Karooooo Ltd.

I would like to welcome everyone to the Karoo Q2 Financial Year 2023 earnings presentation. I am Richard Schubert, the Group Chief Operating Officer, and will present our current operating strategy, while Carmen Callisto, our Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer, will present the financial results. The Group CEO and Founder, Zach Callisto, will then answer any questions. Karoo Management would advise all investors to review this disclaimer. Karoo is listed on NASDAQ under the ticker K-A-R-O and has three operational entities that we will review, Kazooka, Kartrak and Karoo Logistics. We are thinking beyond connected vehicles and equipment, as mobility is core for all on-the-ground applications. Our mission is to establish the leading on-the-ground operations cloud platform We solve problems by digitally transforming businesses. Our fleet management platform manages safety and visibility operations for our customers. Field worker management is helping SMEs like plumbers and ground servicing companies deliver. Logistics and delivery platforms are helping pharmacies and supermarkets with their on-time supply chain operations. While Kozuka is providing a safe and easy to use vehicle buying and selling platform. we are seeing a growing demand from small and large businesses to add operational efficiencies to their organization. Carew investment highlights that drive shareholder value. We are at the early stage of a large and growing addressable market where mobility with IoT is the key for improving operational efficiencies. Our decade-long track record shows strong customer acquisition even in challenging markets with a robust and consistent business model with large expansion options across 23 countries by tapping into the untapped network effect. We have a long-term track record with a robust balance sheet and revenue generation with disciplined capital allocation and a strong cash position despite allocating cash for future growth. Our track record has positioned us well for accelerated growth with strong operating profits and unit economics, while our founder-led culture focuses on agile innovation. We are at the early stage of a large and long-term growth opportunity. We strongly believe that mobility is core to all on-the-ground operational improvements, which represent over 40% of the global GDP. This offers us a massive opportunity. Within South Africa, more than 1 in 10 vehicles are connected to the Kuru platform, while the focus in Asia and Europe is now to grow and deliver more operational value to our customers. There are many opportunities that are ripe for us to disrupt at this point in time. We are able to analyze our data to understand what our customers' needs are and are adding many verticals to our platform to capitalize on our network effect while we continue to add growing value to our customers' operations. Karoo wins by providing a fully inclusive end-to-end IoT cloud platform that's easy to use for our over 95,000 customers. It's continually updated and seamlessly integrates with customers' third-party ERP solutions. Our expanding distribution network ensures we service customers within the shortest possible lead times. We understand our customers' day-to-day challenges and our on-the-ground platform solves these issues and gives them a high ROI. Our fully vertically integrated business model means we might have a slightly larger staff count but provides full control of all aspects of the business. Our established infrastructure gives us the human resources to scale the proven track record to achieve strong growth. Kourou is an agile and entrepreneurial culture that has proven to be resilient in challenging times. I will now hand over to Carmen to present our Q2 financial results.

Thank you, Richard. I will now talk through Kourou's financial performance for Q2 FY23. Please note that all comparisons are against Q2 FY22 unless otherwise stated. Q2 proved to be strong in terms of our financial metrics with record earnings and cash generation. Our earnings per share increased by 28% to R4.93 and our profit for the period was up 26% at R155 million. We continued to generate healthy amounts of cash from operating activities and our free cash flow hit an all-time high of R1 billion. Our performance, despite economic headwinds, acts as a testament to our resilient business model that is highly cash generative. Supported by a high customer retention rate, Karoo continues to grow at scale with a 30% increase in revenue and a 26% increase in profit. Our strong, sustainable revenue growth resulted in a 27% increase in adjusted EBITDA to R377 million. We have strong unit economics, robust operating margins, a strong balance sheet and cash position and have consistently beaten the rule of 40. In spite of our investment for sustainable growth, net cash on hand has increased to over 1 billion rand. Naturally, this has been supported by the improvement in car track status days to 33, which was a direct result of our constant strategic investment in internal systems that ensure our strong track record remains consistent as we continue to scale. We have a strong, clean balance sheet with ample capacity to fund growth. Our cash generated from operating activities increased by 42% to 240 million rand. We invested 134 million rand in PPE and our free cash flow is 106 million rand, up over 100%. We have strong revenue generation, earnings growth as well as cash flow, putting us in a unique position in the market. We will continue to allocate capital to acquire more customers and are focused on increasing Carew's presence across geographies and industries. As you can see, many other world-leading large enterprise customers rely on our solution to overcome their operational challenges. Our differentiated culture, easy-to-use platform, great value proposition and strong customer centricity continue to pioneer success amongst businesses of all sizes across varied industries and geographies. Our customer portfolio remains agnostic, with no significant customer or industry concentration risk. Due to the nature of each business segment, we are reporting our performance broken up by Kartrak, Karzuka and Karoo Logistics. Our total revenue has increased by 30% and sat at R859 million at the end of Q2. CarTrack grew its revenue by 16% to R753 million and operating profit by 24% to R223 million. Our adjusted EBITDA grew by 27% and our adjusted EBITDA margin is over 50%, in keeping with our outlook for FY23. Kazuka's revenue grew from R9 million to R65 million and we are seeing improving traction as a result of improved brand presence despite temporary delays in some of our expansion initiatives. Our operating profits remain negative at R6 million and our adjusted EBITDA also negative at just under R6 million. Karoo Logistics continued to gain momentum through customers acquired since joining Karoo. Revenue now sits at R41 million as compared to R28 million at the end of Q1 of this financial year. Our operating profit and adjusted EBITDA at the end of Q2 were both just under R1 million and we believe we are on track to becoming profitable. All segments are seeing strong traction with the benefits of our strategic investments beginning to show. We continue to build our businesses, Kartrak, Karzuka and Karoo Logistics. We will now focus on Kartrak, the underlying asset to Karoo's success and ability to drive positive impact by maximizing the value of data. Kartrak continues to have great visibility of future revenue, with subscription revenue as a percentage of total revenue increasing from just below 97% to over 97%. Subscription revenue grew 17% to R733 million and total revenue grew to R753 million as compared to R650 million last year. Our track record of execution extends over a decade and we have a proven ability to scale in varying market conditions. Total subscribers grew to over 1.6 million and our subscription revenue grew to a strong R733 million despite challenging operating environments. Our realization of economies of scale and increased staff productivity favorably offset investment, and our profit after tax grew 29% to R163 million. We saw record net subscriber additions of over 57,000 this quarter as compared to other Q2s to date. This was largely supported by demand of small to large enterprises looking to increase their efficiencies and future-proof their businesses by digitalizing their day-to-day operations. Kartra continued to expand in all geographies. Despite challenging environments in South Africa due to power outages, subscribers grew by 12%. Asia, the Middle East and USA grew by 25%, with strong demand coming from Southeast Asian markets in particular, where we are seeing increased brand recognition and a stronger appetite for our leading value proposition as more businesses look to digitalize their operations. Europe saw a healthy growth of 16% and remains a region we aim to allocate more resources to in order to drive more rapid growth. AfricaOther maintained its momentum with a 10% increase in subscribers. Cartrack's low cost of acquiring a customer, high customer lifetime value and retention rate, as well as strong comparative benefits from economies of scale result in attractive unit economics. Our lifetime value to CAC is over 9 and we have strong profit margins. Our gross profit margin on subscription revenue is 75%. and our operating profit margin is 30%. Whilst we remain prudent with our capital allocation, we are well positioned to materially increase investment for growth. Kartra continues to have robust operating margins, and our trends are in line with the long-term financial goals set out upon our listing in 2021. Research and development as a percentage of subscription revenue remains at 6%, in line with our long-term targets of 4-6%. We will be increasing capital allocation into sales and marketing to drive growth, whereby we expect sales and marketing as a percentage of subscription revenue to increase from the current 14% to be within our long-term target of 17-19%. We also expect general and admin as a percentage of subscription revenue to drop from 23% as we experience increased economies of scale, whereby it will fall in line with targets of 12-16%. Our adjusted EBITDA as a percentage of subscription revenue is in line with our targets of 50-55% at its current 52%. We are happy with the progress we have made in Q2 and CarTrack's outlook for FY23 remains unchanged. Number of subscribers is between 1.7 and 1.9 million, CarTrack's subscription revenue is between 2.95 and 3.1 billion and CarTrack's adjusted EBITDA margin between 45 and 50%. Kazuka and Karu Logistics showed good progress with strong quarter-on-quarter growth of 31% and 49% respectively. We feel very positive about the direction of these businesses and will continue to leverage Kartrax data and analytical capabilities to pioneer innovation within both of them. I would like to thank everybody for joining us today and will now open the floor to Q&A with our group CEO and founder, Zach Callisto.

Hi, good afternoon from Johannesburg. Zakia speaking. I'll go through the first question. It's from Alex Scala. Really nice customer growth of 95,000 commercial customers. Can you talk about how you have positioned your sales operations to move up market? Is there any commonality in where you are having success with these enterprise customers? Post-COVID, which is approximately now four months or maybe five months, depending which geography we're talking about, we've been actively recruiting and we have many vacancies and we are specifically now recruiting people to tackle large enterprise customers. We believe we will start getting momentum from about Q4 this year. We do understand that the cycle to onboard large enterprise customers is longer than SME customers. And we expect that we will start really getting momentum probably in about five quarters from now, given the lead times to onboard these customers. And given that a lot of these customers are probably with one of our competitors at this point in time. And next question, also from Alex, can you provide some color or now the subscriber has trended in September, October, any changes on buying behavior in the current macro? September has been our best month ever in net subscriber additions. We've never had a month of 24,000 net subscribers. So Q3 is looking good. judging by September. And if we look at halfway through October, we're quite content with the way October is also progressing. Clearly, we still have a long way to do in terms of recruiting people and building our teams to be able to execute on our plans to accelerate our growth. The next question is from Willow Miller. Any changes in customer retention given the softer macro environment? There has definitely been a change, but it's insignificant and I would call it non-material at this stage. What was the primary driver of CarTrack's adjusted EBITDA margin expansion from 49 last quarter to 51% this quarter? I think a lot of it has got to do with us just retaining costs and watching specifically our gross profit margin. We've negotiated better rates with some of the suppliers, and it's really about just optimizing our cost structure. Could the recent COVID restrictions and lockdowns in China have an impact in traction in Asia? It could. But I doubt it. I think the whole world is over COVID and I do not see any restrictions coming to Southeast Asia. Then next question from Gokul Raj. Can you speak about your competitive position in South Africa and also if the margins are similar to South Africa? At the moment, our region that's got the best margins is clearly South Africa, purely from economies of scale perspective. But we see that Asia, Southeast Asia, will have a very similar unit economics to South Africa, specifically once we're at scale. The competitive landscape, we came to the market approximately 10 years after all our competitors. At this point in time, we're the largest and we're certainly the fastest growing market. And I also believe we've got the most diversified customer base in terms of size of customers, in terms of industries. And I think we are positioned to continue to compete favorably with our competitors. Having said that, I do believe our competitors are sophisticated and we cannot rest on our laurels. Next question, Matthew Kickert. Do you expect continued traction execution in Southeast Asia will be the biggest growth driver over the remaining of the year? Or could we see another region like Europe achieve an equal or greater subscriber growth? And the reality is, Matthew, you know, the months go by very quickly. And we're very busy with recruitment. We're very busy on readjusting the way we go to market with our plans for accelerated growth. And the onboarding of people, the training of people, it's quite difficult in a short period of time to second guess what's going to do best because it's too short of a period. But I certainly believe by the time we get to FY24, we will start getting the real momentum and we will start reaping the fruits of what we're currently doing today. And I certainly believe that Southeast Asia will be our fastest growing region. Cano, could you please explain about the increase of almost three times in trade payable in this quarter versus last year? Will this level be sustained? I'm not quite sure where you've seen that, Cano, but I'm quite happy to look into it. With three times the trade payable, I'm not sure where you've seen that. I can certainly get back to you on that. I haven't got the answer, but I don't see our debt has tripled. If you've got my email address, you can just email me, then I'll know how to respond to you. I'll have your email address to respond. You can just email Lauren at Investor Relations to see where you're getting your numbers from. Another question from Matt Kickert. Have economic and labor pressure increased the importance of value for the product set in the eyes of the potential customers? How often are these factors the leading reason for adoption of your operations cloud? We have many factors that drive demand for our cloud. Clearly, one is operational costs, which can include salaries and other relative operational costs. And I don't think there's any specific thing that drives that. I think it's just the efficiencies, the cost saving, the customer service that our customers derive from adopting our cloud that drives the value. And our value proposition is really what drives customer demand. I don't think the labour pressure is one of the aspects, but there's many aspects to it. It's not just the labour pressure. And I think all companies, even prior to the current headwinds, they're always looking to how do they digitalise their operations in order to have less staff and achieve more and have more visibility of and more reliable information about their businesses. Patrick Caddell, what drove the big pickup in Karoo Logistics revenue? It's all organic growth. As we onboard customers, we are expecting Q3 even to be much stronger than Q2. So it's all going according to plan. And we foresee that Q3 will be substantially stronger than Q2. And in terms of profitability of the business, as you can see, Q2 was already marginally profitable. But we believe that the business will have approximately 5% to 7% of revenue will end up being operating profit once we reach scale. How does the competitive environment in Europe and Asia compare to one another? Asia is more similar to South Africa, similar environment. Europe, in terms of competitive landscape, in terms of the type of customers that we're dealing with on a commercial basis, the type of commercial customers in Europe are slightly different. We have no real significant competitor in Asia at this point in time. And we believe we can compete favorably in Asia. In Europe, it's more consolidated. The market's very consolidated. We've probably got about five strong competitors, very similar to South Africa. And we compete favorably in Europe. Then Rendani Magalela. Isaac, congratulations on the great set of results. How far are you in the plans to improve liquidity in the shares? At this point in time, the only way we can really improve liquidity is either by issuing shares. And at this point in time, we haven't really got any reason to go issue shares, given that we've got a billion rand in our bank account and given that we haven't got an acquisition in mind. But should we have an acquisition or should we need cash? I think the NASDAQ places as well. We've got a great financial platform to go raise capital. And in terms of selling down of shares is the other option that we'll look over the next five years. I will probably sell some of my shares just to give liquidity to the market. It will be in a disciplined way and over probably five years, it's not going to be one single tranche. And fundamentally, I think the most important thing is that I've got to focus on growing the business and then the current free float will be worth more. Currently, the markets all over the world, the prices are under pressure, but I think the only thing i can do is focus really on the business underlying asset and anybody that buys our share and is thinking long term uh then you know it's i think it's the current market is a market to take note of then viru cupisu what is the being the impact of load shedding on karu operations in south africa how was karu dealt with the challenge of load shedding Clearly, load shedding has affected the South African economy. We've obviously got generators and everything to keep us operational, but a lot of our customers might not have. Also, we rely heavily on the infrastructure of communications. And as all South Africans know, that's also been under pressure. The load shedding has also caused pressure on the economy. So we haven't been an island where we've had to live within the parameters of these headwinds caused by load sharing. Mark, what revenue target have you set for Kazuk in the next five years? I think at this point in time, we're really just ironing out all our teething problems. We've got the target to get to 300 million rand per quarter in revenue. And once we have 300 million rand per quarter, then we will be in a position to really plan the next three to four to five years. We're not there yet. We're still busy ironing out a lot of startup operational issues. When do you anticipate to break even? Well, to break even, quite frankly, we could break even tomorrow if we decided not to grow. So it's really, for me, the question is, when do you expect to be at scale? And I think once we're doing 300 million rand per quarter, then we'll be able to plan it. We go from 300 million to 3 billion rand per quarter. But we just need to be a little bit patient, do one step at a time. We've always grown organically and with sustainability. And we want to continue with that sort of the same mindset into the future. What would you be hoping in terms of sustainable margin? I think we operate with very low margins. And I think a sustainable margin will be 4% to 6% operating profit once we add scale. What impact is inflation, strong US dollar and supply chain dynamics having in the contract business? Clearly with the rent, with the rain under pressure, that also puts our business under pressure. And we've seen that we're not at the US dollar negativity in Q2. Our results would have been better. But operating margins will be able to weather the storm. And we know in the past that the rain overreacts. It either overweakens or overstrengthens. And I believe Just given some time, it will come back and the rain will strengthen. But I think fundamentally, we've got sufficient operating margins to weather the storm. Sandile Magalula, given high inflation in Europe, what sort of return on capex are you looking to achieve? Given planned capex ramp up in both Europe and Asia, can you please kindly provide insight whether we can expect adjusted margin at the high end of the guidance level? So we certainly are expecting, you know, we've given 45 to 50%. I'm personally expecting closer to 50% with the margin for this year. But we're maintaining the 45 to 50%. Given our return on capex, I think our return on capex might weaken a bit because of our costs, but it will be insignificant and it will be materially in line with historical numbers. In Africa, what explains the huge dispersion between subscriber growth and subscription revenue growth? And during COVID, we had a lot of non-billing customers that we stopped billing. And a lot of those customers, we've resumed billing. Hence, with the resuming of the billing, you now get the spike in subscription revenue, which was about 23%. They haven't got the numbers in front of me. And where our subscribers only went up by 10%. Kano, could you please provide more color on the operations performance of Karzuka? So, Karzuka, basically, we've got... a tremendous amount of data from our customers. It gives us good visibility where the vehicles have been, how they've been driven. And that allows us to price the vehicles where our customers get a good price for their cars. And it allows us with a small margin to be able to onboard and sell this vehicle to the next customer. We operate with very low margins. We're averaging margins of 12 to 15%. And I think in the last quarter, it was around 12%. And, you know, it's a volume game. And it's not about making a lot of profit out of one specific vehicle. Our average vehicle is about 100,000 Rand that we sell. Clearly, we're in a very early stage of this operation. This operation will then get, as it gets traction, and as we iron out teething problems, there'll be a lot of value adds that we can sell when selling the vehicle, which we're currently at this stage not doing. I want to thank everybody for joining us today. And should anybody else have questions, please feel free to email Lauren. And Lauren or myself or someone in our team will get back to you. Thank you very much. Bye-bye.