Perfect Corp.

Good morning and good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by and welcome to Perfect Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. We will be hosting a question and answer session after management's prepared remarks. Please note that today's event is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to the first speaker today, Mr. Rick Lee, VP of IR of the company. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, Pauline. Hello, everyone, and welcome to Perfect Corp's earnings call. With us today are Ms. Ali Chen, our founder, chairwoman, and CEO, Mr. Louis Chen, our EVP and chief strategy officer, and Ms. Ali Chen, VP of finance and accounting. You can refer to our first quarter 2023 financial results on our IR website at ir.perfectcorp.com. or in the form 6K we furnished to SEC yesterday afternoon. You can also access a replay of this call on our IR website when you become available a few hours after this conclusion. For today's call, management will provide their prepared remarks first, and we will be hosting a question and answer session. Before we continue, I would like to refer you to our safe harbor statement in our earnings press release. which also applies to this call. And this call may contain forward-looking statements regarding Perfect Cope's performance, anticipated plans, operational results, and objectives. Forward-looking statements are based on management's expectations and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied on our call today. Perfect Cope undertakes no obligation to update any forward-looking statement except was required by law after the date of this call. Please note that all numbers are stated in the following measurements prepared remarks are in U.S. dollar terms, and we will discuss non-IFRS measures today, which are most thoroughly explained and reconciled to the most comparable measure reported in our earnings release and Form 6-K furnished to the SEC I will now turn the call to our first speaker today, founder, chairwoman, and CEO of Perfect, Ms. Chen.

Thank you, Rick, and welcome, everyone, to Perfect Corp's first quarter 2023 earnings conference call. We take off 2023 with the U.S. dollar $12.1 million in total revenue for the first quarter, representing quarter-over-quarter growth of 9.7% and year-over-year growth of The nominal growth reflects a strategic shift in prioritizing our new subscription-based cloud business driven by much stronger market demand. Specifically, our AIAR cloud solutions and subscription revenue, which historically accounted for two-thirds of total revenue, grew by 18.7% year-over-year in the first quarter. This is a key area of future growth for Perfect. Although we are still impacted by a longer sales cycle, our value proposition to our clients and our market leadership in AI AR solution continue to be strong. We saw very stable renewals with existing brand customers in the first quarter. We also managed to acquire more new logos from expanded pipeline as we fine-tune our strategy to counter the impact of the prolonged sales cycle. These new clients will need time to grow and make meaningful impact to our top-line revenue. Meanwhile, we continue to invest in AI skincare technology as it is an untapped market with great growth potential. Lastly, our mobile beauty app subscription business powered by AI capabilities such as AIGC continues to experience strong growth momentum, helping to stabilize and balance our revenue streams. During the first quarter of 2023, we continued making strategic adjustments like those we disclosed in last earning calls as we navigated a challenging business environment. We would like to take the opportunity here to provide some business update and share with you our latest industry observation. along with insights on how our technology and partnership with brands have helped shape the industry. First, color cosmetics remain a very resilient and attractive category. We saw more luxury fashion brands offer color cosmetic products to consumers in the town to attract younger shoppers, as well as to diversify their revenue mix. Perfect is the leader in the color cosmetics beauty tech field. and we are well positioned to support this new group of brands. One of the most exciting developments for this quarter is our new partnership with a global top luxury fashion brand from Europe. We will be launching their first-ever makeup virtual try-on on its .com website across multiple countries and also on Taobao, which is China's biggest online shopping platform. This is a very significant milestone for this client as they are relatively new to the makeup category. We expect that virtual try-on feature will drive an enhanced customer engagement and increase sales conversions for the brand. Second, as China reopens its border, brands are coming back and investing in digital solutions to target shoppers in China. In addition, Consumers have resumed their color cosmetics applications and skin care routines since the face mask mandate was lifted. We have seen good recovery momentum for both our WeChat and Taobao solution in China. Third, in the first quarter, we secured several skin care deals, including one of a prestigious affected skin care group in Japan. and another with a US-based healthcare conglomerate to newly launch perfect AI skin analysis. This partnership enabled us to deliver our cutting-edge skin technology of skin diagnosis to a wider range of users, providing personalized recommendations for a diverse range of skin types and skin concerns. As we continue to innovate, We're excited to bring some more AI skincare diagnosis and recommendation services to brands and retailers around the world. Fourth, we saw digitalization has arrived in the jewelry and watch industry. Watches and jewelry brands are finally caught up with virtual try-on technology. Two more notable new wins in this quarter were from Europe-based luxury fashion groups. which officially rolled out of our watch and jewelry VTOs on their website across multiple countries using perfect jewelry VTO technology. As more brands create 3D digital assets, we expect to see wider VTO deployments across all channels, including websites, apps, and WeChat. Fifth, interactive AR advertisements started to become a attractive and a very new way for brands to target more consumers. In a new partnership, Perfect and Teeth have joined forces to deliver the first native virtual try-on AR app format onto Teeth's app platform. These joint solutions enable brands to offer a state-of-the-art DTO experience across makeup, watches, and all other AR video categories in popular media around the globe. We help two global luxury fashion brands feature their watches in AR media campaigns using our AR app. And also, we offer AR apps to several other cosmetic companies Through this type of collaboration, jewelry and beauty brands can reach out to millions of potential consumers through AR ads, which is a brand new form. Another good news to share here, our mobile beauty app business has been growing quite strongly. With the injection of more AI features, we have recently seen a robust surge in growth. Our mobile beauty apps' active subscribers increased by 15% from the previous quarter and increased 50% from the same period last year. These strong goals can be attributed to our efforts in improving digital marketing, developing and monetizing more attractive AI features. One of the examples to share, we recently introduced a new product feature called Magic Extra. by AI to enhance our UCAM mobile beauty apps. This powerful AI tool, through the advanced AI-generated content AIGC technology, and the custom-stable diffusion models can produce fun and realistic digital avatars which app users can use to express themselves in their online social community. This positive user feedback we have received for this feature has helped drive conversions to our mobile app subscriptions. This is just one of our many R&D initiatives that leverage the latest AI technologies for product innovation. We will keep on investing in AI development for both beauty brands and the beauty consumers. And this unique synergy of business models where our core technology is developed once, And it can monetize in both brand business and also consumer beauty apps. It offers perfect, very valuable insights, and a very unique cost advantage. The search in digital commerce pushed transactions far beyond the traditional offline store. Those are increasingly happening online in apps, in social platforms, via content services, and even in search. Brands are rolling out their strategy in omnichannel more than ever. This larger mix of channels is what makes perfect so valuable in any environment and across every sales channel. Our strength is our ability to build all the right tools for commerce to happen in every place. This is why brand customers strategies with perfect. To sum up, despite uncertainty in the macro, We believe that our value proposition to beauty brands and the beauty consumers remain intact. Our dedicated AI, AR innovation and continued investment in the latest AIGC technologies and AI talent and AI skincare technologies will better position Perfect in the competitive landscape. Looking to the rest of 2023, As brands continue to undergo digital transformation, AI and AR technology is a crucial component of creating immersive, personalized omnichannel shopping experience across omnichannels, which provides very good business opportunity for us. In addition, because of our renewed focus on online services, our AIAR cloud solutions and mobile app subscription business will grow more rapidly versus the previous year, and their revenue contribution will be more prominent. As more and more brands live to improve sales efficiency, operate more sustainably, and reduce product waste, we remain committed to driving top-line growth while focusing on profitability. Benefited from this strong signs of growth in each respective area, as I mentioned, and a very healthy market demand, we are very confident to deliver strong growth in 2023. With that, I will now turn the call over to Louis to go over the financial details with you. Louis?

Thank you, Alice.

Before I go into the details of our financial results, please note that all comparisons are on year-over-year basis. The reporting period is the first quarter of 2023 versus the comparable period in 2022. And on top of the IFRS measures, we'll be also discussing non-IFRS measures to provide greater clarity on the trends in our actual operations. During the first quarter of 2023, our total revenue increased from $12 million in the same period of last year to $12.1 million, representing quarter-over-quarter growth of 9.7%. and year-over-year growth of 0.9. Our AR and AR cloud solution and subscription revenues, which now contribute 85.4% of our total revenue in quarter one, grew by 18.7% year-over-year, showing strong growth momentum in our core business. Meanwhile, legacy licensing revenue for physical stores, which accounted for 12.3% of our total revenue, declined by 47.1%. These trends not only show our new prioritization in investing online services, but also reflect customer preference in investing more in our AR, AR cloud solutions and subscriptions instead of the legacy offline SDK services, which are the main component of the licensing revenue. Turning to our customer order expansion and acquisition, during the first quarter, the new rate for existing subscriptions remained as strong and healthy as in the previous cycle. The customer continued to be active on our platform, Furthermore, our ability to acquire new customers is improving via a larger funnel and inbound leads for prospects. However, it will take some time for these new customers to grow sizable revenues to us. Among our revenue sources, they are AI cloud solution and subscription revenue, which grew by 18.7% to $10.4 million, mainly due to the strong and stable demand for our online virtual trial solutions to bring customers as well as strong growth in our mobile beauty app subscriptions. Our mobile beauty app active subscribers grew by 53.3% year-over-year, reaching a historical high of 694,000 active subscribers at the end of the first quarter of 2023. This increase demonstrated robust growth momentum of our suite of mobile apps. Licensing revenue, which is mostly generated from our more traditional offline services, was $1.5 million, representing 12.3% of our total revenue, Primarily driven by brand customer demand and more interest in the e-commerce rather than traditional physical support deployment. The strong growth momentum in AR, AR solutions and subscription revenue and the decrease in licensing revenue aligns with management expectations and is a result of a strategy to prioritize AI innovation and to invest in new cloud-based subscription services. The strategic shift in revenue mix shows that the AR, AR cloud solution and subscription business will continue to drive revenue growth and become our primary growth engine in the future. As we direct our resources in online business going forward, we encourage investors to closely observe the future growth trajectory of our AR, AI cloud solution and subscription services. Growth profit was $9.6 million, while growth margin was 78.8%, compared to 86.2% for the same period of last year. This was due to a change in our cost of goods sold, which was driven by the growing mobile beauty app subscription that generated higher platform fees paid to third-party digital distribution platforms such as Apple and Google. Total operating expenses decreased by 0.9% to $11.1 million from $11.2 million for the same period of last year, demonstrating management's successful effort to control costs and enhance our productivity. To break down operating expenses, Sales and marketing expense remain flat at $6 million, representing 49.6% of our total revenue, on par with the same ratio during the same period of last year. This again shows an effective cost control measure put by the management. Research and development expenses decreased by 3.1%, from $2.7 million to $2.6 million, representing 21.6% of our total revenue, compared to 22.5% in the same period of last year. The decrease was mainly due to the foreign exchange gain from the strong U.S. dollar versus NT dollars, as the majority of our R&D expenses are incurred in Taiwan. General and administrative expenses decreased by 1.8%, from $2.5 million to $2.4 million, or 19.9% of total revenue, compared to 20.4% in the same period of last year, showing that there were no significant changes during the quarter. All expense categories reflect the effective cost control area held by the management team to increase our team productivity under such a challenging macroeconomic and inflationary environment. Net income turned positive to $0.7 million from a net loss of $0.5 million in the same period of last year, mainly due to $2.2 million interest income during the quarter. Excluding non-cash share-based compensation, foreign exchange impact, and one-time non-recurring cost associated to our dislike deal, adjusted net income of $1.4 million compared to adjusted net income of $1.2 million during the same period of last year. Turning to our balance sheet, as of March 31, 2023, our company held $196.1 million in cash equivalent and time deposited six months and longer, compared to $192.6 million as of December 31, 2022. a 3.5 million to 1.8% quarter-over-quarter increase. The company's cash position remains healthy, and we do not have any exposure to Silicon Valley Bank or any other U.S. regional banks or credit suites. In total, our customer base had a net increase of 16 brand clients since the end of 2022, achieving a total of 525 brand clients with over 590,000 SKUs for makeup, skincare, I wear jewelry products as of March 31st, 2023. In this quarter, we grew our key customer to 158 from 152 at the end of 2022. The new acquisition came from the expanded pipeline as we find new strategy to counter the impact of a prolonged sales cycle. While the present business environment is full of uncertainties, we believe the macro situation may improve in the quarters to come despite the difficulties of solid customer base effective cost management, expansion into new categories and geographies, and leave us very well positioned to see the future growth opportunities. That concludes my prepared remarks. Operator, let's open up for questions.

Thank you, and we will now begin the question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. Again, that is star one on your telephone keypad. And your first question comes from the line of Timothy Zhao from Goldman Sachs. Your line is open.

Thank you, Benjamin, for taking my question. Two questions from my side. First, I noticed that on your balance sheet, there's over 30% quote-unquote growth of contract liabilities. which is actually quite strong relative to the revenue growth, either on a Q and Q or young year growth basis. Just wondering if Benjamin could share more detailed color behind this very strong increase in the contract diabetes. Shall we interpret that going forward we should be able to see accelerating quarterly revenue growth for the rest of this year? And that will be my first question. And secondly, I think in your remarks as well as in the press release, I think you mentioned that company is fine-tuning the sales marketing strategy in the context of prolonged sales cycle and also micro uncertainties. But I saw, I think, in the first quarter, the sales marketing expenses was quite flat-ish, stable, young year. Just wondering if management have any guidance for the sales marketing expenses for the rest of this year. Thank you.

Hi, Timothy. This is Louis. Great to talk to you again.

Yeah, so the country I'll be certainly is advanced indicator that the company is gaining more contract with the customers as we said that we're prioritizing of subscription business model and As part of the accounting any subscription contract will take time to be fully recognized. So yeah, so you see a Difficult sizable grow in the country reliability certainly is reflect the power the nature of the business On your second question Again, we are always running a very efficient team, whether it's in sales marketing or R&D. So even reaching to new geography, participating in a lot more trade shows, and also expanding in digital marketing, we managed to get our costs very well under control, able to enlarge our funnel. I think these are early results of what we see. One of the measures that the management has put together in the last six months already, and it seems to be starting to work out the results.

Got it. Thank you, Luis.

Your next question comes from the line of Clark Jeffries from Piper Sandler. Your line is open.

Hello. Thank you for taking the question. I wanted to dig into the brief mention of generative AI and just more broadly, how do you expect some of the recent innovations that have been made available to be applied to the platform? Certainly encouraging to hear about the magic avatar functionality. You know, does that offer new revenue opportunities in sort of charging for consumption for some of those sort of creations by users? Or do you see it as a user acquisition or retention tool within the mobile app product? And then I have one follow-up.

Hi, Karthik. This is Luis.

So the way that we introduce the Magic Avatar feature in our You Can Perfect app, it is an add-on. service on top of the subscription. Consumers can decide to just opt-in for these features. So I think we charge them $2.99 for 50 avatars or $3.99 for 100 avatars. Current active subscribers, they can also opt-in to do that at a discounted rate. So basically, I think the first benefit of that, we see an increase in our pool. So allow us to increase the average order value of the customer or lifetime value of the customer. As well, we've seen these to attract new type of customers who are not traditionally part of our app. So we certainly, you know, it's still early. We launched this in early March. So we just made it for the first month. Early results show the prominent potential to both increase the value of existing subscribers, but also to attract new subscribers.

I'd like to add something about AITC that we are developing. The first feature is what you said, the web of default in the UTM mobile app. That's Magic Avatar. This is only one of the AIGC applications we are developing. We already developed it in the release. And a lot more, and this one is for B2C app first. And a lot more AIGC, we are thinking how we can apply that, not only on app, but also to brands. with different fashion styles, hairstyles. So I personally am excited to see AIGC, all this new AI technology developed to the market and open up a new way to engage with consumers. And also the brand can leverage to engage with their customers. Always we have new technology to embed on our app user beauty apps to try the market with the users directly. If the feedback is very positive, always we will bring to our brand for them to imagine how they can leverage it and engage with their beauty consumers. So yes, we are keep on investing and developing our new applications next quarter. I believe we can share more of AIGC features and solutions with you.

Yeah, perfect. Thank you, Alice. Certainly, the harder question is how do the B2B products change regenerative AI? Just my follow-up in terms of, you know, the current operating environment, I was curious, where do you see the most attractive return on your investment right now? Is that pursuing opportunities for expansion within the top 20? Is that growing outside of the top 20 beauty brands? Or is it maybe investing in the sort of digital marketing advertising accelerators for the B2C business?

I think we are starting to diversify a lot more of business, as you have noted in our release.

So I think B2B remains a very strong core of our business with all our partners, and we continue to help them expand on the channel, which means going to different retailers or retailers, partners to distribute their SKUs, the AR experience in more geographies, in more platforms. So that continues to be strong. Of course, we see the long-tail part of the beauty business starting to take off at a much faster pace, right? So virtual try-on is becoming Very much, you know the table stake for all the e-commerce solution that segment is continue to grow well for online services The mobile app subscription seems to be as you mentioned that we reach another record high quarter or active subscriber I think that's another positive trend. We have seen the business also solidifying on that front the advertising business with our newly announced partnership with TEAS that is very new either way that we want to go beyond our the traditional e-commerce and the brand as well, right? The VTO experience is such an engaging experience that is worth, you know, to be seen for more consumers. And not only those ones visiting the e-commerce shopping cart, right? So I think this will be a new way to offer engagement type of interactive advertising ads, right? So I think consumers are not satisfied with the traditional banners or video ads. They are ready to try to be part of that. And I think VTO, whether it's watches, for makeup does make sense and fundamentally i think one one point worth noting here the core technology are the same right we develop the engine whether it's ar or the igc and we find different use cases to apply both for consumer business but as well for brand business so that is a very huge saving for us from a development cost perspective i we managed to run this engineering team which only accounted about 20 percent of our revenue i think that is a very efficient way to run that now at the same time once this technology we can pilot test that almost in a test bed on the consumer uh uh site and as we gain feedback and understand how consumers are reacting to that we're packaging this technology in a different form factors in different use cases and offer that to the beauty brand perfect thank you very much

Before we proceed on to the next question, a friendly reminder, if you would like to ask a question today on the phone, please press star one on your telephone keypad. Again, that is star one on your telephone keypad. And your next question comes from the line of Chris Chia from Kendall Court. Your line is open.

Hi, Lewis, Alice, good to hear you on the call. Thanks for this. I had a question on the competitive environment. Given what you've observed in the last six months, given the longer sales cycle and the challenging market condition, can you discuss a little bit about what you observe from a pricing and product differentiation strategy and how you think that that's going to evolve in the coming months? Thank you.

Yeah. Hi, Chris. This is Alice. From the competitive point of view, Actually, we did not see any competitors even stronger than us or far behind us right now. So it's not competition any risk so far. So just what we did, as we said, increase the pipeline. It will take some time to make the revenue, keep the revenue, keep those brands in our pipeline to grow the revenue. And for mobile apps, actually, there are a lot of competitors, beauty apps. There are quite several beauty apps in there. But we leverage AI more last year, add more AI features. That turns out to be very attractive to the end user, very unique features by AI, and attract and make those end users, new users, not only on our app, but also very sticky. We increase the renewal rate, everything. So just like Louis said, the core technology we apply to in-user app first, and collect the feedback that's good, and then we approach and also introduce to the brand site. So these new features, AI features to the beauty app site is so attractive. Hopefully, that's our wish, that we can leverage that and also give feedback to the brands, and they can also use our technology to attract their own users. Do you want to add something, Chris?

So, yeah, essentially, I think the competitive landscape that we are remains pretty much the same. Our position, our value proposition to the brand remains very intact. As I mentioned, the renewal rates are pretty much the same as previous cycles. So we haven't seen really a significant change in that landscape.

Okay. Thank you. You're welcome.

As there are no further questions at this time, I'd like to hand the conference back to management for closing remarks.

All right. Thank you again for joining our call today. If you have any further questions, please feel free to contact us or request through our IAAP website. We look forward to speaking with everyone in our next call. Have a good day.

Thank you.

This concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect.