Nayax Ltd. (NYAX) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Nayax First Quarter Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the call over to Ms. Virginea Stuart Gibson. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator, and everyone, for joining us today on this call. With me on the call today are Yair Nechmad, Nayax's Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer; and Sagit Manor, Chief Financial Officer. Following management's prepared remarks, we will open the call for the question-and-answer session. Our press release and supplementary investor presentation are available on our Investor Relations website at ir.nayax.com. As a reminder, during this call, we will be making forward-looking statements. All forward-looking statements on our call today are based on assumptions and therefore, subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from those projected. We have no obligation to update these statements except as required by law. You can read about these risks and uncertainties in our earnings press release issued earlier today and our regulatory filings. In addition, today's call will include a discussion of non-IFRS measures. These measures should be considered as a supplement to and not as a substitute for IFRS financial measures. Reconciliations to the Nayax IFRS measure can be found in our earnings press release issued earlier today. All key performance indicators are intended to evaluate our business and properly measure factors in the macroeconomic environment, to guide and support our decision-making. These key performance indicators may be calculated in a manner different from the industry standards. And finally, please note that all figures in today's call will be reported in U.S. dollars unless stated otherwise. Yair will start the call with strategic and operational highlights. Then Sagit will go through the financial results for the quarter. With that, I would like to turn the call over to Nayax's CEO, Yair Nechmad. Yair?

Thank you, Virginea, and thank you to everyone for joining us on the conference call. I'm especially pleased during this call with all of you today, that this month of May, marks Nayax's 1st full year as a public company. Our results for the first quarter reflect the continued strong performance that we have been delivering over the past 12 months. Demand for our platform and solution remains strong as we added an additional 36,000 devices, bringing the total number of devices to 553,000 and we processed 269 million transactions, an increase of 87% over the year quarter. We reported a higher level of recurring revenue at $23 million. This excellent record revenue growth trend increased by 67% in the first quarter over the same period last year, accounting for 66% of total revenue compared to 59% of total revenue in Q1 2021. Our customer loyalty is measured by net retention rate also reached a new high at 140% for the quarter. This is a result of our compelling solution and our commitment to constantly making them even better for our customers. This industry-leading metric also reflects the high confidence and satisfaction with our platform, solution and a trusted partnerships that we have developed over the past 17 years with our customers. As we previously communicated on our earnings calls, the disruption from the ongoing global component shortage remains a challenge and we saw an impact during the third quarter compared to Q4 2022, but a sequential decline in our post device revenue. We continue to carefully manage the situation in order to supply the growing backlog of orders for our products and focusing on what we can control and mitigate as the situation evolves. Our strong results demonstrate the durability of our business model and the mission-critical nature of our technology in solving our customers' problems and their reliance on Nayax to grow their business. As we announced in April, our continued strong results and the high visibility we have from the growing backlog portfolio for the rest of the year, give us the confidence in repairing our midterm revenue growth target of 35%. Sagit will provide more color on our financial performance and outlook later on the call. I would now like to talk about some of the recent partnership announcements and how we are advancing our strategy for sustained long-term growth and providing Nayax with efficient way to scale our business even faster than our own. Let me start with our ongoing strategic focus on expanding our global footprint while establishing a presence in markets that are still poised for growth as the transition to cashless and accept more digital payments. Expanding into new markets and extending our reach globally has always been part of Nayax growth plan that we outlined, and we have been delivering on that front. Nayax already has a global presence in key regions as can be seen by our revenue mix. For Q1 2022, more than 40% of our revenue was derived from Europe over 30% from North America, 12% from rest of the world and 11% from Australia. We are yielding the results from this expansion strategy and seeing many more underpenetrated market opportunity. Let me give you an example of one of these attractive growth markets. We further strengthened our international presence with the announcement earlier this month about our market expansion into the United Air MEA of UAE region through a partnership with Network International. Network is the leading enabler of digital commerce across Middle East and Africa. The collaboration will enable Nayax's unattended self-service solution to be introduced to Networks UAE merchants and enable seamless payment transactions with unattended self-service businesses segment, including vending machines, kiddie rides, car chargers, car wash, laundromats, micro markets and any type of smart machine or kiosk. In the UAE, Nayax solution will allow consumers to simply select their desired product or service and pay using their preferred payment method, whether it is debit or credit card. Working with the Network International will enable Nayax to reach largest retailers in the UAE and other countries in the Middle East and Africa region, enabling growth for our customers with increased revenue and market opportunity as well as access to Tier 1 customer enterprise assertive win-win situation. We also announced an integration partnership with American Express. This is an extended partnership that we initially kicked off in Australia about a year ago, and we are now rolling out across the European region and U.K. market. Nayax U.K. will be the first office to implement these changes across all Nayax VPOS Touch and Onyx cashless payment devices installed across unattended industries, including vending, self-service, laundromat, kiddie rides, office coffee services, automated car wash and more. Nayax has been accepting American Express cards in both the U.S. and Israel for many years to swipe only. This integration now offer payment acceptance through EMV. We expect to roll out to additional countries in the next upcoming months. This will enable Nayax retailers to accept American Express card for all purchases and services, giving them the opportunity for increased growth in revenue. The American Express card members now have greater choice of where they can use their card. Through thousands of locations around the world, accepting the American Express cards, this partnership is a strong statement of confidence in having Nayax as a key partner. The successful execution of our geographic expansion will help us acquire new customers and leverage our interesting scale. At the core of who we are as a company is our unrelented focus on technology disruption and innovation. This allow us to continuously add value to our customers' business and maintain a trusted partnership. During our participation at NAMA, one of the largest national trade association of the convenience service industry, including vending micro-market and food service management, we introduced Easifit, a bill validator kit allowing the acceptance of cash and cashless payments. Easifit will work with Nayax's proven, award-winning cashless payment solution VPOS Touch used by almost 34,000 customers worldwide. With this solution, Nayax simplify the acceptance of cash and cashless transactions from a single location on operator's machine. Lastly, I want to remind everyone the acquisition of OTI, a provider of smart payment solutions for unattended machine, remains on track to close on in June. This acquisition supports our long-term growth plan to gain market share in strategic growth markets and accelerate our growth drivers in attractive regions such as Japan. We recently provided OTI a loan disbursement of approximately $6.5 million to repay its outstanding debt and support their current operations. The loan is maturity to Nayax within 2 years. Once the acquisition is approved and meet all statutory procedures and processes, Nayax will invest $4.5 million and will assume full ownership of OTI share. To wrap up, I continue to be pleased with our strong execution and the consistent progress we have made in delivering on our strategy and growth initiatives. With that, I will now turn the call to Sagit. Sagit?

Thank you, Yair, and good morning, good evening, everyone. The strong business momentum we experienced in 2021 carried into the first quarter of 2022. Q1 results were very much a continuation of the trends we highlighted over the past few quarters. We continue to see broad-based customer demand across our diverse verticals and markets demonstrating Nayax's value proposition and our focused execution. As Yair stated earlier, we delivered strong Q1 results despite the elevated global uncertainty and the ongoing disruption from the global component shortage. Let me start with an overview of the revenue performance in Q1. Total revenue for the quarter was $34.1 million, an increase of 50% from Q1 2021. Recurring revenue, which is comprised of our SaaS subscription and payment processing fees grew approximately 67% over Q1 2021 to reach a new high of $23 million in revenue and accounting for 66% of our total revenue. We expect this revenue source to continue to drive the majority of growth going forward as we consistently grow our customer base. As a reminder for those new to the Nayax revenue model, our 3 main revenue pillars are derived from point of sale, or POS, devices, monthly SaaS subscription and payment processing fees. The POS revenue for the device itself has a onetime fee recognized when the device is shipped. The devices we sell are the enablers, the engine for growing the number of our managed and connected devices and in turn, create recurring revenue from SaaS and payment processing. The revenue generated the sales of POS devices tends to be sensitive to cyclicality. The monthly SaaS subscription for connection allows for access to our telemetry and software management platform. This includes the management suite, connectivity, telemetry and support services. Payment processing services are determined by the percent charge from the total transaction value per month. So recurring revenue from SaaS and payment processing represents the core value our customers derive from our platform and the value-add they see from increasing sales in one end and cost savings on the other end. With every incremental device that we sell and connect, we established long-term relationships that help fuel highly profitable recurring revenue stream. Now let me turn to the financial highlights for Q1. Starting with our customers who drive everything that we do, we reported strong customer growth of 62% over prior year quarter as we expanded our customer base to 34,000 at the end of the quarter. Customer expansion remains one of our key growth drivers and is an indicator for successful execution in expanding internationally and entering key growth markets for cashless payment solutions. Turning to growth of our devices. Managed and connected devices showed healthy year-over-year growth of 38%, ending the quarter at over 550,000 devices. Another key highlight in Q1 2022 was the significant increase in transaction dollar values, which doubled to almost $0.5 billion compared to approximately $246 million in Q1 2021. This is another catalyst driving a growing contribution from recurring revenue, showing the strong tailwind and providing healthy recurring revenue gross margin, which remains strong and stable in Q1 at 55%. Turning to gross margin. For Q1, gross margins were 38% compared to 35% in Q4 2021 and tracking in line with the direction we have communicated on our last earnings call. This is an improvement successfully achieved by various actions we're taking thanks to the excellent execution done by our purchasing and engineering team. The gross margin improvement was largely due to a better cost factor we were able to achieve in Q1 '22 compared to Q4 '21. However, the disruption caused by the global shortage in components is still ongoing. Moving to adjusted EBITDA for Q1. Adjusted EBITDA was negative $3.3 million. This reflects the temporary increase in our product costs as well as the increase in operating expenses from investments in talent acquisition, customer base expansion and product innovation. Additional investments also include higher go-to-market expenses and enhanced infrastructure to support a global growth as we become a much larger company. However, on a like-for-like comparison to Q1 2021, adjusted EBITDA, excluding 2 items that were introduced later in the year of 2021, felt a bonus for nonsales employees that was introduced in Q3 2021 for the first time; and second, excluding product cost increase. On a comparison basis, the adjusted EBITDA improved to negative $300,000, basically close to breakeven. As we discussed last quarter, 2022 will be a year of disciplined investment to drive future growth and support the scale we anticipate in the business. In an effort to continue capturing a larger market share, we are making focused investments in these critical areas today to accelerate our customer acquisition and expand our global reach, with the ultimate goal of reaching the scale and efficiency to become the company of choice that we aspire to build. Lastly, we ended Q1 with cash and cash equivalents and short-term deposits of $71 million. These strong results further reinforce our conviction and plans, as we've previously stated, to achieve profitability as we enter 2024, if not before, while we continue to take advantage of the significant market opportunities in front of us. With our strong results over the past several quarters and the continued tailwinds received from the transition to cashless and the broad acceptance of payment digitization, we feel confident in our long-term growth aspiration. Additionally, based on the high visibility we have from growing back that we see today, we are reaffirming our mid-term annual revenue of $220 million and our growth rate of 35%. We continue to expect the customer growth, increased market penetration and continued expansion of our platform with sales as the main growth driver. As for long-term outlook, gross margin in the long term is expected to reach 50%, but providing leasing options for IoT POS and by growing the recurring revenue. Our long-term adjusted EBITDA margin guidance is set around 30%. In the near term, we expect to continue seeing margin pressure compared to pre-COVID levels related to the sale of POS devices as the global component shortages continues to play out. With our rapidly expanding and diverse customer base across verticals and geographies, multiple growth opportunities from the strong secular tailwinds and with our industry-leading net revenue expansion rate, we remain confident about the Nayax business and our ability to deliver on our growth trajectory. Before I turn to the operator for the Q&A session, I want to let everyone know that we will be hosting our first Capital Markets Day at the New York Stock Exchange tomorrow, beginning at 08:30 a.m. Eastern time, and we look forward to sharing our growth journey with all of you. I would now like to turn the call to the operator so we can take your questions. Operator?

[Operator Instructions] The first question today comes from Dominick Gabriele, an analyst.

I guess can you just talk about the demand for your unattended and your in-person point-of-sale devices and how that demand may have changed over the last, let's say, 6 months between both of those? And then I just have a follow-up.

Dominick, it's Yair. The demand that we see is increasing. The signal for this, from our perspective, of course, is internal data that we have in our backlog and we will provide and supply all the units we are seeing the increase. And more than that, the team have been presenting in shows and the last show was in VendItalia, it was last week. And we saw a very, very, very good increased demand from customer base. So it's not just that we have in-house demand. It is something that's approaching us and being present us all the potential that customer wants to have, and we're seeing this coming mainly now to the shows. There are many, many customers with different kind of process that are requesting from us to achieve their goals. So we are very much in terms of optimistic regarding the demand in the market.

Great. And then the gross margin looks like it actually stepped up from the fourth quarter level, if I'm looking at this correctly. And so do you think that -- I know that there's been some pressure from the various factors that you discussed on the call, do you think we've seen the likely bottoming of the gross margin given some of the initiatives you're making around cost cutting and the various things. But if you net all that together, do you think we've seen the kind of trough in gross margin?

Dominick, great to have you with us on the call. So yes, we do -- as we said, our team between engineering and purchasing and the entire R&D team working day and night, right, to find a creative solution to components and specific components that either -- that we see a shortage there. We saw, as you see an increase in the gross margin or improvement in the gross margin. It's not yet the pre-pandemic percent that we were so lucky to have for many years and working towards that very digital. The point that I wanted to mention is that the uncertainty is still there, and it's an ongoing pressure and time will tell what the gross margin for how that would be or how long that will take. But as you said, we're doing all kinds of different cost structure initiatives to reduce the price.

Great. And then actually, just maybe one more here. The -- and then I know you've talked over the quarters about kind of leaning away from increasing the pricing, given some of the margins that your customers have, but we do see some fairly significant price increases at some of the retail providers. I was wondering if you've evolved on your pricing structures or if there's ways to structure your pricing differently for your customers that help capture some of the supply chain pressures.

I think we are analyzing this on a daily basis, the customer per region. We are very much sensitive to the customer base of what they can do as well in terms of increasing the prices. We did some mitigation regarding no promotion, no discount that we used to do so for some bulk they buy. But again, I believe it is something that we can overcome and the customer will appreciate. And the target of growth is the #1 globally in the market is very much appealing to what I think is the right thing to do and reaching out to the level that when we out -- we go out on the [indiscernible] of these supply chain issues will be revealed as a much stronger company in terms of what would be perceived by the customers. The -- let's call it, the midterm is much more important to my opinion, to reach out to a very long term growth, 35% year-over-year is kind of a mission that we think that can be achieved by Nayax and extend the gap between us and anyone that wants to come to the market will be more than -- now we have 34,000 customers, and we're growing on a 4,000, 5,000 customer in the quarter. It's extremely important to continue to be on this level of growth. So we do take care of what we call small and accurate ways to mitigate any kind of price, but we're not really taking general mode of increasing the price all over the customer base.

[Operator Instructions] Since there appears to be no further questions, I would now like to turn the conference back over to Yair Nechmad for any closing remarks.

Thank you very much, operator. Thank you very much to everyone to join us on the call. We remain committed to executing against our growth plan and running the company. We are focused on achieving our long-term growth aspiration. We look forward to talking to you tomorrow at our Capital Market Day. Thank you for the question, and thank you again for your interest in Nayax.

This conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.