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Intrinsic Value is all-important and is the only logical way to evaluate the relative attractiveness of investments and businesses.
Good morning, and welcome to Bambuser Q4 Year-End 2023 Report. I am Maryam Ghahremani, the CEO, and I will hold this presentation together with CFO, Jonas Lagerstrom. Our agenda includes a quick company introduction and overview of our Q4 highlights and a dive into our Saas KPIs and financials. Thank you for joining us, and let's begin.
Bambuser is at the forefront of video commerce industry. Our journey began in 2007, initially providing a groundbreaking video technology that actually allowed users to string live video from their mobile devices. In late 2019, we made a strategic pivot into the world of live video shopping, a move that since then has drawn in more than 290 prominent brands, spanning across 53 countries. Our global footprint now extends to key locations such as New York, London, Paris, Tokyo, Turku, Dubai and our lovely headquarters in Stockholm.
Looking at our ARR developments. Since the beginning, we've been achieving strong ARR growth. However, we are now facing a tougher market with customer churn within our long-tail clients and also longer sales cycles among our enterprise clients, affecting our ARR growth rates. 2023 was a tough year for retail and e-commerce and many brands saw a decline in sales. As we sell to a declining retail industry, we are affected by this decline in the market. Nevertheless, we saw growth among our top 20 enterprise clients with 3% year-over-year. We are the leading enterprise vendor on a global scale, and that is where we are sticky and where the clients have a long-term commitment to our platform. We remain very optimistic about our long-term ARR prospects given the significant market opportunities ahead. To give you a better understanding of Bambuser's value proposition, it is important for you to understand that the battle for the attention of the modern consumers is fierce and very competitive. The two scarce commodity of the near future will be human attention, as said by Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft. Consumer attention spans are shortening going from 2.5 minutes in 2000 to 1.3 seconds as of today, across both Gen Y and Z. Looking at the digital ad spends where most retailers are spending their dollars today. Over USD 600 billion will be spent on digital advertising in 2024. But by simply spending more money, you will not win the consumer attention.
To win, you must understand where consumers are spending their time today. Consumers are spending an average of 6 hours and 9 minutes a day online across education -- sorry, across gaming, social media and shopping. And the smartest brands are taking these moments of attention and turning them into memorable experience, and that's exactly what Bambuser is doing for our clients, taking these categories and transforming them into inspiration, education, purchase and retention.
By embracing video commerce brands will win a significant part of the e-com market that is estimated to be worth USD 8.5 trillion in GMV by 2030. We are proud to partner with some of the best brands in the world, including the LVMH Group, HUGO BOSS, Net-A-Porter and Saks Fifth Avenue. Together, we're innovating commerce and reshaping old brick and mortar into new ways of working and interacting with their customers and communities.
Now please let me guide you through some of the key highlights from the fourth quarter. Among some of the wins this quarter was Borghese, Belkin and Auto Mercado, we also had successful expansions with Christian Dior Fast Retailing and Electrolux to mention a few. Some of the key highlights within our platform was social selling. We launched a social selling feature to empower our clients to elevate their marketing and sales efforts by directly tapping into social media, starting with a seamless integration on Facebook. Now businesses can effortlessly connect with their audience by sharing links that leads to specific product detail pages within the live chat on Facebook. This is not only enhancing convenience for both businesses and customers, but also drive some more personalized engagement. This marks a strategic move for us, signifying the dawn of a new era in customer interaction and online commerce. We're excited about the potential this holds for our future growth and the value it brings to our clients. In December 2023, we launched our first advisory board, named The Front-Runners in Stockholm. This advisory program is designed adopt collectively knowledge sharing, striving customer relationships and consistently highlight successful partnerships. We believe that bringing together diverse perspectives, we can drive innovation and better serve our community.
Looking ahead, we're excited to announce that the U.S. launch of our Advisory Board is planned for Q2 this year, extending the reach and the impact of this initiative. This moves underscores Bambuser's dedication to collaboration, innovation and transparency within our community. Bambuser launched its first end user conference called Bambuser Beyond and offered attendees an immersive experience tapping into the evolution of e-commerce. We were honored to host speakers from esteemed organizations such as Google, YOOX Net a Porter Group, Devo Team and Imperial College Business School. Throughout the event, these speakers discussed the transformative impact of technology in reshaping the shopping experience, providing very valuable insights into the future of commerce.
Bambuser Beyond serves a dynamic platform for thought leaders to exchange perspectives and showcase advancements in an ever-changing landscape of online retail. As announced in December, we have successfully divested relatable, aligning with our strategic overview initiated last quarter. The consideration price for this transaction is SEK 22.3 million, and there is a noncash item cost of SEK 85.5 million associated with the transaction. This strategic will position us to focus our resources on continuing to building the global leading video commerce platform. I'm now leaving over to Jonas Lagerstrom who will present the Saas KPIs and financials.
Good morning. The ARR was minus 21% year-over-year at constant exchange rates and minus 7% quarter-over-quarter. New business continued to be slow as a result of the challenging market with longer sales cycles. Churn is not where we want to be, but it was reduced by 50% in the second half of 2023 compared to the first half. Q4 saw a decrease in the number of customer groups compared with the previous quarter, which was a direct result due to churn and slower new business bookings. We're also noticing a drop in ARR per customer group, which is in line with our previous estimation due to the transition into a usage-based pricing model. If we look quickly at the regions, all regions faced negative ARR growth and Americas had the most challenging quarter with both churn and downsell.
Moving on to the net revenue retention. Our top 20 accounts represent 38% of the total ARR. They witnessed NRR of 98%. The number was heavily impacted by one major U.S. customer. And excluding for that customer, the NRR demonstrated 110%. Our group NRR was flat from last quarter, ending at 65%. The net sales were down 22% year-over-year for SaaS. It's worth noting that for the full year of 2023, the net SaaS sales was flat compared to 2022. The SaaS gross margin saw a decrease of 3 percentage points year-over-year. The decline is due to the lower net sales that does not scale over the fixed cost or revenue. However, we expect the gross margin to increase as net sales return to growth. The gross margin for professional services, which is equivalent to adjusted EBITDA was minus 1%. As of the next quarter, we will no longer present the gross margin in these presentations for professional services, as it mainly represents the relatable business. We will continue to present the gross margin for the SaaS business.
Our adjusted EBITDA is being stable, but is naturally affected due to weaker net sales. It's important to have in mind that the corresponding period last year was positively affected by capitalized work for our own account. When we adjust for this item, the adjusted EBITDA improved by SEK 2.3 million year-over-year. To put adjusted EBITDA figure in the light, it's worth noting that the underlying OpEx has improved by 60% year-over-year, representing a SEK 40 million on an annual run rate basis. This improvement is a combination of reduced cost for staff, office and software. And finally, the free cash flow was minus SEK 37.6 million. If we adjust for the onetime costs associated with the relatable transaction, it was actually minus SEK 32.1 million. The cash flow had supported this quarter from net working capital as well as the divestment of relatable amounting to SEK 12.5 million. We ended the year with a cash balance of SEK 272.1 million, which we consider is sufficient taking the company to positive cash flow. We have now reached the end of the presentation, and we are inviting you to our Q&A session. Thank you.
[Operator Instructions] The next question comes from Nikola Kalanoski from ABG Sundal Collier.
Just a few brief questions from my end. Firstly, you mentioned in your report that you've observed a surge in momentum and investment interest recently, what do you think has caused this surge? And would you characterize it as maintainable rather than transitory? Or is it, perhaps too early to say?
Yes, that is mentioned. We do see a greater appetite to have discussions with us with both existing customers, bigger customers scaling their initiatives within the video commerce, but also interesting discussions with potentially new customers or bigger scale. But we want to underline that, that does not necessarily mean that it will translate into new bookings for the quarters. As we mentioned in another part of the -- in the report, we have quite long sales cycles, but we do see a quite big shift in the sort of [indiscernible] to discuss how to utilize our platform.
I can just add some color to that also. So I think that looking at this year, I mean, last year was a tough year for e-commerce and retail across, I would say, all regions. We're seeing some of our customers actually starting to see growth again. I think LVMH Group is a good example in Q1, seeing growth again. It's not double digits as it was during '20 -- back in the days, but it's still grow. So I think when our customer starts to go again, and that's -- we see that within our customer groups and also customers that we would like to sign that are ICVs. There is a bigger appetite to actually start investing in technology.
Yes. That's clear. Understood. And could you perhaps elaborate a little bit on where you have seen churn lately. I think based on what you report, it looks like there is some churn in the enterprise segment now. But given your stricter interpretation of ARR, my understanding is that this could be due to a delay in signing of existing clients or re-signing of existing clients, to put it more precisely. My question is, therefore, is it possible that the churn is overstated?
I would say that -- I would say 2023, I think the worst churn is behind us. I think looking at the churn, I mean, the largest churn is still due to the long tail clients, I would say, if you look to absolute numbers. I mean we -- once again, as we've said before, these are clients that maybe we should have never onboarded. They are not ICPs to Bambuser. And it's quite logical. So if you're a small player and you're going through a tough time in retail, normally, they would then start to downsize the company, you don't have the organization and bandwidth to actually use our platform. So I think where we see large churn and is within the long tail, not within the enterprise.
I think within Enterprise, we've had some churn during 2023. It's mostly because of I would say, strategic change or once again, redoing and laying off a lot of people so they don't also have the bandwidth. We see smaller -- I'd say that is not the biggest churn risk for the enterprise clients, it's more like strategic shifts. But once again, looking at the share numbers, I do think we have the worst behind us. And I think this year. Of course, we will have some of the churn lagging into this year's ARR. But looking at this year, we feel confident that we can start growing again with the larger clients, and we're quite more strict in onboarding the smaller clients also into our platform. To your last question, I don't know if you want to answer that one, Jonas, if we have a...
Sorry, Nikola, can you please repeat the last question?
Yes. So the first part was you have a stricter interpretation of ARR. And therefore, my understanding is that part of the churn could be due to a delay in re-signing of existing clients. And so I was wondering whether that would perhaps cause the churn to be overstated.
I would not say it's significantly overstated, but I do recognize that we are quite harsh to ourselves when we sort of present ARR. So there are definitely some elements there that could come back to the ARR bridge. But I would not say that this quarter is different than in previous quarters in that specific sense.
Yes, that's fair enough. And yes, I hear you, Mary, it's obviously not easy to be a retailer in 2023, but I think there's room for improvement across the board everywhere in the retail sector. So let's hope for the best. And finally, I think, would you say that you're satisfied with your current cost base at this time? Or is there more potentially to be done?
We have done some more sort of -- like cost optimation this quarter, and we continue to do so. I think it's -- now it's for a matter of not necessarily that it's sort of process into actual cost savings. It's more like the reallocation of cash where we have a much sort of much stricter way of where we put the money. So I would say that it's -- you will see some shift perhaps around the different functions, but it can also be across different cost items. So we do expect that there will be more investment in certain parts of the platform, and we will sort of not invest perhaps as much in other parts of the business. So the answer is we are satisfied with it, but it's not sort of -- we're not -- we have not reached the end goal. We think that we still have things to do on the cost base for 2024.
There are no more questions at this time. So I hand the conference back to the speakers for any written questions and closing comments.
I think there were no more questions in the chat. So thank you for joining us for this presentation. And I wish you all a lovely day. Thank you.