FatPipe, Inc.

Good afternoon and thank you for joining FADPipe's earnings conference call. Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone that today's discussion may include forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws, including the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, statements regarding FADPipe's expected financial performance, business strategy, growth opportunities, customer demand, Product Development, Recurring Revenue Initiatives, Market Position and Future Operating Results. These statements are based on management's current expectations and assumptions and are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by these statements. For a discussion of important factors that could affect FatPipe's actual results, please refer to the risk factors and other disclosures contained in the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including its most recent annual quarterly reports, current reports, and other SEC filings. Any forward-looking statements made on today's call speak only as of today's date, except as required by law. FabWeb undertakes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise. And during today's call, we may also discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations of these non-GAAP measures to the most structurally comparable GAAP measures where applicable are included in today's earnings release and related materials available through the company's investor relations website and SEC filings. With that, I will turn the call over to management.

Thank you very much, Vikrant. I appreciate it. Vikrant is our director of CorpDev and investor relations. Sitting along with me in the room today is Sanch Datta. She's the co-founder of the company, CTO, and now the president of the company. We like to let all of you know that Sanch is a major player in this company, directing all of engineering and also assisting in customer relationships and product management. Today, as you can see on the screen, Vikrant is this screen being shared. Yes, it is. Thank you. So our sales has grown about 27% and income has gone up around 65%. And we are happy to let you know that the earnings per share has gone up to 9 cents a share from 5 cents a share the previous year. and as we grow and we start doing bigger deals, obviously the margin falls a little bit, but not by a lot. It's still around 92, 93%. So overall, we had a good quarter coming on the back of a previously very large quarter. We are very thankful to our employees, our partners and our customers who are continuing to support us in our endeavor to be the very best company in this space in terms of product and in terms of support and management of customer relationships. As you'll see in the next slide, our products have been recognized for their contributions to the technology space. And this is Channel Vision, the largest channel partner show in the United States or probably in the world. And we got an award for our product offering. We have been able to successfully convert customers from other vendors such as VeloCloud. We have an active VeloCloud conversion program. VeloCloud is a company that became part of two different large companies and since then we have been able to win customers who are using those products. I'll show you as a sample are here. This is Infotech. They are about a 4,000-person data analytics company. And as you can see, the third or fourth year in a row, our products have distinguished themselves sharply compared to everybody else, whether it's Cisco, VMware, or any of the other big boys. And on the right, you see in every category, we have a very good rating, top of the chart. We also like to pick one competitor and show you the comparison in a Gartner survey. This is a Gartner survey of customers, end customers. We have not paid Gartner for any of this. These are pure rankings by customers. As you can see here, we beat out Cisco's products in this space. and 97% of customers said they will recommend FatPipe. So this gives you an idea of our product offering and what we do in this space. We have been fortunate. We have been developing new products. We earlier released a cybersecurity product and now that's going into various customers, quotations and more marketing. and this year, this quarter is one of the first quarters where we spent a significant amount of money in developing our partners, marketing, trade shows and related travel. And that is helping us a lot. For instance, in Las Vegas at Channel Vision, we hosted a happy hour. at one of the bars, and we thought we needed only a quarter of the space. We ended up occupying the entire bar, and about 120 people, partners, showed up. And that is becoming an event by itself, because last year we had 80, and the previous year we had about 40. So we are finding that our name is getting out there, which also means that more partnerships to come. With that, I will open it up for any questions. Vikrant, Kanishka, if you want to add any more to this conversation.

If you have any questions, please feel free to put them in chat and raise your hand and we can answer them live. Looks like the first question is coming from Lisa Thompson from Zacks. Let me see if I can bring you into the room. Lisa, you are now unmuted. Please ask your question.

Got to figure it out now. Hi. So you had a great quarter. Could you tell us where the revenues came from? Were there a bunch of large contracts? I know you had the second half of one of them. Or are the channel partners doing better? What's happening out there?

Lisa, we are clicking on all cylinders, both in terms of market segments as well as various channel partners. Channel partners, as you know, we have started investing in the channel partner program We signed up TD Synapse, the largest tech, used to be called Tech Data, the largest distributor in the world for technology. And then the size of the deals have gone up, and this is partly because as we develop closer relationships and trust with the partner, the partners are taking us to bigger deals, and that has started happening. So it's a combination of deal size increasing, more deals, More markets and more partners bringing in deals. And we expect the channel partners to increase the amount of deals and number and amount and size of deals.

So is the percent of revenue going to shift more to partners or is direct sales also growing?

We don't do any direct sales. I can't say any. There's always a few where the customers want to deal with us directly. But almost all our sales come through partners. and that is our strategy that partners will be our feet on the street.

And one last question is, you did announce a $7 million deal a few weeks ago. How much of that is going to get booked in the September quarter?

I will have to find that exact number, but we can get back to you on that. Okay. It's probably about 30-35%. Probably about 30-35% will probably be booked this quarter as we deliver those units up. In fact, I saw a whole bunch of units going up today.

Oh, great. Okay. That's close enough. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you, Lisa.

I will move you back into attendee for now. Next up, we have two questions, one in the chat, and Nahal's raising his hand. I'll have Nahal ask his questions first, then I will answer the question in chat. So, Nahal, I am making you a presenter, so you should be able to unmute and ask the question.

Good afternoon. And for folks who do not know Nahal, Nahal is ranked 185 out of 12,000 analysts in the country. And he works for Northland Securities.

Thank you. Thank you, Bhaskar. So congratulations from me on a good quarter here. Can you give us a sense as far as what were bookings in the June quarter?

Can you repeat that, Neha? Can you give us a sense as to what were the bookings in the June quarter?

What were the bookings? Can you hear me? Yes, we can. Bookings is a significantly higher number. However, it is a really forward-looking statement. So at this point, I would like to answer that question on one-on-one rather than

the uh so what we do now as we get the orders and we start uh getting the units in and assigning it to customers so there's always a lag between bookings and actual uh revenue uh recognition so there's a little bit of lag yeah understood that we didn't fill uh fulfill in june or ending june they'll be starting rolling over to this quarter

So the $7 million education win disclosed a couple weeks ago and discussed already, that was booked within the June quarter, is that correct? Not all of it.

We book as we get the orders processed for and assigned to the customer. The products assigned to the customer are either shipped or installed or assigned. Got it. So not all of it.

Can you discuss what are the drivers for winning this very material order?

Working closely with a partner, it was an RFP, and a partner chose us over a major incumbent. and we just met all the technical criteria and of course made sure we gave a good price to the partner to win the deal. So essentially product and pricing.

Okay, great. Go ahead, please.

Oh yeah, sorry. One additional detail I wanted to add is that the Incumbents who we were replacing as well as the competitors we won against. Those companies have recently been acquired. Juniper was acquired by Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Velocloud was reacquired for the third time in five years by Arista. So as these competitive products have been acquired, support from OEM has dropped significantly. So customers choose FatPipe because we still provide first party support and market leading support. that customers appreciate. Guy, great.

And you were disclosing monthly recurring revenue for the past two quarters, which was up 50% year over year. Are you disclosing it again this quarter? And if so, what is it?

Good point. I didn't check the actual numbers. We will be posting it as we get the numbers together.

I don't think we disclosed that this quarter.

Yeah. It does go up. Every quarter it goes up, as you can imagine, as we have new customers being added and renewals happening. Yeah, it does go up.

Okay.

And then finally, can you give us an update on where you are in sales health count and where you expect to be at the end of the fiscal year?

Yeah, I think we are now up to 30 plus, 30, 31. So we were like 24 at the end of March. So we have about five more people. And then our goal is, as we had stated before, to get to 36 people by the end of fiscal. So we will be recruiting more people. We actually added two, three people a couple of weeks ago. and then we will be adding another five six people by the end of December and if there's any stragglers or netting out anybody we let go uh by end of March we'll be at 36 to 38. so we are on track as we projected last year okay great and can you just remind us what are your sales photo expectations uh and presumably you are seeing

and many more. Thank you very much.

helping them get to be productive or having them leave. So it's a simple concept there. And the persons who have a good Rolodex and who have applied themselves very well to the job are doing well.

Great.

Does that answer the question? I don't have a specific number.

No, you answered the question beautifully. Thank you. Thank you. Congratulations.

Thank you, sir.

Thank you, Nahil. Yes, going into question and chat. We've got a question from Rudy. The question being, Sadboost is a latent game-changer, especially in the government space. For many agencies operating in low-power and austere environments, have there been any serious inquiries about adopting it? To answer the question, Rudy, yes, we've already had deployment with state health agencies, with supermarkets, and with other call it rurally distributed customers. These deployments have already happened and customers are live and appreciating the use of the SAD Boost product. In terms of the sales pipeline, I obviously cannot talk too much about the sales pipeline due to it being forward-looking statements. However, we are seeing a strong interest in the SAD Boost product from a variety of end customers across both public sector and private sector. and as we get more sales and specific case studies regarding sad boost we will continue to post those on a regular basis either on the website as case studies or we will mention it in future earnings calls and also in fact just today we had a call with a major partner

about the product and its application. Interestingly, a variant of the same product can be also applied for 5G. So we can speed up 5G performance and connectivity. So we had a call with a partner who's looking at both for satellite as well as for 5G. Anything wireless really, in a generic way, anything wireless because of our Thank you very much. and those of you who are investors, we appreciate you sending us leads. I know a couple of investors sent us leads saying, hey, you need to talk to this guy and that guy. So those of you who are on the call, if you know any potential opportunities, we would very much appreciate you sending us these leads. We'll take leads from anyone and especially our investors who have a very vested financial interest in this company. You're all a big family for us. And what is interesting is some of our original investors, they still have held on to their shares, and they're accumulating shares every time the stock drops. So you can imagine that we have a big ecosystem that supports FATPipe.

Thanks, Bhaskar. And one Q&A we've received is,

have reported their strong revenue growth and profitability in Q1. How should investors think about the balance between growth and operating discipline going forward?

It's a balancing act, right? When there's growth, you are investing more in growth, like I think it was Nehal or somebody had told me, focus on growth and it's okay for margins to come down. And we are doing that, as you can see here. And also last quarter, we invested a significant amount of money in an inventory. Because when you get these big orders, you have to lock in the inventory. And so we locked in the inventory. We spent buying the inventory and also buying RAMs and SSDs and paying for paying it forward in terms of buying those products with a fixed price and marketing. I mean, we spent nearly $400,000 last quarter of marketing. The reason is that's the time when a lot of trade shows happen. Now, this quarter, we won't have much marketing expenses, but so we are investing in all this opportunity to increase the growth of the company.

Thank you, Dr. Bhaskar.

An additional question we have is, where are you seeing success in the market? Are there any areas that you've been seeing notable wins in or continued momentum?

Very similar to the answer that I gave to Lisa. Across the board, there are some segments where the deal sizes are bigger. So obviously, we tend to focus on those kind of deals. But other than that, we are servicing the economy. regardless of whether it's a hospital or a retail store or a company, a manufacturing, financial, credit unions, I mean, just across the board.

Thank you, Dr. Bhaskar.

And one question is someone is inquiring about our Velocloud replacement program that we had announced and press releases in the past. How is that well cloud replacement program coming along?

It's actually coming along well. We have enough number of deals that we have closed to turn those customers to our side. And we have a number of opportunities we are working on. and the way this works is as more and more of those customers, more marketing happens to our partners and bringing awareness. And as time goes by, when those deals come up for renewals, we'll see more happening. We are not just going after VeloCloud. As you know, some of the big companies don't do a great job of taking care of their customers or partners. There's one company that takes three weeks to give you a quotation to a partner. So we just snag that partner. and that customer. So the whole important thing is being a smaller company, we are able to produce products faster, features faster, respond to our partners faster. So we are doing all of that at the same time. Like the $7 million order, we displaced a very large company. So it was all about product and pricing. And the fact that our partners know we are very responsive. And all of that is captured in the awards that Infotech gives us or the customer feedback on Gartner's website. All of that is captured.

And then one question we got in chat was describing the equipment spend that we have over competitors and how this edge is defensible. So the way I would characterize that is FatPipe is first and foremost a software company. The actual appliances we sell are commodity hardware and we load our and others. So in the vein of that where some of our competitors have seen significant supply chain price increases as a result of competing needs from their semiconductor manufacturers overseas where they're now competing with the standard GPU and data center companies for allocation of Fab Times. Fab Pipe has continued to use our commodity supply chain for our equipment, which allows us to see less price increases and less increased lead times than what our competitors have seen, which has allowed us to maintain prices as is in terms of the customer-facing prices and partner-facing prices, while competitors have had to increase their prices, and we haven't had any increased lead times as a result. So that's for both order fulfillment and in general supply chain. So in general, we have that advantage versus our competitors given we are using commodity hardware and loading our proprietary software onto it.

Thanks, everyone.

And if you have any other questions, please feel free to send them to me or put them in Q&A or in chat. and one question is, what is PhatPipe doing in AI, Dr. Bhaskar?

PhatPipe has added AI in all aspects of our business, software coding, fulfillment services, software for fulfillment, pretty much everything. In terms of the product, we are a highly deterministic product. We use machine learning. When you say AI, machine learning is a subset of that. And machine learning enables us to do the fastest routing using spanning tree algorithms and allowing for jitter, latency, and everything else. Our job is to transmit packets from point A to point B in the fastest route possible with the least latency. And we do that better than everybody else. Now, you cannot apply AI to a very deterministic problem. Where AI comes in is when you have more fuzziness. As you all know, fuzzy logic is where AI came from originally. So we are now looking at how to generate reports. If you look at HPE and others, their application of AI in the business has been about creating reports using natural language questions. That is the easiest thing to do, right? It's not the smartest application of AI. But where we need to apply AI is when we can see how we can take a whole network and then see how to release congestions in the network. That is what we are working on. That is a lot more harder in a real-time space. but I also told you how we have applied AI to content, graphical content. Graphical content, AI is perfect for that because it's fuzzy. When I say fuzzy, meaning you could have a person in a bikini versus a person who's naked and the AI has to distinguish between the two. We have developed the software for that. So if you're a school and you want to block Graphical Images or Sexual Content. We have the AI technology applied for that. And that is a perfect example of a perfect application of AI. Totally fuzzy logic, content that cannot be just described deterministically, and our software is doing a great job on that. And that would be applicable more to schools, but obviously I have to charge more for that.

And as CEO, what are the two or three priorities you are most focused on for the rest of the year?

Okay, I'm going to be a little facetious here. Number one is sales. Number two is sales. Number three, go to the first and number one and number two. It's all focused on sales, performance, financial discipline, and trying to help the stock price go up.

It's just focus on sales guys. That's all I tell my team. We have good products.

We have a good organization in terms of customer support. So the only thing we need to focus on is increasing our sales and keeping our margins as much as possible.

Great.

One additional question is, our networks is, do you have any updates on FabPipe's dual security 360 cybersecurity solution that you have mentioned in the past?

We have completed the product. We have fully tested, load tested the product, and we have started giving it out to customers. And so it's been not as fast to start, but it's happening now. Like anything, customers will change the current products with our product as those contracts come to an end. So that is what we are focused on. Finding out when the contracts are coming to an end, then pushing a product. Like I again said, our products are a lot more comprehensive. Total360 is designed to block any type of gaps between when you buy three or four different products from four different vendors, there are gaps, cybersecurity gaps. By we giving a single product that covers all aspects of cybersecurity, we give you a total cocoon in which you can operate your business. And again, for the price of a latte per employee per month, you get everything. including Endpoint Detection and Response, which itself costs about $5 from CrowdStrike, but that I give you all the other aspects of cybersecurity.

Great. I think then we are at 3 p.m.

Thank you, everyone. I really appreciate you taking the time to listen to this presentation and also being a shareholder. It's a great privilege to have you as a shareholder.

And if you have any additional questions, please feel free to email the investor relations email. I believe it is investors.ir at fatpipe.com. Inc. And that email can also be found on the website. And we'll be happy to respond to your questions over email if you weren't able to get them answered on today's call. And with that, thank you, everyone, for joining the first quarter fiscal 27 SatPipe earnings call. We hope you all have a great rest of your day. Thank you, everyone.

Thank you.