Digimarc - Earnings Call - Q1 2025

Executive Summary

• Q1 2025 revenue was $9.37M, up 8% sequentially and +$0.61M versus Wall Street consensus; GAAP diluted EPS was ($0.55), missing consensus by $0.04, while non-GAAP diluted EPS was ($0.40). Revenue beat vs estimates; EPS miss vs estimates.*
• Ending ARR was $20.0M (flat vs Q4 2024, down from $23.9M YoY primarily due to a $5.8M contract expiration). Subscription gross margin held at 86% and service margin rose to 65% on mix.
• Management tightened go-to-market focus to retail loss prevention (gift cards, PLU fraud), physical authentication, and digital authentication; expects gift cards to be a “significant driver” of 2025 ARR and aims for free cash flow positive by Q4 2025, an acceleration versus prior commentary.
• Near-term headwind: elevated legal/PR costs from an external matter (~$0.5M/month) will lift Q2 cash usage; medium-term tailwinds include Unilever’s global GS1 Digital Link rollout, Belgium Digimarc Recycle initiative, and a potential U.S. government digital authentication win.

What Went Well and What Went Wrong

What Went Well

• Revenue outperformed Street in Q1: $9.37M actual vs $8.76M consensus; service margin expanded to 65% on favorable labor mix; non-GAAP gross margin improved to 80%.*
• Strategic focus and pipeline momentum: first protected gift cards expected on shelves within a month; PLU fraud customer advocacy via Omni Talk; management reiterates gift cards as a “significant driver” of 2025 ARR.
• Commercial validation milestones: Unilever selected Digimarc as digital link vendor of choice for a large global 2D barcode rollout; HolyGrail 2.0 trials validated Digimarc Recycle as ready for full commercial deployment (Belgium early adopter program).

What Went Wrong

• EPS missed consensus; GAAP diluted EPS ($0.55) vs ($0.36) consensus; non-GAAP diluted ($0.40) excluded significant severance, but still elevated losses YoY due to reorganization costs.*
• ARR declined YoY to $20.0M (from $23.9M) with churn and deliberate price aggression on renewals outside focus areas; subscription revenue fell YoY on the expired $1.1M contract.
• Cash usage pressure: Q2 cash burn expected higher than planned due to ~$0.5M/month legal/PR costs from an external matter, with potential risk to customer/partner dialogues; management still targets FCF positive in Q4 2025.

Transcript

Operator (participant)

Greetings, and welcome to the Digimarc Q1 2025 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce George Karamanos. Please go ahead.

George Karamanos (EVP, Chief Legal Officer, and Corporate Secretary)

Thank you. Welcome to our Q1 Conference Call. Riley McCormack, our CEO, and Charles Beck, our CFO, are with me on the call. On the call today, we'll provide a business update and discuss Q1 2025 Financial Results. This will be followed by a question-and-answer forum. We've posted our prepared remarks in the investor relations section of our website and will archive this webcast there. Before we begin, let me remind everyone that today's discussion contains forward-looking statements that have risks and uncertainties. Please refer to our press release for more information on the specific risk factors that could cause actual results to differ materially. Riley will now provide a business update.

Riley McCormack (CEO)

Thank you, George, and hello, everyone. As discussed on our last earnings call, we have narrowed our immediate focus to three specific opportunity sets: retail loss prevention, physical authentication, and digital authentication. In parallel, we have also ensured that we are positioned to benefit from our historical programs in other areas, either directly or through our valued partners. This tightening of focus was made possible by our recent technological and market advancements in the authentication space. As a reminder, we discussed those advancements in greater detail on our last two earnings calls. It is a testament to the power of our team and our technology that we've been able to grow annual recurring revenue, or ARR, almost five times over these last four years as we've been zeroing in on areas of deep product-market fit. Most companies oscillate around flat until they reach that critical milestone.

We've accomplished this while applying the rigor and focus required to speed time to deep product-market fit. Since the middle of 2021, we have exited businesses and de-emphasized offerings and business practices that didn't make strategic sense, while also moving away from pursuing non-scalable services revenue. Adjusting for the end of life of our piracy intelligence business, we have more than tripled commercial subscription revenue since Q2 2021. We have also expanded our subscription gross margin almost 1,000 basis points, despite no longer licensing our IP to potential competitors. This decision was a headwind to both revenue and margins, as IP licensing carries a 100% gross margin rate. It was also unquestionably the right thing to do to ensure our long-term success. More exciting than where we have been, however, is where we are going.

On that front, I want to take a moment to reiterate what we shared on our last call. While we continue to expect lumpiness as we shift our focus to our core authentication use cases, we believe we are on the cusp of sustainable free cash flow generation for the first time in over 12 years. Moreover, beyond just achieving this important milestone, we expect to deliver significant top-line growth in free cash flow generation in 2026 and beyond. Turning now to an update on our business, our Q1 results came in above our internal plan. These results demonstrate that it is indeed possible to deliver on our much tighter focus areas while still positioning ourselves to potentially benefit from our historical work outside these specific areas.

Starting with our work in retail loss prevention, we expect the first gift cards protected with our solution will appear on shelves within the next month. This is a critical milestone in our work to catalyze the industry towards meaningful adoption this year. Moreover, while the market sizing we have shared for our gift card solution only contemplates the U.S. market, we're beginning to work with partners to map out the opportunity in multiple other large geographies. The driver behind narrowing our go-to-market focus is the incredible power that comes from such focus, especially when trying to orchestrate a rollout as large and on as tight a timeline as we expect this gift card rollout will be. As discussed in greater detail on our last call, the other retail loss prevention use case that we expect to contribute to 2025 ARR is our solution addressing price lookup, or PLU, fraud.

On this front, our initial customer will be a featured guest on the May 29th episode of the influential Omni Talk Podcast to talk about the power of our solution. This level of customer advocacy is both powerful and appreciated. Turning now to our physical authentication solutions, we expect to shortly sign a fifth deal with a Digimarc Validate customer I referenced on our last call. Recall, the first deal they signed with us was the first deal was signed in Q3 2024. Our learnings from this engagement and how we can replicate it are as valuable to us as the mid-six-figure revenue it represents. We have also formed a partnership with a fellow supplier to one of our loyalty and reward customers. We both agree with this shared customer that our solutions pair well together.

As a reminder, our loyalty and reward offering involves the application of serialized QR codes in Digimarc Illuminate Analytics to modernize and secure loyalty and reward programs, not the creation of the underlying programs themselves. This new partner has already introduced us to four of their more than 1,000 customers. We look forward to strengthening this new partnership one happy customer at a time. Touching now on our digital authentication solutions, as mentioned on our last call, we had chosen to be very conservative about this area's contribution to 2025 ARR. We made this decision to ensure that we were focused on optimizing our work in this area for the long term. As it turns out, it is likely this area will exceed the conservative assumptions for this fiscal year.

Not only do we expect to grow the relationship with the Fortune 100 customer we discussed in the last call, we are also beginning conversations with others interested in a similar solution to help fight unauthorized leaks and/or the improper usage of sensitive and valuable digital assets. Still, my message remains consistent: we will make decisions optimized for the long term, not the short term, in this area and across our entire business. Moving now to how we have positioned ourselves to benefit from other opportunities outside of our three current focus areas of focus, last week we were excited to share the news of being selected by Unilever to be their digital link vendor of choice. We also recently won a deal with another large CPG for this same use case.

With the twin tailwinds of Digital Product Passport and Sunrise 2027, carving out early wins in this space sets us up to help companies with their need for upcoming compliance, whether that be directly or through our value print pack partners. We were also excited to share the announcement from the Alliance to End Plastic Waste and AIM that now is the time to scale commercial adoption of Digimarc Recycle. We agree, and our initial win in Belgium, as well as our support for other opportunities this group is progressing, positions us squarely under that tree as this much-needed future unfolds. Finally, with regards to our work of identifying digital assets in the era of Gen AI, we expect to be able to soon announce a win with an important division of the U.S. government.

When it comes to providing the safer, fairer, and more transparent internet we all deserve, this win is an important beachhead as this future unfolds. It should also act as an important point of validation as we focus on opening the digital authentication market that is currently a commercial focus. I will now turn the call over to Charles to discuss our financial results.

Charles Beck (CFO)

Thank you, Riley, and hello, everyone. Ending ARR for Q1 was $20 million compared to $23.9 million for Q1 last year. Excluding the $5.8 million commercial contract that lapsed last year, we grew ending ARR $1.9 million, representing year-on-year growth of 11%. I want to remind everyone that on the last earnings call, I mentioned the potential for an increase in customer churn and that we would be strategically price-aggressive on a handful of renewals outside our current focus areas. This occurred in Q1, and we expect it to continue into Q2 as we tighten our go-to-market focus. As Riley referenced earlier, we are above our internal plan for ARR after the first quarter. Total revenue was $9.4 million, a decrease of $600,000, or 6% from $9.9 million in Q1 last year.

Subscription revenue, which accounted for 57% of total revenue for the quarter, decreased 8% from $5.8 million to $5.3 million. The decrease reflects no revenue recognized on the expired commercial contract I just referenced versus $1.1 million of revenue recognized in Q1 last year. Excluding the impact of the expired contract, subscription revenue would have increased $600,000, or 13%, reflecting revenue recognized on new contracts and upsells on existing customers. Service revenue decreased 3% from $4.2 million to $4.1 million, reflecting lower government service revenue from the central banks, partially offset by higher commercial service revenue from HolyGrail recycling projects. As I stated on the previous earnings call, we expect government service revenue in 2025 to be 12%-14% lower than 2024, but also to be spread more evenly in 2025 than 2024.

Actual results were in line with our budget, as government service revenue was down 17%, reflecting both a lower annual program budget and a smoother distribution of services in 2025. Regarding the HolyGrail recycling projects, we have now substantially completed the services related to phase three. We do not anticipate any future services as the industry shifts its focus to commercial rollout. Subscription gross profit margin, excluding amortization expense, was 86% for the quarter, down one percentage point from Q1 last year, reflecting the impact of lower subscription revenue. We anticipate that subscription gross profit margins may be lower the next couple of quarters as we continue to consolidate our legacy platforms. After the migration, we expect subscription gross margins to recover and even increase over time as our Illuminate platform should be more efficient than our legacy platforms.

Service gross profit margin was 65% for the quarter, up 9 percentage points from Q1 last year, reflecting a favorable service labor mix that we do not expect to continue at this elevated level. As a reminder, we expect to generate mid-50% service gross profit margins on a normalized basis, with some fluctuation quarter to quarter. Operating expenses were $18.2 million for the quarter, up 6% from $17.1 million in Q1 last year. The increase in operating expenses primarily reflects $3.2 million of one-time cash severance costs incurred in Q1 related to the reorganization we announced in late February and $900,000 of higher professional services costs. Those partially offset by lower stock compensation expenses of $1.5 million and lower headcount costs of $1.4 million.

Due to the timing of the reorganization, the headcount cost savings in Q1 were around $1 million, but going forward, we expect the savings to be over $4 million a quarter. Non-GAAP operating expenses, which exclude non-cash and non-recurring items, were $16.5 million for the quarter, up 19% from $13.8 million in Q1 last year. The increase in non-GAAP operating expenses primarily reflects $3.2 million of one-time cash severance costs incurred in Q1 related to the reorganization and $900,000 of professional services costs, partially offset by lower headcount costs of $1.4 million. As a reminder, we do not exclude cash severance costs in our non-GAAP results. Net loss per share for the quarter was $0.55 versus $0.50 in Q1 last year. Non-GAAP net loss per share for the quarter was $0.40 versus $0.27 in Q1 last year.

Excluding the one-time severance costs of $3.2 million, net loss per share and non-GAAP net loss per share would have been $0.40 and $0.25 respectively, both an improvement over Q1. Now turning to cash flow, we ended the quarter with $21.6 million in cash and short-term investments. Free cash flow usage was down considerably from $8.6 million in Q1 last year to $5.6 million in Q1 this year. Further, the $5.6 million of free cash flow usage included $2.1 million in one-time severance-related costs paid during the first quarter. Excluding the one-time severance costs paid, free cash flow usage would have been $3.5 million. Looking ahead, we now expect to see higher cash flow usage in Q2 than we originally expected due to significantly higher legal and public relations costs as a result of an external matter that arose near the end of March.

Currently, these costs are running upwards of $500,000 per month, before accounting for the risk they introduce to important ongoing customer and partner conversations. Assuming a cessation of this external matter, after Q2, we expect normalized cash flow usage to continue to decrease, with the goal of becoming free cash flow positive by Q4 this year. For further discussion of our financial results and risks and prospects for our business, please see our Form 10-Q that will be filed with the SEC. I will now turn the call back over to Riley for final remarks.

Riley McCormack (CEO)

Thank you, Charles. We are excited to continue to execute against the strategy we laid out in the last call. Recent technological and market achievements have allowed us the opportunity to tighten our focus to an even greater level, and we seize that opportunity knowing that the combination of focus, this team, and this technology is a powerful force. While early Q1 results demonstrate that it is important that it is possible to deliver in our much tighter focus areas, while positioning ourselves to potentially benefit from our historical work outside these specific areas, we remain excited about what lies ahead. Joel, we will now open the call up for questions.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, if you would like to ask a question, please press Star one on your telephone keypad, and 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 speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the Star keys. The first question comes from the line of Joshua Reilly with Needham. Please proceed.

Joshua Reilly (Senior Analyst)

Yeah, thanks for taking my questions. Maybe just starting off on the gift card opportunity, I guess maybe it would be helpful to kind of level set for people. How are you thinking about the potential for revenue and ARR to actually hit the model in 2025 from the gift card opportunities? Or maybe is the better way to think about it, like, this is another year this is a year of development, and maybe that's got more of a financial impact in 2026 and 2027. Second on gift cards, what is the feedback from the ecosystem on how your solution is differentiated versus what has historically been used? Maybe you could just kind of touch on that a bit there as well.

Riley McCormack (CEO)

Sure. Thank you, Josh. Thanks for the question. On the revenue impact, as we mentioned on the last call, we expect gift cards to be a significant driver of our 2025 ARR growth. We're focused on catalyzing adoption this calendar year, which I mentioned again in this call. In fact, this deadline was one of the drivers behind our decision to tighten our focus even further than we've done in the past. This is part of what we talked about last call about why we're getting so focused is deadlines and milestones that we want to hit in order to make it so, in order to make it a significant driver of 2025 ARR. I think it's a great segue into your second question, which, what is the reception like? It's astounding. It truly is.

I know that some people went to a trade show in September of last year, which was six months ago. Things have only progressed since then. This is a real issue. This is an existential issue this industry faces. Mid to high teens growth last year, flat this year. Expectations, obviously, that's not a great trend for this industry. It is a trillion-dollar global industry that is being attacked, and we think we have a novel solution. We've been doing this for 26 years, helping protect other currency, fiat currency. We think we can do the exact same thing in gift cards, and it's wonderful to see the reception we're getting from the industry. This is something that, as we mentioned before, has a lot of characteristics of our ecosystem-driven opportunities, but none of the actual requirements of this being an ecosystem adoption.

It's unlike anything we've seen, and it's pretty exciting. That's why we've been talking about it. That's part of our decision behind the reorganization and focusing on authentication is this is a big driver of that.

Joshua Reilly (Senior Analyst)

Understood. Got it. As you look at a couple of those price-sensitive renewals that you highlighted in the shareholder letter, are those actually having an impact on ARR growth here in Q1 and Q2 that is enough to actually call out, or are you just kind of highlighting those deals to point out a couple of trends in the industry?

Charles Beck (CFO)

We were highlighting them to pull out some trends in the industry. As you know, Josh, we don't break down ARR in any detail. There's no material movements from those, but I think that's why Riley was highlighting those. It was just general trends.

Joshua Reilly (Senior Analyst)

Got it.

Charles Beck (CFO)

I think as we get more price-aggressive on continuing deals, it did have some impact on Q1 and likely will on Q2, but not material enough where we're calling out because we don't break down ARR in any sort of specific pluses and minuses.

Riley McCormack (CEO)

Yeah, Josh, it's an example of us investing in the future, right? These are not areas that we need necessarily monetized right now. Maybe they're areas that are a little bit more competitive. We want to plant our flag so we can come back to them. They're obviously outside of the authentication use cases, so we want to plant our flag. We are willing to get a little more price-aggressive with the, again, making sure that if we decide to come back and focus on the area, we're there and also potentially tightening the screws on some people and some competitors that rely on these areas more than we do.

Joshua Reilly (Senior Analyst)

Understood. That's super helpful. Okay.

Last question for me is, as we kind of think about the deal with Belgium, it's hard for us to get transparency into what's going on from the elements of the governments over there and everything, all the different moving parts. Is there any initial proof points you can highlight now that this has been going for a couple of quarters in terms of points of success or timeline achievement that we should be considering?

Riley McCormack (CEO)

Yeah. It hasn't been going for a couple of quarters, a couple of months maybe. I think we announced it or we signed it within a couple of days of our last call, whenever that was, two months ago.

Joshua Reilly (Senior Analyst)

Okay.

Riley McCormack (CEO)

I would.

Joshua Reilly (Senior Analyst)

Okay.

Riley McCormack (CEO)

I would say, though, the—and I'm not sure if the answer to your question was adoption or if there's upside—there is potential upside from this engagement. It's an initiative to move forward. The initial ARR is not all we expect to get as this initiative has moved forward. It's only been a couple of months since the original signing.

Joshua Reilly (Senior Analyst)

Understood. I think more broadly, too, I was just kind of asking, is this going to be an example that other countries are watching closely, another industry group in Europe, and maybe just touch on that aspect as well?

Riley McCormack (CEO)

Yeah. As I mentioned in the last call, I'm happy to revisit here as well. Absolutely. We think this is a—there has to be a solution to the plastic pollution crisis. There just has to be. I mean, this is a single planet that the plastic is an incredible material right up until the fact you can't recycle it. You can't reuse it, right? That's a big if, or that's a big issue. There is a lot of top-down drivers, PPWR being the biggest that I think will eventually catalyze adoption. Our belief, we've always said this, is our solution not only creates a higher quality and quantity of recyclate, but also unlocks novel data, right, in what happens to be a data desert for most of these companies.

Companies have so much data between the origination or the creation of an item right up until it goes across that front-of-the-store scanner. After that period, that post-purchase period, during when consumers are consuming the product, there isn't that data. There's some qualitative data. There's survey data, but there's no quantitative universal data. While that's always valuable in the era of Gen AI, having novel, clean data to feed into an AI engine is going to be transformational to these industries, to these companies. Our belief is this is where we're focused on Belgium is let's prove out yet again, although I think you saw from Alliance to End Plastic Waste and AIM's press release, everybody agrees our technology is going to lead to a higher quality and quantity of recyclate. It's about how we get to commercial-scaled adoption.

One of the things that we want to invest in improving by giving them a pay-as-you-go type growth initiative in Belgium is, my gosh, the value of the data. Because PPWR is not a global regulation. It is a European regulation. This needs to be something adopted around the world because it is a global issue. We are hoping that while everybody's focused on the higher quality and quantity of recyclate, which is a massively important outcome, we can also prove the value of this data and get a lot faster, quicker adoption. That is how we're viewing Belgium. I think if we had 10,000 people in parallel trying to go light up every country in the world, it's not going to make it move faster. What we got to do is excellently execute in Belgium, prove both value props, and I think adoption will take care of itself.

Joshua Reilly (Senior Analyst)

Understood. Thank you, guys.

Riley McCormack (CEO)

Yep. Thanks for asking, Charles.

Operator (participant)

As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press Star one on your telephone keypad. The next question comes from the line of Jeff Van Rhee with Craig-Hallum. Please proceed.

Jeff Van Rhee (Senior Research Analyst)

Great. Thanks for taking my questions. I've got a few. First on ARR and the trajectory. Can you give us any sense of how you're thinking about ARR trajectory going into the end of the year? I know the prior question was around how do we size this churn, and it's really tough to get a sense of the scope of the churn and then ultimately what you think you can do with ARR. I realize you're not giving formal guidance. You probably don't want to dial it in too narrowly, but any qualitative commentary you're able to share as to how we should think about ARR by year-end?

Charles Beck (CFO)

Yeah, Josh. I would go back to some of the statements that we made on the last call that provided some kind of inputs to modeling. Obviously, we said our focus is to get to non-GAAP profitable no later than Q4. You can kind of do some quick modeling there and get to that number. We do not give specific guidance. I would also just touch on the fact that Riley just reiterated that we believe the gift card will be a significant driver to 2025 ARR. Just taking some level of market penetration in 2025, I think can give you a sense of magnitude there. I would really point you to the model because we do not give specific guidance.

Jeff Van Rhee (Senior Research Analyst)

Okay. Yeah. Thanks, Charles. I think in terms of gift card pricing, while you're on that, can you just give us a refresher? I mean, obviously, you're getting further into these. You're seeing more repeatability of the contracts and getting a better sense of what baseline pricing is going to look like. How should people size the gift card TAM, based on how the current contracts are being priced?

Riley McCormack (CEO)

Yeah. It's great. Nothing has changed in our—we've said a couple of times now—$900 million-$1.5 billion. That's US market. Three vectors for growth there. One is we're pricing to buy the market. We want to not just provide higher efficacy, but also reduce BOM, bill of materials. There's upside there over time. Two, we already have a product roadmap of new features and new attacks we can help against. Just as we continue to roll out different versions and defense against other types of attack this industry is facing, it should affect upside there. The third one is that was just a U.S. number, right? As I said on this call, we're already having discussions with our partners about how we open other large geographies. This is a global issue, a global industry. It's a trillion-dollar GMV around the world.

This is a problem that travels well across borders. There's not a U.S.-specific reason for these attacks.

Jeff Van Rhee (Senior Research Analyst)

Yep. Okay. Last, I guess, for me on the ARR front, you're narrowing the portfolio from seven, eight, nine—I don't recall the exact number of ranges—but you decided to go after these three focal areas. Obviously, with reduced R&D and other support for those other products, and obviously in combination with the comments you've made around increased churn there, can you give a crude sense of what % of ARR right now is from the three go-forward products?

Charles Beck (CFO)

Yeah. Jeff, we just do not quantify the composition of ARR in that respect, just like the pluses and minuses of ARR at this point in time.

Jeff Van Rhee (Senior Research Analyst)

Okay. We'll leave it there. Thank you.

Charles Beck (CFO)

Thanks, Jeff.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes the question-and-answer session, and this will conclude today's conference. You may disconnect your lines at this time and enjoy the rest of your day.