Xtract One Technologies Inc. (XTRA) Earnings Call Transcript

Hi, everyone, and welcome to Xtract One's Live Year-end Earnings Call for Fiscal 2023. This is Will Maze from RB Milestone Group. For those of you who aren't already aware, Xtract One Technologies, formerly known as Patriot One Technologies, is a disruptor in the stadium and public space security industry through their unobtrusive artificial intelligence-driven weapons and threat detection system. The company's shares are traded on the TSX under the symbol XTRA and on the OTCQX under the symbol XTRAF. Joining us today is the company's CEO and Director, Peter Evans; and CFO, Karen Hersh. Today's earnings call will include discussions about the statement of the business, annual financial results and some of Xtract One's recent milestones. This will be followed by a question-and-answer session based on the questions investors have sent in prior to and during the webcast. Questions can be submitted directly in the Q&A module. This call is being recorded today, October 19, 2023, and will be available on the company's website after the earnings call. Before we start today's call, I'd like to note that all dollars are in Canadian dollars unless otherwise specified. Today's call contains supplementary financial measures. These measures do not have any standardized meanings prescribed under IFRS and are, therefore, not -- may not be comparable to similar measures presented by other reporting issuers. These supplementary financial measures are defined within the company's filed management discussion and analysis. Today's call may also contain forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results, performance or developments to differ materially from those contained in the statements and are not guarantees of future performance of the company. No assurances can be given that any of the events anticipated by forward-looking statements will occur or if they do occur, what benefits the companies will obtain from them. Also, some risks and uncertainties may be out of control of the company. Xtract One has a full disclaimer contained in their presentation. Today's call should be reviewed, along with the company's annual financial statements, management's discussion and analysis and earnings press release issued today, October 19, 2023, and is available on the company's website and its SEDAR+ profile. Lastly, RBMG is not a registered investment adviser or broker-dealer. For more information, please visit rbmilestone.com. And now it is my pleasure to introduce Mr. Peter Evans, Chief Executive Officer of Xtract One. Peter, the stage is yours.

Thank you, Will, and thank you so much, and welcome to all of our investors joining us today. It's always a pleasure and very exciting to me to be able to do these earnings announcements, particularly when we had such strong results. We're going to share a lot more details about those strong fourth quarter results, which has ended up in a milestone year for the company. Overall, it's been a very good year. We experienced our very best quarter for deployments in new bookings to cap off a record year of revenue. Revenue grew 365% for our SmartGateway platform operating segment year-over-year, and this has been our focus. We can -- and as a focus, we can see the results and the outcome as we'll talk a bit about more today. In the process of driving growth, we've added dozens and dozens of customers and continued our expansion into new market segments. We've also continued to build up our backlog of sales commitments totaling just under $15 million at the end of the year, setting us up for continued and growing momentum as we enter into fiscal 2024 as this backlog moves to get installed. With the aggressive deployment schedule is planned, investors can expect these bookings to convert into revenue in the coming months and quarters as we will significantly grow our installed base of deployed systems. Based on these results and the success that we've had so far and our ongoing customer engagements, I want to emphasize that we continue to be extremely optimistic about our outlook going into fiscal 2024 and expect similar growth trajectories and growth rates for the business going forward as we've experienced in this last year. There are some key highlights where investors have expressed interest through the questions in understanding in greater detail. So I'll summarize a couple of those first, and then we'll get into those details. First is the overall business momentum. We've completed the strongest year of sales activity since the company's inception. The total contract value of new bookings increased 344% year-over-year. This follows on the prior year where we grew 240% year-over-year. This momentum is underscored by increased demand in the marketplace for our solutions as customers see the clear benefits of what we're delivering and the tangible ROIs from our solutions. And those customers are, in fact, pulling us into the marketplace and into their segments much faster than we originally planned in our business model. We're also very excited about this continued growth trajectory, and the ability to continue to beat and exceed new milestones that we set for ourselves. The overall market expansion has changed, too. While our primary focus started with and continues to be in the sports and live entertainment industries, where we have onboarded a number of key strategic partners, we continue to expand into other market segments such as schools, hospitals, manufacturing and distribution. Today, I'll talk a bit about the benefit from the partners people like Madison Square Garden and the OP Group and what they've done, and they've provided to us as part of that partnership. I'm also going to talk a little bit about our latest partnership with the American Association of Professional Baseball. After that, I'm going to dive a little bit into success in these other market segments, as mentioned, like education, health care and other public sector offerings. The other thing that I want to bring forward is our focus on scale. As a reminder, about a year or so ago, we talked about fiscal 2023 being the year of scale for the company. We continue to drive efficiencies across the entire business from building a very, very robust pipeline and reducing the time for sales conversions from opportunity to close deal. We did all this while cost effectively scaling manufacturing, installation and ongoing customer support. You'll hear Karen and me coming back oftentimes this theme today and throughout the year that we're driving significant increase in the business while keeping our operational costs flat or even down year-over-year. Karen will discuss those specifics in a little bit more detail. The net-net of all this is we almost quadrupled sales for the business this year while keeping the operating costs flat year-over-year. We've got a lot to cover here today and have short period of time to do it, and we want to leave time for questions towards the end. So I'm going to jump right into a few more details here. The recurring theme from this past fiscal year is that the business has grown impressively over the last year. It's easily the best year in the history of the company. On the screen in front of you, you can see the steep acceleration representing the growth in sales. Those of you who were here last year on our Q4 earnings call will remember that we did experience that 240% growth that we talked about earlier, and that was in bookings compared to fiscal 2021. I'm incredibly pleased and very excited to share that in 2023, we accelerated that growth trajectory, further by increasing our bookings by a further 344% compared to last year. Since we first commercialized the SmartGateway product, we booked over $20 million of business for that product, of which approximately $15 million was from this past year, out of which $5 million was from this last quarter alone. That speaks to the continued acceleration and the growing exponential curve that we are on as a company. Demand for our solutions is accelerating along that curve, and we're seeing interest from multiple market verticals that are adopting our technology much faster than we had originally planned. The key message of our fiscal 2023 results demonstrates that we are growing rapidly and most importantly to me that our technology is validated by some of the most compelling organizations on the earth. And the product is here to stay. I continue to be incredibly bullish on the outlook for the company, and I expect that the trend shown in this chart will continue and will accelerate forever. Earlier this week, we announced our international growth plans and an announcement we made on Monday. On prior investor calls, I shared with the investors my overall business strategy, which was to stay hyperfocused on a specific market where we had a very tight and very strong product market fit and to want the company to get distracted or stretched by trying to serve too many markets with too many products at the same time and being weak in all those areas. The approach and philosophy for our international markets is the same. It's very complex and expensive to expand internationally, with the requirements for certifications and different certification requirements for every country, sourcing requirements, import, export requirements, tax laws, business constructs, support, partners, these kinds of things. It can be a very, very costly venture to enter into a new country to do business. I've always chosen to adopt a very much -- a very pragmatic strategy and a very pragmatic approach to global expansion, instead of dropping 10 sales guys into a country and hoping they sell something, the more important and the more pragmatic approach is to grow internationally based on winning a large critical account and using that account as the anchor, the foundation upon which to build a business, and that anchor funnels the growth in that region. We've done exactly that with new recently announced global contracts that will deploy in Asia and in Europe, including winning the largest contract in the company's history, a 3-year USD 5.1 million contract with a global entertainment organization. We expect that this contract will lead to further contracts not only without organization but others of this caliber as we've proven our solution is very reliable, very scalable, and we provide the highest level of customer support across the industry. We're going to continue to take the same pragmatic and judicious approach to growth, right, ensuring that we're delivering a highly predictable, high-growth business model by being very selective about the markets and the customers that we choose to serve, and we will engage, where we see the business is highly accretive to our business plan and highly profitable at the same time. Along with this, we're gaining a lot of support of some of the most stalwart organizations in the sports, entertainment and venue management businesses with the support of 2 strategic partners that have been brought on in the last 12 months. Madison Square Garden of the Oak View Group continue to be very strong partners for us and open doors to count those venues as strong advocates of our solution after testing and using the solution in their venues. In fact, over the last 10 months that we've been in Oak View Group's preferred patriot screening solution, we've increased the number of units deployed at their venues by over 150%, and we continue to do so. These strategic relationships continue to provide us benefits and validate our position in the market as a top-tier technology partner. Earlier this month, we announced a new partnership with the American Association of Professional Baseball as their exclusive and preferred supplier for a league of their 12 teams. That organization has plans to continue to grow, and currently, they welcome over 1.9 million patrons to their baseball stadiums each year. Through this relationship, we are engaging with multiple teams across the United States and Canada and look forward to delivering a fast, reliable and seamless patron screening experience for each of their venues. Those venues moving beyond just baseball and into many other activities with their fans and the folks in their environment. These future -- the future of these venues alongside the aggressive growth plan of the APP -- APV, excuse me, is very exciting and very interesting to me. Over the last 12 months, we've also onboarded a top-tier list of customers across several market verticals. We're making very, very strong progress in our primary markets of sports and live entertainment, predicting venues that are homes of professional sports teams across the NHL, the NBA, CHL, WHL, OHL and the USFL. Our systems deployed some of the most premier entertainment venues in the United States, like the Sphere in Las Vegas, Madison Square Garden, the Beacon Theatre in New York, Radio City Music Hall, many of which are now live. And of course, the Moody Center in Austin, Texas, which was just named the best new venue of its size in America last year. We're seeing incredible successes in the sports and live entertainment industry due to our SmartGateway, which was designed and built by customers and for customers with the needs of office venues in mind, and specifically through the feedback that we see from industry leaders about what they needed in order for our solution to fit their business needs. We're also expanding our customer base outside of the sports and entertainment market, a lot faster than we initially planned. This is due to the growing demand in these segments. During this year, we added a diverse set of new customers from a range of sectors. Organizations like Hyundai TRANSYS in manufacturing, Lakewood Schools in New Jersey where we're hoping to prevent weapons from coming into the classrooms. We're also helping to protect health care professionals and their patients partnering with organizations like Sentara Health and even working with government agencies across the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Office of the Inspector General and municipal governments such as the city of Phoenix. This is a mere subset of the organizations that we work with and those that we publicly announced. I'm very pleased to say that we'll be able to grow in every one of these market verticals as this demonstrates the continued advancement of the smart gateway and its ability to fit multiple markets and serve a variety of customers from schools to hospitals to the places that we all do business. These are only a sample of some of the customers, and we're pleased to say that we have a strong critical mass of customers in every segment. As satisfying as the fact -- excuse me, I'm sorry. As satisfying is the fact over the past year, we've enjoyed repeat or follow on business from numerous customers. People have expanded their business with us and taken us into other venues. This includes customers in automotive industries, in schools, in manufacturing and in the casinos and sports industries. Their satisfaction has translated into many of the customers, not only expanding their business with us but coming strong, strong advocates and references of our business solution to others within their industry. Looking forward, one of the best gauges of future growth for the business is the quality and visibility of our pipeline. We're also seeing significant growth trends when we look at our sales pipeline, which was about $90 million at the end of 2023. The mix of our pipeline has shifted meaningfully over the past year. We're now about 40% to 50% of that pipeline is customers that are outside of what was our primary target market, effectively expanding our initial target of about a $4.6 billion TAM from the sports and live entertainment industries into a much larger $40 billion TAM that we are now aggressively pursuing, particularly with referenceable customers in other spaces. Now that we have those quality anchor customers in each of those segments, who can attest to the value of our solution, we're accelerating our momentum into each of those segments and turning up the amplitude on the marketing and selling activities into those segments. At this point, I'm going to turn it over to Karen to take our investors in more detail through the financial results for the year.

Thanks, Peter. This has been an incredibly busy quarter and there are several financial highlights that I want to bring -- to speak to in more detail. First, let's talk about the continued growth in revenue generated from our SmartGateway, our platform operating segment. Revenue from the Platform segment was approximately $3.6 million for the year, which is an increase of 365% from last year. In the fourth quarter alone, revenue was $1.7 million, 7x the revenue recognized in Q4 of last year. The increase was fueled by strong customer acquisition activities and the continued growth of our subscription revenue. We also commenced a large-scale deployment with the customer, which contributed to our fourth quarter revenue and will continue to generate revenue in future quarters. We continue to support 2 selling models for our customers, being the traditional upfront model with ongoing service and our subscription model, which has been very well received by the sports and live entertainment markets. So far, we found that about 70% of our customers are opting for subscription arrangements. As our subscribers continue to pay over their contract terms, the associated annual recurring revenue will continue to build fueling growth and predictability in our revenue for future periods. These trends demonstrate the momentum that Peter spoke to and keep us optimistic for results for fiscal 2024. Xtract, our other operating segment, is the innovative team who continues to duly focus on supporting the internal platform development efforts while also developing AI-based solutions contracted through public sector agencies. Given the very significant demand for our platform products, this team's primary focus continues to be directed towards innovation and enhancement of our gateway portfolio and other adjacent product offerings. Accordingly, revenue from Xtract operating segment was about $514,000 for the year, which is down from $2.8 million from last year. Due to the unprecedented demand for our platform solutions, we expect that this operating segment will continue to support our primary business being our gateway solution. With the significant improvement in platform revenue, we continue to grow our customer base as evidenced by the increasing value of our contractual backlog, and total contract value signed agreements pending installation that collectively totaled about $14.9 million at the end of the fiscal year. At the end of the fiscal year, the company's backlog for contractual commitments grew to $4.5 million for the full -- for fully deployed systems, which is more than double our contractual backlog from 2022. At the same time, the mix of our contractual backlog has significantly changed. At the end of 2023, over 91% of our backlog came from the SmartGateway operating segment as compared to 59% last year. Along with our contractual backlog, we had an additional $10.4 million worth of signed agreements which are pending installation, the majority of which will be installed in the next 12 months, representing a 447% increase compared to the end of last year. Interestingly, our backlog is comprised of both new customers and repeat customers as well as a broad representation across market verticals that Peter referred to before and that we currently address. Both our contractual backlog and our side agreements pending installation represent revenue that will be recognized in future periods and are excellent indicators of our future revenue. Earlier this year, I talked about providing investors with some additional business metrics when the time is right to allow -- in order to allow investors to have a better understanding of our value drivers and to gauge our progress. Based on the traction and success that we're seeing, we expect that we'll be able to share certain business metrics around gross margin, units installed and other key metrics in upcoming quarters. Moving on to operating expenses. While the company remains focused on top line growth and continues to invest in targeted marketing activities to drive revenue, we're also working towards scaling our operations and continually improving our gross margins. As Peter mentioned at the beginning of this call, a key theme for fiscal 2023 was scale. This means growing our operations in an efficient manner as the company balances aggressive revenue growth with pragmatic investment into the business so that we can continue to support the needs of our customers. It's notable to point out that while the company achieved revenue growth of 365%, we were still able to keep our cash-based operating expenses relatively flat. In fact, if we remove the impact of the non-dilutive funding that we received in fiscal 2022, we actually reduced our operating costs by over 6%. As the company's revenue continues to grow, we expect to see a measured increase in operating expenses as we continue to invest in customer support and of course, R&D activities. However, based on the foundations that we made, we expect that the costs will be outpaced by the growth in revenue and in particular, the ongoing subscription revenue that has been growing quarter-over-quarter. Sales and marketing expenses were $2.8 million for the year, which is 42% higher than the same period last year as we continue to make investments in our sales and marketing teams, with a focus on go-to-market initiatives such as partner-related expansion and a broadening and spending on sales and marketing-related events. In future quarters, we expect sales and marketing will increase in response to an unprecedented market demand for our products. The company continues to invest in R&D activities to refine, improve and expand products -- our platform solutions based on our technology road map and feedback that we receive from our customers. R&D cost is excluding the impact of grant funding was $6.2 million, which is a decrease of about 19% relative to last year. This was primarily due to internal restructuring in the company over the last several quarters as we streamlined our R&D processes. We anticipate that R&D will remain at current levels or increase slightly as we continue to deliver new and innovative products to our customers. Personnel costs were $5.7 million for the year, up about 8% from last year. Most of this increase is related to continued investment in sales personnel to support our increasing base of customers throughout North America. As our customer base grows, we anticipate that additional headcount will be needed and expect that over the coming quarters, our headcount will increase by about 10% or 15% as our business operations adapt to meet the demands of our customers and to maintain our position as a technology leader in our industry. Finally, moving on to cash flow. During the year, the company had positive cash flow of $2.1 million compared to a cash outflow of $3.4 million last year. In part, this was due to the $13.4 million investment from MSG Sports that Peter alluded to earlier and which was made to support the continued growth of the company. I'm also encouraged to see a continued positive trend when looking at our cash used in operating activities, which decreased to $2.5 million in the fourth quarter and continuing the downward trajectory that we have now experienced for 4 quarters in a row. We plan to continue this trend in the coming quarters as we deploy more of our products to customers, which, in turn, will fuel the continued growth in our recurring revenue and slow down our cash burn. In summary, I'm very excited about our progress this year with record bookings that have translated to solid contractual backlog and ultimately into predictable growing revenue. As I've said before, we continue to focus on scaling the business with smart, sustainable growth and operational efficiencies. We're targeting to maintain current trends as we grow the business in a balanced manner. It's very exciting to be part of this journey at Xtract One, and I look forward to sharing many more milestones with investors in the coming months. And with that, Peter and I welcome any questions that investors may have at this time.

Great. Thanks, Karen. And as Karen mentioned, we are now moving into the Q&A portion of the presentation. We've received a number of questions from investors prior too. So let's get started right away. Our first question here is about recently announced growth plans. The question is, can you discuss more about the international expansion plan? And how this expansion may impact the company in the near term?

Well, thanks, Will. I always like the Q&A part of these presentations because we can get into the need of the business and talk more openly. I think as I discussed earlier, our growth plans to address this question, but let's kind of reiterate a few of those thoughts, okay. Investors should know that our strategy is to stay focused on the North American market, where we already have a ton of demand, a very strong sales funnel and kind of a base in and partners to support those customers. Going international just for the sake of going international has never been part of the business plan previously. There's lots of extra complexities in going international, very costly complexities that are involved in setting up operations in other country. Our approach to global expansion, how I've always been successful at doing this before is to go into different markets based on winning large accounts first. And then as I mentioned earlier, using them as an anchor, using them as a foundation on which you can build a business and that it essentially funds the business and the business expansion. In this respect, we have been and we'll continue to be very selective about the geographies we're going to serve and that we're going to expand into. I don't want to give the impression to our investors that they can expect us to enter into dozens of new markets or countries every month or every quarter, right? Or we're going to seek out every opportunity that comes our way. Like anything, we're going to qualify those opportunities and make that we're being very smart and very selective about the growth in order to meet kind of those filters on how we judge a quality business opportunity, make sure they're very cost effective and very are accretive -- sorry, to our growth plans and our profitability, particularly. So our investors should expect that as we enter new market, we'll do so in partnership with the right organizations. We'll do so based on anchor wins and anchor accounts, and that will then support our growth into those local markets. But I want to be very clear, too. We've barely scratched the service or fully tapped out in the North American market within the market verticals that we're now serving. And as I said earlier, that's about a $40 billion TAM locally and domestically that we can continue to monopolize on why we opportunistically grow our global footprint. I hope that provides a little bit more context to our listeners today, Will.

Great. Well, actually a follow-up to that. Investor noticed that the press release referenced the company has won 3 international contracts. There was also a reference to a $5.1 million contract. Can you provide some clarity whether that $5 million contract is a single contract? Or is it a total of all 3 contracts?

Karen?

Sure. I'm happy just to clarify that. The reference was to 1 customer who represented the USD 5.1 million. So it's the most -- as Peter mentioned before, it's the most substantial contract that the company has won in the company's history. And the customer is a large global entertainment company, and this is one of their largest locations. So we're very excited to be working with a world-class organization like this and strengthening our relationship with them. And we're hoping that this is the start of a very long and prosperous partnership going forward.

Thanks, Karen. We've got a technical question. Actually, several on the same subject came in from several investors, including the team over at Northland. Can you quantify your false positive rates and negative alarm rates?

Yes, interesting question, Will, and this has been a hot topic these days, throughput rates, alarm rates, things like this. I think there's an article drop today about that by one of the news organizations. It's a very interesting question. And we also have to be careful because it's kind of steeped in a little bit of false marketing and a misrepresentation of information. Now there's a lot of what I believe to be marketing out there that says 3,600 people per minute, 10x per hour, 10x throughput rates, under 5% false positives. Now independently, these numbers can be achievable. But what's being missed is how things work in the real world and how those different metrics affect each other. If you dial up the sensitivity on the technology, make sure you catch very small knives like us, that could affect your false positive rates and your throughput rates, very much depending on how the organization has set up their security operations or their concept of operations, their conops. Some organizations will have somebody alerts and swing back through and come through the system again. Others will take the individuals off to another area and do secondary screening there. All these things affect throughput rates, false positive rates and things like this. So we have to take the view in kind of totality. In general, we've had scenarios where we've run an event with a customer, and we've had 3000-plus people come through in an hour and a 1.1% false positive rate. The exact same system, the exact same place with exact same settings, 1 night later, 24 hours later, barely got 1,400 people through it in an hour and probably had about a 12% falls positive rate. The primary difference the demographics, one night young individuals going to a concert. The next night, I think it was like the 55th anniversary of the Beach Boys or something like that, and the crowd demographics were different. The number of canes and walkers and very large purses and things like that affected the outcomes. So our approach has always been to -- while we will highlight these numbers, we sit down with every customer and say, let's look at your venue, let's look at a bunch of different events and let's collate the data to find the sweet spot for you based on what weapons you want to catch, how -- what your security operations are, right? What your throughput requirements are, what the demographics are? Do you allow bags? You don't allow bags, those kinds of things and find the sweet spot for each customer so they can maximize the value out of our solution.