Celebrus Technologies plc

Good afternoon and welcome to the Cerebrus Technologies PLC investor presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in the Sononi mode. Questions are encouraged and can be submitted at any time via the Q&A tab situated on the right hand corner of your screen. Simply type in your questions and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives during the meeting itself. However, the company can review all questions submitted today and publish responses where it's appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I'd like to submit the following poll. And I'd now like to hand you over to Bill Bruno, CEO. Good afternoon, sir.

Good afternoon. And thank you, Lily. I appreciate it. And thank you, everybody, for taking the time today to walk through our financial results from this previous financial year that ended in March. With me, I've got Ash Mehta, our CFO, and my partner in crime. And we'll walk you through an overview of the business, but More importantly, we want to make sure that everyone gets any questions that you might have answered. So please feel free to utilize that Q&A tab. I'm monitoring it right here. So as we get through the content, we'll make sure that we try to get through as many of those questions as we possibly can. So please make use of those. And I think just a starter to kick things off. It was a fantastic year for our business. It marked the end of a lot of the restructuring and transition that we had as a business as we moved to being a pure place software sales business with a primary deployment model of what we call Selliverse Cloud or a single tenant private cloud instance for our customers. But I'd be remiss if I didn't just kick things off. And I hope some of them are listening. But the team that we've built and the team that's with us on this journey put an incredible amount of work into the business in this past year, continued to put work in such that we've started this current financial year with some good momentum. And I'm just very proud of the team and very humbled by how much effort people have put in and the passion that our team is showing for the business and also really appreciative of the support from our investor base as well as Ash and I are nearing three years on the roll now. And it's been a great journey and a very supportive one from the market as well. And we very much appreciate that. But with that, Ash, why don't we jump in, jump over to the operational highlights, if you don't mind. We've got the forward-looking statements, et cetera. I'm sure everybody's comfortable with those, but The main thing for us is the Celibris platform, and I'm not going to go too long-winded on this yet because there are actually a subset of slides in today's deck where I'll walk through what that looks like and what a typical deployment looks like, and we'll share a few stories as well. But we've invested significantly in the Celibris platform. We're very fortunate to have an unbelievable product and engineering team that continues to release two new major updates a year. I'll be very honest with you. A lot of our competitors barely get one update out a year and we get two updates and it's not just surface level updates. It's new features and functionality. In the past year and a half, we've rolled out a significant amount of innovation around what you'd broadly categorize as analytics. We've brought more artificial intelligence, machine learning to the product in the form of our bot detection models and a few others that we've worked on with customers. But it really has been a focus of ours. And a lot of that has been driven by the transformation we've been on as a business. As we decided to stand up a direct sales staff, build a formal global marketing team, and really start to bring Celebris into the spotlight, We knew that the platform was going to be asked to do more by our customers, that we were going to find areas of opportunity to to build not only new features and functionality, but also to grow and upsell our relationships with existing customers. And that really brings me to the key customer wins as we look at our verticals now, which are are much more dispersed. So financial services, insurance, health care in the U.S., travel and hospitality and retail. We now have bellwether clients in each one of those categories. So as an example, four of the top 10 global banks, one of the largest insurers in the US, one of the largest healthcare providers in the US, a top two airline to name a few. And these are really helping us sort of evolve and continue our investment into sales and marketing. We stood up a direct sales staff about a year and a half, almost two years ago. In this previous financial year that we're reporting on today, we stood up a customer success team to help really drive the relationships and the growth and partner with our professional services business to make sure that every customer is happy, feeling like they're getting the support they need from us. And also equally as important, understanding all the things they could be doing with Celebris as we transition to more of a land and expand sales approach. That investment in sales and marketing continues. We've now specialized our sales team by industry vertical. So across the verticals that I mentioned, finance, health care, insurance, etc., We've also brought on a new SVP of global marketing recently to the business as well to help us take that to the next level and really partner with sales on some of the initiatives that we have going. From a partner perspective, partners continue to be important to our business, but they're sell with partners. We have reseller arrangements, but even in those reseller arrangements, we're engaging directly with the partner and ultimately the end client or the prospect to make sure that our platform is being positioned appropriately, that clients are getting value. And just being customer first in our mentality, to be quite frank about it. But those partnerships have kind of taken multiple formats now. The first is the one that we've historically made use of, which are technology partnerships. Places where we land celebrous data to add even more value to the brands that we work with. Partnerships like PyGo. or Teradata or Salesforce or Snowflake or Databricks and several others. The other set of partners are to help us set up for scale, and it's our solution integrator partners. And so these are partners like a Merkle, like an Accenture, and some of our other niche partners in both the US and in Europe. Speaking of people, we also continue to invest heavily into our people and how there's been a significant investment from an HR perspective globally to make sure that we're ultimately building the right environments for our people, supporting them, helping them grow, putting training programs in place to help further develop people's roles within the business or develop them into higher tiers of management. We really want the culture to be empowered, and that's been a goal for Ash, myself, and our leadership team to make sure that everything that we do is one, customer first, and two, designed around creating opportunity for those customers and our people. And I'm happy to report that from a transition restructure perspective, With the name change, that was kind of the icing on the cake, if you will. That was the last step. And so as a business, we've moved into execution. That's not to say that we're not making changes. We're not making adjustments. But for those of you that are Formula One fans, the analogy that I've used is you don't put on a set of tires and they're not automatically in the zone, right? Now we're just making tweaks to the car at this point to make sure that we're maximizing performance globally and that we're taking advantage of the opportunity in front of us. So that's just a bit of a recap. operationally, but Ash, I'll throw it to you to talk through some of the financials.

Yeah, thanks, Bill. So let me go through some of the financial highlights, and then in subsequent slides, I'll go through some of these points in a little bit more detail. But the key highlights, obviously, ARR is a very important metric for us, and that's one that we drive through all of what we do through the organization, whether it's our sales team or our customer success team or our professional services team. That's gone up just under 21% to 20.2 million. In terms of the path that that is on, then three years ago, that number was 10.6 million. So quite significant growth over the last three years. And another submetric we use is what percentage of software revenues is ARR. And that's now gone up to 92% from 89% last year. And the balance of that is the services revenues that we have in terms of service implementations and upgrades. Revenue was up very significantly, up to 32.6 million, and I'll talk about that in a bit more detail later. But within that, a key component is the software revenues. So whilst the revenues as a whole, as a headline revenues, will fluctuate period to period because of hardware sales and revenues, the thing to look at is really the software revenues, and those also were up by a healthy 14.7%. Gross profit was slightly lower than last year, 52.7%, but that's due to the higher level this year of low margin hardware revenues. And so within our revenues, you'll see that there is this hardware. It relates principally to some on-premise installation customers that we have. We have made a lot of effort over the last three years in moving our customers away from on-premise into the cloud. And part of that also has been moving them away from perpetual licenses to term licenses. So this is all part of that change. Now, within that, what we have started disclosing a year ago is the software revenue gross profit. which, again, we think is a more consistent indicator of what's happening in the business. And so that was up from 68.8% last year to 72.2%. And that's a blend, if you like, of a number of different margins across licensed, which is typically 85% margin to 90%. Below that is also support and maintenance and our seller is cloud. And the margin there may be somewhere in the region of 65% to 70% typically, And then the third component of that is services. And typically for a services project, you'll be looking at a 35% to 40% margin. Now, of course, as the business grows, that margin will increase because a large component of our new logos and our upsells is licensed revenues. Point four, the profit before tax was up to 6 million. This is the adjusted profit before tax. The statutory profit before tax was 5.6. The reason we focus on adjusted profit before tax is that this is a better representation of cash generation. So the balancing items between adjusted and the statutory are generally non-cash items like share-based payments, for example. So we find that adjusted profit before tax is a much more useful metric for investors. EPS and dividend. So our adjusted diluted EPS was 10.71%. That's up from 7.74 pence last year. And off that, we're paying a final dividend of 2.23 pence, making a total dividend for the year of 3.15 pence. And that's up 4%. And I'll talk more about that later in the presentation. And finally, we had a very healthy cash balance at the year end of 30.7 million. But within that, there was an element of hardware creditors that we need to pay in our Q1, i.e. that's the April to June quarter. Those were paid off to the tune of about 6 million. So the underlying cash balance was 24.7 million. Hey, Phil.