Edgio, Inc.

Q2 2023 Earnings Conference Call

9/12/2023

spk04: Good afternoon. My name is Krista and I'll be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the EDUGO 2023 earnings call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. And if you would like to withdraw your question, please press star 1. Thank you. I will now turn your conference over to Sidmeet Sinha, Vice President of Investor Relations. You may begin your conference.
spk02: Good afternoon.
spk09: Thank you for joining the AGO Second Quarter 2023 Financial Results Conference Call. This call is being recorded today, September 12, 2023, and will be archived on our website for approximately 10 days. A copy of our Form 10Q for the second quarter, along with today's earnings press release, can be found in the investor relations section of our website. Please note that today's comments include forward-looking statements regarding future events and financial performance, including statements regarding guidance for the 2023 fiscal year. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties and involve a number of factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. The factors include any impact from macroeconomic trends, the integration of any acquisitions, and any impact from geopolitical developments. Please see the forward-looking statement disclaimer on the company's earnings press release issued after the close of market today, as well as the sections entitled, This Factors Included in Egeo's Filings with the SEC, including an annual report on Form 10-K and quarterly reports on Form 10-Q. Undue reliance should not be placed on forward-looking statements which speak only as of the date they are made. AGO disclaims any obligation to update these statements to reflect new information, future events, or circumstances, except as required by law. During the course of today's call, we will be referencing certain non-GAAP financial measures. The GAAP financial measures most directly comparable to each non-GAAP financial measure used or discussed and a reconciliation of the differences between such measures are provided in the earnings release in our Investor Relations section of our website. These non-GAAP financial measures are not intended to be a substitute for our GAAP financial results. I will now turn the call over to Bob Lyons, President and CEO.
spk02: Bob, the floor is yours.
spk03: Thank you, Sumit. Good afternoon and welcome to our earnings call for the second quarter of 2023. This quarterly report and the associated 10Q filing addresses the outstanding compliance issues with applicable NASDAQ listing rules. With this filing, we can now put the restatement and compliance issues behind us. Throughout this entire process, we have continued to be laser-focused on executing our strategy, and customer feedback continues to show that Egeo is the preferred partner for creating more valuable connected digital experiences. With each passing month, we are adding new customers, and seeing existing ones reaffirming their trust in the value that Egeo brings to their organizations. We have built a very capable leadership team who recognizes the work in front of us, but is equally motivated by the opportunity available to us. We have accumulated several industry awards in recent quarters from industry analysts and experts for innovative solutions. We have also seen a growing number of notable customer wins, many of whom switched to us from competitors. Let me share the operating highlights that we believe will enable us to continue building on and capitalizing from this momentum. First, the successful implementation of a client success team, the redesign of our commercial teams, and the improvement of our sales enablement motions has, in fact, begun to demonstrate that we have turned the corner. Churn in our acquired applications business has been reduced to rates in line with industry norms, and we expect expansion revenue to exceed churn into the back half of the year for the first time since the acquisitions. Our qualified pipeline continues to grow, and more importantly, we are converting more of that pipeline to bookings at higher rates than we have historically. By the end of the third quarter, we will have had three sequential quarters of bookings growth. With our commercial motions now positioned for success, we believe that momentum is building into the next year. Second, we continue to aggressively manage costs. We remain committed to our plans of reducing run rate operating costs by $85 to $90 million by year end. In the second quarter, we reduced our cash operating expense by 24% compared to the fourth quarter of 2022 and are on track to successfully complete our cost roadmap for this year. Third, our product strategy continues to establish Egeo as a leading edge-enabled solution provider in applications, security, and streaming. The number of awards received after releasing applications version 7 validates our strategy of having best-in-class products powered by our globally scaled edge network protected with native enterprise class security, and delivered with deep expertise. We have established Egeo as a credible and recognized enterprise security solution for high-stake web properties. We continue to have the most complete suite of streaming capabilities in the industry. All of this builds on the strategy that we outlined in August of 2021, a strategy that pivots us away from a heavy reliance on low margin usage-based revenue to profitable and growing edge-enabled solutions with a revenue profile that is both recurring and high margin. We remain committed to aggressively improving profitability this year while laying the foundation for growth next year. We believe that 2023 will prove to be an inflection point for the company, and we are happy to have the distractions behind us. Let me take a few minutes to unpack each of these important milestones in more detail. The first key takeaway, we have now stabilized revenue with clear support for revenue expansion in 2024. we have made significant progress reducing previously discussed customer churn in our acquired applications business. Churn in the most recent quarter was approximately 1% as compared to 6% in the first quarter and 4% in the fourth quarter of last year. This is a significant improvement in two quarters and is now in line with industry norms. Our renewal bookings continue to grow and are up double digits quarter to date versus the second quarter. We believe that our progress in reducing churn and improving renewals will support expansion revenue outpacing churn in the back half of this year for the first time since the close of the acquisition. Our rebuilt marketing organization has implemented the first phase of our demand gen plans. This has resulted in meaningful growth in our qualified pipeline and an improvement to our first 60-day conversion rate by more than five times from 2% to more than 10%, now in line with industry norms. This speaks to improvements in both rate of growth and the quality of our pipeline going into 2024. Todd Hinders joined Egeo as Chief Revenue Officer during the second quarter. Todd promptly organized the commercial teams into a more productive territory model and implemented a number of sales enablement improvements. Sales productivity has improved by four times year over year. Our customer acquisition cost to bookings ratio is quickly trending to a one-to-one ratio and more in line with SAS industry norms. As of the end of August, bookings for application solutions have more than doubled from the first quarter and are already ahead of second quarter levels with a month to go. This improvement has been broad-based across new logos and renewals. As uncertainty surrounding our statement wanes, we expect continued improvements in the growth of qualified pipeline, the conversion rates of that pipeline, and subsequent bookings. In the quarter, we continued to expand our routes to market with the expansion of our relationship with AWS as a channel partner. We anticipate this partnership will prove to be a meaningful contributor to our channel-enabled growth objectives. We will continue to explore opportunities to add additional high-quality partners throughout the balance of this year and into next. Key performance indicators for our commercial motion suggest we are, in fact, laying a strong foundation for growth. Our qualified pipeline is growing faster and with improved quality. Our sales productivity is improving, and we continue to add new high-quality routes to market. While there is plenty of additional work to do, We expect the second half of 2023 to demonstrate slightly positive net revenue retention and sequential growth with continued improvements into 2024. The second key takeaway, we continue to execute as planned on our profitability and positive free cash flow objectives. We continue to execute on our plans to achieve between $85 and $90 million of run rate cost reductions by year end. We remain committed to that number and have a solid roadmap beyond that number to continuously improve profitability well into 2024. We have largely completed implementation of our operating model synergies post acquisition resulting in cash operating expenses declining by 24% in the first six months of this year. We continue to focus on improving our unit economics with detailed plans that reduce our hosting bandwidth and pairing costs. Well, we have had success this year, we are in the early stages of what will prove to be multiple quarters of notable improvements. Leveraging our open edge platform, we are becoming more asset light and have reduced capital intensity for more than 10% of sales in 2022 to under 3% in 2023 at the midpoint of guidance. We will remain focused on becoming a more asset light company as we continue to expand our high margin edge software and security applications business. We have executed and will continue to execute well against our cost savings initiatives. Progress should accelerate in the back half of the year to reach adjusted EBITDA break even in the fourth quarter. With anticipated sequential revenue growth, gross margin expansion, and additional cost savings, we expect to deliver substantial year-over-year improvements in adjusted EBITDA and free cash flow in 2024. The third key takeaway, we continue to make meaningful progress transforming our company from a usage-based CDN utility to an edge-enabled ARR-based technology solutions company. Let me start by highlighting some of the exciting progress we have made with our applications, security, and media solutions. In the second quarter, we released our award-winning applications version 7 suite. This releases a fully integrated workflow and orchestration technology stack that enables companies with high-stake web properties to deliver unmatched business outcomes with sub-second speed, lower operating costs, and meaningfully better security. Our seamlessly integrated next-generation architecture, powered by our globally scaled edge platform, and protected by our native enterprise class security capabilities, removes the latency, cost, and complexity associated with traditional point solutions. Egeo now enables unmatched monetization, operating costs, and security for our customers. In 2021, we unabashedly stated that we would have a much more compelling cybersecurity story to tell. We continue to build on that promise and can now say that Egeo is recognized as a compelling security company for enterprises. In Q1, we launched our advanced bot management solution, which was well-received and resulted in double-digit attached rates for trials across our existing customer base. More importantly, in Q2, we validated that trials could successfully be converted into contracted and paying customers. We recently released our API security solution, which leverages machine learning to inspect both application traffic patterns and content to ensure API endpoints are discovered, managed, and secured. Having exceptional security operations is increasingly critical as Egeo becomes a more essential partner to protect our customers' critical applications. We have recently expanded our security operations center with new leadership and services that we bundle with our security products. Best-in-class products enabled with expert services ensure Egeo can deliver unmatched protection to our customers. Independent research firms continue to recognize Egeo with awards and strong published rankings. We were recognized by GigaOM as leader in its recent edge platform radar report. Frost and Sullivan awarded Egeo the Best Practices Competitive Strategy Leadership Award, and Egeo won a coveted Global Input Security Award at the RSA Conference early in the quarter. Our applications version 7 suite directly enabled a competitive takeout from a large North American pet supply retailer who chose Egeo over the incumbent competitors. Egeo's advanced architecture was able to achieve performance levels within a very short time that were not attainable under existing architecture. Other notable wins include a 15,000 employee safety and security solutions in Europe, a leading Asian Webtoon company, and a global consumer product brand. Applications version 7 also resulted in the expansion of our solution within the world's largest AI semiconductor company. Our advanced bot security features drove a key renewal with an Asian airline, an upsell with a regional bank, and a new contract with a large hardware company. Building on this success, we will soon be releasing a more advanced version of our Edge functions, which empowers developers to better personalize content, improve performance, and have more control over the user experience at the Edge. Our media solutions continue to offer the most complete suite of streaming capabilities in the industry. Today, the product is difficult to consume by other than the largest media companies, so we are addressing that. In the coming weeks, we will be making improvements that will simplify the buying experience, making the product more accessible to the top 2,000 media streaming companies. This will include a more modular design so companies can acquire what they need, a robust set of APIs for easy integration, an expanded ecosystem of pre-built third-party integrations, and a more simplified pricing model. In fact, yesterday we announced an alliance with other leading streaming vendors to help companies manage the complexity of the entire streaming workflow. As part of this partnership, Egeo will act as the primary solutions provider, streamlining the entire workflow for customers. We are excited to be able to offer out-of-the-box complete enterprise-class streaming capabilities to a broader market. We expect our delivery business to remain flattish for the foreseeable future. We have seen further industry consolidation, a slowdown in subscription rates, and lower post-COVID volume growth, but have also seen pricing trends begin to stabilize. We are managing this business to prioritize profitability and return on invested capital. Our commitment to reduce our asset and capital intensity by leveraging our open product coupled with a roadmap to improve unit economics will support improved profitability for our delivery business in 2024. In summary, with the restatement and associated reporting requirements behind us, our full attention is on executing the transition plan initially articulated in 2021. We continue to make notable progress on that plan, and believe we have put the building blocks in place for multiple years of profitable growth. Our leading indicators suggest we are on the right track and have established a foundation for profitability improvement and growth in 2024. Now I will turn the call over to Stephen to discuss second quarter results. Stephen?
spk06: Thank you, Bob. Revenues for the second quarter of 2023 were stronger than expected at $95.8 million, up 50.6% from the second quarter of 2022. due to the inclusion of the Edgecast acquisition completed on June 15th, 2022. We saw a sequential decline of 6.1% driven by normal summer seasonality and previously communicated churn, primarily associated with the Edgecast business. We expect second quarter revenue to be the low point for the year as revitalized sales and commercial motions are reducing churn, driving new product adoption, and increasing conversion of our growing qualified pipeline. Moving to gross margin, cash gross margin, which excludes the impact from stock-based compensation, acquisition-related expenses, and depreciation was 30.8%, down 390 basis points sequentially. Cash gross margin was impacted by the seasonal decline in traffic consistent with having a high fixed cost structure partially offset by savings from previously announced cost containment efforts. Turning to operating expenses, cash operating expenses excluding share-based compensation, restructuring charges, acquisition and legal-related charges, depreciation and amortization were $42.9 million, or 44.8% of revenue, down from $49.7 million, or 48.8% in the first quarter of 2023. We continue to make significant progress in our cost reduction initiative. We are executing well on our planned acquisition synergies and operational efficiency programs while investing in new product introductions and revitalized sales and marketing motions, as Bob has highlighted earlier. Cash R&D expenses decreased by $1.4 million sequentially to $16.7 million, approximately 17.4% of revenue, from $18.1 million, or 17.8% of revenue, due to the savings from previously announced cost containment efforts. Cash sales and marketing expenses decreased $3.2 million, sequentially to $15.7 million, or 16.4% of revenue, from $19 million, or 18.6% of revenue, due to the savings from previously announced cost containment efforts, reduction in variable compensation, and discretionary spend. Cash G&A expense decreased by $2.2 million sequentially to $10.5 million or 10.9% of revenue from $12.7 million or 12.4% of revenues due to savings from previously announced cost containment efforts, as well as the conclusion of the transition services agreement for the edge calf acquisition and reduction in other discretionary expenses. Share-based compensation included in operating expenses was $3 million below the first quarter at $4.5 million. Restructuring charges were $3.3 million compared to a half a million dollars for the first quarter of 2023. Acquisition and related charges included in COGS and operating expenses in connection with the edge class transaction were approximately $1 million compared to $1.2 million for the first quarter. Adjusted EBITDA for the second quarter of 2023 was a loss of $13.4 million compared to a loss of $14.4 million in the first quarter of 2023 due to continuous execution and cost-saving initiatives, which have resulted in across-the-board sequential declines in all operating expense line items. Moving to the balance sheet and cash flow, cash and cash equivalents and marketable securities totaled $36.2 million, a decrease of $12 million from the first quarter of 2023. We've been very disciplined about our cash management and expect to maintain a similar level of cash balance in the second half of the year. First half 2023 capital expenditure, net of payments from ISPs was $2.6 million, or 1.3% of revenues. Over the last nine months, we have initiated tighter CapEx spending controls, which have resulted in CapEx significantly below historical levels. DSO for the second quarter was 60 days, 13 days lower than the first quarter, as we continue to accelerate our efforts integrating EdgeCast customers and streamlining the collections process. Now moving to guidance. Strong product execution and improved go-to-market motions have helped overcome the continued softness in the macro environment. Our broad product portfolio and the value proposition of our solutions are resonating with customers, and we are seeing improvements in our leading indicators. We remain focused on executing on cost-saving opportunities and are on track to deliver the $85 to $90 million of run rate savings by year-end. For now, we are reaffirming our guidance for the year with revenue range of between $392 to $398 million, which implies a growth of 16 to 18 percent, adjusted EBITDA range of between negative $37 million to negative $31 million, and capital expenditure in the range of $10 million to $13 million. This implies business capex as a percent of revenue of about 3% to 3.5%. We expect payments from ISPs of between $5 to $10 million. Now, let me provide you more context around our guidance. Based on seasonality, reduction in churn, and improvements in bookings, we expect a flat to slight uptick in revenue sequentially in the third quarter of 2023, followed by a sequential increase in the fourth quarter. Our pro forma second half revenue implies a meaningful improvement year over year revenue trajectory versus the first half. We expect cash gross margin to start improving sequentially consistent with the revenue trajectory with additional benefits from cost savings and synergies. The first quarter was the bottom for adjusted EBITDA and we expect to break even in the fourth quarter. To put it into perspective, midpoint of our guidance implies adjusted EBITDA loss in the second half to be about $6 million versus a loss of approximately $28 million in the first half of the year. Our cash balance at the end of the second quarter was $36.2 million. We expect our cash levels to be similar in the second half of 2023 and remain undrawn on our line of credit. In summary, I want to reiterate our key financial priorities. Our focus is on revenue stabilization in 2023 and return to revenue growth in 2024, driven by our reduced churn, the new go-to-market initiatives, new product solutions, and by leveraging our reconfigured channel and direct sales team. We've made great progress in right-sizing our cost structure to align with revenue growth assumptions. We expect our cost savings initiative to continue through the rest of this year and into next year, focusing on improving unit economics through managing client profitability and driving efficiency in our network and operating model. For this year, we remain focused on capacity optimization, tools rationalization, CapEx, and organizational productivity initiatives. We continue to explore additional cost-saving opportunities as we drive more operational efficiency and optimization of our network, which would be incremental to the $85 to $90 million run rate savings we have highlighted. The combination of expected revenue growth and cost-saving initiatives should result in 2024 being a year of profitable growth. With that, I'll turn the call back to Bob for some closing remarks. Bob?
spk02: Thank you, Stephen.
spk03: We are well on our way to transforming Egeo, my first generation CDN platform that historically served commodity like utility services into a third generation edge solutions platform that helps customers manage high stakes digital properties at the edge with better monetization, efficiency and security. We continue to develop holistic solutions and software capable of serving mission critical workloads for many of the largest blue chip companies in the world. Some of the largest social networks, FinTech, streaming companies, and even the largest AI semiconductor company and trust Egeo for solutions that drive business outcomes unmatched elsewhere. Having extended the reach of our solutions enables us to expand revenue and our routes to market, all while aggressively managing our cost structure and improving profitability. As we continue with our transformation process, we are increasingly better positioned to leverage what we have created and are focused on profitable revenue growth in 2024 and beyond. Stephen and I look forward to being actively engaged with our investor community again. We will be participating at the Lake Street Conference in New York City this week and will be meeting with investors in other cities throughout the rest of the year. We have also posted video content delivered from our leadership team that helps further unpack where we started, where we are, and where we are going. You can find it on the homepage of our website at edg.io in the About section. Please take a few minutes to review and gain a deeper understanding of our strategy, progress, and plans. We will continue to add content to our website for you throughout the balance of this year. Thank you for your patience while we continue to work on building what we believe is uniquely possible for us.
spk02: With that operator, please open up the lines for the question and answer session.
spk04: If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. We'll pause for a moment to compile the Q&A roster. Your first question comes from the line of Eric Martinuzzi from Lake Street. Please go ahead.
spk11: First off, congratulations on getting the SEC filings up to date. I know that was a project that took a lot longer than expected, but it's good to have it in the rearview mirror. With that, I wanted to focus on the churn color that you gave. You talked about customer churn of 1% in Q2 versus 4% in Q4. But then you also talked about logo churn of down 40% in the same period. And I wonder, could you just take me a layer deeper there? What is that 40% when you say in the same period?
spk02: Is it Q2 versus Q4? Yeah.
spk06: Eric, this is Steven here. I'll take that one, and then Bob, add any additional color. Now, that's Q2 versus Q4. And the two metrics that we're showing there is absolute customer logo churn, the number of customers that turn. You can see in our reported results on our earnings release, we have that metric out there. And then the 40% was actually looking at the dollar values around that. It's substantially reduced by 40%. And I think I gave that data point when we gave our Q4 update as well. So, We've certainly got our arms around this substantially. We're pleased with the results. As you know, this has been a major focus for us as a company. We've put dedicated resources around it along with the senior leadership team and really targeting specifically a lot of the edge cost customers that were churning substantially when we acquired that asset. I think also just to add that we've seen an introduction of our expanded solutions with our V7 product offerings and a simpler pricing plan that's also substantially helping that shared environment.
spk11: So have we, you know, I know the customer base doesn't all renew in a given quarter. Are our major exposures, have we addressed our major exposures and either turned them off or renewed them?
spk03: Yeah, so Eric, this is Bob. How you doing? So you might recall that the two primary root causes of churn were one, client engagement or lack thereof, and the second was feature gaps that we had where competitors had certain features. We had some towering strengths in some areas, but we were missing some basics. The release that we did with application version 7 closed those 23 feature gaps that we had. And then, of course, we implemented the client success team late Q4, early Q1, and you're starting to see the results of that. The net result is the churn is down. As importantly, renewals are going up and in the direction where we want them to. And even more importantly, at renewal, we're seeing more typically an expansion of use versus just a cold renewal. So that's why we believe in the second half of the year, you'll start to see for the first time since the acquisition where renewals and expansion revenue outpace churn, which is what you want in a SaaS company, obviously.
spk11: Yeah. Okay. And then the health of your two largest customers, Amazon and Verizon, could you comment on those relationships?
spk03: Yeah, very strong, positive on all fronts. With Verizon, because of application version 7, we were able to renew that portion of their agreement recently, and they couldn't be happier about the capabilities and features that we have. And again, expansion conversations there as well. They're also a big reseller partner of ours, so very strong relationship there. And Amazon, as always, has been a great partner and a consistent partner with us, and we're actually growing with them which we're excited about. So, and I'd add a third, you know, Disney is up in that mix as well. We have a very strong relationship there and feeling pretty happy about that relationship as well.
spk11: Okay. And then the last question for me, the cash growth margins, you talked about them being, I guess, sequentially higher in Q3. Can we get a little bit more granularity around that? Obviously the 30.8%. It was below where I was forecasting for Q2. I have a pretty substantial step up in Q3, but can you put maybe a range around what your expectation is either for Q3 or for 2023?
spk06: Yeah, Eric, this is Stephen. I'll elaborate a little bit more. So as a company, I mentioned in the prepared remarks, we have a high fixed cost structure. from the operations of our network that has pressured our gross margins. That certainly came out in the first half of this year and Q2 even more so being a seasonally weaker quarter. As I said, you should expect our cash gross margins to sequentially improve. I would sort of liken it to somewhere in the realms of 300 plus type basis points as we go into the third quarter. Obviously, we've got a lot of cost-saving initiatives and synergies that we're working towards on that $85 to $90 million of cost takeout, and a lot of those go into the COGS line. But it takes time to work through some of those. So from a run rate perspective, you'll see a lot more of that materialize towards the end of the year and then tee us up very nicely for 2024. I understand.
spk02: Thanks for taking my questions, and good luck. Thanks. Thank you, Ryan.
spk04: Your next question comes from the line of Frank Lutheran from Raymond James. Please go ahead.
spk08: Great. Thank you. Hey, guys. This is Rob one for Frank. How's pricing in the delivery segment holding up? And you were just characterizing the churn before. Out of curiosity, have you guys seen any churn from existing customers related to the share price? Thank you.
spk03: Yeah, no problem. Hey Rob, how you doing? It's Bob. So I'll start with the churn. We actually, the churn that we've always talked about was in the applications business acquired as part of the acquisition. We have not seen churn in, you know, our kind of our legacy business. In fact, you know, our net, we, one of the metrics we use is net traffic retention, which is year over year, you know, traffic that we get from our top 20 clients and that's up year over year. So we're, we're actually seeing pretty positive there. Obviously that's one factor. The other factor that drives revenue there is pricing compression and which historically has bit us at times. We're actually seeing that settle down for a couple of reasons. I think one, you're not seeing the market grow as fast as it had in the past. I think most industry pundits put it at low single digits, maybe 3% to 5% overall growth. And when you have that, the media companies have less leverage, they have less subscribers. And then also, we've seen further consolidation in the industry. Some of the news that's out recently where you see yet other players fouling out of the market. I think with all those things being true and the fact that we maintain our high performance and our quality support, that part of the business is run pretty stably. We're not going to grow it partly because the way to grow it is to try to take market share from somebody else, which means you got to come in and lower the price. And so instead, what we're focused on right now is how do we take what we have and earn more based on performance and really focus on return on invested capital for that business, which we think is a better and more prudent move for our shareholders.
spk02: Great, that's helpful. Thanks, guys. Thank you.
spk04: Your next question comes from the line of Jeff Van Re from Craig Hallam. Please go ahead.
spk07: Great, yeah, thanks for taking the questions. Congrats on getting through all the restating and all the heavy lifting for sure. A couple questions for me, Bob. Maybe just it'd be worth taking a second, given this is kind of the reemergence of Egeo coming out from all the noise, If you look back to like mid-22 when you were bringing Edgecast on, I think the original expectations were around $270 million for that business. And since then, there's been a lot of noise. I think obviously the ISP relationships, you had to take some of that revenue out. You had a lot of churn there. It's, I guess, unclear maybe what happened in the base business. Just spend a minute and talk about what happened in each of those three components there. from there to here to give us a sense of, you know, where the, now that you've got a little more clarity on the numbers, where the bulk of the disappointments, um, or, or revenue miss came.
spk03: Sure. Yeah. I, and Steven, feel free to jump in, but I, I'll frame it this way. Um, Jeff, uh, and thanks for that comment early on. So, you know, the way to think about it is when we, um, looked at the revenue of the business, there were a couple of factors. Number one, um, You know, we had some pricing compression with large customers who I wouldn't even call pricing compression. I call it reset, you know, where they were much higher than market. And so when we come in and put them on our paper and renegotiate, that opened up the door to, you know, reduce prices. So we had, you know, one very large social media customer who wanted to have a better price. It was unreasonable to ask, but so we had to take that haircut to do that. But we were able to renew them for multiple years and are actually back to growth with that customer today. But it was, you know, kind of a one time it resets. So we had that on a couple customers that were larger customers. All of those turned out to be growing customers on the other side. So it was a one-time reset. We had some revenue that we thought was less quality revenue than what we wanted. And so we took that out of the equation as well, as you normally do when you do an acquisition. And then, of course, we had the churn. So that's really probably the three drivers. When you look at all three of those, the resets are done. We're past those. We've gotten through those renewals, and they're now growth customers. with multi-year relationships. you know, the revenue that we wanted to get out because it wasn't good quality revenue has been taken out. And then, of course, the churn was something that we set up in last year. We said, look, we're going to do two things. It's going to take us a couple quarters. We're going to build a client success team and we're going to make sure that we shore up the product and bring those two things together to land churn into what would be normal rates in a SaaS industry. And that's exactly what we've done. It's taken us about two and a half, three quarters. But, you know, we're at run rates now that you'd expect to have in a well-run SaaS company. So, That's the way I'd frame it overall. From this point forward, we don't have those headwinds. We don't see any resets churn. You know, we've gotten our arms around it. And, you know, I think it's fair to say that, you know, we're turning the corner on the top line in the revenue stability. Yep.
spk06: You referenced... Yeah, I'll just add just one comment, Jeff, to that, that I think it's important to note. You know, certainly we went through a fairly substantial restatement and, you know, Unfortunately, that does take some wind out of our sails. Certainly, there's a hesitancy from our customer base that sort of elongated the sales cycle and sort of natural fear, uncertainty, and doubt when you're not in compliance. So I think that sort of created a little bit more headwind for us as we came into the first half of this year. Obviously, that's behind us now, and you can see from our results our churns. very much more contained, and we're starting to get to this inflection point for growth in the second half sequentially.
spk07: Okay, got it. And then on the revenue, you mentioned to not expect growth in general out of the media or CDN side of the business. It might be worth just taking a second to talk about the revenue splits, how you break up the business, and if media is flattish, how do you think about the other sectors?
spk02: Yeah, do you want to take that, Stephen? Yeah.
spk06: Yeah, so I think, you know, you saw from our commentary in our prepared remarks, right, we're seeing a very strong pipeline, and we're seeing some really strong bookings activities, certainly in our apps and security side. In fact, we've seen sequential booking increases since the beginning of this year. So, you know, we're building that machine now, and so we do expect those will be the growth engines of the company. I don't want to put growth rates around at this point in time, but as we get to this inflection point for the second half, we'll see a little bit of uptick in delivery for the second half of this year, just partly because of the similarity of the business. But we certainly see some very strong bookings activity in our apps and security side as well as uplink.
spk07: And the delivery side is roughly what as a percent of revenue? It's roughly about 50%, give or take. Okay. And then last one for me.
spk03: Jeff, I can just add one more comment to that. We spent a lot of time internally talking about, you know, the easiest way for us to go get growth is with delivery because you can turn it on fast, but it's also the lowest margin. And it also requires CapEx to expand the capacity to do that. And so, well, the other part of the other 50% of the business is a much better profile and takes a little bit longer to drive growth because you got the lead time. We think that's the better answer in the long term for the business. And so that's where we're focused.
spk07: And the last, I guess, just for me on the cost cut side, I think you reiterated the target of 85-90 by the end of the year. Where are you now? As of the end of Q2, how much of that have you taken out of that 85-90 run rate expense?
spk06: Yeah, I would say it's tough to put a specific number on it, Jeff, but a lot of that, as you've seen from our numbers, has come out from the OPEX line. you know, some of the COGS items are fairly substantial renegotiations with our vendors and takes a while to unwind contracts. So, you know, just as a frame of reference, we're at, what, 44.8% of sales now for our OPEX. We were at, what, $56 million exiting 2022, and we're now down to $43 million OPEX. So, you know, we've seen sort of $50 million of run rate savings. Some of that was in the previous year on our other cost-saving initiatives, but a large portion of that is behind us. So we're probably sort of 40-ish plus million there, and obviously a lot more to happen in the second half, probably more in the COGS line and less in the OPEX.
spk07: Got it. Okay, I'll leave it there. Thank you. Thanks, Jeff.
spk04: If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. Your next question comes from the line of Cooper Belanger from TD Cowan. Please go ahead.
spk10: Hi, everyone. Thank you. As mentioned, my name is Cooper. I was hoping that you guys could provide some color on plans to address refinancing your convertible debt due in 2025. As part of that, is there a leverage level that banks want to see for you to be able to refinance that? Thank you.
spk03: Yeah, thanks Cooper. Let me frame it up and then I'll let Steven weigh in as well. So, you know, one of the things when we look at the, we actually have four pillars of our strategy. You know, the first is improved profitability. The second is expand ARR revenue. And the third is extend our products into ARR areas. The fourth, we don't talk about publicly too much, is really align our capital structure to support the strategy so we have the same time horizon. And in that, there are really two focuses. One is the convert, obviously, as you point out. And the second is making sure that we have adequate liquidity to be able to fund the growth that we want to have. And we're very, very focused on both of those things. I can tell you that Steven and I spend a significant amount of time on those topics, exploring a number of venues. ranging from a full range of possibilities. But what I will tell you is that all roads lead back to getting as much EBITDA, hitting our EBITDA targets going into 2025. If we can hit the EBITDA targets that we have and continue on the successful path that we're on, that gives us a lot of optionality, ranging from retiring it to converting it to something else. And so while we certainly explore options today, the best path for us is to continue on this profitability path and make sure that we're putting you know, adequate EBITDA on the bottom line going into 2025 so that we give ourselves the most optionality.
spk06: Yeah, and just to add to that, I mean, I think given, Cooper, given the significant progress we have already made and the changes to our financial model and the reprofiled cost structure, you know, to Bob's point, we expect to be in a much better place really over the next few quarters to just look at that. And obviously we've got time on our side You know, I think it's worth adding that refinancing is one option, and we know where we need to be as we come into 2024 in order to do that. But we're looking at many other options as well. So, you know, not just a refi. I obviously can't talk about many of them, but we're looking at a number of options, but refi being one of them.
spk00: Thank you.
spk01: Your next question comes from the line of Alex.
spk04: Rudy Kissinger from DA Davidson. Please go ahead.
spk05: Hey, this is Lucky on for Rudy. Thanks for taking our question. Can you clarify, does positive EBITDA in Q4, does that also equal positive free cash flow in Q4? And if not, when might we expect to see positive free cash flow? Thanks.
spk06: Yeah, this is Stephen. We actually haven't guided to positive EBITDA in Q4. Our plan is to break even. I'm pleased with the progress we've already made in Q2. Our EBITDA was better than we guided, and we expect to see sequential improvements throughout the second half. But we're really looking at sort of a break-even EBITDA number. You can see from our balance sheet where we have been catching up nicely on some of the payables associated with edge cost acquisition and some one-time events. Cash flow will be a little bit behind that as we go into 2024. I don't want to pinpoint exactly an exact time of it, but certainly with the progress we're making in the cost takeout, we should be in good shape as we go into 2024.
spk01: We have no further questions in the queue at this time.
spk04: I will turn the call back over to the presenters for closing remarks.
spk02: Well, thank you, everybody, for joining us today.
spk03: You know, I think a couple of quick points that I want to share is that, well, the last six months have been certainly difficult, incredibly difficult. In fact, I think it's fair to say that during that time, we have, in fact, strengthened the leadership team. We've strengthened the products that we have, and we have really gotten in front of some of the headwinds that we were challenged with. and really set the company up so that we can go into the back half of this year, moving back into a positive direction and set up for a strong 2024. So that's what we're focused on. The management team is pretty excited about what's in front of us. So we've still got a lot to do and we'll stay focused on that, but we appreciate everybody's patience. Steven and I are both very happy to have this distraction behind us and looking forward to engaging with our investors much more actively as we, in the back half of this year, you know, as we start to move forward. So thank you very much and I look forward to speaking to everybody soon.
spk04: This concludes today's conference. Thank you for your participation, and you may now disconnect.
Disclaimer

This conference call transcript was computer generated and almost certianly contains errors. This transcript is provided for information purposes only.EarningsCall, LLC makes no representation about the accuracy of the aforementioned transcript, and you are cautioned not to place undue reliance on the information provided by the transcript.

-

-