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Freightos Limited
8/21/2023
Welcome to Fritos' Q2 2023 Earnings Conference Call. My name is Eitan Buckman, and I'm the Chief Marketing Officer at Fritos. A press release with detailed financial results for Q2 2023 was released earlier today and is available at fritos.com slash investors. Today I'm joined by T. Schreiber, the CEO of Fritos, and Ron Chaleb, Fritos' CFO. Following the prepared remarks, we will open the call for questions. We are sharing slides during the call, so we recommend using Zoom instead of dialing in by phone. The slides, as well as a recording of this earnings call, will be available on the investor relations section of our website shortly after the call. Please note, we have recently launched a new investor website that also includes the opportunity for a period of complimentary access to Freitas' data product, Freitas Terminal, which you will see later in this call. We encourage everyone to have a look at Freitas.com slash investors. Moreover, please note that on September 7, our CEO, Itzvi, will participate in the TD Cohen Global Transportation Conference in Boston, and on September 12, in the H.C. Wainwright Global Investment Conference in New York City. Please refer to today's press release and our SEC filings for more information on risk factors and other factors which could impact forward-looking statements. Copies of these reports are available online. In discussing the result of our operations, we will be providing and referring to certain non-IFRS financial measures. You can find reconciliations to the most directly comparable IFRS financial measures, along with additional information regarding those non-IFRS financial measures, in the press release on our website at Fredos.com slash investors. The company takes no obligation to update any information discussed in this call at any time. As I mentioned, we recommend using Zoom's desktop or mobile application to submit questions during the course of the call. If you are using the Zoom client, questions can be submitted in writing during the call by using the Q&A feature in Zoom. With that, let me please introduce Dr. Tzvi Schreiber, the CEO of Rados.
Thank you, Eitan, and thanks to everyone who's joined. We're pleased to report continued growth in Q2 and significant progress in our mission to digitalize global freight and to make buying and selling of freight services smoother and more efficient for importers, exporters, carriers, and freight forwarders. Total transactions booked across our platform grew 59% year-on-year in Q2, reaching 239,000 transactions, a run rate of almost a million transactions per year. This growth is driven by a number of factors. The first is persistent use by existing users who place the majority of our bookings. These cohorts of users continue to demonstrate strong retention and growth. In fact, the cohort of users who first placed bookings on FreightOS platforms in early 2021 are now doing well over 10 times more bookings per month. Liquidity growth also comes from the supply side. For example, during Q2, both China Eastern Air and Widero went live, while LATAM, Qatar, Avianca, and Emirates expanded the range of air cargo services offered via WebCargo by Freightos. These ongoing expansions continue to grow platform transactions significantly. For example, one major airline partner who has worked with us for over a year still saw transactions grow by over 25% quarter-on-quarter. The second factor in the growth is unique buyer users. Over 16,400 unique business users booked shipments via the Freitas platforms in the quarter. The growth in demand continues to attract more sellers, who in turn attract new buyers, creating a sustainable flywheel growth dynamic. This network marketplace effect is core to our growth strategy and our ability to capture the vast market opportunity which is still ahead of us. We believe that our ongoing investment in product development is also supporting the expanded usage by existing customers and the attraction of new customers. One example is our newly launched airline dashboard, which provides valuable analytics to carriers, leveraging our vast market data to help them optimize pricing, improve conversion rates, and to help them be more agile in updating their airline cargo services. Another important innovation is interlining booking, where one airline purchases cargo services from another. Interlining is similar to code sharing in passenger travel. It's quite common in cargo, but shockingly inefficient. We recently announced the world's first digital cargo interlining booking on a third-party platform, with a test shipment on WebCargo by Freightos by Qatar Airways Cargo on an ITER Airways flight. These are early days, but we're excited that using our interlining technology to combine cargo airlines in thousands of new permutations will unlock new unique supply for our thousands of freight forwarders globally, improve aircraft capacity utilization, broaden the global coverage available on work cargo, and create all kinds of new businesses opportunities for us and our customers. As you all know, the freight market is going through a significant cyclical downturn this year. Let's take a quick look at the industry conditions that form the backdrop to our results and projections, and we'll do that using data from our own Freightos Terminal product. First, on a broader industry level, ocean freight rates from China to the North American West Coast, tracked by our Bellwether FBX01 index, finally saw a small increase in the first half of August, but are still down more than 90% from their peak. At the same time, rates have begun to rebound since mid-July, up $500 per 40-foot container. As we get closer to the holidays and enter the typical shipping peak season months, volumes to the U.S. are projected by the National Retail Federation to increase by 6% between July and August and be slightly above 2019 levels through the peak season months. Asia to North Europe trade, demand increased 3% for the year from June 22 to this June, though it was down year on year for the entire quarter. Despite sluggish demand, carriers were able to keep rates at about 2019 levels, which are $1,300 to $1,400 per 40-foot container. Moving from ocean freight to air cargo, rates are being pushed down by the combination of lukewarm demand and increasing capacity, and the increased capacity is largely due to passenger travel recovering. Many passenger planes do have cargo capacity as well. A significant rebound is not expected at least until air cargo's typical peak season, which is in Q4. The latest IATA data from June does show volume improves slightly relative to May, but still 3% lower than last year. Air cargo rates have fallen. Our global Freight of Air Index, FAX, is down 55% from its peak. FAX for Asia to Europe is down 48% from a year ago, while Asia to North America rates are 43% lower. And transatlantic price is 44% lower than last August. However, unlike ocean, air cargo rates are still above pre-pandemic levels. All these market conditions were an important factor in our decision to initiate the Organizational Efficiency Plan we announced in July to ensure we're on track to reach profitability on our existing cash reserves. This plan saw us significantly reduce spend while barely compromising our investment in both high growth and profitable offerings. Just to recap, we regrettably reduced headcount by 50 employees, approximately 13% of the team, and focused our growth efforts on the platform business for carriers, freight forwarders, and enterprise importers and exporters, together with ongoing investment in our solutions business, which comprises software and data subscriptions. As I mentioned, global freight rates in Q3 appear to be recovering slightly. Higher freight rates could positively impact our business in two ways. First, in the portion of our business where we're paid a percentage of the transaction rather than a flat fee, higher rates do increase our revenue. Second, higher rates mean more revenue for freight forwarders, which should make it easier for our customers to spend money on new solutions. Having said that, despite the strong booking volumes, we're still in the early days of digitalizing the freight industry, and therefore measure our success by transaction growth more than by platform monetization. To summarize, we believe that we're on track to digitalize one of the largest offline industries in the world. If we look at one of our core lanes, for example, European air cargo exports, while industry volumes in June dropped slightly year over year, our booking volumes on those lanes grew by over 40%. Similarly, June data shows a 6.5% dip in North American export air cargo compared to last year, while RE bookings grew a strong 70% year on year. This shows that demand for our innovative solutions is strong, with the efficiency and transparency we offer winning over cyclical industry conditions. As a pioneer in digital freight platforms, we command a strong market leadership and are well positioned to continue to benefit from this demand. And still, only a fraction of the global freight industry is online, so we're only scratching the surface of this market's potential. The team and I are excited to continue to scale Freightos as a sustainable and capital-efficient business. We have a positive trajectory, outstanding growth signals, and the people and resources we need to deliver. Let me now hand it over to our CFO Ron to discuss our Q2 results and Q3 guidance.
Thanks, Tzvi, and good to see everyone. I'm pleased to review our Q2 23 quarterly results. Revenues for Q2 23 was $5.1 million, down 1.3% compared to Q2 of 22, or 2.6% on a constant currency basis. Our IFRS gross margins remained excellent at 7.3%, compared to 59.6% last year, with the non-IFRS gross margin stable at 65%. Gross margins reflect a mix of our very high solution segment margins mixed with a somewhat lower margin in our platform business segment. Over the long run, we expect gross margins to increase as our transactional platform business matures. Adjusted EBITDA in Q2-23 was negative $5.3 million compared to a negative $3.6 million in Q2-22, primarily due to the cost of being a public company. Perhaps a more meaningful comparison is to Q1-23, our first quarter as a public company, when adjusted EBITDA was negative $5.8 million, as I mentioned in our last quarter. The quarter-over-quarter improvement reflects both the efficiency plan announcement in July, as well as our constant emphasis on efficiency. We believe we will grow transactions across our platforms to between 1 million transactions a year. As industry rates remain low with 5% and 13%, we are pleased to be able to achieve such growth rates on a lean cost structure, particularly in light of the broader market conditions. Combined with our operation efficiency band, as well as our high end stable growth margins, we are anticipating adjusted EBITDA losses of $5.1 to $4.5 million. As industry rates remain low, we anticipate gross bookings value will add up to $146.5 billion and $156.5 billion. Marketplaces thrive on liquidity, so transactions are the north-south of our platform segment. We continue to expand our market share by growing both our supply and demand, while enhancing our underlying platform. The majority of our transactions are still monetized on a fixed-fee basis, which we are increasing gradually as we increase the value delivered to our partners. The fixed-fee structure may reduce our short-term revenues, our growth, but it also ensures that our revenue is less exposed to cross-bordering value fluctuations. In our solution business segment, revenue is typically recurring and high gross margins. Beyond revenue, we've also found that our software and data businesses strongly support acquisition and retention of users responsible for transactions. This powerful strategy is known as SaaS-enabled marketplace. As for our full year guidance, we are reiterating our previous expectations. The figures are presented in the press release and on this slide. Let me pass it back to Zvi for some remark before we take some questions.
Thanks Ram. We're pleased to see indications that the global freight industry may be heading towards a gradual recovery. That said, we're building a digital platform business that can thrive in all market conditions. We continue to invest in research and development and expect to see in the coming months a number of exciting AI-driven features, new carrier launches, more integrations with leading supply chain software providers, and other innovations which will roll out with our carrier, freight forwarder, and importer and exporter partners. Okay. I think Eitan may have dropped off, so I'm going to take some questions. Eitan, are you there? Okay. Good. So a question from Greg here, Greg Pendy. Hi, Greg. Can you help us understand how to think about the new carriers you're adding in 3Q versus Guidance for Transactions? Yes. How much, if any, will new carriers add, or is that mostly growth of existing carriers? So, yeah, I think the answer is that we do see, we didn't have any major new carrier announcements during the summer, but obviously those are lumpy, you know, they happen from time to time. And so it's natural that, you know, you're not going to every quarter have a major carrier joining, but we are in touch with, there are still several major carriers who are not yet on our networks, especially in Asia, but also a couple of others in the West as well. And you can be sure that we're in touch with all the carriers. And I certainly hope that in Q3, we'll get a couple of them over the line and that can help us with a significant jump. So we can still grow. We can grow a little bit without new carriers, but the big jumps do come as new carriers come. And I believe we have a good pipeline of carriers who will be joining us. Good, any other questions? Okay, hold on a sec.
Okay, here we go. There's a question from Jason. Jason, I'm gonna unmute you right now. Your line should be open.
Thanks. Good afternoon, guys. Good morning, everybody else. So two questions. One, the full year guidance implies an acceleration in transactions. Just maybe talk about the risks of this outlook or the puts and takes. So how conservative could this be versus, you know, what are the risks? And then the second question on the solution segment, talk about how you think about, you know, contract terms, your ability to raise prices or upsell more services. Why did revenue growth start to basically slow in the first quarter? And what could be the catalyst to accelerate growth in solutions revenue? And by the way, Jason Helsing from Oppenheimer. Thank you.
Thanks, Jason. Yeah, so look, our ability to predict transactions growth has been pretty good. Of course, like any prediction, it's not perfect, but I think we've got a good record of predicting transactions. We do expect, you know, if I tie it back to Greg's question, we do expect some acceleration, both with new carriers. We had a couple of small carriers, you know, joining in Q2. We hope to have a couple of big carriers during the second half of the year. But also we still do add, you know, we're still adding new freight forwarders every day. The reason why you didn't see more growth in transactions is, A, no major new carriers, but also because the market is down. You know, air volumes are down. If you look at the financial results of the cargo airlines in Q2, you can see the market's down. But we do see that, you know, we hope that the market will stabilize. And in Q4, we hope to see an increase. You know, Q4 is peak season for air. Because by that point, it's too late for retailers to send stuff by ocean. So Q4 tends to be a strong quarter in air. So given peak season ahead of us, given that we're still adding the forwarders, given that we do hope to have a couple more carriers, even bigger carriers during the second half of the year, I think we feel good about our projections for increased transactions in the second half. Does that answer your first question?
Yeah, I mean, it's really more about the fourth quarter, just that the guide implies that actually acceleration in the fourth quarter with the third quarter being the bottom, I think, if you look at number of transactions.
Yeah, so as I said, we do take into account the seasonality and Q4, you know, the majority of our bookings are air. Q4 is normally strong. Plus, you know, plus by then I do hope that we'll have a couple more carriers online. So I think we feel we can't guarantee anything 100%, like any prediction. I think we feel good about our prediction for a strong Q4 in terms of number of transactions. We've got some good confidence in that. Regarding your second question with solutions, yeah, I mean, look, I think we're, as you know, we're selling software to a distressed industry. If you look at the financial results of freight forwarders, ocean carriers, you know, they're down tens of percent year on year. And so we were able to increase prices by a few percent this year, and our retention rate has been quite good. But, yes, our ability to sell big new tickets in this market right now with all our customers hurting, it's been harder than we'd like. Again, it's a cyclical industry. Hopefully next year will be easier. But I feel overall we've done well in a tough, tough market to – maintain our revenue to increase prices a little bit, to retain well over high 90s percent retention of customers. So overall, I think that's going well, and I think we'll be able to grow solutions much more as the market goes into its next upturn. Thank you.
Okay. Our next question is from Brian Dobson of Jardin. Brian, your line is open. Hey, Brian.
Brian, you're muted, I think. Thanks very much. So you had some positive commentary in your release.
That's a great question. We do not have the breakdown by industry because we tend not to – we see the volume. We see how many containers are shipped, how many tons are shipped by air. We don't always know exactly which industry it relates to necessarily. It depends a little bit on the circumstances, but in air, typically a freight forwarder books a whatever it is, five tons, they don't necessarily tell us what's in it, unless it's special handling. But in many cases, we don't actually know. So I cannot give you a breakdown by industry, but I think we're seeing across the board an uptick. I don't want to call it a recovery yet, but an uptick in ocean rates, both Asia, Europe, Asia, North America, which are the two biggest trade lanes. and I believe it's related to the fact that we're starting the ocean peak season. You know, this is the time when retailers are starting to ship stuff out of Asia to have on the shelf for Thanksgiving or Christmas. So I think this is the normal, you know, sort of seasonal uptick, but it's good to see that even in the soft market we are seeing that uptick this year. Some people worry there wouldn't be that. I think also retail spending is, you know, you may know this better than me, Brian, but retail spending is holding up okay. You know, I'm not saying it's great, but consumers, despite inflation and other worries, consumer spending has not slowed down too much or not as much as some people fear. So I think overall there's a feeling in the industry, certainly on the ocean side, that we've seen the worst. Having said that, there are still threats. There's still a backlog of concerns. orders for ships, and there's still planes coming on board. So, you know, there still can be more downward pressure on price, even if the volumes are holding up okay.
Yeah, thanks. That's a very helpful color. And last month, you know, you rolled out digital interlining on wet cargo. How's the early feedback been? Has that been positive?
The early feedback has been excellent. Now, I don't want to mislead you. I mean, we're still just doing test shipments. You know, there's no volume yet to speak of, and that will take many months to get to real volume. But the feedback has been excellent. We have a number of airlines who have already signed agreements or negotiating agreements to join that. I mean, you would not believe, if you're not from the industry, you would not believe how painful it is for airlines right now to do interlining of cargo. I mean, they literally, you know, it's hard to believe. They literally spend a day or two going back and forth by email and phone calls. And actually, there's a lot less interlining happening than should because interlining makes perfect sense. There's no airline who flies everywhere. So interlining should be a very important way of getting cargo, you know, across the globe. And yet it's so painful with the manual process that there is today. So the feedback has been universally excellent. Having said that, things take time with – with airlines. So I think it will take, I think we're on our way now. We've got good momentum, great feedback, but it will take a good while till it really affects our bottom line.
Excellent. Thanks very much for that call. Thanks, Brian.
Okay. Thank you, Brian. Our next caller is George Sutton from Craig Hill. George, your line is opened.
Sorry about that.
So, Zvi, you very quickly went through the new carriers added in the quarter and certain carriers that had expanded. Could you just go through those again real quick?
Yeah, sure. Just pull up my notes so I don't get it wrong. Yeah, so we mentioned two new ones. One is China Eastern, which is a substantial Asian carrier. And even so, we don't yet have the whole network. It's rolling out in stages. But that was actually, I said, maybe I sort of misspoke before because there was one major new airline. Still, the exposure will be gradually. Another one is Widero, which is a smaller regional Scandinavian airline. But we like that as well. I think it's really important to have the niche airlines as well or the niche airlines because that really helps us to, you know, provide coverage. comprehensive coverage, which is very attractive to the freight forwarders. So those are the two new ones. Like I say, we're working hard to bring on some more of the big familiar names that we're missing. We have many of them. We saw expansion in airlines like Qatar, LATAM, Avianca, and Emirates. So Qatar and Emirates reminded us of the two biggest cargo airlines in the world. So both of them expanded the range. I don't have permission to say exact details, but they gave us new countries or new products or bigger weight breaks. So it's very exciting to see that it's going in the right direction, both with new airlines, but also existing airlines. They like us as a channel and then they come back and say, okay, now we want to put more of our network on WebCargo by Freightos, which is always good to see.
So I thought the most meaningful comment you made was that you saw 40% growth in your air cargo exports from Europe at a time that the market fell. And I wondered if you could just talk about the digitization of the market, what you're seeing relative to what the market overall is seeing. And I'm looking at sort of a competitive landscape comment from that.
Yeah. Okay, well, if you're asking in terms of competition, from what we know, of course, you know, our competitors for airline e-bookings are private companies, so we don't see direct, they don't publish numbers. However, we do often get feedback from the airlines if they choose to share with us, you know, sort of how big we are versus other platforms. Sometimes they choose to share that with us, and then we get some good indications. And the indications are really positive. I think we've got a substantial market lead At least from all the data points I have, at least 5x sort of the nearest competitor, which is a very substantial lead. You know, when you're a marketplace, it means we have more liquidity. And that seems to have held up. You know, that seems to be at least the lead seems to be at least as big as it was a year ago. So I'm very, very encouraged that we maintain a very strong leadership position. And, you know, as you know, when you're a marketplace, that's what it's all about. If you've got the liquidity, then that can be very self-sustaining because the buyers and the sellers come to you because that's where all the liquidity is. So, yeah, feeling good about that.
Perfect. Thank you.
Thanks, George.
Okay. Well, seeing there are no more questions here, I'd like to thank everybody for joining. A reminder that a recording of this webcast will be available on our website at fredos.com slash investors. Thank you, everybody, for attending. That concludes this call.