Kinaxis Inc.

Good morning, and welcome to the Kinaxis Incorporated Fiscal 2024 Fourth Quarter Results Conference Call. Currently, all participants are in a listen on demand. Following the presentation, we will conduct a question and answer session. Instructions will be provided at the time for you to queue up for questions. I'd like to remind everyone that this call is being recorded today, Thursday, February 27, 2025. I will now turn the call over to Rick Woodsworth, Vice President of Investor Relations at Kinaxis Incorporated. Please go ahead, Mr. Woodsworth.

Thanks, Operator. Good morning and welcome to the Kinaxis Earnings Call. Today, we will be discussing our fourth quarter and year-end results, which we issued after close of markets yesterday. With me on the call are Bob Courteau, Interim CEO and Chair, and Blaine Fitzgerald, our Chief Financial Officer. Some of the information discussed on this call is based on information as of today, February 27, 2025, and contains forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially from those set forth in such statements. For a discussion of these risks and uncertainties, you should review the forward-looking statements disclosure in the earnings press release, as well as our CDAR filing. During this call, we will discuss IFRS results and non-IFRS financial measures, including adjusted EBITDA, a reconciliation between adjusted EBITDA, and the corresponding IFRS result is available in our earnings press release and MD&A, both of which can be found on the IR section of our website, canaxis.com, and on CDAR+. The webcast is live and being recorded for playback purposes. An archive of the webcast will be made available on the IR section of our website. Neither this call nor the webcast may be re-recorded or otherwise reproduced or distributed without prior written permission from Synactus. To begin our call, Bob will discuss the highlights of our quarter and year and recent business developments, followed by Blaine, who will review our financial results and outlook, and open the line for questions. We have a presentation to accompany today's call, which can be downloaded from the Investor Relations homepage of our website. We'll let you know when to change slides. Before I turn the call over to Bob, I want to remind you that our user event, Connections, will take place from March 31 to April 2 in Austin, Texas. The first day is for user training, but the full agendas on the first and second are open to investors. You can review the event details at connections.com, and if you're interested in joining us, please reach out to me directly at rwadsworth at connexus.com before registering as we add capacity limitations. Over to you, Bob.

Good morning and thank you for joining us today. We really appreciate it. I'm pleased with Q4 results and would highlight three key items. First, our performance will outstand all guidance elements for the year, including SAS revenue growth, total revenue, and adjusted EBITDA margin. Second, and most exciting for us by far, was the record incremental ARR added in the quarter, though foreign exchange adjustments to the ARR balance at the end of the period masked some of that performance, as Blaine will discuss. I see the strong sales performance in Q4 as one reflection of our elevated go-to-market team and approach. I'm confident that we are much better positioned to take full advantage of whatever conditions and opportunities present themselves ahead. Longer term, the ongoing uncertainties facing supply chains will also continue to shine a light on Kinaxis and the incredible value that we offer. And third, we're also very pleased with our 25% adjusted EBITDA margin in Q4 and our near 20% trailing 12 months free cash flow margin. both of which continue to reflect our rapidly improving profitability. The results also demonstrate our clear path to consistently achieve a full year normalized adjusted EBITDA margin of 25%, starting no later than 2026, as we've communicated. We matched our record for new customers in a quarter and set a new record for full year. We're thrilled to have won some large enterprise accounts in Q4. Together, large enterprise and enterprise companies were the biggest contributors of new customer wins in the quarter. As always, we're fortunate that we can identify a sample of our new customers. It's a privilege to have the strongest references in our space with some of the best supply chain companies in the world. I'll let you research some of the names on the slide, but the flexibility of Maestro to address a diverse set of supply chains is obvious from this group. For example, we're helping orchestrate the supply chains for global leaders like Bell Group. Headquartered in France, they make the iconic baby bell and lapping cow cheeses. Toso Corporation out of Japan which supplies the plastic resins and an array of the basic chemicals that support modern life. Opela, also based in France, which is partially owned by Sanofi and focuses on consumer self-care with well-known over-the-counter brands like Allegra and Docallax. Finally, we also won one of the largest life sciences companies, and we hope to be able to share their identity with you in the time ahead. For 2023, we spoke about a 60% plus win rate against our core competitors, and I'm thrilled to have repeated that strong performance in 2024. Our bar channel also continued to gain momentum by adding several smaller customers, and bookings for this year from this group grew over 100%. In addition to success winning new customers, over half of our gross additions to the AR balance in Q4 came from existing customers. We have a significant expansion opportunity ahead that remains in early days thanks to the near doubling of the customer base over the last three years and exciting new product launches. Our success remains anchored in our product leadership and we are thrilled to receive further validation from independent industry observers. Canaxis was named the leader in three IDC MarketScape reports published in the fourth quarter covering supply chain planning overall, supply chain planning for life sciences industries, and supply chain planning for discrete manufacturing industries. Together, the reports highlighted important Canaxis differentiators, including statements around how our concurrency approach supports responsiveness and agility. How Canaxis has an incredibly deep understanding of AI solutions in the supply chain space and our use of integration. In 2024, we launched the Maestro platform and we continue to build out its capabilities, including enhanced and new AI techniques. Our next phase, ready in Q2 2025, makes integrating with Maestro more standardized, faster and more capable as connections to ERP systems and our solution extension partners are handled through our new supply chain data fabric. A key part of supply chain orchestration involves connecting to as many relevant supply chain data sources as possible to improve decision making. So this, for us, is an important step. Over 200 customers have already used our GenAI enabled Maestro chat capabilities to simplify user help, which is bundled into the base functionality. In the second half of 2025, For the first time, users will be able to chat with their own data to save users significant time and, importantly, to democratize access to important supply chain information, significantly enhancing Maestro's value overall. They'll be able to ask important questions like, which components of my supply plan are more than two weeks late? And to follow up, are there any gating items creating the late supply? This and future AI enhancements will be revenue generating as they are released and will be an uplift to the 2026 opportunity. As a follow on, we'll subsequently launch our agentic AI framework, which will enable us to deliver use cases that take action either when asked by users or on behalf of them where processes can benefit from greater automation. Referring back to the example on light supply, a planner could instruct Maestro, please transfer inventory to resolve the gating component responsible for the light parts at our Ohio site. Future phases will see AI help users create critical Maestro resources at implementation or later, improving on our already best in market time to value, and see AI permeated through the platform for increasingly powerful interactions. Our existing predictive AI capabilities continue to quickly gain traction as well. For example, we have triple the count of supply.ai customers from the beginning of 2024. and we continue to see a strong pipeline ahead. We believe Maestro has a two to three year product advantage in supply chain orchestration. So overall, I'm very pleased with the progress we've made through 2024. We reorganized the company to improve profitability and we allocate resources to the highest priority areas. You've seen the impact on our results. Our adjusted EBITDA margin grew from 18% in 2023 to 22% in 2024, and the trend will continue. We did a full review on operational and strategic priorities that confirmed our opportunity, as well as key elements of our well-established plan. Based on that work, we took action to improve in certain key areas, particularly in go-to-market activities. For example, we refocused on our core manufacturing verticals and we'll press our leadership advantage on these markets. There are still thousands of new customers to be won there. Mark Morgan, our new Chief Commercial Officer, has then enhanced our go-to-market model and add key regional and country leaders to the talent in our sales teams. For example, Mark has added a strategic account tier to our team and ensured coordination across the company to make sure that the largest opportunities are getting the appropriate attention. He's also refocused the goals of our install-based team to more effectively address the sizeable expansion opportunity represented by our rapidly growing customer base and product set. Mark has also created a more established and mature methodology around opportunity qualification, account planning, and forecasting. As a company, we have significantly expanded our investment and mindshare with key go-to-market and implementation partners. such as through recent deals with Accenture, NTT Data, and soon with Infor. We'll announce details later this quarter. The result of our enhanced partnerships will be better market coverage, expanded delivery capacity, and better client outcomes. As we steadily move towards public cloud, our partnerships with Google and Microsoft enhance our delivery flexibility and increased the visibility of Maestro in the supply chain space. Look, we remain full speed ahead on our search for Kinaxis next CEO. In the meantime, we're so pleased to be executing well with a very experienced and collaborative team. The fourth quarter gave you a taste of what all these improvements combined can mean to Kinaxis The strong finish to 2024 solidifies our outlook for 2025. Looking ahead, we're focused on ARR growth, further progress towards our mid-term normalized annual adjusted even target of 25%, and the return to consistent Rule of 40 performance. We have lots of growth opportunities ahead. We're better organized. However, We also recognize the challenges that our customers face in this new era of global trade. With that said, I'll turn the call over to Blake.

Thank you, Bob, and good morning. As a reminder, unless noted otherwise, all figures reported on today's call are in U.S. dollars under IFRS. Let's move to slide nine. I'm very pleased to report strong Q4 results. Frankly, it's the best quarter we've ever had. We met all full-year guidance elements, but most importantly, in the quarter, we added a record incremental amount of our ARR. As with other global software companies, recent fluctuations in foreign exchange relative to the US dollar are masking the strength of some of the headline results, including ARR and RPO balances and our 2025 guidance. But the underlying performance in the quarter is very clear. Our just EBITDA margin, Q4, was a very strong gain, reinforcing our path to consistent, normalized 25% plus performance starting in 2026 and supporting ongoing strength in our trailing 12-month recapital margin. Briefly, for the quarter, total revenue was $123.9 million, up 11%. BAS revenue was $81.9 million, up 17%. Our subscription term license revenue was $1.6 million, in line with our expectations given the renewal cycle. Professional services revenue was $35.1 million, up 2%. Product schedules and foreign exchange fluctuations impacted the results. As I've talked about before, our goal is to continue to shift professional services work to partners as that has remained our priority business. Maintenance and support revenue was $5.4 million, up 11%. Our gross profit was up 9% to $75.1 million, or a 61% gross margin compared to 62% in the same quarter last year. Professional services gross margin remained very strong at 29%. The software margin was 73% and was impacted by roughly four percentage points to an impairment of intangible assets related to certain legacy technology no longer used. This charge impacted total gross margin by just over three percentage points. Otherwise, software and total gross margin are more favorable compared to Q4 2023 results. Adjusted EBIT was extremely strong, up 59% to $31.5 million, or a 25% margin versus 18% in the comparable quarter. This reflects our continued heightened focus on profitability and relates to very successful initiatives throughout 2024 and earlier aimed at gaining operating leverage as we scale. Our strong growth and profitability performance resulted in rule of 40 performance in the last two quarters, calculated by adding SAS revenue growth and adjusted EBITDA margins, our usual approach. This lends support to Bob's comments that a return to consistent full-year rule of 40 performance feels very much attainable ahead. Our loss in the quarter was $15.3 million, or $0.58 per diluted share versus a profit of $0.14 per diluted share a year ago. This result was fully attributable to a few key one-time items worth noting. We incurred a one-time tax expense of $17.5 million relating to transferring certain regional market rights within business entities in our corporate group, allowing for more appropriate tax planning ahead. Second, we arrived at a final settlement in our legal dispute with a competitor, which resulted in a change to general and administrative expenses in the quarter. Under the agreement, terms aren't being disclosed, but we're pleased with the results and that distraction is behind us. We remain proud that the widely acknowledged leadership position and success of our Maestro platform is a direct result of 40 years of building industry knowledge and relentless proprietary development efforts to uniquely address the market's needs. Finally, profit was impacted by the impairment of intangible assets relative to certain legacy technology no longer being used, which impacted both gross margin, as discussed, and G&A expenses. Without these one-time items, it was a solidly profitable quarter. Cash flow from operating activities was $24.1 million compared to $28 million in Q4 2023. The cash impact of the tax expense in the legal settlement I just mentioned will occur in the first quarter of 2025. Cash equivalents and short-term investments were $298.5 million, up from $293 million at the end of 2023. despite expenses in the year that we don't expect to recur and our active share buyback program affecting the balance. Going on to slide 10, our trailing 12-month cash flow margin remains strong at 19.6%, a great reflection of our increased focus on profitability. As always, we pride ourselves on being a strongly cash-generative company. On slide 11, I'll leave it to you to review our full year 2024 results in greater detail. I am pleased that we met all our guidance elements and particularly pleased that our adjusted EBITDA grew beyond $100 million for the first time and up 40%, 42% in the year, reflecting a 22% margin, which is at the top of our guidance range and up significantly from 18% last year. We also achieved record free cash flow of $95 million in the year, We won a record number of new customers, had a 60% plus win rate against key competitors, and maintained 95% to 100% gross customer retention for the year. I'd like to thank the whole Canaxis team for what are healthy results in a challenging year across the SaaS enterprise software universe. Moving to slide 12, our annual recurring revenue, or ARR, grew by 14% on a constant currency basis. or by 12% to $360 million on an as-recorded basis. This represents meaningful acceleration from 12% constant currency growth last quarter. We experienced record incremental ARR in Q4, though the achievement gets partially masked when looking at the period and ARR balance due to the foreign exchange impact. Incremental ARR was over 38% higher than in Q4 2023 and more than $4 million higher than the previous quarterly record in Q3 2022, excluding the ARR added as part of our NPO acquisition quarter. The split of additions to ARR between new name accounts and expansion business was 47% to 53% in Q4. In general, we have a significant opportunity to grow ARR from install base, and we are focused on it. For the year, the new name to expansion business split was 55 to 45 in favor of new customers. On slide 13, our three-year CAGR for total RPO and SaaS RPO is 18.4% and 20.8%, which has declined slightly but remains strong. The period end balance was impacted by foreign exchange adjustments and 2024 being a lower renewals year. The figure continues to reflect our elite growth customer retention. The three-year result is the best way to analyze RPO. as it normalized for expected quarterly fluctuations in customer renewal cycles. So we continue to direct your attention to those results. More details on our RPO can be found in the revenue note to our financials. On slide 14, I'm pleased to be initiating our 2025 guidance. Given the current impact of recent unfavorable foreign exchange movements, which we expect will continue ahead, I will provide certain key guidance elements on both an as reported and constant currency basis. We model as recorded guidance using the December 31st rates and model constant currency guidance using average FX rates from 2024. For 2025, we currently expect total revenue at $535 to $550 million for 12% growth at the midpoint or $545 to $560 million in constant currency for 14% growth at the midpoint. As growth of 11 to 13%, or 12 to 14% in constant currency, we expect typical cyclicality within the year to apply, including slower incremental business in Q1 and strength in Q4. Subscription term license revenue of $16 to $18 million. Roughly half the amount expected in Q1, approximately one quarter in Q2, and the remainder split over the back half of the year, with Q3 being somewhat higher than Q4. we will continue to encourage our on-premise customers to move to the cloud. Success here could change our outlook for term license revenue. We expect adjusted EBITDA margin to be 23 to 25%. To help you with your model, I'll add some further commentary. As usual, we'll give you a longer term view of our subscription term license revenue based on known renewal cycles today. We expect this revenue to grow by roughly 55% from 2025 to 2026, and then return to slightly below 2025 levels in 2027. We expect gross margin to take another small step forward in 2025, mostly due to gradual improvement in the software margin due in part to the recent closure of our APAC data centers and higher subscription term license revenues. we will start moving out of our private European data centres towards the end of 2025 and into 2026, when we will also start migration of North American data centres. We expect the following transfer operating expenses on a percentage of revenue basis relative to fiscal year 2024. You should expect slightly higher sales and marketing as we continue to reinvest into the opportunity, as previously discussed. Slightly less on R&D. as we continue to gain operating leverage. And notably less on G&A, as 2024 was an unusual year. I'd expect closer to 13 to 14% of revenue, which is more in line with historical results. With respect to CapEx in 2025, we expect to invest approximately $10 to $13 million with some ongoing investments into remaining private data centers, upgrades to international offices to support expansion, Going on to slide 15, we've continued to be active in our normal course issuer bid. For the year between our previous plan, which ended November 5, 2024, and our current plan, we've repurchased 881,454 common shares for an investment of approximately $98.3 million, including 157,156 shares and $20 million in the fourth quarter. These purchases significantly exceed any dilution from our stock-based compensation plan for the year, and I'm pleased with the investment. Our current NCIV goes through November 5th, 2025. Overall, I'm pleased with progress in the business. We delivered an outstanding Q4 in terms of incremental booking, adding to our foundation for future growth. While foreign exchange volatility remains a significant issue globally, we should focus on momentum in our constant currency ARR. We're building on our product leadership, which continues to be acknowledged by industry watchers and leveraged by customers. Usage of our scenario now has doubled, hitting unprecedented levels as customers respond to mounting pressures in global trade. We will continue investing for growth while managing for increased profitability and free cash flow. and are executing exceptionally well in that regard. We remain firmly committed to our mid-term adjusted EBITDA target and returning to consistent, full-year, will-afford-you performance. To all of you listening in, as always, thank you for your ongoing interest and support today. We're excited about the future and welcome you to the next step in our journey. I will now turn the line over to the operator to start the Q&A session.

At this time, I would like to remind everyone in order to ask a question. Press star, then the number one on your telephone keypad. We will pause for just a moment to compare the Q&A roster. The first question comes from Richard Tse from National Bank Financial Markets. Your line is open.

Yes, thank you. You know, congrats on the nice results here. Bob, you mentioned that you're still full steam ahead on the CEO search. I was wondering a couple of things. Like, is there a timeline to have someone in place? And then secondly, maybe more important is, you know, what is the sort of primary skill profile the board is looking for in this new CEO?

Yeah. Thanks for the question. Good to hear from you. Look, it's going well. The first thing, and I've said it quite a few times, is that This is a scale up. The work we did in 2024 is really preparing the company for what's going to happen over the next five to 10 years. We've done a lot of the heavy lifting. First thing I tell you is there's lots of interest. I think the performance in the quarter, the work that we did makes it even a better company as we go forward. So the real Key here is to establish a position where the CEO is really about a plus up. And our real focus right now is to get it right. The work that we've done, the talent that we've added on the team puts us in a great place as we go forward. And we're just completely focused on getting it right with an overweight on next gen Canaxis. AI, product management, how we go to market, and all the things that make a great company for the next five to ten years. And so making good progress, more important to get it right than set a date.

Okay. And then with respect to the backdrop, no doubt there's questions about supply chains going forward and the complexities that are likely coming here. So you didn't talk much about the pipeline, but Given that backdrop, and I understand you're obviously a bit cautious on the macro, but has the level of engagement kind of picked up with all that sort of coming towards us?

Yeah, the level of engagement with customers that own Maestro now has never been higher. Like, it's pandemic-level engagement, and they have the advantage of being able to plan, think through what happens next, And because of that, and this tight industry and supply chain, you know, the demand is good. People are absolutely, I mean, Q4 is a good illustration against the backdrop of other players in the industry of our ability to, you know, win customers, start new projects, and the level of interest in our company is high. You know, our guidance, or is against the backdrop that we know that FX is really going to change things quite a bit. You know, we're going to see a lot of variability. Our customers are super busy. So we wanted to put, you know, responsible guidance in place. But that's against a backdrop of we're way better control of our business. We've got a really good win rate and the enthusiasm and interest in our company is high. So So we're trying to strike a really nice balance as we go into 2025, but we're feeling very good.

Yeah, maybe I'll just add a couple of comments on that. As Bob had mentioned, what we're seeing in our install base and the expansion opportunities in our pipeline is by far the largest we've ever seen in our pipeline right now. We're extremely happy with where the pipeline is. There's elements that are growing a lot faster than others. The enterprise and large enterprise, they're in similar size for where we would expect at this stage. One of the best parts we've had over the past year is, you know, obviously bringing someone like Mark Morgan on the team, the quality of the pipeline has improved significantly. We saw that actually in Q4 in terms of how we were able to execute on the pipeline that we had available to us. So I think we're in a great position with our pipeline and continue trying to execute at the highest levels.

Okay, that's great. That's helpful. Thank you.

The next question comes from Thanos Moskopoulos from the Inland Capital Markets. Your line is open.

Good morning. Just expanding on the expansion opportunities, have those been weighted more towards customers deploying into new corporate business units, or has it been more about customers buying new modules, or just into both?

I mean, we get paid for scenarios. We get paid for new modules around AI. We absolutely have a roadmap here going into the second half year and into 2026, where we'll be bringing out new products. And the way to think about it, Thanos, is that I already said, you know, arguably, we have a two to three-year head start on the competition. Not only does AI give us economic opportunity, it gives us product differentiation, and most importantly, it creates incredible value for the customers. And all of those things are going to translate immediately onto our existing customer base, but it also supports and contributes to our sustaining high win rates in our category. The other neat thing that is coming up is Planning is at the center of supply chain. It's the what to do and we believe in partnership with other companies. And also in in terms of how we deploy AI will be able to grow our time by being providing orchestration across the supply chain where our products are going to be able to deliver information for different types of users, new users and the like. So so the the. short term is good to go to our customer base the product strength grows our advantage continues and we have an opportunity to increase our tab it's all of the above great um and then a question for blaine with respect to the software gross margins uh notwithstanding the one-time charge um

Can you remind us what kind of margin uplift you would expect relative to current levels once you do complete the transition to public cloud and decommissioned private data centers?

Yeah, sure. So I think a couple of years ago, I mentioned there was about 600 basis points difference between how we calculated our margins based on private cloud versus public cloud. half of that is related to amortization depreciation. So if you take that out, there's about a 300 basis point improvement that we have sitting out there once we get through the completion of this. I will say there are some optimizations and technology things that we are looking at that could improve that beyond 300 basis points. But as of right now, if we're just looking at what we had before and what we have Currently, going to public cloud, I think there's 300 basis points of duplicative cost that will go away.

Great. I'll pass the line. Thank you.

The next question comes from Paul Treiber from RBC Capital Markets. Your line is open.

Thanks so much, and good morning. I was hoping that you could walk through some of the moving parts between ARR growth this quarter and RPO this growth this quarter? And then specifically, to what degree is driven for both by new wins versus expansion or phase deals that would uplift ARR?

Yeah, sure. Well, let me just start quickly with what we're seeing in terms of like foreign exchange and foreign exchange is almost like right now, like a beach ball in the windstorm in terms of like, you just don't know where it's going to land. It's been all over the place. And if you take our big three foreign currencies that we gain revenue from and we have in our AR and RPO balances, we have Euro, we have GBP, and we have Japanese yen. They represent about 32 to 33% of our currencies, foreign currencies that come into revenue that we have to translate. And you think about each one of them, the Euro year-over-year went down 6.2%, the GBP went down 1.7%, and Japanese yen has fallen about 10.6%. Those have huge impacts in terms of how we look at our ending balances for both AR and RPO. We had an exceptional quarter in terms of gross bookings to outside of the fact that foreign exchange played around with those levels. It was a slightly higher amount that came in from new business versus renewals. Although we had a good renewals quarter, the renewals year was down year over year just because of the renewal cycles that we had in place. And that was in large part why you saw a lower RPO that came through. we had around something around $18 million of hit on the RPO just because of foreign exchange. So you can expect that there's a higher amount that will come in once we get those currencies back in the right spot. In terms of our ARR, extremely happy with the growth that we had in Q4. The incremental amount was beyond all of our expectations for what we saw in Q4, and that was a great spot. I think we are in a much better position, and I think the thing that I'm really concentrating on is the change in direction. The momentum that we saw in constant currency for AR in Q4 was a great first step in the direction that we expect to go for the rest of 2025.

Thanks, that's helpful. And then just on your last point, looking at the constant currency AR growth in the quarter, versus the SaaS guidance for the year on a constant currency basis. The SaaS guidance is a little below the ARR growth. How are you thinking about SaaS growth on a constant currency through the year and bookings potential through 2025?

We're feeling good about our bookings. Q4 is one of those markers that you say, We've got the momentum behind us. We've got the tailwinds behind us. We don't want to get too far in front of ourselves. There's a lot going on in the macro right now. It feels like people are changing their minds all the time, but I will say that we're right now set up for success. I think the scenario analysis is a great example of something that people are using and our customers are using over and over again right now. I see it doubling. basically in the first month of the year when there's a big change in a lot of tariff discussion that started happening. We think that we're in high demand right now and our ability to execute and have the best product out there, I think puts us in a really strong position.

Thanks for taking the questions.

The next question comes from Kevin from Scotiabank. Your line is open.

Hey there, good morning. Congrats on the ARR strength. Can I maybe dig into what drove that strength? Are you seeing any slight shifts in the macro that are helping the enterprise customers close in on deals? You also referenced the changes of the go-to-market, a lot of different things that were going on there. I'm just trying to get a sense of what we're kind of the key drivers of that ARR strength. And then second, on that go-to-market change, are there still more changes to come Q1, Q2 before everything is kind of up to the level of what you'd like it to be at? Thanks.

Yeah, first thing I'd say is that we have added significant, high-quality people into our go-to-market business. and grew EBITDA margins. And so the big thing that happened in 2024 is reset our priorities around spending. And so the thing you need to know in the term that we have put is this isn't a cost savings plan to try and get EBITDA margins. It's a reprioritization of our focus. And I would characterize Q4 and as we go into 2025 as the most important thing that's happened is everyone understands the importance of new revenue growth, whether it's in the existing base with our customer support teams, whether it's with our services teams working with software, whether it's adding new talent, whether it's supporting the salespeople in place. and much higher rates of executive engagement. Myself, Mark Morgan, Blaine, the whole team is engaged on what we would call company to company selling in a more systematic way. And frankly, even John Sicard last quarter was a big part of the success. He's down here. He's been helping us with strategy. He's at a customer conference next week with Mark, which is a really important customer conference. He's going to be at Connection. So his continuing support for the company has been fantastic. We're doing what great enterprise companies do. We got the whole company focused on growth. We're doing it with a set of priorities that is really precise. at an all company event last week, you know, everyone on the call has heard about the change early last year where we brought, you know, McKinsey, Goldman and other people in to help with the company. I told them that after all of that work and all of the advice we got and everything that we're doing, we're doing fewer things that are really important that are really making ourselves a very efficient company in the short term, but those priorities are the ones that are going to allow us to win for a long time. So we just had a great year getting organized, teams fired up, companies excited, and we're winning.

Great. Appreciate all that color there, Bob. Second question, you referenced later on in the year some more gen AI features, being able to chat with the data. Uh, and that might, you know, I think you, you talked about an uplift, uh, more than 2026. I'm just wondering, how do we think about that model? Is there any way to quantify what type of a lift, uh, how are you thinking about, um, you know, how that could work through, through your numbers? Thanks.

Yeah. So here's what you're hearing from the team here in our guidance and our language. It's the strategy is really tight and the goal now is to make this quarter then we're going to make next quarter, and then we're going to make the quarter after that. And we're not trying to get ahead of our skis. We're not trying to dismiss the challenges for our customers. We're totally focused on the things that matter for the long term, obviously, but we really have sharpened our edge around trying to make the quarters. And that's what our investors want. That's what is a great compounder. And I think we've got some pretty good edge going around that. I don't know, Blaine, do you want to add to that?

Yeah, I think our number one goal is to concentrate on continuing to accelerate ARR in the right direction. And we're in the process of finalizing pricing around what we're going to do with chat with data. And then following that, we'll have the agentic AI that's a little bit later in the year. So two really big improvements for what customers utilize and get in front of themselves to be more efficient as we go forward. I would not expect that it will have a huge impact on SaaS. I do think it will have an impact on AR growth as we go forward, and that's something we're pretty excited about at this stage.

The other thing I'd say on that is, at the end of the day, our AI product roadmap definitely sustains our product advantage in a category In today's macro environment of unsure trade and FX, that is what people are buying and interested in. And we do it better than anybody else because we've already introduced AI into our product to be able to actually provide scenarios and nobody else does it like we did. So we're in a great position to monetize this business in the short, medium, and long term.

Thanks a lot. I'll pass the line. Thank you.

The next question comes from Lachlan Brown from Redburn Atlantic. Your line is open.

Hi, Bob. Thanks for the question. ACV over ARR, you delivered the 1.23 times in the first nine months of 2024. Are you able to provide any color on that figure on how that fared in the fourth quarter? And having a look at the FY25 revenue outlook, Is there expected to be a meaningful contribution from these phase deals that you secured last year, or should we expect these more of contributing to out-of-year growth? Thanks.

Sure. And good question. Yes, we've been giving that ratio in the past. We didn't this time. I'll give you the number right now. It's 1.16 is what we ended the year at. It actually is the exact same number that we had the year before. And what really... defines why it's important is when you see either acceleration or deceleration of that ratio compared to prior periods. And that kind of moves into your second question, which is how does it impact what I sometimes call free ARR going forward? So we do have free ARR. It's going to be higher than we had in 2024. And so we have some free ARR coming in 2025. Depending on how that ratio moves, if it stays stable, there will be an equal amount of almost cancellation on the ACVAR free air that comes out from this to be deferred for future periods. So at this stage, 1.16 is where we ended the year. Again, very similar to what we had in 2023. But we did have a couple of fairly large ramp deals in Q4, but not as much as we had in the first three quarters of the year.

Great. Thanks for the detail. And on the presentation, you highlight that greater than 20 customers have engaged with the Maestro AI chat agents. How should we reconcile that number with the 100 that were actively using the tool at the end of last quarter? Has there been a meaningful step up or take up over the last three months in that product?

Yeah. I mean, it's a doubling. It's our highest uptake of any product. Now, the way that we obviously talk about the chat agent is that it is something that helps seed our current customer base for understanding like, okay, the next step is to move on to chat with data. And the next step after that is agentic AI. So we have over 200 customers currently using it. Very strong feedback as to how great it is and how much it makes things much more efficient. I think the chat with data, we were in a board meeting over the last couple of days. I got to see even more views on what that looks like. It is going to make customers much more efficient over time. And the automation that it provides at fingertips is, I think, a game changer.

All right. Thanks. That's all for me.

The next question comes from Stephanie Price from CIBC. Your line is open.

Good morning. Hey, several peers have flagged declining professional services revenue growth just given small initial deal sizes and phased deals. Looks like your Q4 PS revenue growth was the lowest we've seen in a while. And if you kind of back into the PS you're expecting in your guide, it looks like it's going to be well above where it was in Q4. Just if you could talk a little bit about the PS line and what you're seeing there.

Yeah, There's obviously things that are in our control, and whether or not we actively push things to our partners is in our control. We have seen a very nice trend in terms of our partners getting more of those deals, and we've been actively trying to support them. Everyone's aware we have a very strategic relationship with Accenture and trying to ensure that they meet their own targets. Our priority right now and going forward will continue to be subscription business. We did have a couple of contracts with, I guess, impacts that were fixed fee type of contracts that makes it harder to actually grow on a variable basis or exchange impact of results. But overall, again, I think the most important point to take away from this is that we've done a lot better job of redirecting the professional services work in the direction of our partners. And I think that also can contribute to why we have had a really strong Q4 ARR and ACV growth that we had.

Okay, that's good color. And then just maybe on your adjusted EBITDA in the quarter included quite a bit of special charges. And I know you had settlement with a competitor in the quarter, but I'm curious if you could talk about what's embedded in the EBITDA guide in terms of special charges and how we should think about that for 2025.

Yeah. I'll be frank. I don't like having a ton of adjustments or special charges at all. And so I'm pretty happy the fact that we have very little, if any, special charges going forward. I think we're in a much better position to go back to normal. And 2024, as we all are aware, there was a little bit of a different type of of the year for us. We had some unusual transactions that we don't think are recurring. We don't expect that to come back in 2025. So there's no guide that has, or our guide right now doesn't have any of the special charges coming up.

Great to hear. Thank you.

The next question comes from Sutan Sukumar from Stifel. Your line is open.

Good morning, guys. The first question, I wanted to touch on the new product cycle with Maestro. It's really good to hear that usage and engagement is spiking higher. It's a good proof point. Just curious, is that being led by net new customers, the adoption there, or is it really upgrades from the base that's driving this activity?

Yeah, I think what you're seeing is some of our more mature customers, because the newer customers are usually in the process of deployment. So the usage and the amount of scenarios that we're seeing right now are those customers that are live, obviously, and using it to their full capabilities. Yeah, it's more mature customer base that's continuing to use more and more of our product.

Okay, great. The second question I had was more around your platform strategy. In the past, you guys have called it rapid response as a platform. And this strategy has been in play now for a number of years, and it looks like you guys have made some really good progress in expanding the partner side of that. Can you speak a little bit about how much revenue is being driven from your solution extension partners today, and where could this revenue mix go over the medium to long term?

Yeah. The VAR and SOLEX business we're super excited about. It doubled last year in its contribution. Our expectation is we'll continue that trend and it becomes an important part of our geographic expansion. It becomes an important part of our value extensions. It creates more coverage and spotting for customers that allows us to get in, attract new industry capacity. All of these things contribute to the, you know, the strategic positioning of the company to operate as a global company. And the neat thing is, you know, with the investments we've made in geography, and in the partner ecosystem are now starting to pay in a way that not only gives us better coverage, supports our ability to work with the largest companies in the world, but it also is starting to pay. You know, I would have seen some of the work that we've done over the last few years as the cost of scale And by making those investments in geography, partners and the like, we're now seeing that it's becoming more profitable and it's part of the even a margin story.

Yeah, and I'll add that one of the exciting things that although how much we talk about or we should probably talk about more, we've been working on our supply chain data fabric. And that's going to be a key part of the architecture of the Maestro platform. It's going to be a key aspect of supply chain orchestration, which should seamlessly absorb and share data from as many supply chain sources as possible. And that will improve the decision-making end-to-end. So this database fabric that we're working on right now, which I think everyone understands is one of the key aspects of not only how people are using AI and Gen-AI going forward, but just the orchestration you have end-to-end across the supply chain. And that's something that we're pretty excited with the progress and something that hopefully we can differentiate from our competitors going forward.

Great. Thank you for taking my questions and just congrats on the new records this quarter, guys. Thank you.

The next question comes from Martin Tonner from ATB Capital Markets. Your line is open.

Thank you very much for taking my question, folks. Want to dig into that incremental ARR number. It looks like it's 20, 20 plus. And just wondering if you can kind of talk about the drivers and let us know if there's any unusual in there that we should be aware of.

Yeah, the only. I made sure I caveat this in my sentences that the foreign exchange, we took out the foreign exchange obviously as an impact just to make sure that it was apples to apples that you could compare again. The unusual we had was just the execution. It was an extremely high conversion. I look back to Q3 2022 and I used to always talk about that quarter as like we just closed everything. Every deal that we had in the pipeline just kind of started coming in and I would say Q4 of 2024 was a was very similar to that. In fact, the conversion rates that we had for those two quarters are one and two in the charts right now. So I think, of anything, what we realized is the demand for our product is extremely high. We had a leadership team on the go-to-market side that was able to execute at the highest levels. And I was I'll say I was pleasantly surprised because Bob here knows that I was not expecting that quarter that we had in Q4, and to be able to execute that level gives me a lot of confidence in where we're going in the future. I was a lot more bullish.

Hey, listen, look, the way to summarize it, is, look, it's an industry where people compare their ability to operate supply chains. They know each other and they go to conferences together. And the macro environment we're seeing, you know, post the U.S. election was a bellwether on, you know, the importance of having a solution like Maestro in your business. And I think that what helped us in the quarter is the references, the ability to get time to market, the flat out need to have the product that nobody else has in the market with the level of sophistication we have. It's become a must have to run your business. And when you think about what's going on with tariffs and free trade, the reason that there are such a spike in scenarios it's really, really hard to understand exactly how things are going to play out, what your cost base is, shipping routes, alternatives. So this trend is not going to change in the short term. And so obviously it creates some risks, obviously. We've seen it with some of our competitors. But it also creates for us an amazing tailwind because, you know, we're the leader. We're We have the product that people need to operate their business, right? And so what we're trying to do is really project forward a balanced view of our position, which is strong with the challenges, you know, for our business. But it helped us in Q4 for sure.

Fantastic. Can you let us know how much pricing is in that incremental ARR number?

Very little, if any. We did price changes in Q4.

If I may ask one more, can you talk about professional service revenue growth in the quarter? I mean, it decelerated meaningfully, which is, I mean, it's a common theme we're seeing in the quarter. But in your guide, it appears that you're pretty optimistic that this is a bit of an anomaly. Can you talk us through that?

Q4 is always actually a slower quarter for professional service just because of how the contracts work. The more vacation you have, obviously Christmas holidays play a part in it. It slows down the amount of the ability to generate revenue. We actually get our largest revenue base coming from Q2 and Q3 on professional services usually. Now, saying that, as much as we are trying to push in the direction of our of our partners with a higher base of ARRs that we're growing and new incremental ARR that we're growing. It will help push the professional services revenue up no matter what. But again, we're on a tightrope here in terms of we are trying to push, but we do have like certain commitments that we want to still uphold within the organization to hit revenue targets that we have. And so we are on a constant trying to slow down professional services as a percentage of total revenue. But in turn, we're hoping that helps accelerate the subscription revenue that we're really focused on.

And we're also trying to, you know, part of our multi-year profitability story is to actually improve the profitability of services as well. These things all work hand in hand. And then the final one is, you know, over time, We're going to make it more less. It's already one of the best software products at the enterprise level in time to value. We're going to keep pushing that. We're going to make it easier to implement. And that puts pressure on professional services as well. So, well, we've got a really, really tight plan to make sure that we turn all of these dials properly to take advantage of the opportunity for the company.

The last question comes from Mark Schuppel from Loop Capital Markets. Your line is open.

Hi, thank you for taking my question. Most of my questions have actually been answered, but I just have one, Bob, it's for you. I was wondering if you could just speak to the current perspective or the company's current perspective on strategic inbound interest that you either are seeing or not seeing for the company.

Yeah. I think for me, the goal has always been, and particularly once I became the executive chair, to focus on the performance of the business. We believe that the value of the company is about making the quarters, about pushing the product advantage. It's about making sure that we're adding talent to the team. And we kind of I kind of separated myself a little bit or a fair amount from what the expectations of all of our shareholders are and really zeroed in on the expectation of our shareholders around performance. I don't think anything's changed. We're still in a position here where we're operating the business, we've always said that we're open to having conversations, and we continue to run the business. So I don't think anything's changed.

Thank you.

This is our Q&A session. I'll turn the call over to Rick Woodsworth, Vice President of Investor Relations, for closing remarks.

Thanks, operator, and thank you, Ekalon, for participating on today's call. We appreciate your questions and your ongoing interest and support of Kinect. We look forward to speaking with you again when we report key word results.

Bye for now. Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes today's call. Thank you all for joining, and you may now disconnect.