WELL Health Technologies Corp.

Welcome to the World Health Technology's fourth quarter and full year 2023 conference call. My name is Ludi and I'll be your conference operator today. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. We will conduct a question and answer session later in the call, which will be restricted to analysts only. Please note this conference is being recorded. I'll now turn the call over to Mr. Tyler Bhabha, Manager, Investor Relations. Mr. Bhabha, you may begin.

Thank you, Operator. and welcome everyone to Well Health's fiscal fourth quarter and annual financial results conference call for the three and 12 months ended December 31st, 2023. Joining me on the call today are Hammad Shabazi, chairman and CEO, and Eva Fong, the company's CFO. I trust that everyone has received a copy of our press release that was issued earlier today. Portions of today's call, other than historical performance, include statements of forward-looking information within the meaning of applicable securities laws, including future-oriented financial information and financial outlook information. These forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, assumptions, and other factors, many of which are outside of wealth control, and that may cause the actual results, performance, or achievements of wealth to differ materially from the anticipated results, performance, or achievements implied by such forward-looking statements. These factors are further outlined in today's press release and can be found in our management discussion and analysis. We provide forward-looking statements solely for the purpose of providing information about management's current expectations and plans relating to the future. We do not undertake or accept any obligation or undertaking to release publicly any updates or revisions to any forward-looking statements to reflect any change in our expectations or any change in events, conditions, assumptions, or circumstances on which any such statements are based, except if it is required by law. We may also use terms such as adjusted gross profit, adjusted gross margin, adjusted EBITDA, adjusted shareholder EBITDA, adjusted net income, and adjusted free cash flow on this conference call, all of which are non-GAAP and non-IFRS measures. For more information on how we define these terms, please refer to the definition set out in today's press release and in our MD&A. The company believes that adjusted EBITDA is a meaningful metric as it measures cash generated from operations, which the company can use to fund working capital requirements service future interest, and principal debt repayments, and fund future growth initiatives. Adjusted EBITDA should not be construed as an alternative to net income and loss determined in accordance with IFRS. And with that, let me turn the call over to Mr. Hamed Shabazi, Chairman and CEO.

Thank you, Tyler, and good day, everyone. We hope that you're all keeping safe and healthy, and we appreciate everyone for joining us today. We're extremely pleased to be with you today and discuss our annual 2023 results. which was a record-breaking year in which we achieved record revenue, record adjusted EBITDA, record patient visits, and positive net income. We achieved 36% overall revenue growth in 2023, with over 15% organic growth in the business, which includes clinics added to the network for nominal consideration as part of our clinic absorption program. We remain committed to the company's continued focus on tech-enabling healthcare providers and supporting them in simplifying their work lives, modernizing and digitizing their clinical practices, and delivering the best healthcare possible. And this is evident in our increasing patient visits. During the year 2023, Well delivered over 4.2 million patient visits to our physical and virtual clinics, and a total over 1.77 million patient interactions. Well now serves more than 34,000 healthcare practitioners with our SaaS and technology services in Canada alone. which is equal to approximately more than one out of every three healthcare providers in the country. We're extremely passionate about supporting our providers, and every day we focus on supporting them better. This attitude and focus is what allows the company to continue to witness healthy growth across all business segments, including both online and in-person care channels. We expect our strong performance to continue into 2024. We do not foresee any material influences or challenges that would impair our ability to deliver solid results in 2024 in any of our businesses as we are poised to maintain and even accelerate our growth without meaningful capital allocation while delivering on enhanced profitability. And I'm pleased to provide our 2024 annual guidance as follows. We are increasing our annual revenue guidance to be in the range of $950 million to $970 million, representing annual revenue growth of up to 25%. In the past, I've mentioned our goal of achieving $1 billion in revenue. With the revenue guidance of $950 to $970 million that I provided today, we're easily within reach of that $1 billion milestone. Keep in mind that this annual guidance does not include any unannounced acquisitions. Even though we're now favoring organic growth over acquisitions, we do continue to have a pipeline of mostly smaller tuck-in acquisition potentials, and we expect a number of them will be completed this year which just put us in a position to report that we've crossed the $1 billion in revenue figure on a run rate basis by the end of 2024. For our annual adjusted EBITDA guidance, we expect to be in the range of 125 million to 130 million, representing annual growth of up to 15%. Comparatively, we achieved 8% growth in adjusted EBITDA in 2023 and 73% growth in 2022. As you can see, our expected EBITDA growth is accelerating as our expected EBITDA growth is significantly higher than it was in 2023. And we expect this to happen with less capital allocation activity. Our improvements in EBITDA in 2024 are driven by several factors, but I'll quickly point out four of them. One, WELL has implemented a comprehensive cost optimization program to enhance its operational efficiency and profitability. This program has been implemented in both Canada and the United States and includes a streamlined approach to staff restructuring, increased utilization of technology, and where possible, AI for process improvement and optimization, consolidation of suppliers, tighter integration of our business units, and other cost optimization initiatives which are expected to result in millions in annual cost savings. Two, continued performance from our Canadian operations which experienced a 39% year-over-year increase in four-wall EBITDA to $45.2 million. We will talk a bit more about this later as our Canadian business has significant momentum. Three, last year's acquisitions of MCI and the large Manitoba clinic had a dampening effect on our EBITDA last year. However, our clinic transformation team and shared services teams are already hard at work in their efforts to optimize and digitize these clinics. And as such, we expect them to have improved margins and profitability in 2024. And four, in addition, the acquisition of CarePlus by WellUSA last year, which added incremental revenue and EBITDA to our core anesthesia business, as well as our provider staffing services, which had a strong organic growth profile associated with it. We expect strong cash flow generation in 2024. And given that we plan to focus more on organic growth, which includes our clinic absorption program and acquisition volume, we plan to use our positive cash flow to reduce debt levels this year, thereby also reducing our interest expense run rate. 2024 is also a significant milestone year for us as we have important timelines related to both our U.S. digital patient services businesses, Circle Medical and WISP. Both of these businesses have call option and IPO registration option timelines that expire in the near future unless extended. And as a result of that, we've begun to partner with minority shareholders and management to consider strategic alternatives for both businesses, which could include a sale for one or both assets. Given how we believe this could be a key positive catalyst for well in terms of significantly de-levering and returning value to shareholders. With that, I would now like to turn the call over to our CFO, Eva Fang, who will review the financials for fiscal 2023 and fourth quarter of 2023. I will then come back and provide further commentary on our business unit. Eva.