Zenvia Inc.

Good morning and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Zanvya's Q3 2022 earnings conference call. Today's speakers are Mr. Cassio Bobson, Zanvya's founder and CEO, and Shai Shor, CFO and investor relations officer. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded and a replay will be available at the company's IR website where you can also access today's presentation. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the prepared remarks, there will be a question and answer session. For the Q&A session, we ask you to write down your question via the Q&A icon at the bottom of your screen. Your name will then be announced, and you will be able to ask your question live. At this point, a request to activate your microphone will appear on your screen. If you do not want to open your microphone live, please write down no microphone at the end of your question. In this case, our operator will read your question aloud. Now, I would like to welcome one of our speakers for today, Mr. Cassio Bobson, founder and CEO. Sir, the floor is yours.

Hello everyone and welcome to Senvia's earning call. I'm Cassio Babsin, founder and CEO. Today we're going to review our performance for the third quarter and nine months period of 2022. Let's start with slide 4. Since our IPO, we have been delivering on our promise to expand gross margin and increase profitability. I'm very proud to report that we registered the best profitability metrics recorded as a listed company for a quarter, including positive free cash flow. This is a direct result of a better revenue mix backed by the expansion of our SaaS business together with the implementation of a strict cost control plan. As we are seeing a very competitive environment in the CPaaS business with strong pricing pressure, we have been taking a series of measures to reduce overall expenses, putting Zenvia on a clear path to profitability. Also, given the challenging global environment to tech companies, management is now very much focused in improving the company's capital structure and maximizing cash flow. Therefore, we recently announced two important initiatives. First, we have significantly reduced our funding gap until the end of 2023 by renegotiating the earn-out terms with D1 and Movidask. Second, we implemented several cost-cutting initiatives, which included downsizing of our corporate structure, as announced last week. Shai will cover both initiatives in more detail during his remarks. Also new this quarter, and as part of the guidance we provide to the market, we are introducing a full-year EBITDA guidance. With it, we are also adjusting revenue guidance down and adjusting up our gross profit margin. Let's now take a look at our performance during this quarter. We are reporting post-evolutions on all our key metrics, net revenues, adjusted gross profit and adjusted gross margin. As you can see, we were able to increase the profitability of our operations and, more importantly, convert gross profit into EBITDA and free cash flow. We did this despite the challenging and more competitive environment like we lived in this quarter. Net revenues were up 10%, while adjusted gross profit jumped 50%, adding 12.7 percentage points to our adjusted gross margin, which attests our commitment and path towards profitability. On the next slide, in looking specifically at our gross margins, we can see the evolution of our gross profit margin since the first quarter of 2021 and the IPO until today. We have delivered on the promises made during our IPO. We have expanded our margins significantly, a double-digit expansion, whether it is since the IPO or on a year-over-year basis. In the nine-month period, we recorded a gross margin of almost 40%, as you can see in the orange bars to the right, which is close to the top range of our updated guidance for the full year of 2022. This is yet another proof that we are walking the talk on our path to profitability. Looking ahead, we intend to accelerate the integration of our SaaS products and strengthen our cross-selling. Under CPaaS Business, our plan is to continue to pursue a balance between volumes and profitability to maximize gross profit. We have already been changing the customer experience of more than 300 million humans in Latin America with our CX platform by improving the way in which brands communicate with end customers. The good results of all these initiatives and all the innovation we are bringing to the market are already reflected in our profitability. However, there is still a huge white space opportunity in this market, and we have just begun to tap it. There is a promising future ahead, and we are ready to take the opportunities. We will be doing all of this diligently and with a strict focus on cost control and cash preservation. We aim to continue increasing our profitability and maximizing our returns. I will now turn the floor to Shai for his remarks. I'll be back after that for the Q&A.

Thank you, Cassio. Hello, everyone, and thanks for being with us today. I would like to start by breaking down our revenue and adjusted gross profit mix by SaaS and CPaaS. As we started to report like this only in Q2, we decided to present Q3 numbers compared sequentially so that you can all fully understand our path to profitability. When we analyze the performance of our revenues on the chart to the left, you can see the sequential drop in revenues of 11.5%, which was mainly due to a 22% decline in CPAS. This decline reflects our decision to focus on profitability, which led to lower volumes given the much more competitive environment with strong pricing pressure. On the other hand, our SaaS revenues went up almost 12% sequentially and contributed to offset part of this decline. Let's now look to the graph on the right. It shows the mix of adjusted gross profit. We see sequential increases in both SaaS and CPaaS margins, which means that our focus on profitability paid off. CPaaS delivered a solid 15 sequential increase, while SaaS grew almost 12%, which consolidated into 12.5% total increase in adjusted gross profit. As you know, we have been transforming Zenve into a SaaS company since our IPO. During this quarter, we can see how our software business already represents 57% of our gross profit, which demonstrates we are effectively more SaaS than CPaaS. On the revenue side, SaaS represented 40% of the total in the quarter, a large sequential improvement from Q2, when SaaS was 29% of total. Important to highlight that the third quarter is the first in which we fully consolidate D1, SenseData, and MovieDesk. Looking ahead, long term, we expect SAS to represent about 70% of our gross profit. And as Cassio said, we are just beginning to tap the huge white space in the SAS market in Latin America. Let's now address the cost side. We have been implementing cost-cutting initiatives throughout the year, especially as we accelerated the integration of the acquired companies and started extracting synergies. This initiative also included reducing non-personnel G&A expenses, such as consulting and travel, among many others. Last week, we announced a downsizing of our corporate structure, equivalent to 9% of the total workforce in Latin America. We expect this to reduce our personnel expenses by 40 million reais in 2023. In order to execute this, we expect to incur one-time expenses of approximately 5 million reais in Q4 2022, mainly related to severance. I would like to share with you that we were very transparent with all our humans regarding this process, with all communications made individually. We are also supporting affected employees by extending health care plans and providing career replacement opportunities. Finally, we also hosted several meetings with all other employees to reaffirm our commitments and expectations going forward. On top of the downsizing, we are implementing a plan to generate non-personnel savings. Altogether, we expect to bring our costs down by R$ 70 million on a yearly basis as of 2023. Moving on, we are happy to report that all the initiatives implemented made us reach the best profitability metrics recorded for a quarter since our IPO. In this third quarter, we recorded R$ 9.9 million in normalized EBITDA, which excludes certain non-cash items related to future earn-out payments, evidencing the profitability of our operations. This means that we have been able to convert high gross profit into EBITDA and cash flow. This gives us confidence to introduce a new EBITDA guidance for the year, which we'll discuss in the next slide. In its 19 years of history, Zenve has built a pattern of sustainable and profitable growth. The decision to become a SaaS company has taken a toll in profitability in the last couple of years. We believe the third quarter is the turning point, and we are already returning to positive EBITDA. Therefore, we feel confident to introduce a full year 2022 EBITDA guidance, which we expect to be in the range of 10 to 15 million reais. This is the normalized EBITDA, again, excluding non-cash adjustments related to earn outs and also one-time expenses related to the downsizing we have just announced. Another positive metric of the Quora was the positive free cash flow. This slide shows a normalized free cash flow bridge, which allowed us to generate R$ 3.5 million in the Quora. For transparency and to help you understand the recurring cash flow generation, this number already excludes the working capital instruments that we use in the Quora to ensure a higher level of cash balance. And finally, we announced at the end of October the agreement with D1 and MovieDesk in terms of their announce, which allowed us to drastically reduce our funding gap. As seen in the slide, we were able to reduce the total amount to be paid by the end of 2023 to approximately 30 million reais from 360 million reais by extending the payment schedule to the fourth quarter of 2026. This means we can remain totally focused on continuing expanding gross profit and generating positive EBITDA. As you can see, this was indeed an eventful quarter with a lot of important changes in the market dynamics and also inside our company. All recent initiatives have allowed us to introduce the new full year EBITDA guidance of between 10 and 15 million reais as previously mentioned. Additionally, we are also updating our full year 2022 guidance with some important changes. We are reducing our revenue guidance, but we are increasing our adjusted gross margin. In terms of the revenue guidance, the reduction is mainly concentrated in the CPS revenues and it stems from our focus on profitability. The new revenue guidance is projecting for 2022 a range between R$ 740 and R$ 790 million, which implies a year-over-year growth of between 22% and 31%. SAS revenues should be in the range of 250 and 275 million reais, already including six months of movie desk, while CPS revenues should be in the range of 490 and 515 million reais. Our adjusted gross margin is projected to be higher, reaching between 38% and 40% on a 5.7% to 7.7% percentage points expansion from 21%. This figure is taking into account the 5 percentage points increase in the CPAS adjusted gross margin to 27%, with the SAS adjusted gross margin remaining at 65%. With this, we conclude our prepared remarks, and we are ready to take your questions.

We will now begin the question and answer session. Once again, for this Q&A session, we ask you to write down your question via the Q&A icon at the bottom of your screen. Your name will then be announced and you will be able to ask your question live. At this point, a request to activate your microphone will appear on your screen. If you prefer not to open your microphone, please write down no microphone at the end of your question and our operator will read your question aloud. Now let's go on now to our first question. It comes from Lucas Chavez, cell site analyst with Zenvia. Lucas, the floor is yours. The mic is open. Go ahead, sir.

Thanks for having my question. So I have two questions here. The first one is, could you enter in more details in what you expect in terms of organic and inorganic revenues going forward after the 10% increase we had this quarter? And if I may, a second question. I'd like to know more about the cross-selling opportunities that you mentioned, and if you could enter in more details into that. Thank you.

Thank you, Lucas. I'll let Cassio start with your second question on your cross-selling and revenue opportunities, and then I'll come back to the organic versus inorganic growth.

Lucas, thank you for the question. We've been working over the last couple of quarters in integrating our portfolio in part of these operations that we did in terms of earnouts was actually to accelerate integration so we can benefit from all of the expansion that we do in terms of technology and solutions to our customers. And we're starting to get the first structure of combining products and making a go-to-market of these products combined. So we have customers that have been operating during this quarter on these new go-to-market initiatives that combines different products so they can benefit from this evolution that we've been doing. Hence, we expect this in the next couple of quarters to be really important in terms of growth, as we see that most of our customers that are using one product are targets for our other products. And as we integrate these solutions, we are able to address that big opportunity that we have within our same customers.

And on your question on organic versus inorganic, so let's separate the discussion between SAS and CPaaS. So the SAS business is growing at 40, 45% pro forma pace. So this is all organic, right? And this trend continues to be true. It was true in Q3, and we continue to see that pace going forward. The CPaaS business has been very competitive. The environment has been very aggressive in terms of pricing. And this is the reason why in Q3 we decided that we should not go for those specific deals that were with negative margins. And the dynamics of this CPS market is very flexible and accelerated, meaning our clients can move from us to another player very short and back to us. So essentially, we keep monitoring how aggressive prices are and we'll continue to continue pursuing the balance between revenue and profitability. So if we see opportunities to accelerate volumes again at decent profitability, we'll do that. So the. the organic growth uh of the of the cps business will depend essentially on how aggressive uh the market is i don't know castle if you want to add anything on on on this competitive environment on the cps uh i think you uh explained the most most of the dynamics that we are

See terms of the market, so we see that there's there is some players in the market subsidizing customers focusing more on top line growth. And we don't see that as something that is sustainable on the mid to long term, therefore, we expect the market to be naturally adjusted to more sustainable pricing for large volumes and see pass.

Okay, our next question comes from Vitor Tomita, sell-side analyst with Goldman Sachs. Vitor, we're opening the mic for you. Go ahead, sir, ask your question, please.

Hello, good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for taking our questions. Two quick questions from our side. The first one is if you could give us some more color on how you are seeing the sales cycle amid a more uncertain macroeconomic scenario. And our second question would be, I know you provided already updated full-year guidance, but from a more qualitative sense, how should we think about seasonality for Zenvia in Q4, given seasonally higher retail volumes and the usual seasonality of CFAS revenue and margins? Thank you.

So looking at a more understanding of the seasonality on Q4 and what we are seeing more qualitative basis. Yes, we do have some Q4 effects of Black Friday and the promotional calendar that do affect some of the volume based revenues. And so we're expecting to have some of that being captured on the fourth quarter. Looking at the macroeconomic environment and how we expect that to affect our projections for 2023, we're seeing that companies are more cautious when they're making their 2023 budgets. Therefore, we expect some deceleration on IT spending growth, which is something that occurs. I mean, we also always have growth on IT spending, but we expect that this have a bit of deceleration. And that could affect our top land growth next year, as there are still lots of uncertainty, not only in Brazil, but I'll say all of Latin America and globally. as these turbulence kind of ceases and companies are, again, more safe to apply their resources into technology, we expect this to get back to a normal trend of continuous growth that comes from digital transformation of all these processes, and especially on the customer experience where we are leading this space.

Very clear. Thank you very much.

Again, if you have a question, please use the Q&A icon at the bottom of your screen to write it down, and we will open your microphone. If you prefer not to open your microphone, please write down no microphone at the end of your question, and our operator will read your question aloud.

So I'll take a question here in the web. We welcome your focus on profitability. Can you detail more what are you doing for 2023 on top of the layoffs to cut costs? I know, Caio, do you want to take that?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. First of all, as we are reducing our structure, we have some costs related directly to that expenses that we can reduce so that also reflect not in people expense, but in systems, for example, license and everything. Also, we are reviewing our budget for travel and consulting and also some expense that we decided as a team that is not the priority right now and will not impact growth for the year. So some of those repackage of expenses and all the work that we are doing with the team with a more detailed look at every expense that we have so we can deliver those additional 30 million reduction for 2023.

Another one here from the web. Can you tell us how is your funding gap looking and what would be the next steps? So let me take that one. As we've been doing since middle of end of June, beginning of July, we've been assessing and negotiating different instruments. So the renegotiations of the earnouts, the payment terms of the earnouts for T1 and Movie Desk are an example. We've been negotiating directly with banks to extend the maturity, to provide us with some grace period and those things takes time. So we will be announcing them as we close those deals. But we are confident that all the instruments and tools that we have available to us and we've been discussing and negotiating will help us navigating through this time of difficulties to find credit. Operator, can you repo to see if you have any more questions?

Reprompt? Okay. Again, if you have a question, please write down your name. And excuse me, use the Q&A icon at the bottom of your screen to write it down. We'll open your microphone for you. If you prefer not to open your microphone, please write down no microphone at the end of your question. And our operator will read your question aloud. We're still waiting for questions.

So I'll take another one here. Good afternoon. Can you please comment on the growth of new clients in SaaS? How can we see the growth of the new clients looking forward? Cassio, I think you can take that one.

Yeah, definitely. We've been working on all the go-to-market for these different solutions that we have, especially as we integrated, finished integration of Sirena. And we just concluded the acceleration of integration that now starts as a project for us to get the benefit of that over MovaDask. We are able then to combine both solutions of attraction, conversion, service, and success. So we can benefit not only from the standalone go to market, which is something that we have been capturing over the last couple of quarters, but also to add cross-sell to our customers. And that's how we expect them to add this new stream of customer growth, which means selling other products to the same customers. And that, of course, creates a continuous cycle of uh enriching our presence and the same customers and looking also the same combination of products we're able then to serve them for new customers as well as a bundle so we can achieve markets that were not able to be served with the standalone solutions now we open up for customers that require the adoption of more than one of our solutions so they can address their demands or their use cases. So we see that even though we are facing an economic environment that is not like the best for growth, we see that there is this continuous demand for our solutions. We see that the continuous flow of new customers and we're able to capture that in terms of customer base growth now combined with integration of our solutions. We expect that to drive a very healthy growth of our SaaS business over the next couple of quarters.

I don't see any further questions here on this system, so.

Okay, well then let me just check the Q&A session, the column here. Hold on just a second. We don't seem to have any more questions. So now I would say that this concludes our Q&A session. Questions and answers are over. And I would like now to turn the conference back over to Mr. Cassio Bobson for his closing remarks. Mr. Bobson, please, you have the floor.

Thank you very much for your time to get to know how we're being implementing all of these strategy towards profitability. This has been our whole history, but it's combining growth with a profitable operation. So we're very proud to get back to that historical trajectory. And as we see the next couple of quarters, especially next year, we expect to go even stronger in that profitability trajectory. So we can combine all that strategy that we work in terms of expansion of the platform with a sustainable company for the future. So thank you very much for your time and see you in the next one.

Thank you all. The conference is now concluded. Zenvia's IR area is at your disposal to answer any additional questions you might have. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect. Have a nice day, everyone. Thank you so much.