Zenvia Inc. (ZENVF) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Zenvia's Q3 2022 Earnings Conference Call. Today's speakers are Mr. Cassio Bobsin, Zenvia's Founder and CEO; and Shay Chor, CFO and Investor Relations Officer. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded, and a replay will be available at the company's IR website, where you can also access today's presentation. [Operator Instructions] Now I would like to welcome one of our speakers for today, Mr. Cassio Bobsin, Founder and CEO. Sir, the floor is yours.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to Zenvia's earnings call. I'm Cassio Bobsin, Founder and CEO. Today, we're going to review our performance for the third quarter and 9 months period of 2022. Let's start with Slide 4. Since our IPO, we have been delivering on our promise to expand gross margin and increase profitability. I'm very proud to report that we registered the best profitability metrics recorded as a listed company for a quarter, including positive free cash flow. This is a direct result of a better revenue mix backed by the expansion of our SaaS business together with the implementation of a strict cost control plan. As we are seeing a very competitive environment in the CPaaS business with strong pricing pressure, we have been taking a series of measures to reduce overall expenses, putting Zenvia on a clear path to profitability. Also, given the challenging global environment at tech companies, management is now very much focused in improving the company's capital structure and maximizing cash flow. Therefore, we recently announced 2 important initiatives. First, we have successfully reduced our funding gap until the end of 2023 by renegotiating the earn-out terms with D1 and Movidesk. Second, we implemented several cost-cutting initiatives, which included downsizing of our corporate structure, as announced last week. Shay will cover both initiatives in more detail during his remarks. Also new this quarter and as part of the guidance we provide to the market, we're introducing a full year EBITDA guidance. With it, we are also adjusting revenue guidance down and adjusting up our gross profit margin. Let's now take a look at our performance during this quarter. We're reporting positive evolutions on all our key metrics, net revenues, adjusted gross profit and adjusted gross margin. As you can see, we were able to increase the profitability of our operations and more importantly, convert gross profit into EBITDA and free cash flow. We did this despite the challenging and more competitive environment like we believed in this quarter. Net revenues were up 10%, while adjusted gross profit jumped 50%, adding 12.7 percentage points to our adjusted gross margin, which attaches our commitment and path towards profitability. On the next slide, in looking specifically at our gross margins, we can see the evolution of our gross profit margin since the first quarter of 2021 and the IPO until today. We have delivered on the promises made during our IPO. We have expanded our margins significantly, a double-digit expansion, whether it is since the IPO or on a year-over-year basis. In the 9-month period, we recorded a gross margin of almost 40%, as you can see in the orange bars to the right, which is close to the top range of our updated guidance for the full year of 2022. This is yet another proof that we are walking the talk on our path to profitability. Looking ahead, we intend to accelerate the integration of our SaaS products and strengthen our cross-selling. On the CPaaS business, our plan is to continue to pursue balance between volumes and profitability to maximize gross profit. We have already been changing the customer experience of more than 300 million humans in Latin America with our CX platform by improving the way in which brands communicate with end customers. The good results of all these initiatives and all the innovation we are bringing to the market are already reflected in our profitability. However, there is still a huge white space opportunity in this market and we have just begun to tap it. There is a promising future ahead and we are ready to take the opportunities. We will be doing all of these diligently and with a strict focus on cost control and cash preservation. We aim to continue increasing our profitability and maximizing our returns. I will now turn the floor to Shay for his remarks. I'll be back after that for the Q&A.

Thank you, Cassio. Hello, everyone, and thanks for being with us today. I would like to start by breaking down our revenue and adjusted gross profit mix by SaaS and CPaaS. As we started to report like this only in Q2, we decided to present Q3 numbers compared sequentially so that you can all fully understand our path to profitability. When we analyzed the performance of our revenues on the chart to the left, you can see the sequential drop in revenues of 11.5%, which was mainly due to a 22% decline in CPaaS. This decline reflects our decision to focus on profitability, which led to lower volumes given the much more competitive environment with strong pricing pressure. On the other hand, our SaaS revenues went up almost 12% sequentially and contributed to offset part of this decline. Let's now look to the graph on the right. It shows the mix of adjusted gross profit. We see sequential increases in both SaaS and CPaaS margins, which means that our focus on profitability paid off. CPaaS delivered a solid 15% sequential increase, while SaaS grew almost 12%, which consolidated into 12.5% of increase in adjusted gross profit. As you know, we have been transforming Zenvia into a SaaS company since our IPO. During this quarter, we can see how our software business already represents 57% of our gross profit, which demonstrates we are effectively more SaaS than CPaaS. On the revenue side, SaaS represented 40% of the total in the quarter, a large sequential improvement from Q2 when SaaS was 29% of the total. Important to highlight that the third quarter is the first in which we fully consolidate D1 SenseData and Movidesk. Looking ahead, long term, we expect SaaS to represent about 70% of our gross profit. As Cassio said, we are just beginning to tap the huge white space in the SaaS market in Latin America. Let's now address the cost side. We have been implementing cost-cutting initiatives throughout the year, especially as we accelerated the integration of the acquired companies and started extracting synergies. This initiative also included reducing nonpersonnel G&A expenses such as consulting and travel, among many others. Last week, we announced a downsizing of our corporate structure, equivalent to 9% of the total workforce in Latin America. We expect this to reduce our personnel expenses by BRL 40 million in 2023. In order to execute this, we expect to incur onetime expenses of approximately BRL 5 million in Q4 '22, mainly related to severance. I would like to share with you that we were very transparent with all our humans regarding this process, with all communications made individually. We are also supporting affected employees by extending health care plans and providing career replacement opportunities. Finally, we also hosted several meetings with all other employees to reaffirm our commitments and expectations going forward. On top of the downsizing, we are implementing a plan to generate nonpersonnel savings. Altogether, we expect to bring our costs down by BRL 70 million on a yearly basis as of 2023. Moving on. We are happy to report that all the initiatives implemented made us reach the best profitability metrics recorded for the quarter since our IPO. In this third quarter, we recorded BRL 9.9 million in normalized EBITDA, which excludes certain noncash items related to future earn-out payments, evidencing the profitability of our operations. This means that we have been able to convert higher gross profit into EBITDA and cash flow. This gives us confidence to introduce a new EBITDA guidance for the year, which we will discuss in the next slide. In its 19 years of history, Zenvia has built a pattern of sustainable and profitable growth. The decision to become a SaaS company has taken at all in profitability in the last couple of years. We believe the third quarter is a turning point, and we are already returning to positive EBITDA. Therefore, we feel confident to introduce a full year 2022 EBITDA guidance, which we expect to be in the range of BRL 10 million to BRL 15 million. This is the normalized EBITDA, again, excluding noncash adjustments related to earn-outs and also onetime expenses related to the downsizing we have just announced. Another positive metric of the quarter was the positive free cash flow. This slide shows the normalized free cash flow bridge, which allowed us to generate BRL 3.5 million in the quarter. For transparency and to help you understand the recurring cash flow generation, this number already excludes the working capital instruments that we use in the quarter to ensure a higher level of cash balance. Finally, we announced at the end of October the agreement with Movidesk in terms of their earnouts, which allowed us to drastically reduce our funding gap. As seen in the slide, we were able to reduce the total amount to be paid by the end of 2023 to approximately BRL 30 million from BRL 360 million by extending the payment schedule to the first quarter of 2026. This means we can remain totally focused on continuing expanding gross profit and generating positive EBITDA. As you can see, this was indeed an eventful quarter, with a lot of important changes in the market dynamics and also inside our company. All recent initiatives have allowed us to introduce the new full year EBITDA guidance of between BRL 10 billion and BRL 15 million, as previously mentioned. Additionally, we are also updating our full year 2022 guidance with some important changes. We are reducing our revenue guidance, but we are increasing our adjusted gross margin. In terms of the revenue guidance, the reduction is mainly concentrated in the CPaaS revenues, and it stems from our focus on profitability. The new revenue guidance is projecting for 2022 a range between BRL 740 million and BRL 790 million, which implies a year-over-year growth of between 22% and 31%. SaaS revenue should be in the range of BRL 250 million and BRL 275 million, already including 6 months of Movidesk, while CPaaS revenues should be in the range of BRL 490 million and BRL 515 million. Our adjusted gross margin is projected to be higher, reaching between 38% and 40% on a 5.7 to 7.7 percentage points expansion from '21. This figure is taken into account the 5 percentage points increase in the CPaaS adjusted gross margin to 27%, with the SaaS adjusted gross margin remaining at 65%. With this, we conclude our prepared remarks, and we are ready to take your questions.

[Operator Instructions] Now let's go on now to our first question. It comes from [ Lucas Chaves, ] sell-side analyst with Zenvia.

So I have 2 questions here. The first one is, could you enter in more details and what to expect in terms of an inorganic revenues going forward after the 10% increase we had this quarter? If I may, a second question, I'd like to know more about the cross-selling opportunities that you mentioned and if you could enter in more details into that.

Thank you, Lucas. I'll let Cassio start with your second question on your cross-selling and revenue opportunity, and then I'll come back to the organic versus inorganic growth.

Lucas, thank you for the question. We've been working over the last couple of quarters in integrating our portfolio in part of these operations that we did in terms of earn-outs was actually to accelerate integration so we can benefit of the expansion that we've been doing in terms of technology and solutions to our customers. We're starting to get the first structure of combining products and making a go-to-market of these products combined. So we have customers that have been operating during this quarter on these new go-to-market initiatives that combines different products so they can benefit from this evolution that have been doing. Hence, we expect this in the next couple of quarters to be really important in terms of growth as we see that most of our customers that are using one product are a target or our other products. As we integrate these solutions, we are able to address that big question we have within our customers.

On your question on organic versus inorganic. So let's separate the discussion between SaaS and CPaaS. So the SaaS business is growing at 40%, 45% pro forma pace. So this is all organic. This trend continues to be as true in Q3, and we continue to see that pace going forward. The CPaaS business has been very competitive. The environment has been very aggressive in terms of pricing. This is the reason why in Q3, we decided that we should not go for those specific deals that were with negative margins. The dynamics of this CPaaS market is very flexible and accelerated, meaning our clients can move from us to another player very short and back to us. So essentially, we will keep monitoring how aggressive prices are, and we'll continue pursuing the balance between revenue and profitability. So if we see opportunities to accelerate volumes again at decent profitability, we'll do that. So the organic growth of the CPaaS business will depend essentially on how aggressive the market is. I don't know, Cassio, if you want to add anything on this competitive environment on the CPaaS.

I think you explained most of the dynamics that we are seen in terms of the market. So we see that there is some players in the market subsidizing customers focusing more on top line growth. We don't see that as something that is sustainable in the mid to long term. Therefore, we expect the market to be naturally adjusted to more sustainable pricing for large volumes and CPaaS.

Our next question comes from Vitor Tomita sell-side analyst with Goldman Sachs.

Two quick questions from our side. The first one is if you could give us some more color on how you are seeing the sales cycle amid a more uncertain macroeconomic scenario? Our second question would be, I know you provided already updated full year guidance. From a more qualitative sense, how should we think about seasonality for Zenvia in Q4, given seasonally higher retail volumes and the usual seasonality of CPaaS revenue and margins?

Looking at a more understanding of the seasonality in Q4 and what we are seeing more creative basis. Yes, we do have some Q4 effects of Black Friday and the promotional calendar that do affect some after volume-based revenues. So, we're expecting to have some of that being captured on the fourth quarter. Looking at the macroeconomic environment and how we expect that to affect our projections for 2023. We're seeing that companies are more cautious when they're making their 2023 budgets. Therefore, we expect some deceleration on IT spending growth, which is something that occurs. I mean, we always have growth on IT spending, but we expect that to have a bit of deceleration. That could affect our top line growth next year as there are still lots of uncertainty not only in Brazil, but also all of Latin America and globally. As these turbulence kind of seizes and companies are, again, more safe to apply their resources into technology, we expect this to get back to a normal trend of continuous growth. That comes from the transformation of all these processes and especially on the customer experience where we are leading this space.

[Operator Instructions]

So I'll take a question here in the web. We welcome your focus on profitability, can you detail more what are you doing for 2023 on top of the layoffs to cut costs? I don't know, Cassio, do you want to take that?

Yes, yes, yes, of course. First of all, as we are reducing our structure, we have some costs related directly to that expenses that we can reduce. So that also reflects people expense by systems, for example, license and everything. Also, we are reviewing our budget for travel and consulting and also some expense that we decided as a team that has not been the priority right now and will not impact growth for the year. So, some of those package of expenses and all the work that we are doing with the team with more detailed look in every expense that we have, so we can deliver those additional BRL 30 million reduction for 2023.

Another one here from the web. Can you tell us how is your funding gap looking? What would be the next steps? So let me take that one. As we've been doing since middle to the end of June, beginning of July, we've been assessing and negotiating different instruments. So, the renegotiations of the earn-outs, the payment terms of the earnout for Tier 1 and Movidesk are an example. We're being negotiating directly with banks to extend the maturity, to provide us with some grace period and those things take time. So we will be announcing them as we close those deals. We are confident that all the instruments and tools that we have available to us, and we've been discussing and negotiating will help us navigating through this time of difficulties to find credit. Operator, can you see if you have any more questions?

[Operator Instructions] We're still waiting for questions.

So I'll take another one here. Can you please comment on the growth of new clients in SaaS? How can we see the growth of the new clients looking forward? Cassio, I think you can take that one.

Yes, definitely. We've been working on all the go-to-market for these different solutions that we have, especially as we integrated the finish integration of Sirena, and we just concluded the acceleration of integration that now starts as a project for us to get the benefit of that over Movidesk. We are able then to combine both solutions of attraction, conversion, service and success so we can benefit not only from the stand-alone go-to-market, which is something that we have been capturing over the last couple of quarters, but also to add cross-sell to our customers. That's how we expect them to add this new stream of customer growth, which means selling other products to the same customers. That, of course, creates a continuous cycle of enriching our presence and the same customers. Looking also at the same combination of products, we're able then to serve them for new customers as well as a model. So we can achieve markets that were not able to be served with the stand-alone solutions. Now we open up for customers that require the adoption of more than one of our solutions so they can address their demands or their cases. So we see that even though we are facing an economic environment that is not like the past for growth, we see that there is this continuous demand for our solutions. We see that the continuous flow of new customers and we're able to capture that in terms of customer base growth now combined with integration of resolutions. We expect that to drive a very healthy growth of our SaaS business over the next couple of quarters.

I don't see any further questions here on the system.

Okay. Well, then, let me just check the Q&A session, the column here, hold on just a second. We don't seem to have any more questions. So now I would say that this concludes our Q&A session. Questions and answers are over. I would like now to turn the conference back over to Mr. Cassio Bobsin, for his closing remarks. Mr. Bobsin, please, you have the floor.

Thank you very much for your time to get to know how we've been implementing all this strategy towards profitability. This has been our whole history, it's combining growth with a profitable operation. So we're very proud to get back to that historical trajectory. As we see the next couple of quarters, especially next year, we expect to go even stronger in that profitability trajectory. So we can combine all that strategy that have been working in terms of expansion of the platform with a sustainable company for the future. So thank you very much for your time, and see you in the next one.

Thank you all. The conference has now concluded. Zenvia's IR area is at your disposal to answer any additional questions you might have. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect. Have a nice day, everyone. Thank you so much.