KORE Group Holdings, Inc.

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the CORE Wireless Third Quarter 2021 Conference Call. Delivering today's prepared remarks are President and Chief Executive Officer, Ramil Bail, and Chief Financial Officer, Puneet Pomnani. Following their prepared remarks, the management team will open the call up for any questions. Before we go further, I would like to turn the call over to Vic Vijayverghia, CORE's Vice President of M&A, as he reads the company's Safe Harbor Statement that provides important cautions regarding forward-looking statements. Vic, please go ahead.

Thank you, Alex. On today's call, we will be referring to the press release filed this afternoon that details the company's third quarter 2021 results, which can be downloaded from the investor relations page at ir.corewireless.com, where you'll also find the latest earnings presentation that supplements the information discussed on today's call. Finally, a recording of the call will be available on the investor section of the company's website later today. Please note that this webcast includes forward-looking statements. Statements about the company's beliefs and expectations containing words such as may, will, could, believe, expect, anticipate, and similar expressions are forward-looking statements and are based on assumptions and beliefs as of today. The company encourages you to review the Safe Harbor statements, risk factors, and other disclaimers contained on this slide and in today's press release, as well as in the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which identify specific risk factors that may cause actual results or events to differ materially from those described in our forward-looking statements. The company does not undertake to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements after this webcast. The company also notes that on this call, it will be discussing non-GAAP financial information. The company is providing that information as a supplement to information prepared in accordance with the accounting principles generally accepted in the United States, or GAAP. You can find a reconciliation of these metrics to the company's reported gap results in the reconciliation tables provided in today's earnings release and presentation. And now, I'll turn the call over to Romal Bell, the company's president and chief executive officer.

Romal? Thanks, Vic. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us today for our very first earnings call as a public company. My name, as you've now heard a couple of times, is Romal Bell. I've been here with Core right at about four years. And with me is Punit Bhamnani, our CFO, who has been here over three and a half years. The objectives of our call today are to introduce our company to the public markets, discuss our Q3 earnings, and describe why we are so excited about the next five, 10, and yes, even 15 years. I know for many of you that sounds like an awfully long time, but that is the beauty of our opportunity. We are in the singular growth market of the Internet of Things, or IoT, which is poised to grow spectacularly and hence provide our company with excellent tailwinds as we hurdle towards becoming a truly connected planet. In this first call, therefore, I will take a little longer with my prepared remarks. To introduce our company, I will provide an overview of our services, which are powered by unparalleled technology and IP, provide an overview of our market and growth dynamics, our strategy and competitive positioning, and bring it to life with a customer use case example. Then, Puneet will cover our financial results, after which I will cover the five-year transformation plan we have put in place, and summarize our competitive moat and investment highlights. Looking at our third quarter, and as summarized here on page three for those of you following the webcast, We recorded strong total revenue of $67.9 million. Of note, we were aided by the timing acceleration of a significant project with our largest customer, which was to start in Q4 and go through the first half of next year, but has been accelerated into being delivered mostly this year itself. Our EBITDA results and strong connected health performance flow directly from this acceleration, given that our largest customer is in healthcare. Importantly, and since the timing acceleration is merely from 2022 into 2021, we are happy to confirm that we are confident we will exceed our revenue projection for this two-year period, i.e. 2021 and 2022 combined. While the acceleration of our customer's LTE transition project will make 2022 look relatively flat with 2021, we expect to beat our combined revenue projections over this two-year stack by a meaningful amount, which will further demonstrate our ability to execute our business and drive growth. Course two lines of business, as depicted on this page, are IoT connectivity and IoT solutions. First up is IoT connectivity, the largest part of which is IoT connectivity as a service, or what we refer to as CAS. We have been building our global value proposition in this space for almost 20 years, and it allows our customers to connect multiple device types using multiple types of networks in multiple countries and regions of the world. This is why we like to call our independent, world-leading IoT connectivity offering our multi, multi, multi service. And right until the time this leadership team arrived, this was near 100% of our revenue. To our core business of IoT CAS, where we charge by subscription and data usage, we have added connectivity enablement services, or CAs, where we can license our IP over multiple years to customers who are looking to control their own communications networks. Even as we have added CAs revenue into our overall IoT connectivity services, we are proud to say that our newer IoT solutions business grew to approximately 26% of overall revenue in 2020, and is trending towards, as it says there on the slide on the left, towards 32% of our revenue in 2021. The major categories of our IoT solutions business are depicted on the page as well, from IoT device management to our newer IoT analytics services, including Security Pro and our location-based services. Both of these are built to customers on a subscription basis, just like our CAS service. Further, we are hoping to accelerate the pace of our growth investments, including investments into preconfigured solutions and private networks. On then to the exciting market that we participate in. Largely in the three categories of connectivity, applications and platforms, and managed services, The IoT market is expanding from less than $400 billion in 2020 to $7 trillion in 2030. And it's then expected to double again to approximately $15 trillion by 2035, driven largely by the exciting use cases that 5G will bring to IoT. This market growth is best depicted by the growth in the number of IoT devices deployed, which will grow from roughly 12 billion at the end of 2020 to approximately 75 billion devices by 2030. This growth is marked by a significant shift in the mix of short-range to long-range devices. It is the long-range devices where our IoT connectivity services fit, while our IoT solution services actually apply across the entire spectrum of device and connectivity types. While this market growth seems very large, the fact is that there are several trends that deterministically underpin it. Chief amongst these, marked on the page, are eSIM, LPWA going into massive IoT, and of course 5G. But one could also look at edge computing and AIoT, where artificial intelligence meets IoT, as being the technology developments that can make this growth a reality. This leaves us two key questions from the standpoint of understanding our market opportunity. One, what really is IoT and does it only apply to highly sophisticated or mission critical applications? And two, why was the last decade generally disappointing and why did we not reach the predicted 20 billion IoT devices by 2020? Well, the answers to these two key questions are on this next page. First, on the left side, are depicted real IoT solutions that we support today. You will note several are everyday items, and they can be relatively simple sensors, but other use cases can be deceptively simple to look at, but making them work is highly complex. And that sort of leads to the right side of the page, which is a summary of the top seven challenges that have held IoT back the past decade. I could spend a lot of time speaking to each of these, starting with security as a foundational challenge at the bottom, all the way around, and then to the middle where we make the point of the fragmented ecosystem that our customers have to find a way to harness. They have to put the Lego blocks together themselves, and this is the root cause of the complexity in IoT. In the interest of time, I will just speak about this overall complexity. I remember reading two key statistics back when we were crafting our growth strategy. The fact that it takes the average enterprise 18 to 24 months to launch an end-to-end IoT solution, working with, on average, 18 partners to do so. And secondly, the fact that almost two-thirds of all IoT pilots and proof of concepts failed or stalled, especially in the early part of the last decade. It is this complexity that we fundamentally target as our growth strategy now, to provide a one-stop shop for IoT to help our customers adopt IoT with ease. So let's look at our growth strategy. What we do for our customers is help them deploy, manage, and scale their IoT applications, whatever those applications are, whatever the use cases are, if you prefer that term. We help them deploy successfully instead of stalling at the pilot stage or failing to expand to multiple regions and multiple carriers because the costs are exorbitant and the number of partners required are unmanageable. We help them manage their deployments with world-class support and a series of managed services they can outsource to us so they can focus on their own growth. And this, in turn, helps them scale confidently and securely. So if that is what we do, the how we do it is through connectivity, solutions, and analytics. Three simple words, and yet they represent a lifetime's worth of opportunity. As we transform and grow our product catalog, Core will grow. We have a billion dollars in revenue squarely in our sites, and we have confidence we can get there sooner than many might expect. Now clearly there is a lot of detail underneath these simple words, and I could peel the layers of the onion slowly describing our portfolio of services under each dimension. But in the interest of time, I'm going to go straight to a bit of a detailed framework we use with our customers. We call this our seven by seven framework, and it represents the seven big deliverables required under each of the seven stages it takes to launch an end-to-end IoT solution. It doesn't matter the complexity of the solution. It needs to go through each of these steps. This picture instantly explains to you why IoT is so complex and why one enterprise might need to have 18 partners to launch one end solution. And that's an average. In some cases, like in the case of our largest customer, you might need an order of magnitude more partners. So as customers hear about core and hear about our IoT in a box approach, we believe they will engage with us earlier in the process, not just when they need connectivity. And we will work with them to ensure they understand everything they need to map what they have sorted on this chart versus what we can help them with. And of course, we transparently tell them what we do ourselves, which is everything in green on the chart, including, of course, our core business in step three of core connectivity management plus device management plus data management, what we do with partners, which is everything in blue on the chart, and what we fully outsource to partners, the items in red. Customers can ask us to sort of prime their solution or give us some portion of these 49 steps. And our commitment to them is we will make it work and we will speed their time to market. This takes us to the picture on slide 10 that best tells our pure play IoT story. We are an enabler. The end solution, the part of the iceberg that's visible above the waterline, belongs to our customer. That is the value proposition they sell to their end customers, businesses or consumers, and that is what they should be singularly focused on themselves. The majority of the work that needs to be done, represented by the 90% of the iceberg under the surface, can be supported by us, and this represents a lot of growth. Further, it represents stickiness. And as our customers grow, we grow with them. And this makes us one of the best ways to play the growth of the connected world and the IoT market. Not a singular bet in any one use case or any one industry, but a diversified, pure play, enablement way to play IoT. So the last part of the company overview I want to provide you before we go into our customer use case is our go-to-market approach. Increasingly, we go to market by industry. When we were just an IoT connectivity player, we were inherently horizontal. But to holistically enable our customer solutions, we need to know their use case and speak their language. This is only possible with an industry orientation. And so just this year, we launched our first two industry practices, connected health and fleet management. Even as we anticipate these industries growing in the near term, we believe the next three verticals will grow even faster over the next few years as those segments adopt IoT solutions. One of the key levers of our growth strategy is launching and growing these industry practices organically and inorganically. Now to slide 12 for the use case, our number one customer. The customer is an instantly recognizable large med tech enterprise, and one of the use cases they participate in is cardiac rhythm monitoring, which is one of the early use cases in the exploding space of remote patient monitoring. This is an incredible story of enabling IoT adoption. Bottom line, this customer just sends us a PO every quarter with the number of devices they need for the following quarter, and then we go to work. The third party hardware manufacturer ships the devices to us. We take care of the configure, provision, test, label, record, pack, ship, and reverse logistics services that are needed. and help our customers ship to approximately 57 countries and actually gather data from over 150 countries on their behalf and make sure that data gets to the appropriate data cloud and then to the cardiologist and caregiver portals in a highly secure manner. The customer reached almost 1 million subscribers last year and will likely go over that number this year as they have been growing at roughly 20% each year. And to give some sense of why they are our largest customer, Let's go one further slide and overlay on the seven by seven chart that you just saw all of the services that we perform for customer number one. That then is the goal. Not that every customer will buy multiple services from us or even that there will be many that will buy so many of our seven by seven services. But getting more of our 3,600 plus customers buying more of our services is a key growth opportunity that we refer to as our cross-sell opportunity, and this is another key reason we are bullish about our future. With that, I will now hand the call over to Puneet to cover the financials in more detail. I will then conclude with further commentary on our business and our differentiators. Puneet?