Sangoma Technologies Corp (SANG) 2021 Q1 法說會逐字稿

Thank you for standing by. This is the conference operator. Welcome to the Sangoma Technologies First Quarter Fiscal 2021 Results Conference Call.

(Operator Instructions) And the conference is being recorded.

I would now like to turn the conference over to Mr. David Moore, Chief Financial Officer. Please go ahead, Mr. Moore.

Thank you, operator. Hello, everyone, and welcome to Sangoma's first investment call of our fiscal year 2021.

We're recording the call and we'll make it available on our website tomorrow for anybody who is unable to join us today.

I'm here with Bill Wignall, Sangoma's President and Chief Executive Officer; and John Tobia, EVP, Corporate Development, to take you through the results of the first quarter of our fiscal year 2021, which started on July 1.

We will discuss the press release that was distributed this afternoon, together with the company's unaudited interim financial statements and Q1 MD&A, which are available both on SEDAR and our website at www.sangoma.com.

As a reminder, Sangoma reports under international Financial Reporting Standards, IFRS. And during the call, we may refer to a couple of terms such as operating income, EBITDA and adjusted cash flow that are not IFRS measures, but which are defined in our MD&A.

Also, please note that unless otherwise stated, all reference to dollars are to the Canadian dollar.

While this is same as in past years, the growing percentage of costs and debt that's denominated in U.S. dollars has caused us to change the functional currency of the holding company and one of its subsidiaries to U.S. dollars.

This means that, as described in note 2 of our financial statements, from 1 July of this year, all of the company's transactions are recorded in U.S. dollars and then converted to Canadian dollars for our quarterly reporting and filings.

Before we start, I'd like to remind you that the statements made during the course of this call that are not purely historical and which are, therefore, forward-looking statements regarding the company or management's intentions, hopes, beliefs, expectations and strategies for the future. Because such statements deal with future events, they are subject to various risks and uncertainties, and actual results might differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements.

Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements are discussed in the accompanying MD&A, our annual information form and in the company's annual audited financial statements that are posted on SEDAR.

With that, I'll hand the call over to Bill.

Thanks, David. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today.

I've consciously kept my prepared remarks succinct because I provided a very extensive update on our year-end call just 3 weeks ago. As I mentioned then, this could be a rather confusing time in Sangoma's fiscal year for new investors.

That's because of the timing of our Q4 results in October followed so soon afterwards by our Q1 results in November, just a few weeks later.

So if there is anyone on today's call that has not joined us before, I would encourage you to please listen to the October 20 recording of our fiscal 2020 results from our website as that will give you a much fuller picture of Sangoma, then you will get purely from my remarks here today.

Okay. Back to the shorter call for today. I have structured my prepared remarks into 3 sections. I will start by taking you through our Q1 results. Second, I will share a brief update on Sangoma's strategy. And finally, I will touch on our forward guidance for fiscal '21. You'll note that there's no additional year-to-date section given we're here to discuss Q1 results. As always, I'll then wrap up with a brief summary and turn the call back over to David for our typical open Q&A session.

With that, let's move to section 1 on Q1.

Sales for the quarter ended September 30 were $35.0 million, up 25% from the $28 million in the first quarter of fiscal '20.

The increase in sales resulted from the continued growth and compounding of the company's services business, where the recurring revenue was generated. The acquisition of VoIP Innovations are partly offset by the slightly softer demand for onetime product sales. This modest softening in onetime product revenue was mostly due to the ongoing impact of COVID-19 as it impacts demand for these products, which are CapEx-type decisions for our customers and makes it more challenging for Sangoma's channel partners to get physically on-site to do installations.

More importantly for us is our focus on the continuing growth of our services business, which we have worked so hard to build the past several years. Overall, services revenue as a percentage of total sales continues to increase at Sangoma and hit 56% in the first quarter this year.

Gross profit for the first fiscal quarter of fiscal '21 was $23.2 million, 33% higher than the $17.5 million realized in the first quarter of last year. Gross margin for the quarter was 66% of revenue, 4% higher than the 62% in the same quarter a year ago.

This results from the steady increase in the percentage of revenue from services as well as the positive impact of the VI acquisition on margin.

Operating expenses for the first quarter this year were $19.6 million versus $15.9 million in the same period last year. This was primarily driven by the additional OpEx that came with the acquisition of VI, our more general investment in R&D and marketing and sales to drive growth, all partly offset by COVID-related cost controls.

EBITDA was a record $6.7 million in the first quarter, 83% or $3 million above last year when Sangoma generated $3.7 million in Q1.

This level of EBITDA is equivalent to about 19% of sales and as many of you will realize, is slightly higher than our expectation for fiscal '21, as you can glean from our guidance for the year.

This 19% figure, as mentioned, is partly the result of COVID-related cost containment. So as customer demand continues to recover gradually as we anticipate it should. We will begin to carefully open up spending again slowly but surely. This prudent gradual relaxation of the cost controls should bring EBITDA back closer to the range expected in our fiscal '21 guidance to around 17% of revenue.

Net interest for the quarter ended September 30 was $0.5 million compared to $0.4 million in the same period last year. This slight increase is due to the additional debt taken on to finance the VI acquisition, partly offset by the reduction in interest rates, as shared in prior calls, through the wise restructuring of our debt using an interest rate swap during fiscal '20.

Net income for the first quarter was $2.2 million compared to $0.9 million for the equivalent quarter last year.

And for the final portion of my commentary on first quarter results, I'd like to briefly touch on a couple of highlights from our balance sheet and cash flow. Let's start with the balance sheet, given there are significant changes there in Q1.

Obviously, the biggest change was the result of our equity raise. As you will recall, shortly after fiscal year-end, in July, we raised the net $75 million from the sale of approximately 35 million shares. This was done in a bought deal by Core-Mark, Acumen, PI, CIBC, Infor, Beacon and Canaccord Genuity. The offering was oversubscribed and earmarked for possible future acquisitions, debt repayment and general corporate purposes.

Accordingly, during Q1, we did indeed repay the operating lines that we drawn in April as the COVID outbreak was hitting. Back then, it wasn't quite clear what the impact of the pandemic might be and whether there would be a liquidity crunch. So we drew on those lines simply to ensure the company was ready for anything. Once it was a bit more clear that the impact on Sangoma was manageable, we repaid the $10 million in full and those 2 operating lines remain fully available to us at any time.

In addition to the more impactful topic of our capital raise, I'd like to now cover briefly to less significant balance sheet items of inventory and receivables.

Last year, during fiscal '20, we undertook a significant supply chain project to consolidate some contract manufacturing, as our services business began to dominate over our product segment. That project involved moving some manufacturing and warehousing to simplify and reduce costs, as I covered in a couple of our quarterly calls together.

These changes caused some temporary increase in inventory levels as we rebuilt buffer stock. We explained at the time that we expected this to stabilize around fiscal year-end.

While we exited fiscal '20 with about $12.6 million in inventory, and you now see that in Q1, our level of inventory was down just a bit from that figure at under $12 million, a level that should become fairly consistent over the next few quarters going forward.

As I indicated in my Q4 commentary, we've been watching receivables carefully the past couple of quarters because some folks feared AR could become a higher risk for companies generally, but customers were unable to pay or perhaps significantly delay payments due to COVID-19.

We have not seen this to any material degree amongst the Sangoma customer base, so that's good. And in fact, overall receivables declined slightly from Q4.

This is partly a result of the growing traction of revenue that comes from services, where more customers pay via fairly automatic repeatable methods each month rather than in our product business where many customers buy on terms.

Nevertheless, we remain watchful and continue to maintain a higher AR provision than we would have done pre-pandemic, just in case. As of December 31, we had a receivables provision at about $350,000, and it's now around $600,000, just to be careful.

And finally, for a few remarks on cash flow.

In Q1, we generated a solid adjusted cash flow from operations of $3.9 million, about $1 million above last year's first quarter. This method -- measure of adjusted cash flow excludes the impact of acquisitions, financing and other nonoperating anomalies. For the first quarter, this level of adjusted cash flow was around 60% of EBITDA, a little lower than we average, primarily because our annual tax bill now approaching $2 million per year with growing profitability was paid in the quarter. It is quite normal for Sangoma's conversion of EBITDA to operating cash flow to fluctuate somewhat from quarter-to-quarter as you've seen historically. And with that cash flow from operations, together with our starting cash position, the equity raise and our repayment of the operating lines, Sangoma ended the quarter with almost $94 million on hand, positioning us very well to continue our growth trajectory in fiscal '21. This results in working capital of $84 million, and of course, we've continued to make all principal and interest payments, comfortably meeting all debt covenant ratios.

This brings my comments on Q1 financial results to a close, and I'll now move to our section on strategy. In this section today, I plan to cover 3 topics for you: a short COVID update; a refresher on our customer or market-facing corporate strategy; and finally, a few remarks on M&A.

So let's start with the COVID update. While I've not plan to discuss this today, to be honest, given the lengthy treatment I gave it in our call just 3 weeks ago, I've actually had e-mails from 2 new investors asking me to do so. My compromise is that I will discuss COVID and Sangoma's response in a much bridged version than I did on our last call together so as not to duplicate things too much. Again, for those of you unable to attend the year-end call just a few weeks back, may I suggest you listen to the replay on our website, if you'd like more details on this topic.

On that call, I discussed what we've been referring to as the 3 phases of COVID impact: First, on supply chain; than on internal day-to-day operations; and finally on demand. I will not repeat that explanation today. Instead, I will focus solely on the reasons that we believe strongly, Sangoma is well positioned to withstand this COVID pandemic and its impact on the global economy. Those reasons evolve a lengthy list, one which includes the following key points. We have proven we can operate in a business as normal manner in spite of COVID. We have transitioned to a work-from-home model ahead of government requirements to do so and have been operating seamlessly since then. We have a long track record of adapting very successfully at Sangoma, whether it be transitioning from a single-product company to a full portfolio, from hardware to software, from software to services or from a domestic company to a global one. Your company is flexible and has the management depth to navigate this one, too. We have a very large and diversified customer base. We have a broad portfolio of products that appeal to many different user needs from connectivity to premise-based UC to cloud, especially important these days. An ever-present focus on the customer that enables us to respond quickly with empathy towards our clients. Sangoma's supply chain and our operations team continued to build and ship around the world to fulfill all customer orders, just as we've always done. Ongoing investment in innovation and an ability to reprioritize road maps to quickly launch new products, including those in demand during this crisis, such as video meeting services. And last but certainly not least, our proven financial strength, such as consistently growing our top line over many years, generating over half of our sales in services revenue, which is more insulated from economic shock. Very healthy profitability, producing over $6 million in EBITDA these past 2 quarters, strongly cash flow positive with over $10 million in adjusted operating cash flow during the 2 COVID impacted quarters and a well-capitalized balance sheet with over $90 million in cash to act on opportunities that we feel are a good strategic fit.

For all these reasons, both financial and strategic, we believe strongly that Sangoma is unusually well positioned to weather the ongoing COVID storm.

Second, in today's strategy section, I will cover our customer-facing corporate positioning and its competitive differentiation, one that we described using the phrase, communications as a service, or CaaS, building on the SaaS terminology. This is the second call with shareholders in which we've referred to this term as we seek to introduce the concept to our investors. For us, CaaS is an overarching umbrella of cloud communications with a number of applications or individual cloud services under it. At Sangoma, cloud communications does not equal UCaaS. Sure, the applications under this umbrella, of course, include UCaaS for voice. But CaaS also incorporate each trunking as a service or TaaS as well as CPaaS and video meetings as a service and collaboration as a service, et cetera. Sangoma's differentiated strategy is to offer all of these capabilities from a single cloud provider, us, integrated elegantly with one gooey, single sign-on and a consistent user experience. We don't believe most normal companies want 5 different tools from 5 different vendors, such as video meetings from Zoom, or voice from Ring or CPaaS from Twilio or collaboration from Slack, et cetera.

Sure, if you're a Fortune 100 company with enormous IT departments capable of integrating 5 different tools on your own, maybe that's practical. But in our view and that of our customers, it's not practical for most companies and at Sangoma, we're indeed focused on most companies, not the biggest 100 in the world. This is where Sangoma is headed.

We have UCaaS tasks, video meetings as a service, CPaaS, Fax as a Service, et cetera, all under the CaaS umbrella. We host these cloud services in our data centers, enabling us to provide monthly subscriptions for customers who prefer a cloud-based service. It's easier for them versus an on-premise model. It costs less, requires less distraction from the core business of running a courier or a florist business. Their software is always up to date, lessening the risks of security breaches and such things. This strategy commenced our rapidly growing services business, which you are now very familiar with and which has proven so successful. In fact, if you look back over the past few years, the trends are actually pretty amazing. In fiscal '18, we were generating about $5 million per quarter in services. In fiscal '19, that grew to about $10 million per quarter. Last year, it had expanded to about $15 million per quarter. And now in fiscal '21, you see we are hitting almost $20 million per quarter in services revenue, quite an impressive trend.

Finally, I'd like to draw your attention to a modest change we've started in today's MD&A. In the upfront section of that document, the large one entitled description of the business, we have now rewritten it to capture the framework of a CaaS company. That section had not been updated for some time. And in our view was now too tilted towards our more mature product portfolio rather than our newer growing services business. For those investors who may be interested, we'd encourage you to go through this new section of our MD&A to help familiarize yourself with the CaaS concepts.

And now for the final third portion of my remarks on strategy, I'd like to share a few comments on M&A.

Many of you will have heard me say that Sangoma employs 2 approaches to scaling. One is organic growth and the other is prudent acquisitions to complement and accelerate that growth. We use these acquisitions either to get needed technology or get it faster than we'd be able to do in-house or to secure new customer segments or to access new paths to win such customers. Sometimes an acquisition gives us two or all three of those strategic attributes. We plan to continue on this path via our mix of organic growth and M&A while balancing growth and the investments that drive it, with a desire for reasonable profitability and the financial stability that provides. As you have seen, we've used a mixture of debt and equity to accomplish this. And after each acquisition, we've begun to pay down debt in order to reduce our debt-to-EBITDA ratio and advance up the next opportunity. This, too, will continue.

As mentioned earlier, Sangoma raised approximately $80 million in our July equity raise, providing us over $75 million of net proceeds. That has left us with over $90 million of cash on our balance sheet at the end of Q1 and has put your company in a very strong position to fund future acquisitions as well as enabling future debt payments and general corporate usage. We are actively engaged in the M&A activity. And while I'm not in a position to be able to share additional information with you today, I just wanted to reiterate that we're confident Sangoma will put the money that many of you folks on this call have entrusted us with to very good use.

Finally, before I leave my update on strategy, I just wanted to share a bit of information about the escrows and equity lockups associated with the VI acquisition since a few of you have been asking.

As we explained at the time of that deal, there was an escrow set up to cover some telecom taxes that Sangoma had identified at the time. All of these back taxes have now been paid and closed off with the U.S. Tax and Regulatory Agency and at 0 cost to single. So the remaining balance of this escrow will be released to the sellers of VI this quarter.

Also, the shares that the VI owners received as part of the consideration paid, became free trading last month in October. I'm pleased to confirm that all of those shares were sold last week so that these shareholders have no ongoing ownership in Sangoma, removing any concern that some of you had regarding the possible overhang on share price.

That concludes my comments on Sangoma's strategy, and I'll move on to forward guidance.

On the last call, I shared our guidance for fiscal '21. That was for revenue of between $143 million and $147 million and for EBITDA of between $24 million and $26 million. While many companies are not providing forward projections and the pandemic continues to be an evolving concern for everyone, Sangoma was confident enough in our business to continue to new issuing guidance. We assess the expected growth in our services business, the FX rate outlook, trends in Europe, Asia, North America and CALA, likely GDP growth, the COVID-19 pandemic, the ongoing decline of PSTN networks on our product sales.

You have now seen our fiscal '21 results for this first quarter and heard me describe today some color around those results. We are pleased with your company's performance in Q1 this year, and hence, we remain comfortable with the guidance for fiscal '21 issued at the time we released fiscal '20 results.

And with that, I'd now like to bring my short and prepared remarks to a close with a quick summary. Sangoma has grown from a very small nano cap company with about $10 million in sales to a strong growing business with $140 million in revenue, a level we fully expect to continue adding on to and a market cap of over $300 million.

We have demonstrated proven top line growth over an extended period, solid and expanding EBITDA, an increase in our services business, where the recurring revenue is generated to over 50% of sales, positive cash flow and an ability to cope with COVID headwinds.

All in all, our recent acquisitions are bearing fruit as expected. Share price has been strengthening, albeit more slowly than I would like. We are cashed up on our balance sheet and we are comfortable enough to provide guidance in spite of the worst -- one of the worst economic disasters in our lives. We feel we are well positioned for a number of conceivable scenarios, including possible future acquisitions and we plan to put the money that you invested in Sangoma to very good use during fiscal '21.

Finally, before I close off my remarks, just a reminder that we have our Annual General Meeting coming up in a few weeks. It will take place on December 17. But this year, in order to ensure the safety of our shareholders and the Sangoma team, we have decided to have a hybrid meeting. We will hold the meeting in our boardroom as we have in the past.

However, to comply with COVID requirements and health department recommendations, this year, we will also broadcast it virtually in parallel at the same time. We simply do not have space here in the Sangoma offices or boardroom to provide adequate social distancing, if many of you were to attend in person. We will be issuing the circular shortly with all of the details, but I just wanted to take a moment on this quarterly call to request 2 things when we're all together.

First, that you please vote by proxy in advance this year. And second, to request that you also please join our AGM remotely, not in person, just for everyone's safety. You will be able to dial-in, but you can listen to the formal matters and then participate in our regular Q&A afterwards, but you won't be able to vote virtually by phone in real time, and thus, the request that you vote by proxy ahead of time.

We hope you understand. We apologize for the inconvenience this year, since we always like seeing shareholders at our AGMs, which were getting larger and more crowded over recent years, but this is the prudent approach during the second wave of COVID.

With that, I'll turn the call back over to David for questions.

Thank you, Bill. To make sure everyone knows how to ask questions, I'll ask the operator to go over the instructions. Operator, we're ready to take questions now.

(Operator Instructions) The first question comes from Nick Corcoran from Acumen Capital Partners.

Congratulations on the strong quarter.

Just my first question has to do with product sales. I think in your prepared remarks, you said that they were softer due to your channel partners not being able to go on-site to COVID-19. Have you seen any improvements subsequent to quarter end?

Not to an extent that I would describe as material, Nick. To be completely candid with you, I kind of expected we might, but that was on the basis that COVID would continue on the trajectory it was a couple of months ago. And as we said together, 3 weeks back on the last call, it looks like it's actually gone the other way. So if anything, I think people have retrenched a little bit and those that were returning to the office, maybe have stopped going back to any further degree. Some people seem to have called people back. So I wouldn't say it's now easier to get on customer sites than it was a month ago, no.

And then a related question would be, do you see any potential for product sales to see any catch-up once the situation of COVID normalizes and people kind of return to normal?

Yes, for sure. Whatever the impact of COVID is, will eventually subside. And I would fully expect whatever that negative impact has been to disappear.

The way we think about it internally is there are 3 quite independent influences on product sales right now.

One is the long-term migration away from the PSTN to IP-based or packet networks. Two is the more recent but gradual and consistent trend from premise to cloud. And third is the COVID impact you asked about.

So those 3 independent variables are hard to forecast with any precision and to know whether removing the COVID impact will lead to a couple of points up in product sales or whether it will add a couple of points, but the migration to cloud will pull it down by a point, and it's just very hard to know. I would just say that product sales are not the focus of the future. We know the growth there is GDP at best and whether it's up 4 points or down 1 or up 3 or flat, it isn't the biggest deal for us. We do what we can to maintain that business and grow it a bit, but the drivers of the business are the services line, and that's where most of the company is focused right now.

Great. And then just thinking about the full year, you said your margins will go back down to, I think, you said 17%. How much of that is the services bring your margins up versus cost control? And how should we think about that in Q1?

Well, as I said, in Q1, I think the biggest driver was the cost containment that we started a quarter or 2 back as COVID was hitting.

The reason I said that is the 17% versus 19% is obviously a discussion about EBITDA margins. The question of product versus services mix is really a factor which affects gross margin, not EBITDA margin. So of course, that leads to an impact on EBITDA for obvious reasons. But they're very different. Long term, as you've seen services go from 0% to 20% to 40% to 50% and now 56%, we do see that trend continuing as more of the revenue is generated in services, which have higher gross margin in general, not in every case, but as a generalization then product, we should see some benefit to gross margin, which, of course, will then fall through to EBITDA.

But the point I was really commenting on in my narrative was, we made a pretty conscious decision a couple of quarters ago to be careful with spending. We plan to hire quite a lot to support growth, and we slowed that down. We put a salary freeze in place. We slowed down marketing. Travel was slowing and then stopped all on its own. And my comment was really about that. We do not choose to do anything to accelerate product trends. We're trying to maintain them, grow them a little bit, but we're not going to overinvest there. And so gross margin will tick up as services grows. But we will loosen the purse strings a bit to spend more on R&D and marketing and sales, and we just didn't want you guys to see the results from Q1, update your models. Everybody goes and adds 2 points to EBITDA margin. And the next quarter, it's back down to 17% and you say "Oh, why didn't you say something?" So that's really what I was commenting on, not the gross margin line.

(Operator Instructions)

The next question comes from David Kwan from PI Financial.

I guess, getting back to Nick's comment about the spending and the margins. When I look at the MD&A, can you kind of talk about when the crisis starts to subside here, that's when you look to increase your spending. But I think, Bill, in your commentary, you kind of talked more about increasing your spend as customer demand picks up. Given, I think, theoretically, you could possibly see customer demand improve despite the crisis kind of staying where it is or even getting worse here. What's really -- I guess, are you focusing on more in terms of when you would start to maybe increase some of these investments?

Yes. I guess I would encourage you, David, not to tease those apart quite so finely as you've done there. My point was really meant to say, we think that as COVID is understood and the world adapts to it and has adjusted to whatever extent we can, and we kind of see the impact, we will be able to begin making decisions that allow us to spend a bit more on OpEx. And we're feeling that way now. We haven't really done a whole lot yet, but we're starting to. It will be gradual. We're not going to go from OpEx up 6 months ago -- OpEx now to OpEx of 6 months ago in a week. It'll be gradually phased in, we'll monitor the impact, see how COVID's doing over the course of colder months.

But we're not waiting for some particular metric if that's kind of what you're asking. Cases have to drop below x or demand has to grow by Y percent. We feel like we kind of understand the impact COVID has had. We've managed to adjust to it. The growth is still very solid. Gross margins are good. EBITDA is healthy. We're going to loosen up a little bit from where we were over the last quarter or 2. And it will be gradual. For us, it's not really different when I say the impact of COVID starts to decline a bit or demand starts to pick up a bit, we kind of think of them together.

Okay. No, that's helpful. I guess just given the surge in cases, obviously here in North America and abroad. It seems like things are kind of heading in the wrong direction. So wondering, given that, whether you would still look to increase that spend or whether that the timing as it relates to that would might get pushed out another quarter or 2?

Yes. It could easily be a quarter, not 2. I don't think, David, we're going to start a little bit and might not even notice whatever that would be in November and then a little bit more in December. It's not going to be this step function, where we take 2% of revenue and added OpEx and 19% become 17%. And oh my gosh, then what a big surprise. The second wave got worse as the weather got colder and where we ever stupid. It's much more gradual.

I was really just trying to caution you guys away from looking at Q1 results, seeing 19% and saying, okay, that's the way to build the model going forward. That's all.

No. That's definitely helpful. I guess, like if you were to generate, I think, roughly 17% margins this quarter, that would have translated into spending, I think, of roughly $0.75 million.

Can you maybe talk about where you would spend that money? I know you kind of talked about G&A, sales and market R&D. But is there anything a priority amongst kind of the 3 line items in particular?

Yes. I mean I can make 2 comments, I guess. The first one is, we don't really use the phrase SG&A. I'm not going to understand it, of course. We reported in IFRS. And frankly, even before companies started using IFRS. I've always preferred those 3 buckets. I feel like SG&A lump things together that are really quite independent investments, thinking about marketing and sales separate from R&D is really important to us. Those are the 2 drivers of growth in tech companies.

And most of the investment in R&D and marketing and sales is people, right? It's not a fixed asset business. We don't build another factory or buy another piece of equipment or whatever.

CapEx is modest, this investment in capacity and data centers to support cloud services. So what we really mean is, could we add another person or 10. Could we release salary freezes over time. And secondly, I was going to say -- I said to make 2 comments. The other 1 is discretionary spending in the marketing area, right? Marketing is 1 of the first places that gets cut back when companies are worried about demand.

The other one we would normally talk about is travel, but that thing to thrust upon us right now rather than us choosing to reduce it. If we could travel more, we would be being in front of customers is really helpful for us.

But at Sangoma, I think we will slowly start investing more back into marketing as well. And I don't really want to get more granular than that, but those are the 2 pieces of an answer that I think makes sense at this point anyway.

R&D and marketing and sales, which really means people and a bit more on marketing programs, Dave.

That's helpful. And last question, just on the services revenue, saw a stronger move up sequentially this quarter versus last quarter. Obviously, last quarter, mitigated a bit by COVID.

How much of that was driven by new customer additions versus just expansion with existing customers?

In general, although, of course, in any 1 narrowly defined period, looking at a week or a month, this may not apply, but over a reasonable period of time much more of our growth comes from new customer wins than it does expansion from existing customers.

The next question comes from Gabriel Leung from Beacon Securities Limited.

A couple of questions. I wanted to ask, Bill. First, I kind of want to get your thoughts around -- the thoughts around growth and profitability. As you mentioned, right now, Q1, I guess, you put up some pretty good EBITDA margins because the cost containment you're looking for the right time to accelerate investments within the operating base to support further growth. But if I sort of look at the -- if I look at the services line, in particular, even at these contained operating expenses, you're still growing quite sharply. I think organically, you're probably up 20% plus on the services side. So I just wanted to get your thoughts around, if you were to knock EBITDA margins down by a couple of points, what sort of growth rates are you trying to target at the higher level spending?

Yes, I'm going to decline that one, buddy. For 2 reasons. One, I feel like it's going beyond guidance and guidance is already something that most companies aren't doing right now. And secondly, I don't feel like we know how to pinpoint that with any level of confidence that I feel good about giving to you guys and then finding out we did a bit more a bit less. One of the things about Canadian public companies is -- and in fairness, even you guys who I know because you're trying to help educate many of the institutional clients. This is very, very intense focus on profitability. And I'll get questions like please do the calculation for me about what is our ROIC? Or what's the return on equity? And what am I half serious half joking responses is, why don't you go ask that of 8x8 or Ring or Zoom or Slack or Bandwidth where there's no are and see what they tell you. And really, the reason I share that, Gabe, is we've never been prepared to do anything that would move EBITDA in the opposite direction. We've always said we're going to continue to grow EBITDA, both in absolute value and percentage of revenue.

It's kind of why I commented that 19% is not an equilibrium or steady state number, it's more like 17%. But if we took 17% down to 15%, what would it do to revenue? And if we took it down to 14%, what would it do? I don't think we know the answer to that yet. All we know is we're competing against a bunch of companies who generate 0 and negative EBITDA and have valuations that are 10x revenue or 20x revenue or 80x revenue. And here we are generating $25 million of EBITDA trading at 2x revenue.

So it really is an important question you're asking. I don't want my answer that I acknowledge is evasive to, in any way, sound dismissive. I just don't think we know the answer.

And for the first time, I feel like EBITDA has gotten to a level where it's healthy. We're not going to like destroy EBITDA and say, we're going from $25 million of EBITDA to 0, please don't worry. But we are starting to think about, is it useful to continue ratcheting up EBITDA margins indefinitely going from 17% to 19% to 20% to 22% or is 17% fine and 15% fine. And use that investment to drive growth.

We haven't made the decision yet. I wouldn't know how to answer your question in a quantitative way. But it is important. You and I have talked about it before, Gabe. And our view is Sangoma is now at the stage, and especially as we continue to scale and look at future acquisitions where maybe a little bit of extra investment in marketing and sales and R&D would be wise, even if it means we stay at 17% instead of moving up to 19% when we're -- which might be what everybody is expecting.

Got you. Then focusing on the...

I didn't really answer it.

I know it's the top line, but I appreciate the candor.

Focusing on the -- going to the services line for a second. Obviously, some pretty good growth organically on a year-over-year basis and sequentially as well. I'm curious if you're able to talk qualitatively about whether there are any specific solutions within the services division, which is helping to drive the growth more so than the others?

Yes, I can talk about that, as you said, qualitatively. So we're building out this suite of CaaS services. During my comments, I tried to introduce you guys for the second call to what that means, what is the concept? How is it different than what other companies are doing? What are those applications under the CaaS umbrella? And we've got the first 4 or 5 or 6. There's a couple more we're working on. But like I've said about the products in our product portfolio in prior years. It probably won't surprise you that the revenue from the cloud services and the materiality of each kind of follows the length of time it's been in the market, right? So the 2 cloud businesses, we've had the longest that we launched multiple years ago and have built up with a little bit of time under our belt, our UCaaS and trunking as a service. The ones we've added more recently, CPaaS, video meetings as a service, we're launching access control as a service, Fax as a Service. The ones that are a little bit older, the UCaaS and the tasks are by far our biggest still. They're the most material. They contribute much more than video meetings, which we're still giving away for free during COVID, although we're about to change that or Fax as a Service or CPaaS.

And as those other service lines become more material, I can talk more about them. But the right now still in the recently launched phase. And any way that we could contribute to that $20 million per quarter is mostly going to be driven from UCaaS and trunking because the other ones aren't a material enough fraction of that number that an increase of 10% or 20% would really move the needle to a large degree.

Got you. Just had 1 last question on the product side of things. Earlier -- in an earlier question, you mentioned a couple of variables, which would, I guess, ultimately help to drive the growth of that business line.

I want to talk about one of the variables you mentioned around the transition from on-prem to cloud. I'm just curious, as you're talking to new customers, what is their preference when there is a choice between on-prem and cloud? What do they naturally gravitate towards? And are your sales guys incentivized to sell them a service cloud-based solution, first off? So that's the first question. The second question is, with your existing on prem customers, is there -- is there a notable effort by them to move towards a more cloud-based solution? Or are they sort of content maintaining their on-prem platform and just continue to add to that?

Yes, there's a lot of questions in there. Let me try and unpack them. First one, if I understood correctly, is talk about.

What fraction of customers are choosing cloud versus prem. My second note to myself was talk about compensation strategy and how we motivate salespeople to do what we want them to do. And #3 is what kinds of things, and if at all, are existing causing existing prem customers to move to cloud? Did I get the 3 pieces, right?

Yes. Sorry, yes, that's perfect.

Okay. Okay. So instead of me trying to cite statistics about what Wignall thinks is happening in the industry, all I'll do is refer you guys to the fact there's a bunch of industry analysts. This is different than research analysts inside an investment bank. These are industry guys, Gartner, Dataquest, Forrester, who published reports. And in general I would say that most of those suggest the North American communications industry is at the stage where the fraction, and this is important of new adoptions that are going cloud is somewhere around 40% or 35% or low 40s or something like that, right? So 100 people are buying a unified communication solution, and 40 of them are choosing cloud.

And that's usually a figure that catches most people by surprise. And the surprise reaction is used to because, oh my gosh, that means -- I mean 60% of people are still buying a premise system. That's not what I expected. All of the -- all of the news is about cloud. And that's right, all of the news is about cloud. But 1 of the reasons that we consciously choose to continue offering a prem solution is because more than half of the purchase, they're still prem. Now that 50% or 60% today, which is prem, was 60% or 70% a year or 2 ago and was 70% or 80% 3 or 4 years ago and was 80% or 90% 5 years ago. So it's clear what the trend looks like.

But I think that's a meaningful number for shareholders to understand and appreciate. We're no different from the trends, Gabe. For sure, we see a larger fraction of new purchasers each year opting for cloud. That's what we want anyway. It's where we think the growth is going to come from and why we've doubled down so heavily on this transition to service, but it's interesting to note that it's not 80%. The other piece that I sometimes cite when talking about that statistic is, I shared with you at the beginning of it, that, that's a North American figure.

In general, North America is the furthest along. Europe is second, but well behind the penetration of North America and Asia Pacific and Latin America are well behind Europe.

So if most of the runway is still in front of us in North America, a much larger fraction of the runway is still in front of us in Europe. And almost all of the runway is in front of us in Asia Pacific and Latin America.

So that all feels like good news to me, but an interesting statistic. And that's 1 of the reasons, as I said, that not only premise matters to us, but hybrid deployments are becoming quite interesting to customers. They may have, I don't know, Gabe, 3 locations in their company, right? And they might say, we're not ready to move to cloud quite yet. We get it. We like it. We like some of the benefits. I don't really want to pay for a big IT team to manage communications. And what I'm really trying to do is operate, I don't know, a manufacturing business.

So our corporate headquarters is going to get a premise system and our 2 satellite offices are going to get cloud, and we're going to try that for a year, right? And if you don't have a premise solution, you're locked out of that opportunity. And getting in there with a deployment, which is 1 prem site and 2 cloud sites and being able to move to all cloud when they're ready in a year or 3, that's really interesting to us. Okay. The second part of your question was about compensation and sales teams.

The simple answer is yes. I hope you guys have developed enough confidence in the executive team here to know that we'd be all over this, right? So we understand how to compensate the sales team to focus them on areas we want them focused on. We do it in 2 ways. We have, in the right geographic areas. We have dedicated teams that focus on cloud.

And in areas where we have teams that don't focus purely on cloud, we make sure a portion of their compensation is tied to cloud success, and they can't make it up elsewhere. They need to have cloud success, to get their the total commission. So I think we're all good there. And then I think the third part of your question was our existing prem users, not the percentage of them that might buy parameter cloud this year, but the installed base moving to cloud. And the answer is, yes, slowly but surely, right? It's like talking about resellers. Are resellers adopting cloud, yes, some are maybe not as fast as companies like us want, but for sure, it's moving ahead.

That's how I feel about the end-user customer base. Instead of just giving you such an abstract useless answer, I can talk about how we see that happening. Not all of them are prepared to move to a full cloud communications solution, all at once. What we're seeing is sometimes it happens in 2 steps. I have a premise-based solution. I'm connected to the public switch phone network because that's the way it was done for 80 years.

And Sangoma's come in with a cloud service called Trunking as a Service. And their task offer sounded pretty good. It lets me get exposure to a monthly subscription model. It sees -- lets me see how well their network operates? What their up time looks like? How do they support me when I have a problem, what does their billing mechanism look like? You used to paying them each month.

And then in a year or whatever it is, when I'm ready to move from a trunking as a service model to a full UCaaS or a full cloud solution with video meeting and CPaaS collaboration, we're well entrenched. It's no guarantee. We're not locked in, but there's some positive predisposition in that customer that they've touched cloud with Sangoma and I think they're more likely to then buy other cloud services from us than from someone else. So that's how we kind of see the prem world migrating game.

Awesome. I really appreciate the insightful commentary and the congrats on the quarter.

The next question comes from Gavin Fairweather from Cormark Securities.

I just wanted to touch on the product road map. Obviously, you had a busy year rolling out video meeting service and also headset. Can you just touch on kind of the priorities from here with those 2 pieces out, you mentioned access control, anything else within maybe the communications as it serve its umbrella that is now kind of more of a priority for you?

Yes. Okay. So I have a couple of thoughts. I just wrote down 5 super quick bullets as you were asking me the question to think about what stuff I would share with you. You even mentioned in your question, video. So the stuff that I think we're -- I think the stuff that we're focused on in video meetings as a service includes taking a very solid product that's got good customer reaction.

But in a free service that was launched into the market during COVID from a free service to a chargeable model. So that's what we're focused on with video right now, that might sound tribute what they got to do with the product road map.

Just attach a price to it. But it's not that simple, of course. From a product road map point of view, you've got to do stuff, you have to put code into your back office to support that product. You have to figure out how you're going to structure the price. And what's the role of the channel? And how does the channel get compensated and make sure that's built into the back office. So much of our video meeting service road map work is based upon turning it from a get the product into market during COVID earlier than we might otherwise have planned and maintain it as a free service to try and do our corporate good during this pandemic to a normal cloud service that people pay for. The next one I was going to talk about was, you're asking about cloud services generally. I mentioned this idea that in a CaaS model, one needs a fairly common or consistent GUI or graphical user interface, you need single sign-on, you need a user experience that makes each of those cloud services look like they're coming from the same company.

And so that would be the second major thrust that I'd mentioned to you guys rather than having a series of cloud services that we've built over time or in some case, acquired, how does that get presented to the user in a single amalgamated suite. Thirdly, I talk about the role of softphones in the cloud environment, more and more of our customers, especially in a work from home model, are asking to be able to make and receive calls and do all of their communications from the computer and not need a separate desk phone that doesn't mean desk phones are going away, but there is more interested in demand for softphone clients. And so we have quite a lot of work going on in that area, both on the desktop version and the mobile version. Some of you who are close to this technology understand, there's a lot of nuance complexity. Once you say the word softphone, there are usually 2 different products, 1 for desktop and 1 for mobile. And then inside mobile, you have to deal with 2 different operating systems, iOS for Apple devices and Android for others. So those are all different little development streams being run in parallel. Next one I talk about is collaboration.

So we're working on collaboration as a service. There's lots of debate internally about how that gets packaged up, and is it a separate product or functionality access from inside the other products like UCaaS and video meetings as a service and softphones. And so that's receiving both product management work and R&D efforts right now.

And last but not least, they'll touch on access control as a service. This is a little bit of a stretch for us. It's not right in the sweet spot of communications. It's a little bit of try some interesting things like Sangoma has been willing to do over the years, don't be too constrained to what you do already.

Some of those have born fruit and we stick with and double down on and some we say, "Oh, that was an interesting experiment, hasn't taken off, cut your losses and move on to something else."

Access control as a service for us is a way to try and take advantage of the fact that we think these kinds of solutions are also ripe for moving from hardware physical devices to virtualized cloud deployments. They happen to make use of apps on softphones, which we already have for communications purposes on the phones of employees at our customers. It is the same kind of customer sold through the same kind of channel to the same decision-maker as buys communications products, it's usually the IT department. So we're in the process of launching that. It's a little bit more work for us because it's not the same intuitive, oh, I get it, you're adding a softphone. It's this whole new product category. But I don't know, there's the 5 first things that came to my mind off the top of my head in 30 seconds, Gavin.

The next question comes from Will (inaudible) from (inaudible) and Company.

Gentlemen, so the balance sheet is locked and loaded, ready to go. It does -- given how much cash you have on the balance sheet, it does suggest you're capable of a pretty sizable acquisition here.

How likely -- and there's been a lot of talk in this call about EBITDA margins, which have marched in 1 direction for years now in a wonderful way. How likely is it that the acquisition is large enough and perhaps of low enough margin, it has a significant impact, negative impact on margins, at least in the short term. And then over time, I presume you want to tease costs out sort of reattain that 17% target over time?

Yes. I'm not sure how to answer your question, Will, without saying something I'm not permitted to say. I understand it. You want to know if 17% is going to turn it to 10% and then ratchet back up. Without disclosing something about any particular acquisition candidates that we're talking to. I don't really see how to answer that. I will tell you that would not be our objective. It's not like that's the profile of the kind of customer we're targeting in acquisition discussions -- sorry, not customer company.

If it's at all useful to you, although I realize it's not an answer to your direct question, I would say that thinking about EBITDA and EBITDA margins is 1 of the 5 financial screens that we perform when looking during M&A funnel conversations. There's the strategic stuff that always comes first. As you guys have heard me discuss on many calls. I even mentioned it here. We're looking for companies that have products we think are important to our customers that are valuable or a channel to those customers. But when we find a company that looks interesting and meets one or more of those tests. We're looking for things like is the revenue material enough to matter? Is it growing? How much of it is recurring? What does EBITDA look like both on absolute value and percentage of revenue?

And what do those 4 things mean for valuation? So I share that with you to let you know. We do care about it. We know especially Canadian investors pay attention to this. But I don't think I could in any helpful way, tell you, that will or will not happen. It really depends upon who that company is that we eventually put into the Sangoma family.

And I'm just not at liberty to talk about that quite yet, in spite of the fact that we're in some very interesting M&A conversations.

There are no more questions at this time. I would like to turn the conference back over to Mr. David Moore for any closing remarks.

Well, thank you, everybody. Really appreciate your attendance today and some good questions also. Just a reminder that it is our AGM on December 17. And please do vote by proxy, and we will be providing information about how you can listen into that shortly. And with that, I wish you a very good evening. Thank you very much.

Thanks, everyone. Good night.

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