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spk00: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Chantelle, and I'll be your conference operator. Today we will be hosting a conference call to discuss the fourth quarter and full year 2021 Panetta results for VIQ Solutions Inc. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. For those that dialed in, should you require any assistance during the call, please press star then zero on your touchtone phone. We will have a question and answer session at the end of the call. which time all participants wishing to ask a question will be instructed to press star 1 and identify themselves before asking a question. Please limit yourself to one or two questions so that others may have a chance to ask questions. You may re-enter the queue. Your host for today is Ms. Laura Kiernan, Head of Investor Relations for BIQ. Please go ahead.
spk01: Thank you, Chantal, and good morning, everyone, and welcome to VIQ Solutions' 2021 Fourth Quarter and Full Year Results Conference Call. Before we begin, I would like to point out that certain statements made on today's call contain forward-looking information subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors. For a complete discussion of the risks and uncertainties facing VIQ, we refer you to the company's MD&A and other continuous disclosure filings which are available on CDAR at cdar.com and sec.gov. As a reminder, all dollar amounts are in U.S. dollars unless otherwise stated. And with us today, we have Sebastian Paré, CEO, Alexi Edwards, our CFO, and Susan Sumner, our President, COO of the EIQ, all of whom will be available for questions following the prepared remarks. I will now turn the call over to Sebastian Paré to begin.
spk06: Thank you, Laura. Welcome everyone to our full year 2021 earnings call. The first order of business today is to congratulate and welcome Susan Sumner and Sheng Peng to the board of directors. Our chairman Larry Taylor stated that he was excited to announce the appointment of these two highly accomplished executives to our board and that Sheng's technology experience and leadership and strategic growth will contribute substantially to advancing our goals. and Susan's extensive operational and management experience in the global transcription industry, including VIQ for the last four years, adds meaningful perspective to our board. These appointments further our ability to scale globally and achieve our strategic growth plan. Each of these seasons professionals has an established record of accomplishment for executing strategies to build successful companies. They are the next step in our plan to expand the board experience and operational acumen matching the needs of our growing global enterprise. Now into our results. The past 12 months have been a remarkable journey for our company, our clients, our society, and for many of us personally. I am pleased to report that VIQ has not only persevered during one of the most challenging business environments on record, but was able to finish 2021 strong by completing many of our commitments in the areas of cloud infrastructures, cybersecurity, products, capital, and regulatory markets, as well as acquisitions that will allow us to scale and our financials to lift significantly throughout 2022. While 2021 was a challenging year, given the fluctuations of COVID recovery in our operating geographies, We have advanced our growth strategy and make extensive strides in overall operational performance. We're now ready to scale profitably to the next level. We have enhanced our capture to documentation offerings and expanded our client relationship by acquiring two key assets, including Offscript in Australia and the transcription agency, otherwise known as TTA in the UK. The strategic acquisitions are a foundation for future global growth in those regions. The pro forma annual recurring revenue for last year increased by 63% to $48.6 million USD from $29.7 million for the comparative period in 2020. This is a new baseline revenue that we're working with, with 2022 and beyond. Please note the ARR of $29.7 million is slightly below our total reported revenue of $31.75 million last year because some of the revenue was not recurring. A key intellectual property patent was obtained for artificial intelligence innovations that covers 10 unique aspects of our patent AI assist automated workflow and analysis platform. The technology productivity impact in insurance and law enforcement was demonstrated last year. In 2022, we expect to achieve productivity improvements in our core vertical, which will further increase the sustainability of our gross margin expansion. Also, during late 2021, we capitalized on our global labor capacity to lessen the impact of COVID and labor shortages in our operating regions. We did this by rethinking structurally how we utilize this asset while still providing our secure end-to-end solutions without compromising speed and accuracy of the content. For our two most recent acquisitions, our court segment is forecasted to represent 65% of our 2022 revenue globally, which is an increase from 34% in 2021. We expect most of our existing courts and media clients, as well as the ones gains from these two most recent acquisitions, will migrate into NetScribe platform, which is powered by AI assist over the course of 2022. The shift towards legal courts is expected to enable higher productivity and further gross margin expansion. Susan will get into a lot of those topics when she speaks. We also expect the shift in revenue towards Australia following the completion of the OSTRP acquisition with approximately 50% of our 2022 revenue derived from Australia versus 31% last year. Now I will hand it over to Alexi, who will provide a high-level overview of our financial results and goals for 2022. When he's finished, Susan will provide additional insight into our operating results. They will open up the lines for answering questions, and I'll come back to you for closing remarks. Alexis? Thank you, Sebastian, and good morning, good afternoon, and good evening to everyone. Rather than rehash the content published in our press release, I would like to make remarks on a few key highlights from our results last year and reaffirm our goals for 2022. We reported total revenue of $31 million in 2021, which decreased 2% versus the prior year. However, when compared to 2019 or the last year before the pandemic, we saw meaningful trends in revenue. For example, our U.S. revenue was only $14.5 million in 2019 but increased to $22.2 million in 2020 and declined to $19 million in 2021. The US decline in 2021 versus 2020 was driven by several factors, including some difficult comparisons. Our US meter revenue was significantly lower due to skewed year-over-year comparisons. During 2020, the company completed a large one-time archive project that was not repeated in 2021. also included additional volumes relating to the election cycle that weren't repeated in 2021. Combined with the COVID-19 impact on the traditional conference in business throughout the year, media, corporates, and government was negatively impacted in what has otherwise been a growth vertical through the addition of two major new broadcast clients in Q4 and a significant Q122 ramp-up by our largest media client in financial earnings work. Lower U.S. insurance claims in 2021 attributed to slower U.S. recovery in car accident claims due to reduced movement of people and traffic from the lockdown and decreased local policing activities from government mandated lockdowns in various states and local communities. These resulted in lower volumes of insurance recorded statements, police interviews, and transcription revenue in insurance and law enforcement segments. In Australia, Our revenue went from about $9 million in 2019 to $8.5 million in 2020 and was about $9.5 in 2021. In Australia, our growth was hampered and revenues were deferred as a result of having 163 billion days that were negatively impacted by COVID-19 lockdowns during 2021. And these factors are partially offset by, one, acquisition-related revenue in UK and Australia, which contributed about $900,000 to the year, and adoption of first draft technology. Please note, the late December close of OSCQIP was tied to the delayed clearance by the Australian Competitive Bureau, and subsequently had an estimated $2 million impact on planned revenues versus reported results. We expect that U.S., Australia, and U.K. revenues to normalize in 2022, including the acquisitions. Now on to our gross margin. Our gross profit of $14.9 million was 48% of revenue versus 51% for the same period in 2020. The decrease in gross profit was primarily due to the reduction of COVID-19 wage subsidies and delayed revenue resulting from the pandemic. Excluding the COVID-19 wage subsidies impact, gross margin for the full year would be 46% compared to 42% for the full year 2020, representing an increase of approximately 395 basis points. Please note that we have referenced the gross margin excluding subsidies on the presentation. Driving the increase of about 4 percentage points in gross margin excluding the impact of COVID-19 wage subsidies this past year were the following factors. One, the migration of technology services, particularly in the insurance and law enforcement verticals. Two, proven labor force efficiency gains from the implementation of NETSCRIBE and AISX technologies enabled a reduction in rates paid per unit of production for certain segments. The migration to a global labor force to better utilize access to labor across VIQ entities. Fourthly, the stabilization of the labor force in the U.S. post-COVID-19 reducing requirements for bonus payments to incentivize the contract labor. Fifthly, we believe the shift towards legal or courts will be a driver of improvements planned for next year. And finally, the company expects to continue to trend further towards predictable, recurring, higher margin revenue as first draft is adopted and more clients leverage higher margin machine drafts. We have reaffirmed our goals for 2022. Our financial expectations include generating at least $50 million in revenue, while gross margin expected to be between 47% to 55%. As Sebastian mentioned, our pro-form annual recurring revenue rate at the end of last year was about $49 million. When you include a full year of 2021 base recurring revenue and TTA and OSCQIP acquired analyzed revenue of approximately $14 million and a major court contract of approximately $6 million, which effectively began in December 2021 upon the close of the OSCQIP acquisition. This really means that we're at least $50 million in revenue for this year is achievable, almost with no additional organic growth. We do expect to pursue additional organic growth, especially in light of the recovery following the real meaning of the economy as COVID-19 restrictions subside. We're allocating capital towards the highest and best use, including acquisitions, organic growth drivers such as investment in technology, sales and marketing, and infrastructure development. The company's capital allocation is centered on generating organic growth, investment in technologies, mergers and acquisitions, and balance sheet deleveraging. Our goal with capital allocation is to increase the earning power of the company and reinvest the free cash flow of the business to generate more cash. We plan to demonstrate to our shareholders that flywheel post-pandemic started in Q2 throughout 22 with a key priority being using cash to pay down debt. In the last five annual reports, we have demonstrated incremental increases in gross margin and revenue. While results may appear lumpy in the last two years due to the societal disruptions from the pandemic, that incremental progression over time is moving in a very solid direction. No, I'd like to turn it over to Susan.
spk02: Thank you, Alexi. I'm honored to have been appointed to the Board of Directors along with Shin, and I'd like to thank the Board. The Board, like BIQ, is committed to diversity in both the actual representation of the directors and the leadership team. but also diversity in skills, approach, and thinking to challenge our strategies in technology, segmentation, and global expansion. I know I speak for the Board, Sebastian, and Alexei in saying that we are committed to continuing this journey of diversity and inclusion across all of the IQ. Since Alexei has covered much of the high-level financial trends, I would like to get a little more granular Let me pivot to the operational achievements of 2021, as there certainly were many. We committed to expanding our sales and distribution organizations and we have. In 2021, we added incremental sales and distribution resources in North America and the UK, and announced expanded partnerships around the world. We have established those key partnerships and awards in 2021, that will help us to drive organic growth in 2022. And here are a few highlights. We were awarded the Integrated Digital Court Reporting Systems for the Supreme Court of Florida, which gives VIQ the ability to market and sell Capture Pro's suite of solutions to the Florida courts without individual RFPs. This award validates the value of our innovative technology, our global expertise to provide accurate and secure digital recording solutions that meet and exceed the needs of that client base. D'Agostino Electronic Systems is a U.S.-based full-service technology integrator and became a VIQ partner in 2021. VIQ will see immense value in this new partnership in two key areas. we are now able to put the VIQ suite of solutions on the COSTAR's contract for the state of Pennsylvania, as well as utilize their expertise in audio and video to help us consult, design, and implement courtrooms of the future around the world. As technology plays an increasing role in the transformation of court workflow, court personnel recognize the need for innovation, solutions to keep pace with the vast amount of courtroom evidence that is being produced and shared. The Law & Order-VIQ Solutions Partnership brings together significant industry knowledge, technological solutions, and professional client services organizations to support successful client transformations in the courtroom. And finally, we signed a strategic partnership agreement with Legalcraft to create an integrated solution using the Lexel platform, which optimizes legal case analysis, trial preparation, and real-time transcription to assist legal professionals globally. Given our history with the district attorney and public defenders, law firms are a natural extension of our court focus and our current client base. VIQ was the first legal craft strategic partner robust, collaborative case management platform in the United States. All of these partnerships and frameworks bolster our ability to expand our reach in selling our end-to-end solution to the legal and media verticals. This pivot to court is driven by successful acquisitions of Offscript and TTA, where 65% of our revenue is now tied to court services. positioning us to lead in this sector. We committed to consistently improving gross margins in 2021. And as presented by Alexi earlier, we delivered on those improvements, net of subsidies resulting in a 395 basis point improvement. Much of this gain is a result of the maturity of our technology and the scale we have gained from the deployment of that technology. During 2020 and 2021, there was a focus given to migration of the insurance and law enforcement segments in the U.S., but the biggest impact on gross margin will be in 2022 when the technology is now ready to take on media and courts, which is expected to represent nearly two-thirds of our overall revenue. While incremental R&D was required in 2021 due to the level of complexity to manage our court documents, the productivity gains in that space will be significant. Also contributing to the gain was a shift to utilize our global workforce to address the challenges associated with the availability of our U.S. labor force and the management of the velocity required to maintain and grow our business. We took advantage of the available labor from closures in Australia and to cross-train the organizations to share work while still maintaining the security requirements of our clients. This is where we really see the advantage of the combination of our workflow technology platform layered with the flexibility of our language models and our AI. Regardless of where the work is done on our platform, the work is secure and the platform can adapt to the language nuances and customization requirements of the client. Over 2022, we will continue to expand our global access to labor by expanding our footprint into new geographies that will provide opportunities for both transcription and administrative labor. We call this project Titan, and we expect to see the full benefit of this effort in 2023. We also committed to continuing with aggressive M&A pursuits in 2021 to build scale around our deployed infrastructure. In October, we completed the purchase of TTA in the UK, and this was strategic because it provided BIQ a services footprint in geographies where we share our largest capture client. This coincided with the launch of our NetScribe technology, putting secure infrastructure within the borders of the UK to allow us to rapidly grow. Shortly after the acquisition, we began to deploy the award for the Houses of Parliament. We are also undertaking a major trial with a key judicial customer and our local partners to innovate the way content is summarized and made available to users. In October, we also announced the acquisition of Offscript in Australia. I cannot overstate the importance of this addition to the VIQ enterprise. Important not only in size, but also in scale, it brings to the court vertical, which has now become so critical to VIQ, the marriage of the complex requirements of court documentation workflow and content with efficiency gains from our technology. This is very exciting. The result of our AI-Assist trials and migration, which was only touched on in 2021 in the legal and courts vertical, was better than expected and significantly better than we have seen in other segments. It is that success that gave us the push to complete the acquisition as neither TTA nor OSCQIP had a deployed AI-Assist-like solution. The timing of the off script acquisition was certainly not optimal as the time required for regulatory approval was unexpected. The commencement of the contract occurred right at the beginning of the holiday shutdown, so our first month post acquisition drove the highest cost and the lowest revenue. Now, with the holidays and COVID firmly behind us, the organization is back to pre-COVID levels and will now focus on the migration and our technologies later this year. Our pivot to the court segment will not only accelerate our gross margin goals in 2022, but it will also allow us to take advantage of our key investments in technology around the world. As we look at our technology gains in 2021, the commercial launch of both NetScribe and with the court-enabled customization accelerates our competitive advantage in delivering our end-to-end solutions that enable our clients to gain the most value from capture, workflow, and speech recognition technologies. We also plan to expand our hybrid technology services portfolio to include NetScribe Live, This will take on traditional capture and transcript creation and turn it to a new level, enabling real-time capture and editing in both courts and media. This access to fast edit will change the overall concept of turnaround time and delivery, creating a new competitive advantage for VIQ. Some of our competitors focus on speech from their capture technologies, while others focus on editing and speech-to-text alone. We believe that the core value of our strategy sits in the integration of both. Whether a court or a media outlet chooses to capture or edit via their own infrastructure or partition any element of that workflow, we meet them there with the enhancements that allow them to use VIQ for some or all of their requirements. And while the labor shortage is impacting court resourcing, particularly in the U.S., We believe that our NetScribe to NetScribe Live will allow governmental agencies to improve their throughput with existing resources while reducing costs, but also improving the security and the usability of the content they create. In 2021, we also invested in security and IT infrastructure to ensure that we comply with governmental requirements that vary across the globe and to prepare for running an integrated cloud architecture. We have preserved our ISO 27001 standard within our media and UK operations and expect to be globally certified later in 2022. In 2021, we also committed to establishing the baseline for tracking KPIs to provide a consistent methodology to provide measurable tracking of our operating performance. We will outline in detail along with definitions of those metrics in our MD&A, so I will not specifically list them today. We will, however, provide the first comparables of Q1 2021 to Q1 2022 in our Q1 earnings release in the next few months. I will highlight a few of those metrics and why they are important in evaluating the health and the progress of the company. First, the annual recurring revenue, ARR. This is a critical metric in evaluating the ongoing stability of the client base and the impact of our organic growth and churn. While we certainly will evolve our ability to distinguish between organic growth versus churn in our reporting, the run rate will provide the baseline year trend of recurring revenue to track the required progress of organic growth through the year. As previously discussed, our 2021 year-end pro forma run rate was approximately $49 million. Another important metric is our average cost to produce a minute of transcription. This provides visibility into the cost efficiencies gained from the improvement in our technology and the related cost reductions tied to variable labor. This is an important metric to be used in conjunction with gross margin as it is not influenced by pricing, but much more aligned with the scale and the performance and the efficiency gains of the platform. While no one could have anticipated the impacts associated with the extended COVID and regulatory delays that impacted our results in 2021, there were significant measurable achievements that allowed us to prepare for our future. We look forward to 2022. We are excited about the ongoing execution of our strategy and continuing to deliver the innovation to the industries that we serve. Now I would like to hand it over to the operator for the Q&A session.
spk00: At this time, I would like to remind everyone in order to ask a question, please press star one. Please limit yourself to one or two questions so that others may have a chance to ask questions. We'll pause for just a moment to compile the Q&A roster. Our first question comes from Brian Winslinger with Alliance Global Partners. Your line is open.
spk05: Hi, good morning, guys. Thanks for taking my questions.
spk06: Good morning, Brian.
spk05: Good morning. Hi, Sebastian. Hi, Susan. I wanted to start with business development. I mean, you said this too. From your disclosure, you've got $48.6 million in annual recurring revenue on hand. So even you said it's not going to take a lot of growth to get you to $15 million. Can you talk about your pipeline in terms of how it compares to a year ago, also pre-COVID, maybe in total contract value or number of procurements, in which verticals you're seeing the most near-term opportunity, of course, excluding the Queensland contract, which we know is already in the numbers?
spk06: So maybe I'll just start. That's a good question on our side. So overall, we want to come out of the two years of COVID conservatively. And I think it was important for people to appreciate what that new run rate is about. So what we've done now is the pipeline, there was a lot of delays. We talked about the backlog last year. All of this now is being activated. And we're actually going to be doing quite well on that side of it. But we wanted to be conservative. in our forward-looking guidance for this year and purposely we are focusing now on the run rate and then quarter over quarter we will provide you with a little bit more visibility towards our progression uh towards uh the organic growth in terms of that susan
spk02: Yeah, thanks, Brian. The pipeline is building in a way that's kind of hard to comprehend just because what I would say the sleeping giants globally around the court space are now firmly awake and active in both RFPs as well as changing the way they do business. for a couple of reasons. One, they have a significant backlog from their closures and they have to be innovative in the way they look at courtroom efficiency. And also that they had extensions and renewals that didn't allow them to actually execute on new evaluation during the shutdown phase. And they're also adjusting, by the way, you know, I mentioned it in my statements, to labor shortages, which are impacting their own in-house transcription resources. So, we are growing the pipeline all over the globe, but particular growth, which is really interesting to us in the U.S. market, where there is much more demand for that end-to-end solution that I talked about in my comments. So the pipeline is very robust. It's certainly higher than it was in 2020 or 2021, and we're seeing accelerated growth from there. I think I answered all of your questions, Brian. Maybe there was something else in there. You did.
spk05: You did a great job. Thanks. And then you mentioned a trial with a key judicial customer. Kind of said that quickly, but I figure you wouldn't say that if it wasn't meaningful. So are you able at all to decide the opportunity and how you expect the trial to last? And then my next question, and I'll get back in the queue, is as you look at your portfolio of contracts, Are any of them experiencing lower volumes or COVID restrictions, or is there any headwinds to your business still in the first half of the year? I guess I'm just trying to understand if we're at the steady state of run rate, or there still is more headwinds to the business right now.
spk02: Bob, do you want me to take that?
spk03: Yeah, go ahead.
spk02: So the first question, I'll kind of answer them in reverse. Are there incremental headwinds and are we feeling that we're kind of past the COVID? I'm going to talk to each of the segments, but I will start with courts, which is courts are interesting. They have accelerated in the spring because they are fully out of what I would call the COVID fog operationally. The challenge that you have with courts, and we talked about this earlier, is that it's hard for them to make up lost volume because they have a fixed number of courtrooms. So we're working collaboratively with them to help them bring capture and technology in new ways. That also speaks to what we're doing in the UK, Brian. I can't effectively size this because we are in the early stages of this trial. But if the trial is successful, it will be material not only in the offering with this particular client, but also to all of our judicial customers In terms of the insurance space, the insurance space has been interesting. You may have seen there were a couple of challenges. One of our largest insurance clients is climbing back, and they're climbing back quickly. The GEICO contract was heavily impacted in 2020 and 2021, and we're seeing good, steady recovery on that account. When we look at the rest of the insurance space, is that the recorded statements that we do relate to work that was done either six to nine months prior to the accident. So if you're in a car accident, you're going to have conflict with your insurance company. It's probably going to take six to nine months to get to the point where they're actually determining if they're going to litigate. So we are in that recovery stage, but we're still seeing some lumpiness in the insurance space. But in the way that we're looking at the business in terms of the steady climb of the average revenue per day, which is one of the metrics you're going to see us talk more about, we're seeing absolute improvements month over month. So I think that with insurance and law enforcement, we're adapting to some of the legacy stuff from 2021. I wouldn't call it a headwind. I would say we're seeing a very healthy and steady improvement in the average daily volume that will get us back to the steady state this year, probably closer to mid-year than it's growing aggressively.
spk05: Great. Thanks. I'll get back in the queue with a few more questions.
spk00: Your next question comes from Scott Buck with HC Rainwood. Your line is open.
spk03: Hi, good morning, guys. Thank you for taking my questions. First, I was hoping you could help reconcile 4Q revenue of $7.5 million with the $11 million or so that was embedded in the full-year guidance. I know the Oscar closing being pushed was about $2 million of that, but there's still $1.5 million to $2 million that's kind of unaccounted for. Could you kind of give us some color around that?
spk06: Yeah, so there's really two components to the bridge, Scott. One is obviously the delay in that closing. I mean, we ended up closing two months almost behind schedule because of the reasons we discussed. So that's a $2 million impact. So that will have taken us to that $33 million. and also that there was about 163 billing days last year that were negatively impacted with COVID and things. And that was worth about $1.2 million based on all the audited work that we've done. So that's the bridge to the $34 million. So if those two things will have unfolded as planned, basically we will have basically met our target of last year.
spk03: All right. That's helpful, Sebastian. And then can we talk a little bit about longer-term gross margin expectations or targets? It looks like at the midpoint, there's a nice sequential move up in the guide for 2022. But where could we be three or four years from now? Could we push 60%?
spk06: Yeah, so I think that's the direction differently we're taking. And if you look back at what we've shown, I mean, really, we took the technology commercially really early 2019. And then we've acknowledged early on that the bulk of that year, there were obviously some early hiccups related to the deployment and all of that. But really, the migration got accelerated in 20. And then 21, we really, really went to town of migrating from all our insurance and law enforcement. And you could look at it in terms of the gross margin implications. We've been able to lift that. What we're seeing now is none of our court's revenue has been fully migrated yet. And now this represents 65% of our global revenue moving forward. based on the early trials that we've been working on with our courts customers, the productivity gains that Susan was alluding to is actually very significant. It's above expectations. So what we want to do now is with that confidence and say, listen, we will have met last year's revenue subject to the bridge that we talked about. And just remember that none of the court's productivity gains, i.e. gross margins in the courts, have started to flow to our P&L, never mind lifting the financials. So it's really on the back of that, and that's why we were more than ever determined last year to close on the TTA and the OSCREP because of now we saw the implication of the AI within that court revenue. So it's a very significant piece of what it means for 2022 onwards. As far as what we want to be is corporately across all verticals, that basically we're aiming towards 47 to 55 last year, and that will be significant. What we want to do now is obviously we're getting closer to 60, and I think that's really where we're going for 2023, because remember behind the scene, and Susan made comment about it, that technology is gaining maturity. The language models and all the different things that we do with AI ASSIST, is now being able to process, you saw that in the press release, our AI revenue process, our AI is now up by almost 24.5%. So the volume is really starting to go true. We're going to get the bulk of the media and the revenue volume to the AI this year. So it's on the back of that that I feel really comfortable that in 2023 onwards, then we're going to be talking about the 60%, 62%, 63%. And it will be an incremental growth. But that will be really significant if you actually start modeling that against the financials on that side of it.
spk03: That's really great color, Sebastian. Thank you for that. And then last one for me. You call out organic growth opportunities in 2022 as part of the goals, but there's nothing in there about inorganic growth. Are we taking a pause from M&A at the moment?
spk06: Yeah, so what we said is really, look, we obviously, if we do the math, it will be a significant growth year this year, regardless. What we're saying is we're approaching organically conservatively, and we're one to basically be able to prove to everybody that organic growth, and we will adjust as we're moving forward. But overall, the answer is our pipeline is still very active. But the direction that we're taking right now is because of the impact of the court revenue on the gross margin, everybody's all hands on deck right now to accelerate the migration of the TTA court revenue into NetScribe AI Assist. That was doing the heavy lifting in Q1. This should be up and running next week. That's a big nut. If you remember historically, Scott, it took us anywhere between nine and 10 months historically to migrate an asset. In the case of TTA, we did it in four months. So that's how much gain and how much productivity now we're gaining our methodology. And obviously after that is the ostrich. So right now our directions globally is we're still obviously entertaining a lot of different assets, but because of the significant growth that we set up for 2022, really we want to focus where we're going to do the biggest lift in terms of restoring our profitability and restoring our gross margin, and that's in the court's revenue. That's what right now for the next basically several quarters you're going to hear the three of us, all ends on deck. on accelerating those integration because that's how we get back to profitability moving forward very quickly and i think in the market that we're in it's a very important aspect of it that's helpful thank you for taking my questions guys thank you our next question comes from daniel rosenberg with paradigm capital your line is open
spk00: Daniel Rosenberg, your line is open.
spk04: Hi, good afternoon, Sebastian, Susan and Alexi. I just wanted to follow up on the COVID impact that you mentioned affecting numbers last year. So of the 163 days that were impacted, I was wondering kind of, you know, which quarters got impacted most and maybe just what was the Q4 impact in terms of number of days?
spk06: Yeah, so that number, Daniel, was really throughout the year. And, you know, as we mentioned in the prepared statements, it's been an interesting challenge because while we were out of COVID in one area, then really Australia went back in a full lockdown. So we were managing a number of things. But overall, that impact of 163 days, was against 254 billing days last year in Australia. So that gives you a sense that there were significant implications on the billing in Australia last year in terms of that. And what we've seen is basically we were able to do all the reconciliation financially and the impact was over 1.2 million just in Australia alone. as we exited last year. So we're very pleased that that period of time is behind us, but that's how it came out. 245 days of billing last year in Australia, 163 were negatively impacted. Lexi? Yeah, just to add to that, Daniel, thanks for your question. Just to answer Sebastian's comment. We haven't quantified it. The 163 days quarter by quarter. So we know that information available right now. But we do know based on our calculation that the 163 days that were negatively impacted amounts approximately 1.2 million for the full year.
spk02: Daniel, across all of the geographies within Australia, there were varying levels of closure, but they didn't have a full opening up from the August closing until about the 15th of November. So you see a rather large impact. And again, Alexi, we'll need to quantify that for you. But I think you remember me saying in my statements last quarter that the bars were opening on the 15th of November. So we expected some kind of regain to velocity. And I think so October and November were certainly heavily weighted.
spk04: Okay. Thanks for that. Second, just turning to the guidance, I didn't see any comments around adjusted EBITDA. I know it's 10 to 20%.
spk06: uh had been a target i was just wanting to have your thoughts change around that are you investing in the initiatives and i picked that off the table uh in the commentary there yeah so what we uh what we've done is really again coming out of those two years that we wanted to be very conservative in the way we move forward we also wanted to take a proactive approach to q1 And we, you know, as far as whether or not there's going to be any implication, is there any courts in Australia that could be impacted by some lockdowns during Omicron phases? Like, we wanted to be very, very conservative that way. And that's why we basically took, you know, an approach. We're going to focus on the revenue that we know we've got a good line of sight on. we will incrementally disclose our tracking against organic growth quarter over quarter number two and then on the other side basically we'll be able to show you as we're moving forward what the implications are for the adjusted EBITDA so we're planning to start providing you with a lot more callers as we report Q1 as we go into Q2 but we want to be very conservative monitoring very carefully and really using our actual results to actually provide you with the right guidance as we emerge from Q1 and as we emerge out of Q2. And I think from that perspective, we made it very clear right now we are returning to profitability. I think you can see from last year, there was a significant amount of one-time expenses that hit the bottom line. And if you look at the bigger context, we came out of COVID in a relatively good shape operationally. It's just that there's a lot of one-time expenses that obviously were added to it. So all of this is behind us. All of the COVID restrictions are kind of behind us, but we wanted to make sure that we've got the ability to talk to you, Daniel, about the adjusted EBITDA guidance once Q1's results are in, and then we've got to kind of tease the first month of Q2 in the bag so we know exactly where we're trending post a lot of those one-time expenses. So it will be coming your way, just going to be a little bit more incrementally done this year.
spk04: Okay, thanks. Then in your prepared remarks, Susan, you mentioned the number of partnerships that you had established. So I was curious which ones are most exciting to you. And then in terms of the pricing, if you were to sell through one of those partnerships, is there any differences in the economics that you accrue from those?
spk02: The second question is a good one, and they're each structured very, very differently. Because in one case with Lexel as an example, we're actually selling their technologies in our bundle in the framework in Florida. And in the partnership in Pennsylvania, we're selling our services directly. So it's a little of both. Certainly in alignment with partnerships, we're paying them in lieu of distribution. So there is a shared gain model, but it differs whether it's our product that they're selling or their product that we're selling. We are most excited about I would say the framework in Florida, not because the other partnerships aren't extraordinary, but because it really gives us a chance to begin to accelerate the court work in the United States. As you know, historically, and you guys have heard me talk about this, we were very resistant to expand that end-to-end portfolio, but to really only capitalize on the courts as it relates to the as it relates to the capture technologies. Where we're seeing the demand now in the United States is around the end-to-end solution that will be sold to courts um with a major trial we have going on right now in the midwest as an example where they are using it's a current capture customer but they are using the the net scribe technology and the first draft technology to be able to support losses of of internal staffing so this framework in florida gives us an opportunity to accelerate growth and and certainly to evangelize what we believe is a very important strategy relative to our competitive position. So I think they're all exciting. They're exciting in different ways, but I think in terms of short-term opportunities to accelerate the investment that we're making in augmenting the technologies to directly impact the court sector, I think that gets me the most excited. And oh, by the way, it's closed and I get to go talk to customers, which makes me really happy.
spk04: All right. Thanks for taking my questions. I'll pass the line.
spk00: Again, if you would like to ask a question, please press star 1. Our next question comes from Brian Kitzlinger with Alliance Global Partners. Your line is open.
spk05: Great. Thanks. I have a few more. I wanted to follow up on the gross margin. First, I think you mentioned it, but I missed it. But what drove the fourth quarter margin to be so much lower than the other three quarters of the year? So first, if you'll highlight that one more time. And then with TTA almost complete on its transition, and then you're moving to OSCRIC, should we expect the gross margin in the first half of the year to be at the low end, possibly even lower than the guidance range, and then at the upper half of the range in the second half of the year based on this transition schedule?
spk06: Susan, do you want to go ahead?
spk02: Well, I will say that seasonality certainly affected Q4. And also, as I inferred in my discussion, the timing of the close of the Oscript acquisition really couldn't have been worse. We took on all of the costs and sat with fixed costs in the second half of December where there was really no cord activity. So that, Brian, I would say is the major driver other than the fact that seasonality does affect our business. It affects the business most profoundly in the month of December and January. That's not only in Australia, that certainly affects the UK corp business as well. That's not new news. We've seen that in the trends that you could go back to in Q4 and Q1. The migration of TTA, we are very excited about. I will caution that we are training a new industry on gross margin. And if we look at the effects of that from historical migrations, it's a little bit of a hockey stick. We are supplementing resources that are trained in the United States and around the world to kind of offset some of that downward trend. We certainly are better at training transcriptions to be editors today than we were when we went through that first migration. But I think that what we have predicted is that it's not going to be a flash cut. In order to preserve margin, Brian, what we will do is a slower migration to make sure that the resources are gaining velocity and their productivity as we bring new resources on behind them. We've gotten pretty good at predicting how long it's going to take to get a new editor up to full productivity. So with that, we have a measured migration. So we're said we will start that this quarter. it will be a measured approach toward how we accelerate or decelerate that as we get the editors up to full productivity.
spk05: Great. And then my follow-up is you talk about seasonality. That was going to be my next part of the question. Can you tell us, based on what is revenue in hand, what's the weakest quarter you expect this year, the strongest quarter, or any details on the seasonality? You said June and December, obviously, are the weakest. And then the first quarter is one day away from being done. Maybe it would be helpful to give us some discussion on revenue and margin expectation, given we're through the quarter.
spk06: Alexi, do you want to go? Sure. So to answer your question, Brian, in terms of our seasonality, for Q1 is usually our lowest revenue because of what Susan described earlier, the impact of the courts in Australia. And so we expect Q1 to be lowest in terms of trend, and then Q picking up in Q2 and Q3, and then a bit lower in Q4. In terms of We expect gross margin to be within a lower NQ1 and increasing as we progress through the year, impacted by the migration of the customers and that's going to be in Australia and the quartz customers.
spk05: Okay. Thank you so much.
spk06: Okay. Thank you.
spk00: There are no further questions at this time. I would like to turn the conference back over to Sebastian Parry for closing remarks.
spk06: Well, thank you, Chantal. Our success as a company continues to be made possible by our global talents. Despite the impact of COVID and the global recovery, labor shortages, and great resignation that we all heard about, our global workforce kept the pace in meeting the needs of our clients. Under very challenging conditions, that continue to achieve critical milestones demonstrating the resilience, commitments, and loyalty of our workforce. I would like to take this occasion to publicly thank each and every one of our employee, editors, software engineers, contractor, and partner of EIQ for helping us to remain positioned for success as we exit 2021. I also like to thank our customers globally for standing by us as we all adjusted to the challenges of mid-2021. You have embraced our technology and the adaptability of our model, and now we're all in together in what used to be a very strong year ahead of us. As the business level, we enjoy a privileged position with a unique, highly specialized, and protected technology platform, a very good revenue visibility in 2022 that will produce positive cash flow as we do so with a strong balance sheet and limited debt. We have a chance to lead in an addressable market that is getting larger every year, and all of us get to do extremely important work and complex work. I thank you for your time today and your time throughout 2021. We look forward to speaking in a few months to review the results of Q1 2022. Please follow up with Laura Kiernan with any questions you might have. Thank you, everyone, for joining us today on the call. Be safe.
spk00: This concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect.
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