Enghouse Sys Ltd

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Ench House's fourth quarter and year-end results conference call. At this time, all lines are in the listen-only mode. Following the presentation, we will conduct a question and answer session. If at any time during this call you require immediate assistance, please press star zero for the operator. This call is being recorded on Friday, December 15, 2023. I would now like to turn the call over to Mr. Stephen Sandler, Chairman and CEO. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everybody. I'm here today with Vince Mifsud, Global President, Rob Medved, VP Finance, and Todd May, VP Legal Counsel. Before we begin, I'll have Todd read our forward disclaimer.

Certain statements made may be forward-looking by their nature. Such forward-looking statements are subject to various risks risks, and uncertainties, including those in the ANCHO's continuous disclosure filing, such as AIF, which could cause the company's actual results and experience to differ materially from anticipated results or other expectations. Under-reliance should not be placed on forward-looking information, and the company has no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking information, whether as a result of new information, future events, or under-reliance.

Thanks, Todd. Rob will now give an overview of the financial results.

Thanks, Steve. Good morning. I will be taking us through the financial highlights for the 3 and 12 months ended October 31, 2023, compared to the 3 and 12 months ended October 31, 2022, as follows. Revenue increased to $123.1 and $454 million, respectively, compared to revenue of $108.1 and $427.6 million. Results from operating activities were 35.7 and 122.1 million, respectively, compared to 33.1 and 129.7 million. Net income was 25.1 and 72.2 million, respectively, compared to 36.9 and 94.5 million. Adjusted EBITDA was 37.9 and 133.8 million, respectively, compared to 35.8 and 140.6 million. Cash flows from operating activities excluding changes in working capital was $43.5 and $140.5 million, respectively, compared to $37.7 and $145.1 million. In fiscal 2023, we achieved a significant milestone by expanding our revenue, increasing our cash reserves, and also deploying $55.2 million on acquisitions. We are pleased to announce record annual SAS and maintenance services revenue of $297.6 million, an increase of $39.4 million or 15.2% compared to the prior year. SAS and maintenance services are an important strategic source of revenue characterized by their predictable and recurring nature. They now represent 65.6% of total revenues for the year compared to 60.4% in the prior year. The growth in revenue was accomplished through the expansion of our recurring SaaS revenue base, bolstered by new revenues from QEMU, Naveda, and LifeSize, all of which were acquired and successfully integrated in fiscal 2023, combined with positive impacts from foreign exchange rates in the year. This positive momentum was somewhat offset by declining software license revenue, as we see increasing customer preference for SaaS solutions. Aligned with our commitment to provide our customers choice, we are actively broadening the global availability of our SaaS offerings, particularly in our customer experience and contact center technologies where demand for SaaS is growing. Despite the industry shift, we remain profitable, reporting results from operating activities of $122.1 million. With cash reserves of $240.4 million and no external debt, we continue to actively pursue opportunities to strategically deploy our cash reserves on acquisitions, and return cash to our shareholders in the form of dividends. Yesterday, the board of directors approved the company's eligible quarterly dividend of 22 cents per common share payable on February 29th, 2024 to shareholders of record at the close of business on February 15th, 2024. I will now hand the call back to Mr. Sandler.

Vince will now give some operational highlights of the quarter.

Thank you, Steve. We are pleased to report double-digit growth in Q4 of 23 compared to Q4 of 22, with total revenue growth of 13.9%, recurring revenue growth of 35%, and net cash flows from operating activities improving 52.8%. Once again, we have also demonstrated to be one of the most profitable companies in our market, if not the outright leader in terms of profitability. We achieved these results despite being faced with inflationary pressures in 2023. These results reflect the competitive advantage of our choice strategy, our good products, acquisitions and how we integrate acquisitions, and the NCHOSIS team's ability to execute and continually find new ways to improve our business. Breakthroughs in 2023 in the field of generative artificial intelligence has prompted a lot of discussion and market awareness around AI. So we thought the timing is appropriate to provide more detail in terms of what EnchHouse is doing in AI. We have a two-pronged AI strategy. One is to provide our customers with AI products that add value to their business and generate additional revenue for EnchHouse. And secondly, is to use AI tools to improve our overall internal operations that translates into improved profitability. Entrust has been developing and integrating AI technologies since 2019, which commenced with the acquisition of Eptica. And our approach involves integrating leading AI technologies with our own proprietary AI innovations. When developing and constructing our AI products, certain foundational blocks were essential to build and create. And let me describe some of these building blocks. The NHELS transcription engine is a critical piece of software that translates phone calls and video recordings automatically into text. This proprietary transcription technology is available in over 50 languages and represents one of our fundamental building blocks for AI. Advanced linguistic search is another proprietary building block. This search capability enables us to go beyond simple keyword matching into broader language understanding. A third building block is the in-house knowledge base product that provides customers the ability to create their own proprietary data set derived from consuming multiple sources of internal content including emails, customer interactions, documents, and files. And this knowledge base provides the unique data set relevant to our customers' businesses which is what generative AI engines need to generate applicable and relevant responses. With these core building blocks integrated with leading AI technologies, we have several AI products and plan additional future products that serve the needs of the enterprise market. In a contact center environment, we think of AI primarily as a tool to improve the contact center agent's productivity. As an example, our agent knowledge product provides the ability for an agent to ask questions to the knowledge base and retrieve helpful and relevant responses which can assist them when addressing customer questions. SmartQuality is our AI-powered quality assurance product. Contact center interactions are typically recorded for quality assurance purposes, And smart quality automatically evaluates the performance of an agent, scores their performance, provides agent recommendations. This saves supervisors many hours listening to recordings. We also have real-time coaching technology, which is used to help an agent while they're interacting with the customer, providing real-time suggestions by recognizing the customer's sentiment during the conversation. Also, in most contact centers, After every customer interaction, agents need to manually summarize the call and the required action items. This consumes a lot of time. Our conversational summarization product performs interaction summaries in a fully automated manner. Virtual agents, also known as chatbots, use AI to respond to customer inquiries, freeing up the contact center agent to handle more complex interactions. When a chatbot is unable to respond to an interaction, our engaged product redirects the email or chat based on its content to the agent most suited to address the interaction. These are all examples of our AI tools that improve agent productivity. We also have AI in our video healthcare customers. Video fall detection technology is being embedded into our virtual sitter application that helps healthcare professionals professionals monitor several patients simultaneously. This triggers alarms when a patient is falling or about to fall, which is used both in home and hospital patient monitoring. Within our emergency safety technology, AI is used to optimize the fastest route for a fire truck, police car, or ambulance to the emergency incident, considering several variables and factors such as vehicle size, traffic conditions, traffic lights. These are all aimed at helping save people's lives. In addition to offering AI products to our customers, which we are still early on in terms of generating revenue, we're also leveraging AI within our operations to enhance efficiency. We started using AI in demand generation area in 23, driving more inbound leads with the same level of spend. And in 2024 and future years, we plan on expanding AI across all areas of our company. Turning now to acquisitions. Our growth strategy continues to be expand profits both organically and through acquisitions. With acquisitions, a fundamental challenge lies in the post-acquisition integration process. In 2023, all three acquisitions that were completed were effectively integrated. transforming these companies from historical losses into profitability in the immediate quarter following each acquisition. The investments we made in technology and our improved internal capability have enhanced our ability to integrate acquisitions. LifeSize, which we closed at the start of Q4, was purchased out of bankruptcy, and even with that complexity, we managed to generate profits from this purchase immediately in the quarter. As a reminder, we acquired certain assets of life size for a purchase price of 20.7 million U.S. and employed approximately 70 former life size employees. While we demonstrated success in Q4, we always continue to explore new innovative ways to improve our business, focusing on our products that we offer our customers, operational efficiency, acquisition and acquisition integrations. I want to personally thank the Ange Health team for their hard work and commitment during fiscal 23 that made our success possible. Let me turn the call over to Mr. Steve Sadler.

Thanks, Vince. Just a little bit more on acquisitions. Just to remind you that LifeSize acquisition was completed August 1 and is in our full fourth quarter. It is performing as expected. We announced the assets were purchased in a receivership process, as Vince mentioned, and with a lot of work, it met our revenue and EBITDA expectations in the quarter. It's operating on our standard financial model already because some of the issues in a receivership process you can leave behind. Life-size business is nearly fully integrated with our communication center business and video business at the end of the fiscal year. I should also point out that without life-size, our revenue is approximately the same as the third quarter. There is no longer a large decline because of video, but there still is some decline because of video. So most of the revenue increase in Q4 came from the life-size acquisition. Acquisition opportunities remain at a high level as companies in our sector struggle with debt, high interest rates, and a slowing economy. I also should point out at LifeSize, when you go through a receivership, some companies started looking long before we bought the company, and so we expect a slight revenue decline in our LifeSize business. Acquisition opportunities remain at a high level as companies in our sector struggle with debt, high interest rates, and slowing economy, as I previously stated. I would now like to open the call for questions.

Thank you. And ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question and answer session. Should you have a question, please press the star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. You will hear a three-tone prompt acknowledging your request, and your questions will be pulled in the order they are received. Should you wish to decline from the polling process, please press the star followed by the number two. And if you're using a speakerphone, please keep the handset before pressing any keys. One moment, please, for your first question. And your first question comes from the line of Stephanie Price from CIDC. Your line is open.

Good morning. Congratulations on the life-size acquisition and the quick integration there. Just wondering if you could kind of elaborate on the integration process and how much of it was the fact it was in receivership and how much of it was the fact that it seems like your integration process has changed has kind of been refined here with QMU and NVIDA and their life size.

Yeah, we are improving, of course. The more type of deals you do, and we have some new people who are doing their first deal, but we've also some who have done many deals over the years. I would say that the process in a receivership is quite different. You get there faster, but it's a lot more work because you have to sign up the suppliers again. But you do not have to do a big, you know, hiring of staff and then exiting of staff. You pick the staff you want and leave the remainder that maybe not fit what you're trying to do with the receiver. So, again, there's some advantages, but the disadvantage is a lot more work because you just don't buy something and have time to To sort it out, you have to move quite quickly in that whole process. So it helped us get to profitability a lot faster. It's a very similar business that we have only run differently in that it has video and has contact center in the cloud. Like many companies, they did the same mistake that we saw with video and others where they told their customers they had to go to the cloud. They're not selling on-prem anymore. We stopped that. We will do both. It costs us a little bit more in R&D to do that, but we want to give the customers choice. That's helped, and we believe the decline they saw in their revenue, we will still have some decline as people have already started looking but we will have less decline. And over the next couple of quarters, we expect the life size revenue to stabilize and probably profitability could still grow a little bit, especially as a percentage of that revenue. So, you know, again, I think it was a good deal. It was an interesting deal in the sense that it wasn't a receivership. But as Vince said, the staff performed very well and we're ready to take on more.

Sounds good. And then one on the organic side, I think you mentioned in prepared remarks, broadening the global availability of SaaS solutions. Can you walk through this in a bit more detail? How's kind of your SaaS selling kind of changing?

I'll give a short answer and let Vince take it. What we really do is offer choice. So we're not pushing SaaS. And some customers want on-prem still, but we offer choice. That's a little harder for us in that some of our sales guys have to know how to do that well, and that's taking a little bit of time. But we hope that's going to be the right way forward to improve our internal growth a little bit.

Maybe, Vince, you can... Yeah, not much to add there other than the choice model also helps reduce churn because if a customer... wants to go from, let's say, on-prem to private cloud or multi-tenanted SaaS, we have that availability. So a lot of it was about getting our sales team ramped on doing that, getting our operations team comfortable selling, you know, SaaS products and doing demand gen around choice. So it helps reduce churn and it helps also win new business by having the flexibility of choice.

Great. Thank you very much.

Thank you. And your next question comes from the line of Paul Tiber from RBC Capital Markets. Your line is open.

Thanks very much and good morning. Just following up on the comments on SaaS, can you give us a sense of the magnitude of new SaaS bookings or maybe just the rate of conversion within your install base from on-premise to SaaS?

That's kind of hard to do. I will make a couple of comments on SaaS. I think it helps customers. It is not as profitable as on-prem for suppliers. I'm saying that because part of our strategy, of course, as a capital allocator is to buy companies. And we're finding the SaaS companies are the ones that are struggling the most. And as you've seen, we have bought a couple of in that area already. You know, I think we let the customers choose. A lot of our customers were on-prem. If you force them to SaaS, they will look and potentially leave because no one likes to be forced to do anything. But I'll turn it to Vince to give further.

I think, you know, we don't go into a lot of detail in terms of, you know, new logo wins on SaaS and conversions, but we're getting success in both areas. Winning new logos that are starting right away with either a private cloud service or our multi-tenant products. And we're getting more conversions from on-prem to SaaS. And we're also getting partners that are standing up their own SaaS platforms based on Enchouse's technology and offering SaaS to their end customers. So we're seeing success in all the different areas.

And Paul, that's important because most of the competitors in SaaS run it on their system. They don't allow... partners to set up their own. We will let partners do that. So some of them are setting things up now, and they will then sell on a SaaS basis our software to their customers. And even some of the telcos, sometimes they just buy licenses from us and maintenance, and yet they use SaaS to their customers. So we have a little bit of a more complex model, but it's really all about giving customers choice.

Thanks. That's helpful. The comments that you made just in terms of product investments in AI and generative AI were interesting. Do you have a sense of the competitive ecosystem and how you're faring competitively when customers look at your product roadmap investments that you're making in AI? Because you called out new customer, new logo wins. Just if you have a sense of win rates and how you see that tracking.

It's very interesting. Most of the things we hear is just people talking and not doing. We've taken the other approach and we decided to talk a little bit more today because we usually do and don't say very much. Again, it's helped us. If you look at some of the competitors who talk about AI, they're not profitable and they aren't getting more profitable. So we don't know what AI they're doing. Our AI is based on tangible things that help the company either increase revenue or reduce costs. So again, it's a little bit different. We don't see in the selling process we have a big disadvantage there, but it is a change for us. Again, we're getting the salespeople up to speed to do a little better in that area.

Yeah, I think in sales calls, there's a lot of conversations about AI if people want to know what we're doing in it. want to maybe incorporate it into their future plans. So there's a lot of conversations. And like Steve said, we've got a very practical solution to AI and a lot of different things that they can use. But it's mostly in kind of conversation stage, I would say. So revenue is still early on it. But like Steve said, we've been building these products for a while. So we have tangible things to show and we don't have any competitive disadvantages.

Thanks. Just last question for me, just in regards to the M&A environment, can you comment on the environment, what you're seeing in terms of your pipeline? And then related to that, it's been a fairly longish time for you, at least since the acquisition of LifeSize at least was announced. What's sort of the disconnect perhaps between the environment and actually closing deals that you're seeing?

It took a lot of work with the life size. I guess my simple answer to that is stay tuned. We believe the acquisition environment is good for us. We're one of the few that have cash in the contact center. Most all the competitors, you can look up the public ones are way down in value. They don't make money and they don't have money unless investors give them more and they're reluctant to do so now. So the market's changed. and cash is king, and we're in a good spot. We have cash, we don't need anything from the market, and we've been watching the whole market space that we're in for a long time. So we're pretty confident on our acquisition strategy going forward, and we don't have any barriers to us doing our strategy.

And just one quick- Maybe just to add, you know, oh, sorry, Paul, just to add, you know, we have beefed up our acquisition team as well, So we've done that about six months ago. So that's a work in progress, which is increasing the activity level in M&A as well.

And just a quick follow-up, if you can give any hints, so to say, about the types of companies that you would consider here. Like you look at larger ones or you look at ones that are receivership, like life-size SaaS versus on-premise. How should we think about that?

Like we've been doing for a long time, anything that gives us a five to six times a six-year return, which generally means an IRR over 20%. We think there's lots of opportunities. We have a lot of cash, but we may need a lot of cash.

And we always look at companies typically ranging from five to 50-ish has been historical kind of size.

It doesn't mean, though, we can't do bigger. Again, as you saw, let's look a little bit at the marketplace, a little what we see. Avaya went into receivership. It's $2.5 billion. It was brought out, wrote off about $2 billion. And let's say they're back in the market, but I think struggling a little bit. A company called Verizon bought a competitor called Blue Jeans many years ago, paid about $500 million for it. They did about $100 million in revenue at the time. They've announced that they are going out of the business by the end of April, and you have to find other solutions. You have the life size, which we've talked about. You can go look at the public companies, even the ones that have pretty good product. They are challenged to making money. Some have money because they raised it at the right time when things were hot, and others don't have much money, so they're on a bit of a timeline to do something. So we see the market, and if you look at the competitors, we didn't talk about it, but if you look at the AMG side, you can just look around Toronto at Ativia. They used to be called Red Knee. They came out. You can see their stock, you can see their results, and you get some idea of what's happening in the marketplace. So it used to be it didn't matter if you made money and it didn't matter if you did revenue that didn't make money. Life has changed. We're back to what I would call more normal. And you've got to have cash flow. And if you don't, at least many investors on the call can decide their own thing. But I don't see them putting a lot of money in these companies anymore. You even got Zoom, very good company, went $500 down to, what, 70 or 80 now? Five, nine, good company with good product, went from over 200 to about 70. They're all, and if you look at the results, it's because they're not making money. They're growing okay. But I guess their strategy is grow to loss. The key is for their shareholders is just to grow. For our shareholders, we've always been looking more at the bottom line than the top line. And we want profitable revenue. And that means we give up some revenue. I'll also point out in acquisitions, people wonder, just add in the revenue. Some of the way we get the profitability is take out revenue that's not profitable. And that could be we increase prices and say, look, here's what it's going to be. And if you can't pay the price, you should find something else. We aren't in for just revenue. We're in cash flow and a profit-orientated company. And yes, that hurts our sales growth a little bit, but it seems to work okay. And the environment today, it's nice to have the cash. It's nice to have the growth and profitability, and it's nice to have the money to do acquisitions.

Thanks for those comments. I'll pass the line.

Thank you. And ladies and gentlemen, as a reminder, should you have a question, please press the star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. Your next question comes from the lineup. Daniel Chan from TD Cowan, your line is open.

Good morning. You mentioned that the life-size contribution was declining more than you expect, not more than you expect, but was going to climb because of the receivership. Just to help us calibrate how we're thinking about this, how much revenue did Lifesize contribute in the quarter, and what rate do you expect that to continue declining?

So two points. It was declining, but not more than we thought it should be. So that's one, because they had told their customers they had to go in the cloud, and they had to have SaaS-type model, and many of their on-prem then said, okay, well, we'll go somewhere else. because some wanted on-prem and some said, well, I'm going to go to cloud, I might as well look at other ones that are more mature than yours. So that's caused their problem. We're hoping that by letting them stay on-prem, that some of those customers that might have churned won't, but a lot have started already. I do think that the results in the quarter, you know, we don't give out exact numbers, but basically the revenue increase in the quarter is, from Q3 to Q4 is basically life size. So that gives you a sizing of the life size revenue. Without life size, we would have a slight decline, but much lower than in the past. And basically it's still because of video and you can look at all the video companies, et cetera. They're all declining a little bit, mostly because teams, Microsoft has really got into that space. So we still had a slight decline, in our, let's say, our revenue without life-size, and life-size revenue was what added to the quarterly revenue number. And I will say that there's still maybe some more churn coming there, but there's also more opportunities in that customer base now that we've sort of changed the scenario. We think some of the customers may buy more, but maybe, Vince, you can add a bit.

Yeah, Daniel, a few other points. One is... By offering choice and you get a customer that says, we'll take your cloud product, your private cloud product versus on-prem, what happens is you get less perpetual revenue, but you get more recurring. So you see our recurring revenue is growing because of that and less on-prem. So that's kind of one point. The other point is when we acquire a company like LifeSize, we also have a whole bunch of technology within EngHouse that we embed into their products. I mentioned this in the previous call, we have a suite of products called Inch House Source, and we also can bolster their products pretty quickly by just embedding our technology to improve theirs. And we also get technology from this company that can improve our other products. So within LifeSize, we got a workforce management piece of software that we never had in our portfolio. So we also get that to go and offer that to our customers.

There's a lot of moving parts, but it does help in different ways, as Vince has outlined. Sometimes it takes time to bolt the products into ours. One thing we don't do, we do not force customers to change.

That's helpful. Thanks for that. And maybe talking about the AMG segment, that was down quite a bit in constant currency year to year. Any color on what the drivers of that was?

I missed the first part of that question.

We didn't hear you there, sorry. Yeah, sorry about that. The AMG segment was down quite a bit in constant currency year to year. Just any color on that? Was it just due to the completion of some projects or was there anything else to call out?

No, I think what you'll find in the AMG group It's pretty steady. Everyone was hoping for 5G to improve things and keep them up. But the telcos have really cut back, worried about a recession. And the 5G is not as strong as they thought. So we find that they're managing their costs a little bit and not doing a lot of new business. investing or purchasing at this time. It's still going pretty well for us compared to others. But yes, it slowed down in the, I think the fear of recession could be coming is also causing him to hold back a little bit. But we have noticed some pullback in the telcos.

Okay, thanks. And AR collections were really strong this quarter. I think we seem to improve any color and what drove that improvement?

Hard work.

Yeah, yeah. We're just on it, Daniel. We're staying on the receivables very closely. Because of the recession, we don't want people stretching us, so we're over-indexing there, I would say.

Okay, sounds good. Okay, one last one for me. Thanks for all the color on the AI stuff, Vince. Gen AI is due to potentially replace call center representatives. What is NHELS doing to enable this? And do you think this will change the business model as customer experience?

For some reason, I'm not hearing. Daniel, I'm sorry. It's hard to hear. My apologies.

I couldn't hear you. Yeah, that's better now, I think. Yeah, just a question on Gen AI. You know, it's due to potentially replace call center representatives. Just wondering if you guys are doing anything there to help enable that and whether you think that transformation in the customer experience industry will change the business model for you guys.

I think we talked a little earlier. There's a lot of talk, but not much happening on that side other than we are doing projects that are leading there, but they're projects. I've compared it before to five years ago when everyone said, I'm going to sit in the back of a car and it's going to drive me around. So we're going to eliminate anyone driving cars. Haven't seen anyone doing that yet. And I don't think I'll see it in the future. We see the future really being in real life practical manner is AI helping us do things, but not eliminating things. So it makes new agents up to speed faster. They can use it to do things. We do not see that elimination. I've joked before saying probably the analysts on the call will be eliminated before that ever happens in contact center.

The conversations around using chatbots to answer simple questions, that's definitely occurring, which then frees up the agent to deal with more complicated interactions. There's not enough agents to handle all the activity out there in the world, but Like Steve said, we see it as a productivity enhancement. That's what we see in the market, looking for tools to make the agent better.

We don't believe in the immediate future you're going to have no agents and the computer is going to answer the question because usually you need an LLM, a large language model, and especially our accounts are smaller, so they don't have a big enough base of data. to answer it on their own, but they can provide information to somebody who can answer it. The cost of an agent doing that is not really high. The agents aren't the highest paid people in the world. So again, we're trying to use it to give better answers. It will get better over time, but right now you don't want to have a computer give a wrong answer to somebody and cause a bigger problem too. So we're in this space. We're doing practical solutions. But it's going to take a lot longer than the people who write about it, I'll call them visionaries, think it will. Just like I still don't see anyone sitting in the back of a car or parcels being delivered by a car with no driver. It takes longer. And we're there. We're in the space. We have someone whose total job is just to look at AI solutions for us. So, you know, we're doing that, but it's not happening anywhere yet. It's just a lot of nice discussion. And again, in some ways, I'll say it sarcastically, I think it's good for investment bankers to raise money for people on that vision, but importantly. in a company to make money doing it, other than the platform people, NVIDIA, Google, those guys, because they don't care if the company's using their services to lose money, but they have to have a large capacity to do AI. So they're all doing quite well. I don't think our customers, even just to convert and have a large database, a large base of data, It's not that large. You've got to be a bigger company. We sell generally to the middle-sized contact centers. So we do it as a hybrid model. Help them be more efficient, help them answer their questions, and help us answer their questions for them. But we don't have that same vision that, shall we say, some of the other visionaries have.

Thanks for passing by.

Thank you. And there are no further questions at this time. I would like to turn it back to Mr. Stephen Sandler for closing remarks.

Okay. Thank you, everyone, for attending the call and your continued support. Our objective remains to have profitable growth both internally and by a creative capital allocation. EngHouse is well positioned to execute its strategy in the current economic environment. Have a Merry Christmas and a happy holiday season.

Thank you, presenters. And ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.