Nayax Ltd (NYAX) 2023 Q1 法說會逐字稿

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Nayax First Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call. (Operator Instructions) As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded.

I would now like to turn the call over to Ms. Virginea Stuart Gibson. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator, and everyone, for joining us today on this conference call.

With me on the call today are Yair Nechmad, Nayax's Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer; and Sagit Manor, Chief Financial Officer. Following management's prepared remarks, we will open the call for the question-and-answer session. Our press release and supplementary investor presentation are available on our Investor Relations website at ir.nayax.com.

As a reminder, during this call, we will be making forward-looking statements. All forward-looking statements on our call today are based on assumptions, and therefore, subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from those projected. We have no obligation to update these statements, except as required by law. You can read about these risks and uncertainties in our supplementary investor presentation released earlier today as well as our regulatory filings, which you can find on our IR website.

In addition, today's call will include a discussion of non-IFRS measures. Management believes non-IFRS results are useful in order to enhance our understanding and our ongoing performance. However, these measures should be considered as a supplement to and not as a substitute for IFRS financial measures. Reconciliations to the nearest IFRS measures can be found in our earnings press release and/or investor presentation issued earlier today. All key performance indicators are intended to evaluate our business and properly measure factors in the macroeconomic environment to guide and support our decision making. These key performance indicators may be calculated in a manner different from the industry standards.

And finally, please note that all figures in today's call will be reported in U.S. dollars, unless stated otherwise. Yair will start the call with key financial highlights and then provide a business outlook. Sagit will go through the details of financial results and discuss the financial outlook.

With that, I would like to turn the call over to Nayax's CEO, Yair Nechmad. Yair?

Thank you, Virginea, and thank you to everyone for joining us on the first quarter 2023 earnings conference call.

On today's call, I'm going to focus my comments on 2 areas. I'll briefly highlight key results in our excellent first quarter and provide an update outlook on the business. I'm pleased to say that we exceeded our first quarter expectations on both the top line and bottom line and continue to capture efficiencies across our global operations. This is a result of the investment in automation and infrastructure we made in 2022 to scale the Nayax business and from our disciplined focus on capital and expenses management as we communicated last quarter.

For the quarter, top line growth remained strong as we delivered revenue of $52.4 million and growth of 54% year-over-year that again exceeded our 35% annual growth target, driven primarily by our revenue growth initiatives. Recurring revenue grew 44% to represent 62% of our total revenue. First quarter adjusted EBITDA continued to show strong improvement. Our focused efforts to manage the business with greater cost discipline resulted in a $2.7 million improvement with adjusted EBITDA coming in at negative $600,000 compared to a negative $3.3 million in Q1 2022, an improvement of $1.9 million compared to Q4 2022. This ongoing improvement has been driven largely by our consistent revenue outperformance and higher efficiency capture across the business as we further automate and scale and with the diligence focused on moderating expenses.

In reviewing our excellent Q1 results, it demonstrates how our scalable platform and our capital management decisions are putting us well on track towards our long-term target of 30% adjusted EBITDA. Looking at Q1 2023 over Q1 2022, we've seen $18 million revenue increase and $2.7 million adjusted EBITDA improvement. This represents 14% of the growth cascading to the bottom line. With a significant improvement in adjusted EBITDA over the past 2 quarters, this outcome now give us a clear line of sight and confidence to reach profitability at an accelerated time line.

Last quarter, we provided initial guidance that adjusted EBITDA will reach breakeven in 2023. I'm excited to report that we now expect to reach adjusted EBITDA profitability in 2023. Sagit will provide more detail about our profitability outlook later on the call. But at a higher level, we remain committed to and have been executing our profitability plan. We expect that with an annual revenue growth target of at least 35% in addition to an improvement in hardware gross margin to mid-teens combined with relatively flat year-over-year operating expenses, these results will flow through to the bottom line, putting us on the test to profitability.

2 metrics that I'm particularly proud of and pay close attention to are our net retention rate, which measures our customer loyalty and our churn rate, which measures our customer satisfaction. We ended the quarter with an increase in our net retention rate of 141%, reflecting the high staff section and confidence our diverse customers placed on the Nayax end-to-end platform and solution. Our churn rate remained low at 3.8%.

Turning to our global footprint performance. In Q1, 39% of our revenue was driven from Europe, 38% from North America, 10% for Australia and 13% from rest of the world. We continue to see strong growth and demand for the Nayax solution across all these regions.

Finally, we reported gross margin of 34% for the quarter. This is a slight improvement from last quarter, which was 33%. I'm encouraged to see the modest improvement in hardware gross margin of 300 basis points this quarter compared to Q4 2022 as we previously communicated. Last quarter, we announced that we had raised hardware price in the mid-single digits, and we started seeing the benefit already in Q1 2023 with full impact to be seen as we continue in 2023. We are also continuing to find ways to reduce component costs through dual sourcing, and we are already seeing the benefit as we head into Q2 2023. We will see additional hardware gross margin improvement throughout the year. Sagit will provide more detail about our hardware margin outlook later on the call.

Before I wrap up, I wanted to share our thoughts on the remainder of the year. Let me start by saying that our business fundamentals remain strong, and our diversified business model and our momentum with our customers and solutions position us well for the large market opportunity ahead. We will continue to watch the macro environment closely. And as we have demonstrated, capital management is a key priority. We have the flexibility to act nimbly in a rapidly evolving macro environment to adapt our cost structure and prioritize strategic investments while executing on our key strategic initiatives.

To wrap up, Nayax is off a great start in 2023 with another set of strong financial results highlighted by delivering improved adjusted EBITDA ahead of the expectation and accelerating the path to profitability. As we look ahead to the rest of 2023, these results give us the confidence that we are tracking in line with the revenue guidance we gave for the full year and the visibility to raise our adjusted EBITDA guidance for reaching profitability in 2023. This reflects steady progress against our long-term growth aspiration.

With that, I will now turn the call over to Sagit to talk about our financial performance and provide an update on our 2023 guidance. Sagit?

Thank you, Yair, and Good morning, good evening, everyone.

The first quarter of this year continued the trends we saw in 2022 with strong top line growth and our commitment to deliver balanced growth with profitability in mind. You will clearly see this in our first quarter results. We delivered revenue of $52.4 million, which was a 54% increase year-over-year. This strong top line results, combined with our cost management execution during the quarter and the ongoing efficiencies gained from our investments in automation and scaling the business, resulted in a significant improvement to adjusted EBITDA of $2.7 million compared to prior-year quarter. We delivered an adjusted EBITDA of negative $600,000 compared to an adjusted EBITDA of negative $2.5 million in Q4 2022. With this significant progress and additional process, we're projecting for the remaining of the year, we now expect to be adjusted EBITDA profitable in 2023 instead of reaching breakeven. I will provide more details during my outlook discussion. The significant improvement during the quarter was mainly due to strong revenue growth and capital management with improved cost structure.

Now let's turn to some of the key factors that drove our strong first quarter results, starting with an overview of the revenue performance. We continue to see a strong increase in recurring revenue, which is an important growth indicator of our underlying business. As a reminder, recurring revenue is comprised of our SaaS subscription and payment processing fees. Recurring revenue for Q1 2023 grew 44% over Q1 2022 to reach a new high of $32 million in revenue and accounting for approximately 62% of our total revenue. As a reminder for those new to the Nayax revenue model, our 3 main revenue pillars are derived from point-of-sale or post devices, monthly SaaS subscription and payment processing fees. Excluding the impact of foreign exchange, revenue grew 60% over Q1 2022. However, revenue in Q1 was strong, contributing $20 million to our overall revenue.

Now let me turn to the highlights of our customer expansion and the growth of our managed and connected devices. These metrics are key indicators of the scale we are building in our business and our ability to execute against one of our strategic long-term growth pillars. Starting with our global and vigorous customer base, we again reported strong customer growth of 54% over the prior-year quarter as we expanded our customer base to 52,000 at the end of Q1. With the large market opportunity ahead of us that remains underpenetrated, customer expansion remain one of our key growth drivers and is an indicator of our successful execution in expanding internationally and entering key growth markets for cashless payment solutions as well as growing market share.

Turning to the growth of our devices, managed and connected devices showed healthy year-over-year growth of 39%, ending the quarter with almost 770,000 devices. We reported significant increase in transaction dollar value. In Q1, transaction dollar value grew 63%, reaching a new high of $796 million compared to $489 million in Q1 of 2022. This metric remains a key contributor to recurring revenue and recurring revenue gross margin, which was 48% in Q1 and mostly reflecting higher payment processing fees than SaaS revenue.

Turning to gross margin. Q1 gross margin was 34%, a slight improvement from 33% in Q4 2022 largely due to gradual benefit of hardware price increases that were put in effect in January, but not yet having the full positive impact that is expected for the remainder of the year. Similar to last quarter, gross margin was impacted by the higher mix of processing fees, which had exceptionally strong growth of 57% year-over-year in payment processing fees and has lower margins relative to SaaS revenue. I will have more to say about the direction of our hardware gross margin during my outlook discussion.

The significant improvement in the adjusted EBITDA results during the quarter was mainly due to strong revenue growth and improved cost structure as we continue to moderate our pace of expenses as communicated last quarter. As we have communicated previously, 2022 was the year of disciplined investment to drive future growth and support the scale we anticipate in the business long term. 2023 is the turning year on our path to profitability with continued focus on revenue growth with moderating expense increases while capturing greater efficiencies and productivity across our global operations from strategic investments in automation and enhanced infrastructure.

With that, total operating expenses of $22.7 million decreased 5% or $1.3 million from Q4 2022. On a percentage of revenue basis, operating expenses declined approximately 400 basis points to 43% from 47% in Q4 '22. This highlights the operating expense leverage across sales and marketing, R&D and G&A. Should there be a recession or a geopolitical development that impacts our business showing revenue growth below our planning assumptions for 2023 or beyond, we will, of course, adjust our spending plans.

Let me now discuss the impact of the macroeconomic environment as it pertains to the impact of the U.S. dollar in the first quarter. Since we last spoke on our earnings call in March, we have seen a strengthening of most currencies against the U.S. dollar, where we operate globally. Regarding revenue, we had a positive impact of $1 million in the quarter from foreign exchange rate fluctuation when compared to Q4 2022. We do not see any impact of foreign exchange rates on operating expenses.

Lastly, we ended Q1 with cash and cash equivalents of approximately $33 million, in line with last quarter. The cash balance is a direct result of our focus on managing cash prudently and by adapting to a better cost structure. Our outstanding debt balance at the end of the quarter was $24 million. We used approximately $4 million of cash during the quarter to fund the inventory in anticipation of stronger device demand in Q2.

Moving to our outlook for 2023. As a reminder, our 2023 guidance is based on what we are actually seeing in terms of behavior from our customers around the globe. And of course, it reflects what we know today about the secular shift in payments that continues to be strong tailwinds, our stronger market leadership and a robust demand from both our existing customers and the large and expanding new customers for our comprehensive product portfolio.

Today, we are reaffirming the revenue outlook provided on the last earnings call on March 1. For the full year 2023, we expect our revenue to be in the range of $235 million to $240 million, representing year-over-year growth of at least 35% as previously communicated. We are also reaffirming our hardware margins outlook and expect it to improve throughout the year to the mid-teens. As Yair mentioned, we are encouraged by the direction of hardware margins in Q1, and we expect to see ongoing improvements throughout the year for the following reason. First, we raised our hardware sales prices in the mid-single digits beginning of January this year. This will continue to have a positive impact throughout 2023. Also, we have made several changes to our products to accept more available components, allowing us to shift to dual component sourcing from single and more. We will continue to update the market on our hardware gross margins as we see developments play out.

Given our accelerated pace in moderating expenses and the ongoing efficiencies gained from our investment in scaling the business, we now expect operating expenses for the full year 2023 to be flat from the Q4 2022 annualized run rate. With the significant progress made on moderating expenses, particularly in this first quarter, a consistent revenue outperformance and the expectation for hardware gross margin improvement, we feel confident to raise our adjusted EBITDA guidance to be between $3 million to $7 million in 2023 instead of breakeven.

As for long-term outlook, we are reaffirming our outlook and remain confident about reaching these targets. We expect our revenue to continue to grow 35% year-over-year. Gross margin in the long term is expected to reach 50% by providing leasing options for IoT POS, growing SaaS revenue and payment processing fees from our core business and services offering through our growth engine initiatives. Our long-term adjusted EBITDA margin guidance is set around 30%.

To summarize, we delivered another quarter of strong financial and operational results. And in 2023, we will continue to focus on delivering strong revenue growth, improved operating expenses, driven by increased scale and automation efficiencies with a focus on achieving profitability.

I would now like to turn the call to the operator so that we can take your questions. Operator?

(Operator Instructions) The first question comes from Dominick Gabriele with Oppenheimer & Company.

Congrats on a really excellent revenue growth quarter. So if we just -- if we think about that as far as how fast the revenue growth is and it actually that year-over-year revenue growth accelerated in the first quarter versus the fourth quarter. And then we think about the guidance range of the $235 million to $240 million, I guess I would expect some moderation in that growth throughout the year. Could you just talk about why you would expect some of that moderation? And then I just have a few follow-ups, if you don't mind.

Dominick, thank you for the question. Go ahead, Yair.

I will take the first one. Sagit will continue. I think in short, we are in a position that we don't see a slowdown, and we want to be on the track that we committed. And I believe that if we will see a slowdown, it will be something that we can work with on it and protect our revenue. I think in this case, we don't see any slowdown, but we have to be very cautious regarding unknown and unforeseen macroeconomic. So this was what we see now is very strong growth. We believe it will continue. I think the update is there will be no later should be more during the year because the environment is not always macroeconomically clear to all of us. So we're very cautious around this.

And just to add to your year, yes, there's no moderation. We are on track with the guidance of at least 35% growth year-over-year on the revenue.

Okay. Great. And then is it really -- it seems like the profitability coming in sooner than expected, is that really due to the stronger revenue growth that you saw in the first quarter, in particular? Or is there anything on the expense side that you believe has changed? I don't believe it's on the expense side, but if you could talk about the dynamics of why the adjusted EBITDA is coming in better than expected, that would be really great, too.

Of course. So it's a combination of 3 and as we communicated all of last year without path to profitability, 3 main pillars. One is the revenue growth. And as long as we continue to grow at least 35%, we knew year-over-year or quarterly even over the quarter, we knew that will have a significant impact on the bottom line. In fact, if you look at Q1 '22 versus Q1 '23, we grew $18 million on the revenue and the adjusted EBITDA improved by $2.7 million, so 14% cascading to the bottom line, basically. So one is the growth of the revenue, that's for sure impacted. 2 is the gross margin, both on the hardware, where we're going to see additional even improvement as we've communicated, reaching gross margin on the hardware to the mid-teens and both on the fact that we've increased the selling price on the hardware. So both of that will improve the hardware gross margin as we've communicated.

And lastly, and it is also about the OpEx. So if you look at quarter-over-quarter, Q1 of 2023 had $22.7 million OpEx, including everything, compared to $24 million in Q4 of 2022. So all of these combinations cascaded to the bottom line and will show -- that's where we actually said that we are positively updating our guidance from Q4 annual run rate of 2022 plus 5%. That's what we've initially expected that the OpEx in 2023 will be. Now we're talking about flat year-over-year. So I hope I answered you, it's a combination of, yes, the revenue, yes, the gross margin and also the OpEx.

Right. No, really great execution. I just -- one more, if I may. The average transaction size was 194, I believe, in the quarter, and that's up pretty significantly versus the average of 2022's roughly 182 average ticket transaction size. Could you just talk about what you're seeing that's creating such an uplift even from the fourth quarter to that 194?

I think Dominick, I'll start and maybe Sagit will give more color on this. But Nayax is operating in more than 42 verticals. One of the verticals that taking more place in some areas is the electrical vehicle chargers and the car wash and the transaction size is higher. So it's basically on the growth of verticals coming in, not to decrease the importance of vending. Vending is also -- so the operators are also increasing their prices and not in such a high rate, but they're also reacting to the inflation. So basically, it's a vertical combination and with slightly higher pricing that the operators are posing to the consumer.

And the next question comes from Trevor Williams with Jefferies.

Yair, I wanted to ask on CoinBridge. It looked like there were a couple of call-outs in the presentation. If you wouldn't mind just giving us an update there? And then how should we be thinking about making kind of markers of progress over the next 6 to 12 months and then when we might start to get more visibility into P&L contribution?

CoinBridge is not yet live. We want to make it live very quickly in Israel first to make sure that everything is in the right place. We are very encouraged regarding the future of CoinBridge and that we do bring in from a customer point of view that are in line to work to onboard with the CoinBridge. We have a full line of Tier 1 customers that are working for this coming together. We got a license also in the U.S. of issuing with DISCOVER. So currently now, we are covering Israel, Europe, U.K. and the U.S. So we have a full line of customers all over the countries. But first, I have to admit, I want to see this happening in Israel to see that everything is correctly advanced. And then we'll scale it towards the end of the year to outside of Israel.

Okay. Great. That's helpful. And then Sagit, on gross margins, it was great to see the hardware gross margins improving sequentially. I know you were calling out the mix of revenue within the recurring piece with the payment processing revenues growing faster this quarter. Just as we put all of those 3 pieces together, hardware gross margins continuing to improve, how should we think of the consolidated gross margin for the full year, at least with what's embedded in your full year outlook, which is, I guess, a question around how you're expecting the mix of payments and software revenue to progress over the course of the year? And then just any help on kind of cadence of gross margins at a consolidated level for 2Q and beyond.

So thank you for your question, Trevor. And as with guidance, we've particularly provided guidance on the hardware gross margin. We have not provided guidance on the recurring revenue margin. So I can speak on the -- what we see in Q1 and what we are expecting in the remaining of 2023 from the mix. So we talked about around 40% of hardware revenue. We've spoken about 60%-ish on the recurring revenue. Indeed, if you look at 2022, you will see that processing revenue grew twice as much faster than services. And this is the pace, as you can see in Q1 that we're seeing we think here also. So with that taken into account, you can figure out 2023. Both recurring revenue from a processing perspective as well as from services stayed more or less in the same range of gross margin. And I hope I answered your question.

Yes. No, that makes perfect sense.

(Operator Instructions) The next question comes from Mark Feldman with William Blair.

So more a general question. Could you go over the key components that drive the strong NRR that you guys are seeing and continue to see?

Yair, would you like to talk about the net retention rate?

I'm not sure that I have the question correctly provide the answer. Can you repeat the question?

Yes. Just want to see what you guys think the key components that drive the strong 141% NRR is? And then I guess also that low revenue churn that you have?

Okay. So this is a model that I think we are mastering in the last 20 years. This is how we became to be a good stock until 2021 before we went to the IPO. We strongly believe that the way that we are operating in terms of getting customers we currently small nano merchants and delivering them a full solution, which is the strategy of Nayax to have a full solution all in one, create a lot of higher satisfaction from customer point of view. While we know that we're taking a small part of the customer full line of operation of 5 machine, 10 machine at the beginning. We also know that we carry around 20 to 40 to 50 machines. This strategy is delivering us the trajectory into the future to know that how we're going to grow the business because it's yearly the same customer is buying more and more units.

Consumers driving the demand on all the usage from cash to cashless. So once we look with the customer, we continue to buy more and more units to cover all these suits, we're not starting with a full coverage of the customer fleet. We are starting with the 5 machine and is growing. We have the cohort that presents that shows how it is happening so customers that 4 years ago was started having more than 4 or 5 times recurring revenue mix. This is the model that we've been operating for many, many years, and it's still a lot to kicking the user market is huge, and we know how to capture this market and we demonstrated this with more than 50% growth year-over-year because of this excellence in operation delivering and I think we are the leader in the global world that doing this kind of operating for noting the market.

Great. And then I guess another question is now that we're out of the 4G EMV upgrade cycles in the U.S., can you talk about how the competitive environment is looking there? I know, obviously, the U.S. is a big focus for Nayax. And then additionally, any headwinds you may be facing as you're lapping some of those upgrade cycle wins this year or, I guess, going into '24 as well, too?

I can say that U.S. is important. It's 40% of our business, but we have also the rest of the world, Europe, as well, U.K. and rest of the world, Australia. There are some major initiatives that we are doing to increase the consumer behavior within the unattended business to increase the revenue for the customer. We have a lot of novelty that we want to present. And recovering, as I said before, 40 verticals, 42 verticals. And these verticals are going in a different pace in different territories. I don't see a slowdown in the U.S.

On top of it, we are reaching to the Tier 1 customers. We're doing this country today also for acquisition. We're partnering with the Tier 1 players with support marks. And I don't see a reason why there will be any slowdown and the driver of the 4G or any changes or the EMV that was imposed in the U.S. market. I don't think that it will slow down amounts in the U.S. There's a lot of what we call, call it, dry powder that we have to implement in the market, and we believe that we are in a strong position to scale up more and faster than anyone else.

Great. And if I could just sneak in one more on the outlook for EBITDA profitability for the full year, how does that impact the outlook for free cash flow? I know in the last call, it was mentioned that company would have -- would be free cash flow positive in 2024? Does the earlier than anticipated EBITDA profitability have any impact on timing of cash flow?

The cash flow positive still tend to be in 2024, and we will provide more information about it as needed during 2023. And keep in mind, I was talking about cash flow positive in 2024, we've never discussed free cash flow. So just to make sure we're all on the same page.

This concludes the question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Yair Nechmad for any closing remarks. Yair, Your line is now open.

Sorry. Thank you.

Before ending the call, I wanted to point out that Nayax would be displaying its leading comprehensive solution for vending operators at The NAMA Show in Atlanta this week. And if you're in the area, please stop by and our booth to see our innovative solutions.

Thank you very much for everyone for joining us on the call. I'd like to thank our teammates for their endless dedication to our customers and partners and for their continued commitment to making Nayax a great integrated technical company. Thank you very much, all.

This concludes today's conference call. You may disconnect your lines. Thank you for participating, and have a pleasant day.