Exela Technologies, Inc.

Good morning and welcome to the Accela Technology Bank first quarter 2023 financial results conference call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your touchtone phone. To withdraw from the question queue, please press star then two. We ask that you limit yourself to one question and one follow-up. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Vince Condiviti, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thanks, Kate. Thank you for joining us for our first quarter 2023 conference call. Our earnings release presentation will be posted to the IRS section of our website. Speakers on today's call are our child and second chairman and our chief financial officer. Today's agenda will be similar to previous calls. PAR will provide an overview of our results and treat them while walking through our financial performance. We expect this call to last under an hour. Some of these matters we will discuss in today's call are forward-looking and involve a number of risks, uncertainties, and other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially. Such risks and uncertainties are set forth in our press release. So, without further ado, I'll turn the call over to our Executive Chairman, PAR. PAR?

Hello to everybody, and thanks for dialing into our call. We are excited about the progress that Accela has made, and I look forward to sharing some of the highlights from our Q1 that will eventually become part of the value chain for all of our shareholders. Finally, look at slide number three. We've talked about this and walked through this slide before. I'd like to call out one important change. On the bottom, it says approximately 15,000 employees. This number a year ago was about 17,000. However, the important message here is not the 15,000 employees, is that we are prepared with a substantial amount of flex capacity because of the business model that we have chosen so that we are prepared for growth as needed. Let's look at slide number four. We continue to chug along in Europe, Ireland, Business there has been renamed as XBP Europe and it reaches majority of the population in some of the key markets. One highlight from Europe that happened after Q1 was closed. So we won in Europe one of the largest transaction or deal in its history. Let's look at slide number five. If you look at the bottom right hand, we started our industry coverage by being called Hot Vendor. And look at the top left hand, we are now they named leader three times. So a migration and recognition of our services over time. And I look forward to adding one more in very near term, recognition as a leader. And I look forward to the day where instead of it being hot mender or a major contender or a major player, we'll be leaders in all solutions and services the company offers. Slide number six, if you would kindly turn to this. In this slide, I'll cover some of the highlights from our keyword. Our revenue grew by 2.5%. over sequential quarter. And remember, our headcount went down by almost 1,000 people, but yet our revenue grew. Our margin also improved, and partly because of the savings. We've talked about savings and the improvement plans, which totaled between $65 and $75 million for 2023. So the margin improvement is both the quality of revenue, but also partially due to the flow-through that we're beginning to see through. Almost 240 bits increase of gross profit margins over the full year 2022 margins. Payroll, which is another way to look at this, reduced by 5.5 million. And year over year, it reduced 3.5 million. So that tells us there's still some stagnant costs that we're going to take out as the year progresses and our flow through will rise. The geography of our CapEx is changing. We used to invest primarily in CapEx to both for growth as well as for maintenance. You know, data centers, PCs, servers, software, licenses, things we built. So because we're now on the cloud and we are not, we don't own the cloud, so our operating expense, or OpEx as we call it, is increasing and we're estimating that's going to increase to $10 million. But at the same time, our capex has gone down from 2% at the year end to 1.5% in Q1. And that's going to stay this way for all of 2023. But it does have an impact of reducing, on a comparable basis, our income. Because OpEx sits in a different part of the geography of our financial profit and loss statement. We did good. We won $64.9 million of GCV. And we won a lot of logos. But let's look at slide number seven. We continue to have stable conversion from pipeline into PCB. We also did okay on renewal rates. 94% translates to 43.3 million of PCB. We remain stable on the recurring revenue at 98%. And our Digital assets, DMR and SMB, they continue to grow in lower three digits. All in all, that translates to about 243 logos. Many of them are SMB logos, but they also include some of our enterprise links. One call-out is that It's sort of contrarian, but it's worth mentioning that in uncertain macroeconomic environment that we are seeing today, my historical experience is that our business and businesses like ours grow because our customers outsource more of their needs to companies like ours. So this, in some ways, bodes well for us. And we have additional digital assets, solutions in the works, very exciting stuff. And I look forward to sharing that in the coming Shareholder Connect and calls like today. Let's look at slide number eight. Some of the corporate actions, key corporate actions that are underway. As you know, we have the special meeting of the shareholders at 10 a.m. today. I promise you it will not be adjourned. We'll publish the results as early as today, but more likely with all the compliance and the filings we have to do. More likely it will be tomorrow. And we have been working on the value creation, strengthening of the balance sheet, improvement of our liquidity. These translate to the three projects and some more that are not mentioned here. For example, Project Neon. We have a sale process underway for that. The bankers are working hard to get that process not only underway, but reach its final destination. Our XDP Europe transaction, we continue to drive it forward. We hope to share those results when it reaches its final destination. also in a very important part of addressing our 2023 and maturities, but also getting, expanding our liquidity, strengthening our balance sheet initiatives, like the recapitulation of Xela Technologies BPA is one of our largest subsidiary inside of the public company, Xela Technologies Inc. We continue to make continue to discuss, make progress with a select group of lenders, which we announced on March 30th, 2023. These initiatives, obviously in a total, will help create value, but also strengthen our balance sheet and expand our liquidity. So they are very important and look forward to sharing and speaking to you as some of these initiatives get completed. With this high-level update, I will hand it off to Shrikant, our Chief Financial Officer. Over to you, Shrikant.