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Intrinsic Value is all-important and is the only logical way to evaluate the relative attractiveness of investments and businesses.
Intrinsic Value is all-important and is the only logical way to evaluate the relative attractiveness of investments and businesses.
Good afternoon. Welcome to WeCommerce's Third Quarter 2022 Financial Results Conference Call. After market close, WeCommerce released financial results for the period ended September 30, 2022. The press release as well as a replay of today's call can be found on the company's Investor Relations website at investors.wecommerce.co. Please review the release for additional information on what will be discussed during today's presentation. The company will make forward-looking statements on the call today that are based on assumptions and therefore, are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected. The company undertakes no obligation to update these statements except as required by law. You can read about these risks and uncertainties in the press release issued by the company this afternoon as well as in our filings on SEDAR. Note that the adjusted financial measures the company speaks to today are non-IFRS measures, which are not a substitute for IFRS financial measures. Reconciliations of these measures to IFRS measures are available in the company's earnings release and most recent MD&A. I will note now turn the call over to WeCommerce CEO, Alex Persson.
Thank you, operator, and good afternoon, everyone.
I'm joined today by Dave Charron, our Chief Financial Officer. On today's call, Dave and I will review our third quarter results, highlight developments in the quarter and provide an update on several growth initiatives both recently implemented and scheduled to launch early next year. First, while we continue to generate signification operation cash flow, we're not pleased with our revenue for the quarter, particularly in our Themes and Agency segments. Themes is a more volatile business as it is tied to new merchant acquisition and is sold as onetime licenses. Despite the lower revenue in the quarter, we generated a 49% segment profit margin in Themes. We anticipate Themes revenue to be improved in the coming quarters. Our Agency business continues to build a healthy sales pipeline and wins contracts. However, several prospective clients delayed major projects due to the broader market uncertainty. We expect the effort led by our new Agency CEO, Brad McCrory, to lead a higher revenue in a much improved financial profile. I want to highlight several new initiatives recently launched and coming up in early 2023 at our Apps companies. Stamped unveiled its product partnership with Attentive, allowing merchants to send review requests and loyalty program updates using Attentive's leading SMS platform. Further, Stamped continues to add review syndication partners, having added Google Shopping earlier this year and most recently Instagram and Facebook Shops to help merchants improve conversion and demonstrate strong ROI from the Stamped platform. These initiatives are aligned with Stamped's product strategy to expand review collection and syndication beyond traditional methods and several additional product partnerships and integrations are in the works. Stamped also continues to press ahead with the upcoming launch of its revamped loyalty and rewards offering anticipated in early 2023. The bundle offering continues to resonate with customers, and there's lots of potential given less than 10% of Stamped's customer base uses its loyalty offering today. I'm also delighted to announce Mike Berardo, currently Chief Operating Officer at Stamped will be taking over as Chief Executive Officer of Stamped. Previously, Mike was an early employee at Away, the innovative travel company and most recently served as VP of Data, Finance and Strategy. I want to thank Andrew Dumont for his tireless work leading Stamped to where it is today. KnoCommerce continues to provide a unique insight layer for brands struggling with attribution in the post-ATT world. For example, KnoCommerce data shows that TikTok is driving an increasing percentage of discovery for brands though only 21% of respondents who say they discover a brand at TikTok actually have a click attributed to the platform, showing the need for a more robust attribution solution. KnoCommerce has continued to deliver unique insights to brands and its upcoming benchmarking product will allow brands to collectively leverage the millions of survey responses garnered monthly to gain further insight into attribution and other customer data points. Foursixty is finalizing several product initiatives, working closely with strategic partners, and we'll dive into further detail on those once launched next year. Altogether, we have lots of exciting new developments in our Apps segment to power growth in 2023 and beyond. We believe we are well positioned for ongoing growth given that segment's focus on midsized merchants across ecosystem partnerships and product launches in the coming months. At WeCommerce, we postponed several corporate initiatives as we no longer expect to uplist on the TSX next year. This has resulted in a reduction in corporate expenses, and we continue to optimize head office cost. Turning to our M&A pipeline. Last quarter, I mentioned we continue to have productive discussions with multiple acquisition targets, though uncertainty meant sellers were not diving into the M&A market with both feet. That uncertainty, not surprisingly, continues to be the case today. We're building and attending to the M&A pipeline to be the first call for entrepreneurs and e-commerce enablement. I'll now turn it over to Dave to provide more detail on our Q3 financials.
Thanks, Alex, and good afternoon to everyone on the call. Before I begin, as a reminder, we report in Canadian dollars and all references to amounts on this call and in our published financial reports are in Canadian dollars unless otherwise stated. Moving to our results. In the third quarter of 2022, we generated revenue of $11.5 million, up 5% year-over-year and 1% on a constant currency basis. Breaking down revenues by segment. The company has 3 reportable lines of business through which revenue is generated, Apps, Themes and Agency. The Apps segment refers to the operations associated with providing software to customers. In Q3, Apps revenue was $7.9 million, an increase of $1.1 million or 16% equal to 11% on a constant currency basis from Q3 of 2021. The Themes segment refers to the sale of Themes designed templates to customers operating their stores on various e-commerce platforms. In Q3, Themes revenue was $2.8 million, a decrease of $78,000 or 3%, equal to 6% on a constant currency basis from Q3 of 2021. Lastly, the Agency segment refers to the operations associated with providing agency services to customers. In Q3, Agency revenue was $732,000, a decrease of $497,000 or 40%, equal to 41% on a constant currency basis from Q3 of 2021. Net loss in Q3 2022 was $6.5 million compared to a net loss of $3 million in Q3 of 2021. The net loss for Q3 2022 includes a foreign exchange loss of $3.2 million, whereas Q3 2021 includes a foreign exchange loss of $1.6 million. Excluding the foreign exchange impact, the net loss for Q3 2022 would be $3.3 million compared to a net loss of $1.4 million in Q3 of 2021. Our adjusted EBITDA for the third quarter was $1.9 million or 17% of revenue compared to $3.4 million or 31% of revenue reported in the third quarter of 2021. Operating cash flow for the 9 months ended September 30 was $7.3 million or 21% of revenues, an increase of 67% compared to $4.3 million or 17% of revenues in the first 9 months of 2021. Unrestricted cash on hand at September 30 was $10.5 million compared to $26.1 million on December 31, 2021, as we paid down $12.7 million of our revolving facility in Q2 2022. Total debt outstanding at September 30, 2022, was $50.6 million compared to $60.2 million at December 31, 2021, and the interest rate on our debt was 6.48% as of September 30. With that, I'll pass it back to the operator to facilitate the Q&A.
[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from Daniel Chan with TD Securities.
So Shopify is expanding their extended trials program. I'd expect this to increase new merchants on to their platform, so I'm just wondering if you've seen any material shift in traffic for your Apps and Themes following that change?
Dan, nice to hear from you again. We've seen traditional pickup in activity, how that is associated with their extended trial program, I think it's a little too early for us to tell, frankly. But we've seen the usual pickup leading into Q4.
Okay. And then just any color on the merchant dynamics, whether it would be gross adds, churn, size of merchants as the macro uncertainty continues here?
Yes. It's a good question. A couple of questions kind of rolled up into one there. I think a few observations to highlight. One is some products that drive revenue based on order volume or having a softer year compared to last year just by virtue of orders not being as strong. The second is, there has been a sizable decline and probably very small merchant adds, and that's consistent with the messaging coming out of Shopify. Our Apps business primarily caters to what we call kind of midsized merchants. Those are doing north of 1 million GMV. We're a little more isolated from various macro shocks and are more willing to invest where they see clear ROI in our platforms. Certainly, if you look at our Themes revenue, that is more directly tied to new customer acquisition and primarily smaller businesses, so that result is certainly a function of declining new customer acquisition on the low end and continued kind of growth and strength in Apps is a reflection of both continued strong value proposition for our Apps as well as a stronger, generally healthier merchant for the midsized merchants.
Great. That's very helpful. And then maybe on the M&A environment, you talked about the uncertainty prevailing. Just any change in the sentiment from these founders on the willingness to sell, has that budgeted all or is today's market rebound going to set you back a few more months again?
It's hard to tell. Luckily, 1 day doesn't make that much of a difference. I think last week, certainly, the mood was not as optimistic as today, so we'll see how long that carries on. Generally, when -- in our business, most of our founders are heads down, preparing for Black Friday Cyber Monday. So Q4 is not necessarily a strong or a regular time for someone to enter into a sale transaction to complete one. I think people are waiting to see how this BFCM measures up compared to last year, try to get a sense of what 2023 looks like. But ultimately, with how many conversations we have, how many companies are in our pipeline, there's no one reason why someone is looking to sell, or why someone is not looking to sell. Often, it is because of personal matters or it's the right time, and we just want to keep those lines open, and again, tend to those conversations over a very long time. So when the opportunity strikes, we're available.
Your next question comes from Parth Shah with Canaccord Genuity.
This is Parth on for Rob. I'll start with Stamped, some nice growth there. You mentioned that the activity is strong there, lots of new initiatives, but particularly in Q3 and as we head into Q4, what's kind of driving the growth there? Is it the uptake of bundles? And I think last quarter, you mentioned about 18% of MRR was because of these bundles, right? So what's the update there? And how should we expect that heading into Q4?
Sure. So that MRR figure is consistent. The number I mentioned earlier on the call is actually a number of users, not the revenue driven. So the full suite offering is a higher priced offering. So we'd expect that to be a higher percentage of revenue than actual percentage of customers. We expect that number of customers to increase, obviously, as the new product is unveiled in early 2023. A lot of the product initiatives launched in, I'd say, middle or late Q3 in a runoff to Black Friday Cyber Monday, and so there's natural delay before we see some of that progress going into both Q4 and Q1.
Okay. That's helpful. And then just around your Themes business. So I see that the margins are back up to close to 50% mark and Apps was close to 28%. So I mean if you think about the near term, how do you see your investments kind of scaling? Do you see those margins in Apps coming back to the 30%, 40% range, or are you still willing to continue investments?
Yes, those are going to fluctuate quarter-to-quarter, Parth. One, there's a bit seasonality; and two, sometimes we invest ahead of those initiatives. Generally, we're -- and Dave, feel free to chime in after this. Generally, we continue to optimize our margin. It's certainly lower than where we were last year. Certainly, we've done a lot in the past few weeks and months to continue to improve margin and make sure that every dollar is going to its highest and best use.
Yes. And the only thing I'd add there, Alex, is that, and Parth to your point, longer term, the 35% makes a lot of sense to us, but there'll be investments in the short term.
Okay. And then just moving to Agency revenue was down quarterly. Has anything changed since Q2 in terms of strategy, like I understand that the pipeline is kind of pushed out, you're seeing deals pushed out. But has there anything changed on behalf of customer outreach, or the way you're approaching things there?
Sure. It's a good question [Audio Gap]. One is continued investment into the sales team to not only build that pipeline, but build a very healthy pipeline that converts. The second is strengthening the deputy leadership team, which has been an ongoing process for the past 6 months at the Agency. And so as we communicated, we see a lot of promise there. It's going through some short-term hiccups, and we expect the new Agency CEO, who's done a phenomenal job over the past 6 months for his efforts to show up in our financial profile in the coming quarters.
All right. And then I'll just -- my last question on M&A. You spoke a bit about the pipeline and my question is more around the deal mix. So I think last quarter you mentioned you're looking more at tuck-ins or smaller size targets. Has that changed in terms of the deal mix and given the market situation are you willing to look at bigger transactions or just looking towards your target of smaller ones?
So we're actively looking at both is the short answer. One the small tuck-in acquisitions can be really accretive to our product road map and with -- whether that's at the Stamped or other organizations could be really beneficial when plugged into the existing distribution network at those companies. When it comes to larger kind of platform acquisitions, we're still having those conversations frequently, and we're not swearing off any of those sorts of acquisitions today.
At this time, this concludes our question-and-answer session. I'd now like to turn the call back over to Mr. Persson for his closing remarks.
Thank you again to everyone who joined us on today's call. I especially want to thank our employees, investors and partners for their continued support. Thanks. Back to you, operator.
I would like to remind everyone that a recording of today's call will be available for replay via a link in the Investors Section of the company's website. Thank you for joining us today for WeCommerce's third quarter 2022 financial results conference call. You may now disconnect.