KORE Group - Q4 2023

Transcript

Operator (participant)

Hello and welcome to the KORE Group Holdings 4th Quarter 2023 earnings call and webcast. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to turn the call over to David Freund, Manager M&A. Please go ahead, David.

David Freund (Manager M&A)

Thank you, operator. On today's call, we will refer to the 4th Quarter 2023 earnings presentation, which will be helpful to follow along with, as well as the press release filed this morning that details the company's 4th Quarter 2023 results. Both of these can be found on our investor relations page at ir.korewireless.com. Finally, a recording of the call will be available in the investors section of the company's website later today. The company encourages you to review the safe harbor statements, risk factors, and other disclaimers contained on this slide and today's press release, as well as in the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which identify specific risk factors that may cause actual results or events to differ materially from those described in our forward-looking statements. The company does not undertake to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements after this webcast.

The company also notes that it will be discussing non-GAAP financial information on this call. The company is providing that information as a supplement to information prepared in accordance with accounting principles generally accepted in the United States or GAAP. You can find a reconciliation of these metrics to the company's reported GAAP results in their reconciliation tables provided in today's earnings release and presentation. I'll now turn the call over to Romil Bahl, the company's President and Chief Executive Officer.

Romil Bahl (CEO)

Thank you, David. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us for our 4th Quarter and full year 2023 earnings call. With me is Paul Holtz, KORE's Chief Financial Officer. As always, I'll start with a brief overview of the key events and announcements for the 4th Quarter. Paul will then review our financial results, and then we will review our sales pipeline, key wins, and a summary of how we view the year ahead. We will finish with a Q&A session. Slide four presents some key announcements from the 4th Quarter. First, we launched a pioneering eSIM-powered medical alert device in collaboration with Medical Guardian. This device is designed to facilitate active aging as defined by the World Health Organization. This revolutionary technology overcomes the challenges of limited carrier flexibility and coverage, enabling network switching to optimize connectivity across different regions and operational phases, and enabling optimal 24/7 connectivity.

This medical alert device leverages KORE's industry-leading connectivity services. KORE's eSIM optimizes opportunities for health, participation, and security for aging adults, enabling end users to age with dignity. This innovation shows how revolutionary IoT is in addressing some of society's most daunting obstacles, in this case, an aging global population, and how IoT can enable a better world. IoT for good, as our purpose statement says here at KORE. Second, we continue to receive recognition from numerous industry analysts and publications for our best-in-class connectivity products. For instance, Gartner recognized KORE as a managed IoT connectivity services worldwide leader for the fifth consecutive year. KORE's CaaS offerings, including SuperSIM, also received the 2023 IoT Excellence Award from TMC and Crossfire Media. This recognition cements our unwavering reputation for understanding our customers' needs and creating cutting-edge solutions that simplify the complexities of IoT and empower our customers to achieve their goals.

The Gartner Magic Quadrant leadership is especially encouraging since we improved our position in the leaders' quadrant, even as large, well-known carriers and competitors dropped out. And also, on the vision and strategy dimension, KORE is now firmly among the top three providers globally. As evidence of our industry-leading strategy, and specifically with respect to our investments in preconfigured solutions, in the first quarter of 2024, we landed our first major Connected Health Telemetry Solution, or CHTS, preconfigured solution win. This $26 million TCV achievement will have KORE supporting global home respiratory therapy to over 65,000 patients. The solution involves managing the capture, secure transmission, and delivery of home ventilator and oxygen concentrator data telemetry to the patient's care team. This customer will utilize KORE's CHTS Gateway, Device Management and Configuration Cloud Platform, and the CHTS Temporary Data Repository Cloud Service.

The customer will map their existing patient engagement and support workflows to KORE's CHTS Cloud to enable the care delivery teams to configure, install, and monitor their home respiratory therapy for thousands of ventilators and oxygen concentrators. This win demonstrates KORE's ability to streamline the IoT deployment of a complex medical device with our integrated, secure, and regulatorily compliant cellular connectivity and data routing infrastructure. These capabilities enable continuous healthcare monitoring from the comfort of patients' homes, significantly improving patient outcomes and comfort. Now let's look at our 4th Quarter financial results on slide 5. KORE's 4th Quarter revenue of $72.4 million increased 16% year-over-year, driven by an acceleration in high-margin IoT connectivity, which was up 27% year-over-year. A decline in low-margin IoT solutions revenue partially offset this growth in IoT connectivity.

While double-digit top-line growth in Q4 is impressive, we should note that these results were below our expectations due to additional unexpected customer order deferrals in Q4, including those from our largest customer. While these deferrals impacted both IoT connectivity and IoT solutions, solutions experienced the greater impact due to customer managing year-end inventory levels and further delays in remote patient monitoring and clinical drug trial deployments. Reiterating what we said last quarter, these orders and customers have not been lost. We fully expect to continue to serve these customers in 2024 and beyond. That said, during our 2024 business planning process, and partially in response to the lumpy characteristics of hardware revenue in our maturing IoT solutions business line, we have decided as a company to reduce our exposure to low-margin hardware revenue. Moving forward, we will only accept hardware orders that are essential to winning a customer contract.

This decision resulted in a reduction in our TCV pipeline and, obviously, a lower projection of IoT solutions revenue in 2024. However, this marginal short-term headwind is more than offset by the increased predictability, visibility, and profitability improvement that shrinking our reliance on hardware will deliver in 2024 and into the future. Further, we expect growing momentum in KORE's IoT connectivity business to more than offset any one-time headwinds resulting from this decision. On this point, before handing the call to Paul to cover the financials in more detail, I wanted to touch on our outlook for 2024. At a high level, with 2G/3G sunsets and the worst of macro uncertainty behind us, we expect a re-acceleration in our high-margin IoT connectivity business to be KORE's primary growth driver in 2024.

This growth will offset a decline in low-margin IoT solutions revenue and drive year-over-year revenue growth, and more substantially, exciting double-digit growth in Adjusted EBITDA. Overall, we expect 2024 revenue to be between $300-$305 million, with Adjusted EBITDA between $64-$66 million. I will provide more color on our 2024 outlook later in the call. With that said, Paul, over to you.

Paul Holtz (CFO)

Thank you, Romil, and good morning, everyone. Turning to our results on slide 6, as Romil highlighted, fourth quarter revenue increased 16% year-over-year to $72.4 million compared to $62.4 million in the fourth quarter of 2022. By segment, IoT connectivity revenue of $55.3 million, which includes Twilio IoT acquisition, increased 27% year-over-year and represented 76% of fourth quarter revenue. Organically, IoT connectivity grew in the mid-single digits year-over-year. This growth is despite continued delays in plan upgrades at some customers in the second half of 2023 that have been pushed to the first half of 2024. IoT solutions revenue declined 10% year-over-year to $17.1 million, or 24% of fourth quarter revenue. As Romil mentioned, the decline in IoT solutions reflects customer deferrals, including from KORE's top customers.

To show the magnitude of these deferrals, no orders from our top customer were received in the quarter as they continue to manage their inventory from their large LTE transition project. Total gross margin in Q4 2023 was 52.6%, a decline of 150 basis points compared to the 4th Quarter of 2022. By segment, IoT connectivity's gross margin was down 650 basis points year-over-year to 58.6%, reflecting a full quarter inclusion of the lower-margin Twilio IoT revenue. Additional year-end revenue provisions were also made in Q4, with some smaller customers struggling to make on-time payments. The IoT solutions margin was up 450 basis points to 33.2%, reflecting the lower mix of hardware versus services revenue in the quarter.

Total connections at the end of the 4th Quarter were 18.5 million, a decline of over 400,000 from the 3rd Quarter of 2023 and an increase of 3.5 million year-over-year. The decline in quarter-over-quarter SIM count reflects the deactivation of low-revenue SIMs from a single CaaS customer that is transitioning their base to be managed in-house. KORE and the customer have been working together during this transition as we informed them in 2023 that the CaaS business was being de-emphasized by the company going forward. With the 4th Quarter also being the year-end for many of our customers, some were active in cleaning up their zero-usage SIMs prior to year-end to save costs heading into 2024. These deactivations will not have a material effect on IoT connectivity in 2024, again due to their very, very low RPU.

Dollar-Based Net Expansion Rate, or DBNER, for the 12 months ended December 31, 2023 was 96% compared to 92% in the prior year. As a reminder, DBNER is like same-store sales as it measures the growth of existing customers in the trailing 12 months compared to the same customer cohort in the year-ago period. This means that customers gained from the Twilio IoT acquisition in June were excluded from the calculation. Our 2023 DBNER was impacted by our largest customer's LTE transition project, which occurred from June 2021 to June 2022 and significantly benefited our top-line performance. As a reminder, we saw revenue from our top customer double during this period. Excluding our largest customer, DBNER for the year would be 101% compared to 103% in 2022.

Turning to slide 7, operating expenses, including depreciation and amortization in the 4th quarter, were $47.7 million, a decrease of $50.4 million compared to Q4 2022. The decline in our operating expenses reflects a non-cash goodwill impairment charge in Q4 2022 of $58.1 million, which did not exist in the current quarter. This decline was offset by increases in depreciation and amortization, incremental operating expenses from the Twilio IoT acquisition, and one-time professional service fees from our debt refinancing completed in November. Fourth quarter interest expenses, including amortization of deferred financing fees, increased year-over-year to approximately $12 million versus $9.7 million in the 4th quarter of 2022. This increase is due to the higher borrowing cost on our prior senior secured term loan.

As a reminder, we refinanced our previous $300 million term loan in the 4th Quarter with a new $185 million term loan and $150 million preferred stock placement. We also incurred a $2.6 million loss on the extinguishment of our previous debt. Net loss in the 4th Quarter was $33.7 million compared to $69.6 million in the prior year. The 35.9% decline in the net loss year-over-year was mainly due to the already mentioned non-cash goodwill impairment charge in Q4 2022 of $58.1 million. This decline was offset by year-over-year increases, or one-time costs relating to the refinancing of our long-term debt, increase in interest expense, and incremental costs associated with the Twilio IoT acquisition. Adjusted EBITDA in the 4th Quarter was $13.8 million, a decline of $1.9 million, or approximately 12% compared to last year.

Our adjusted EBITDA margin in the current quarter was 19.1%, down 610 basis points compared to the same period in the prior year. The EBITDA margin decrease is mainly due to the majority of incremental revenue year-over-year coming from the Twilio IoT acquisition, which, as we previously disclosed, would be at negative EBITDA margins for most of 2023. It should also be noted that our adjusted EBITDA, or net loss in the 4th Quarter, does not include approximately $4 million in funds received as a CARES Act employee retention credit as the company has taken a conservative approach not to yet recognize the benefit from a U.S. GAAP perspective. Moving to cash flow, cash used in operations for the three months ending December 31, 2023, was approximately $10 million. This amount increased year-over-year mainly due to the additional one-time expenses paid related to our debt refinancing.

At the end of the 4th Quarter, cash and cash equivalents were $27.1 million compared to $34.7 million as of December 31, 2022. Turning to our full-year 2023 results, total revenue of $27.6 million increased 3% from 2022. IoT connectivity revenue increased 15% to $202.3 million, more than offsetting the 25% decline in IoT solutions revenue of $74.3 million. The full-year gross margin of 54% was up 210 basis points from 2022. This was driven by a higher mix of connectivity revenue and a 250 basis point improvement in the full-year solutions gross margin to 31%. These factors were partially offset by a 180 basis points decline in IoT connectivity gross margins to 62.4%. Adjusted EBITDA for the year was $55.6 million, resulting in an adjusted EBITDA margin of 20.1%. This compared to $62.8 million and 23.4% in 2022.

The full-year 2023 net loss of $167 million, which includes goodwill impairment charges, increased by $60.8 million relative to 2022. Excluding the goodwill impairment charge of $78.3 million in 2023 and $58.1 million in 2022, our net loss increased by $40.6 million to $88.7 million. Our annual net loss increased due to higher interest rate expenses, increased costs due to the Twilio IoT acquisition, a change in the fair value of our warrants, and the one-time costs associated with our debt refinancing. With that, I'll pass it back to you, Romil.

Romil Bahl (CEO)

Thanks, Paul. Slide eight presents a snapshot of our global sales pipeline as of December 31, 2023. As I mentioned, we have decided to reduce our reliance on low-margin hardware revenue. This decision has obviously reduced our funnel in total size, as has the relatively large number of deals that were closed in Q4, both closed-won and closed-lost, and a larger-than-typical year-end cleaning out of the funnel led by our new CRO, Jason Dietrich, who joined KORE in the middle of last year. Importantly, the quality of our pipeline has improved due to these actions. Our sales pipeline now includes over 1,600 opportunities with an estimated potential TCV of approximately $545 million. In the 4th Quarter, we generated an incremental $28 million of closed-won TCV, bringing the year-to-date total to $115 million as we delivered our fifth consecutive year of TCV growth.

For those who may be new to our story, the majority of sold TCV is recognized as revenue over four years, and it is important to note that the closed TCV figure is aggregated across all of our services, which have different durations of revenue recognition. Slide 9 shows our customer wins in the 4th quarter. These wins include number one, KORE is growing wallet share with a leading provider of high-performance software and solutions for the real estate industry. This customer is adding 15,000 units to its multi- and single-family home portfolio and reaffirmed its commitment to KORE by signing new contracts representing approximately $2 million of incremental TCV. KORE's one API approach and top-tier customer support helped give the customer confidence to scale its IoT deployments. Two, we had a cross-sell win with one of the largest privately held homebuilders in the United States.

This customer was overpaying for substandard connectivity services with next-to-no customer support. KORE's connectivity products opened the conversation, and the company optimized the customer's entire connectivity system. Then, after demonstrating that KORE's high-bandwidth preconfigured solutions could enhance operations, quicken time-to-market, and improve the end customer experience, KORE grew our wallet share with this customer. three, a global, fast-growing specialized management network chose KORE for its primary and failover solutions in the U.S. There are significant opportunities for European expansion with this customer, as well as further avenues for growth from new product introductions. Finally, a provider of vehicle and asset tracking IoT solutions with operations spanning three continents chose KORE OmniSIM as its connectivity solution for its new products. This customer's new products will contain buy-here, pay-here features, and target the subprime vehicle loan market. This contract is worth an estimated $1.6 million in TCV.

As you can see, our sales and growth momentum continues to build. Our independent multi-multi-multi offering is resonating with the market, and our connectivity position has never been stronger. KORE's connectivity products, including OmniSIM and SuperSIM, are uniquely suited to our customer's needs and simplify the complexities of IoT deployments. Our products provide customers with a single unified solution that enhances our customer's operational flexibility by ensuring cost-effective, uninterrupted network across borders. These are critical factors for success for individual customer deployments and the IoT ecosystem as a whole. Combine KORE's strong foundation with stabilizing our RPUs, and 2024 will be a great year for organic connectivity growth. So what does this mean? What is the end result? As I said earlier, we expect revenue in the range of $300million-$305 million, with Adjusted EBITDA between $64 million-$66 million in 2024.

To help contextualize our guidance, let me walk you through the chart on slide 10. The first thing to note is that KORE's 2023 adjusted EBITDA adjusts out one-time transformation investments needed to establish KORE as a leader in IoT and capitalize on the explosive growth of connected devices. 2023 was the last year of these transformational investments, and they will not occur in 2024. After taking these one-time expenses into account, our 2023 adjusted EBITDA is approximately $49 million, meaning that we expect 2024 EBITDA to grow approximately 33% year-over-year on an apples-to-apples comparison basis. As a reminder, these investments involved doubling down on KORE's core IoT connectivity business, launching industry-specific business lines, and focusing on eSIM leadership. We have been adjusting out these one-time transformation expenses to show a clearer picture of KORE's financial health and operating performance.

Given the volatile market backdrop in 2023, it is worth stepping back and talking about what gives us confidence in this outlook. First, 2024 revenue growth will be driven by high-visibility, high-margin IoT connectivity, which is reaccelerating following the end of the 2G/3G sunsets and customer deferrals, a rebound in KORE's key end markets, and stabilizing RPUs. This high-quality revenue growth is offsetting a decline in lumpy and low-margin hardware revenue, which gives us better visibility into our top-line performance throughout the year and increases our profitability overall due to IoT connectivity's superior margin profile relative to solutions. Secondly, we streamlined our operating costs and improved our economies of scale, as evidenced by our start in 2024, and we expect this performance to gain momentum throughout the year.

But before I continue to talk about this start to 2024, I should specify that we will not be providing ongoing quarterly guidance. That said, given that we are in April and Q1 is over, we feel confident in saying that our Adjusted EBITDA for Q1 2024 will be approximately $1.5 million above Q1 2023. This would mean that first-quarter Adjusted EBITDA would be higher than every single quarter of 2023, despite Q1 historically being KORE's highest expense quarter of the year. This strong start to 2024, combined with our refined operating model and connectivity-led growth, gives us confidence in our 2024 outlook and demonstrates our solid operating leverage. Slide 11 is our last prepared slide and summarizes the key points of our prepared remarks. First, KORE's 2023 revenue growth will be driven by IoT connectivity, which will be supported by stable RPUs and connected device growth from existing customers.

We are conservatively planning for IoT solutions to be down year-over-year, reflecting our decision to de-emphasize low-quality revenue. Launching our next-generation eSIM product will only accelerate our momentum. Our next-generation products present customers with best-in-class global IoT connectivity with compliant local access, seamless digital consumption, and white-glove customer service. Secondly, in addition to these exciting product developments, KORE delivered closed one TCV of $115 million in 2023 while identifying several improvements in our direct and indirect sales efforts, which we expect to bear fruit in 2024. On the direct sales side of things, we hired seasoned sales executives with many years of experience who are becoming trusted partners and advisors with their customers. At the same time, we have developed relationships with GCP, that's Google, and other major companies that give KORE distribution to an extensive range of companies across industries, sizes, and geographies.

This helps KORE meet customers where they are, enabling successful IoT deployments and advancing the IoT ecosystem. Taking a more holistic view, we are cautiously optimistic that 2023 was the high-watermark for macroeconomic uncertainty among our most prominent end markets. While customers remain cost-focused, the inventory correction at our customers is largely behind us, and we have de-risked our exposure to lumpy hardware revenue and customer inventories. Crucially, as KORE grows, we will remain focused on profitability and operating efficiency and will leverage the economies of scale that result from IoT connectivity growth. As a result, we have a clear line of sight into exciting double-digit Adjusted EBITDA growth in 2024, driven by increased sales and greater profitability.

We are happy to revisit any of these key points during the Q&A, but before turning the call over to the operator, I want to thank KORE's IoTeers around the world for their tremendous work this past year. I am excited about where we are going this year and in the future. Our connectivity portfolio, financial positioning, and sales motion have never been stronger, and we are well-placed to capture the opportunity that the decade of IoT brings. With that, let's start the Q&A.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, the floor is now open for questions. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad at this time. 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 the handset before pressing the star keys. Again, that's star one to register a question at this time. Today's first question is coming from Scott Searle of Roth MKM. Please go ahead.

Scott Searle (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst)

Hey, good morning. Thanks for taking the questions. Hey, Romil, maybe just to dive in on the 2024 outlook. It sounds like you're looking for double-digit growth on the connectivity side of the equation. I'm wondering if you could give us a little bit of color as well as connected units and how you're thinking about RPUs. I think we were bottoming out. It seems like there were some low-end end-of-life connections that are now gone. So should we start to see an upward trajectory? And as an extension of that, looking at that TCV pipeline, I'm wondering if you could give us an idea of what the annual recurring revenue component looks like. I think back in the napkin math would say something like 15% or so of that funnel would be ARR.

I'm just trying to get my hands around that and the TCV wins that you got in 2023 in the fourth quarter?

Romil Bahl (CEO)

Okay. Thanks, Scott. I'm going to struggle to remember all of those, so let's just come back and remind me as we go. Yeah, look, the fundamental thing is what you nailed absolutely correctly at the front end of your questions, which is with 2G/3G behind us in a simple P times Q business, price-times-volume type business, when you had both forced churn of devices coming off 2G and 3G networks and RPU declines that were averaging about 20% a year for every one of the first four full years I was here. Yeah, it's tough to do that kind of business, right? When I joined the business, it was in the neighborhood of 6 million SIMs. We've more than tripled that, and we obviously haven't tripled revenue. So yeah, a lot of that was given back to the fundamental price differences of an LTE/4G/5G type environment over 2G/3G.

When that goes away and as the volume growth gets back to, I'll say, pre-COVID-type levels, anywhere close to the 25%-26% CAGR we've grown volume at, connectivity becomes a very exciting business, and we're certainly starting to show that here in 2024, which will actually be approximately 20% top-line growth. Not all of that is organic. And as I said, we're still growing, right? Our volume growth is still going back. On the P side of the equation, we have seen stabilization, which we talked about last year, after a sort of low point of average RPUs for a quarter, I think it was Q3, if memory serves me correctly, of sort of $0.95. We saw stabilization to slight increase last year up to sort of the $0.98-$0.99 level at the end of the year, and actually Q1's coming in at $1.04.

Now, that may not sound like a lot, but to us, it's like nirvana, right? It's like, "This is what we've been saying will happen between the higher bandwidth that our customers and just the, right, the stopping of this notion of high-price RPU devices coming off and low-price RPU devices coming on." So that's really the fundamental driver is IoT connectivity in terms of the outlook and the confidence. And yeah, I'll say also that our high-bandwidth product set and preconfigured solution set has gotten off to a really great start. So let me take a pause there, see if that makes sense, and then I think you asked a question about TCV, and I forget what else, Scott.

Scott Searle (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst)

Yeah, that was perfect. Nice to hear the increase in the RPU. But just to translate the TCV then into what an ARR opportunity looks like, so the annual recurring revenue component of.

Romil Bahl (CEO)

Yeah. So look, so the first thing I'll tell you is that since sort of the middle of last year, Q3, when Paul and I spent a bunch of time with our teams analyzing what was going on with the deferrals and you're well, Scott, as obviously a very good IoT analyst, and you know all the inventory and modules and all these problems that were out there. People were using up those inventories the way they had stocked up during COVID, during the supply chain constraints. So there were deferrals across the board, and we were impacted as well. And so we said, "You know what? Yeah, it just doesn't make a lot of sense to have so much volatility forced, if you will, into our numbers because we're not a really volatile business.

We are an ARR business." And so as we've increased our focus on connectivity in Q4, we were near 87% recurring revenue, right? Just connectivity at budget level this year, Scott, in 2024, straight will be almost between 78%-80% is how it's budgeted these solutions. So your recurring revenue starts with a base of 78%-80%, and then you add all the programs that we get from our solutions customers. So if anything, that 87% should be stable and maybe even increasing, which is a really cool part of our business model.

Scott Searle (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst)

Great. Perfect. And last one, if I could. The respiratory telemetry win is very interesting. You guys have historically been very strong, I think, in cardiac telemetry. How big is the respiratory telemetry market, and are there some bigger opportunities behind this as we look into current year and beyond? Thanks.

Romil Bahl (CEO)

Yeah. No, we are really excited about that win. And by the way, we've had a really good reputation with that customer over a long time, and this was finally where it started to come together. I mean, my head of health would say he's been chasing this opportunity for several years, not just a one- or two-year enterprise-type sales cycle. And obviously, when they went through their sort of buy versus build decision, our decades now worth of experience and engagement and the IoT-managed services model were key differentiators, reasons why we won that deal. Now, to the size of the market-specific question, respiratory therapies are, in general, today smaller still than cardiac rhythm monitoring, right, which is, of course, dominated by the big three. But it's growing significantly faster, Scott.

And so there's actually and in fact, last night, I was meeting with our European connected health sales team, and they're looking at about 50 opportunities in the connected health clinical trial space that are very exciting. A good chunk of those, I'd say about 20% of those TCV dollars, are actually focused in and around this respiratory area. There's one opportunity with a phenomenal $5 million customer number. Now, how long does that take us to actually win? Do we win and all that? I'm not committing that, right? All I'm saying is it's an exciting little segment of connected health, not total, and growing fast.

Scott Searle (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst)

Great. Thanks so much. I'll get back in the queue.

Romil Bahl (CEO)

Cheers to that.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. The next question is coming from Mike Latimore of Northland Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Mike Latimore (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst)

Hi. Great. Good morning. Thanks very much. Yeah, Romil, on this decision to focus more on higher-end hardware, reduce the lower-margin hardware business, can you just elaborate on that a little bit? Historically, I don't know, what % of the pipeline has been this lower-margin hardware? Is it in different verticals? Just maybe just elaborate a little bit more on that.

Romil Bahl (CEO)

Yeah. No, look, I mean, so let me just start with some basics that you are well familiar with, Mike, and then Paul may want to jump in on the end to sort of clean up my story here if I miss anything. So the first thing, of course, is we're not a manufacturing shop. We're not a device or hardware manufacturer. And so we've only really resold other parties' devices if it was simplifying the complexities for the customer, right? That's our tagline: simplifying the complexities of IoT. So it was just easier for us to get the container of whatever was coming from Taiwan or wherever and then configure those devices and get them out into the field, right, with our pickpack, configure, ship type services and management services, and then the reverse supply chain type services. We were happy to do it, right?

Now, on the hardware piece standalone, you obviously didn't make particularly good margins. In some cases, it was embarrassingly low single-digit margins. But we did it, again, in the context of simplifying it for the customer, for winning everything else. We're having connectivity in every device that went out there and all the other good reasons. IoT solutions exist as a strategy for us, right? So what we then found was since it's relatively easy dollars to add up, and it tends to be front-ended in these three, five-year type contract cycles, so meaning hardware revenue, right, that in some cases, I mean, it was probably between 25%-30% of our funnel, actually, right, when we looked at it hard towards the end of Q3 last year. And we said, "Boy, this is starting to be too much.

It's introducing volatility and lumpiness into a business that's solid and sort of made to be public, recurring in nature, 85%-87% recurring in nature," as I just said earlier to Scott's question. And so we and by the way, at the end of all of that, we get 5% and 7% and 10% margin on that business. Why are we doing this? So again, we'll do it if the customer insists. We'll do it when a customer says, "I don't want to spend all this CapEx, Romil. I want to let you guys buy it for us and OPEX it out to me over 36 months or 24 months or whatever." In those cases, of course, we'll continue to do it, but we won't let it be such a drag on our overall margins. By the way, IoT solutions is already showing a real uptick.

Remember how IoT solutions was even as low as 27%-28%, 30% when it was very hardware-driven? We're already kind of creeping into the mid-30s. And as I've long said, our goal is to get to 40%, and there were two or three drivers of that, including preconfigured solutions, which are by definition higher margin, and including hardware becoming a smaller portion of our total revenue base. So those are the set of reasons, but let me just give Paul the opportunity to add anything.

Paul Holtz (CFO)

Yeah. Yeah. The only thing I would add, Mike, was so during the full fiscal year for IoT solutions, we were $92 million-ish, and then in 2022, dropping down to about $74 million. So you have a, say, roughly $20 million drop this year. Now, some of that, as we talked about, was from the deferrals and so forth. But as we go into next year and as we indicated that we're forecasting that solutions will decline more, that is because we're taking out of this lower-margin business. So you're talking about $20 million-$25 million of lower-margin hardware that we're going to right now, currently, let go or not forecast in. Like Romil said, if we need to take it and the customer is insisting, then we'll do it. But from a forecast perspective and guidance perspective, we're assuming it's not there.

Mike Latimore (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst)

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Got it.

That's very helpful. And then I guess just on the macro here, can you talk just I mean, you guys have a pretty diverse view and wide and diverse view into the IoT market. I mean, what's your thought on the IoT market just kind of broadly this year? Is it accelerating? Is it stable, declining a little bit? And any kind of big-picture stuff, that'd be helpful.

Romil Bahl (CEO)

Yeah. No, I appreciate the big-picture question. We've never been sort of more bullish on this market growing than we are right around now, right? We've long sort of said that the trends were all in our favor, right? The world wants more connected devices, wants more data. We can hype AI all we want, but AI without data sort of doesn't do much, right? The first step of all of this AI stuff working out is guys like us connecting devices and getting data back to you so you can apply your algorithms, right? So that was a big trend. All of this edge compute, edge-to-cloud type movement is a helpful trend. Obviously, higher-bandwidth things as 5G matures. One of my key talking points at the Embedded World Conference in Nuremberg yesterday was about the convergence that's coming, including with satellite.

And then, of course, the closest to our hearts at KORE is eSIM, right? And depending on who you believe, somewhere between 3 and 5 billion eSIMs get shipped between now and the end of the decade, right? And we certainly think we have the leading proposition there, OmniSIM with its downloadable characteristics, SuperSIM from the old Twilio SuperSIM, which is probably one of the most stable, dependable, reliable products out there. And our next generation is going to combine the best of those two. And if we can get sort of more than our share, if I could be greedy and say well more than our share of that eSIM shipping that's going to go on as the world goes into more global deployments, takes regional POCs, and says, "All right. Let's go global," we've never been more bullish about sort of volume growth and our positioning.

At the end of the five years of investments, our positioning to take advantage of those trends.

Mike Latimore (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst)

Okay. Great. And then just a real quick one. Should we assume the first quarter is sort of the low point of the year and you get some sequential growth from there, or how should we think about the pattern throughout the year?

Romil Bahl (CEO)

Yeah. I mean, you're absolutely right. That's pretty much always our pattern. So it's a great question. We do fully expect Q1 EBITDA, even though it'll be the largest quarter we've had in the last five or six, to be our lowest. And by the way, Mike, I mean, just to make sure you noted that that's with no one-time costs being invested, that is our largest, right? So it's a significant step up in our profitability across the board. But we do expect the Q1 to be our lowest. I mean, obviously, all of our payroll expenses, taxes, that sort of thing start to go down. And of course, we anticipate growth on the top line.

So if Q1 is going to be in that, call it, $75-$76 million range and hopefully close to 20% of that's EBITDA and you're getting closer, right, you're increasing that $75-$76 top line going forward, and your OpEx is actually going down, right, we expect that to increase. But Paul, would you add anything, or did I steal all your thunder?

Paul Holtz (CFO)

Yeah. Yeah. No, you got it.

Mike Latimore (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst)

All right. Awesome. Thanks very much. Good luck this year.

Romil Bahl (CEO)

Thanks, Mike.

Paul Holtz (CFO)

Thanks, Mike.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. The next question is coming from Meta Marshall of Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Mary Lenox (Equity Research Associate)

Hi. This is Mary on for Meta. Thanks for taking our question. I want to ask you about the deferrals. Do you have a sense of when those projects resume and then what have been some of the hang-ups to some of those drug trials? Thanks.

Romil Bahl (CEO)

Yeah. No, thanks, Mary, and our best, for Meta. Hopefully, we'll talk to her soon. But look, first of all, this is, as I was saying, I think, in my response to Scott or Mike earlier, even on this call, this has been a phenomenon, right? I mean, if you get a look at Sierra, I know that's now, I guess, just a line in Semtech business or really anybody out there, right, when there was a bit of panic around supply chain issues in 2021, 2022 for sure, people piled up inventory, our number one customer, our largest customer. But we were doing the math the other day, about 5.5 years' worth of stuff in a year, right?

So that's stuff that's just sitting out there, whether that's healthcare devices, fleet devices, whatever devices they are, everything else that comes with it, the modules, and so forth, has to be used from a perspective before customers can keep ordering. And oh, by the way, introduce then a kind of risk-off environment in the market, more focus on expenses than ever, people watching their inventory levels at the end of the year, on and on and on. And we actually saw sort of a reverse, right, the pendulum going all the way the other direction of people really thinning out their inventory before they order. So the deferrals are, for the most part, related to what most of this industry has seen in the inventory levels needing to be used up. I mean, it's quite remarkable. I'll give you one example.

With our absolute largest customer, we had a PO that we thought we were going to fill and deliver in Q3, and we pushed it back into Q4, and then we were asked to push it back into Q1, right? I mean, so it was amazing. We didn't ship anything to our largest customer since about June last year. And that's sort of an extreme example. In other cases, people just didn't send us the PO and said, "You know what? We're going to get our inventory levels down to the targets that our CFO has set for us or our CPO has set for us. We're just going to defer ordering." All of that will come back over the next few quarters as those customers get back to the business as usual with the new inventory levels, right, with their new target levels. So that's sort of not worrying.

The last part of what you asked, though, Mary, is sort of interesting. It is certainly in the healthcare space, the dearth of resources, the resources being reallocated to things like pandemics and, right, those kinds of situations. So the availability of those knowledgeable SME-type resources to drive the digital transformation, which is, right, IoT-enabling clinical trials or, right, technology-enabling clinical trials or electronic data capture more generally, those resources just weren't there, right?

Some clinical trials were being delayed because they didn't have enough resources, nurses, and the like, to actually run trials, right? So those things, again, the industry is addressing, will balance out over time, and will pick up. None of these are worrying trends. And I've been known to say that as we wring our hands in America, I've been watching this story now for 30 years of, "Oh my God, 10%, 15% of GDP is health.

Oh my gosh, 20% is. I think we're going to 40% and 50%, right? And so all of this is going to come back. And connected health was strategically the single best bet we've made outside of eSIM.

Mary Lenox (Equity Research Associate)

Great. Thanks.

Romil Bahl (CEO)

Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. At this time, I'd like to turn the floor back over to Mr. Bahl for closing comments.

Romil Bahl (CEO)

Outstanding. Well, I really want to say thank you to everyone for your interest attending our call here. We'll look forward to updating you with our first-quarter results in, what, the next 5, 6 weeks. Thank you very much.

Operator (participant)

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your participation. This concludes today's event. You may disconnect your lines or log off the webcast at this time and enjoy the rest of your day.