Bambuser AB (publ)

Good morning and welcome to Bambuser Q4 year-end 2023 report. I am Mariam Ghermani, the CEO, and I will hold this presentation together with CFO Jonas Lagerström. Our agenda includes a quick company introduction, an overview over our Q4 highlights, and a dive into our soft KPIs and financials. Thank you for joining us and let's begin. Bamboozer is at the forefront of video commerce industry. Our journey began in 2007, initially providing a groundbreaking video technology that actually allowed users to stream live video from their mobile devices. In late 2019, we made a strategic pivot into the world of live video shopping, a move that since then has drawn in more than 290 prominent brands spanning across 53 countries. Our global footprint now extends to key locations such as New York, London, Paris, Tokyo, Turku, Dubai, and our lovely headquarters in Stockholm. Looking at our ARR developments, since the beginning, we've been achieving strong ARR growth. However, we're now facing a tougher market with customers shown within our long-tail clients and also longer sales cycles among our enterprise clients. affecting our ARR growth rates. 2023 was a tough year for retail and e-commerce, and many brands saw a decline in sales. As we sell to a declining retail industry, we are affected by this decline in the market. Nevertheless, we saw growth among our top 20 enterprise clients with 3% year over year. We are the leading enterprise vendor on a global scale, And that is where we are sticky and where the clients have a long-term commitment to our platform. We remain very optimistic about our long-term ARR prospects, given the significant market opportunities ahead. To give you a better understanding of Bamboozer's value proposition, it is important for you to understand that the battle for the attention of the modern consumers is fierce and very competitive. The true scarce commodity of the near future will be human attention, as said by Satayana Della, the CEO of Microsoft. Consumer attention spans are shortening, going from 2.5 minutes in 2000 to 1.3 seconds as of today across both Gen Y and Gen Z. Looking at the digital ad spends where most retailers are spending their dollars today, over 600 US billion will be spent on digital advertising in 2024. But by simply spending more money, you will not win the consumer attention. To win, you must understand where consumers are spending their time today. Consumers are spending an average of six hours and nine minutes a day online across education, sorry, across gaming, social media and shopping. And the smartest brands are taking these moments of attention and turning them into memorable experience. And that's exactly what Bamboozer is doing for our clients. Taking these categories and transforming them into inspiration, education, purchase and retention. By embracing video commerce, brands will win a significant part of the e-commerce market that is estimated to be worth 8.5 trillion USD in GMB by 2030. We are proud to partner with some of the best brands in the world, including the LVMH Group, Hugo Boss, Net-a-Porter and Saks Fifth Avenue. Together, we're innovating commerce and reshaping old brick and mortar into new ways of working and interacting with their customers and communities. Now, please let me guide you through some of the key highlights from the fourth quarter. Among some of the wins this quarter was Borghese, Belkin and Auto Mercado. We also had successful expansions with Christian Dior, Fast Retailing and Electrolux to mention a few. Some of the key highlights within our platform was social selling. We launched a social selling feature to empower our clients to elevate their marketing and sales efforts by directly tapping into social media, starting with a seamless integration on Facebook. Now, businesses can effortlessly connect with their audience by sharing links that leads to specific product detail pages within the live chat on Facebook. This is not only enhancing convenience for both businesses and customers, but also drives a more personalized engagement. This marks a strategic move for us, signifying the dawn of a new era in customer interaction and online commerce. We're excited about the potential this holds for our future growth and the value it brings to our clients. In December 2023, we launched our first advisory board named the Frontrunners in Stockholm. This advisory program is designed to adopt collectively knowledge sharing, strengthen customer relationships, and consistently highlight successful partnerships. We believe that bringing together diverse perspectives, we can drive innovation and better serve our community. Looking ahead, we're excited to announce that the US launch of our advisory board is planned for Q2 this year, extending the reach and impact of this initiative. This move underscores Bamboozer's dedication to collaboration, innovation, and transparency within our community. Bamboozer launched its first end user conference called Bamboozer Beyond and offered attendees an immersive experience tapping into the evolution of e-commerce. We were honored to host speakers from esteemed organizations such as Google, Uxnet-A-Porter Group, DevoTeam, and Imperial College Business School. Throughout the event, these speakers discussed the transformative impact of technology in reshaping the shopping experience, providing very valuable insights into the future of commerce. Bambuser Beyond serves a dynamic platform for thought leaders to exchange perspectives and showcase advancements in an ever-changing landscape of online retail. As announced in December, we have successfully divested Relatable, aligning with our strategic overview initiated last quarter. The consideration price for this transaction is 22.3 million SEK, and there is a non-cash item cost of 85.5 million SEK associated with the transaction. This strategic move positioned us to focus our resources on continuing to building the global leading video commerce platform. I'm now leaving over to Jonas Blagerström, who will present the SaaS KPIs and financials.

Good morning. The AR was minus 21% year over year at constant exchange rates and minus 7% quarter over quarter. New business continued to be slow as a result of the shadowing market with longer sales cycles. Churn is not where we want to be. but it was reduced by 50% in second half of 2023 compared to the first half. Q4 saw a decrease in the number of customer groups compared with the previous quarter, which was a direct result due to sharing and slower new business bookings. We're also noticing a drop in AR per customer group, which is in line with our previous estimation

due to the transition into a usage-based pricing model.

If we look quickly at the regions, all regions faced negative ARR growth, and Americas had the most challenging quarter with both churn and downsell. Moving on to the net revenue retention, our top 20 accounts represent 38% of the total ARR. They witnessed NIR of 98%. The number was heavily impacted by one major US customer, and excluding for that customer, the NIR demonstrated 110%. Our group NIR was flat from last quarter, ending at 65%. The net sales were down 22% year-over-year for sauce. It's worth noting that for the full year of 2023, the net sauce sales was flat compared to 2022. The sauce gross margin saw a decrease of 3 percentage points year-over-year. The decline is due to the lower net sales that does not scale over the fixed cost of revenue. However, we expect the gross margin to increase as net sales return to growth. The gross margin for professional services, which is equivalent to adjusted EBITDA, was minus 1%. As of next quarter, we will no longer present the gross margin in these presentations for professional services, as it mainly represents the relatable business. We will continue to present the gross margin for the SaaS business. Our adjusted EBITDA is being stable but is naturally affected due to weaker net sales. It's important to have in mind that the corresponding period last year was positively affected by capitalized work for our own account. When we adjust for this item, the adjusted EBITDA improved by 2.3 million SEK year-over-year. To put the adjusted EBITDA figure in another light, it's worth noting that the underlying OPEC has improved by 60% year over year, representing a 40 million SIC on an annual run rate basis. This improvement is a combination of reduced cost for staff, office, and software. And finally, the free cash flow was minus 37.6 million SIC. If we adjust for the one-time costs associated with a relatable transaction, It was actually minus 32.1 million SEK. The cash flow had support this quarter from network and capital, as well as the divestment of relatable amounting to 12.5 million SEK. We end the year with a cash balance of 272.1 million SEK, which we consider is sufficient taking the company to positive cash flow. We have now reached the end of the presentation. And we are inviting you to our Q&A session. Thank you.

If you wish to ask a question, please dial pound key 5 on your telephone keypad to enter the queue. If you wish to withdraw your question, please dial pound key 6 on your telephone keypad. The next question comes from Nikola Kalinowski from ABG Sundal Collier. Please go ahead.

Thanks for the briefing, Mary and Jonas.

Just a few brief questions from my end. Firstly, you mentioned in your report that you've observed a surge in momentum and investment interest recently. What do you think has caused this surge and would you characterize it as maintainable rather than transitory or is it perhaps too early to say?

So, yes, that is mentioned. We do see a greater appetite to have discussions with us, with both existing customers, bigger customers scaling their initiatives within video commerce, but also interesting discussions with potentially new customers of bigger scale. But we want to underline that that does not necessarily mean that people translate into new bookings for the quarters. As we mentioned in another part of the report, we have quite long sales cycles, but we do see a quite big shift in the sort of descent to discuss how to utilize our platform.

I can just add some color to that also. I think that looking at this year, I mean, last year was a tough year for e-commerce and retail across, I would say, all regions. We're seeing some of our customers actually starting to see growth again. I think LVMH Group is a good example in Q1, seeing growth again. It's not double digits as it was during 20, back in the days, but it's still growth. So I think when our customer starts to go again and that's we see that within our customer groups and also customers that we would like to sign that are icvs there is a a bigger appetite to actually start investing in technology yep that's clear understood um and could you perhaps elaborate a little bit on where you have seen churn lately i think based on what you report it looks like there is some churn in the enterprise segment now but

Given your stricter interpretation of ARR, my understanding is that this could be due to a delay in signing of existing clients or re-signing of existing clients, to put it more precisely.

My question is, therefore, is it possible that the churn is overstated?

I would say that, I would say 2023, I think the worst churn is behind us. I think looking at the churn, I mean, the largest churn is still due to the long tail clients. I would say, if you look to absolute numbers, I mean, we, once again, as we've said before, these are clients that maybe we should have never onboarded. They are not ICPs to bamboo and it's quite, it's quite logical. So if you're a small player and you're going through a tough time in retail, Normally, they would then start to downsize the company. You don't have the organization and bandwidth to actually use our platform. So I think where we see large share and is within the long tail, not within the enterprise. I think within enterprise, we've had some sharing during 2023. It's mostly because of, I would say, strategic change or once again, redoing and laying off a lot of people so they don't also have the bandwidth. We see smaller, I'd say that is not the biggest churn risk for the enterprise clients. It's more like strategic shifts. But once again, looking at the churn numbers, I do think we have the worst behind us. And I think this year, of course, we will have some of the churn lagging into this year's ARR. But looking at this year, we feel confident that we can start growing again with the larger clients. And we're quite more strict in onboarding the smaller clients also into our platform. To your last question, I don't know if you want to answer that one, Jonas, if we have a... Sorry, Nicolai, can you please repeat the last question?

Oh, yes. So the first part was you have a stricter interpretation of ARRN.

you know therefore my understanding is that part of the churn could be due to a delay in resigning of existing clients um and so i was wondering whether that would perhaps cause the churn to be overstated i would not say it's um it's significantly overstated but i do recognize that um we are quite harsh to ourselves when we sort of present ar so there are definitely some elements there that could come back to the AR bridge. But I would not say that this quarter is different from any previous quarters in that specific sense.

Yeah, that's fair enough. And I hear you, Mary. It's obviously not easy to be a retailer in 2023, but I think there's room for improvement across the board everywhere in the retail sector. So let's hope for the best. Finally, I think Would you say that you're satisfied with your current cost base at this time, or is there more potentially to be done?

We have done some more sort of cost optimization this quarter, and we continue to do so. I think now it's more a matter of not necessarily that it sort of translates into actual cost saving. It's more like reallocation of cash. uh where we have a much sort of you know much stricter um way of where we put the money um so i would say that it's you will see some shift perhaps around the different functions but it can also be across different um um cost items um so we do expect that there will be um more investment in certain parts of the platform and we will sort of not invest perhaps as much in other parts of the business. So the answer is we are satisfied, but we have not reached the end goal. We think that we still have things to do on the cost base for 2024.

Very clear. Thank you very much. That's all for me. Thank you.

There are no more questions at this time, so I hand the conference back to the speakers for any written questions and closing comments.

I think there were no more questions in the chat. So thank you for joining us for this presentation, and I wish you all a lovely day. Thank you.