offerings, enterprise data management, that's known as our Vendor Neutral Archive. That's kind of the brains of our solution. That's where we manage all of the data from. Provided on-prem or via cloud doesn't matter to us. Our enterprise diagnostic viewer, also known as the eUnity Diagnostic Viewer, is a zero-footprint viewer, which is a unique value proposition, especially outside of radiology, fully functioning diagnostic viewer and a great viewer to be able to image-enabled EMRs because of the simplicity of the zero-footprint nature. And then our workflow orchestration, which just really comes down to our communication workflow engine. This is where we normalize data. It's where we do tag morphing. It's where we do routing, our complex workflows. If you have AI-specific workflow, we can optimize that, data anonymization, life cycle management, these are workflows that we produce. You'll see some of these things, other companies specialize in some of these things. We offer this as part of our VNA package, right, the capabilities of doing these things. It's a differentiator for us in our VNA. So moving from product and thinking about our FY '24 results. In review, FY '24 was an amazing year for us. It really, really was. Navigating through this transition that everyone is aware of from what was a business that was heavily capital software intensive to a subscription business, that's a tough transition. I feel like we've done that pretty gracefully. We have allowed for strong growth in our recurring revenue, while still delivering positive operating cash flow throughout that transition. That's very important. We were able to achieve another year of record sales orders, $61.3 million. Of course, that's on top -- part of a large renewal program. But those renewals are as equally important to the long-term growth of our business as any net new logo would be. So that was a really important thing for us to get over and really building that foundational book of business. Record results that we'll go over with our CARR, our contracted annual recurring revenue, and our annual recurring revenue. We've always talked about a disciplined approach to cost management. We continued that through FY '24. Our OpEx grew by 13%, which I was really pleased with. And we still have no debt, and we met our FY '24 guidance to be cash flow positive and actually operating cash flow positive. And throughout the tail end of FY '24 into calendar year '25, we started to make an investment in people, process and tools to further differentiate ourselves from our competitors. I'll talk a little bit about that in a few minutes here. So again, transformational year. Just some highlights from that foundational change. 80 contract wins. These are contracts. Look, they're not all full-stack contracts, right? I mean this -- we could be winning contracts for a routing engine. We could be winning contracts for a mammo viewer. We have a slew of use cases that go the breadth of a customer base, which we would have contracts for, for different pieces and components of our software. It's really important to know that because we cover a wide variety of use cases across multiple ologies, across both the acute care and ambulatory segment. So we get a high volume of contracts. We had 19 renewals. Those tended to be bigger renewals. Everybody has seen those numbers throughout the results of FY '24. We actually completed 32 implementations in FY '24. Again, not all full-stack implementations, but all important implementations to our customers. Our customers need these use cases to be live. It shows value of our products, and it really makes us stickier and stickier with our customer base. And this is something we put in here to give you an idea. In FY '24, we secured almost $51 million of forward revenue, right? That's secured book of business over the next 5 years. So some financial highlights. And again, none of these should be a surprise to anyone. Revenue of $29.1 million, in line with revised guidance, which was between $27 million and $30 million. We'll spend more time on revenue. Recurring revenue of $21.1 million, showing really good growth there. $27.9 million of CARR, again great growth of 35% there. The ARR run rate, so think of it as recurring revenue, right? And then we have the contracted annual recurring revenue and the ARR run rate is a given month, multiplied by 4, right? That's the run rate moving forward, a run rate of $22 million. $61.3 million in sales orders. Again, a great year for us on sales orders. Of course, that revenue number being down, really a byproduct of the transition to subscription. It's just kind of a one-to-one relationship where EBITDA was going to be down, NPAT was going to be down because of that transition, which I think everyone is fully aware of. And then we had a positive operating cash flow of $3.5 million. Again, a great metric for us, and closing cash of $26.2 million and again, no debt. So we've got plenty of cash moving forward. We continue to be cash flow positive. Revenue was in line. CARR and ARR continue to grow as we would expect. So a few charts here really concentrating more on the revenue side of things, and our recurring revenue is up. And listen, this is the key to us and the key to our growth is growing our recurring revenue line. But it wasn't just recurring revenue that went up. Our professional services revenue went up as well. And when you look at the product revenue split of approximately 60-40 between the VNA and Viewer, I think that's kind of important too because this is showing good positive cross-selling momentum within our products. And I think that we will continue to see good progress there throughout the installed base. But I think this graph does a great picture of showing you how our revenue is growing and what percentage of our total revenue is now recurring. So this is sort of a bridge graph for you all. FY '23 revenue, of course, is slightly higher than FY '24 revenue, right? We saw a pretty severe decline in capital software of around $7 million. But really, much of that was made up for by increasing our recurring revenue on subscription licenses, support and maintenance licenses, and we had some increase in professional services, too. You'll see the percentages on the right there. Coming close to covering that gap of the $7.1 million that we lost in capital software. But I'll take a moment just to say on this graph, if you think about that capital software loss, in any given year, we know we could win additional capital deals, particularly coming out of APAC. So as we look into FY '25, just because we saw these capital software deals eliminated in North America in '24, it doesn't mean you're not going to get the occasional capital software deal. So just keep that in mind, that can -- that we could occasionally get a capital software contract in the door. I don't want everyone to think that those are gone for good, right? It will happen occasionally, but it will not be the rule. So talk a bit about CARR for a moment. And really, we think of CARR as a leading indicator at this point for our future growth. We know recurring revenue is our future growth. And we know that CARR is an indicator of where our ARR is going to be in the following year. So we were really emphasizing CARR this year, and we're looking at this number as a number that we all want to watch grow. We know the impact it will have on ARR moving forward. And you see this backlog of $5.9 million, and these are deals that we have signed contracts for. But either they've not gone live yet, so they haven't reached first productive use, which is when we'll start to achieve revenue for a subscription deal. And it also affects add-ons, but I'm really concentrating right now like on new customers. I'm thinking of the impact of new customers like the VA, as an example. They're in that gap there, that backlog. But people ask me oftentimes what I think that gap should look like. And honestly, I'd like to see that gap grow a bit because -- and I've said this before, I think of a healthy backlog being a backlog where our sales team is outperforming our services team. It's not an indication of our services team not getting sites live fast enough. It's an indication that we want to build that backlog. We want sales to be ahead of services, right? So building a backlog is not a negative thing. It's actually a very positive thing for a business. That helps us manage our resources effectively actually. So sales orders, converting over to this metric. Subscription sales dominate, right? And that's a change in customer preference, and that's sort of a macro effect across the industry, I think. Record sales orders this year for us though of $61.3 million. Almost $51 million of that, the ARR style of sales. A pretty small number of $3.9 million in capital software. And professional service sales of $6.5 million, which was significantly higher than what we saw in FY '23. And I think we'll continue to see services grow throughout the following years. We've talked a lot about renewals. These renewals, they're super important to us. I can't overestimate how important these things are to us. New customers are fantastic and very, very important to us, but securing your installed base for the next 5 years is very important as well. So it shouldn't be overlooked how difficult it is to keep customers and how there's a lot of things that you have to do right as a company to keep those customers and get them to renew for another 5 years. It means 5 years of performance, right? It means 5 years of providing good support, 5 years of providing good services, 5 years of good relationships, 5 years of meeting expectations. And then at the end, a sales director comes in and able to secure that business for another 5 years. It's a true team effort for these things to fall into place. So renewal is very important. Add-ons and expansions are additive to what we do because it's a little difficult for us to predict. We can't really predict add-ons and expansions very well. Sometimes, you can with add-ons, especially if we know it's like an eUnity deal to a VNA client or something like that. But expansions, in particular, they happen when a hospital is acquired. They happen when somebody starts to go up to a new imaging center. It's something that happens that we don't really get a whole lot of fair warning about, right? So those expansions are additive and not really in our funnel, right? So we know we always count on a bit of that expansion and add-on, but they're not funnel dollars. So then, of course, this all comes down to sales orders, revenue and OpEx growth, right? And I'm happy to say this year that we were able to keep our OpEx to a 13% increase. I think that the team overall did a really good job of managing costs this year, while trying to meet some pretty demanding clients. We talked about the revenue decline. The EBITDA is really due to the shortfall and decline in revenue, right? The same is really true with NPAT. We did have record cash receipts this year of $34.9 million. And that was a great job by our accounting and finance team to really be disciplined and have a lot of rigor in our process of making sure that everything is working perfectly there. And of course, the $26.2 million in cash. So I think these results are great results for us for FY '24, and we've been very happy with our FY '24 results. Our cash balance, again, cash on hand of $26.2 million. I would say the one thing to highlight here is just, again, that this concept that we transitioned to subscription licenses -- to predominantly subscription licenses this year. And at the same time, we were able to keep our cash and actually grow our cash, right? That's, I think, a great feat and a really big accomplishment by our company to be able to do that. And very happy that we were able to work through this transition in a healthy way. So now I'm going to move into strategy and outlook. And look, when we think of our business and we think of sort of our business objectives and we think over the course of the next few years, frankly, the number one thing here is that we're providing solutions that compete at the enterprise level in market segments. So let me explain what that is. So we are an enterprise company, not just a radiology company, and we want our product to be used across ologies. The more complex, the better for our software. The markets that we're in, we're in the acute care and the ambulatory care market. We're in North America, and we're in the APAC, Middle East. We're not in Europe. We're not in Latin America, right? We want to compete where we have resources, where we feel like we can grow, where we can do it in a responsible way. We want to make sure it's in a market segment that we can win in and that we can support. We want to continue to focus on growing our recurring revenue, and we want to expand new revenue streams for profitable growth, right? That means cross-selling opportunities. It means building new software. It means partnering with new people. It means more use cases. It means expanding that land and expand, right, the expanding how our customers are using our software, continuing to grow our revenue inside our customer base and by adding net new customers. We want to drive our financial KPIs. And look, we still have an eye towards profitability. We never have taken our eye off of profitability. We realize how important that is. And we're driving to get there, and we're driving what we think is a fundamentally strong business, and we're making decisions with this business that we think are going to get us to profitability into the future in a fair and reasonable way where we can continue to grow. And that's really important to build that foundation, right, and not skip steps. We're going to get there through leveraging our capability to innovate and create new solutions. The way to think about this is that in FY '19, we as a business -- we had this wonderful VNA product, but we had a little over $2 million in the bank. And then in 2020, we were able to straighten out our business. We were able to acquire Client Outlook, which added a whole new offering to our business. So our focus has been on that Client Outlook acquisition and integrating that product, really figuring that product out, figuring out those customers, and we have had a focus on those 2 products. And we've driven our cash up from a little over $2 million to the $26 million that we have today. And we've absorbed that Client Outlook acquisition. And now we're ready to concentrate on some more innovation, right? And we really want to grow new solutions and build out products within our product line that will make us more profitable, that will increase our margin and also offer the things that we know our customer base needs. We're going to get there through investing in our people, investing in our processes and products. That will further differentiate ourselves. We're going to talk about this in the next slide, but this is really important because people are the difference in this business. People are the innovators. People that improve their process are going to move our implementation time frame from 12 months to 6 months. Being able to further differentiate our product is going to help our sales team. All of this is important investment, really important for us to keep our eye on it. I'll get back to a little bit of that in the next slide. So when we think of our landscape and trying to play to our strengths and you'll have seen some of these before, but listen, the health care space doesn't move fast, right? We still have a fragmented imaging market. We still have legacy modality vendors that are still losing market share but still have a big number of market share, right? We're still talking about people that are shifting 1% a year if, right? Continuing to shift to ambulatory from acute care settings, that's absolutely the case still. We're seeing consolidation of health care providers and demand for centralized imaging IT. Decisions are being made by the CIO now, not just the clinicians. Enterprise imaging strategies requires a simplified management and diagnostic viewing solution from any location. This means it should be cloud-based, right? This means it should be zero footprint. This means it needs to be scalable across the whole enterprise, which is multiple locations. Our reading environment is getting more complex. More and more radiologists are working from outside the walls of the hospital. That's mandating this investment in technology, and there's this growing opportunity to capitalize on replacement cycles. It's important to know this is still a replacement cycle. These are not customers who have no digital imaging platform. They already have a digital imaging platform, right? They're thinking about what 2.0 look like for them. What features does 2.0 need to have or 3.0 in some cases? So that's where we capitalize on replacement cycles. So back to that innovation piece. When we're thinking about our pillars, what's going to make us successful, we've really narrowed this down to 3 strategic pillars around product innovation and one key driver from a corporate perspective. So around product innovation, cloud enablement, service and supportability, integration interoperability. These are the 3 pillars that we're focused on when we think of our products. Cloud enablement means architecting your product appropriately, so it is a cloud-native product. Being able to take advantage of the micro-processing and the hyper-scaling available in cloud -- public cloud offerings like AWS and Azure, but also being able to have an agnostic product that can be implemented in private cloud or maintaining that on-prem. Very important. So building a product, and this is a 3-year road map, right, for cloud enablement, where you're going to make incremental progress along the way, right? And that requires some investment. Service and supportability. We talk about scalability as a business, and we want scalability sooner rather than later. Scalability comes from having a product that's easily supportable, easily serviceable, easy to deploy. And part of that might come from the cloud, but the other part of it comes from process improvement. It comes from little things like security requirements, all the way through to usability and deployability of your product. Integration and interoperability are really important and I would argue probably the most important of these 3 pillars because as an enterprise solution, you cannot have it all. As an enterprise solution, if you really want to be an enterprise solution, you need to embrace third-party companies. You need to embrace the products that they're bringing to the market. You need to do what you can do to make your customers successful. If you're able to bridge that gap and you're able to really help those other companies provide this powerful information to a customer, the customers are really going to appreciate that. And you cannot do it alone on the enterprise. There are too many niche vendors, too many vendors that do great things, and they're uni-taskers. And all those uni-taskers need to be summed up. And that's a best-of-breed approach, and that's what our customers are looking for. On the customer intimacy perspective, I feel like this is really where we can shine. We have a customer-centric focus, and this is really something that's being driven through the culture of our company right now and making sure that we know everything there is to know about our customers. We know what use cases are important to them. We know what value is important to them. They have a relationship with not one person in the company but relationship throughout the company. So it's not a single person, a single focus from a relationship perspective. We want our customers speaking to each other. We want to build a culture within our customer base. We want to have an amazing customer support system. We've made great strides on that recently to really provide a better and better program for our customers. We want to add value by addressing growing use cases. All of these small use cases add up to a product that's irreplaceable. And that's what we're shooting for. A customer who is very loyal, enjoys the relationship with Mach7, can trust Mach7 and feels that Mach7 is bringing everyday value to them in a tangible way that they can easily prove. That's what the CIOs are looking for. That's what the end users are looking for. So from an outlook perspective, the focus in FY '25 from a sales perspective will be net new logos, right, and the conversion of a growing and healthy pipeline of opportunities. And look, the renewal program will not be as big as it was last year. But these net new logos are very important, and it's important that we grow not just in North America but also in APAC. We need to invest in product innovation. And look, we just got done talking about this customer-centric mindset, that's a culture thing, but it's also a people thing, right? You have to invest in your people in order to do this. You have to invest in the tools. You have to invest in the process. But most importantly, you have to invest in the people. And that's where the focus is in FY '25. We expect to be in the range of maybe a $2 million to $3 million investment, where we really think that's going to help us execute against our 3-year strategy, execute against our pillars, help us get to the point of profitability, help maintain a point where we're super competitive in the marketplace, and we can continue to build out those customer relationships. Very important for us. And look, we get this question all the time around cash. We have $26 million in cash and how are we going to use this "lazy" balance sheet. Well, look, the best way to use that money is by investing in our business. And maybe this is going to delay profitability by a year, but it's going to provide us good scalable profitability when we reach it. It's an investment that if not made now will cost us more in the future. So now is the right time. Again, if you think about how we've grown from Client Outlook, we're in a good financial position right now to invest in our people. We've had a great year. We've got a healthy cash balance sheet. And we've really grown this business, and we've fully absorbed Client Outlook at this point, and it's ready for us to move on to the next step. That next step is this investment. When we think of FY '25, our expectations and what we're guiding to, we're concentrating on CARR growth. The reason for that is that what's most important is how is our recurring revenue going to grow because that's going to be a future indicator, right, of the growth and the health of our business. It's going to be how is our CARR growing, what's our overall revenue, of course, and ensuring that our OpEx continues to be lower than our revenue growth, right? Those, at the end of the day, are the big expectations here. Those are the things we want to concentrate on, while we make this investment and while we make Mach7 a big success for everyone into the future, most importantly to our customers, our people and our investors. So I think with that, Francoise, I'll turn it back over to you, and we can begin to take some questions.

Thanks, Mike. We have received some questions via e-mail from [ Mike Goodson ]. So we'll start with those. The first question is, earlier this year, there was mention of the goal to bring new customers onboard sooner. How is Mach7 progressing in this regard?

Yes, good question. I think -- and I touched on this earlier, so just to summarize this for you. Yes, we want to reduce the time frame it takes for us to deploy our products, right? As we move into a recurring revenue model, getting to first productive use so we can get to that revenue is really important for all of us. So the sooner we can do it, the better. We have what we've called the 12- to 18-month deployment time frame in the past, really, really a broad time frame. We'd like to get that to 6 to 12 months. Again, taking into account complexity, things like the VA as an example. So look, we're making progress there. And I think that we've had a really good year of making good progress. We did just invest in a professional services automation tool to help us manage our projects a little bit better, help us do our time tracking, help us keep our customers on track, which we find to be problematic for us. So we've made good steps in the last 6 months, and I think we'll continue to make good steps throughout fiscal year '25 towards that.

Thanks, Mike. Our next question is when do you expect ARR to cover OpEx?

Yes. Look, I think, what was it, last year, the year before, I said it's going to be 3 years before ARR starts to cover OpEx and that was what I was driving towards. I think that would have meant FY '26, right? And I think with this investment in people, I think that probably gets pushed by a year to FY '27 before our ARR is covering our OpEx. But again, we continue to take a really disciplined approach to that and hope to get there soon. We did make good progress with our ARR this year and our increase year-over-year was good. We just got to keep at it and keep trying to drive that.

Our next question is what is the ARR for the VA's Phase 1? And when do you expect first productive use?

Good question, and I'm sure not the only VA question to come up tonight. But look, the VA, the way that contract works is that it's based on actuals, right? So when they first go live, they're going to start using our solution. They're not going to be at full maximum capacity right off the bat on day one. So we guided to the fact that their go-live will happen on the first half of FY '25. We'll stick to that guidance. We're almost into September now. And then once they do go live, if they're at full volume, the full contracted volume, it's about $3.5 million a year, and it's going to take us some time to ramp up to that from day one to full volume.

We have a bunch of questions on the chat, so I'll start working through those. Our first question comes from Melissa Benson at Wilsons. The $2 million to $3 million investment in systems people tools guided for FY '25, is that included within OpEx guidance or additional to?

Yes, it's included in OpEx guidance.

Our next question comes from [ Andrew Hewitt ]. Could you talk a little about the VA and the opportunities you see there and any time line associated with that opportunity?

Sure. Yes. Look, first half go-live. I wish I could be more acute with a specific date, but I can't be. But once they go live, that's when we would expect to start to see some additional traction with the VISNs for Phase 2. And I would be happy to see one or 2 of the VISNs sign an agreement with us in FY '25, but it's going to take a bit of time. But I do really believe that once things start rolling and once we have a really happy customer using the National Teleradiology Program, then I think that the network effect within the VA is going to be pretty strong, and we could see a sudden surge in Phase 2 activity.

Our next question comes from [ Jeffrey Reed ]. Mike, what is the tipping point for Mach7 to break through the small cap ceiling and attract investors from the bigger end of town?

Yes. Look, I think it comes down to one thing at the end of the day, right, and it's profitability. I think once we start to hit profitability and we start to drive that, then I think it brings a rerate and another -- a whole other slew of interested investors. I think that's the critical sort of fulcrum point.

Our next question, we have another question from Melissa Benson at Wilsons. Are there any major renewals you anticipate in FY '25? Or will this be very modest following a large FY '24?

Well, we'll be modest in comparison to FY '24. We still will see some double-digit renewal activity in totality, but low double digit in renewals for FY '25.

Our next question comes from [ Sean Truant ]. Good day, Mike. Are you able to give us some insight into the DoD VA RFI that is out currently? Particularly, the size of this contract in total for Viewer, Worklist and Archive.

Yes. Let me just make that a little bit more clear. There is no such thing as a DoD VA RFP. There is a VA, which is not out yet, that would replace their VistA solution as an enterprise solution. And there is a DoD RFP, which is out. And the DoD RFP is much different and has a lot different security requirements and a lot different requirements in totality than the VA does. We will not participate in the DoD RFP. We're not even going to bid on it. But we are looking forward to the VA RFP coming out when it does, which we don't expect that will happen until probably the spring time frame.

Our next question comes from [ Locknam Rogers ]. Is the CARR growth guidance predominantly new customers or add-ons and expansions?

Yes. Look, it's predominantly going to be new customers, but I say that not always knowing what kind of expansions and add-ons we're going to get. And I said that earlier where we get surprised sometimes, all it takes is a hospital acquisition. And before you know it, somebody wants to buy a license for 1 million studies. We could have a stellar year, which could change that narrative, right? But I would start the year by saying we would expect that to come from net new logo, the bulk of it.

We now have a few questions from Jules Cooper at Shaw's. Could you please talk to what you have assumed for capital deal license fees in your FY '25 guide?

Yes. Look, we're -- we don't count on a lot from capital licenses, right? If anything, it's a deal or 2, and that would come out of APAC. I don't think we'll see any capital licenses come out of North America. And traditionally, we've not really forecasted out those APAC deals just because they tend to be volatile from a timing perspective. So from a budget perspective, not really counting on that. But from a hope perspective, I think that we definitely have some expectations in APAC. And we think we understand the timing, and I would hope to get a deal or 2 out of APAC and they very well could be capital deals.

Another question from Jules. Your guide implies EBITDA positive by about $1 million FY '25. How will that likely compare to cash flow generation? And do you expect your cash balance will grow in FY '25?

Yes, it's a good question. And it comes down to a couple of things, Jules. It comes down to timing of that investment of that $2 million to $3 million, which, by the way, the bulk of which is in people, right? So the timing of that can be adjusted to some degree, and the actual impact can be adjusted a bit. And we will keep a disciplined approach on that investment, so that we can keep that OpEx growth at less than revenue growth, right? And that's what we're guiding to. In regard to the cash flow impact, we always have an eye towards positive cash flow, right? And that's -- we always have an eye towards that. We're guiding to OpEx over revenue growth, and we're guiding to revenue and CARR. So we're not guiding to cash flow at this stage. But yes, we always have an eye to it, for sure. And we are making an investment, though, and the impact of that is definitely going to be felt.

We now have a question from Scott Power at Morgans. Hi, Mike. Can you expand on progress outside of the U.S., that is Hong Kong and the Middle East?

Yes. Last year, actually, we did sign a renewal for a hospital authority. So the Hong Kong -- Hospital Authority of Hong Kong actually renewed for another 5 years, so that is secured and in the bag. And that's great news, but that's only one of many deals in Hong Kong, right? That's an anchor for us that continues to grow and grow. And we would still expect to see good growth coming out of Hong Kong. APAC, in general, their pipeline is growing. It is maturing. And I think that Sathyan is doing a really good job of running a much more rigid process there from a sales perspective. And I feel good about the way he's handling that. And as he's transitioning Ravi from the team and Sathyan sort of taking the reins of that team, I think that transition is going well, and I would expect to see a much better contribution of the APAC team this year than we have in the last couple of years.

Our next question comes from [ Ivan Tanner ]. Who are your main competitors when you are pitching for new contracts? That is, are they embedded legacy suppliers that are defending their installed base? What are the other companies that pitch for the contracts? That is PME.

Yes. Great question, Ivan. First of all, I'll say that, and I've said this before, we rarely compete with PME, like rarely. Like maybe, there's 1 or 2 deals out there, of which I couldn't even name. But we have several customers where PME is the radiology pack solution. We're the VNA and we're the universal viewer for the enterprise. So we work more as an integration together than we do as competitors in that particular case with that particular vendor. But you're right on in your comment. It's generally the incumbent, right? The incumbents are fighting to keep that installed base, right? This is a sort of a dog-eat-dog industry where everyone is trying to hold on to their customer base. And those vendors are trying to hold on to their customers. Now in many cases, they're not trying hard enough though. In many cases, they're the older vendors who don't have strong relationships, and they've just been there for -- because it was easy, right? So it's giving customers an easy way to transition off of their old technology and on to new technology, helps the customers make that decision. So on the VNA front, Hyland remains one of the other independent VNA companies, probably the only other independent VNA company other than Mach7. Fuji has a really good VNA product as well. They're winning market share, too. But beyond that, from a VNA perspective, it's really scattered, right? From a perspective of what other vendors that we run across on a regular basis, it's all the regulars, right? It's Fuji, it's Agfa, it's GE, it's Philips, it's Change, it's Hyland. That's who we're running up against, generally speaking.

And Mike, we have another question via e-mail from [ Matthew McCormack ]. Can you comment on the class ratings and whether you've seen any movement in the past 6 months?

I am so glad somebody asked that question. Yes, actually, we have seen some good movement. It's live data, right? So every month, the data can change. But what we have seen since January to July, we've seen the VNA increase in score by 7 points, and we've seen the eUnity increase in score by 4 points. So both products making really good strides towards better class performance. I have to give credit -- some credit to that to our support organization who has really done a great job of combining the support processes across our 2 companies, the eUnity product and the VNA product, where we had separate teams. We have one team now. We have one call center. We have one phone number. We have live customer service support now, which we didn't have up until just 3 months ago. So a lot of effort has been put into providing a better support environment for our customers, and I think that's leading to some great scores, not to mention just the increased job of really pushing on this culture of customer intimacy throughout the services organization. It's having an impact. It's going to be slow, but it's having an impact. So thanks for asking that question.

Before handing back to Mike, I'll pause a moment in case there are any final questions. We have no further questions at this time. So Mike, back to you for closing remarks.

Well, thank you, everyone. Thanks for hearing about FY '24. And we look forward to future conversations around FY '25. Q1 coming up before we know it. Thanks again, everyone, for attending and spending a bit of time on Mach7. I appreciate it.