Snipp Interactive Inc.

Okay, I think we have everybody in now. So thanks for joining this morning, everybody. Good morning. Thanks for joining the SNP Interactive third quarter 2020-2024 earnings conference call. I am Atul Sabharwal, founder and chief executive officer of SNP. Joining me today is also Richard Pistelli, who recently took over as our interim chief financial officer. Jason Garcha couldn't make it today. He will continue to support the company as we transition into next year and through our audit. Please visit our investor relations site at snip.com for a copy of our earnings press release and detailed financials. which have also been filed on CDAR. We present all financial figures in US dollars, unless otherwise indicated. Before we proceed, I'd like to remind everyone that today's discussion may contain forward-looking statements. These statements are based on current expectations and are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. So let's start with a summary of the third quarter and key developments. The third quarter of 2024 marked a pivotal moment for Snip. We reported record EBITDA of $708,649 for the quarter, our highest ever. This represents a significant milestone for the company as it highlights the operational discipline and strategic focus that we've implemented over the past year. It's also worth noting that this achievement comes on the heels of a $600,000 EBITDA loss in the first half of 2024, underscoring the pace of our turnaround. Equally important is our margin improvement. The third quarter gross margin surpassed 62%, up dramatically from 32% in the same period last year. This improvement stems from our deliberate strategy to transition away from a single lower margin legacy contract Q3 revenue was 6.65 million. Sorry. Down 22% year over year. This decline. Sorry. More people in the waiting room. Just have to get them in. I apologize. Yeah. Equally important is our margin improvement. For the third quarter, gross margin surpassed 62%, up dramatically from 32% in the same period last year. This improvement stems from our deliberate strategy to transition away from a single lower margin legacy contract. Q3 revenue was $6.65 million, down 22% year over year. This decline was again solely driven by the termination of a single low margin contract that continues to weigh on our year-to-date reported revenues. Our core business remains very healthy and is comprised of high margin revenue stemming from our over 90 plus clients, many of whom are Fortune 1000 members. That single contract was expected to sunset. It has and now our core growth is emerging as we have now completed the gambit integration into our Snipcare platform. Looking at the first nine months of 2024, we achieved a positive EBITDA of $120,866, a strong improvement compared to a $1.94 million loss in the same period last year. Our bookings backlog also hit a near record $15.5 million as of September 30, 2024, compared to $14.5 million a year ago, setting the stage for sustained growth. I'd now like to turn the call over to Richard Pistelli, Interim CFO, who will discuss our financials in more detail.

Thank you, Atul. To build on what Atul has already mentioned, I'd like to provide a deeper dive into our financial performance for the quarter. Revenues in Q3 totaled $6.7 million, down from $8.6 million in Q3 2023, and $16.2 million for the first nine months of 2024, as compared to $22.6 million for the same period last year. As you've already stated in previous communications, this decline in revenue has been deliberate as we exited a single low-margin contract that was inherited as part of our last acquisition. Gross margins have now reached 62% for the quarter and have averaged 60% year-to-date, as compared to 32% and 28% in the respective periods last year. Q3 EBITDA of $708,649 marked a significant increase from $33,408 in Q3 2023, while year-to-date EBITDA of $120,866 reflects a major turnaround from a loss of $1.9 million during the prior year. Our net income in Q3 amassed $295,580, as compared to a net loss of $184,885 in the comparative period. However, year-to-date net loss remains at $1.4 million, which includes $1.6 million in non-cash expenses. As of September 30, 2024, our cash balance increased to $4.6 million from $2.9 million at the end of 2023, and the company remains debt-free. We believe that the strategic investments made over the past two years in our people and our product suite now firmly position the company for sustained profitable growth. These results validate our strategic initiatives and highlight the underlying strength of our business model.

Thanks, Richard. Let's move on to a bit of a strategic outlook. Let's start, of course, with our core business, which continued to have a strong quarter and healthy top line growth for the first nine months of the year. Our updated investor presentation on our website should help shed some more light on our underlying strength in our core business on both the top and bottom lines. More of our largest clients are increasing their spending on our solutions, and we've had some new logo wins as well. As we stated earlier, we ended the quarter with a record bookings backlog of close to 15.5 million. Those following us closely on LinkedIn, they've seen us recently post the results from our proprietary SNIP 2024 holiday shopping trend survey, have seen a SNIP leadership present at the Parts to Purchase Institute, Digital Grocery Summit in Hamburg, Germany, and the Digital Grocery Summit in Amsterdam, launch holiday digital programs for Snickers, Keto's, Vodka, Jim Beam, Kellogg's, Nestle, Purina, Conagra, O'Reilly, and Lego, just to name drop a few key customers. Our core SNIP business continues to thrive by focusing on high margin contracts and operational excellence. We've achieved a seamless integration of Gambit into our infrastructure. With all costs related to Gambit now behind us, it's fully positioned to contribute to our margin profile going forward. Now I want to take a moment to highlight performance and potential of SNIP Media, our financial media network. This platform has been live with Bank of America for six months and it was recently deployed on Amplify. We haven't made an announcement about that yet. It's a leading banking loyalty platform that serves over 250 regional banks across the US. FMN, our financial media network, is already delivering impressive results. The platform currently reaches over 30 million monthly active users and is growing steadily. In-stores Q-level grocery offers are experienced redemption rates of between 5% and 10%. Active users clip six offers on average, redeeming two per shopping trip. All great metrics. This performance demonstrates the scalability and effectiveness of our media platform. Looking ahead, several other financial institutions, including Triple, who we have previously announced, are already integrating for targeted deployments in 2025, further helping us to grow our audience of active users. In closing, Q3 2024 represents a very successful quarter for Snip. We have emerged from a period of operational realignment and the results of our hard work are evident. As we have one month left in traditionally our strongest quarter, I am pleased to report that SNP will be EBITDA positive for the full year 2024, a significant achievement compared to both 2023 and the first half of this year. This milestone reinforces our confidence as we enter 2025 with momentum. Thank you to our team, partners and shareholders for your support. We can now move to Q&A. If you have a question, can you raise your hand virtually or in the chat, ask us a question and we'd be happy to respond. The first question from Jeremy, how are you doing? Can you speak on the deferred revenue? Yep, Jeremy, that is correct. simply clients who trust us with their money, prepay us for the contracts that they've signed with us, and that deferred revenue will eventually convert into revenue as those programs go live and we get to recognize the company.

Who's next?

Next question comes from Ryan. Can you comment on strategic plans from Gambit? Yep. So with Gambit, as everybody knows, we inherited one contract which caused our margin decline last year. That contract came to a logical conclusion. We did not renew on those terms. We were unsuccessful in renegotiating that contract with better economic terms, so we made the smart decision of letting it go. In the meantime, we have incorporated Gambit into our infrastructure and you will see in the coming quarter a relaunch of Gambit more in line with the brand of Snip and more integrated into our platform. We essentially are a B2B to C company and incorporating Gambit into our loyalty platform was the core reason we bought the company and to allow for sports betting to be incentive in our portfolio. Now that we have turned the corner with legacy clients that we inherited, necessary evil of any acquisition, we can move forward with launching Gambit within the SNP world as we had originally envisioned.

One thing I'd add to that a tool in addition to exiting any legacy business that was not attractive for snip interactive at a consolidated basis, we have also now eliminated any legacy costs and overhead associated with operating the gambit platform as well.

The next question, Margaret Baron from Canaccord. Margaret, what is the status of stock consolidation? Is that still on the table? Yeah, it is. Everything's on the table. Not only is stock consolidation on the table, but so is moving to the U.S. exchanges. If we think that makes sense for shareholder value, we continue to evaluate all options that can enhance shareholder value. A stock consolidation itself, in my view, isn't of value without some underlying catalyst event. Right now, the company is 100% focused on profitable growth. We don't want to be in a situation where, you know, we consolidate the stock and the bind disappears and it just results in the stock falling. So we got to manage that risk when we do this. But definitely on the table. We have shareholder approval for it from our last, I think from last year's AGM. The exchange might require us to get shareholder approval again. But we've made no decisions as to when to execute any kind of consolidation yet. The next question, can you speak, this is from Jeremy again, can you speak on the value of active monthly users regarding Smith Media? The asset seems little understood. Okay. Good question, Jeremy. Thank you for that. So, active users in any system are people who are users who are using an app or a solution consistently. Okay. You have active daily users, active monthly users, active quarterly users. The potential value that, you know, investors typically put on an active user is about $40 per active user. To give you some sense of, you know, a comparison, if you look at iBorder, which recently went public on the NASDAQ, they have over a billion dollars of market cap, I think they have about 13 million active users. You can check that with the filings, please. I might be wrong on that one, but it's in that range, 13 to 15 million. um you know having active users allows for companies that are building platforms and ecosystems and networks more than anything else to be able to break the classic chicken and egg between you know advertisers who want to spend money to attract users and you know users who come to see to networks and platforms like ours that um want offers right if you don't have offers you can't get users but if you don't have users you can't get offers so growing that active monthly user piece is a very very critical part in order to break this chicken and egg and get brands to open their wallets and spend on the media that we've built and that's the value of active monthly users and here is the same kind of metric and the same kind of analysis an investor can do for any platform or network that has built an audience okay next question is from neil Can you talk about the strength of your core business bookings this year? What is driving the growth? Is it primarily new customers or is it growth from the current customer base? So our core business continues to grow, as you guys can see. It actually has not stopped growing, even if last year's results were kind of colored by the one contract that caused margin destruction, as well as, you know, the revenue to go up very high last year in comparison to this year. We have a set of really great customers who continue to give us repeat business. I think 60 to 70% of our business comes from repeat customers, but these customers are also very global in nature. They have operations globally. We do a lot of work with them. 80% of our revenue comes from the U.S. market, but they have operations basically everywhere. So being able to land and expand, you know, with these same customers is a natural part. You know, last year we invested in Europe. We now have salespeople in Europe. In Germany, we're about to recruit people in France. We've got a few people in the UK. And they're going after the same clients that we have because of introductions that our clients here make to their overseas counterparts. so part of our growth is going to come from there it hasn't yet even kicked off in any form or fashion i think our european business was maybe you know i think 10 of our business last year um the rest of the world was training um the us was 80. so you know there's a huge amount of growth Right there. But then also these same customers that we have today in the US have other requirements. Like I said in the past, we do 300 to 400 programs a year. We don't capture any of the media spend on those programs. Clients, you know, if every $50,000 they're spending with us, they're probably spending $500,000 on media. So if I could capture just a small percentage of that spend on the same program I'm implementing for them, you can see what the huge impact on our bottom line could be, right? The logic behind why we launched SNP Media. So, you know, I think our core business continues to grow. We're attracting also clients from... non-traditional markets. We suddenly found ourselves working with lots of home building companies as an example. There's a whole market for tire companies, there's a whole electronics industry. All areas we have not even tapped into yet and we are slowly but surely progressing into. So we've been pretty confident that For my existing clients, working with them in different markets, selling them new products, entering new markets, we've got a nice path ahead of us on our core business to continue brewing at a steady clip over the course of the next few years.

And to add some color to those numbers, we speak a lot about the noise and impact of a single legacy contract on the consolidated business. However, if you strip out that contract and look at nine months, year-to-date performance, 2024 versus 2023, revenues are actually, for the core business, have increased by 21%. And so as we end 2024 and are able to start delivering Q on Q comps that are more comparable or comparable because it will not be a legacy impact from a from a discontinued client relationship. those numbers will start to translate. That's what you're starting to see in our single quarters. That's where you're seeing the margin expansion, where you're seeing inherently what is sustained high-level top-line growth.

Okay, the next question comes from Raphael. Hey, also, Richard, congrats on a very good quarter. Can you share more about your capitalized R&D and revenue expected from the investment, et cetera? Okay, so in terms of capitalized R&D, you know, we don't capitalize a tremendous amount of the R&D that we put in. It's really based on whatever the auditors will allow us to or make us capitalize. So, I think it equates to about $200,000 a quarter, if I've got the numbers correct. What we expect from that is really, you know, the continued enhancement of our platform, you know, the launch of Snip Media, you know, all the work that we've done to integrate Gambit into our platform. So, The revenue expected from the investment is really the core business revenues that you've seen today and the ability to monetize them more efficiently, right? Which is what explains how our EBITDA can continue to grow and our margin can continue to grow.

To put a quantum on that, in the history of the business, SNP has invested roughly $40 million in developing its technology solutions, the overwhelming majority of which has been expensed as incurred. However, that asset, that investment, is still the core technology base from which we develop and produce all of our revenue growth going forward. So the economic life in that investment is still long-term. even if it's been fully expensed and does not appear on the balance sheet in a more traditional manner.

Jeremy, again, do you have a plan to monetize the Gambit asset? Yeah, absolutely, which is why we bought them, right? But monetization isn't necessarily, you know, the way you see Gambit. when we bought them and ran it for the first couple of years, expanding our rewards portfolio was the primary purpose of buying Gambit. So to the extent that clients want to incorporate games of chance related to sports into their programs, which they do, that's going to result in being able to monetize that asset. The original asset, as it was, was an MVP product. We have had discussions with different parties that have been interested in picking up that asset from us. If we thought a deal made sense to do, we'd do a deal on the original core assets. But right now there's nothing on the horizon which gives me confidence to tell the world that we're going to sell some of those core assets off Gambit. We did buy them for our own use. But if there's a deal that we can do to carve out certain types of implementations, we absolutely would. Brian has a question on salary, wages and benefits go up 400,000 on a sequential basis. What are the explanations for this? Yeah, so, you know, as I was saying earlier on today, you know, we've been landing and expanding with our clients, not just in the US market, but in other markets. So there's been some expenditure there. We've been building a brand new industry disruptive product in SNP media. You know, making sure we don't fall down with what we've done with Bank of America, for example, or Amplify or Triple is really, really important. So there has to be some incremental investment in that. You know, I can't go to a Bank of America and just assume that you can service a client that big with that much of security requirement, et cetera, et cetera, without having an incremental expense. So some of our, you know, investments in these areas are quite small in comparison to the opportunity opportunities in front of us and also if you want to think of us as a startup doing just a financial media network that's an industry first And going into Bank of America, and if we had been VC-funded, I mean, they would have, you know, I can imagine a startup spending a couple of million getting to where we are right now, if not more. So, you know, you can look at some of these companies out there that are trying to build similar kind of networks with us. They don't have half the coverage because they don't have a company like Bank of America behind them. And you can see how much they raise to the tune of $30 million, $40 million, actually, that we managed to accomplish on a very small budget of a million or less. So that's what explains the small increments in salary and wages.

One comment I would add to that, if I may, Atul, when you look at the salaries and payroll compensation and overall headcount, while it looks like there's a tremendous increase on a Q&Q or year-on-year basis, I think strategically you have to look at the company as a whole. And while the company was in the midst of dealing with integration headwinds and moving forward, With our strategy, we also have to make an investment in our people so that we can be in a strong position to capitalize on growth opportunities going forward, and that's what we've done. Now I believe we have the proper human capital in our business to support continued growth of the business. That investment certainly is an impact, but as we move forward, we expect to see that that line and that overall quantum of cost will stabilize.

So Brian has an additional question on that. So should we view this amount as closer to your run rate as opposed to be driven by one-time items? You know, it actually, it's a good question. Actually, I think our salary and wages will actually fall. It's the end of the year. We're pretty draconian about performance and making sure that we only keep people who perform at a certain level. So there'll be some amount of change that you will see coming through not only on the financials when it comes to salaries and salary and wages, but also in terms of announcements of certain personnel that have just graduated from slip. I would, for the sake of your model, Brian, I think if you take it at 75% of what the increment is, I think that should be a fair assumption. Okay, so Brian has another question. You mentioned being EBITDA positive for the full year. Are you expecting to be EBITDA profitable on a quarterly basis going forward? So I think I would basically say on a steady state, we want to grow profitably and grow EBITDA, you know, as the quarters go by. If you go back to 2022, you'll see I think we had a run of like eight or nine quarters of EBITDA positive in steady state, right? So, however, opportunities do come up. you know, for a business like ours, especially in an industry like ours, which is consolidating fast. So I can confidently tell you that on a steady state, yes, but I reserve the right to make decisions that actually enhance shareholder value for the long term. Look, we're a $22 million company at the most right now. I'm not that worried about EBITDA positive if I need to get to 150 million in valuation. And so I need to have flexibility to be able to run the business strategically versus on a quarter-to-quarter basis. What plans do you have for cash reserves, stock buybacks? At this stage, we don't have a formal plan on utilizing our cash reserves for stock buybacks. Even if we could, I think the exchange only allows us to spend about 5% of the capital, of the outstanding share capital on stock purchases. It's not going to make that much of a difference. That said, if there is a good enough reason to do so and a good catalyst event that will benefit from also doing a stock buyback as well as a rollback, we absolutely would. Right now, our cash reserves are to build our business. grow our markets, grow our products, you know, expand within our clients. You know, who knows, even look out for an acquisition, one makes sense to do, we have no debt. That's something that can take us from being a $20 million company to, you know, a $50 million company. Okay, I think that's the largest number of questions we've ever faced in a conference call, so we welcome the discussion. Anymore? Nope? Okay, thanks everybody. If you have questions, feel free to text me, call me, send us a message on our investor line. Now that Richard's been onboarded, you get better answers