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spk04: Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the fiscal year 2022 first quarter financial results conference 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'll need to press star 1 on your telephone. Please be advised that today's call is being recorded. If you require any further assistance, please press star 0. I would like to hand the conference over to speaker today, Mr. Chris Burns, Vice President of Business Development. Please go ahead.
spk01: Thank you, Sarah, and good afternoon, everyone. I'd also like to welcome you today to the call for PARS 2022 First 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, a.k.a. 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 parttech.com. I also want to be sure all participants today have access to our earnings presentation and business review slide deck that we will use later in the call to better communicate the momentum in our software business. Individuals on the webcast should have access to the deck when they logged on to the call this afternoon. For those just dialing in on the conference call, the presentation can be accessed on the investor page of our website and we also included it as an attachment on the 8K we filed this afternoon. 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 the call, and it will be available for playback. If you ask a question, it will be included in both our live conference and any future use of the recording. I'd also 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. Stephanie?
spk08: Thanks, Chris, and thanks to everyone for joining us to review PAR's first quarter 2022 results. As always, there's a lot we want to share, so prepare your marks, so let's get started. Q1 saw us continue to hit our ARR growth targets of 30% to 40% growth with consistent margin expansion. Every quarter continues to prove out the long-term growth and profitability of our unified commerce initiative. As a company, we delivered a strong first quarter with quarter total Q1 revenues of $80.3 million, 47% increase from one year ago. This revenue growth was driven across all business lines and specifically around our software recurring revenues, resulting in $94.4 million of total live ARR at quarter end and a year-over-year growth rate of 172% from Q1 last year. When adjusting for the Punch acquisition, ARR grew 34% year-over-year. This acceleration continues to be driven by 40% growth in ARR coming from Punch and 35% from Brink. Contract ARR now totals more than $116 million as of March 31st, paving the way for a strong rest of the year and beyond. Equally important as we scale AR is the dramatic improvement we've been able to drive in gross margin expansion on our subscription revenues. When new management stepped in a little over a year ago, three years ago, recurring revenue gross margin was in the low 40s. At the end of Q1 2022, we've now achieved 72%, a significant improvement from just one year ago. We expect this positive trajectory to continue to expand over time, This growth has been driven by intense ROI-focused engineering and by a dramatic improvement in Brink's scalability. Our strong results this quarter continue to be driven by high-level execution across the business and continued demand for part of the unified commerce cloud. We have established strong momentum, and we have continued to build on that throughout the quarter. In Q1, we activated 1,244 new Brink sites, a solid start for the year as stores go live. On a net basis, after churn, Brink's active store count now totals nearly 17,000, a 40% increase from one year ago. Brink's bookings total nearly 1,100 stores in the quarter. In more detail, Brink's strong first quarter was headlined by strong activation numbers with higher MRR, the cross-selling of Brink's plus payments to new accounts, and operational improvements resulting in margin gains. Brink ARPU increased by $62 in the quarter, as new deals and subscription increases are now having favorable impacts. We had a 76% increase in gross new store activations from Q1 last year. Excuse me. We continue to see improvement in present low churn rates for Brink, approximately 3% annualized, and are encouraged by the progress of deals attaching par payment services to Brink that validate to our unified commerce platform. We continue to be hyper-focused on margin expansion by scaling with new customers and also driving operational efficiencies. Brink continues to be the distinguished leader in cloud POS for enterprise QSR and fast casual restaurants. Now turning to Punch. We continue to outperform with Punch and added in excess of 1,500 sites in the quarter that now total more than 58,800 active sites, a 29% increase in the last 12 months. We signed 10 new customer logos in Q1 that added to our impressive contracted store list, including C-Stores, and are beginning to build out the grocery pipeline. Digital loyalty programs are critical to the future of restaurant marketing. Applications like Punch make it easier for brands to connect with their most loyal customers and increase customer lifetime value where it counts most. As the number of channels grows, the need to understand customer LTV expands, thereby pulling more Punch demand. I want to highlight that Punch has just crossed an important milestone, showing a strong momentum in leadership in the market. There are over 200 million loyalty guests on Punch. Each of these guest relationships is unique to a brand. The number includes duplicate guests. On a dedupe basis, Punch now has over 150 million unique guest profiles. That is approximately 58% of adults in the United States. are participating in a loyalty program that is powered by Punch, clearly showing our market dominance. PAR payment services pipeline grew significantly in the quarter as well, and we were extremely encouraged by the early performance in new customer interest. Although working off a small base, AR associated payments grew by 163% from Q1 last year. We are now engaged with a steady stream of new customers who have sought out PAR for payment services due to our transparent and competitive pricing, along with the integration with Brink and Punch. Park continues to see increased interest in the pipeline, broadly across brink and punch customer bases. I'm confident additional upsell and new customer opportunities will significantly accelerate this year as more and more enterprises are seeking integrated payments offering from a trusted technology partner with competitive and transparent pricing. Although still early, our payments initiative, we have seen notable customer wins during 2022 and believe this revenue stream will be meaningful and accelerated to our future financial performance. We expect a dramatically increased CAR, in 2022 from payments alone. To update you on DataCentral, we experienced higher than normal churn in the quarter due to a one-time unfavorable renewal process. This churn negatively impacted the number of active stores for Q1, and we are now working hard to reverse this quickly. Also impacting DataCentral is the workflow interruptions to our development team based in the Ukraine, and sadly, the Consul Fair. New product development enhancement team initiatives have been impacted by 20% to 30% due to the war, and this is having an impact on DataCentral sales. For the last two plus years, restaurants have focused tech spend on the front of house, with CRM, loyalty, digital, and delivery. Now most restaurants have upgraded the front of house tech stack, and they're struggling with the operational issues and profit and margins leaking out the back door via food and labor challenges. We added three new logos in Q1, with California Pizza Kitchen and their 150 plus sites being the most notable. Data Central had a significant product release in January also, focused on labor management, and we have signed deals where we went head-to-head leading labor solutions and won, which shows our labor solution is a product that we can now sell on its own. Our product and hardware businesses continue to perform well in difficult and challenging environments. Product revenues in the quarter continue to strengthen year over year and were reported at $25.1 million in this recently ended quarter, a 35% increase. The capital purchase environment for restaurants is always tricky, and this has been even more so with the pandemic and the global supply chain difficulties thrust upon several end markets. As I mentioned previously, we are not immune to these challenges around the supply chain, and we have experienced some margin impact with the costs associated with the current realities. We continue to monitor the supply environment closely, specifically realities in Asia and specifically China, in regards to the pandemic and the impact of wide shutdowns. We will continue to diligently manage our partners and vendors through these shortages, price inflation, and increases in freight charges. We are constantly seeking out a greater diversity of supply sources while, at the same time, technology-enabled operations and management of supply chain inventory. We anticipate continued volatility in our sourcing channels and expect to closely monitor real-time upstream and downstream visibility across the supply chain to help us predict and plan for adverse events. While we don't like to carry excess inventory, we have strategically added inventory over the last year and will continue for parts of this year to ensure rollouts are not delayed. Now to briefly report on our government business. Our government had a solid Q1 financial performance as evidenced by the 20% increase from Q1 last year and reported revenues of $21.4 million. Our government segment performed above plan for both revenue and earnings. Our ISR group had a solid quarter driven by increased demand for our services. Our government segment also delivered improved performance from our mission systems and product business lines, and I'm confident this segment will continue to outperform for the foreseeable future with a solid contract backlog and future award opportunities. In addition to our solid revenue growth in 2022, we will continue to seek out additional contract opportunities where we can leverage our decades-long experience and performance excellence. Let me now talk a bit about where we see things going forward from a business perspective. We continue to work to advance the enterprise restaurant industry's vision of autonomous restaurants with our focus on creating a single cloud-based platform that is designed to enable SaaS and tech-enabled restaurant operations. Unified Commerce connects all the guest-facing channels, website, app, in-store, third-party deliveries, with one common technology platform that is built on the open web standards. This is an evolution in the industry for multi-channel and omni-channel platforms, which still require bands to do the heavy-duty integration, often at their own peril. With the current state of technology, achieving a personalized guest experience through unified commerce is no longer a holy grail. In fact, mega-brands have created their own custom technology stacks through the proprietary investments to achieve this. PAR's unified commerce democratized the access to that opportunity for thousands of brands through a SaaS model. This is similar to what Salesforce did to the CR market almost two decades ago. Brands no longer have to become a system integrator to band-aid disparate systems and still end up with a tablet nightmare. They can focus on delivering unparalleled guest experiences and building better employee engagement instead. To achieve our goals, we continue to solidify our senior management team and recently added an experienced chief marketing officer and SVP of human resources. Both of these individuals have proven track records, and these new contributors are designed to foster collaboration across our company and to establish linkages to critical It is critical to bring innovative new products to market quickly and cost-effectively while ensuring we are aligned with the needs of our customers and employees. I also want to reiterate my message from last quarter's call. We will seek to continue to deliver 30% to 40% year-over-year ARR growth driven by new customer signings along with upsell and crossover opportunities that will deliver the strong operational performance for our company. In summary, we are pleased with our results in the first quarter of 2022, and we believe we are executing well in what continues to be a challenging and dynamic environment. Our revenue growth is strong, and we expect our margins to continue to improve and improve some services specifically. We have a strong balance sheet and a solid cash system to execute our strategic plans. Most importantly, we believe our unified commerce cloud distinguishes us from the competition and positions us well for long-term growth. As I mentioned on the last quarter's call, a fairly large portion of our data central team is based in Ukraine, and it's an important location for us. Despite the ongoing war, I want to report that our entire Ukrainian-based team has remained productive with high morale. I admire the courage and dedication and the single-minded focus that they put into their work without being asked to do so. For our part, we're providing and will continue to provide support to our data central team and their families. This is a behavior that is central to the culture and integrity of our company. As always, I would like to thank all PAR employees for their dedication and efforts over the past quarter. Across the organization, people have stepped up to ensure we meet our customers' needs, while at the same time embracing the changes necessary to create a platform for long, sustainable success for PAR. With that, I'd like to hand it off to Brian, who will review our financial performance in greater detail.
spk10: Thank you, Sabneet, and good afternoon, everyone. Total revenues were $80.3 million for the three months ended March 31st, 2022, an increase of 47.4% compared to the three months ended March 31st, 2021. Net loss for the first quarter of 2022 was $15.7 million, or 58 cent loss per share, compared to a net loss of $8.3 million or $0.38 loss per share reported for the same period in 2021. Adjusted net loss for the first quarter of 2022 was $7.1 million or $0.26 loss per share compared to an adjusted net loss of $7.6 million or $0.34 loss per share for the same period in 2021. Product revenue in the quarter was $25.1 million an increase of $6.5 million, or 35 percent, from the $18.6 million reported in the prior year. The strong growth was primarily driven by hardware refresh investments by our domestic Tier 1 accounts. Service revenue was reported at $33.8 million, an increase of $15.8 million, or 87 percent, from the $18 million reported in the prior year. The increase was primarily driven by revenues of Punch of $11.2 million, which included SAS and related recurring services of $10.8 million and other services of $0.4 million. Total subscription services revenue reported in Q1 2022 was $21.7 million compared to $8.4 million in Q1 2021. The annual run rate of subscription services exiting the quarter was $94.4 million. The company continues to expand our total recurring revenue base which includes both software-related services and hardware support contracts. Of the 33.8 million of service revenue reported in Q1 2022, 29.2 million is comprised of recurring revenue contracts, as compared to 15.2 million in Q1 2021. Contract revenue from our government business was 21.4 million, an increase of 3.5 million, or 20 percent, from the 17.9 million reported in the first quarter of 2021. The increase in contract revenue was driven by a 2.7 million increase in our ISR solutions product line. Contract backlog continues to be significant, noting a total backlog of 195.7 million as of March 31st, 2022, compared to 140.1 million backlog as of March 31st, 2021. Now, turning to margins. Product margin for the quarter was 20.2 percent versus 19.8 percent in Q1 2021. This margin growth was driven by our price increases affected in 2021 partially offset by unfavorable product mix. We continue to monitor our pricing to properly reflect changes in the cost structure. Service margin for the quarter was 41.4 percent compared to 29.6 percent reported in the first quarter of 2021. The increase in margin was driven by a higher mix of SaaS software and continued cost improvements with our hosting costs and support services, which has enabled Brink's scalability. Service margin during the three months ended March 31st, 2022 included $5.2 million of amortization of identifiable intangible assets compared to $2.1 million during the three months ended March 31st, 2021. Excluding the amortization of intangible assets, service margin for the three months ended March 31st, 2022 was 56.8% compared to 41.1% for the three months ended March 31st, 2021. Government contract margins were 7.3% as compared to 6.7% for the first quarter of 2021. The increase was driven by our mission assistance product line. In regards to operating expenses, GAAP SG&A was $22.4 million, an increase of $7.9 million from the $14.5 million reported in Q1 2021. The increase was primarily driven by $6.6 million in total punch operational expenses, of which $1.4 million is stock-based compensation. Other drivers include increases of $.8 million in corporate expenses, of which $.4 million is stock-based compensation. This quarter again highlighted how our core business continues to scale with minimal incremental SG&A expense. In fact, in Q1, our revenues grew at the rates highlighted, yet with only approximately $1 million of true incremental spec. Net R&D was $10.8 million, an increase of $5 million from the $5.8 million recorded in Q1 2021. The increase is primarily driven by $3.4 million for punch, and $1.6 million related to additional investments in our other existing products. Net interest expense was $2.5 million compared to $2.2 million recorded in Q1 2021. The increase is driven by an increase in debt with the issuance of the 2027 notes in September 2021, partially offset by the reduction of accretion resulting from our January 1, 2022, adoption of a recent accounting pronouncement. Prior to our adoption, we accounted for our convertible notes by bifurcating between debt and equity, which resulted in non-cash accretion of debt discount within interest expense over the life of the respective notes. Upon the adoption, all notes are now accounted for as 100 percent debt. Please see Note 7 and Debt Footnote in our Q110Q filing for additional information. Now to provide information on the company's cash flow and balance sheet position. For the three months ended March 31st, 2022, cash used in operating activities was $21.2 million versus $3.4 million for the prior year. Cash used for the three months ended March 31st, 2022 was primarily driven by additional net working capital requirements due to a $5 million increase in accounts receivable related to our government segment, a $5 million increase in inventory, and the payout of our annual cash bonus. These increases will be temporary, as we expect accounts receivable and inventory to revert back closer to December 31st, 2021 levels during Q2. In regards to inventory, the balance as of March 31st, 2022 was $40.9 million, and we have a planned target for the company to exit this year at $30 million while managing supply chain needs for our customers. Our increase in inventory has been a strategic investment over the last 18 months to ensure product delivery in a supply-challenged market, but we are also confident that we can support customer demand while managing inventory down to more modest levels. Cash used in investing activities was $3.1 million for the three months ended March 31, 2022, versus $1.7 million for the three months ended March 31st, 2021. Investing activities during the three months ended March 31st, 2022 included $1.2 million of cash consideration in connection with a small tech tuck acquisition to complement our drive-through offering. Capitalized software for the three months ended March 31st, 2022 was $1.6 million and was associated with the investments for various hospitality software offerings versus $1.5 million for the three months ended March 31st, 2021. Cash used in financing activities was $1.4 million for the three months ended March 31st, 2022 versus $2.1 million for the prior year. Finance activities for both periods was driven by stock-based compensation related transactions. Day sales outstanding increased within restaurants and retail from 58 days at December 31st, 2021 to 59 days at March 31st, 2022. Day sales outstanding increase within government from 55 days at December 31st, 2021 to 62 days at March 31st, 2022. At this time, I would like to recognize the importance of continuing to provide clear financial performance data and metrics as we execute to our strategy and the transformation of PAR. As such, in the future reporting, we will disaggregate the services reporting line between subscription services and professional services. Breaking out these distinct revenue streams will give a more accurate and transparent portrayal of the increased velocity and momentum of our software subscription services initiatives. This concludes my formal remarks, and we'll now move to Q&A.
spk04: Ladies and gentlemen, if you have a question at this time, please press the star and the number one key on your touch-tone telephone. If your question has been answered or you wish to remove yourself from the queue, please press the pound key. Again, ladies and gentlemen, if you have a question at this time, please press star and then the number one on your touchtone telephone. Your first question comes from the line of Mayank Tandon with Needham. Your line is open.
spk06: Good afternoon, guys. This is actually Kyle Peterson from Mayank. Appreciate you guys taking our questions. I just wanted to touch on client conversations, particularly in this kind of higher inflation environment. I know kind of everyone's dealing with it differently. It seems like at least a lot of restaurants anecdotally have been able to push on some prices through higher menu costs and such. Are you guys able to kind of push similar pricing increases through, especially given some of the supply concerns on the hardware side?
spk08: Yeah, I mean, we've been able to – so I think there's two questions there. So, you know, from client conversations, it's probably consistent with what you've been hearing, which is restaurants have been able to pass on without a major impact to their bottom line yet. And so we've seen them been able to do that without a ton of traffic impact. On our business, we've been pretty good at passing on the – particularly the hardware inflation to our customers – So, you know, if you look at our hardware margins, they've been expanding the last two quarters, which is a combination of a product mix, but, you know, passing on the price increases to our customers. So, so far we've been able to expand it. Part of that is that we may be investing in inventory. Part of that is we've been able to pass on prices. But, you know, I think we sort of feel like now we've kind of figured it out up until this point, and we'll see how things move going forward.
spk06: Got it. That's helpful. And then, Just a quick follow-up on the 1Q strength, particularly on the hardware side. Was there any pull forward with some of the planned hardware investments from some of your clients into the first quarter, or is some of that strength and momentum due to that pricing that you were kind of just touching on? Just want to see if you had any more color on the really strong hardware growth.
spk10: This is Brian. We've been seeing over the past couple of quarters some really strong hardware sale results that we've had. Some of that is actually a lot of it actually is timing of some of our tier one accounts that were kind of delayed out in 20 and the early part of 21 with COVID. And so we actually had very good year over year this quarter, actually lower than the past two quarters. But that's what really kind of drove that. And we did not see any kind of pushback from price increases that we implemented this in the mid part of last year as an impact on our sales the past three quarters.
spk06: Thanks, guys. Nice quarter. I'm sorry? I just said thanks, guys. Nice quarter. Thank you.
spk04: Your next question comes from the line of Samad Samana with Jefferies. Your line is open.
spk05: Hi, good afternoon. Thanks for taking my question. So, Stephanie, there was a lot in your prepared remarks, so I'm going to try to unpack it as best as I can. Maybe first, just when I think about the growth for Brink in the quarter, it's clearly continuing to get better than some of the last few quarters you've posted. How much of that is a function of better activations versus pipeline conversion that's happening from prior deals versus new deals that are coming into the pipeline that are closing in periods. Let's maybe start there.
spk08: Great question. You know, generally what you see in this quarter is a reflection of, you know, sales work, you know, six months to a year ago. So it's really executing on, you know, deals we sign and getting them out the door. So the success we've had the last few quarters is, you know, a lot of the work that happened, you know, during the pandemic and in the prior quarters. and us just becoming really, really programmatic about getting activations out the door. We've had some new leadership kind of run our activations for the last few quarters, and it's just really made a big difference. And we've been able to burn down that backlog from the strong sales we had the prior year.
spk05: Okay, great. And then just I want to make sure I understood the developer impact of Is that specific to Data Central itself, or is that more broadly on your software portfolio that you're seeing a bit of a headwind? I think it's understandable. There's obviously much bigger concerns, and there's a lot of companies that are being impacted by this, but I'm just curious if you could help us understand kind of more specifically what you were calling out.
spk08: Yeah, it's just the Data Central product line, not the other product lines. And, you know, I think we've been able to move a lot of the team. But, you know, I think our team estimates it's about a 20% to 30% hit on production. So the team is still performing really, really well, better than we all expected. But there's no doubt that, you know, just given the situation, there are limitations on what we can get done. But it's just that product line. And we expect that to get better given the relocation that we've been able to push through.
spk05: Okay, great. And then just maybe on the pricing in the quarter, I know you mentioned that ARPU melted upward. Is that primarily due to payments attaching more and more, or is that just better pricing like for like for Brink? Maybe just help us understand what's driving that upward dynamic for ARPU.
spk08: Yeah, it's without question better pricing. We've been talking a little bit, you know, last year, We activated a lot of stores, but as you saw, the price point per activated store was lower than average, and that was very much driven by, you know, legacy deals. What you're seeing now is the deals that we signed over the last year that came in at the pricing that we've been telling folks that, you know, is better than our legacy deals. And so you should continue to see that happen as we kind of lapse some of these legacy deals that have kept pricing down.
spk05: Gotcha. That's all for me. Thanks, guys. Appreciate it.
spk04: Your next question comes from the line of Stephen Sheldon with William Blair. Your line is open.
spk07: Hey, thanks for taking my questions and really strong results here. First, with the three assets that you have, I guess where are you at in terms of integrating them from a back-end technology perspective? If you look between Brink, Punch, and Data Central, are they fully integrated now or is there a lot more work to do on that front?
spk08: So from an organizational perspective, they're all within the same product and technology organization, which is super important because they all report into the same person, the same head of engineering, the same head of product. And so that really creates a sense of unification across what we're doing. You know, we're constantly working on, you know, how you make, if you buy all three products, what do you get that someone who doesn't have that? And so that's constantly going to get better and better. But from a back-end perspective, it is. United and, you know, one of the things we're most excited for this year is exactly what you're talking about where we're coming out with products or features that you cannot get if you didn't buy those products altogether. And it's all in the effort to say, hey, there's value if you buy the suite of products as opposed to just one.
spk07: Got it. That's helpful. And then just on Brink, really strong activations there again this quarter, and especially I think in light of Omicron during the quarter. But the bookings did slow a touch. I guess anything to call out there in terms of the booking slowdown? And how much visibility do you still have in terms of sign concepts where the franchisee locations are not yet showing up in the booking metrics?
spk08: Good question. You know, bookings are, you know, we've historically said we want to do at least 1,000 bookings a quarter. And there will be volatility from quarter to quarter because it's sort of you sign the corporate and then you are signing up the individual franchisees, which is a bit of a sale to a small business. And that process generally becomes heavy at the quarter end, and so you don't have a ton of visibility always. We feel very good about, you know, confidently exceeding our target for the year there, but And like I said, it won't be consistent quarter to quarter, but we kind of want to clear that 1,000 every quarter at least. Great. Thank you.
spk04: Your next question comes from the line of George Sutton with Greg Holland. Your line is open.
spk09: Thank you. Savneet, I wanted to go a little bit more into the whole concept of the unified sale and You talked about closing several large brands who chose multiple solutions, and you separately talked about what you get if you buy all three products. Can you just give us a little bit better picture as to what that means to the buyer of those multiple products?
spk08: Yeah, absolutely. And it's a core part of what we're looking to deliver, but I can try to unpack that a bit. So the The simplest way that I think software stores can sell is very much a bundle. Hey, you get this and you get a price discount. And we're very much against that because the idea that the foundation of all this is if you put it together, you actually are able to have a holistic picture of your store, of your business. And that is impossible today. So I'll give you one example. Today, when you're running a restaurant, you've got your in-store transactions, which are people coming in your store, people going to your drive-thru, and potentially people coming in and using some sort of QR code pickup. But you also have your online orders coming from your digital ordering partner, your loyalty orders hopefully coming in through Punch, your Uber Eats orders, your DoorDash orders. And so one of the advantages of having unified commerce across bar is that you can get the data across every single order. And it allows you then to do something that we call omni-spotting and omni-throttling, where you can throttle orders to make sure that you can fulfill the orders that are coming in. So as an example, you may want to shut off your third-party delivery options like a DoorDash order, because you're concerned that you can't handle that within the kitchen. Or conversely, you may want to turn on that channel because you've got capacity in the kitchen. And you can only figure that out if you know what's happening from every single point of order within the restaurant. And you also know what's happening in the kitchen and with your labor. And so that's an example of some value that we can provide that we can't really do without being unified. I'll give you a second one, which sounds very silly. We once surveyed our largest customers and asked them for their biggest technological need. And number one and number two on everyone's list, which is going to shock you, was that they wanted a better integration between their online ordering system and their POS and between their loyalty system and their online ordering system. And, you know, the idea here is that the integration is actually very hard to get right. And when you build them natively together, you don't have to worry about integration. And so if one product is updated And you don't have to worry about that update cascading and causing problems for all the products that that's integrated into. And so that ease of use, that simplicity is really, really powerful to our end customers.
spk09: That is a fabulous set of details. I appreciate that. One other question. You gave a number that was very encouraging. You have 150 million unique profiles. I did a little quick Google search. There's 322 million people in the country, so that's about half. Help me understand the value you get when you bring that number of unique profiles to your potential customer.
spk08: So, you know, I was highlighting more in just terms of the breadth of how WidePunch is distributed, but there's certainly opportunity there as we think over time. We're not focused on that yet, but I think without question, just the immense amount of data we have is hard to ignore. Great. Thank you.
spk04: Your next question comes from the line of Anja Sagerstorm with Tedoti. Your line is open.
spk03: Hi, yeah, thank you for taking my questions and congratulations on the great quarter again. Just have a follow-up on that data you said you're collecting from those unique profiles. Would you be owning that data or does that belong to your customers?
spk08: So it's customer-by-customer dependent. Unfortunately, it's not consistent across everybody. And, you know, we would never do anything without our customers' approval. But, you know, one of the things that it obviously gives us is a ton of anonymized data to share back to our customers and provide value on, you know, how is their offers, campaigns, promotions, loyalty program working versus a comp or how it should be going. So it really helps them run their business better. And, you know, maybe down the road there's an opportunity to do something else there. But, you know, that's still a little bit out there.
spk03: Okay, thank you. And then I have some follow-up on the data central. I understand you have some challenges there with the development team in Ukraine. But you also had that seeing a little bit of slowdown there during COVID, but then you saw a pickup in the demand there. What do you see in terms of the demand for data central?
spk08: We think it will turn the second half of this year. We've got a great new leader in there who's been driving really wonderful changes. We see a pipeline, which we hadn't seen, you know, candidly in the last couple of years. And, you know, we started to win some real logos. We're talking about CPK. There are a couple of other good logos after that. So we think we feel pretty good about the opportunity for that business going forward.
spk03: And do you see sort of a tailwind in that business, helped by the inflationary environment maybe?
spk08: Absolutely. One of the things I mentioned was that we recently broke out a module on the labor side. And we've been able to sell that as an individual product. And I think that highlights the challenges on labor that you're talking about. And so in seeing that, we've been able to kind of create a little bit of a monetization effort focused just on solving that one labor challenge that we see today.
spk03: Okay, thank you. And just one last question about the M&A market. What do you see there? And are you actively looking? And sort of what's the environment like?
spk08: We're always very active in that environment given how well the punch acquisition has gone and how much it's pulled far forward. The M&A market is, I'd say, depending on where our stock price is, our cost of capital is very expensive. But what we're seeing for the first time is that the market is also turning rational as it relates to private businesses that we spend most of our time with. I don't think than anyone is kind of holding out anymore for 2021 prices, if you will. So it is, you know, we expect to be active. We think we'll be successful in that endeavor because I think the market's also come around to the belief that, you know, the public market is the anchoring for future private market exits.
spk03: Okay, thank you.
spk04: That was all for me. Again, ladies and gentlemen, if we have a question at this time, please press star under the number one on your touchtone telephone. Your next question comes from the line of Adam Wyden with ADW Capital. Your line is open.
spk02: Hey, thanks, guys. I've got a few questions here, so just make sure the operator doesn't cut me off. But the first question is, you know, there's been a lot of talk about inflation. And, you know, I think you know, software is in technology in general has been rather deflationary, you know, and you guys talk about bodies to bits. I think it might be helpful for you guys. And by the way, a lot of technology companies, they were beneficiaries of COVID and they brought forward demand. I think our growth was somewhat stalled during COVID. I think it might be helpful for you to talk about, you know, the ability to accelerate adoption as a function of bodies to bits, lowering and, you know, lowering costs, lowering labor, lowering food. I mean, Do you think that that's a reality? Has something changed? Or, I mean, is this an opportunity for you guys to really accelerate revenue growth, you know, even in a softer economic environment or an inflationary environment?
spk08: Yeah, without question. I think our customers are, you know, feeling the pressure of inflation across the board, whether it's labor or food, and they are looking for more technology, not less. The data central example is a good one where, you know, we were able to pull out a labor module I don't know if we could have done that before this environment because I don't know if there would have been appetite. Today, it's probably the number one issue our customers face. So I think technology is deflationary, and we expect that trend to be very helpful for us. And I think particularly for QSR restaurants that are actually enabled to put in all this technology, for them, they can actually provision this much faster than down markets. Okay.
spk02: Okay, and my second of three questions is as it relates to engineering engineers, you know, we've done some kind of work on engineering and engineering efficiency, and, you know, it seems to me that we've been, you know, and I think you might have mentioned on one of your calls or fireside chats, you know, that you were overstaffed from an engineering perspective, and that was basically the tail end of solving technical debt. You know, we haven't done, you know, with the exception of payments, which isn't really technology, we haven't really rolled out a new module. Can you talk about, you know, reallocating those engineering resources to kind of roll out new modules and how that affects ARPU and kind of, you know, the ARR trends over the next couple of years?
spk08: Sure. So, you know, I think without question, if you look at our engineering spend, it's too weighted towards, you know, technical debt and the and the, you know, sort of the backward-looking stuff, not the forward-looking stuff. But that's also what's led to the ability to build out this platform and vision that we've talked about. And so it's been, you know, very, very worthwhile. You know, said differently, without those changes, we couldn't have acquired punch, we could not have maintained the revenue growth, and we couldn't have grown the gross margins as high as we've gotten them, you know, in just a very short period of time. I think that as we continue to get better with our technical debt, particularly on the BRIN product, we should be able to switch those percentages around to where more of that spend is going to new product development as opposed to the historical work of fixing the past. And particularly in this year, we've talked about new product leases coming, and that's only possible because we now have the ability to take on new product where historically we haven't. And we are becoming very, very specific about this with our own engineering leadership where we know on every product how much money is going to technical debt, how much is going to infrastructure, how much is going to new product development, how much is going to enhancements, so that we can manage it in a way where we can be dynamic about that spend and also be transparent.
spk02: Got it. Okay. This is my third question. It, it, it revolves around capital allocation. So look, it's, it's not lost on us that, you know, software companies and technology companies, you know, kind of, you know, broadly speaking, um, have been, you know, somewhat, uh, you know, kind of call it attacked or have gone down interest rate fears, you know, look, um, You know, this is a little bit like deja vu because I think I remember having a similar conversation with you in May of 2020. And I think, you know, March and, you know, on that quarter, you know, you said, well, I don't, you know, COVID, it's uncharted territory. You know, I don't have a ton of visibility. And I think now having gone through COVID and everyone realized they need software, you know, I kind of do the same math and I'm going to do it for everybody. So just, you know, hang in there with me for a second. But there's 27 million shares outstanding. It's an $800 million market cap. The government business effectively signed the contract to double. So if it was worth $100, maybe it's worth $200 today. You know, hardware and maintenance has grown precipitously as a function of brink. You know, you've got the headset division. You can do this tuck-in drive-thru, blah, blah, blah. You know, you've got, you know, call it $400 million of non-core asset value against $200 million of debt. So you've got $200 million of non-core value on $800 million cap. You know, it's whatever, $600 million and $120 million of contracted ARR, plus or minus, not including ARR. a lot of other things that don't go into it. So you're, you're trading at five times revenue. You've got a huge cash balance. You know, what is the, you know, what is the opportunity? You know, we, we didn't really get that moment in time during COVID to really put our cash to work. I mean, what is the opportunity to, to, to use that cash to repurchase shares? You know, you know, I think M&A seems to be hard. I mean, look, obviously if you can get some guy to sell you his business or two or two or three times revenue, great. But I mean, you know, The way you create lasting shareholder value, and you quote the outsiders, is, you know, giving it to people, you know, in the backside when they're giving it to you. And, you know, we never really got our stock to a price where we could put it to work. And, you know, now we have an opportunity to kind of catch everybody off sides. I mean, what are you prepared to do, whether it be selling government, you know, doing a share buyback? I mean, you know, us being long-term shareholders, you know, is there an opportunity to kind of play offense? You know, and how do you kind of think about all that?
spk08: Yeah, listen, I think, first of all, I think we've been pretty good applicators. We sold shares at the top when we financed the punch acquisition, and then we sold Sarah's, you know, literally six weeks before the crazy software.
spk02: No, no, no. You've allocated capital intelligently, but you've never really gotten the cost of capital that other people did. Sure.
spk08: So I think, to your point, we want to drive shareholder value. You know, as an organization, you know, we just had our first ever, you know, global leadership off-site at the top. folks at the company. And, you know, the vast majority was on it, you know, driving shareholder return and how do we build an ROI. And, of course, if we think an investment in our shares is a higher return than an acquisition, we will pull that lever. We have plenty of cash. Our margins are expanding. There's not a reason we wouldn't do that. I think as it relates to M&A, to me, it's all about, you know, is it accretive? And, you know, there are deals that are not accretive in year one that are very accretive in year two and three. And, conversely, there are deals that are accretive in year one that could be, you know, destructive in year two and three. And so, You always got to kind of balance that. I think, as the last caller talked about, we are seeing deals that we think are very creative to par, and now it's about deciding if we want to pull that trigger. But we're very committed to driving value, whether it's through a share of a purchase or through an acquisition or continued investment in our existing products. But we feel very good from a cash position, which gives us that flexibility to make that decision.
spk02: And the government business, I mean, now with, you know, now seeing that government backlog, you know, ramp up and, you know, obviously in, you know, in light of what's going on, you know, owning a government asset that is, you know, somewhat economically, you know, kind of, you know, invincible. I mean, what is the opportunity? I mean, look, getting that cash from government today is more valuable for M&A and buyback than it might have been 12 months ago. I mean, now you've got the revenues coming in, you've got the backlog. I mean, you know, can we finally pull a ripcord on that?
spk08: You know, I can't talk too much about that. But, you know, I think it's also the time where our margins continue to expand outside, you know, outside the government business. So the company would also be well. But, you know, I unfortunately can't talk too much about it. But, you know, as I've been saying, you know, now that we've demonstrated the growth of that large contract we won, you know, I suspect we'd be able to get the multiple and the price that we want.
spk02: Yeah, good. Well, look, you know, keep up the good work. You know, it's been a roller coaster, but I'd love to see you guys find ways to play offense and, you know, magnify the shareholder return over time. Thank you. Thank you.
spk04: I am showing no further question at this time. I would like to turn the conference back to Mr. Sabneet Singh.
spk08: Thanks, everyone. We look forward to updating you on our progress next quarter.
spk04: Ladies and gentlemen this concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation and have a wonderful day. You may all disconnect.
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