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spk06: Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to this Research Solutions, Inc. conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode, and later you will have the opportunity to ask questions during the question and answer session. You may register to ask a question at any time by pressing the star and 1 on your touchtone phone. Please note this call may be recorded. I will be standing by should you need any assistance. It is now my pleasure to turn today's program over to John Beisler with Investor Relations.
spk04: Thank you, Operator, and good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us today for Research Solutions' third quarter fiscal 2024 earnings call. On the call today are Roy W. Olivier, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Bill Nervin, Chief Financial Officer. After the market closed this afternoon, the company issued a press release announcing its results for the third quarter of fiscal 2024. The release is available on the company's website at researchsolutions.com. Before Roy and Bill begin their prepared remarks, I'd like to remind you that some of the statements made today will be forward-looking and made under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied due to a variety of factors. We refer you to Research Solutions' recent filings with the SEC for a more detailed discussion of the risks that could impact the company's future operating results and financial conditions. Also on today's call, management will reference certain non-GAAP financial measures, which we believe provide useful information for investors. Reconciliation of those measures to GAAP measures is included in the earnings press release issued this afternoon. Finally, I would like to remind everyone that this call will be recorded and made available for replay via a link on the company's website.
spk00: I would now like to turn the call over to Roy W. Olivier. Roy? Well, you may be on mute. I am on mute. You think I haven't done this before.
spk02: Thank you, John, and thank you, Bill. As we've discussed in previous calls, it is our strategy to reimagine and improve the research workflow. Our recent acquisitions are a big part of that journey's success. After a few months of performance from site and Resolute, I remain excited and committed to the vision, and how site and Resolute fits into that. We had strong quarterly results in terms of overall growth, adjusted EBITDA, and cash flow from operations. The results are starting to show the ability of the business to scale as we continue this journey. The quarter represents a run rate of more than $48 million in revenue, with $16 million in SaaS platform revenue, and approximately $32 million in document delivery or transaction revenue. I'm excited about the strategic and product progress we are making and what it means for our future growth. That said, I'm very excited about the financial transformation the business will undertake as we continue this journey and how it will translate to shareholder value creation. There's lots of moving pieces in the numbers, so I'd like to pass it over to Bill to walk through our fiscal third quarter 2024 financial results in detail. And then I'll be back to discuss the business's progress and quarterly accomplishments in more detail. Bill?
spk05: Thank you, Roy, and good afternoon, everyone. Before I begin, I'd like to remind everyone that our third quarter results now include a full quarter's contribution from both the acquisition of Resolute AI, which closed on July 28th of last year, and the site acquisition, which closed on December 1st, 2023. For fiscal year to date numbers, there are approximately eight months of resolute AI and four months of site factored into the numbers. Total revenue for the third quarter of fiscal 2024 was 12.1 million, a 17% increase from the third quarter of fiscal 2023. Our platform subscription revenue increased 76% to approximately $4 million. The growth was primarily driven by revenue contributed from the site acquisition, as well as a net increase of platform deployments from last year and the addition of platform revenue from the Resolute AI acquisition. We ended the quarter with $16.6 million in annual recurring revenue, or ARR, up 82% year-over-year and about 6% sequentially. We added about $1 million of incremental ARR in the quarter, the vast majority of which was in the Site B2C business. I wanted to take a few minutes to discuss the limited sequential increase we experienced in B2B AR in the quarter. We did in fact grow both Site B2B and Article Galaxy in the quarter. However, the vast majority of that growth was offset by churn in the Resolute AI business. While this churn was material, it was not completely unexpected and was concentrated across three large customers, all of which had renewal dates in Q3. The downside of this is the effect that it had on ARR in the quarter. The upside is that we have now cycled through most of the Resolute AI customers from a renewal perspective, and a good portion of the churn risk is behind us. This does not mean that we will not have future churn in Resolute AI. However, we believe the worst is largely behind us, and we are rolling out new products using the Resolute technology. On a positive note, site growth in both B2B and B2C ARR in the quarter was strong and above expectations. Additionally, we had some large cross-sell successes of site within our Article Galaxy customer base, which Roy will speak about in more detail. When we announced the site acquisition, we noted that they had about 3.6 million of ARR. Today they are at roughly $5.5 million, and we continue to believe there is a lot of upside in both the B2B and B2C sides of the business. Please see today's press release for how we define and use annual recurring revenue and other non-GAAP terms. Transaction revenue for the third quarter was $8.2 million, a 1% increase from the prior year quarter. This quarter represents our first year-over-year comparison that includes the customer contracts acquired from the Fizz-Carlsruhe acquisition, which was effective January 1, 2023. While the year-over-year increase was modest, Q3 is typically our seasonally best time for transaction revenue, and this quarter represented a company high mark for quarterly transaction revenue. Further, the year-over-year comparison was largely affected by a normal slowdown we experienced during the week of Easter, which was in March this year and was in April of last year. In looking at early returns for April, the opposite effect is happening and we are up significantly year-over-year with a strong start for the quarter. Our total active customer count for the quarter was 1,426 compared to 1,417 in the same period a year ago. Gross margin for the third quarter was 45.2%, a 630 basis point improvement over the third quarter of 2023. The increase is due to the ongoing revenue mix shift towards our higher margin platforms business. The platform business recorded gross margin of 85.5%, a decrease compared to 88.1% in the prior year quarter, but within the range of our gross margin expectations for platform revenue. Decrease is also related to the inclusion of Resolute's platform revenues, which generate a lower margin. Gross margin on Article Galaxy remained consistent with recent history, and the gross margin of CITES products are similar to that of Article Galaxy. Gross margin in our transaction business increased 40 basis points to 25.7%. The increase was primarily attributable to increased copyright margins. This result was a little higher than we normally expect and going forward, margins will likely fall back into a range between 24% and 25%. We remain confident in our ability to increase the company's blended gross margin as the revenue mix continues to be more heavily weighted with platform revenues. Platform revenues are now about a third of the business but contributing over 60% of the gross profit. Total operating expenses in the quarter were 5.4 million compared to 3.9 million in the prior year quarter. The increase is primarily attributable to the addition of Resolute AI and CITE in the current quarter's results, as well as approximately $300,000 of non-cash depreciation and amortization expense, largely associated with the amortization of intangible assets associated with the acquisitions. Turning to profitability, I mentioned on our last call that I thought the back half of our year would be much cleaner from a one-time expense perspective, allowing us an opportunity to demonstrate the profitability of the business. Recall that in the first half of the year, we experienced roughly 1.3 million in expenses related to the proxy matter and M&A activities. In Q3, with those expenses largely behind us, we were able to post an operating profit and positive net income. Net income was $76,000 or break even on a diluted per share basis compared to net income of $230,000 or one cent per share in the prior year quarter. This profitability also translated into a strong adjusted EBITDA performance. We generated a company record of 961,000 of adjusted EBITDA for the quarter compared to 559,000 in the year ago quarter. Turning to our balance sheet, we also experienced a new company record with respect to cash flow from operations in a quarter. In the quarter, we generated over $2 million in cash flow from operations compared to 0.8 million in the year-ago quarter. Cash and cash equivalents as of March 31, 2024 was 4.2 million compared to 2.7 million in the prior quarter. And that is where we stood at the end of Q2 after the cash spent for the site acquisition. We also entered into a new $500,000 line of credit with PNC Bank that remains untapped. This line is flexible from both a covenant and cash diversification perspective, and we think it is a good fit for our needs and where we stand with the business today. As we look ahead, I think Q4 has the potential to be very similar to Q3 with some exceptions. First, with Q3 seasonally being our strongest period for transaction revenue, I would expect transaction revenue to be down sequentially, but up modestly year over year. Second, we are seeing very positive returns on our advertising spend related to B2C customer acquisition. As a result, we will be experimenting with increased advertising spend in Q4, so our sales and marketing expenses will likely be higher. All that said, I think the quarter will be relatively clean, and we should experience another strong adjusted EBITDA performance with cash flow behind it. I'll now turn the call back to Roy. Roy?
spk00: Thanks, Bill.
spk02: In our last earnings call, I discussed our BHAG or big goal of $30 million in ARR by the end of FY26. Our ARR at the end of Q3 is 16.6, which means we're pacing a little behind that goal However, this was largely due to the turn bill mentioned within the resolute AI business. Overall, our progress toward the BHAG will not be straight line, but I remain comfortable with where we stand today. In addition, I'm very pleased with our revenue adjusted EBITDA cashflow from operations performance in the quarter, but we have several areas we need to continue to work on. My top three priorities are as follows. First, integration across the new products that we've acquired as part of the Resolute and Site acquisitions. We have completed the first phase of the Site Article Galaxy or AG integration. We now support single sign-on so that users can seamlessly jump between AG and the Site product. We also have added the Site badge to the Article Galaxy product. As a reminder, this unique feature of the site product allows for a FICO or Rotten Tomatoes score for articles, so the user can more quickly judge the quality of the article or articles. While an AG user can click on that badge and jump to the site product to see detailed results, and all users in site can see pricing and availability of the articles in the site platform. The second is article galaxy growth. As a reminder, we have four drivers of Article Galaxy growth. The team we refer to as the new new team sells new logos and is on track to beat last year. The new existing team, which sells transaction only customers, Article Galaxy is also on track to beat last year. We continue to see challenges with the upsell team who historically has delivered strong performance through moving customers up to more advanced features or software versions, in addition to adding seats and licenses. We continue to see that our customers are more careful with spin versus previous years. The fourth driver of churn, which continues to remain higher than we have historically seen. That said, we have not seen any material increase in churn due to competition. A majority of our churn is uncontrollable in that it is due to the customer being acquired or going out of business. There is a block of controllable churn that we need to work on, and we brought in new leadership for that group who's doing a nice job setting up new workflows and increasing our customer outreach to get ahead of this problem. My third priority is where we invest in growth. As we enter the next phase of our growth, we need to be thoughtful about how and where we will make investments to drive that growth. I think it's time we move forward building out a more focused sales approach around verticals or products to accelerate new logo onboarding. We are in our FY25 planning now, and I'll report back on this in our next call. We have seen a lot of exciting activity with the new site product. From a B2B perspective, I reported in our last call that site B2B ARR was around 400,000. We closed over 200,000 in new site deals in Q3 alone, some of which were cross-sells into our existing customer base. We have a very strong pipeline and expect to see strong results in the next couple of quarters. As part of your aforementioned cross-sells, we closed the largest site deal ever to a large pharma customer, which is a three-year contract. We closed our second deal in India, our first deal in mainland China, and two more first-for-that-country deals in the Middle East. On the Article Galaxy side, we've seen some good progress in the new, new teams in terms of competitive takeaways and in closing larger deals. We closed a large Article Galaxy deal to a top 10 pharma customer during the quarter. I'm excited to see the progress here, as in the past, we've had more success with SMB. While SMB remains a majority of our new logos, our competitiveness in large deals is great for the business long term. On the Resolute side, we saw unprecedented churn in Q3. As Bill mentioned, we do not expect that churn to return I'm sorry, to remain and expect it to return to more historic levels going forward. On the positive side, we did close a contract with an existing AG client and released two new solutions around the technology landscape and clinical trial reporting based on Resolute's software and data sets. The B2B site product, sorry, the B2B site product continues to show great progress. At the end of Q2, we reported B2C ARR to be 4 million. We ended Q3 at 4.9 million. We continue to experiment with ad spend and monitor conversion to trials and then to subscribers. We have also seen some success in our B2C to B2B cross-sell efforts. We've seen a few individual B2C subscribers move into the B2B sales pipeline and close. We are entering the season, the typical slow season and the summer months for B2C, but we remain excited about this business's contribution as we move into FY25. Moving to document delivery or Doctel, our reported transaction revenue, we experienced a material slowdown in transaction sales in late March due to Easter this year. Last year, Easter was in April. I can report that we've seen strong rebound in Doctel sales in early April, I can also report that due to some work in the platform and through agreements to manage the publisher's paywall, we're seeing some nice Dock Dell growth over FY23. In addition, we're starting to see some B2C sales as we integrate pricing and availability into the site product and due to UX improvements in Article Galaxy. You may recall we had some concerns about the impact of the proxy matter on our employee base. We also recently completed our second Gallup employee engagement survey and I'm pleased to report that we showed nice improvement from a year ago. Our engaged versus actively disengaged ratio has improved significantly. While we have and we will always have more work to do, I'm very pleased with the progress in the Gallup results. As many of you know, I'm typically very measured in my comments about the business. When we did the diligence on site, we believed that its combination with our business had the potential to be very exciting and a transformational event. After a few months, I'm even more convinced that this is a path that can lead to something much greater than a simple one plus one. Our employees and customers are excited about what we can do to help research. And while I'm happy with the Q3 results, I'm also very excited about our overall direction and the long-term potential of what we're building here, how we can help improve research, and what that means for long-term shareholder value creation. With that, I'd like to turn the call back over to the operator for Q&A. Operator?
spk06: Gentlemen, thank you. And to our audience, a quick reminder that is star and one. If you would like to ask a question, we'll hear first from Jacob Steffen at Lake Street.
spk03: Hey, guys. Appreciate you taking my questions here. Congrats on the quarter as well. Roy, you made a comment kind of regarding churn and how it's usually not due to competition. I'm just curious, you know, how you're kind of seeing the opportunity to win market share from some of your competitors and kind of how you're positioning yourself there?
spk02: Yeah, that's a great question. I think, you know, our strategy is to have a superior product in the categories that we participate in, which include Discovery Tools, which is where Site and Resolute come in. We continue to add functionality to Article Galaxy, which is our core access or document delivery platform. And we continue to add functionality to the references product, which is the reference management software. So moving forward as we more tightly integrate these tools together, we think that's a competitive advantage in that you're not exporting from one tool and importing into the next tool. And integrating some of the unique features like the site badge and additional AI capability into the platforms we think adds real value. In addition to the fact that our objective is to simply be the easiest and fastest research tool out there today. So it's a much longer conversation with that, but I feel like we have made progress and continue to have a good strategy to be competitive and take share as we move forward.
spk03: Got it. Understood. And maybe just one more. You know, you guys had a solid quarter and kind of B2C expansion. You noted kind of sales and marketing. Efforts are going to be, you know, implemented kind of in Q4 here, but, you know, I guess, how should we think about kind of sales and marketing moving forward? You know, we saw your first quarter over a million in expense here in Q3, but maybe just any sense on how we can see that trending over the near term here.
spk02: Yeah, I'll let Bill comment on the numbers. I mean, big picture, as Bill mentioned, we will invest a bit more in digital ad spend as we continue to experiment with the right spend that drives trials and subscribers on the B2C side. On the B2B side, we don't expect any big changes as we roll into Q4. We may add some additional costs as we go into next year, but I think it'll be negligible. But Bill, Any comments?
spk05: Yeah, a couple. First, you know, this was the first quarter that we fully had a site represented from a cost-based perspective, and so that's what's kind of pushing us to that, you know, the $1.1 million we had this quarter. And I do think that's sort of a reasonable run rate with the one exception of marketing spend. I think we're going to, you know, we'll experiment. We'll probably do anywhere $150,000, maybe $200,000 of additional revenue marketing spend in the quarter, and there are metrics that we'll be looking at to see what kind of return we're getting on that expenditure and whether that'll kind of continue going forward or not. And so it is something that, one, we get a very quick read on how it's working, and then, two, we can adjust quite rapidly, you know, turn on or turn off if we're not seeing the results that we want. So I think that's how I would look at that line on the P&L on a go-forward basis.
spk03: Okay, yeah, I appreciate that. And maybe, sorry, just hop in with one more. Maybe kind of help us think about the overall B2C opportunity. Obviously, you know, it was a nice quarter of ARR growth, but how are you thinking about kind of the overall opportunity here and growth rate or growth expectations?
spk02: Yeah, I think B2C is new to us, and we don't know what we don't know relative to what really are good churn rates. I mean, when we compare it to the churn rates of the B2B business, they're obviously materially different, but the onboarding rate of new customers is also very, very different. So in terms of TAM for that business, we know that there's roughly, I'm looking up the exact number, 25 to 50 million researchers out there. or when I say out there, I mean that's subscribed to a platform that focuses on research. So we think there's a very large TAM, especially in comparison to how many users we have today. The question is, you know, can we continue to deliver value to expand the lifetime value of a customer that signs up in addition to continuing to onboard customers? And so far, as we've increased spend, We've not seen a material change in terms of the cost per trial or the trial, the subscriber conversion rate. And that's why, as Bill mentioned, I mentioned we're going to dial up that spend and see where the point is where we see any material change in those numbers. All that said, it has more seasonality than the rest of our business. So we're dialing up spend this month. We're going to be careful about June, July, August, and then dial up spend again as people get back to school.
spk00: Anything you want to add, Bill? No, I think that covers it, Roy. Okay. I appreciate it, guys. Best of luck going forward here. Thank you.
spk06: Thank you. Again, ladies and gentlemen, that is star and one. We'll hear next from Alan Klee at Maxim Group.
spk01: Hi, you gave your fiscal 2026 guidance for annual recurring revenue. How do you think about how it ramps up over the next two plus years to get there? Is it kind of accelerated in your mind or is it kind of a steady eddy or how do you think about that? Thanks.
spk02: Yeah, just to be clear, I wouldn't call our $30 million target guidance for me. It's a BHAG. It's a big hairy goal that we're chasing. And, you know, we typically don't provide guidance on the top or the bottom. But as you know, three years ago, I provided a BHAG of $20 million. That's what we were chasing. And now I've moved it to $30 million. Back to your question, though. No, I think we'll see acceleration in the number. Keep in mind, we've not fully integrated the products. We haven't built all of the new products we're going to build out of the combination of the three companies, Research Solutions, CITE, and Resolute. We've also not finished implementation of a lot of things we think will drive road in the future. Me being relatively conservative, I am looking for 1.5 million or 1.44 million in growth, net ARR growth per quarter, but we won't hit that in these early quarters, but I believe we'll outperform that as we start to get into certainly the second half of FY25 and then throughout 26.
spk01: That's great. Thank you. Just a housekeeping question.
spk00: What's your current share count? Bill?
spk05: Yes, it's right around 32.5, I want to say. Let me just confirm yet. 32.3, 32.3 million, roughly.
spk00: Thank you.
spk01: And you announced two new products or features recently. Can you talk about those features and if you can give any sense of the opportunity from them?
spk02: Yeah, we think, you know, within the organizations we serve, there's typically departments that are focused on clinical trial or tech landscape. And the way those products work is we're basically using one of our search engines to allow you to put in criteria. It will then gather together a tremendous amount of information. Some of it is in the peer-reviewed scientific articles. Some of it is in the external data sets that Resolute has. And it will literally write a summary of the tech landscape for the subject matter you search for or write a summary of the clinical trial research that you ask it to run. So effectively what it does is it dramatically reduces the amount of time it takes to do those functions within heavy research intensive organizations. These tools, we don't expect to be tens of millions, but we do expect them to grow over time. However, I think the TAM for that is certainly smaller than Article Galaxy or CITE, any of the versions of CITE, simply because the research organizations in the companies that are our targets are typically tens, hundreds, even thousands of researchers, whereas the departments that are doing that type of work are much smaller. So they're exciting products. They line up with our strategy of helping all the various steps and departments involved in the research process. But I would not think of them as an opportunity anywhere near the size of Site, SitePro, or Article Galaxy or Article Galaxy references.
spk01: Okay. Thank you. Last question on your increase in sales and marketing as you've gotten good results for that. How do you think about, like, the hopeful, you know, the cost to acquire, you know, if you spend an extra dollar in sales and marketing, what you hope to get for that?
spk02: Yeah, I mean, I can pull something up here and give you some context. When we invest, well, Bill, do you want to comment on the B2C side? And I've got a couple of comments on the B2B side.
spk05: Yeah. So typically on B2C side, we're typically looking at two metrics. One is the customer acquisition cost and the time to pay back that cost. And the other is the lifetime value of that customer over time. as a ratio compared to the cost to acquire that customer. And so, you know, obviously as we're spending more, we're looking to see if those metrics are improving, not improving, and where can we kind of optimize those. In general, looking for pretty quick payback, like under six months or so, you know, under 12 months is more the standard, but we're looking maybe a little bit more aggressive there. And you know, trying to minimally be above kind of three times lifetime value to CAC. So those are things we're looking at, but it's really more, you know, are these trends, are these numbers improving as we add spend? Are they starting to deteriorate? And that's what we're monitoring.
spk02: Yeah, we have a similar approach on the B2B side, just the numbers are a bit different. So we typically have experienced, you know, between 12 and 18 month payback period. And we typically have a very large kind of lifetime value because customers don't churn out at a fast rate. So, again, our CAC to LTV numbers there are very good, and that's another area of the business where I think we've done a nice job in the past few months of calibrating spend to maximize traffic that converts into sales pipeline. So, you know, I think we've made a lot of progress there, and I think that'll start to show up in the numbers as we get into – beginning of FY25.
spk01: Okay, great. Thank you so much. Congrats on the quarter.
spk06: Thank you. And this does conclude our Q&A session for today's conference. I'm happy to turn the floor back to Mr. Olivier for any additional or closing remarks.
spk02: Thank you. And thanks, everyone, for joining in the call today. We will be participating in the three-part advisor ideas conference in New York City on June 12th. Hope to see you there. Qualified investors that would like to attend or schedule a meeting should contact three-part advisors, and we look forward to speaking with you again in September to discuss our full year and fourth quarter fiscal 2024 results. Have a great day.
spk06: This does conclude today's teleconference, ladies and gentlemen, and we thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect your lines.
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