Cantaloupe, Inc.

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Candlelit Fourth Quarter for Year 2022 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you need to press star 1-1 on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Daryl Dirks, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the Cantaloupe Fourth Quarter Earnings Conference Call. With me on the call this afternoon is John Feeney, Chief Executive Officer, Doug Bergeron, Chairman of the Board, Scott Stewart, Chief Financial Officer, Ravi Venkatesan, Chief Operating Officer. Before we begin today's call, I would like to remind you that all statements included in this call, other than the statements of historical fact, are forward-looking in nature. Actual results could differ materially from those contemplated by the forward-looking statements because of certain factors, including but not limited to business, financial, markets, and economic conditions. A detailed discussion of the risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results and events to differ materially from such forward-looking statements is included in our filings with the SEC and in the press release issued earlier today. Listeners are cautioned to not place undue reliance on any such forward-looking statements which reflect management's views only as of the date they are made. Cantaloupe undertakes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements, whether because of new information, future events, or otherwise. This call will also include a discussion of certain non-GAAP financial measures that we believe are useful for, among other things, evaluating Cantaloupe's operating results. These non-GAAP financial measures are supplemental to and not substitute for GAAP financial measures such as net income or loss. Details of these non-GAAP financial measures, a presentation of the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures, and a reconciliation between these non-GAAP financial measures as well as the most comparable GAAP financial measures can be found in our press release issue this afternoon, which has been posted on the investor relations section of our website at www.cantelope.com. And with that, I would like to turn the call over to Sean.

Thank you, Dara. Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us today. For the past two years, we have been working on a fundamental transformation of the company, and today I am excited to report strong results for Q4 and for FY 2022, showing the continued momentum behind our strategy. First, on Q4, our revenue during the quarter was $58 million, up 18% over last year's fourth quarter. This marks an all-time high for total quarterly revenue and is the fifth successive quarter where we posted double-digit revenue growth. The strong finish to the year was driven by 17% growth in combined transaction and subscription revenue and equipment revenue growth of 22%. During the quarter, we also grew active customers by 21% and active devices by 4%. Our adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was $2 million compared to $5 million in the same quarter of the prior year. As a reminder, prior year benefited from a $2.9 million adjustment to our sales tax reserve due to a state law change. Now, a few highlights from our annual results. For the full fiscal year, we reported a 23% increase in revenue to $205 million, also a new company record. and delivering on the initial guidance we provided last September, despite a slowdown in transactions during the winter months due to the resurgence in COVID-19. Our adjusted EBITDA was $9.9 million for the year, up 30% over last year's $7.6 million, again delivering on the initial guidance. This was driven by our strong revenue growth and disciplined expense management. We also managed our inventory and supply chain aggressively and effectively throughout the year. We utilized our strong balance sheet to build up our inventory and ensure we could meet the demand of our large and growing customer base, particularly during the 4G and EMV hardware upgrade cycle. And with that, I'd like to turn the call over to our chairman, Doug Bergeron, for a few words. Doug?

Thanks, Sean. I'd like to take this opportunity to congratulate Sean and the senior leadership team on the quarter and on the fiscal year results. Sean has played a pivotal role at Cantaloupe, delivering consistent growth and profitability over the last two years. I feel more confident than ever in the strength of the company's foundation and the talent we've been able to recruit, positioning us for long-term growth. Today, we are announcing that Sean will retire at the end of September. Then as part of our planned succession, our COO Ravi Venkatesan will take on the CEO role on October the 1st. Ravi will also be appointed to the board of directors at that time, replacing Sean. During his time as COO, Ravi developed a compelling vision for growth and launched a number of new products, proving that he is the right person to lead Cantaloupe as we look to expand internationally into adjacent markets. He is known to many of our investors, but if you have not yet interacted with him, you'll get a chance to meet him as well as other members of our leadership team in person at an investor day, which the company will host in New York city on December 12th. And with that, I'd like to turn the call over to Robbie. Robbie.

Thank you, Doug. And thank you, Sean. I'm excited and humbled by the opportunity to lead this great company through the next phase of growth and development. It's been an incredible turnaround under Sean's leadership over the last two years, and I'm very grateful for the mentoring and thoughtful preparation for this role that I've received from Sean. The self-service economy is still at an early stage. I'm very excited about Cantaloupe's capabilities and our market position that allow us to capitalize on secular tailwinds in this space. We have worked with the board, external partners, and the leadership team on our longer-term growth strategy. You will hear more at our investor day that Doug mentioned on December 12th, where we will take investors through this multi-year strategic plan in more detail. The last year was one of reigniting innovation, which led us to launching a number of new products. Just to name a few, we launched the Engage and Engage Combo interactive devices that combine card reader functionality and telemetry into a single unit with a full-touch interactive screen. We have a rich roadmap of features that build upon the interactive capabilities and will launch in the coming quarters and years. We had already shipped over 43,000 of these devices in fiscal year 2022, and we see continued momentum this year. We enhanced SeedSync, an innovative tool that customers are capitalizing on to accelerate the rollout of seed across their operations. For example, Prestige, a large operator, was able to rapidly onboard 5,000 vending machines after an acquisition, giving them instant enterprise-wide visibility. We are pleased with the reception to our new Catalog One platform, a first-of-its-kind bundled subscription model that enables retailers to future-proof their business, eliminate capital expenditures on new hardware, and reduce the risk of hardware obsolescence with zero upfront purchases. This has allowed us to deepen our reach within the SMB market where upfront capital is a greater consideration in purchase decisions. Our remote price chain solution, launched at the NAMA industry conference in April, provides customers the ability to manage pricing on demand, react to supplier increases, and merchandise dynamically. One of our clients, Continental Services, noted that at our largest college campus, it would take three weeks to change prices. Now it takes three days. In summary, The results of our innovative and flexible product launches and improvements to the Cantaloupe platform are enabling more partners to capitalize on the incredible opportunities in the self-service economy. Moving to sales, we've added additional resources to bolster our leadership position in the US, which has shown dividends. In the most recent quarter, we were able to expand our enterprise-level relationships with Continental Services Sodexo's InReach and Pepsi Bottling Ventures, who expanded the range of products and services that they purchased from Catalope, including our secure 4G EMV-compliant payment systems, our transaction processing services, as well as our Seed cloud software platform. Our Lead with Seed strategy, selling our full suite of cloud software solutions, helps us to create more meaningful relationships with customers who rely upon seed for managing critical areas of their business operations. Another recent seed new customer win is essentially organic vending, who have gone all in with Cantaloupe, including add-ons for hybrid and remote price change. We are also seeing positive momentum with win-backs. For example, Allison Industries was a longtime seed customer who had left for a competitive solution. Within 12 months, they returned to Cantaloupe's seed platform and enrolled 1,100 of their connections onto our Cantaloupe One bundled subscription service. With the addition of Jeff Dumbrell as our CRO, we've expanded our distribution channels to accelerate growth. For example, we've renewed our contract with the Wittern Group, a key Cantaloupe reseller, who's recently ordered thousands of our connected devices. Beyond new products and adding to our sales and service teams, we continue to focus on driving long-term operating leverage. And during the year, we invested further in improving the GNA side of our business, as well as our internal systems. In July, we migrated both our payments and IoT platforms to the Amazon Web Services Cloud. This migration gives our network best-in-class stability and reliability and an easier path to replication in international markets. In addition, we've completed our conversion to Fiserv, which will also deliver future cost savings. We continue to strengthen our leadership team, and I'm happy to announce that Gaurav Singhal will join Cantaloupe as its new Chief Technology Officer on September 12th. Gaurav joins Cantaloupe from the Georgia Lottery Corporation, where he was the executive vice president and CIO responsible for a comprehensive digital transformation. His other experiences include serving as the CPO for the last mile at XPO Logistics, a vice president of technology at Goldman Sachs, and a former founder of a technology startup. Gaurav has extensive experience scaling technology companies and driving innovation. Singhal graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology at Delhi with a degree in chemical engineering and a master's in computer science from the University of Illinois, Chicago. I'll now turn it over to Scott to review the financials and our outlook. Scott? Thanks, Ravi.

During the fourth quarter, as Sean mentioned, we achieved another quarterly revenue record Q4 FY22 revenue was $58 million, an increase of 18% year-over-year. This was driven by subscription and transaction fees of $44.9 million and equipment sales of $13.1 million. Our combined transaction and subscription revenue grew 17% and our equipment revenue grew 22% compared to the same quarter and prior period. This also marks our fifth consecutive record high for quarterly transaction revenue and total dollar value of transactions on our platform. Total gross margin for the quarter was 29.5%, slightly down from 30.2% in prior year's fiscal fourth quarter due to revenue mix. Subscription and transaction revenue margin was 39.5% flat year over year, while equipment revenue margin was negative 4.6% in Q4 22 compared to a negative 2.3% in the prior year. We have continued to improve gross margins on transaction revenue, which is now in the mid-teams. Total operating expense of the fourth quarter of 2022 was $19.2 million, compared to $15.2 million in Q4 FY21. Recall that in fourth quarter of 21, reported OPX benefited from a one-time sales tax accrual reduction of $2.9 million due to the state law change. Net loss applicable to common shares for the fourth quarter was $2.1 million, or $0.03 per share, compared to net income of $2.7 million, or $0.04 per share in the prior period. Adjusted EBITDA was $2 million in the fourth quarter compared to $5 million in the prior year period. As previously mentioned, the prior year benefited from a $2.9 million adjustment to our sales tax reserve. Relating to our balance sheet and liquidity, we ended the fourth quarter with cash and cash equivalents of $68 million. The sequential decrease is due to increase in inventory on hand by $14 million. Early in the year, we made a conscious effort to increase our inventory to safeguard our customers. This gave us a competitive advantage at a time when supply chain issues were affecting our competitors' ability to service customers. Now turning to 2023 guidance. Based on what we see today, we expect the following. Total revenue to be between $225 million and $235 million, representing growth of 10% to 15%. The combination of transaction subscription revenue will be between $191 million and $198 million, representing growth of 13% to 17%. Total U.S. gap net income to be between $1 million and $5 million. Total adjusted EBITDA to be between $12 million and $17 million. Total operating cash flow to be between $10 million and $15 million. We expect equipment revenue to be relatively flat year over year, but skewed to the first half of the fiscal year as we conclude the 3G and EMV upgrade cycle. Conversely, we expect transaction and subscription revenue to ramp sequentially throughout the year. With that, I'm now turning the call over to the operator for Q&A. Operator?

Thank you. As a reminder, to ask a question, you need to press star 1-1 on your telephone. Once again, that's star 1-1. Please stand by. We'll compile the Q&A roster.

Our first question will come from the line of Chris Kennedy from William Blair.

Your line is open.

Hey, good afternoon and thank you for taking the question. Doug, can you talk about, I remember the first call you were on, you talked about, you know, long-term confidence in the business growing at least 30% and generating at least 20% operating margins. Can you just give your updated thoughts on those long-term objectives?

Yeah. I mean, Rome wasn't built in a day, but Ravi pointed out to the fact that a lot of the business now is positioned to get great operating leverage. I see, you know, I'm the chairman, I'm the CEO, but I see transaction and recurring software to be safely growing in the mid-teens. If we get more traction in new geographies, which we're working diligently on, they'll be upside to that. Equipment growth, as we said, should be flat. That's the razor and razor blade model. You need to not only get those systems out there and upgraded and new territory established in order to sell the software stack that we have and the transaction stack that we have on top of them. But I think the business is positioned for growth. We'll continue to invest in great sales and marketing talent, great product innovation, et cetera. And I don't know what the margin structure looks like. We're positioned for profitability, more profitability next year than this year. This year was more than last year. So, I mean, depending on how long you want to plot the curve, I see no reason why profitability shouldn't continue to go up over time.

Great. Thank you. And then Ravi, if you could just congrats on the new role. Can you just kind of talk about your key priorities as you enter the new position? Thanks a lot, guys.

Thank you, Chris. And good question there. Look, the priorities have been established over the last year, I would say. And as I mentioned, we worked with the board and Sean and other external partners on a very robust strategic plan with a much longer term outlook. So the priorities are going to be to start executing the discipline on that and make sure that the execution matches up to the strategy, in which case there's a lot of value to unlock.

Okay. Thank you. Thank you. One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from Mike Lattimore from Northland Capital. Your line is open.

All right, thanks, Dan. Congratulations, Ravi and Sean, for your new roles. So I guess maybe, Ravi, on the subscription business here, what do you see as the main drivers of subscription kind of growth this year? I know there's several, but maybe what would be the top two or three, let's say?

Again, great question, Mike, and always a pleasure to hear from you. Look, the subscription growth, as Doug pointed out, it's a little bit of the razor and razor blade model, so the more we get our connections out there, that naturally drives subscription growth in terms of software that we layer on top of that. In addition, we've also diversified the range of add-ons with the remote price change product, the artificial intelligence-based merchandising product, and we have a number of those in the pipeline. As we layer on more of those, what you'll see is subscription growth is driven by two different levers. One is continued connection growth, and the second is increased revenue per connection because we are now putting more add-ons on top of each connection.

And then, Ravi, I'll just add to that. Mike, I'll just add to that in a little bit. So we're also expecting to see a lot of growth out of our Cantaloupe One program as well. We've seen really good results. And we expect that's going to continue through the year.

Okay, very good. And then I think you said you have all your customers migrated to Fiserv now. I guess, you know, that should help gross margin, I imagine. But how should we think about subscription and transaction gross margin this year?

Yeah, so overall, we mentioned first on third quarter that we're in the mid-teens for the gross margin on transaction revenue. We expect that to continue. Overall, we are seeing savings from the migration that we had with Pfizer. We've also worked on some other cost saving measures, such as renegotiating some of our contracts to get some additional incentives. So we expect that to maintain within the mid-teens, even maybe improve a little bit more as we go through the year. And then on the subscription side, Yeah, we've always said we're in the 80 to 85%, the typical software margins. We anticipate that to remain as well.

And I would add as a reminder that on the transaction side, on the one hand, we are continuing to expand that gross margin. On the other hand, that margin drops directly to the bottom line. There is no incremental GNA associated with it. So it's pretty attractive revenue and margin for us as a business.

Yeah, okay, makes sense.

Great, thank you.

Thank you. And as a reminder, that's star 1-1 for any questions. One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from Gary Prestapino from Barrington. Your line is open.

Hey, Joe. Good afternoon, everyone. A couple of questions here. It looks like the equipment sales are not going to be as dramatic as last year, but as you come out of this 4G upgrade, you said the back half of the year, it'll be, I think, a little flattish. Will you still have to be selling this equipment at a negative margin, given that the upgrade is over at this point?

Gary, as we get past the upgrade, we think margins will come back up, and that... that imperative of having to sell them at break-even or negative margins should no longer be there. Now, as we go into international geographies and into new adjacent markets, there are always opportunities where strategically we may do bigger deals where we subsidize that margin a little bit to get the recurring revenue on the back side of that.

Okay. And then with the Cantaloupe One platform, if I remember correctly, you will actually own the device on your balance sheet. Is that correct? That is correct. Okay, you're not selling this device and then selling it to a third party. So about how much are you guys, and you don't have to give me an exact number, but how much on a cost basis is it costing you for these devices to put out there?

Gary, we don't disclose those numbers for competitive reasons. But, I mean, you kind of piece it together based on the margins we've had, et cetera. But there is a lot of sensitivity around those numbers with respect to the situation, both the supply chain situation as well as competitive situation.

Okay. I'm just trying to get an idea of what, you know, your outlay on a capital basis is going to be as you grow this product.

Gary, just to jump in real quick, just to let you know, we do make a lot better margins on the cantaloupe one program, so I want to be very clear on that. So margins for the year on equipment were around negative three and a half percent, but with the cantaloupe one, they're a lot more on the positive side.

Okay, better margins. That's great. And then lastly, I want to ask, your customer counts look like they were up 21% year over year. Your active devices were only up 4%. So I guess, did you sign a whole bunch of new customers in Q4 or the back half of the year that do not have active devices out there, or are you just signing a bunch of smaller customers?

Now, Gary, what happens there is as we navigate the upgrade cycle, the 3G and the EMV upgrade cycle, if we replace existing equipment, that doesn't increase our active device numbers, right? And as we start getting out of that, you'll see it, you know, skew much more towards the active devices keeping pace. The good news side of the story is that in spite of moderate growth in active devices, there is a more significant growth on the revenue year over year, as well as the active customers, and that should tell you that we are The strategy of layering add-ons is starting to be successful, so we are able to derive more revenue per connection.

And then Gary, I'll also point out that our sales to the SMB market are at higher markets as well. Okay.

Thank you so much.

Thank you. And I'm not showing any further questions in the queue. I'd like to just call back over to Rob for his remarks.

Thank you, operator. I would once again like to thank Sean for his contribution and just say how excited I'm about the opportunity to lead Cantaloupe. We look forward to speaking to many of you over the next few weeks and then reporting our first quarter results in November. I hope to meet many of you at our investor day on December 12th, where we will review our growth strategy and longer-term goals in more detail. Have a great evening.

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect. Everyone have a great day.