NETSOL Technologies Inc.

Welcome to NetSell Technologies' third quarter 2023 earnings conference call. On the call today are Najeeb Ghori, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Roger Almond, Chief Financial Officer, and Betty McGlasson, General Counsel. Please be advised that there is a slide presentation accompanying today's call that is available as part of the webcast and also available separately on the company's website. I would now like to turn the conference over to Patty McGlason, who will provide the necessary cautions regarding the forward-looking statements made by management during this call. Please proceed.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. Following a review of the company's business highlights and financial results, we will open the call for questions. I'll now provide the necessary cautions regarding the forward-looking statements made by management during this call. Please note that all the information discussed on today's call is covered under the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act. The company's discussion, including any accompanying slides, may include forward-looking statements reflecting management's current forecast of certain aspects of the company's future, and their actual results may differ materially from those stated or implied. These forward-looking statements are qualified by the cautionary statements contained in NEDSL's press releases and SEC filings. including our annual report on Form 10-K and quarterly reports on Form 10-Q. I would also like to point out that we will be discussing certain non-GAAP measures. The press release issued earlier today contains a reconciliation of these non-GAAP financial results to their most comparable GAAP measures. Finally, I would like to remind everyone that this call will be recorded and made available for replay at www.nedsaltech.com and via link available in today's press release. Now, I'd like to turn the call over to Najeeb. Najeeb?

Thank you, Patty, and good morning, everyone. It was a busy quarter here at NetSol, one in which we made a lot of progress driving key new initiatives. First, we are expanding our customer base with a focus on SaaS. Second, we're expanding in North America, which is a key new market focus, for us that offers considerable opportunity to leverage our success in Asia and Europe. And third, we are driving efficiencies in the business. In the third quarter, we expanded our already robust customer base that includes some of the most recognizable names in the global leasing and finance industry. And we continue to strategically partner with entities that help us to better support our customers and accelerate our organic growth. We signed a multi-million dollar agreement with Kabuta, a Japanese company, relating to its operation in Australia. Per the agreement, we will deploy our NFS Ascent retail platform, which consists of the Ascent Omni point of sale and Ascent contract management system as well as selected NFS digital touchpoints, including self-point-of-sale, mobile point-of-sale, and mobile account. Also in the third quarter, we went live with Flex, our API-first and cloud-based calculation engine for Haydock Finance, a business finance provider in the United States. We are especially excited about this agreement, as Flex is the first product that we've launched as a part of NetSol is a new APEX Now marketplace, specifically targeting the global credit, finance, and leasing industry, so we are encouraged to see this product gaining some early traction. On the partnership side, we extended our partnership with Amazon Web Services, or AWS, and became an API gateway delivery partner, allowing us to provide more robust and reliable solutions to our clients by enabling us to build, secure, and scale APIs like Flex. We also signed a teaming agreement with Digital Intelligence Systems, allowing us to leverage their expertise and large resource pool of over 5,000 US-based engineers to augment and complement our growing US presence and jointly undertake large enterprise create programs for existing and new US clients. Partnerships like these are crucial part of our business and allow us to offer better products and more efficient service to our customers. At the center of our agreements and partnerships is our suite of industry leading product offerings. Our core products consist of the next-generation NFS Ascent platform, a highly adaptive retail and wholesale platform for the global finance and leasing industry, available on the cloud via SaaS subscription-based pricing. NFS Digital is a combination of our core strengths, domain, and technology, providing digital transformation solutions like self point of sale and mobile point of sale to augment and enhance our customers ecosystems. Autos is a fully digital white label platform for lease, finance and cash transactions that delivers a frictionless customer experience. In addition to these products, We recently launched Apex Now, the first marketplace offering solution built on API-first strategy developed specifically for the global credit, finance, and leasing industry. Our first product to be launched as a part of this marketplace flexed in an instant cloud-based calculation engine for accurate contract lifecycle calculations. Subsequent to the quarter, we also launched Hubex. an API library that enables companies to standardize all their API integration procedures across multiple API services through a single integration, and we are actively developing new products for launch under the APEX Now umbrella. Finally, in October 2022, we entered a partnership with Amazon Web Services, or AWS, to offer our customers innovative cloud solution services at scale with the highly skilled AWS resources. In the third quarter, we extended our partnership with AWS to include our designation as an API gateway partner, which will support the development and implementation of products in our APEX Now marketplace. Our products are the driving force behind our growth into a global company with a robust geographic presence and deep experience in our field. Over the course of 40 years, Nestle has established a strong global presence, particularly in APAC and Europe. We have become synonymous with innovative, state-of-the-art business services and enterprise solutions that support the everyday operations of some of the largest and most recognizable companies in the world. While we are well known in our established markets, North America remains largely untapped for Nestle. The U.S. represents a very exciting opportunity for us, and we are taking steps to position Nestle as a leading provider of leasing and finance software solution in this region. we managed to achieve a year-over-year sales growth driven by a multi-million dollar contract with a tier one automotive provider, AutoNation, and our Autos platform is currently live in 53 many anywhere dealerships across the US, demonstrating strong early traction for our products. As I mentioned last quarter, we are also making good progress establishing a client support facility in Austin, Texas, which will accommodate all our sales and support staff based in North America and facilitate a growing customer base, and we are actively identifying and evaluating M&A opportunities in this region to further accelerate our organic growth. We believe the U.S. and North America represents a tremendous opportunity for Nassau, especially as it pertains to our SaaS and cloud-based offerings that generate valuable and reliable recurring revenues for our business, and we are intently focused on building our presence in this region going forward. Speaking more on our SaaS and cloud-based offerings, we are currently in a very exciting part of our growth as we evolve toward a SaaS-based model and establish Nestle as a SaaS and fintech IT company. The recurring revenue is a very attractive and reliable model for our business, with sequential growth over the past three quarters indicating a shifting demand for subscription-based products in place of our traditional licensing model. The benefits of shifting to a SaaS model are plentiful, both for the customer and for NetSol. As I mentioned, SaaS and cloud-based products drive high margin recurring revenue for our business, and shifting to a SaaS model also increases our customers' access to industry-specific generative AI or artificial intelligence learning technology through our partnership with AWS and others like it. Consequently, we are implementing more and more out-of-the-box products on a pure SaaS model and deployed over the cloud. We are projecting over $25 million in subscription and support revenue for the full fiscal year 2023. And we expect the number to increase both as we continue our evolution to a SaaS model and as demand for SaaS and cloud-based products continues to grow. Because of this shift to a pure SaaS model, our products and services will require significantly less manpower to deliver the same superior customer support and customization that we are known for and we are adjusting our business accordingly. Last quarter, we announced cost reduction initiatives, which we estimated would generate more than $4 million in savings across our business. To date, we have reduced our headcount by 10% and we are targeting a total headcount reduction of up to 25% with significant total savings that we expect to have a positive material impact on our revenue for employee net profit and EBITDA. Overall, we now expect to reduce our total cost by over $7 million and our plan is to allocate more capital to our most attractive growth markets, namely our expansion into the North American markets and the development of additional SaaS and cloud-based products that further strengthen our already robust offerings. This is an exciting time for Nefsol as we significantly shift our business model and tap into new markets that provide us with a tremendous opportunity to exponentially grow our business. I will now turn the call over to Raj Amand, our CFO, who will walk us through our financial for the quarter. Go ahead, Roger.