Livechat Software Sa

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and I would like to welcome you to Tech's earnings conference call to discuss the 2023 annual, as well as April to June 24-25 results. At this time, all participant lines are on listen-only mode. The format of the call today will be a presentation by the investor relations team, followed by a question and answer session. So without further ado, I would now like to pass the line to Uti Akaseya. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us today for our webinar. I'm pleased to present our financial results for the fiscal year first. Then I will be presenting key performance indicators for Q1 of the new financial year. And then later on, I will shed some light on additional information on products in our company. Once I will finish the presentation, there will be a Q&A session, so we will be happy to answer any questions that you might have. For the financial results, our total revenue for the year was £335.3 million. reflecting a 13.4% growth when adjusted for changes in our revenue recognition policy during the year. Then EBITDA reached 198.5 million Polish zloty and that is a year-over-year increase of 9.2%. You can also see here that the net operating profit was 179 million which is an increase by 7.1%. And that led us to net profits, which stood at a very round number of 166.6 million, which is more than 10 million higher than the adjusted profit for the previous year. This data, we present them, we compare them to the revised numbers for the previous year, because as you are aware, we have changed within the year the revenue recognition policy, and that is we now attribute the revenues to exactly to the periods for which they are paid for. Sorry. When it comes to the fourth quarter, we recorded a revenue of 83.3 million and that is a minus 1.4% as compared to revised Q4 of 2022-23. This number was negatively affected by 3 million Polish lots of revaluation of deferred revenues. This number actually fluctuates quite significantly between the quarters. However, if you think about the annual net effect of those fluctuations in 2023-24, it was actually 3.8 Polish million zloty. Our EBITDA for Q4 was 46 million Polish zloty and EBIT, as you can see, 40.9% million zloty, which is minus 15.7%. as compared with the quarter a year ago. Actually, this is the effect of higher costs that occurred during Q4. This is due to at least three reasons. First of all, this quarter we had much higher payouts to the partners in the partner program. as part of the revenue sharing. This number for the quarter was the highest in the whole of 2023-24. And actually it was 35% higher than a year ago and almost 50% higher than in the previous quarter. So it actually adds almost 2 million to the cost of the quarter. Then we also had a higher cost of infrastructure and servers. That is an additional 1 million cost. And this is actually because we are investing our infrastructure and this change actually will stay with us into the next quarters as well. And the last thing that was more of a one-off cost in that quarter with the recognition of the bonus that will be paid out to the management board next quarter, but because we already know the value of it, it was recognized this quarter. So that means that actually in the quarter we have both recognized a paid out bonus once and then also the one that will be paid in the next quarter. All that brings us to net profit of 38 million zlotys. And now I will go into the future revenue. So actually with the change of the revenue recognition policy, we now show the annual subscriptions divided per particular month so only a part of the paid annual subscription is recognized in per quarter and what is over the period reported we recognize that as revenues of the future periods. And actually this number increases both if you think of the numbers in US dollars and also in Polish zloty. However, the change recalculation of these numbers at the end of the quarter actually create a non-cash revenue that is translated into profit and loss account and causes fluctuations to revenues on our side. Then it is nice to show here again and again that the earnings per share are growing. So we have earnings per share of 6.63%. police law to per share. And again, here we compare this number with the revised with adjusted numbers for 2022-23 to provide the actual comparison. When we talk about revenues and the whole annual data, it is nice to have a look at the revenues by geographies. There are important things that can be seen on this graph. First of all, the most important market for us is the United States, which is now generating 31% of the revenues. Then we have also other English-speaking countries, UK, Australia, Canada. And those markets, the US market is actually our focus. So when we create the products, when we think of additions to the product, we talk with our American customers But also, we have customers from other places. And for the first time, you can see an Asian country, which has a share in revenues over 5%, which is Indonesia. And this is something that has been growing for a good few quarters now. So Asia is slightly over 25% of our revenues. However, there are important distinctions between the users, our target American clients and also the Asian clients. So the U.S. clients on whom we want to focus are much more loyal and they stay much longer with us. Whereas the Asian countries, the customers from this region, they are actually much quicker also in terms of the communication. So the messages they share, the way they interact are very quick messages, but a lot of them. So in our case, it means that the service usage, for example, for this type of the customers is higher. And then Poland, where we are based, is actually, Now quite stable 1.4% in the revenues, but it's quite surprisingly only top 15 countries, whereas a year ago it was top 10. We continue to generate good cash and we managed to generate 84.8 million of cash at the end of the period. Whereas among the financial activities that require paying out the cash are the dividends, both the annual dividends and also interim dividends that we pay out throughout the year. Together with the annual results, we at the company, but more importantly, the management board, decided to propose, and this proposal was accepted by the supervisory board, to pay out 5.98 polis lot per share as a dividend. And it means that we will be paying out 153.9 million out of our profits in form of a dividend. Of course, that has to be approved by the annual general meeting. Now we go more into division between the products in terms of the revenue. So the live chat product is still the most important one for us in terms of the revenues. It has shown good growth in terms of the annual growth, which was 22%. Not so much of the last quarter, which was just 8% increase. The other two products, Chatbot and Helpdesk, are enjoying much higher growth rates. And year on year, they become more important, which you can see on the next slide. where we present the revenue split of the products. So live chat still dominates 91.1% of the revenues, but chatbot has 6.5%. And how this is each quarter, It is adding revenues currently 2.1 and as the products have knowledge base and how this will be together in the future, that is already 2.4% together. As a little summary of this section, the most important things are in terms of the annual results, the total revenue, which was 335.3 million. That was a growth of 13.4%. Of course, adjusting for the revenue recognition policy changes. EBITDA and net operating profit enjoyed one digit growth respectively 9.2% in terms of EBITDA and 7.2% in terms of net operating profit and that led us to a net profit of 166.6 million for the entire year. The margins, although they are still at the very high levels, well above 60%, they were impacted by the higher costs and also by the change in the revenue recognition policy this year. Q4, we finished with 83.3 million in terms of the revenues, but that was negatively affected by this revaluation of deferred revenues. If we didn't have that, the revenues for that period would have been higher. And the EBITDA and EBIT numbers in the quarter were affected by higher costs of the success fees paid to partner program then a higher cost of external services that is mainly service and infrastructure and also a provision for the bonus of the of the management board having said that now we fast forward to the current quarter so we we almost what three days ago we finished our q1 um And we can also now discuss more recent data, which I think is something that interests everyone even more than the annual results, than the financial results. So first of all, we start with MRR for all of the products. In June, at the end of June 2024, that was 7 million 0.07, which is an increase both in terms of the quarter and year-on-year increase. It was the result of the changes in the product. And we... We enjoyed the growth of MRR. Also, in terms of the payments received, this quarter was a very, very, I can even say a record quarter for the payments. So at the company's level, we had 22.62 million US dollars paid in the quarter. And now we can discuss exactly the DECA API. So what is actually behind the numbers, both MRR and cash flows. So I will discuss the number of customers and our pool per each product. First of all, we start with live chat. Live chat, we ended the quarter with 37,523 live chat clients. And if you compare it to the last quarter, it's actually a negative of 321 clients. partly because of the churn that we have within the product, but also it is a result of our own change in the definition of the customer. So we deducted almost 200 clients from the number of customers, and that is because we changed the definition. So previously it was just for the customers who were paying for the product, but we added also a condition that they have to have an active access to the application. So what it means is that it, for example, excludes the customers who are on annual subscriptions but already stopped using the product. Within the quarter, we also very actively optimized price lists. So some of the customers were moved from the remaining customers from paper seat to paper agent model, and that added to increased churn. So not only the tough market that we see for small and medium-sized customers, but also small and medium-sized companies, but also this was an additional factor for the churn in the product. If you look at ARPU and initial ARPU of LifeChat, you can see that quite a lot of things happened within the quarter. First of all, you can see that right at the beginning of 2024, we started those price optimizations and we continued them throughout the year. So in the last quarter, This translated into increase of ARPU to 170.1 US dollars, not Polish zloty, as from the presentation, at the end of June. The major change was done in May. So you can see that the numbers for June are already much flatter. And also one thing that has changed and quite important one is that we added one AI plus paid features for the new customers starting in June. So it is another factor that improves our pool of live chats. Then we have our second product, Chatbot. From the graph, you can see that the number of customers of Chatbot is actually flat. If you compare the numbers, it's plus two customers quarter on quarter. However, again here we changed the definition of the paying customer and by mistake we had been adding non-profit organizations to the chatbot numbers and we excluded 70 of those between March and April. So actually, when you look at these numbers, June is the third consecutive month of growth of new customers for chatbots, which is for us a positive sign for chatbots. Also, you can see that chatbot ARPU increased as well. So partly that is because of excluding those customers that were not supposed to be there. But even if you exclude that effect, Chatbot's ARPU has increased and at the end of the quarter it is 146.2 US dollars. We also added here a new slide that explains quite a bit about Chatbot and the way we get the revenues from Chatbot because Part of that is subscription, which is taken into account when we calculate monthly recurring revenues. But also there is additional parts, so additional chats that are paid by the customers once they exceed the number of chats that they have within the subscription plan. And we do not include this additional chat in MRR. of chatbot and not even in ARPU. But here on this graph, you see that if we were to add those additional payments for interactions to normal ARPU, the combined number for chatbot would be 198.6 US dollars at the end of June 2024. So this component of additional chats actually increases quite a lot, also because of the fact that we have changed the pricing starting in March. For existing customers, the price for additional chats is one US dollar cent per additional chat, which is above the plan. And for the customers that started to be our customers in March, that cost is 3 cents per chat. And the last product that I will discuss in this section is Helpdesk. Actually, we added 32 customers net in the quarter. So at the end of June, it is almost 1,200 paying customers for Helpdesk product. In the following quarters, we will be combining the product with knowledge base and so there will be a combined offer of those. But Helpdesk actually is enjoying a very good growth, partly because it is... introduced into new channels of acquisition of customers. So, for example, we added a web flow within the quarter. There is a plan to add Shopify integration by the end of the next quarter. And also, we are able to gain much higher in terms of the size customers. And you can see that on the ARPU graph. both we are able to expand within the existing customers. And additionally, in June, Helpdesk was, we added a new subscription plan, business, so a higher plan for Helpdesk, which makes bigger customers to go on a higher plan. So it's another factor that adds up to our pool. That's the end for the summary of the KPIs. However, I would also like to discuss a little bit about the events that took place in Q1. So I will discuss a couple of things, mainly about the product. The first one is Open Widget, which you know already for a good couple of quarters. But we started to gain traction in terms of Open Widget. So currently we have over 1,000 customers. it started to become a source of growth for LifeChat because we started to see the first migrations from Open Widget, which is a free product, organized in such way. Already through integration between the two products, we have some live chat paying customers. And then the second thing we have shown on our website, on techs.com, product roadmap for our, mainly for our customers to see where we are going with the products and what they can expect in the future. First of all, it very much underlines our focus on automation and ensuite of the product, so unification of all the products that we have, the widgets, and the way the customer will be navigating within the product. We have set a list of quite ambitious goals to fulfill and to release the integrations and some features or some changes to the product by September 2024. And this is something which is a live-in roadmap. So there will be changes on this website. And it is available publicly. So if you want to have a look, you can use that link. Then the next thing in terms of the product is actually how we started to use to monetize AI. So as you know, we have two ways of AI in the product. We have in chatbots. We have our own LLM model on which the chatbot is based. And then for other products, we have features which are based on OpenAI currently. And we pay the bills for that per usage. We, within the last couple of months, we tried to show more and the features of AI to our customers. And currently, at the beginning of June, we also started to monetize it. So now all the customers who start live chat, they are presented with the features which are based on AI. And they can buy those features additionally to their subscription in live chat. So this will be a way of, first of all, covering the cost for AI usage in the product. We are after, effectively, after two weeks of sales. So we... already have some customers paying for that. However, because it's just a very short period of time, we do not want to give out the numbers because those might change. We need a little bit more traction. However, we can provide you with the numbers for another thing that we launched since Q1, 2024, five. So we are happy as a service. We have communicated throughout the first quarter of 2024 to our customers, to developers that our API will become a premium product and that the use of the product will have to be paid if the products are not presented in our marketplace. So, for example, if the customers or some third parties create products on top of API and they put up those end products on our marketplace, the usage of API is for free. However, if they create a product on top of our API, they will have to pay for the usage. And actually, this monetization started in Q1 of the current financial year. And after the first quarter, we estimate... that the revenues that we get from the stores are above 50,000 US dollars. And there is quite a potential growth for a tax platform into the future. With this slide, I'm going to sum up the latest numbers for Q1. So most importantly, MRR grew by 6.2% if compared to the previous quarter, and that is almost a 10% year-on-year growth. We had a record high value of payments received, which were 22.62 million US dollars. That's an increase of 12.2%. Within the quarter, we were able to give a boost to ARPU of all products. However, still, the increased churn undermines live chat number of customers. In terms of the product, there is a lot of things happening. In live chat, we are still optimizing price list. However, the developments will not be as dynamic as they used to be in the quarter that has finished. They will be continued on a smaller scale into the future. We have a public roadmap for the product development, including we added effectively new products, One AI Plus, which is a paid feature for new live chat users. Chatbot, sorry, Open Widget is enjoying a growth currently and also is a source for live chat customers. And the last but not least, something that quite a lot of people were waiting for, we started to use API as a service and that already generated revenues of 50,000 US dollars in this quarter. And with that slide, I'm going to finish the presentation, which already is quite long, and we will be happy to take your questions.

Thank you. Thank you very much for the presentation. We'll now be moving to the Q&A part of the call. If you are dialed in via the telephone, please press star 2 on your keypad. That's star 2 on your keypad for any voice questions. If you are dialed in via the web, you may ask a question on the webcast. So that's once again, star two for any voice questions and any text questions on the webcast. Okay, it looks like we have no questions on the voice lines. I'll pass the line to Wozniak and Marcin to continue answering the text questions.

So we have some text questions. Thank you very much. And the first is from Private Investor Ben. Do you have the net MRR churn by the individual product, LiveChat, Chatbot, Helpdesk?

We do not provide those data individually per product. However, so far we have been quite consistent in saying that Helpdesk is definitely enjoying retention over 100%.

Which means negative net MRAP churn. Exactly. At the same time, I think if you look at the data, this data is very representative and repetitive. And now if you look at especially live chat, when now actually when you look at that, that net MRAP churn, in some months looks great, looks absolutely fantastic. It's a negative territory, but that's not representative because that's the effect of the optimization we are talking about. So unfortunately, it's not something, not the real picture of that product. So probably we have to wait when we finish the optimization and then we will see how it will look like, how it's working on that level.

Then we have a series of questions from Ben, another private investor. So I will start reading them one by one. The first one is, is text partnering with value-added resellers and system integrators in North America to better target the mid-market clients? If no, what is the strategy to target larger customers versus the current majority SMB base?

Maybe I will take this one. Yes, sure. Yes, that's something we're trying to do. I mean, part of our partner program is solution partners We have reseller program. So yes, we're trying to do so. If you know some company we should approach, some possible partners, we are very open to meet. So we'll be happy to invite anyone on that. But yes, we have partners like that and we really would like to see to expand this program and get more of this kind of partners.

Then we have a question. Are there any plans for techs to focus on certain industry verticals? and maybe together with the next one for the healthiest product, are there plans to target IT and HR departments or the current strategy is to focus on customer support functions? I'm going to take that one. And actually our focus is first of all on customer support functions in terms of all of the products. In terms of the industry verticals, We have some industries which are much more represented than the others. And those include, for example, especially e-commerce, retail. But also we have good representation from financial services, IT services, gaming and gambling as well. Then healthcare services. but also education. On top of that, we also have customers from many other sectors. Currently, we are not doing any targeted marketing on certain industry verticals. However, we provide from time to time, especially with, for example, case studies that we present to the potential customers, we tend to cover some of the industries.

Yes, we have some landing page dedicated to some industries. Sometimes we are launching some campaigns, but probably nothing really very extensive but I think the beauty of the live chat especially like all of our products is that really we have customers from every industry even some not really intuitive I would say but at the same time we're working on some adding some use cases so for example one thing we are working on is to make live chat more suitable, more effective for marketing purposes, for example. So that would be an example. So maybe not some industry, but I would say to expand, to add more features which can be useful, for example, for marketing teams. Marketing teams.

Then we have a question on how much is the current revenue for API as a service? Pricing for API as a service is usage-based and not seed-based and will not have MRR. That's exactly true. So it is per usage. Also, if you look at the website, the developers, there is some free amount of usage that you can have, and only if you exceed that, you have to pay for the usage. And the last one, as mentioned in the last quarter, so in Q1 2004-05, the revenue that we got was slightly above 50,000 US dollars. And the last question from Ben is about text labs, so our incubator. Are there any projects currently revenue generating? So we have three projects that are on our marketplace that they are sold to text customers.

Actually, when you look at the text.com and tell us about labs, Actually, it's more than that. For example, we include insights among this product. So absolutely, this is generating revenue. Sorry for this interruption because I really wanted to mention insights, which if you look at the website, it's included in the labs. But also, honestly, at this moment, not like, you know, some huge thing.

And then we also have another question from Romana Hoffman, an individual investor. Can you elaborate a bit further? What are the reasons of churn for live chat? Since SaaS businesses need to optimize their NRR, churn is a tremendous factor in this equation. Thanks.

So huge, huge topic, of course, a reason of the churn. We definitely are going deep. We're trying to really understand churn, what is happening, why customers are leaving. And we have two types of churn, really.

So-called... Voluntary and non-voluntary.

Exactly. Thank you. Yes, so actually in voluntary churn, well, let's start with voluntary churn. The voluntary churn is the situation where the customer is making a decision that he's going to quit, stop using our product. And involuntary churn is that situation when usually the payment is not proceeded properly. So actually it's on our side to stop giving access. And the main reason for involuntary churn would be like not sufficient funds on the card, transaction fails and so on and so on. And the voluntary churn much more interesting Actually, the good thing about this churn is that we can go to the customer and ask him why he made that decision. The biggest reason for the customer churn, for this voluntary churn, is lack of chats. Also, actually, yes, we have some small customers who are trying LiveChat, but they don't have really a lot of visitors on their website, so they're not chatting a lot. And if you're not chatting, you don't want to pay for LiveChat because you can see no benefits here. With some exemptions, with some notable exemptions, one of such exemptions can be real estate industry. because in the real estate you don't need a lot of charts. One chart monthly which will translate into some transaction will be enough to justify paying like $50 a month for that tool. But that's the main reason it's very difficult to do something about this churn. The next important part of the churn is business so actually we have a lot of returning customers each month because a lot of them are using live chat on seasonal basis or for some project like conference something like that we include that number in the chat you know we are very harsh to ourselves doing so but yes that's how we look at that now where the change is actually is that we can see a lot of customers who are stating that they are quitting because they actually they are closing businesses they have some problems they are changing profile of their businesses and now we have much more customers who are quit churning and claiming that's the reason versus some a few quarters ago. So that's a huge change. And of course, that's not a good thing, really, to see that situation. And of course, we track different reasons. Competition is like very small thing. Of course, maybe not all customers like to admit, but that's something we actually can track. So we can check if the current customer is choosing another solution. And actually, that's a very bad situation. I mean, just a few customers really choosing other solutions and especially other premium solutions. instead of live chat. Of course, the next probably the last reasons we discuss is the price. So usually the price is not a huge thing. When we change pricing, of course, that became a thing that actually the chain when customer declared that he quit live chat because that was too expensive, gone back to the previous level. And now we have more customers who are quitting because of the price, because of the optimization we're doing. For some customers, for different reasons, live chat became more expensive than it used to be.

Now we have a question from Eric Altman from Addington. Are there ambitions to monetize open widgets in the future or will it be used as a funnel to increase the number of users in other products? So initially, our plan was for it to be free of charge. And the thinking was that it will be able to provide the potential live chat customers in the future. And it took a little bit longer. So now we are gaining traction. And as we have mentioned, we have first customers who are paying for live chat products and they started with open widgets. And into the future, that open widget might get its paid version. But currently, in the closest future, we have no such plans.

And the next question from Jacek Gurmantovic, private investor. What is the total revenue beside the MRR? I understand that is AP plus chatbot interaction, anything else. with the one AI plus will be counted as ARR. So, yes, the one AI will be included in MRR and as the effect in ARR. Yes, that's recurring revenue. And yes, you're right. The biggest single position would now, that would be additional interaction from chatbots. that would be biggest position. And Appy would be the next. What else? Marketplace. Some services, that's small, but there are some services for the enterprise customers. Is there something else? All right. That's it, that's it. If we, if actually, if we would like to include that position into MRR, that would be like addition of some $300,000 on MRR monthly. So something like that at the moment. Am I right?

Mm-hmm.

It looks like we have managed to answer all the questions that there were on the chat. If there are still any questions, please ask them. There's also a possibility to ask them via phone. If not, we thank you very much for... for the questions that you had. And the recording of the presentation together with the transcript will be on the website. But we still have one question.

Yes. Giacomo Borgo, private investor. Are you expecting further margin erosion from server cost in the upcoming quarter? Yes. I think that's a good question. Server and infrastructure costs will be growing because we are growing. We are spending more not only because we are growing and we want to grow and we're going to use more of this infrastructure, but also for the quality reasons. We definitely also want to... We think that we are leaders in terms of the quality, but we want to uphold that position. Also, AI usage is on the rise and definitely something we'll expect. That's also something which generates cost. So, yes, that's correct. That cost definitely don't think that there is no chance to reduce that cost. We don't want to do that. But now, speaking about margin, we definitely can see that there is room to improve, especially if you compare that margins to really bad Q4. I mean, the Q4 was impacted by a lot of unfortunate events actually. So yes, definitely we'd like to see higher margins. There is a chance for that. Currency would be very important. in that perspective because the cost are split like 50-50 between zloty and dollars but the hard revenue is generated in dollars so stronger dollars should help weaker dollars will also impact margins negatively but we definitely would like to see at least slightly better margins start, you know, having Q4. Yeah.

We have just got a question. Can you tell a bit about the idea of integration with Shopify? Anything you are looking specifically from this integration? Thanks. Can you tell a bit more about... Okay, that is again the same question. We are not only integrated with Shopify, but also with some other e-commerce platforms. with BigCommerce, with Square, Squarespace, what else? Square Online. Exactly. And basically, our integration is in their marketplace. And whenever the client thinks when they have a specific product, when they want to add also live chats, we want to have this integration with our product ready on the market so that it is very easy to get this solution.

It works for LifeCats also. We definitely would like to do the same with Helpdesk.

Exactly.

All right, with that question, I think we've finished the Q&A session. Now, once again, thank you very much for your attendance and for the questions. And we will speak to you in three months' time.

Thank you. But meanwhile, please, text us if you have any questions via email or live chat. Thank you very much. Have a great day.

Thank you very much. This concludes today's conference call. We'll now be closing all the lines. Thank you and goodbye.