POSaBIT Systems Corporation (PBIT) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Greetings and welcome to the POSaBIT Systems Corporation Second Quarter 2025 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions] Please note, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to turn the floor over to your host, Oscar Dahl. The floor is yours.

Thank you, operator. With me on this call are Ryan Hamlin, Chief Executive Officer; and Emily Egan, Senior Corporate Controller. I'd like to begin the call by reading the safe harbor statements. This statement is made pursuant to the safe harbor for forward-looking statements described in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. All statements made on this call, with the exception of historical facts may be considered forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Although the company believes that expectations and assumptions reflected in these forward-looking statements are reasonable, it makes no assurances that such expectations will prove to have been correct. Actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied in the forward-looking statements due to various risks and uncertainties. For a discussion of such risks and uncertainties, which could cause actual results to differ from those expressed or implied in the forward-looking statements, please see risk factors detailed in the company's annual report and subsequent filed reports as well as in other reports that the company files from time to time with SEDAR. Any forward-looking statements included in this call are made only at the date of this call. We do not undertake any obligation to update or supplement any forward-looking statements to reflect subsequent knowledge, events or circumstances. The company will also be citing adjusted EBITDA, adjusted revenue and adjusted gross profit in today's discussion. Adjusted revenue, adjusted gross profit and adjusted EBITDA are non-IFRS measures used by management that do not have any prescribed meaning by IFRS and may not be comparable to similar measures presented by other companies. The company defines adjusted revenue as gross revenue minus license support revenue plus actual licensing cash received as part of POSaBIT's licensing deals. The company defines adjusted gross profit as adjusted revenue less company cost of goods sold. The company defines adjusted EBITDA as net income or loss generated for the period as reported before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization and further adjusted to remove changes in fair value and expected credit losses, foreign exchange gains and/or losses and impairments. The company believes these non-IFRS measures are useful metrics to evaluate its core operating performance and use these measures to provide shareholders and others with supplemental measures of its operating performance. The company also believes that securities analysts, investors and other interested parties frequently use these non-IFRS measures in the evaluation of companies, many of which present similar metrics when reporting their results. We caution that adjusted revenue, adjusted gross profit and adjusted EBITDA are not substitutes for gross revenue, gross profit or profit loss, respectively. Now I would like to turn the call over to Ryan Hamlin, Chief Executive Officer. Ryan, please proceed.

Thanks, Oscar, and welcome, everyone. As a reminder, all the numbers that I'll be talking about today are going to be in U.S. dollars. Q2 was a historic quarter for POSaBIT. You can see it clearly in the numbers we just released half an hour ago. It's a testament to all the work we put in into the company over the past 12 months, getting lean, improving efficiencies, focusing on operational excellence and executing on all of our product goals. Not only are the numbers great, but our customers are very happy. I'll start with some key highlights in case you've missed the press release that came out 30 minutes ago. We had a massive adjusted EBITDA profit this quarter to the tune of $782,000, the most of any quarter in the history by 7x. A net income gain of $635,000 in Q2. Again, this is the first quarterly income gain in the history of POSaBIT. And a huge 78% adjusted gross profit margin versus 61% in Q1 of this year, another record for POSaBIT. And lastly, cash in hand grew quarter-over-quarter by 10%, and our accounts payable decreased by $2,000 versus Q1. So we are paying down our debt and still putting money in the bank. So I guess if you take one thing away from this call today, it's this. POSaBIT is profitable, we are growing and we're putting cash in the bank. Now I'm going to update you on a few other details from the quarter. We installed our point of sale in over 50 new stores during Q2, continuing the incredible momentum with our core product offering. We continue to dominate in Washington State and are now seeing more and more stores in Oregon and New Mexico. We believe this is due to our continued improvements in our POS, adding more and more key features that our merchants greatly appreciate. Adding to overall reoccurring revenue with the POS is the continued success of our e-commerce menu, which brings in additional SaaS revenue to POSaBIT per store. We are seeing stores move away from third-party menus like Jane and Dutchie, which is opening the door for us to offer a complete all-in-one solution to our customers. We are very excited about the future of our e-comm offering. Product enhancements and new features will continue to be rolled out over the remainder of this year. I know we have talked about this many times in the past, but cannabis rescheduling is back in the news and all indications this time are very positive. We believe there is a good chance we see rescheduling happening in the coming months. If and when this happens, it will be a game changer for POSaBIT. Our merchants will have more cash due to 280E going away and the potential of actual merchant services like credit card processing. We've always talked about the upside when credit card processing is available. We are already processing over $2 billion in cash sales annually through our POS, and the majority of that would shift to credit and debit cards when available. Our overall GMV will go up as our cost remains flat. This is the holy grail we've always talked about, but it's now finally looking like it is on the horizon. We will share more to our investors as we learn how the Trump administration finalizes their ruling on rescheduling in the weeks and months ahead. Now I'd like to turn it over to Emily Egan, our Senior Corporate Controller, to dive a little bit deeper into our Q2 numbers. Emily?

Thank you, Ryan. I'm going to review two Q2 results. So this is the 3 months ending June 30, 2025, versus the same period last year. Total revenue was $2.7 million in the second quarter of 2025. And while this is down compared to $4.1 million this time last year, the change was driven entirely by the transition to our new payment processing. While within our revenue lines, our POS recurring revenue actually increased by 15% quarter-over-quarter. So although top line revenue appears lower, this shift has positioned us squarely in the sweet spot for improved gross margins, as Ryan highlighted. Gross margin was $1.9 million or 70% of revenue compared with $2.2 million, which was only 54% of revenue in the second quarter of 2024. This improvement reflects the reduction in processing costs following our payment processor change as well as an overall more favorable mix of higher-margin revenue streams with POS. As a result, the improvement in gross margin flowed through to the bottom line with adjusted EBITDA meaningfully improving compared to last year's second quarter. Operating expenses were $1.6 million this quarter, down by 42% compared to this time last year, which was at $2.8 million. The decrease was driven by lower professional fees, reduced share-based compensation and a favorable foreign exchange impact. Let's look at the primary driver of that professional fees. Professional expenses were $0.25 million this quarter compared to $0.75 million this time last year, a decrease of 64% with legal costs remaining that largest component. Operating income was $207,000 this quarter compared to an operating loss of $639,000 Q2 of last year. That's a triple-digit improvement of 132%. Again, kudos to team POSaBIT for all the hard work, as Ryan outlined. On an adjusted basis, adjusted EBITDA was approximately $782,000 this quarter compared to adjusted EBITDA of only $100,000 this time last year. The improvement again reflects both higher gross margins and disciplined expense management. Net income was $635,000 for the second quarter of 2025 compared to a net loss of $454,000 this time last year. The swing to profitability was driven by stronger gross margins and lower operating expenses, impressive improvements to the P&L performance. To wrap it up, I'll call out a few key balance sheet highlights as well. Cash on hand at June 30, 2025, was $806,000 as compared to $1 million this time last year. However, when we look quarter-over-quarter, we are up 10% for $100,000 from Q1 of this year. Our debt balance remained stable at $4.5 million. And lastly, POSaBIT paid down $200,000 in outstanding accounts payable quarter-over-quarter, further cleaning up our books and setting ourselves up for future success. And with that, I will hand it back to Ryan for closing remarks.

Thanks, Emily. Before we get into our questions, I just want to share a couple of final thoughts. I want to make sure our investors fully understand the impact of the results in this quarter. For the last several quarters, we've been talking with all of you about how we've been lean and efficient in our cost control and how we've been able to continue to grow, particularly at the point of sale. It is great to finally be able to share these positive results from Q2 after several tough quarters in the cannabis industry. I want to thank our amazing POSaBIT team, our Board, our investors, all of you have been patient with us during this time. Now I do want to discuss our stock price. If you read the press release that went out half an hour ago, you'll see a strong statement made by me about how we all remain very disappointed in our stock and our overall valuation of the company. Its current price, frankly, is illogical. As you can see by the numbers, the degree to which we really hunkered down as a company over the past year has now paid off in spades. We focused on efficiency and profitability, and it worked. Most savvy investors will look at our total gross margin growth, our cash on hand, our point-of-sale growth and our committed licensing revenue and frankly, scratch their heads. Yes, we do trade on a lesser known market, and there tends to be a lot of day traders on those markets. But in the end, things are just not making sense. We will continue to execute and have faith that the market will eventually respond in a way that reflects all the amazing work and profits that POSaBIT has worked so hard to achieve. To all of you, investors, I'd just say, stay positive. You have my commitment that we will keep working and executing. And frankly, that's all we can control. As a side note, our investors have been buying POSaBIT stock during the non-blackout period this last month. In fact, over 0.5 million shares were purchased by insiders in July. Internally, we could not be more bullish about where POSaBIT sits at the moment. We have built an incredible product. The company's infrastructure is stronger than ever, and we sit in a solid financial position. Now I'm going to open it up to questions and hand it over to the operator so they can go over some logistics. And then after that, we're going to turn to some of the mailed in questions, and I appreciate it. We actually got a fair amount of questions mailed in this time. Operator?

[Operator Instructions] I'd now like to turn the floor back to Oscar Dahl for any questions you may have via e-mail.

Thank you. First question we received. I've raised this point before, as have other investors, but we've never received a clear answer. Does management have any concrete plans to implement a regular investor communication strategy, whether through press releases, updates or other means?

Good question, and I get e-mails from our investors quite a bit on this. And I think we've been clear on this earnings call that we've spent the last 2 years trying to get lean and making sure that every dollar we spend has positive ROI. Part of that was decreasing and looking at our marketing spend and our IR spend. And we made a business decision that at the time, it just doesn't make a lot of sense to spend a lot of money in that area because we looked at what we had done in the prior years, and we've spent quite a bit of money. And frankly, it didn't move the stock at all. And so like I mentioned, everything that we do now, we have a really hard line to make sure that the money that's spent is spent well and does have a return. And so it doesn't mean that we're not going to assess this and do more scheduled IR in the future. It just means that right now, my hope is that most investors want us to put our energy and our time on the company and the growth. And we have these quarterly earnings calls, and I hope everyone listens in and reads the full press release and the numbers because the numbers are going to tell the best story than just the PR message that comes out occasionally. So like I said, we'll keep evaluating it. But at this point, we don't want to spend a lot of money in this area because we just haven't seen any sort of positive return in the past.

Great. Next e-mail question. You've done a great job earning substantial market share in the state of Washington. Why have you not succeeded in doing the same thing in a meaningful way in other states?

Yes. We talk about this a lot. Washington is our home state. We've had a lot of success here. And I think we're up to close to 90% of all transactions flow through our POS, which is amazing. A lot of that stems from us being based here, but we're very involved here in the state of Washington with the LCB. I'm on the Board of the Washington Cannabis Association. We have a great reputation with retailers and processors. And what I'll say is it takes time. When you go into a new state, it's not that easy. Every state is different with its requirements. It requires product updates, it requires putting salespeople in the field, it requires us attending conferences in those states to get our reputation. So because cannabis isn't federally legal, rules are different everywhere you go. So it's a little bit different piece than what a lot of people think. So we want to be lean, we want to maintain smart investments and making sure everything pays off. So the playbook that we executed in Washington, we're starting to now execute in Oregon, and it's working. So yes, you will see us expand into other states, but we're going to do it strategically and do the playbook that we know worked in Washington. We're not going to take a shotgun approach like a lot of our competitors and just try to go into as many states as possible. That's proven, frankly, as a failed strategy. So we're going to keep doing what we do right.

All right. Next e-mail question. There are a number of possible legislative bills and policies being considered that could dramatically change the cannabis landscape. What would be the best outcome for POSaBIT and what would be the least favorable? We think that part of the reason the stock has seen such low interest is that investors are confused about how these outcomes would help or hurt the company.