Iteris - Q4 2023

Transcript

Operator (participant)

Good day, and welcome to the Iteris Fiscal 2023, fourth quarter and full year financial results conference call. At this time, all participants are on 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 would now like to turn the conference over to Todd Kehrli of MKR Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Todd Kehrli (President)

Thank you, operator. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for participating in today's conference call to discuss Iteris' financial results for its fiscal 2023, 4th quarter, and full year, ended March 31st, 2023. Joining me today are Iteris' President and CEO, Mr. Joe Bergera, and the company's CFO, Mr. Kerry Shiba. Following the remarks, we'll open the call for questions from the company's covering sell-side analysts. Before we continue, we'd like to remind all participants that during this call we may make forward-looking statements regarding future events or the future performance of the company, which statements are based on current information, are subject to change, and are not guarantees of future performance. Iteris is not undertaking an obligation to provide updates to these forward-looking statements in the future.

Actual results may differ substantially from what is discussed today, and no one should assume that at a later date, the company's comments from today will still be valid. Iteris refers you to the documents that the company files from time to time with the SEC, specifically the company's most recent forms, 10-K, 10-Q, and 8-K, which contain and identify important risk factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those that are contained in any of the forward-looking statements. As always, you'll find a webcast replay of today's call on the investor section of the company's website at iteris.com. Now I'd like to turn the call over to Iteris's President and CEO, Mr. Joe Bergera. Sir, please proceed.

Joe Bergera (President and CEO)

All right. Thank you, Todd, good afternoon to everyone. I appreciate all of you joining us today. Before we begin our regular earnings commentary, I want to apologize for changing the date of our earnings announcement. During his remarks, Kerry will explain the reason for some additional closing procedures that led to this delay. In the meantime, I want to confirm that these additional procedures have resulted in no impact to the company's income statement for fiscal 2023 or our fiscal 2022 comparisons. Let's turn to those results. Iteris reported record fiscal 2023, fourth quarter total revenue of $42.4 million, and record fiscal 2023 full year total revenue of $156.1 million, representing significant growth rates of 24% and 17% year-over-year, respectively.

We attribute the significant growth to a strong demand for our products and services, as well as the progress of our supply chain improvement plan, which mitigated the shipment constraints we experienced in the first half of fiscal 2023, and continues to normalize the economics of our Vantage sensor product lines. Our fiscal 2023, fourth quarter product gross margins improved 172 basis points on a sequential basis as we began to ship Vantage sensors with the alternative circuit boards that we released to production in our fiscal 2023, third quarter. The product gross margin improvement would have been even greater, however, we shipped more units with high purchase price variances to address customer requirements in the period.

While this constrained gross margin improvement in the fourth quarter, it helped us flush more purchase price variance through our income statement, which improves our position as we enter fiscal 2024. As a reminder, the improvement in our fourth quarter follows a sequential improvement in product gross margins in our fiscal 2023 third quarter of 2,640 basis points. In a few minutes, I'll provide some more color on the status of our supply chain improvement plan, and of course, Kerry will address our service and product gross margin dynamics in more detail in his comments. Despite concerns about a possible economic slowdown, customer adoption of the ClearMobility Platform remains very strong, based on key metrics including net bookings, competitive win rates, and instances of customers specifying the use of our solutions.

For example, we reported record fiscal 2023 total net bookings of $44.4 million as well as record fiscal 2023 full year total net bookings of $170.3 million. In fiscal 2023, our win rate in competitive procurements for our service offerings, which include consulting, managed services, and software as a service, hit a new record high of 82%, and our solutions were increasingly specified as requirements by various customers. There are many examples of customers specifying Iteris technology, we're particularly pleased to report that Iteris is specified by five of 37 agencies who were awarded the first wave of Safe Streets and Roads for All implementation grants. These grants are funded through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, or IIJA.

The total combined value of these grants is $94 million, or 16% of the total $600 million in initial implementation grants. It's unclear at this time how much of this funding Iteris will receive, but this result clearly demonstrates a high level of customer preference for Iteris solutions. Due to strong customer demand we ended the March 31, 2023 period with a record total ending backlog of $114.2 million, representing a 14% increase year-over-year. As always, our ending backlog figures and net bookings reflect firm customer orders rather than total contract value. The total value of customer contracts, which varies from quarter-to-quarter, averages on a historical basis about 200% of our total ending backlog.

Keep in mind that our backlog excludes a portion which varies from period to period of our sensor bookings, since these orders often convert to shipments within a single quarter. Speaking of our sensors, I'd like to share some detail about the performance of our product portfolio. For our sensors and third-party hardware that we refer to collectively as products, we reported fiscal 2023 fourth quarter revenue of $25.1 million and fiscal 2023 full year revenue of $85.1 million, representing a 47% and 24% increase year-over-year, respectively. The performance of our sensor portfolio, which represents the majority of our product revenue, demonstrates significant share gains in market categories that we estimate grew at about a weighted average in the range of 6%-8% over the past 12 months.

This implies that revenue for our sensors grew more than 3x the market growth rate. We believe our sensors continue to take market share at a significant rate due to both excellent sales execution and superior product performance. In the fourth quarter, we continued to extend our superior performance with improvements to various detection algorithms, such as red light running, queue length, and delay algorithms, enhancements to the setup and ease of use of our video and radar sensors, and optimizations to our connected vehicle sensors process and publish connected vehicle data packets at massive scale to ClearMobility Cloud, as well as directly to ecosystem participants. Due to the strong performance advantages of our sensors, we continue to win virtually every large, competitively sourced detection, fixed travel time, and cellular vehicle to everything, or CV2X, sensor initiatives across the country.

In the fourth quarter, our sensors were selected for the following representative smart mobility initiatives: An expanded deployment of CV2X sensors on the I-4 between Tampa and Orlando as part of the Florida Regional Advanced Mobility Elements, or FRAME program. You may recall that on previous earnings calls, we discussed similar purchases of our Spectra connected vehicle sensors for this large-scale, multi-year initiative, excuse me. Another initiative was a quarter-wide deployment in Richardson, Texas, of high-definition, AI-based detection sensors. This is the first large-scale deployment of our Vantage Apex sensor. A corridor deployment in Sunnyvale, California, of our hybrid intersection detection sensors. In other words, our Vantage Vector sensors, using both our video and radar technology, that was bundled with our ClearGuide Signals and VantageLive! cloud software.

A corridor deployment in Nashville, Tennessee, of our travel time and cellular V2X sensors attached to our cloud-based BlueARGUS software. A corridor deployment in Fredericksburg, Virginia, of our Vantage Vector sensors that are connected by our ClearMobility Cloud to the Virginia Department of Transportation Central Signal system. A deployment across a segment of the Rio Grande Valley in Texas of our radar sensors, which we brand as VantageRadius. These representative fourth quarter orders demonstrate our progress against the following three strategic priorities that we've talked about previously. First, it demonstrates our ability to win a disproportionate share of large-scale modernization initiatives. Second, to attach annual recurring revenue at the point of sale to our quarter-wide sensor deployments. Third, to leverage our leadership in intersection detection to penetrate adjacent categories, including the emerging CV2X category.

For reference, at this time we have more than 3,100 intersections and 2,100 travel time and C-V2X sensors that are connected or in the process of being connected to our ClearMobility Cloud. As mentioned earlier, we continued in the fourth quarter to make excellent progress on our supply chain improvement plan. Recently, we released to production two additional alternative circuit boards, meaning we've now released a total of eight alternative circuit boards to production. With this achievement, we've now met all the primary goals of our supply chain improvement plan, as outlined on our June 1st, 2022 earnings call. Besides mitigating supply chain constraints, the alternative circuit boards will improve our ability to source electronics components, optimize the cost of our electronics components, and enhance our ability to level load our manufacturing capacity.

Due to the success of our supply chain improvement plan, we have discontinued the use of external resources to help develop alternative circuit boards, and we started to redeploy internal engineering resources to new product development and sustaining engineering activities. Now, let's review the performance of our services portfolio. We reported record fiscal 2023 fourth quarter service revenue of $17.4 million and record fiscal 2023 full year service revenue of $71 million, representing a 1% and 9% increase year-over-year, respectively. As a reminder, about 45% of our service revenue line is comprised of project-based, in other words, consulting revenue, and 55% is now comprised of annual recurring revenue associated with our software as a service, data as a service, and managed services offers. In fiscal 2023, our annual recurring revenue increased 17% year-over-year.

During fiscal 2023, labor capacity constraints hampered the growth of our consulting revenue, and in some instances, required us to subcontract activity due to a shortage of internal resources. Additionally, we experienced more moderate growth in the fourth quarter due to customer delays, which affected our ability to meet critical project milestones, pushing some service revenue recognition to the right. Despite the delivery delays, the level of demand for our service offerings is historic. In our fiscal 2023 fourth quarter, we reported net service bookings of $25.5 million, representing a 26% increase relative to the same prior year period. We estimate that roughly $16 million or 62% of our fourth quarter net service bookings will be recognized in the future as annual recurring revenue.

In the fourth quarter, our more notable service bookings included a $6.6 million task order from the Virginia Department of Transportation to extend and expand the scope of activities related to our management of traffic operation centers across the Commonwealth, a $3 million task order from the Virginia Department of Transportation for Iteris to manage critical activities for the agency's network operations center, a $1.3 million task order to complete a corridor-wide traffic signal synchronization project for La Habra, California, a $1.2 million task order from the Orange County Transportation Authority to develop a plan, specifications, and estimates to modernize traffic corridors in three cities in Orange County, a $1 million task order with the Florida Department of Transportation for integrated corridor management services for key I-94 and I-4 corridors, and an almost $1 million cloud-enabled managed service or process virtualization task order to support the design and construction of the I-494 improvement project in Minnesota.

As demonstrated by the Minnesota project, we continue to increase the attach rate of annual recurring revenue to our consulting projects, which is accelerating the mix of service bookings that will be recognized as annual recurring revenue going forward. To sustain strong customer adoption of our ClearMobility Platform, we continued in the fourth quarter to enhance our software as a service, data as a service, and cloud-enabled managed services solutions. For example, we released a new ClearMobility Cloud standard component library to improve the ability of our software applications to operate together in a seamless manner and also enable various software development efficiencies. We began to roll out an enhanced security framework, which will create additional competitive differentiation for our cloud solutions. We continued to enhance our ClearData, Data Feed, and Integrated Enhanced Feed with our ClearGuide software to address new use cases.

We released an innovative new feature in ClearAsset that uses artificial intelligence to predict the obsolescence of transportation assets, we introduced a new application programming interface, or API, to publish travel time and connected vehicle data. In summary, we are very pleased with our record fiscal 2023 fourth quarter and full-year revenue, as well as our record total ending backlog, particularly during a difficult and complicated operating environment. Also, we're pleased with our ability to deliver against an aggressive solutions roadmap while meeting the critical goals of our supply chain improvement plan. As a result, we successfully unlocked our product backlog, we continued to service our customers, we managed to approach a full normalization of our product gross margins. With these financial metrics continuing to trend in a favorable direction, we further demonstrated that Iteris has achieved an important financial inflection point.

On that note, I'd like to turn the call over to Kerry to provide some more color on our fourth quarter and also our full-year financial results, after which I'll come back and I'll talk further about our fiscal 2024 expectations.

Kerry Shiba (SVP and CFO)

Excuse me. Thank you, Joe. Good afternoon or evening, everyone. Before I address our fourth quarter and full-year results, I want to say that I'm very excited to have joined Iteris. We participate in a business environment that is growing and developing technologically to meet evolving needs in the intelligent transportation space. When coupled with our solid market position and breadth of value propositions, it's great to join an enterprise that has both a firm foundation and a significant opportunity to help shape the marketplace in the future. Working closely with Joe, our board of directors, and the rest of the Iteris team has been my pleasure, and I look forward to getting to better know our shareholders and the analysts that cover Iteris. I next would like to speak to what is happening with respect to our year-end reporting cycle.

As we just described in a Form 8-K we filed before convening this call, our fiscal year-end closing process has been extended. We are in the process of evaluating previously recorded amounts in the balance sheet from activity that predates current periods, as well as any possible adjustments that may result from this evaluation. This matter was identified recently, and the evaluation is not yet complete, but we are focusing on transactions that occurred or may be affected by a data conversion process that began in fiscal year 2018 before the company migrated to our new cloud-based ERP systems at the start of fiscal year 2019. We intend to complete the evaluation and file our annual report on Form 10-K on or before June 29, which would be in compliance with the filing grace period under Rule 12b-25 under the Exchange Act.

We intend to file a Form 12b-25 with the SEC later today or tomorrow. I want to stress again that our evaluation is focused on amounts in the balance sheet related to activity that predates current results and do not affect our cash balance or financial health of the business, should we need to make any adjustments. Okay, let's move now on to address some of the underlying details regarding our financial results for the fiscal 2023 fourth quarter and full year. As Joe noted, we made significant commercial progress in fiscal 2023. While I don't want to repeat the various accomplishments that Joe highlighted, I do want to underscore that our strength in the market is reflected both in the rate of growth and the nominal value of our revenue, backlog, and bookings.

Moving down the income statement to the gross profit line, I would like to expand some on the commentary Joe provided, particularly related to the impact of supply chain dynamics on our gross profit performance. In fiscal 2023, we incurred almost $16 million in negative purchase price variance from aftermarket purchases of semiconductors and other electronic components. This amount was on top of negative purchase price variances that we began to incur on purchases made in the back half of fiscal 2022. After initially flowing through the balance sheet, what hit the income statement in fiscal 2023 as we sold product incorporating those components, also approximated $16 million. Due to the success of our supply chain improvement plan, we were able to progressively and significantly reduce our aftermarket purchases as the year progressed, due to our introduction of alternative circuit boards, as Joe described.

From a high of almost $5 million per quarter over the first six months, negative purchase price variance incurred for new purchases fell to just over $600,000 in Q4 of fiscal 2024, or I'm sorry, fiscal 2023. Given the rapid and dramatic impact of these dynamics, I think it's important to look at our gross margins on both a year-over-year and a sequential basis. From a year-over-year perspective, fiscal 2023 fourth quarter consolidated gross profit increased $2.4 million or 22%, due largely to the increase in fourth quarter product revenue.

Our consolidated fiscal 2023 fourth quarter gross profit margin of 31.8% did decline 60 basis points year-over-year, due to a specific shift in mix between direct labor and subcontractor contact, content that impacted our service gross margins and, to a lesser extent, higher costs for purchase data. We do not believe the labor mix shift is systemic in the long run, but it may persist for two to three quarters until we start to realize the benefit of talent acquisition and talent development initiatives that Joe will touch on in more detail in a few minutes. Likewise, we expect to demonstrate progressive leverage on our data acquisition agreements as our Software as a Service and Data as a Service revenue continues to grow. The sequential gross margin trend also was important to understand.

Aggregate gross margin for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2023 of 31.8% improved 270 basis points over the 29.1% for the prior quarter. The improvement reflects a $2 million decline in the amount of negative purchase price variance hitting the income statement, which also was reflected in the sequential gross margin improvement for the products portfolio. Partially offsetting this improvement was a 610 basis point decline in gross margins for the services portfolio, which, while more pronounced than for the year-to-year comparison, resulted primarily from the same factors that I just noted. As Joe mentioned, the amount of negative purchase price variance hitting the income statement in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2023 was higher than originally expected, as the mix of sensor products sold shifted some as we pivoted to meet very strong market demand.

However, the offsetting good news is that negative price variance remaining on the balance sheet was therefore reduced and now approximates only $600,000. Just to reiterate a comment I made previously, equally important is that the rate of incoming variance on new purchases has abated significantly from prior quarters and currently is expected to remain at levels that range between $200,000-$300,000 per quarter, based on current market conditions. As we look at all the factors involved, we expect our aggregate gross margins to improve progressively as we proceed through fiscal 2024.

With the fundamental minimization of negative purchase price variance, better leverage on data cost as software and other related revenues grow, and a better labor mix on consulting projects, we currently expect that our overall gross margins should return to levels approximating or slightly exceeding 40% in the latter half of the year. Operating expenses in aggregate were 1% lower in the current year fourth quarter when compared to the prior year, and as a percent of sales, declined 820 basis points, reflecting significantly improved leverage on the large revenue increase. The aggregate decline reflects lower G&A expense, as spending controls implemented earlier in the fiscal year continued in the fourth quarter. The G&A reduction, excuse me again, was largely offset by higher sales and marketing costs, primarily due to higher sales commissions on the significant increase in sales for the products portfolio.

R&D costs incurred were relatively flat nominally, with a small increase reflecting some continuing expenses to re-engineer product circuit boards, albeit at a lower rate than incurred in the third quarter, as well as continuing development of various ongoing product enhancements. The factors just discussed related to revenue, gross profit, and operating expense fundamentally explain the major comparisons in operating income, net income, and adjusted EBITDA. For adjusted EBITDA, we delivered $1.4 million in the fourth quarter of this year, which represents a $1.8 million sequential and a $2.5 million year-over-year improvement. The sequential improvement further underscores that Iteris is poised for adjusted EBITDA and related margin improvement going forward.

Total unrestricted cash at the end of Q4 2023 was $16.6 million, which was $6.4 million higher sequentially. Seven point one million dollars lower compared to last year. While the year-over-year decline reflects the negative impact of the difficult supply chain conditions encountered during fiscal 2023, the sequential improvement is a result of a combination of higher income and strong balance sheet management. Effective accounts receivable collection and reduced inventory investment were key contributors to the improved cash position. While trajectory can be affected in the short term around balance sheet cutoffs, future earnings improvement and good balance sheet management provide the foundation for continued liquidity improvement going forward. I'll now turn the call back over to Joe, who will discuss our fiscal 2024 guidance and provide some closing comments. Joe?

Joe Bergera (President and CEO)

Great. Thank you, Terry. The smart mobility infrastructure management market, in our opinion, represents significant long-term opportunities, due both to favorable secular trends and also the historic IIJA funding that has been committed by Congress through 2026. In our opinion, the transportation infrastructure sector is largely insulated from current political machinations, though we do expect some temporary market confusion to occur this summer when Congress negotiates how to apply the budget targets established by the recent debt ceiling agreement. We remain very optimistic about the long-term growth prospects in front of Iteris, and we're very excited, with our supply chain challenges largely behind us, to be redirecting management attention and engineering resources back to strategic initiatives.

To that end, Iteris plans to deliver an aggressive fiscal 2024 solutions roadmap that includes the following major releases: First, a next-generation travel time and connected vehicle data collection and data presentation system powered by Clear Mobility Cloud APIs. Second, a suite of connected vehicle software applications that will leverage our enhanced connected vehicle data collection and presentation capabilities. Third, a state-of-the-industry, cloud-based international registration planning and international fuel tax administration system for commercial vehicles, which, among other benefits, will capture valuable new data sets for Clear Mobility Cloud. Fourth, a new form factor for Vantage Apex to secure additional technical specifications and expand the addressable market for Apex. Fifth, various releases to enhance our video and radar fusion algorithms.

We believe our fiscal 2024 release plan will accelerate the adoption of the ClearMobility Platform, increase the cross-sell of ClearMobility offerings, and improve the monetization of our expanding mobility data sets. To capitalize on our release plan, we'll continue to improve the productivity of our various sales channels. For example, we'll further optimize the distribution network for our sensor portfolio, create a small, dedicated enterprise sales team focused on private sector segments, and expand our customer success function to maintain a greater than 95% retention rate and drive more upsell revenue. In addition to channels, sales channel improvements, in fiscal 2024, we'll implement various talent acquisition and talent development initiatives to improve the labor capacity of our consulting teams.

We'll focus on the supply of civil and traffic engineering talent, which remains very tight, even though we've seen some improvement in the software-- supply of software engineering and data science talent. Our tactics will include enhancing our employer brand presence on select campuses, expanding our existing internship programs, improving our capabilities to source international job candidates, increasing the number of generalists we hire, and increasing the level of technical and professional training that we provide all employees. These initiatives, of course, are going to require some short-term investment, but they should accelerate the pace of conversion of our historic consulting backlog, and perhaps more importantly, create operational efficiencies and certain competitive advantages for us going forward.

Given these dynamics, we expect fiscal 2024 revenue to be in the range of $168 million-$175 million, representing organic growth of 10% year-over-year at the midpoint. With the increase in revenue and the normalization of our supply chain, we expect a significant improvement in adjusted EBITDA dollars, even after some investments in talent acquisition and talent development. As a result, we forecast an adjusted EBITDA margin in the range of 7%-9% of fiscal 2024 revenue, and we anticipate a continued improvement in liquidity with fiscal 2024 net cash flow in the range of $12 million-$16 million. Looking beyond fiscal 2024, we believe Iteris remains on track to achieve our Vision 2027 targets.

In other words, we continue to estimate fiscal 2027 revenue in the range of $245 million-$265 million before any additional acquisitions, representing a five-year organic revenue growth rate of 14% at the midpoint. With this substantial increase in annual revenue, we also anticipate progressive benefits from scale to result in fiscal 2027 adjusted EBITDA margins in the range of 17%-19%. Additionally, we anticipate improvements in our liquidity to enable Iteris to resume our acquisition program, which would, of course, be additive to our organic Vision 2027 targets. In closing, fiscal 2023 was a difficult period due to COVID and then the subsequent global supply chain constraints.

We demonstrated significant agility in the face of those challenges, achieving the objectives of our supply chain improvement plan and continuing to develop our platform-centric business model at the same time. As a result, we now enter fiscal 2024, positioned to extend our leadership in the smart mobility infrastructure management market, and we are poised to create significant shareholder value through achievement of our Vision 2027 operating targets. With that, we'd be delighted to respond to any questions and comments. Operator, I'd like to open up the line, see if you have any questions for us.

Operator (participant)

Absolutely. Thank you. At this time, we will be conducting a question-and-answer 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 speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. One moment, please, while we poll for questions. The first question is from Jeff Van Sinderen with B. Riley. Jeff, please proceed.

Richard Magnusen (Associate Analyst)

Hello, this is Richard Magnusen in for Jeff Van Sinderen. Thank you for taking our call. You gave us some color, I believe, on gross margin percent, but what other additional color can you give us on expectations around OpEx, quarterly revenue progression, any lumpiness of converting backlog to revenue as we progress through the fiscal year?

Joe Bergera (President and CEO)

Maybe I'll just kind of talk about quarterly revenue progression and sort of lumpiness. It's your term, Richard, and then I'll turn it over, Kerry, to you to talk about the gross margin % and operating expense, if that's okay. In terms of quarterly revenue, as I said, we're providing guidance for the full year of 10% growth at the midpoint. You know, we would expect that to look fairly consistent over the fiscal year from quarter-to-quarter. That being said, we are anticipating the possibility of some initial confusion, modest, but potentially some confusion in the first half of the fiscal year due to the debate that we expect to occur between Congress and the Administration, which can create some confusion at the state and local level.

Additionally, for our first and second quarter, we expect to have some modest, not significant, but some modest impact from limitations in terms of our labor capacity. Aside from that, we expect that the year-over-year growth in each quarter should be approximately similar, you know, as we progress through the year. Again, we're guiding to 10% growth for the fiscal year at the midpoint of our range. In terms of bookings, which I think perhaps was the point about lumpiness, you know, we do, from time to time, have, like, some difficult comparisons. For example, in the fourth quarter, for which we're currently reporting, as a reminder, prior fourth quarter of fiscal 2022, we had almost a $10 million order for our detection product from Miami-Dade.

That represented a challenge for us in terms of product booking in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2023. Of course, there'll be certain, you know, difficult comparisons going forward that, you know, could result in, you know, some, in terms of year-over-year comparisons, some fluctuations in terms of the rate of bookings growth. Overall, at this point, we've been standardly reporting bookings in the sort of mid-$40 million range. We would expect that to continue to increase as we progress and, you know, on a nominal basis, to have, you know, substantial bookings be able to report substantial bookings growth in each quarter as we progress through fiscal 2024. Kerry, do you want to talk about gross margins and operating expense?

Kerry Shiba (SVP and CFO)

I think, directly, you know, Richard, of course, you know, we're not releasing quarterly guidance specifically. However, as far as the trajectory, we would expect some steady progress, particularly in the second half of this year when you look at margin projections. I think as I had discussed, some of that's gonna clearly be evident with regard to increasing leverage on our software business as the revenues continue to grow. That should start to show through also as we progress. Operating expenses, I think that we will show a little bit of inflation as the year goes on, but it should be somewhat steady and not anything unusual standing out quarter by quarter or in the trajectory as we go forward.

Again, I think the margin is going to reflect continued sequential progression, particularly in the back half of the year. You know, the year-over-year comparisons, of course, are gonna be clouded by what came through the cost of sales with regard to all of the purchase price variance that hit us as the year went on.

Michael Latimore (Managing Director and Artificial Intelligence Equity Analyst)

All right, thank you.

Joe Bergera (President and CEO)

Any additional questions, Richard?

Michael Latimore (Managing Director and Artificial Intelligence Equity Analyst)

No, that's it for now. Thank you.

Kerry Shiba (SVP and CFO)

Great. Thank you.

Operator (participant)

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

Michael Latimore (Managing Director and Artificial Intelligence Equity Analyst)

Great, yeah, thanks very much. On the services business, Joe, I think you said some revenue was moved to the right there. Can you quantify that a little bit? Was it this dynamic where you incurred the cost in the quarter but didn't recognize the revenue in the quarter in that project or projects?

Joe Bergera (President and CEO)

Yeah, correct. I don't have the precise number in front of me, but I think it probably around $1 million, maybe between $1 million and $1.4 million in revenue. Yes, it was a situation where we did incur the expense, but we weren't able to take the associated revenue.

Michael Latimore (Managing Director and Artificial Intelligence Equity Analyst)

Got it. Okay,

Joe Bergera (President and CEO)

By the way, I think that translated to about a 200 or 300 basis point impact on our EBITDA.

Michael Latimore (Managing Director and Artificial Intelligence Equity Analyst)

Okay, okay. Is the thought that the service gross margin would improve in the first quarter here and then sort of improve every quarter after that?

Joe Bergera (President and CEO)

Yes, that's generally true. What I was trying to say previously is that I think we'll do a better job of unlocking our services backlog as we're able to overcome some of the labor capacity constraints. The gross margin underperformance, if you will, in the fourth quarter, we think is largely isolated. It's really driven more by the timing of some specific projects. Yes, that revenue did just slip to the right, and we expect to recover, both the revenue, and then we'll also see a benefit from a gross margin and EBITDA perspective.

Kerry Shiba (SVP and CFO)

You know, Mike, as our labor mix improves and we, you know, begin to staff up, it'll not only help to unlock revenue, but also the mix between contract and...

Joe Bergera (President and CEO)

Yeah

Kerry Shiba (SVP and CFO)

Our own labor will improve the margin also.

Joe Bergera (President and CEO)

Yeah, it's a great point, and thanks for pointing that out. Because Mike, in some instances, in order to deal with our own labor capacity constraints, we used subcontractors to perform some of the work, and we don't realize the same kind of margin on that revenue that we do our direct labor.

Michael Latimore (Managing Director and Artificial Intelligence Equity Analyst)

Yeah. Got it. Okay. Just on the 10-K analysis, can you provide a little more clarity there? You know, which balance sheet items are you thinking about and in which years?

Kerry Shiba (SVP and CFO)

I clearly expect, Mike, that we're gonna have some balance sheet adjustments that are gonna flow through. You may have noticed we didn't include a balance sheet, for example, and when we put the earnings release out, because those are gonna be subject to change. Excuse me. The focus is really around deferred items that relate to our contracts, you know, and the services part of our business, really has nothing to do with the hardware business, which is much more straightforward. We're poking at the deferrals. I guess I'll reiterate that this is a balance sheet analysis that does go back years into the past.

I wish I had the evaluation complete, but we're going back in time, and there's a lot of contracts to look at, and there's a lot of detail to sift through. But primarily around the deferred, the deferred items on the, on the balance sheet.

Michael Latimore (Managing Director and Artificial Intelligence Equity Analyst)

Yeah. Okay, great. Joe, you mentioned that Iteris was kinda, quote, "specified" in several, I think, proposals from this, Safe Cities Act, I believe. Is that... Have you seen that before? I mean, it sounds like they're basically not doing an RFP. They just say, "This is what we want to spend money on." Can you just clarify that a little bit more?

Joe Bergera (President and CEO)

Yeah. Well, specification happens at multiple levels. For example, we work with a lot of states to help them set the specifications for detection devices that are sold and deployed in their jurisdictions. To the extent that we're able to influence that can obviously be beneficial for Iteris, that's one thing that happens. You know, to the extent that we're able, in certain competitive procurements, to influence the specifications of the request for proposals or the technical evaluation criteria, that's obviously beneficial to us, and as appropriate, we'll, you know, and attempt to influence those specifications. In this particular instance, we were talking about something different. These are instances where several agencies submitted and received grants from the U.S. Department of Transportation for initiatives that are gonna be funded through the IIJA funding.

In those particular instances, the way that the grant proposals were written, the agencies specified Iteris technology, software, or services. In some instances, that could be because, you know, they're required to use us because the state has already stipulated that we must be used 'cause we've managed to influence the state specifications. In other instances, the states just felt that we were the appropriate technical solution for the project that was envisioned when they submitted the grant. In any event, through either one of those mechanisms, we are the specified solutions, and then they subsequently received that funding from the USDOT when their grants were selected.

Michael Latimore (Managing Director and Artificial Intelligence Equity Analyst)

Mm-hmm. Okay, great. Makes sense.

Joe Bergera (President and CEO)

Now, just to be clear, though.

Michael Latimore (Managing Director and Artificial Intelligence Equity Analyst)

I'm sorry.

Joe Bergera (President and CEO)

That does not mean necessarily that we represent 100% of all the activity that's been funded. You know, we're now working with agencies to get clarification as to what our scope is gonna be in those projects. The sum total of all that activity that was funded through those grants represents about $94 million, which is almost 20% of all the. I think it's like 16%-17% of all of the Safe Streets and Roads for All grants that were awarded in the most recent cycle.

Michael Latimore (Managing Director and Artificial Intelligence Equity Analyst)

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Should help keep the win rate high as well.

Joe Bergera (President and CEO)

Absolutely, we're obviously super focused on that. As I mentioned, we were really excited that our competitive win rate, this is for our services business, I'm setting aside the hardware, was 82% in the fourth quarter.

Michael Latimore (Managing Director and Artificial Intelligence Equity Analyst)

Yeah. Great. Thank you.

Operator (participant)

The next question is from Tim Moore with EF Hutton. Please proceed.

Tim Moore (Managing Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Thanks. Congratulations on the strong sales growth for the year. It's also nice to see the addition of Kerry's expertise on supply chain, ops, and service-based business models. You know, it was good to talk to him last month at our conference. Just starting off with my first question about services, you know, I'm just wanting to, you know, reach more of an inflection point of incremental gross margin acceleration and step up there, you know, specifically for your cloud-based solution, you know, the direct licensing subscriptions, or with process virtualization. Do you estimate that you need about $10 million more in revenue from those combined businesses to really move the needle more, to get the gross margin up significantly more?

Joe Bergera (President and CEO)

Yeah, Tim, I think you're right. I do think that we reach a critical inflection point when we add an incremental $10 million in, you know, recurring revenue. You're absolutely right. I don't want people to think that we're not going to see any incremental improvement. I mean, we definitely will. We would expect to see. I mean, it may not be obvious, you know, when we report our enterprise results yet, but we do feel like we're seeing, you know, some improvement every quarter, and we would expect to continue to see that as we progress through fiscal 24. As Kerry mentioned, I mean, that is driving some of the expected, you know, gross margin and EBITDA margin improvement in the second half of the current fiscal year. It is absolutely coming from, you know, the growth in our services revenue lines.

Tim Moore (Managing Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Great. No, that makes sense. We'll expect, obviously, gross margin to improve and then get that extra super boost, when you get to maybe that $10 million extra revenue.

Joe Bergera (President and CEO)

Tim, also, just to provide a little bit more clarification, people are wondering like, "Well, what does that inflection point look like?" In terms of our SaaS product lines, as we've said previously, we believe that at scale, you know, we should be able to realize 70+% gross margins on our SaaS product lines. When I was saying we need probably an additional $10 million in revenue, I was meaning, like, more specifically as relates to those SaaS products. That's where you're gonna see, like, a big step up from like, you know, growth margins in the mid 40%-mid 50%, moving to 70+%. We will have incremental improvement as we, you know, move towards that incremental $10 million in revenue.

Tim Moore (Managing Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst)

That's great. Now, thanks for that color and that elaboration. You know, maybe just switching gears, you know, you had positive adjusted EBITDA in the quarter and pretty much, you know, nearly break even operating income if you ignore that one-off expense. I was just trying to wrap my head around maybe the SG&A expense timing. It sounded like there's gonna be some labor hiring and the training investments. You know, you wanna get away from that higher cost labor for subcontractors. If we just take it to another level, I know we talked about incremental gross margin sequentially as the quarters unfold this year. How do you think about, you know, achieving positive adjusted EBITDA and maybe the magnitude of that?

Do you think the September quarter will still be positive EBITDA, or will it be, you know, a drag from that labor hiring and training investment?

Joe Bergera (President and CEO)

I'll just kind of provide some context on what Kerry talked about specifically. Absolutely, we expect positive adjusted EBITDA in our fiscal first quarter and second quarter. Also, just to make sure that everybody understands, the mix of product that we shipped in the fourth quarter was different than what we had expected, because we were responding to customer requirements, you know, which are fluid. You know, that resulted in a 300 basis point negative impact, if you will, against what the original expectation was, in terms of our EBITDA margins. Then the service revenue, which was a function of two things, some delays, and then also the labor capacity constraint, resulted in another approximate 300 basis point impact. I just wanted to make sure you guys understood both of these.

Those are both temporary issues, you know, that we've put behind us. We do not expect to see, you know, that kind of impact going forward. Anyway, with that, Kerry, do you want to talk more specifically about what the expectations should be?

Kerry Shiba (SVP and CFO)

I think, you know, Tim, you touched on this, the investments Joe mentioned in labor-related, you know, initiatives for, you know, training and recruiting are really focused on improving our ability to, you know, access people skills related to our services business. You have to think about the fact that these are really customer-facing and revenue, you know, producing positions. While there'll be, you know, a little bit of cost increase that will probably proceed converting these resources into producing revenue and margin, by and large, you should think of it from that perspective.

With regard to other types of costs that are more fixed in nature, you know, we would hope to continue to improve our leverage on those aspects of operating expenses as the revenue continues to grow at a double-digit pace.

Tim Moore (Managing Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Great. Now, thanks for quantifying those two sets of the 300 basis point drag each in the March quarter. That's very helpful. It seems like the bottom there, easily the bottom. You know, maybe just switching gears, can you elaborate maybe on how some of the DOT agencies are migrating to letting you handle the service remotely from your office, and, you know, how, and new customers, you know, are really seeing the overlaying, you know, benefit from the centers of excellence that you have in California, you know, rather than having people, you know, in their office at the agencies, just kind of this remote migration?

Joe Bergera (President and CEO)

Yeah. You know, every customer account is different, but in general, we're seeing a really high receptivity. This is a model that we're actually evangelizing. I'd say that we're probably, you know, on the bleeding edge. You know, when we embarked on this, we were uncertain how quickly it would begin to resonate with agencies. We believe it's actually, you know, beginning to resonate at a, you know, meaningful level and actually kind of ahead of our original expectations. I think that we're tapping into, you know, sort of this latent demand, which is fantastic.

The thing that we need to work through, however, is working with agencies to get from a position where they're interested in procuring the services on that basis, as we've been trying to outline for them, and figure out how that can fit into their procurement practices and work within their budget frameworks. There's still some more work to be done there. What we're finding is that those sort of more progressive agencies are very eager to work with us to get through, you know, those kind of that next level of hurdles. As we get more and more success with that, then we'll be able to take those best practices and migrate them to other agencies who are perhaps less forward-thinking.

That being said, in terms of, like, tapping into, like, the basic underlying demand, you know, I think that we feel very confident, you know, that we've identified a gold vein here, and, you know, we're increasingly tapping into, you know, that market interest in capitalizing on this alternative delivery form. I think, Tim, to some degree, you kind of hit on maybe one of the primary reasons why that's the case. You know, as a result of COVID-19, you know, as everybody knows, there was, like, a huge loss in, like, labor, right? It kind of evaporated, and a lot of that labor that was lost happened to be, you know, boomers.

You may or may not know, if you look at the public sector labor force, they had a particularly high exposure to, you know, employees that are, you know, of that generation, the baby boomer generation. Meaning that there's been a tremendous drain on labor capacity among these agencies. They're desperate to try to figure out, you know, how do we plug that gap? Our ability to offer cloud-enabled managed services and process virtualization, and just generally, automation, is a great answer for them. I think that's why we're seeing such a high level of interest.

Again, the only issue for us now, not to say the only issue, but the primary issue for us now, is to help agencies get from, like, that level of interest to a point where it's easy for them to now procure, you know, these services. We're starting to work through that with agencies, frankly, across the country, although we are seeing probably more interest in this model in some of the bigger states, which would include California, Texas, and Florida.

Kerry Shiba (SVP and CFO)

I think when you think about flexibility, scalability, and time to ramp up, our model all, I think, enhances outcome in all those cases. It's a great return on investment also because you're not looking at supporting, you know, fixed cost operations underneath all of that, too.

Tim Moore (Managing Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Well, great. Thanks for sharing that. That's very helpful color, and that's it for my questions. Thanks.

Kerry Shiba (SVP and CFO)

Great. Thanks, Tim.

Operator (participant)

The next question is from Ryan Sigdahl with Craig-Hallum. Please proceed.

Ryan Sigdahl (Senior Research Analyst)

Hey, guys. All my operational questions have been answered. Just two clarifications. One, what was cash as of the end of the quarter, if you're willing to give that one balance sheet metric? Two, any internal control deficiencies or material weaknesses related to the potential restatements?

Kerry Shiba (SVP and CFO)

Both points, the unrestricted cash and the restricted cash is very, very nominal, as you've seen really from period to period. We were at $16.6 million, is where we ended up the quarter. That was a very nice improvement sequentially. The year-over-year cash comparison, again, as I know you realize, was affected by the, you know, the excess costs we had to incur due to the supply chain issues during the span of most of fiscal 2023, especially in the first six months. A nice turn from the end of Q3 to Q4. You know, we will expect again to continue to enhance our cash position as the, you know, the year comes to a close in 2024.

On the material, or the controls assessment, we're still going through that right now. Ryan, I think, you know, the first part of the evaluation is to get the numbers correct, quite honestly. The fact that the activity we're focusing on goes years into the past, I can tell you that certainly since I've been here, and as I've looked back, you know, kinda sequentially, year-by-year, I'm very comfortable with the controls that have been looking at and measuring activities for really the last 3 fiscal years, certainly. The issue that arose, again, goes back to a time when the culprit that we're looking for is really related to the ERP conversion.

I would like to say that, you know, we could be immunized from that, but I've seen a lot of companies that have had struggles in maybe different ways that it's manifested, but related to large-scale conversions like that. I'm not worried about current controls at all. You know, the controls assessment that goes back a few years in the past is something we really haven't come to a conclusion on yet.

Ryan Sigdahl (Senior Research Analyst)

Great. Thanks, guys. Good luck.

Kerry Shiba (SVP and CFO)

Thanks. Are there any additional questions?

Operator (participant)

We have no further questions in queue. We've reached the end of the Q&A session. I will now turn the call back over to Joe Bergera for closing remarks.

Joe Bergera (President and CEO)

All right, great. Well, thank you, operator. As always, I really appreciate everybody's support and your thoughtful questions. On the investor relations front, I want to let everybody know that we plan, in our fiscal 2024 second quarter, to provide an IIJA update. You may recall that we had talked about that in the past and planned to organize a virtual event to present this information, just in full transparency, we continue to run into schedule conflicts, and that's become increasingly difficult to pull that off. Therefore, we've decided instead to publish a white paper. That'll describe various aspects of the IIJA, such as a breakdown of the budget line items and the status of new programs that will be created due to the legislation, and we'll map that to our lines of business.

Kerry Shiba (SVP and CFO)

We have an understanding of the points of intersection. Additionally, we'll conduct various investor outreach activities, and as always, we are available to speak with investors should you guys have any follow-up questions. In the meantime, we look forward to updating you again on our continued progress when we report on our fiscal 2024 first quarter results. With that, we're gonna go ahead and conclude today's call. Thank you, everyone.

Operator (participant)

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