Crexendo - Q4 2022

Transcript

Operator (participant)

Greetings. Welcome to the Crexendo Fourth Quarter 2022 Earnings Call. At this time, all participants have been placed in a listen-only mode. A Q&A session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. Please note this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to your host, Steve Mihaylo, Chairman of the Board. You may begin.

Steve Mihaylo (Chairman)

Thank you, John. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Steve Mihaylo, Chairman of Crexendo. As you have seen, it's been a very busy day for us. I want to welcome all of you to the Crexendo Q4 2022 and year-end conference call. Joining me on the call is Jeff Korn, our new CEO, Doug Gaylor, our President and COO, Ron Vincent, our CFO, Jon Brinton, our CRO, and Anand Buch, our CSO. I'm going to ask Jeff to read our safe harbor statement. After that, I will have a few personal statements, then turn the call over to Jeff for more brief comments. Ron will provide more details on the numbers. Doug will provide a sales and a business and sales update, and then we will open the call up to questions. Jeff, would you please read the safe harbor?

Jeff Korn (CEO)

Yes, Steve. I want to take this opportunity to remind listeners that this call will contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. The Private Securities Litigation Act, Reform Act of 1995 provides a safe harbor for such forward-looking statements. All statements made in this conference call, other than statements of historical fact, are forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements may include, but are not limited to words like believe, expect, anticipate, estimate, will, and other similar statements of expectation identifying forward-looking statements. Investors should be aware that any forward-looking statements are based on assumptions and are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those discussed here today.

The risk factors are explained in detail in the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including the Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31st, 2022, and the Forms 10-Q as filed. Crexendo does not undertake any obligation to publicly update, revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise. I'll now turn the call back to Steve. Steve?

Steve Mihaylo (Chairman)

Thank you, Jeff. As you probably know by now, I've decided to retire. This has not been a spontaneous decision, but one that has have thought through for some time now. I will turn 80 in November. My health is great, I wanted to retire while I had a good health and enjoy my retirement. The process we undertook allowed me to retire knowing Crexendo is in good hands, and I might add that Ron Vincent has thoroughly cleaned up the balance sheet across the board and poised for greatness. Let me now address my stock ownership interest. I will not have to sell any shares for estate planning purposes. My family and I have decided that Crexendo will be given to my foundation.

I have been very fortunate in my, in my life, and I do not take that lightly, and I want to do good fortune to be shared with those who have had that haven't had the advantages or opportunities that I've had. This is why the shares are going to the foundation, which support education, drug addiction, women's issues, community issues, and a host of other issues. I have full faith in the foundation. As a matter of fact, both Doug and Jeff sit on the foundation board, which is a benefit to both the foundation and Crexendo. Let me briefly describe, discuss the transition. We have an amazing management team. I have worked with Doug for over 35 years.

I have worked with, closely with Jeff and Doug, and Doug worked together, and I have had a history with the rest of the senior management team. I have worked with Jeff for over 40, 14 years now. He is steady. He has a deep understanding of legal, business, regulatory issues that we exist in. He has a broad view of the company's operation. He is an excellent communicator and problem solver. I have known Bryan Dancer, the former president of Allegiant Networks, for approximately 30 years now. Doug and the rest of the management team as Jeff's partners, we have over 300 years of telecom experience and a wealth of expertise. I could not be more excited about the transition and our future.

This is the best management team I have worked with, and I will turn the call over to CEO, Jeff. Jeff?

Jeff Korn (CEO)

Thank you, Steve. Steve, the thank you is not perfunctory, it's genuine. It's not just for me, but it's everyone here at Crexendo, as well as everyone in the industry that you've impacted and the tens of thousands of people whose lives you've enriched, both personally and professionally. Steve has been a trailblazer in this industry for over 50 years and a mentor to many who have gone on to senior leadership positions in our industry, including most of the people sitting with me here today in this room. Steve's belief that we must provide the best software solutions, products, and services while also providing exceptional support and respect to our customers will remain the guiding principles under which Crexendo will continue to operate. As Steve pointed out, he and I have worked together for over 14 years.

He's taught me the telecom business, shown me that a CEO must have an open door, lead by example, strive to always treat everyone respectfully and always listen. His leadership and generosity, both of time and of his personal resources, will be something that I strive to emulate. I am very pleased that he has agreed to remain on the board to help the team in this transition. I am thrilled to be working with such a talented and dedicated executive team. We have worked together well, and I'm sure we'll continue to do that. I have worked with Doug for over 12 years, Ron for 10, and have an excellent working relationship with the remainder of the executive team. We will work as a team and do our best to drive strong performance and continue our culture of excellence. Doug, Ron, and I meet every day and discuss operations.

That will not change. We have regular meetings with the executive management team, including Jon, Anand, David, and Jim, as well as Brian, who recently joined our team from Allegiant. I know that experience and knowledge will make our sessions that much more valuable. I believe in a collaborative approach, I guess the only change is if we can't agree, I get to decide. That really almost never happens because there is consensus within the group. At today's board meeting, I discussed with the board my belief that with our current growth trajectory and with all the available opportunities for additional investment, it is in the best interest of our shareholder value to discontinue our quarterly dividend. We believe the cash would be better served by either investing in our technology, say, with potential acquisitions or other corporate action including potentially a stock buyback.

We have agreed to pay a dividend this quarter as we believe it was an expected action. Going forward, we do not expect that we will continue, and I will convene the board to determine other uses for the cash. In addition, we believe it is important to do a better job of getting our stories out to investors. You may have noticed in our press release that we have retained an IR firm to assist us in that regard. Getting to the actual results and our performance. This was an exceptional quarter and year for Crexendo. Our financial performance is tracking ahead of plan, which supports our belief that we are on the right track. In the fourth quarter, we drove a 34% increase in consolidated revenue while continuing to grow on an organic basis.

We substantially improved our non-GAAP net income to $4.1 million. During that period, we did record a substantial write-down in goodwill as a result of the downturn in the market, which contributed heavily to the GAAP loss. We have very strong non-GAAP earnings and positive cash flow, underscoring the inherent profitability of our operations and once our performance can be viewed on a comparable basis. That said, however, the team will be working to improve GAAP results and non-GAAP results, and we'll continue managing the business efficiently and productively. We want to increase our organic growth, and we will work hard on that. I expect to spend the rest of the year working with the team to fully integrate all the parts of the business, and particularly the Allegiant team. We plan to complete the migration of our Crexendo Classic customers to our award-winning VIP Platform.

We won a lot of awards, which Doug will discuss in more detail. We want to add exciting upgrades to the software, and we will not rest until we are operating as one highly functioning team. We will work to increase productivity, watch our margins and costs carefully, and have positive cash flow. If we do all these things, I believe we will be in a great position to continue our growth, improve productivity, and generate additional shareholder value. We are watching what Doug loves to call the fishing pond. While we, in the short term, are not concentrating on integration, not acquisitions, we do understand that sometimes a fish will jump in the boat.

We will use our cash for acquisitions, hopefully, as our intention that we generate from operations. We don't want to dilute existing shareholders any more than is necessary. We intend that all acquisitions are accretive, primarily from the fishing pond. I thank all of you for your support and interest in Crexendo. With that, I will turn the call over to Ron for more details on the number. Ron?

Ron Vincent (CFO)

Thank you, Jeff. Jeff went over some of the highlights for the quarter and the full year, I'll go into the details. Financial highlights for the fourth quarter of 2022 are as follows: Total revenue for the quarter increased 27% to $11.4 million. That's compared to $9 million for the prior year. Service revenue for the quarter increased 41% to $6.1 million, compared to $4.3 million for the prior year. Software solutions revenue for the quarter increased 14% to $4.4 million, compared to $3.9 million. Product revenue increased 16% to $947,000, compared to $815,000 for the prior year. Margin remained strong. Telecom service margin on combined basis, 66%.

Our software solutions gross margin, 65%. Our product gross margin, 43%. Consolidated operating expenses for the quarter increased 370% to $46 million. That's compared to $9.8 million for the prior year. During the fourth quarter, we completed our goodwill and intangible asset annual impairment analysis. As a result, we recorded a goodwill and long-lived asset impairment of $32.7 million. The Allegiant acquisition contributed $2 million of the additional increase in operating expenses. The company reported a net loss of $32.6 million for the quarter, or $1.33 loss per basic and diluted share, compared to a loss of $602,000 or $0.03 loss per basic and diluted common share for the prior year.

As you can see, the majority of that is the $32.7 million goodwill and long-lived asset impairment that was recorded during the quarter. Non-GAAP net income of $2.5 million for the quarter, or $0.10 basic and $0.09 per diluted common share, compared to non-GAAP net income of $592 or $0.03 per basic and $0.02 per diluted share in the prior year. EBITDA for the quarter was a $1 million loss, compared to a $102,000 loss in the prior year. Our adjusted EBITDA for the quarter increased $596,000. That's compared to $474,000 for the prior year. I'll go over some highlights for the full year, ended December 31st, 2022.

Total revenue increased 34% to $37.6 million, compared to $28.1 million for the prior year. Allegiant acquisition contributed $1.8 million of the increase in total revenue. Service revenue increased 14% to $19.5 million, compared to $17.1 million for the prior year. Allegiant contributed $1.5 million of the increase in service revenue in 2022. Software solutions increased 75% to $15.1 million for 2022. That's compared to $8.7 million for the prior year, or let's say, the seven months in the prior year from the acquisition date of June 1st. Our product revenue increased 24% to $2.9 million for 2022, compared to $2.3 million for the prior year.

Operating expenses increased 143% to $74.9 million for 2022, compared to $30.9 million in the prior year. Goodwill and long-lived asset impairment, we discussed earlier, $32.7 million contributed to this operating loss. The Allegiant Networks business acquisition contributed $2 million of the increase in additional operating expenses. For comparison purposes, the software solutions segment for 2021 only included seven months of operating expense. The company reported a net loss of $35.4 million for 2022, or $1.54 loss per basic and diluted common share, compared to a net loss of $2.4 million or $0.12 loss per basic and diluted common share in the prior year.

Again, if you back out that $32.7 million goodwill and intangible or long-lived asset impairment, pretty good, pretty good year. Non-GAAP net income of $4.1 million for 2022. That's $0.18 per basic common share and $0.16 per diluted common share, compared to non-GAAP of $1.7 million or $0.09 per basic and $0.07 per diluted common for the prior year. EBITDA loss was $2 million for the year, compared to a loss of $1.2 million in the prior year. But our adjusted EBITDA came in at $2.5 million for 2022, compared to $1.6 million for the prior year. Cash, cash equivalents at December 31st was $5.5 million. That's compared to $7.5 million at the end of the prior year.

During the year, we paid $2 million for the Allegiant acquisition in cash. That's a large part of the decrease. We used cash for operating activities of $411,000. That's compared to a million used in the prior year. Cash used for investing activities of $1.7 million, that's the acquisition, compared to $9.9 million in the prior year, which was the software solutions acquisition in 2021. Cash used for financing activities of $54,000 compared to cash provided by investing activities of $650,000 in the prior year. With that, I'll turn it over to Doug Gaylor, our President and COO, for additional comments on sales and operations.

Doug Gaylor (President and COO)

Thanks, Ron. I'm very pleased with our Q4 and our year-end numbers. Highlighting our performance was a 27% year-over-year increase in Q4 revenues and a 34% increase for annual revenue over the prior year. $11.4 million in revenue for the quarter and $37.5 million in revenue for 2022 have us on a $45 million-plus revenue trajectory for 2023. Our strong organic performance for the quarter, combined with our acquisition of Allegiant Networks in November, gives us great momentum as we start 2023. As Ron mentioned, while our GAAP results were affected by a large one-time goodwill impairment charge and acquisition-related charges and an asset impairment charge, our non-GAAP earnings were very strong, totaling $2.5 million or $0.10 a share for the quarter and $4.1 million or $0.18 per share for the year.

Our financial results validate that we are improving organic growth, while at the same time realizing significant synergies from past acquisitions, allowing us to quickly leverage the power and opportunity to rapidly scale our business. Much of our success is due to our phenomenal team, who through a tremendous amount of hard work and effort, has laid the foundation for greater success in the future. We believe we will continue to realize more efficiencies and cost synergies as we continue our growth. As most of you know, we announced the acquisition of one of our licensees, Allegiant Networks, on November first. Allegiant checked all the boxes of a highly complementary and synergistic acquisition. First, it was highly accretive, generating north of $10 million in annual revenue and was profitable.

Second, Allegiant was a Crexendo platform customer, and we are already seeing great synergies as we integrate their platform and customers onto ours. Third, Allegiant offers managed services, IT services, and network services to their clients, services that we intend to offer our Crexendo customer base in the near term. The 200-plus licensees using the Crexendo platform to run their UCaaS business are the ideal stocks fishing pond candidates for us to find additional highly accretive acquisitions. We believe Allegiant marked the first of many trophy fishes from our pond. More broadly, we continue to see tremendous demand and growth in the UCaaS industry. These robust industry tailwinds contributed to our recent milestone of eclipsing 3 million users on our platform, nearly double the 1.7 million end users we had in July of 2021.

Our Crexendo licensees and agents continue to benefit from the rapid migration of small, midsize, and enterprise-level businesses to the cloud. As our licensees grow, they need additional services from Crexendo, which in turn drives organic software solutions growth. Highlighting this unique demand model, in the fourth quarter, our software solutions were up 14% on an organic basis compared to Q4 of last year. Our unique model, combined with our robust platform, continues to drive new partners to Crexendo. It allows us to differentiate ourselves from our two largest competitors, Cisco's BroadSoft and Microsoft's Metaswitch offerings, which are significantly higher priced based on their cost-per-seat model. We recently announced new partners that left the likes of Cisco and Avaya and hope to secure more partner wins in the year ahead.

We also continue to see strong traction in the European market, reflected by the large increase in bookings and new logos added in 2022. Our traditional Crexendo agent program continues to grow as well. We've seen great success from our two large master agent partnerships with Telarus and OTG Consulting, and recently signed Jenne Distributors as our newest master agent. Our traditional agent program highlights our Crexendo VIP offering, powered by NetSapiens, and has a 100% uptime guarantee along with a lifetime warranty on our Crexendo phones. We continue to add new and larger agent partners to the program and are excited about the opportunities in the funnel that these new partner agents are bringing to Crexendo. Along that line, our backlog, excluding Allegiant, exceeded $46.8 million at year-end, which was up 12% year-over-year.

As a reminder, our backlog is the sum of the remaining contract values for our telecom services and software solutions customers that will be recognized on a sliding scale over the next 60 months. Our telecom services margins declined slightly to 66% for the year, affected by lower margins from the Allegiant service revenue contribution. We expect the telecom services margin to return to the 70% range quickly as we recognize synergies from the acquisition. Our software solutions revenue increased nicely from 53% in 2021 to 65% in 2022. Our product growth margins also saw a nice increase from 34% to 43% year-over-year, assisted by better cost management and lower shipping costs that spiked in 2021. Our tremendous engineering talent continues to add to and improve our award-winning technology.

We were recently recognized by G2, the premier business software and services review site, as a leader in its 2023 Winter Voice over IP report, along with awarding us the Easiest to Do Business With and the Best Support and Easiest to Use awards. During Q4, we released our newest version of software, Version 43, to great reviews and acceptance, and we just released our Insight Management Application for the platform and had great adoption from our licensees. We also recently released our Contact Center as a Service or CCaaS offering, which provides omni-channel customer engagement, chatbots, and automations into our platform for larger call center applications. We have begun receiving orders for the new offering and are seeing a lot of larger opportunities being proposed. We start 2023, I couldn't be more excited about the direction and opportunity for Crexendo.

The burgeoning demand for our product offerings, disruptive pricing model, and world-class team have us perfectly positioned for the future. We are committed to delivering the best UCaaS offering in the industry to our customers and our partners, which we believe will enable to deliver strong returns for our shareholders. With our combination of the fastest-growing platform solution in the country, along with our direct end user offerings, we are positioned extremely well for continued growth and success in the years ahead. Finally, on a personal note, I wanna thank Steve for his leadership, his mentorship, and his friendship over the amazing 35 years that we have worked together. It's been a tremendous ride, and I look forward to helping you enjoy your next chapter of your life. You're the best, Steve. With that, I will now turn it back over to Jeff for any further comment.

Jeff Korn (CEO)

Well, no, thank you, Doug. Thank you, Ron. Thank you, Steve. We'll now open the call to questions.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. At this time, we will be conducting a Q&A session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star two if you would like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speakerphones, it may be necessary to pick up your headset before pressing star two. One moment please. One moment, please, hold for questions. The first question comes from Eric Martinuzzi from Lake Street. Please proceed.

Eric Martinuzzi (Senior Research Analyst)

First a comment. Congratulations, Steve, on your retirement. You certainly have created a wonderful business here at a $45 million-plus run rate. Jeff, congratulations on your promotion to CEO. I guess my first question is actually on the management side. Are you gonna be adding a general counsel, or are you gonna be wearing both ball caps?

Jeff Korn (CEO)

For the current period, I'm gonna wear both ball caps. Primarily because I'm much more approachable as general counsel. It's very nice when a junior salesperson can reach out to me and feel like they can ask me a question, "What do you have to do with this contract?" Or, "Do we have to do that?" I like getting information, you know, from everybody this way. We'll see how it works. If I find it's too taxing, we'll make some changes. We do have some support within the organization, so I will get some assistance in that, but for the time being, I intend to do both.

Eric Martinuzzi (Senior Research Analyst)

Okay. I wanted to get your take on the macro demand environment, where continued headwinds seems to be domestic across most of my technology-oriented coverage companies. If you could address it from both the service business as well as the software solutions business, kinda what are you seeing out there on the macro?

Jeff Korn (CEO)

I think it looks good. I'm gonna turn that over to Doug for a little more information.

Doug Gaylor (President and COO)

Yeah, Eric, thanks. Great question. No, I think we still continue to see a lot of adoption to the cloud for communication services. You know, the statistics show that, you know, approximately half of the U.S. business market is still using older legacy telecom equipment. It's not a matter of if they move to the cloud, it's when. All the reports from Gartner and Frost & Sullivan and others show that that's gonna be still a very rapid migration over the next three to four years. You know, when we look at the amount of opportunity out there, we still see a tremendous amount of opportunity. We're seeing that in our sales. We haven't seen a slowdown in sales.

We see a lot of demand for our product, both on the direct side from end user customers and on the platform side. As I mentioned in my comments, we recently had BroadSoft, Cisco BroadSoft, clients move over, Avaya clients move over, from their hosted offerings to the Crexendo platform. We just got done exhibiting at ITEXPO in Miami and had tremendous excitement about our platform. We couldn't be more excited about the opportunity for growth, and we continue to see a lot of opportunity coming to us looking for our products and services.

Eric Martinuzzi (Senior Research Analyst)

Okay. Final question from me, I think it's probably for Ron. The retention had been trending, at least through Q3, I think had been trending at around 0.75% churn on a monthly basis. How did we finish up the year?

Ron Vincent (CFO)

We were coming in around Q3 at that three-quarters of a percent.

Eric Martinuzzi (Senior Research Analyst)

Right. Sorry, I didn't catch. Did you get the take on, was Q4 in line with that?

Ron Vincent (CFO)

Oh, sorry. Yeah. That just cut out. Yeah. Yes. Q4 was absolutely in line with the $0.75 that we were previously reporting.

Eric Martinuzzi (Senior Research Analyst)

Gotcha. Thanks for taking my question.

Ron Vincent (CFO)

Thank you.

Jeff Korn (CEO)

Thank you, Eric.

Operator (participant)

Okay. The next question comes from Josh Nichols with B. Riley. Please proceed.

Josh Nichols (Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Yeah. Well, first off, congratulations, Steve and Jeff. Looking forward to working with you more directly going forward here. I know on the call you mentioned that you're a little bit more focused on integration rather than acquisition. Today, could you talk a little bit about what's left to be done with the Allegiant acquisition and then?

Just to dive a little bit further on your comment regarding services gross margin, how long until those get back to the 70% level? Is that sometime within the first half or back half of 2023?

Jeff Korn (CEO)

I'll let Doug answer the second half of the question. I'll answer the first half. What we have to do with Allegiant is they have a very, very talented group of engineers and a talented group of salespeople. Very, very talented group all across the company. What we wanna do is spread them out so they're providing support to all facets of the organization, and vice versa. Our engineers are working more closely with them. We just wanna be one brand. As Doug mentioned a little bit in his comments, the fact that they're an MSP is very exciting to us because we want them to extend that expertise to the Crexendo's telecom side of the business, so we can add that as an offering and hopefully increase our sales. It's an exciting time.

It's gonna take a little bit of a challenge, but we're working tirelessly at it. Brian is working very hard, and he's rolled up his sleeves, amazingly providing support to everybody in the organization. I think it's gonna be a great win for us when we get that fully integrated.

Josh Nichols (Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Thanks, Jeff. I'll just add that, from a financial accounting standpoint, we completed our 805 valuation, finalized our purchase price allocation, during the year-end close process. The numbers presented in the footnotes will be final. Then, we're continuing to work with the local accounting team, giving them oversight, and GAAP assistance. So everything's working well from a finance and accounting perspective.

Jeff Korn (CEO)

You wanna discuss the margins, Doug?

Doug Gaylor (President and COO)

Finally, on the gross margins, as I said, we saw a great increase on the software solutions gross margins on a year-over-year basis. On the telecom services side, we saw a little bit of a decline, but we expect those to get back into the 70% range relatively quickly. The Allegiant group obviously will be able to take advantage of some of the buying opportunities and cost synergies that we'll have bringing in Crexendo as a much larger organization. With the cost management aspect of the business, you know, we anticipate getting back to those margins. I'm not sure if we'll see them in Q1, but definitely relatively quickly.

Josh Nichols (Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Perfect. I was just assuming probably Q2, Q3 at the latest or something like that, but that's pretty quick for the margin expansion front. Looking here, I guess, like, the other question on the top line is, I mean, you're actually already running at north of a $45 million run rate, right? Especially considering that you only had the Allegiant acquisition starting, I believe, November 1st for two months. Is that business growing, and what's the expectation for organic growth going forward, relative to what you put up in four Q4?

Doug Gaylor (President and COO)

Yeah, we did see growth, from Allegiant from 2021 to 2022 on an overall basis. We've got a great pipeline of opportunities there, so we see strong growth opportunity there. you know, we don't give, forward guidance, but I anticipate seeing good organic growth coming out of Allegiant and their numbers, along with good organic growth coming out of, both segments of the Crexendo side of the house.

Josh Nichols (Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Great to hear. Then I guess last thing for me, I think I might have missed it. Did you mention where the backlog is at today, Doug?

Doug Gaylor (President and COO)

I did. I mentioned that in my comments. Backlog at the end of the year finished at. Let me just pull it up here real quick. $46.8 million, I believe.

Ron Vincent (CFO)

That's $48.846 million. $46.846 million.

Doug Gaylor (President and COO)

$46.846 million, which is up 12% from the end of 2021.

Josh Nichols (Senior Equity Research Analyst)

As much as you can break out how much of that was Allegiant.

Doug Gaylor (President and COO)

Yeah, that number does not include any of Allegiant's backlog. We have not been able to do a full calculation on Allegiant's backlog. That number is pure organic backlog growth and no Allegiant backlog numbers in there. We'll have Allegiant backlog numbers hopefully for our Q1 earnings call. That $46.8 million does not include any Allegiant backlog. It's all organic backlog.

Josh Nichols (Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Great. 12% year-over-year exclusive to the acquisition gap.

Doug Gaylor (President and COO)

Yes. Correct.

Josh Nichols (Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Perfect.

Doug Gaylor (President and COO)

Yes.

Josh Nichols (Senior Equity Research Analyst)

That's all for me. Back into you. Thanks and congratulations again, Steve.

Jeff Korn (CEO)

Thank you.

Josh Nichols (Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Looking forward to working with you more in the future, Jeff.

Doug Gaylor (President and COO)

Thank you, Josh.

Jeff Korn (CEO)

Thanks, Josh.

Operator (participant)

Okay. The next question is coming from Mike Latimore with Northland Capital Markets. Please proceed.

Mike Latimore (Managing Director)

Great. Thank you very much. Yeah, congrats on the changes here, Steve and Jeff. Steve, hope you have a great retirement.

Steve Mihaylo (Chairman)

Thank you. I plan to.

Mike Latimore (Managing Director)

Sounds good. Sounds good. you know, you're over 3 million subscribers on the software platform, you know, and clearly really strong growth there. Doug, could you go into a little bit more detail on what's driving that? You know, is it new service providers coming on? Is it current ones expanding? Are you mostly replacing legacy systems or is there greenfield? Just a little more detail before you get to how strong the growth is coming from.

Doug Gaylor (President and COO)

Yeah, great question, Mike. We're really seeing that growth coming from all angles. We are adding new logos. We added a considerable amount of new logos in 2022. Now those logos bring on seats, but those seats have to migrate over from their existing platform. When a new logo comes on board, you know, we don't see thousands of seats coming on board immediately. It's a slow migration. Our existing licensees, of which we have over 205 licensees out there now, our existing licensees are continuing to see great growth across the board. You know, they're in all different markets, in all different verticals and specialties.

You know, when we had our user group meeting in October, for all of our licensees, we had record turnout and record enthusiasm from all of those licensees because their businesses are growing nicely. They're seeing organic growth just from the demand of everybody that's leaving premise-based equipment and moving over to the cloud. When we think about the challenges that Avaya and Mitel and other premise-based providers are having and the efficiencies and productivity and cost benefits of moving to the cloud, none of our licensees, including Crexendo, are having an issue with, you know, lack of opportunities. There's a lot of business out there that still needs to migrate to the cloud, and we're taking advantage of it as are our partners. The numbers I mentioned also include international.

We haven't seen still not a material contribution to our numbers, but we saw tremendous growth in the international markets as well. The international markets are even further behind on adoption than the U.S. market. We continue to see nice traction in the U.K. and the European markets and in Australia. We've got, you know, significant momentum in Australia right now as well.

Mike Latimore (Managing Director)

Okay, that sounds good. Then in terms of cross-selling Allegiant's managed services into the Crexendo base, can you just give a little more detail there about, you know, timing, how you're gonna package that or any other kind of relevant information?

Doug Gaylor (President and COO)

Yeah. I'm gonna pass that over to Jon, and he'll give a little bit more color. You know, the benefit of Allegiant is that they had IT services, managed services, along with network services. All three of those components are services that we didn't necessarily offer as a core competency of Crexendo to our direct end user customers. Allegiant has done a great job of boxing all of that into a single so-source provider for their end user customers. We anticipate using that for a lot of our larger opportunities out there on the Crexendo direct side. I'll have Jon add a little bit more color to that.

Jon Brinton (CRO)

Thanks. One of the areas that we can already see some fruit of that is that Allegiant had a greater level of expertise in the omni-channel CCaaS offerings than we did within our core business. We're already leveraging their employees and the associates that were in that business now to help us deploy those services, to scope them with customers. We talked about earlier, we're having good success there. Those opportunities are all really greenfield to us from a share of wallet perspective. When you look at their portfolio, they have several other services that are really interesting for us to be able to offer through our partners in an expanded distribution.

We're working on bringing those through our system to deploy them through our Crexendo retail offerings, and in some cases, even looking at ones that we could offer to our other platform licensees. We're really excited about being able to drive more through our offer, expand our average billings per customer based on additional offerings through Allegiant.

Mike Latimore (Managing Director)

Got it. Great. Then just last one. Did you have a price increase at the start of this year? Can you give us a little more detail on it?

Doug Gaylor (President and COO)

Yeah. For our licensee applications out there, we are anticipating a price increase that was not announced to the community yet. Thanks, Mike, for giving me a heads up on that. We do anticipate a little bit of a price increase coming down the pipe for our licensees that'll be announced soon.

Mike Latimore (Managing Director)

Got it. Okay. Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Okay, the next question is coming from Chris Sakai with Singular Research. Please proceed.

Chris Sakai (Director of Research)

Hi, good afternoon.

Jeff Korn (CEO)

Hi, Chris.

Chris Sakai (Director of Research)

Question I had, can you go over the reasoning again as far as the dividend, or stopping the dividend, and what will you use that money for now?

Jeff Korn (CEO)

Yes, Chris. As you know, we're a microcap business, and we're in a growth industry, and we think there are better uses for the money than paying a dividend. We could use it for anything from a stock buyback to buying companies, which would be accretive, to using it as investment in technologies. We thought at this point of our growth trajectory, there were just better uses of the money. It doesn't mean if we start throwing off a ton of money, we might not look at it again. Right now we have to manage to where we are. At this point, it just didn't make a lot of sense to us to continue it.

Chris Sakai (Director of Research)

Okay. That sounds good. For future acquisitions, I mean, what can we expect for 2023?

Jeff Korn (CEO)

Well, Doug always talks about the fishing pond. We are often have people in our software solutions community who reach out looking for an ability to sell their business. We have reached out to other people. Obviously, something within the community is almost immediately accretive to us, so that would be our primary interest. We will look at any appropriate accretive acquisitions that come along.

Chris Sakai (Director of Research)

Okay, thanks. You mentioned growth out of Europe. Can you mention or talk about how much market share do you have there and then same in Australia, and will that grow in the future?

Jeff Korn (CEO)

It's not large yet, but we're hoping to change that.

Doug Gaylor (President and COO)

Yeah. It's not, it's not large yet, Chris. As I said, you know, the contributions outside of the U.S. domestic market is not material in our financials at this point, but we do see tremendous opportunity for growth there. When we look at the opportunities, I think we've got 18 logos, maybe 20 logos, internationally, most of those in the U.K. and European market, four in Australia, one or two in New Zealand, one in the Philippines. We continue to see opportunities there. You know, if you think about BroadSoft and Metaswitch owning the majority of the markets out there from a platform perspective, you know, they are notoriously tough to deal with and very expensive to deal with.

When people are looking for alternatives for the platform, you know, we are the third-largest platform provider and the fastest-growing platform provider domestically. We're starting to take that same message across the pond on both sides of the waters there. We're seeing a lot of great demand because our product is so easy to use, so simple to implement and easy to expand. We're getting a lot of excitement and a lot of traction there. Jon, anything you wanna add to that?

Jon Brinton (CRO)

I would just add that, you know, as we've talked about a couple of times, some of the opportunities. You know, just so you understand, most new licensees for our platform that come to us, virtually none of them are starting a UCaaS offering for the first time. Almost all of them are offering our solutions built on somebody else's technology. BroadSoft and Metaswitch, you know, with there being far enough time between the Cisco and Microsoft acquisitions to date, you know, there's more opportunities in our funnel with larger partners that had worked with those platforms in the past and have seen a change in the structure and the way they're supported now over time. That's irrespective of the country that people are in.

We have very good funnel growing in Europe and, in, you know, largely what you'd call the cricket countries. In the areas where, you've got customers who are on different platforms that like the, as Doug said, the ease of use of deploying our solution and its scalability and like our model for monetizing that as well.

Chris Sakai (Director of Research)

Okay, thanks. Then last one from me. Can you talk about this quarter, if it improved from last quarter or about the same?

Ron Vincent (CFO)

Our churn's currently at the same percentage rate it was for Q3 at three-quarters of a ron average.

Chris Sakai (Director of Research)

Okay. Sounds good. Thanks for the answer.

Doug Gaylor (President and COO)

Thank you.

Jeff Korn (CEO)

Thank you, Chris.

Operator (participant)

The next question comes from John Harrell with chickenhat.com. John, please proceed.

John Harrell (Analyst)

Good afternoon, and thanks for taking my call. This Q4 diluted EPS of $0.09 is quite an acceleration year-over-year from $0.03. Do you look at this $0.09 as a one-off, or can we actually accelerate from this $0.09 level going forward?

Jeff Korn (CEO)

I'll let Ron answer that. Obviously, we wanna continue to do better, but we're not gonna commit into $0.09, but go ahead, Ron.

Ron Vincent (CFO)

Yeah. We don't give forward guidance, but we were very excited about this strong fourth quarter and the end of 2022 ending strong. We would like to continue to improve on our EPS, but at this time, we can't really give guidance as to where that will trend.

John Harrell (Analyst)

Okay. Thank you.

Doug Gaylor (President and COO)

Thank you.

Jeff Korn (CEO)

Thank you, John.

Operator (participant)

If there are any remaining questions or comments, please indicate so by pressing star one. The next question comes from Michael Kaufman with MK Investments. Please proceed.

Michael Kaufman (President)

How do you do, gentlemen? I wanna first thank Steve for his leadership in building a great company and management team, and I wish him the best of luck in his retirement, which I hope will be many, many years. I also want.

Steve Mihaylo (Chairman)

Thank you, Michael.

Michael Kaufman (President)

I also wanna thank Doug for driving the growth in sales and marketing. I look forward to Jeffrey Korn's leadership and his experience, which I think will be very helpful for the company. I wanted to comment on the fact that with the Silicon Valley Bank failure, the regulators and banks are very nervous and gun-shy, and it's basically closing down the small-cap IPO window, and small companies are under pressure for financing. I guess the question for Jeffrey is what keeps you up at night in this current environment where clearly positive cash flow and minimum leverage in terms of debt and profitability are gonna be key?

Jeff Korn (CEO)

What you just mentioned is what does not keep me up at night. We have positive cash flows. We run the business incredibly conservatively and carefully. We don't make stupid decisions or stupid investments. I'll tell you what does keep me up at night. I mean, to be honest, in this market, our stock, in my opinion, is tremendously undervalued. We are in a weak sector, and we've been hit even harder than some of our competitors. The stock prices will keep me up at night because I'm very concerned that somebody might try and make a run at us before we've had the opportunity to fully value and fully appreciate the value that I know is going to be unlocked here.

If we can get by without that happening, I'm very excited about our future.

Michael Kaufman (President)

I guess as a last comment, some of our competitors, like 8x8 and Ring and others, have brought on a lot of debt, and they really can't lower their pricing structure because they have the installed base. We have a huge opportunity to win market share with our pricing strategy. Anything we can do in that regard is gonna be great because they can't react because they have an installed base, and we're not there yet. I wish you guys the best of luck in making that happen and making this a multi-hundred million dollar company quickly.

Jeff Korn (CEO)

Thank you, Michael. rest assured, even with Steve's retirement, we're not gonna start running the business recklessly. We will not take on any unnecessary debt. We will not take on any issues that we don't need to. you know, we're a very cohesive management team. We look at the world similarly, and we run our business based upon fundamentals.

Doug Gaylor (President and COO)

I think it's also important to note, since you brought up Silicon Valley Bank, is that, we have no holdings and no dealings with them, at the present or in the past. we don't have any exposure there.

Jeff Korn (CEO)

Speak for yourself. I actually owned some stock that's got wiped out. Sorry.

Operator (participant)

Our next question comes from Ron Sharma, he's a Private Investor. Ron, please proceed.

Speaker 12

Hi, guys. How are you? Hi. I wanted to go back to the topic of the dividend. That dividend was necessary to, I thought anyway, participate in the institutional market. Is that correct?

Jeff Korn (CEO)

Well, Ron, it's partially correct. There are some funds which will only invest in companies that pay a dividend. They don't tend to be as interested in Crexendo as we were hoping they would be. Since that didn't materialize where those kind of funds took a large interest in us, we looked at the cost of paying the dividend, the benefits of paying the dividend, and the detriments of paying the dividend. Without getting the return we were expecting, we thought it made more sense to suspend it or cancel it.

Speaker 12

Yeah. That leaves. I'm sorry. That leaves the, you know, the smaller buyers as the principal target then for investors, for investment rather. If that's the case and the problem I've always had is that if there is a spike in the share price and you've got a lot of, let's say, little investors involved, many of those are just in for a quick buck, and they're gonna be selling off as fast as the price spikes, I think. I don't know. I just see the reliance on small investors as, you know, being detrimental maybe to the increase in share price for investors. Do you guys agree with that?

Jeff Korn (CEO)

I'm gonna disagree slightly with you and put it back to the dividend. Most of the institutional investors we've spoken with were not as crazy about our paying the dividend, and they're looking for us to. They're looking for us to start improving. I believe as the sector starts improving, we will see larger investors. You're right, a small investor may get out quickly, but we've had some small investors who've stayed with us for a long time. We have a lot of loyalty in our stock, and we have a lot of promise. I don't think it. You know, if, you know, as they like to say, from your mouth to God's ears, if the stock jumps to $6, I think that's a start. I think we will not lose a lot of investors.

Will some people take money off the table? Probably. That always happens with success.

Doug Gaylor (President and COO)

I think that's also another reason. I think that's also another reason, Ron, why we decided to invest in investment relations because we really realized there's a lot of opportunity out there with big offices, high net worth individuals, audiences that we haven't been able to get our message out to. By hiring an IR firm, we anticipate being able to get in front of new investment audiences that we haven't been able to get in front of prior.

I agree with you, we wanna make sure that, you know, as we tell our story and continue to execute on our plan, that we get in front of bigger and more long-term investors, because we really feel like, as Jeff said, the stock is undervalued today, and we see the long-term opportunity. That's the message that we'll be getting out to, hopefully, a new group of investors with our IR firm.

Speaker 12

Yeah. You guys are doing so well that loyalty really is, you know, a card in your hand. You know, and I can vouch for that 'cause I'm one. You know, a small investor that's been around a while because I just like your company. Thank you very much for your time.

Jeff Korn (CEO)

Thank you, Ron. We appreciate your support.

Operator (participant)

We have no further questions on the queue. We have reached the end of this question and answer session. I will now turn the call back to Jeff for our closing remarks.

Jeff Korn (CEO)

Well, I wanna thank all of you for your time and attention in joining us on the Q4 and 2022 results conference call. We look forward to speaking with you in the not-too-distant future when we announce Q1 results. Thank you, everybody. Have a great afternoon.

Doug Gaylor (President and COO)

Thanks, everybody.

Steve Mihaylo (Chairman)

Thank you.

Operator (participant)

This concludes today's conference, and you may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.