Shapeways Holdings, Inc.

Q3 2023 Earnings Conference Call

11/14/2023

spk00: Greetings and welcome to Shapeway's third quarter 2023 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the prepared remarks. As a reminder, the conference is being recorded. Before we get started, I'd like to remind everyone that management will be making statements during this call that include forward-looking statements within the meaning of federal securities laws, which are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Any statements contained in this call that are not statements of historical fact should be deemed to be forward-looking statements. All forward-looking statements, including without limitation, statements regarding our business strategy, future financial and operating performance, projected financial results for the fourth quarter of 2023, timing or results of any strategic transactions or future cost-cutting measures, impact of recent acquisitions, new offerings, and market opportunity are based upon current estimates and various assumptions. These statements involve material risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated or implied by these forward-looking statements. Accordingly, you should not place undue reliance on these statements. For descriptions of the risks and uncertainties associated with our business, please see the company's SEC filings, including the company's quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended September 30, 2023. The information provided in this conference call speaks only to the broadcast date today, November 14, 2023. Shapeways disclaims any obligation, except as required by law, to update or revise forward-looking statements. Also, during the course of today's call, we refer to adjusted EBITDA, which is a non-GAAP financial measure. There is a reconciliation schedule showing GAAP versus non-GAAP results currently available in our press release issued before market open, which can be found on our website, shapeways.com. On the call today are Greg Kress, Chief Executive Officer, and Alberto Recchi, Chief Financial Officer. And now I'd like to turn the call over to Greg. Greg?
spk05: Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for joining us to discuss Shapeways' third quarter 2023 financial results and progress on our key initiatives and strategic growth plan. I will begin by providing a business update, and Alberto Recchi, our CFO, will then discuss our third quarter financial results and outlook for the fourth quarter. In the third quarter, we continue to execute our strategy to grow software and enterprise manufacturing revenues. Our conviction for Shapeway's opportunity remains unchanged. We believe that the market is shifting towards digitization of manufacturing and is approaching an inflection point in the overall adoption of digital manufacturing solutions And we believe that we are well-positioned to take advantage of this market opportunity across an array of industries due to our platform that combines high-quality, flexible, on-demand manufacturing with purpose-built proprietary software. We are encouraged by our progress with regards to our software business and the increasing traction with enterprise manufacturing customers. Additionally, we remain disciplined and prudent as we execute our operating plan and continue to refine our cost structures. Our software business is scaling as expected, and we remain encouraged by our growing traction of staff contract commitments, increased customer acquisition, improved retention, lifetime value expansion, and new initiatives such as MFG Materials, which was launched in late Q2. Through MFG Materials, we believe we are providing a compelling value proposition to our customers by helping them save on raw material costs. We have recognized 2.2 million of software revenues year-to-date up 81% from prior year period. Our software products provide a critical tool for manufacturers, allowing them to leverage end-to-end manufacturing software to scale their business and shift to digital manufacturing in order to increase productivity. Turning to our enterprise manufacturing sales, we continue to increase our customer focus towards middle market and enterprise opportunities. and anticipate seeing accelerating benefits from these investments in the coming quarters. We steered two new long-term agreements in Q3 with leading automotive and transportation manufacturers for multi-year production programs expected to ramp up to approximately $4 million annualized revenue by the end of next year. This affirms our commitment and the proficiency in partnering with tier one manufacturers to support OEM volume production. We continue to increase our share of wallet with existing customers on multi-year revenue projects and saw revenues from the first nine months of this year from our top 250 customers grow 18% compared to the same period last year. In our self-service e-commerce operations, sales remain stable, providing a good foundation for our growth initiatives. We are optimistic that we are seeing a more rational competitive backdrop with regards to our e-commerce business. While we remain encouraged by the momentum in our business in light of the elongated sales cycle and near-term macroeconomic uncertainty, we also initiated a number of cost reduction measures in the quarter. This included a reduction in force completed in October 2023, a reduction in new hires, and a reduction in non-critical capital and discretionary operating expenditures. In addition, we have also been working with advisors and considering the strategic alternatives available to the company. Potential strategic alternatives may include, without limitation, a capital raise, a merger, a business combination, a sale of a material portion of the company's asset, or other strategic transactions. We have not made any decisions regarding any potential transaction, and at this time do not have any additional details to share. I would like to thank the entire Shapeways team, our customers, our investors, and all our stakeholders for their ongoing support. Alberto will now discuss our financial results in more detail.
spk04: Thanks, Greg. I'll provide a recap of our third quarter 2023 performance, give an update on our balance sheet position, and provide guidance for the fourth quarter. In the third quarter, revenue was $8.4 million, flat from the prior year and slightly below guidance due to shipment delays from the third quarter into the fourth quarter of about half a million dollars worth of contracted revenue related to three enterprise customers. We saw growth in software and enterprise sales partially affected by lower sales from marketplace and self-service. Our gross margins in the third quarter were 41% compared to 44% in the third quarter of 2022, but grew sequentially compared to the second quarter by about 100 basis points. We continued to deliver solid gross margins, and the year-over-year change was primarily due to the ramping of recently deployed new technologies and makeshift to non-3D printing and higher shipping costs, partially offset by software growth and price increases. We anticipate realizing margin expansion over time as we see more contribution from higher margin software sales, the benefits from the consolidation of our US manufacturing operation, as well as our cost optimization plan. Third quarter adjusted EBITDA was a loss of $5 million compared to a loss of $4.6 million in the third quarter of last year. SG&A expenses for the third quarter were $11 million compared to $7.6 million in the prior year, primarily reflecting increased professional fees and a write-off of certain equipment that would not be utilized in our operation and prepaid services associated with such equipment. As Greg mentioned, we have recently implemented cost alignment initiatives, including a reduction in force of 15%, of our employees, including OPEX, which was completed subsequent to quarter end. We anticipate realizing approximately $2.4 million in annualized cost savings as a result of our headcount reorganization. Turning to our balance sheet as of September 30, 2023, our cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities totaled $17.7 million. During the quarter, we deployed approximately $7 million in cash. and we remain prudent and focused on further improving our cash burn while proactively monitoring our liquidity. Looking ahead for the fourth quarter of 2023, we anticipate revenues to be in the range of 9.3 million to 10 million. With this, we completed our prepared remarks and we will now open the call for questions. Operator?
spk03: We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star, then 1 on your touchtone phone. If you are using a speaker phone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. If at any time your question has been addressed and you would like to withdraw your question, please press star, then 2. At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster. The first question today comes from Greg Palm with Craig Hallam. Please go ahead.
spk02: Yeah, thanks. This is Danny Egerich on for Greg today. I appreciate you taking the questions. I'd like to just kind of start with kind of more broadly what you're seeing in terms of demand, how it progressed throughout the quarter, and then maybe in terms of some of the push-outs, you know, maybe at some of your enterprise customers. I think you said around 500,000 from Q3 to Q4. What's your confidence level that those, in fact, do hit in Q4? And is there any risk that maybe that and some of the others that you thought would get hit in Q4 get pushed into 2024 just given, you know, maybe customers managing their year-end budgets?
spk05: Yeah, thanks, Danny. That's a – thanks for the – one, thanks for joining and a good question. I would say, one, from a demand perspective on the sales side, we're still seeing really good traction, right? Our strategy of going out and supporting enterprise customers I feel is working, and we continue to build a strong pipeline. And not only are we bringing on new customers, but the customers that we have brought on are also expanding their wallets. So we're feeling quite good about that on the manufacturing side. To your point related to the revenue that pushed from Q3 into Q4, a lot of that has already shipped. I think one thing that we're finding with enterprise-level customers is in the process they are reviewing or potentially signing off on different steps of the process, whether it's a quality check or acceptance of the order or whatever it might be, that historically we thought we would be able to move through quite quickly. I think we are just less in control of making that happen as fast as we'd like. you know, we may reach out to a customer and it may take them a week or two to get back to us to set up that review or from step to step. And so I think we'll get better and better at it as we go. But at the end of the day, I feel like the orders that we're closing are strong. We continue to win more orders from the same customer base. So the expansion of Wallet is really there. And then, you know, I think that we will see how the end of the year goes, but we actually, we're making really, really strong progress already. So we're feeling quite good about the guidance that we're setting for Q4.
spk02: Got it. That makes sense. Maybe if I can just hit quick on gross margin and kind of the outlook there. I guess maybe if you assume more of kind of a consistent macro environment, maybe less fixed cost absorption, but then you also have the higher software contribution and some of the, you know, cost initiatives that you've taken and, and previously and the new one. So I guess, how should we think about gross margins next couple of quarters? You know, can you get back to kind of that low to mid forties? Yeah. Just anything you got there. Thanks.
spk05: Yeah. From our, from our perspective, we see line of sight to getting back to that. There's a lot of opportunity for further price in the market. You know, I think one of the things that, we've talked about in the past is some of the pressure specifically on price from more of our e-commerce channels. And what you've seen is some of the competitors in the space have reversed a lot of those decisions while we've kind of maintained that price. And so with more volume coming back into the business, that allows us to optimize more and more of our manufacturing production volumes and reach more gross margin from the same cost basis. And so you know, we see line of sight for that continuing. And then again, software continues to scale and that becomes more and more disproportionate amount of our revenue that allows, you know, obviously a much significant higher impact to the gross margin net. And so, yeah, we see line of sight for that continuing to move in the right direction.
spk02: All right, great. I'll leave it there. Thanks.
spk03: As a reminder, if you have a question, please press star and 1 to enter the question queue. The next question comes from Jim Ricciuti with Needham and Company. Please go ahead.
spk01: Thank you. I think in the last call, you mentioned that there was a piece of business in order that you're expecting to ship, had been expecting to ship in Q2. from an enterprise customer that you anticipated shipping in Q3. Did that order ship or is that part of some of this ongoing slippage that you're seeing?
spk05: Well, thanks, Jim, for joining. Appreciate the question. Yeah, that order that we referenced back in Q2 did ship in Q3. And actually, part of the orders that didn't ship in Q3 into Q4 was an additional order from that exact same customer. And so, But yeah, the order that we referenced back in Q2 did ship out in Q3.
spk01: Got it. And I joined the call a little bit late. You may have provided this detail, but I think in the first half of the year, I believe you said you generated a little over half your revenues from enterprise customers. What did that look like in Q3? I apologize if you gave that.
spk05: No, we didn't give that. And I don't have that number ready for like off the top of my head, but we can always follow up with you. But again, I think that what we didn't mention in the script was in our prepared remarks that we did see 18% revenue growth year over year for the first nine months for those enterprise customers. So we are continuing to see that customer base grow. And then, you know, we've talked a lot about our e-commerce channels and some of the pressure that we've had on that revenue line over time. But we're actually seeing that, although we may still have year-over-year pressure, it's really stabilized over the last six to nine months. And so pretty consistently we're seeing that business stabilize and continue, but we'll see most of our growth coming from our enterprise manufacturing customers, at least on the manufacturing side.
spk01: And obviously there's some moving parts here, but with what you're seeing – in the market and some of the cost actions you've taken. But I'm wondering if you can give us some sense as to how you're looking at the cash burn in Q4.
spk05: Yeah, our goal is to continue to make progress on reducing that cash burn on a quarterly basis. And the way that we're doing that is really by focusing on, one, driving top-line growth. And so I think we have to pretty good line of sight to the revenue forecast that we have in place and the guidance that we set for Q4. Continued improvement in gross margin, not only from just NICs, but also there's some opportunity for price and a lot of value-added services that we're providing to our customer base. And then last, we want to continue to optimize our OpEx. And so there's projects pretty much across the board focused on reduction of our operating expense and trying to make sure our cost structure is aligned as closely as it can to, you know, the revenue lines in the business that are showing the most progress, right? And so when we made some of those changes to the business in October, it was really around, you know, making sure that we tightened up areas where we weren't seeing the best ROI. And so, you know, ultimately we'll continue to do that moving forward. So we should see continued improvement in our cash burn on a quarter-by-quarter basis.
spk01: And were those reductions that you made across the organization, were they focused in certain areas, Greg?
spk05: They were pretty much across the organization. I think it impacted six to seven individual functions. And ultimately, we didn't make a lot of impact to commercial functions because the commercial functions today are delivering strong results or at least meeting our expectations on results. so far with strong pipelines. And so, you know, it's most of the support resources that we had been working on over the last, say, you know, 12 months that, you know, maybe weren't returning as much as we had hoped for. And so we started tightening up a lot of those roles.
spk01: Okay. Thanks a lot.
spk03: Mm-hmm. This concludes our question and answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Greg Press for any closing remarks.
spk05: I just wanted to thank everyone for joining us today. We continue to focus on executing on our strategy and we see a lot of opportunity in front of the business. We will continue to provide updates as we go, but thanks for joining us today and we'll talk to you soon.
spk03: The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.
Disclaimer

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