7/16/2024

speaker
Laura Viita
Head of Investor Relations, WithSecure

Hello and welcome to VidSecure. This is our second quarter 2024 results release. My name is Laura Viita. I am responsible for the investor relations of VidSecure. Today we will have our CEO, who's no longer interim CEO, but the real CEO, Antti Koskela, and he will talk about the business highlights of the second quarter. He will also do a little bit of diving into our product launches and how we look at our Elements cloud software and services portfolio today. And that includes this little helper. After Antti, our CFO Tom Jaasson will go through the second quarter financials. After these two sets, we will take questions and answers. If you're watching us on the webcast today, please put in questions anytime. I will take them up at the end. Now with that, I'm handing over to the president and CEO of WitSecure, Antti Koskela.

speaker
Antti Koskela
President and CEO, WithSecure

So thank you, Laura, so much. I start first with the Sphere. So quarter two for us was a quarter of our Sphere event and the many product launches we did over there. So we had over 800 people here in Finland together with us, 600 plus customers. And we had the opportunity to meet many of our partners and customers, of course, during the event. We got really good feedback on our direction for becoming a European alternative for midsize companies together with our partners. I will go a little bit deeper into this when I talk about the portfolio. One of the things which I really enjoyed during the event was that we had nonstop queues to the demo booths. And so there was a good interest for everything we have made for our customers. And I'm happy to report we have first customer agreements for every single new product we launch. So we have deals for exposure. We have deals for identity security. We have deals for with secure manage detection and response. And one of these contracts was done right at the event when we did. So in a way, there's a positive vibe among us all post fear. And I'm also with this with Luminen here. And it's important to note what we did is that we embedded Luminen into our whole Elements cloud, and it's now activated to 200 plus customers. We believe it's key for customer retention as going forward. So when I look at then the results, so we grew Elements Cloud ARR growth 13%, and this was the fourth quarter of growth in ARR terms in a row. The following previous quarter ARR revenue landed a cloud revenue at 10% growth, and we were able to have a slight pickup on the Elements Cloud net revenue retention during the quarter. The elements company as a whole, the revenue grew 4%. This was driven slightly down by planned on-premise decline, but there was also decline in the non-recurring incident response projects. So that's important to notice. So Elements Cloud and Elements Cloud software is the growth driver in this business, and we are relatively pleased with the uptake now during Q2. Our managed services, i.e. the counter set, is slightly below last year level as the transition of the sales to mid-market is ongoing. And you know, managed services and the counter set is part of the cloud ARR as we calculated. So the two top regions for us this quarter were DAH, which is the German-speaking Europe, and then France. And UK and Japan were below previous year level. In UK, we are rebuilding the partner channel, as we have talked about. And in Japan, Tom will talk about it more. We were a little bit hit by the currency rate topics. So with secure elements, a proactive module are made for co-security. I start a little bit from the distance first. Why are we doing the things we do? So we have researched quite a bit the mid-market security needs. We even look at some of the World Economic Forum papers. And what can be said is that small to mid-sized companies are universally losing their digital confidence. And at the same time, attackers and the criminals are not losing confidence. They operate at an industrial fashion. And that's what we need to work towards. When we look at the large companies and what they have been doing at the same time. So cybersecurity has been developed for the large companies by the large manufacturers, and it has led to a quite human-centric view on the cybersecurity. The people do the work. So this is incrementally safer, absolutely, but it comes with a certain cost. as well. So we have looked that these midsize companies are left a little bit without affordable and meaningful choices for them. And that's what we need to work on. So we researched this as well in the past quarters, and we went out to 1,500 people in the cyber landscape. And the answers come in three categories. They talk about resiliency, they talk about trust and efficiency. And with those three things, we formed the basis for the new cyber playbook. And now when we look at what we actually released now at the event, so we start with resiliency. So with our extended detection and response, we introduce identity security. These small to mid-sized companies have a digital infrastructure today. They have a lot of SaaS and cloud assets, different identity systems. So it's important to have identity security and detect problems from there as well. So we cover cloud, we cover Entra, AD, and those kind of topics. Endpoint security includes here endpoint protection and detection and response. And that continues to be important. And we had a really good thing actually last Friday that made my day. So we had a prestigious AV test, advanced EDR test, and we got stellar results from that one. So we were able to capture every single method with our detection, with our elements EDR. So there was a press release made on that one by WizSecure. So really good work from our teams. And it speaks to the point is that we, We are not having a human centric view, that we are having a very AI and automation driven solution that solves your problems and the proof is there. So when we then look at the exposure management, that has been the key thing. Of course, that includes what we have capabilities from vulnerability and cloud protection, cloud posture management. But what is the problem we are really solving? So when you have a digital infrastructure that is open, and the open infrastructure is exposed in the internet. And you need to understand through the lenses of attacker how you might be attacked to. That's why we have attack path modeling in the exposure management. Then you are able to understand, secondly, what is the digital risk I'm having and what do I need to do about it? And that's the exposure score and remediation. And we believe that type of a preemptive mechanism to work on your IT hygiene is critical for multis midsize companies that they can restore their digital confidence. In the past, this may have been endpoint protection on firewalls, but in the open era, that's not the way to go. You need to do that together with extended detection. And the cool thing, this Luminen here, so many of you have used ChatGPT and know the co-pilots of the world, and they are separately priced and what have you. So we thought it's important to put generative AI as an integral part of our user experience so that this Luminen icon is inside the products when you use it. For instance, you see a long laundry list of events, you click, you get a summary of what's relevant, you get actionable insights, so that it just makes the workflow more efficient. And that's what the mid-market companies need. But then trust was the last one, what I had in my list. So when we look at the co-security services here, so many of our partners and end customers, they might not have the cybersecurity skills as a large enterprise might have. They don't have a teams of 30 to 50 people to run security operation centers. So we have a simple mechanism. So the single item you can elevate to us so that we can solve one by one. Then if you work eight to five with your service offer as a partner, we can co-monitor. And now we released managed detection and response. So we have been doing countercept for our direct customers. But what we do today, we have now managed detection available with Elements Cloud through our partners to all the mid-market customers. So that should increase our reach quite a bit. Then we have packaged incident response as a co-security service. we are introducing exposure management services as well as we move on. And the counter set here is the direct, the premium manage detection and response service we have. So hopefully this is the modeling we are going to use to describe our portfolio going forward, because it explains better what the customers are actually buying from us. So the summary is a data and AI driven solution. There are tools for exposure management, detection and response, and the services are packaged in a subscription model from one place, which is Elements. So hopefully you found this useful and a little bit describes what we do. So we made many introductions to these in Sphere. So summarizing, exposure management was launched, identity security was launched, managed detection and response was launched for Elements and Luminem as the digital AI assistant embedded into the experience. So it was quite a bit of things that we got it to the market. So hey, then moving on. So cloud protection for Salesforce, ARR growth 5%, revenue at the previously level, and NRR at 88. And last time when we spoke here, we talked about few large customers contributing to the NRR. what I'm not saying here, but I am having a positive, optimistic outlook on the cloud protection for Salesforce, the quarter-on-quarter performance, and the ARR growth was beating the levels we were thinking about internally. And we have had a good pipeline here, another good pipeline development continues, and we are working with the team to realize the potential of this one. So we are continuing the strategic review, and I know both from consulting and cloud protection, you would like to hear more details on that one. But I think for both of the businesses, we say the review continues and the focus is on increasing operative independence, which is naturally a part of the strategic review. So when we look at consulting then, so the revenue growth was 12% year on year and Nordics financial sector and large US accounts were performing well. And like I said, we continue the strategic review and we focus on increasing operative independence. And finally, I was appointed the CEO of Whitsecure 1st of July. I'm humbled and I'm excited to lead the next phase of WithSecure. With all the things we have launched with Sphere and the positive vibe we have in the company, I'm cautiously optimistic on what's ahead of us. And in this business, working close to customer and doing continuous innovation is the key. So thank you for my part and over to Tom.

speaker
Tom Jaasson
Chief Financial Officer, WithSecure

Thank you very much, Antti, and good afternoon for my part as well. So if we look at a little bit more detailed on our numbers, I said our Elements Cloud ARR grew 13%, and specifically software, we're doing well in the second quarter. The managed services stayed pretty much at last year's level at this point. From a geographical point of view, we continue to have strong performance in France and DAH. Japan also, on a local currency point of view, did quite well. But unfortunately, the yen development during the year and over the last 12 months has been quite significantly negative for them. So that, of course, impacts our euro numbers for Japan. And as I said, in the UK, there has been some churn with the larger countercept accounts as we have been discussing in the previous quarters and we are rebuilding that and of course have also targeting now the more the mid-size market for this and that is progressing quite well. As said we had slight improvement in our Elements Cloud NRR up to 103% this quarter. and then our on-premise revenue declined, as we have been planning and communicating also in our previous quarters. And as we also mentioned, this quarter two was, as expected, also a heavy-cost quarter for us with the Sphere investment, which is our largest and biggest marketing event that we do every year, and therefore also our adjusted EBITDA for Elements Company was then slightly negative. So that's about the elements company. Then if we look at the cloud protection for Salesforce, we had a good quarter with this business and we could show a good ARR growth year on year, even a better one quarter to quarter. So we are quite happy with the performance and we clearly can see a break in the trend in this quarter. And as also Antti mentioned, we have a pretty strong pipeline and we look quite favorably on this going forward. Net revenue retention here, as has been in the previous quarters, was really low, related to a few large customers that we have seen reducing the value in Q4 last year and Q1 this year. But other than that, we see very good retention with the customers, except for those. And we, of course, assume this will also improve going forward. Adjusted EBITDA, slightly negative. This was very much planned, but it is also, from a comparable point, have improved quite a bit. And of course, this last year's measure have also impacted cloud protection for Salesforce. Then cybersecurity consulting, we got pretty good growth in our revenue in second quarter. And specifically in the Nordics and financial sector and the US, we did quite well. We have also in the first half got quite a bit of new logos into this business. So we are quite happy about that. And so on. And we have a good level of backlog going into the second half of this year. Adjusted EBITDA here, slightly negative. We had some one-time payroll impacts on second quarter on this one. But other than that, we are, of course, working on the profitability all the time for this business. Then overall company grew 6% and then gross margin also improved. This is of course an item that we have discussed many times before and it's an item that we continuously work on to get more efficient with all our costs related to data and also delivery and so on. OPEX was down 3.9 million. Good to know that in our comparable numbers, we had some TSA income still from last year. And so the total OPEX reduction year on year is about 5.7 million. We had some additional adjustments in this quarter, which impacts the comparability as well. So we are on track to fulfill all the cost savings and measures that we implemented last year, still also in this quarter and going forward. Then the last slide outlook is unchanged. So we're expecting the AIR for Elements Cloud to grow 10 to 20% this year and the revenue for Elements Cloud products and services will grow between 10 and 16% and total revenue 6 to 12%. And we do expect the adjusted EBITDA on a full year basis to be positive. So with that, I would invite questions and answers and Laura, maybe you can come here next to us with the questions.

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