PAR Technology Corporation

Hello, good day. This is your conference operator speaking. Today's conference is scheduled to begin momentarily. Until that time, your lines will again be placed on hold. Again, this is your conference operator. Today's conference is scheduled to begin momentarily. Until that time, your lines will again be placed on hold. Thank you for your patience. Thank you. Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Power Technology Fiscal Year 2021 Second Quarter Financial Results Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star then the number one on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. If you require any further assistance, please press star zero. I would now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker for today, Mr. Chris Burns, Vice President of Business Development. Please go ahead.

Thank you, RJ, and good afternoon. I'd also like to welcome you today to the call for PAR's 2021 Second Quarter Financial Results Review. The complete disclosure of our results can be found in our press release issued this afternoon, as well as in our related Form 8K furnished to the SEC. To access the press release and the financial details, please see the investor relations and news section of our website at www.partech.com. At this time, I'd like to take care of certain details in regards to the call today. Participants on the call should be aware that we are recording this call this afternoon and will be available for playback. Also, we are broadcasting the conference call via the World Wide Web, so please be advised if you ask a question, They'll be included in both our live conference and any future use of the recording. I'd like to remind participants that this conference call includes forward-looking statements that reflect management's expectations based on currently available data. However, actual results are subject to future events and uncertainties. The information on this conference call related to projections or other forward-looking statements may be relied upon and subject to the safe harbor statement included in our earnings release this afternoon and in our annual and quarterly filings with the SEC. Joining me on the call today is PAR's CEO and President, Savneet Singh, and Brian Minar, PAR's Chief Financial Officer. I'd now like to turn the call over to Savneet for the formal remarks portion of the call, which will be followed by general Q&A. Savneet?

Thanks, Chris, and good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining our call today. To begin, I first want to welcome the Punch team and shareholders to par. Together, our firms are working quickly towards building a unified commerce platform. I'm pleased to report on our continued progress in this quarter as we reported sequential and strong year-over-year growth in our business and see strong momentum within our bring business lines early in Q3. First, to update you on the Punch acquisition and our success in the first three months post-closing, and we'll move on to review the quarter's results. As you know, we completed the acquisition of Punch during the second quarter on April 8th. With a purchase price of approximately $500 million, plus the assumption of stock-based compensation, Punch was by far our largest acquisition to date. Punch is a leading provider of loyalty and customer experience solutions that serves approximately 40 of the largest 100 restaurant companies. We believe that the combination of Punch and PAR provides tremendous opportunities for incremental growth in both business lines. The combined... is a market leader in providing a unified commerce cloud platform for large enterprise restaurants. We plan to use Punch's technology suite to expand our customer reach. We also have an opportunity to leverage Punch's strong brand and customer relationships to deliver the par platform at the enterprise level for restaurants. We discussed our vision for those opportunities on our investor call in early May. I'm pleased with the progress we've made towards the initial objectives in the three months that Punch has been a part of PAR. Our teams have prioritized our opportunities and are very engaged, working well together in a regular cadence. Our pre-acquisition impressions regarding the dependability of the backlog came true, and the high degree of compatibility between the cultures of the two organizations has thus far proven to be accurate. Our product teams have begun to work together, and we are excited as we learn more about each company's strengths and how complementary they are. We'll quickly be on combined roadmaps, combining guest, transaction, payment, and back-office. The goal is to deliver a platform to our customers that can run their restaurant, but also give our customers control over their destiny. They can build on top, configure, or integrate on top of. While restaurant technology has proliferated tremendously over the last few years, most restaurant companies have yet to truly mark a win in their technological journey. Said differently, while restaurant technology companies have won, the restaurant operator has not. We aim to change that. Together, Punch and the entire PAR platform can now provide the most expansive set of capabilities for enterprise restaurants. As a result of those capabilities, we saw demand for our platform offerings grow. As I cited earlier, restaurants are in the midst of a remarkable bounce back of their business from the hardships caused by the COVID pandemic. Many of PAR's restaurant customers are experiencing record growth in same-store sales, foot traffic, and average ticket price. These conditions provide an environment of investment for restaurant and technology at the top of that list. Now to briefly review the second quarter reported numbers before Brian gives further details. In Q2, we reported revenues of $69 million, a 51% increase from one year ago. Today, we also reported a gap net loss of $10 million, or $0.39 loss per share, compared to a gap net loss of $9 million, or $0.29 loss per share from the same period in 2020. On an adjusted basis, non-gap net loss for the second quarter of 2021 was $9.2 million, or $0.36 loss per share compared to a non-GAAP net loss of $4 million or $0.21 loss per share for the same period in 2020. Now moving to our business performance. We reported ARR of $76.7 million, a 166% increase aided by the acquisition of Punch. The growth is led by Punch and Brink, with Data Central still in a period of recovery. Adjusting for Punch's Q2 2020 contribution, the combined ARR growth would be around 42.5%. The underlying growth at Punch in Q2 continued the strong momentum we saw in Q1. Brink growth this quarter was notable as we activated 1,099 new stores this quarter, solid performance in the face of several challenges in the hardware supply chain. More important, though, is the velocity of activations in Brink exiting Q2 that should lay the foundation for strong ARR growth through the second half of the year. We're seeing record activations and expect and hope that to continue. In Q2, we reported brink ARR of $27.6 million, a 29% increase from Q2 2020. This growth came from improved activation, and as I mentioned earlier, the exit velocity was very strong. At the end of Q2, we now have 13,234 active stores, and our reported open order backlog number within the second quarter was over 3,100 stores yet to be installed. Brink bookings for Q2 came in at 1,012, a 24% increase from Q2 2020. Bookings are a signed purchase order and continue to be a significant KPR for our company that demonstrates the velocity of our business. It's important to point out this metric is not totally linear from quarter to quarter as order patterns from customer to customer vary, but our pipeline is deep not only with signed customers but also new customers as well. While lower than the number reported in Q1, I'm very confident in our pipeline. Turning to Punch. Their contribution to Q2 results is as of April 8th, and as expected, they did not disappoint. Our Punch product line added 2,774 new live sites in Q2 and now has a total of nearly 48,400 sites at the end of June, a 56% increase in live sites over the last 12 months. Punch's ARR at the end of Q2 was reported at $40.3 million, a 61% year-over-year increase and a 4.4 million increase since just the end of Q1. Contracted ARR at the end of Q2 totaled $16.5 million, a significant number that proves the value and demand for loyalty and customer experience by restaurants. We're extremely pleased and fortunate to have added this industry leader to the PAR platform. Data Central, our back-office software acquired in the Restaurant Magic transaction, saw improved bookings in the quarter at 346, a 67% increase from last year's Q2, and ARR reported at 8.8. Combined ARR with Brink and Restaurant Magic is now $36.4 million at the end of Q2. As I mentioned last quarter, we continue to see some near-term weakness in demand for non-customer-facing technology in restaurants. I'm encouraged by the bookings improvement within Data Central and expect more normal bookings pace as 2021 progresses. And similar to our expected growth in Brink activations for the back half, we expect Data Central to also improve as 2021 plays out. Now to quickly review our product business in the quarter, that is our point-of-sale hardware and drive-through communication systems business. Product revenues in the quarter improved dramatically from the COVID-impacted Q2 2020 quarter. Product sales were reported at $23.9 million in this recently ended quarter, a 94% increase. As we are seeing favorable impact of vaccine rollouts and improving capital purchase environment for restaurants, we will continue to see higher sales throughout 2021. Important to note, the current industry-wide challenges such as supply chain constraints, price inflation, and significant increases to freight and logistic costs require ongoing management and vigilance. We've experienced a margin impact with the cost associated with the current supply chain realities, including dramatic growth in shipping charges. To mitigate this pain, we've put through price increases and other addressable actions and are already seeing margin improvements in Q3, which I hope to continue to Q4. While we don't know how long supply chain challenges will exist, our customers have stayed committed to us and allowed us to pass on parts of this challenge to them. Now to review our government segment. Our government business reported revenues of $17.8 million. a minor decrease of 1% when compared to Q2 of last year. Our contract backlog at the end of Q2 was $141.6 million. We continue to seek out contract opportunities where we can leverage our decades-long experience with performance excellence, specifically in value-added revenue contracts that include more direct labor and high-tech contract work with our Intel Solutions business line. In summary, we have considerable optimism as the entire restaurant industry is in the midst of record store sales and customer traffic levels. We had a busy and active second quarter. We closed on a transformative acquisition with Punch, announced large new customers, and the new customer pipeline continues to be strong. Looking towards the second half of 2021, we anticipate accelerated deployments in Q3 and Q4 of Brink, which should drive strong ARR growth. Given the success of the Punch acquisition, we will look to continue to build out our platform both organically and inorganically that will increase our subscription rates and make us more attractive to more customers. And with that, I'll turn the call over to Brian for more details on the Q1 numbers and then take your questions.

Thank you, Stephanie, and good afternoon, everyone. Product revenue in the quarter was $23.9 million, an increase of $11.6 million, or 94% from the $12.3 million reported in the prior year. Our product revenue during the quarter was the highest compared to the preceding 12 quarters. Growth was driven by multiple factors, including continued growth in drive-through and kitchen display systems, hardware refresh investment by some of our Tier 1 legacy accounts, and hardware revenue associated with our rollout of Ring POS to new customers. Service revenue that includes revenue streams from our subscription software was reported at $27.2 million. an increase of $11.9 million, or 77.8 percent, from the $15.3 million reported in the prior year. The increase was primarily driven by the inclusion of punch revenue of $8.1 million, a $1.7 million increase in other software revenue, and a $1.7 million increase in implementation revenue. The company continues to expand a recurring revenue base, which includes both software-related services and hardware support contracts. In total, The recurring software revenue streams contributed $9.6 million of the increase in service revenue. Of the $27.2 million of service revenue reported in Q2 2021, $23 million or 85 percent is comprised of recurring revenue contracts as compared to $13.2 million or 86 percent of service revenue in Q2 2020. Contract revenue from our government business was $17.8 million a decrease of 0.3 million or 1.7 percent from the 18.1 million reported in the first quarter of 2020. The decrease in contract revenues was driven by a 0.5 million decrease in our ISR solution product line, partially offset by a 0.3 million increase in our mission systems product line. Contract backlog continues to be significant, noting a total backlog of over 141 million as of June 30th. Now turn to margins. Product margin for the quarter was 22.8 percent versus 19.1 percent in Q2 2020. The increase in margin was primarily due to more effective absorption of overhead fixed costs compared to Q2 2020, which was a low product revenue quarter. The favorable impact for absorption was partially offset by higher material costs. Service margin for the quarter was 30.3 percent. compared to 35.2 percent reported in the second quarter of 2020. The decrease in margin is primarily driven by an increase in amortization expense for the 2.9 million acquired developed technology intangible in the punch acquisition, in addition to incremental costs incurred while transitioning our field operations organization. Important to note, the service margin would be 40.8 percent, excluding the amortization of punch intangibles. Government contract margins were 7.9% as compared to 7.4% in the second quarter of 2020. The increase was driven by productivity improvements on existing contracts. GAAP SG&A was $22.9 million, an increase of $12.9 million from the $10 million reported in Q2 2020. The increase was primarily driven by $9.8 million in total punch-related expenses of which $2.7 million were acquisition costs and $7.1 million were operational expenses. Punch operational expenses included $2.5 million for stock-based compensation assumed as part of the transaction. Other drivers included increases of $0.8 million for sales and marketing, $1 million for variable compensation, $0.7 million for internal technology infrastructure costs, and $0.6 million for corporate management expenses. Net R&D was $8.6 million, an increase of $4.1 million, or 91%, from the $4.5 million reported in Q2 2020. The increase is driven primarily by $2.9 million for Punch and $1.1 million related to the additional investments in our existing product development organization. Net interest expense was $4.9 million compared to $2.1 million recorded in Q2 2020, The increase is driven by the Owl Rock credit agreement we entered into as part of the punch acquisition. Net interest for the quarter includes $1.7 million of non-cash accretion of debt discount and amortization of issuance costs compared to $1.1 million for the same period last year. In regards to taxes, there was a net tax benefit for the quarter of $12.3 million driven by a $12.3 million partial release of the company's deferred tax asset valuation allowance as a result of a deferred tax liability created by the punch acquisition. A net tax provision of $1 million for Q2020 was driven by a $1 million adjustment to the deferred tax benefit recorded in 2020 for the 2026 notes issuance. Now to provide information on the company's cash flow and balance sheet position. For the six months ended June 30th, 2021 net cash used in operating activities was 33.1 million versus 13.6 million for the prior year. Cash used for the six month ended June 30th, 2021 was primarily driven by net operating losses, net of non-cash charges and additional networking capital requirements, primarily driven by an increase in inventory of 8.8 million and other current assets of 11 million which is driven by an increase in prepaid assets as the company took advantage of repricing opportunities with key strategic partners. Cash used in investing activities was $381.7 million for the six months ended June 30, 2021, versus $4.6 million for the six months ended June 30, 2020. Investing activities during the six months ended June 30, 2021 included $377.3 million of cash consideration, in connection with the punch acquisition. Capitalized software for the six months ended June 30th, 2021 was 3.8 million. It was associated with the investments for various hospitality software platforms versus 4.6 million for the six months ended June 30th, 2020. Cash used by financing activities was 319.3 million for the six months ended June 30th, 2021. versus $49.1 million for the prior year. During the six-month end of June 30th, 2021, we received net proceeds of $155.7 million from the private placement of our common stock with Act III and certain funds and accounts advised by T. Grohl Price Associates, and net proceeds of $170.7 million from the term loan under the ALRA credit agreement. During the six month ended June 30th, 2020, we received net proceeds of 49.7 million from the 120 million issuance of the 2026 notes, offset by the repurchase of the majority of the 2024 notes. Inventory increased from December 31st, 2020 by 8.8 million. We increased our inventory on hand to mitigate some of the supply chain shortages and delays while ensuring we can meet our enterprise customer's demand for installations in the second half of 2021. Accounts receivable increased 1.5 million compared to December 31st, 2020 due to increased sales volume. Days outstanding improved within restaurants and retail from 74 days at December 31st, 2020 to 61 days at June 30th, 2021. Day's outstanding increase within government from 51 days at December 31st, 2020 to 55 days at June 30th, 2021. This concludes my formal remarks and we will now move to Q&A.

As a reminder, to ask a question, if you would like to ask a question, please press start and the number one on your telephone keypad. Again, that is start and the number one. To withdraw your question, press the pound or the hash key. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Your first question comes from the line of Samad Samana from Jefferies. Your line is open.

Hi, good afternoon, and thanks for taking my questions. Maybe first... Savneet, if I start with you, when I think about maybe the demand environment and bookings, I know you talked about activations trajectory, but can you maybe help us understand how the bookings environment has looked, especially as now, you know, I think there's obviously concerns around the Delta variant. And then to the extent you can comment on the first 30 days of the third quarter, I think it would be helpful for us to understand maybe what bookings activity looked like, both in 2Q and then so far into 3Q.

We haven't seen any impact yet on the Delta variant as it relates to the bookings or activations. Obviously, we have a huge push on activations just given the backlog built up over the pandemic. And so a lot of focus is there. And we haven't seen any change there, nor on the bookings front yet. That can all change as it did a year and a half ago. But I haven't seen any big changes there. I would say early in this quarter, bookings are sort of fine. They're on track. A lot of our bookings come in the last month. So, you know, what happens in July is not super illustrative of what could happen for the quarter just because there's always a rush at the end of the quarter. So too early to say, but I would say where we would first see the pain would be if their Delta variant was causing issues would be on the activation side because that requires, you know, us to come in store or a party come in store. We haven't seen that at all. In fact, like I mentioned, we're seeing incredible momentum on the activation side, which is, you know, turning on ARR.

Great, which I guess brings me to my follow-up question. If I think about activations over just the last 12 months, obviously the low was the second quarter of last year, but in the past you guys have averaged or been able to do kind of well north of like 700, 800 this quarter. was really sharp at 1,100, how should we maybe think about site activations maybe for the next couple of quarters? And, again, I think it would be helpful if you helped us understand what maybe that increased velocity looked like. Are we on track for another 1,000-plus sites activated type of quarter, or should we kind of get back to that more of a 2H20 type of assumptions level in our model? Sure.

Yeah, as I said, I expect us to clear Q2 very easily in Q3. You know, I think it'll be a significant quarter-over-quarter growth in activations. And I hope that continues in Q4. Obviously, we'll see when we get closer. But I think we're on pace for a very meaningful, you know, continued upswing in the activations, which is just a reflective of we have all the stats that we built up over the pandemic that's now just ready to go. So I wouldn't expect us to come anywhere back. I wouldn't expect us for some time to go back to where we were second half 2020.

Okay, great. And then, you know, just as I think about the punch acquisition, it seems like the early folding them into the organization is off to a good start. How should we think about maybe the technology integration? How long should we think that that will take? And then a similar question on the go-to-market model, you know, are you starting to kind of give incentives to the two different company sales organizations to go out there and sell? Just maybe an update on the integration process.

Yeah, so we're three months in. The first few months have been focused more on you know, call it the GNA functions, getting together there, more strategic, kicking off in a month or two, we'll combine product and tech orgs so that we have a combined roadmap. That's the most important part. We want to make sure that the roadmaps get tied together. And that will not only help us on our internal product development, but also guide a lot of our M&A strategy. So that'll be next. And then, you know, I think sales would be last. And, you know, the key will be us proving that we can, you know, make one plus one equal three on each one of those, you know, GNA projects. product and tech, and then obviously sales. So I'd say we're doing the GNA. We're moving on to product and tech, which is a long process, but the one we're most excited about, and then we'll move on to sales. We are certainly seeing the ability for strong upsell amongst it. We haven't yet got to the point where we're dramatically compensating. That's just because we haven't got to the point of Salesforce yet.

Great. And then maybe one more for me. I don't want to hog too much of the Q&A, but For the supply chain issues, can you maybe double-click into that a little bit more? Is that impacting more the kind of traditional, your point-of-sale terminal business, or is it impacting Brink as well? And how should we factor that into maybe the backlog? I know it's down only modestly quarter over quarter, but is it having any impact on the ability to close deals for Brink?

Not yet. There was a little bit of that in Q2. Nothing now. I don't expect that to continue. Where it has impact is the cost of what we, you know, the inputs to what we buy has gone up as well as the shipping. And that, you know, was hitting margins, you know, hit our margins in Q2, albeit because we had strong revenue, you know, more than recovered and had strong margin growth. year over year, it would have been even stronger if not for those impacts. There will be impact and margin in Q3 and Q4, but I said it should get better as we've put through some price increases, our customers have accepted it, been really supportive, and done some mitigation activities. So, you know, I think it's the margin where it has impact. I think we feel pretty good now on bookings and activations not being slowed down. This is super dynamic, though, Samad, so, you know, it could all change overnight, but we feel very good where we are now.

Understood. And that leads me to my last question. As I think about last quarter, I think that the company had a lot of confidence in accelerating Brink ARR growth in the back half of the year. And so as we kind of think forward... It's been three months. You've done a transformative acquisition. Would you say that your confidence is the same as it was this time a quarter ago, more or less the same? Just how should we think about now that we're rounding August, maybe the view on the next six months?

Yeah, I'd say we're more confident now than we were then just because I've seen – You know, July was a record book activations, i.e., you know, turning on error. I expect that to continue August and hopefully September. So I think we feel even more confident now and Q3 being super strong. And then, you know, I expect that would continue in Q4 unless, you know, there are some other... existential issue we didn't predict. So I think we feel even stronger that, you know, the Brink second half will be very strong. The other part of the Brink second half is that in the first half, you know, we activated a decent number of stores. And I would say those are our sort of stores that are priced at our historical pricing or below. So there was some, you know, they weren't our highest priced customers. The second half, I feel the customer mix is also very positive for us.

Great. Thanks again for taking my questions. I'll turn it over to the next analyst.

Thanks, bud. Your next question comes from the line of George Sutton from Craig Hallam. Your line is open.

Thank you. I wondered if you could address the payment opportunity, and we were excited to see that you signed your first customer, I believe, Mr. Pickle, at least from a formal announcement perspective. Can you talk about the payment opportunity as you see it here? Sure.

Yeah, absolutely. So we're definitely starting to get some momentum. You know, that was a good customer win for us in that, you know, they sort of buy all part products. So that's fantastic to see. I think, you know, we've now got a full-time person focused on payment sales. So we've had a product person. We just approved a development team. You know, payments is going to be a meaningful part of our revenue next year. We're starting to get momentum this year. And as I mentioned a couple months ago, I hope that by the end of the year we'll win at least one, but hopefully a couple of larger customers that we were unexpected there. So I think we'll see good revenue by the end of the year, and I think it'll be a decent part of our revenue in 2022, as we've learned a lot in the first six months. Everything I would suggest is, while it's taking us a little bit longer to get here, I think the net of it is actually, you know, will be a better outcome than we expected going in.

You discussed a great quick service restaurant environment to sell into right now. There are a couple of what I would define as fairly significant trends occurring, and I wondered if you could address those relative to your opportunity. First, the digital design innovations that we're seeing are obviously suggesting that QSRs are going to look very different than they have in the past. And second, the labor shortages and that issue, and what your product can be doing for those issues.

Absolutely. So on the digital design side, we win there, right? We're the platform that a lot of this stuff is pulling the data off of, whether it be inside the store, outside the store, on your app. All that comes from products that we sell and where we want to be the platform that powers that. So we are a huge beneficiary of that trend. And I think that's an exciting point. And, you know, part of the point I was making was, if you look at the restaurants across PAR, it's not just that the average restaurant has more same-store sales than they did 18 months ago. They have higher average ticket order volume. It's not just the average. It's almost every single one of them. So it's pretty amazing to see the resiliency and which should hopefully allow them to reinvest in that digital redesign that you talked about. And we will be absolutely a net beneficiary of that because most of those products and bills are coming off of the point-of-sale platform or are bundled into their customer engagement loyalty product. We launched Punch Pickup, which is a good example of some of that change. On your second question around the labor challenges, it's certainly an opportunity for PAR. Our restaurant management solution, our backup solution, Data Central, partakes in that from scheduling labor. You know, I would say that it's something that we will, you know, I expect some point to address by product builder acquisition. And certainly, as we sort of have historically talked about, most of our M&A focus being on things like digital ordering in the front of the store. I do think it's definitely, given how strong our customers are talking about these labor challenges, you know, you might see us move faster to address that hole in our solution. I think this is a problem that's going to continue for a long time.

Lastly for me, you had an interesting article. I'm sure most people on the call were not able to see this relative to ambient technology. Can you just give us a quick summary of your thoughts there in your product set that will meet that opportunity?

For sure. So a big part of the foundational thesis of acquiring Punch is that with Punch we sort of know the customer. With PAR we know the payment information, we know the transaction, we know what's going on in the back office and the kitchen. And so you know, together this platform should be able to power an ambient experience. And what I mean by that is, you know, George, you should be able to walk into a restaurant one day, and that restaurant should, you know, again, if you decide to opt into this, should be able to know who you are, adjust the menu, adjust all your preferences for you, and you should be able to sit down, order your food without ever taking out your phone or your wallet, all your loyalty information, your punch cards, your payments, your gift cards, all sort of done through something like voice. So that's really the dream. You know, how do you create that almost like that Amazon Go store experience at the restaurant, such that the technology is actually enhancing that in-store experience. It's not sort of making you farther away from that brand. It makes you feel closer to that brand. And then also having that ability outside the store. So that's really what we want to create.

Beautiful. Thank you very much.

Your next question comes from the line of Stephen Sheldon from William Blair. Your line is open.

Hi, this is actually Pat McAleon for Stephen. I think we covered a lot of it, but I just had one more quick one here. So you touched a bit on the upsell and the cross-sell with Punch, but just curious on what kind of traction you're seeing there, if you could talk a bit more about that, and then specifically what drove the strong ARR growth this quarter?

So, you know, I would say across our businesses, you know, assuming a punch was here in Q2 2020, we had sort of, you know, 42.5% ARR growth. And a lot of that growth, I think, is coming from just the point that we were talking about with George in the last question, which is there is just a move to get digital quickly, and we are a huge beneficiary of that. I would say the first few months – There's definitely been cross-sell. There's been customers that have been won on the punch side that came from Brink, and eventually I think that will happen vice versa and that will continue. But the real impact of that will be later in this year as we continue to sort of get together and push this under a more formal banner. We'll see it happen. The other thing that I think was not, I wasn't expecting, but the vast majority of customers, and I've spoken to almost all of them, were very excited about the acquisition because The idea of consolidating vendors is attractive to them because today they're managing too many vendors. They're actually overwhelmed. You know, managing a dozen different software products per store is a lot of work. And so I think there will be interesting customer opportunities that may have not picked Punch or not have picked Brink that we could come into those solutions and push, which I think is your point. So I think that will happen later in the year, more next year. Right now it's the obvious ones where Brink's an RFP or Punch is an RFP and we can bring in the other quickly.

Okay. Makes sense. Thanks for the question.

As a reminder, to ask a question again over the phone line, please press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. Again, that is the start and the number one. Your next question comes from the line of Adam Wyden from ADW Capital. Your line is open.

Hey, Savneet. You know, look, I had a couple questions. One, Could you give people a little bit of clarity? I know you've talked at certain conferences about gross margin, and there's been some sort of, I guess, misinterpretation or confusion on Twitter and among people. I mean, can you talk to people about the conservative nature of your accounting relative to your peer group and what that implies for gross margin modeling going forward and your path to EBITDA profitability?

Sure. So we are very conservative in how we account for gross margin models. As a business, historically, if I was to just break out Rink Software, so our service line includes all sorts of other stuff, Rink Software, it's historically been sort of in the 50s of gross margins, and as we've talked about in the past, it's got to be 70s plus. We've got a strong path there, strong path to get there, I'd say, over the next year or two as we get the benefits of scale, but also get to lap all of the rework we've been doing over the last two years here. And so we've overspent to get better, and I think we're obviously seeing the results of that. The other huge tailwind we have is that our largest ARR contributor, Punch, is already at what I'd call natural high software margins. And so I think we'll have strong margin expansion just because we've got the benefit of the Punch revenue. The Brink margins will expand as we move forward. And again, we also get this interesting benefit that as our hardware business grows, and as you saw, we had pretty tremendous growth this quarter, that helps everything get economies of scale, including our service. which, you know, I'd say has been very low margin and challenge over the last year, you know, that will now turn as well.

Yeah, I mean, look, I think a major part of the story for me is less about the ARR growth, although that's forthcoming, but the fact that your churn is very low and that because of the enterprise nature that, you know, once this thing gets going, I mean, this really has the potential to invest in class growth margins and even thought margins for that matter. So it'll be exciting.

No, Adam, I think Brink was historically a very tiny business. And as you get scale, you see immense impacts. And remember, the last two years, none of the focus of management has been on margin. It's been 100% on getting the product right, which was, I don't want to use over-engineered, but it was a ton of focus on building out a product group, building out engineering teams, putting a ton of investment spend behind that. And, you know, so we haven't got the benefit of those investments, but those are to come, particularly as we launch new products off of that same team. You know, you see the margin expansion from scaling your existing products, but also each additional product should be incrementally much higher gross margin, which I absolutely expect for us to be the case.

Right. So, second off, you know, just valuation perspective, I think you've been pretty clear that, you know, if you think about the part opportunity holistically and from a macro view, I mean, Brink is effectively the spinal cord of the restaurant called the Bloomberg Hall, whatever you want to call it. And whether it's Restaurant Magic, Data Central, or Punch, or, you know, X, Y, and Z delivery company or payments, I mean, all of these things, are relatively easier upsells in that, as you noted on the call, you can flick on the switch over the cloud and you don't have to be on present. It doesn't require hardware. And so, you know, to me, this is much, much more about the M&A story, buying modules and upselling them to existing clients than it is, you know, kind of brink activations. You know, And then against that backdrop, PAR today probably trades at the largest discount to what I would call analyst 12-month sell-side targets for price, which means that it's the most mispriced relative to the sell-side, and we can argue whether they're right, than it's ever been since these companies had research coverage. In fact, it's trading lower than... it was trading pre the punch deal. And then obviously on a combined basis, rolling forward a quarter, it's even cheaper. How do you think about kind of solving for that cost of capital now that you've got the scale? I mean, what is it that you think is missing from kind of getting that cost of capital? Because obviously incrementally, it's going to be more expensive to do deals, even though you're executing. So just kind of curious how you think about you know narrowing the cost of capital gap and and and kind of your m&a pipeline in terms of upselling these modules because i think that that's that's a super exciting story for me if you can kind of get all the balls aligned there yeah for sure so i think um

You know, we are super cognizant of our cost of capital. And, you know, I think we've demonstrated in our ability and the acquisitions we've done and the way that we raise capital to be very sensitive to those numbers. I think the way that you... close that gap is, first and foremost, execution. We've got to continue to grow, and as I mentioned, we feel really excited about the second half. I mean, I think we had, like I said, 42.5% ARR growth this quarter. I expect us to have really good growth the second half of this year, and I think that's point one. Point two is also continue to get the story out. I think because we've been successful in our M&A and we feel very good about it, we're going to continue to do that, and so it's vital that we do this well. And so I think it's getting that message out that when we have used our capital, I think we've cleared our hurdles. And then I think the last is, you know, kind of what you've talked about is we've got to get the story out there. We have to let people know we exist. You know, we do see the valuations of companies that are in our category and, and, you know, we really do like our position. So I think that's more of just getting the message out.

Yeah. I mean, I'll leave you with this. I mean, look, Goldman Sachs, you know, you know, was an MNA advisor for the company on the punch deal. And, They don't really have coverage. I would say that the vast majority of these analysts on this conference call, I don't want to single anyone else, target smaller investors. And it's clear to me that at a billion and a half market cap or whatever it is, it's kind of in between micro cap and smid cap. And I think that this is a super exciting story. I mean, look, as you know, we purchased our first shares You know, for $8 a share, I believe it's 16 million shares outstanding. So we purchased this thing when it was left for debt, $128 million market cap and a roughly 7 million of ARR, you know, in utter shambles. And, you know, here we are. you know, over $100 million of year-end ARR. And, you know, we like the story more today than we did when we bought it. I mean, look, you're there. You've got Sham and the Restaurant Magic team. I mean, you've really built a corporation, you know, and built a real entrepreneurial culture. So it's really astounding to me that, you know, that we are cheaper today than arguably we've been in kind of its modern history with this corporate governance. I mean, I'm just kind of, you know, flabbergasted. So, you know, excellent execution. I encourage you guys to find creative ways to kind of get that cost of capital. And, you know, I look forward, you know, I look forward to the path, you know, of, let's say I've owned it for three years, ARR has gone from 7 million to 110 million. That's you know, call it, you know, 14X. I mean, I don't see any reason why you can't 14X ARR over the next three to five years. So, you know, maybe between now and the next three to five years, we'll actually get our cost of capital. But unbelievable execution and just, you know, keep up the good work.

Great. Thanks, Adam.

And there are no further questions over the phone line at this time. I would now like to turn the call back to Mr. Savnit Singh. Sir?

Thanks, everyone, for joining. We look forward to updating you next quarter.

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. We thank you all for participating. You may now disconnect.