Perfect - Q1 2024

Transcript

Operator (participant)

Good morning, and good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by, and welcome to Perfect Corp's earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. We will be hosting a question-and-answer session after management, management's prepared remarks. Please note that today's event is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to the first speaker today, Ms. Jennifer Wu, IR Manager of the company. Please go ahead.

Jennifer Wu (IR Manager)

Thank you, and hello, everyone. Welcome to Perfect Corp's earnings call. With us today are Ms. Alice Chang, our Founder, Chairwoman, and Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Louis Chen, our Executive Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer, and Ms. Iris Chen, Vice President of Finance and Accounting. You can refer to our first quarter 2024 financial results on our IR website or in the Form 6-K we filed with the SEC earlier. You can later access a replay of this call on our IR website shortly after the conclusion of this call. For today's call, management will provide their prepared remarks first, and then we will host a question-and-answer session. Before we continue, I would like to refer you to our safe harbor statement in our earnings press release.

We also apply to this call that this call may contain forward-looking statements regarding Perfect Corp's performance, anticipated plans, operational results, and objectives. Forward-looking statements are based on management expectations and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied on our call today. Perfect Corp undertakes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements, except as required by law after the date of this call. Please note that all numbers stated in the following management prepared remarks are in U.S. dollar terms, and we will discuss non-IFRS measure today. Without further ado, I will now turn the call to our first speaker today, our CEO, Ms. Alice Chang.

Alice Chang (Founder, Chairwoman, and CEO)

Thank you, Jennifer, and welcome to Perfect Corp 2024 first quarter earnings conference call. We have some exciting news to share today, so let's get started. Leveraging our advanced AI capability, we started 2024 with a robust first quarter. Our first quarter revenue grew by 17.7% year-over-year to $14.3 million, and our net revenue was positive $0.6 million. The double-digit increase in revenue and a positive net income were driven by the strong growth of our AI, AR, cloud solutions, and solution services for both of our mobile business, app business, and our enterprise business. Both business clusters have benefited from our superior AI technologies and contributed to our top-line expansion and the profitability improvement.

Plus, our operating cash flow had a net, net inflow of $3.5 million due to our sound business model. In this quarter, we continue to invest in our Beauty AI strategy, including Beauty AI, Skin AI, Fashion AI, and the Gen AI across both of our consumer and enterprise business. For our consumer app business, we leverage our new Gen AI technology to launch more innovative features in YouCam suite of mobile apps in quarter one, attracting more users to our apps and converting more users into subscribers. For our enterprise business, we have a renewed contract with many big clients and brought in several new brands for makeup virtual try-on services. We also saw ongoing strong momentum in our new AI skincare diagnosis product, and we expected this trend will extend growth.

Furthermore, new clients from luxury, jewelry, and watch industries are integrating our jewelry and fashion VTO offerings into their digital offerings. This new development showed our sustained effort to extend our coverage into different verticals and address some larger markets. They also reflected the various avenue we have got to increase business potential. As we are committed to keep investing resources in AI advancement, we are able to deliver products and services that continuously strengthen our unique position in Beauty AI, Skincare AI, and Fashion AI. Now, let's shift our focus to operational outcomes and discuss our most recent development. We saw another robust quarter for our B2C mobile beauty app business, evident by the 30% year-over-year increase in our mobile beauty app active subscribers to a historically high over 902,000.

The continuous growth in the active subscribers reflected in the rising demand for mobile apps that enable users to edit, enhance, and beautify their photos and videos. As self-expression and creativity become increasingly important, consumers expect more personalized and diverse experiences from mobile apps. Our family of YouCam apps is able to offer unique and high-quality digital outputs, leveraging advanced technology like generative AI for photos and videos. This new set of Gen AI features, including AI editing and beautiful beautification for photos and videos, empower our users to freely and creatively express themselves on social media, and to create high-quality, ultra-personalized photos and videos generated or edited by YouCam Suite of app. The key appeal of the YouCam family app is advanced AI and AR technologies to help the users to solve real-life challenges and explore more creative ideas.

These offerings allow users to beautify, edit, and enhance photos and videos, as well as virtually try on makeup and hairstyle. Users can also experience and create their unique and diverse styles in photos and videos and artwork to unleash their creativity by leveraging the latest AI technology. As the users become satisfied with the quality of our products, our apps, they continue to use it, use our app, making YouCam family apps an integral part of their daily life. Moreover, we offer a complete line of online AI editing tool on our website, and through our YouCam Suite of mobile app that leverage advanced AI capabilities to enhance photos, videos, and generate AI artwork, such as AI Enhance for photo and video, AI Colorization, AI Color Correction, AI Lighting, AI figures, and anime characters.

Our product strategy centers on integrating AI across our entire offering to edit, beautify, and enhance photo and video in one second, and easily transform user experience to solve users' real-time problems, and meet evolving needs from a broader user base, while at the same time maximize return on our R&D investment. A key strength of ours is the ability to leverage the same AI engine to power both our consumer mobile business and our enterprise SaaS business. This allows us to fully monetize innovation across different sectors in our B2C and the B2B sectors. Our unique AI-driven approach, combined with a commitment on ongoing innovation, positions us to significantly expand market penetration by unlocking AI transformative potential. Now, let's shift focus to our B2B business.

This quarter, in our B2B sector, we focused on deepening the penetration in new verticals to provide AI skincare diagnosis product and jewelry and fashion virtual try-on business, while at the same time expanding the adoption of our makeup VTO to more brands in the region. Specifically, we got several new wins for our beauty, skincare, jewelry solutions within our B2B sector. This demonstrate the growth demand from our comprehensive solution and superior technology from clients in different industries and sectors. Moreover, we successfully secured a major license renewal with key beauty, skincare, and the jewelry brands and the retailers. This renewal underscore the increasing trust these brands place in our solutions to address their evolving requirements and highlight of our leadership in VTO solution offering.

We also capitalized on this opportunity by cross-selling to their sister brands and offering additional services, including expanding SKU selections and expanding brands presence into new geographies. The strong momentum in revenue growth in this quarter reflected the recovery in the sales cycle and the pipeline expansion of our enterprise business. Firstly, for our Beauty AI, we remained a leader in the industry, and we continue to innovate. Beauty AI has always been the core of our business. In this quarter, we have renewed contracts with all major existing clients and brought in several new brands for makeup VTO, Virtual Try-On Services. Furthermore, we continue to innovate and expand the capability of our makeup offering. We have added metallic textures to eyeshadow VTO and a shimmer texture to eyebrow VTO.

These new textures for makeup not only allows brands to provide more try-on options to their clients, but also further strengthen our market leadership in makeup VTO sector. Secondly, for our Skin AI tech, in this first quarter, we saw strong momentum for our skin diagnostics products from both existing and the new customers. As people become increasingly conscious about their skin health, we aim to capitalize on this trend. By providing AI solution, notably, we gain significant traction in new market segments such as med spas, aesthetic clinics, and the dermatology practices. These professional institutions leverage our AI technology to deliver real-time and a dermatologist verified skin diagnosis, results, and the scores to their clients and patients.

The key differentiators for our skin service is our cutting-edge and unique high-definition AI diagnosis that offers a comprehensive approach to understand individual skin conditions in super high precision, allowing users to visually change their skin after skin treatment with a very easy-to-see AR overlay, precisely positioned on the location of the actual skin concern, and with a measurable skin score. Using advanced AI, our skin diagnosis solution can detect and evaluate up to 14 key skin concerns, providing patients with a detailed, data-driven assessment of their unique skin health profile. Third key driver of our skin business success this quarter came from our self-service offering. A new product, Skincare Pro, which gain robust momentum, particularly among aesthetic clinics and medical spas.

This is an iPad-based skin diagnosis solution, serves as a consultation tool for clinics to engage with their clients, and with the newly added CRM module, it can improve customer retention, where keep track of each individual customer's progress during treatment. Skincare Pro enables this business to deliver personalized, data-driven skin consultation to their clients and patients in a very cost-efficient and easy way. Furthermore, we recently developed and integrated a comprehensive customer relationship management, CRM, system with our Skincare Pro, allowing skincare professionals to better manage customer profiles for skin health reports in cloud-based console, and compare before or after results. This integration represents a significant shift in how personalized skincare is delivered, ensuring a more personalized and efficient patient experience.

By seamlessly integrating and upgrading our AI-powered skin analysis, diagnosis, and emulation tools, as well as providing science-based skincare experience that supports data-informed decisions and drive parallel patient engagement and satisfaction. Since AI and AR adoption among skincare industries, it's at its very early stage. We believe there is a large untapped market for us to serve and grow. Thirdly, for our AI fashion and jewelry VTO, another highlight of the quarter was the accelerated market adoption of our VTO solution for watch and jewelry. We saw several new wins and the renewal of prestige and the luxury brands, making good progress of our VTO offerings in this category.

We first began expanding into jewelry and watch VTO at the start of 2023, and we are thrilled to see our efforts paying off as more deals have been confirmed and more use cases for products that have been launched in the market. In particular, we saw renewals and upsells from some luxury jewelry brands this quarter. We believe the superior AI technology and professional service, the brand clients' experience in working with us, made them willing to renew the contract and to purchase more services. In this quarter, we have partnered with an European luxury jewelry group and watch group to provide jewelry and the watch VTO for three luxury brands within the group.

Leveraging our cutting-edge AI technology, the sophisticated texture and the radiant reflections of the jewelry can be faithfully portrayed on the screen, providing users an immersive true-to-real, true-to-life shopping experience. Though the case is still at its stage of a POC, we believe that this new win not only confirms the trust in our AI technology by this high-end brand, but it also unlocks the chances to get more new logos onto our SaaS platform for jewelry, accessories, and watches. The increasing numbers of jewelry and watch brands using our VTO and AI technology indicates that the demand for this interactive shopping experience is on the rise. The unique and the leading function of our product allow brand clients to increase user engagement time and reduce their return rate.

Given the robust demand for jewelry and watch VTO, we will continue to deepen our penetration in this sector and further grow our business in different and new categories and regions. We have made good progress in our AI-powered hair solution, too, in the first quarter. In this quarter, we added a new AI hair type analysis technology that can be quickly identify hair texture, thickness, and curl patterns by simply taking a picture of user's hair. This AI technology accurately classifies hair into nine distinct types across 10 categories, from straight, wavy, to extremely curly, and deliver precise and personalized recommendations tailored to each unique hair type. This new innovation on AI hair complements our full range of AI hair solutions, which include our hair color VTO, AI hairstyle generation, AI wig, hair wig generation, and hair extensions.

This industry-leading solution for hair enable hair care brands and the retailers to provide customer with a more customized, shopping experience. To sum up, we delivered strong business performances in the first quarter of 2024, with double-digit revenue growth and a positive bottom line. Not only did the momentum in our mobile app business remain robust, our enterprise business also gained success in expanding services into new verticals. These positive indicators suggest we are well-positioned to capitalize on growing market opportunity for AI on beauty, skin, fashion, and generative AI. We'll continue growing our AI, AR-powered business. Driven by the good demand for both our mobile app subscription and enterprise, SaaS solution, we reiterate our outlook for the full year 2024, projecting total revenue growth recognized under IFRS to range from 12%-16% compared to the full year 2023 results.

With that, I have now concluded my remarks and will be handling the call over to Louis, who will discuss our financial details with you. Thank you.

Louis Chen (EVP and Chief Strategy Officer)

Thank you, Alice. Please note that all financial comparisons are on a year-over-year basis, and the reporting period is the first quarter of 2024 versus the comparable period in 2023, and are on top of the International Financial Reporting Standards, IFRS, measures. We will also discuss non-IFRS measures to provide greater clarity on the trends in our actual operations. As Alice mentioned, in the first quarter of 2024, our total revenue increased to $14.3 million from $12.1 million for the same period in 2023, representing a robust year-over-year growth of 17.7%. The strong performance was mainly due to the strong growth momentum of our AI and AR cloud solution and subscription business.

Among our revenue sources, AI and AR cloud solution revenue was $12.4 million in the first quarter of 2024, an increase of 19.6% compared to the same period in 2023. The continued expansion can be attributed to the robust growth in our mobile beauty app subscription and the strong demand for our online virtual try-on solution among brand customers, especially with the addition of new categories that now serve on skin diagnosis, jewelry, fashion markets, and the growing popularity of our Gen AI technology and AI editing features for photo and video. Notably, our mobile app active subscriber has surged by 30% year-over-year, reaching an all-time high of 902,000 by the end of the first quarter of 2024.

The strong momentum underscores the growing interest in our suite of mobile beauty apps from both users and subscribers. The licensing revenue, which is mostly generated from our traditional offline services, increased by 7.1% in the first quarter of 2024 to $1.6 million, compared to $1.5 million during the same period of 2023. Gross profit for the first quarter of 2024 grew by 16.9% to $11.2 million, with gross margin of 78.3%, compared to gross profit of $9.6 million and gross profit margin of 78.8% for the same period in 2023.

The decrease in gross margin was primarily a result of the increase in third-party payment processing fee paid to digital subscription distribution partners, such as Google and Apple, due to the increase in our mobile app subscription revenue. The total operating expenses for the first quarter of 2024 increased by 11.8% to $12.4 million, compared to $11.1 million for the same period last year. The increase was primarily due to the higher sales and marketing expenses occurred in the first quarter of 2024. To break down operating expenses, the sales marketing expense for the first quarter of 2024 were $7.2 million, compared to $6 million during the same period of 2023, an increase of 19%, and this was due to an increase in marketing and user acquisition costs.

The research and development expenses were $3 million for the first quarter of 2024, compared to $2.6 million during the same period of 2023, an increase of 15.4%. The increase were from additional R&D headcount and related personnel costs. General and administrative expenses were $2.2 million for the first quarter of 2024, compared to $2.4 million during the same period of 2023, a decrease of 9.9%. The decrease mainly came from the lower directors and officers insurance premium fee. Net income was $0.6 million for the first quarter of 2024, compared to a net income of $0.7 million during the same period of 2023, a decrease of 9.4%.

The positive net income in this first quarter was supported by continued revenue growth and effective cost control. Excluding the non-cash share-based compensation, the non-cash valuation gain and loss for financial liability, and one-time non-recurring costs associated to our deal, the adjusted net income was $1.5 million for the first quarter of 2024, compared to adjusted net income of $1.3 million in the same period of 2023, an increase of 14.5%. This represent a sound margin rate of 10.6% in the first quarter of 2024. Looking at our balance sheet, as of March 31, 2024, our company held $157.3 million in cash, cash equivalent, and 6-month time deposits, compared to $154.2 million as of December 31, 2023.

The increase in cash and cash equivalent, including six-month time deposits, was result from the positive operating cash flow and the interest income received from the company's bank deposits. We had positive operating cash flow of $3.5 million in the first quarter of 2024, compared to $3.8 million during the same period of 2023. The positive cash flow demonstrated the company's ability to generate sufficient cash flow to support its business operation and the growth. In total, our customer base has a net increase of 21 brand clients since the end of last quarter, achieving a total of 666 brand clients, with over 745,000 SKUs for makeup, skincare, eyewear, and jewelry products as of March 31, 2024. This is yet another record quarter for this metric, showing the continuous increase in customer penetration and SKU expansion.

More brands and products are leveraging on Perfect Console to operate the various different SaaS modules subscribed from Perfect. In the first quarter of 2024, our total revenue has consistently exhibited strong growth, primarily driven by the continued momentum in our AI and AR cloud solutions and mobile app subscription earnings from premium features and AI-powered apps. Despite a very mild rise in expenses, our net income remained positive. We continue our investment in talent acquisition and technology innovation to expand our core competencies in acting as a transformative tool that reinvents how products are showcased and consumed. We firmly believe that our position within this thriving industry equips us to remain at the forefront of revolutionizing how beauty and fashion brands engage with the audience. Finally, we reiterate our 2024 guidance that total revenue year-over-year growth will range from 12%-16% under IFRS.

This forecast is based on company's current assessment of the market and operational conditions, and management will closely monitor the business progress each quarter and update our guidance periodically to offer better transparency to the market. With that concludes my prepared remarks. Operator, please open up for questions.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, simply press star one again. Your first question comes from the line of Brian Schwartz with Oppenheimer. Your line is open.

Brian Schwartz (Managing Director of Enterprise Software Equity Research)

Yeah. Hi, thanks for taking my questions this afternoon or evening, where you're at. I had a couple. First one was around the SKU growth in the quarter, because it looked very strong, and I was just wondering if the expansion in SKUs is that coming all from the core beauty segment, or is the expansion being spread evenly across some of those newer, like, fashion and the skin segments, too?

Alice Chang (Founder, Chairwoman, and CEO)

Yes, Brian, this is Alice. Thanks for the questions. Yes, because we expanded to new verticals, the jewelry and skin analysis. So it's quite spread out, split between three different verticals. But makeup still the biggest one. They have more SKUs than jewelry, especially luxury jewelry. They don't have too many SKUs like makeup. And skincare also, they do have new SKUs in our consoles, but still makeup has the biggest part, and the rest of the split between skincare and the jewelry.

Brian Schwartz (Managing Director of Enterprise Software Equity Research)

Okay. And then, my next question, I wanted to ask that now that a recovery is happening in the enterprise business, how are you thinking about expanding your sales capacity? Did you add sales reps in Q1, and what are your plans for hiring more sales reps this fiscal year?

Alice Chang (Founder, Chairwoman, and CEO)

Yes. For B2B sectors, especially our SaaS business model, the lead time to acquire new customers is not immediately like B2C, so it takes time. So we keep our sales talent in each of the business units, not growing too much from now. And since we see the growing in our skincare channels and the fashion jewelry channels right now, so we would specifically increase some, a few sales capability in the business unit. And so overall, we will keep increase, but not too much and still serve the same group and the growth of the B2B growth.

Brian Schwartz (Managing Director of Enterprise Software Equity Research)

Okay. And then, Alice, can you talk about, or Louis, you know, the decline that's happening in the key customer count? You know, I think the commentary in the press release is, you know, there's some financial distress from those customers. I guess the question is just kinda say, looking forward, you know, is it your sense that that has bottomed? That, you know, the more distressed customers that you had, those are, you know, kinda has been churned out and there's more financial stability among that customer cohort moving forward?

Louis Chen (EVP and Chief Strategy Officer)

Hi, Brian. This is Louis. Yeah, I think, you know, the macro setting has impacted some of those smaller customer. We look into. As you know, majority of our enterprise clients, they are on annual-based contracts. So, upon the expiration of the contract, typically they'll renew on a year-to-year basis. What we noticed in this quarter is many of those, you know, not so big clients that they didn't have their following year budget approved by their management, mostly mainly because of the overall financial pressure that they are getting. So we saw some of those customer not renewing those agreement at the end of this period. We certainly in management are very vigilant about the trends. I don't think it is something significant.

It doesn't contribute on the material part of the revenue, but it is certainly something, you know, sad to see some of these customer not renewing those. So the company is doing our effort to acquire more customers, so we can, you know, kind of net, you know, that, that impact out.

Brian Schwartz (Managing Director of Enterprise Software Equity Research)

Okay, and then my last-

Alice Chang (Founder, Chairwoman, and CEO)

Most of the decrease from what I observed are not big customers, but you know, there's more medium-sized customers. When they face financial difficulties, they need to drop off, not because they don't like this engagement of users, because they just have a very difficult financial situation. And the size is just a little bit more than the threshold, $50K, those kind of a medium-sized range that we saw in first quarter.

Brian Schwartz (Managing Director of Enterprise Software Equity Research)

Thank you. And my final question, Louis, I just wanted to ask you about the G&A expense, 'cause it came in a lot lower than I had forecasted it. And as I think about, you know, my model moving forward, is this the right level for, you know, for the G&A expense as we think about our models here moving forward? Thanks again for taking the questions.

Louis Chen (EVP and Chief Strategy Officer)

You're welcome. I think we always run a very, you know, agile and slim team, you know, for our back office and our G&A. You know, in the past few quarters, certainly there was more cost as a newly listed company, you know, just for governance, compliance and related different, you know, auditor or external counsel services. As the company mature, getting more mature as a public company, some of these costs will be reduced. As I mentioned in my remarks, the D&O insurance premium has been reduced. The company, you know, has been performing pretty well in the market and so forth. So I think, you know, we try to always to maintain, you know, a slim and, you know, lower cost G&A.

So I think what you see in this quarter, certainly is not a one-off situation, but the market, you know, can change quickly. But at the core, we focus more of our investment into R&D development and certainly expanding in sales, marketing, outreach, while try to be really nimble and effective in the G&A.

Operator (participant)

Once again, ladies and gentlemen, if you have a question, it is star one. As there are no further questions at this time, I'd like to hand the conference back to management for closing remarks.

Jennifer Wu (IR Manager)

Thank you again for joining our call today, and have a good one, and look forward to seeing you online next time. Thank you.

Operator (participant)

This conference is now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.