RADCOM - Earnings Call - Q1 2025

Transcript

Operator (participant)

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to the RADCOM Results Conference Call for the first quarter of 2025. All participants are present in listen-only mode. Following management's formal presentation, instructions will be given for the question-and-answer session. For operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded and will be available for replay on the company's website at www.radcom.com later today. On the call are Benny Eppstein, RADCOM's CEO, and Hadar Rahav, RADCOM's CFO. Please note that management has prepared a presentation for your reference that will be used during the call. If you have not downloaded it yet, you may do so through the link in the investor section of RADCOM's website at www.radcom.com/investor-relations. Before we begin, I would like to review the safe harbor provision. This conference call will contain forward-looking statements.

Forward-looking statements in the conference call involve several risks and uncertainties, including but not limited to the company's statements about its momentum, strategic direction and trajectory, future execution and delivery of value to customers, development of and enhancing strategic partnerships, and expected benefits from collaborations. The success of new technologies to, among other things, enhance automation, pipeline opportunities, and customer engagements, demand for its products and solutions, including AI capabilities, trends in the market, innovation, expanding its business, the expected benefits of its AI-driven assurance solutions, its expectations with respect to gross margins, research and development, and sales and marketing expenses, grants from the Israel Innovation Authority, and its full year 2025 revenue guidance, and future growth and profitability. The company does not undertake to update forward-looking statements.

The full safe harbor provisions, including risks that could cause actual results to differ from these forward-looking statements, are outlined in today's press release and the company's SEC filings. In this conference call, management will refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures, which are provided to enhance the user's overall understanding of the company's financial performance. By excluding certain non-cash stock-based compensation expenses, financial income expenses related to acquisitions, and amortization of intangible assets related to acquisitions, non-GAAP results provide information helpful in assessing RADCOM's core operating performance and evaluating and comparing the results of operations consistently from period to period. The presentation of this additional information is not meant to be considered a substitute for the corresponding financial measures prepared in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles.

Investors are encouraged to review the reconciliations of GAAP to non-GAAP financial measures included in the quarter's earnings release available on our website, www.radcom.com. Now, I would like to turn over the call to Benny. Please go ahead.

Benny Eppstein (CEO)

Thank you, Operator. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for RADCOM's first quarter 2025 earnings call. The first quarter has been an exciting one, marking my transition to lead RADCOM, a company driving innovation in the next-generation assurance market for 5G. I'm proud to work alongside an exceptional team with whom I've closely collaborated to expand key business initiatives and guide the company into the next phase of growth. Turning to slide seven, I will discuss the results. This quarter, we achieved another record for company revenue, reflecting a 17.5% year-over-year growth with substantial profitability improvement and cash generation. Our operating margins increased by more than 6.5% year-over-year, with $4.4 million positive cash flow.

As of March 31, 2025, RADCOM had cash and cash equivalents and short-term bank deposits of $99.1 million and no debt, ending the first quarter with its highest cash levels, continuing our growth trajectory. Looking ahead, we remain confident in our strategic direction and execution. We are on target to grow in revenue for the sixth consecutive year, supported by encouraging signs across our pipeline and customer engagement. As we close a strong first quarter, our focus will remain on disciplined execution and delivering consistent value to our customers. Our core value lies in automated intelligence assurance solution, RADCOM ACE, which delivers real-time service and customer-level experience data and insights. Turning to slide eight. Last year, we began introducing our generative AI capabilities into our solutions. This year, we are moving into agentic AI as part of our collaboration with market leaders, as will be discussed below.

We anticipate an increasing demand for our data and insights as emerging AI-driven use cases continue to evolve. Agentic AI requires real-time user analytics to drive customized services and products, support business processes, and operate autonomously based on those insights. Agentic AI is the next frontier of artificial intelligence, which uses sophisticated reasoning and planning to autonomously solve complex multi-step problems. AI agents ingest vast amounts of data, which then analyze challenges, develop strategies, and execute tasks. Turning to slide nine, to our strategy. We see a great opportunity in the market for ultra-fast development of analytics to enable fully automated customer care and network operation, optimizing quality in real time. Our strategic objective is to become a key provider of a real-time user and service experience insight for AI-powered telecom operators, supporting their network end-to-end across customer care, service management, and service orchestration.

We are investing in a few major areas related to our core competency. One area includes leveraging accelerated computing and GenAI technologies to provide high-capacity real-time user and service insights from customer service experience and usage metrics to advanced customer intent models that will enable predictive customer satisfaction and customer intent to complain. Another area of investment is in agentic AI, where we are collaborating with leading customer care, service management, and orchestration platforms to provide fully automated customer experience-driven workflows. This covers a wide range from delivering the best resolution in live call center interaction to resolving network incidents in operations, where real-time customer impact analysis is essential. This will also support network orchestration and optimization through processes that require resolution and optimization of real-time experiences. We believe the shift to agentic AI will require a robust telecom ecosystem, moving beyond traditional siloed automation toward collaborative intelligence. Slide 10.

On that note, we announced important partnerships that will help fast-track our vision to bring these technologies to the service assurance market and enable real-time customer insights to empower business processes. Our partnership with ServiceNow leverages AIOps and agentic AI to offer an automated complaint resolution and predictive customer experience solution that supports customer care. As noted on slide 10, last week at Knowledge 2025, ServiceNow announced the inclusion of RADCOM among the first vendors to integrate with its AI fabric for seamless workflows. We are very excited to be part of this collaboration that delivers new levels of agent-to-agent and multi-modal communication for seamless wall-to-wall workflows. Slide 11. Following our announcement this quarter of collaboration with NVIDIA, we have reached the next phase of our development roadmap and have received requests from leading customers to move into their labs for evaluation of our cutting-edge, high-capacity user analytics solution.

As noted on slide 11, in the coming quarters, we plan to deepen our partnership with strategic industry players to accelerate growth and expand our market share. This brings us to our install base and slide 12. As published recently, we extended and expanded the renewal of Tier 1 multi-year contract in North America, which reflects confidence in our best-in-class solution. We aim to extend our collaborations to include co-developing future-ready solutions alongside Tier 1 customers as design partners, guided by a deep understanding of their evolving needs and priorities. RADCOM then achieved significant growth with its Open RAN network, the world's first commercially scalable Open RAN deployment, surpassing 8.5 million subscribers in Japan and ranking the most-used mobile services among foreign residents. Turning to the telecom market, the global telecom market continues to grow, driven by key opportunities that underscore the strategic importance of 5G standalone networks.

High-value use cases, including IoT, private 5G, and mission-critical services, are fueling demand for ultra-reliable, high-performance networks. As the AI-driven digital grid emerges, telecommunication providers are uniquely positioned to serve as critical enablers for this AI-native transformation, integrating diverse technologies across hardware and software ecosystems. This accelerated shift continues to reinforce the strategic imperative for scalable standalone 5G networks capable of supporting next-generation AI-powered applications. Furthermore, operators are increasingly turning to emerging AI technologies, including agentic AI, to boost their own productivity, optimize operational efficiency, and manage capital expenditures. We see these trends as creating unique growth opportunities for RADCOM, with extensive expertise and cutting-edge, high-capacity user analytics technology to capture data, provide insights across diverse telecom networks and business processes. RADCOM is well-positioned to capitalize on the data-centric demands of agentic AI. Another key trend presenting significant opportunity is the industry-wide shift toward open architecture.

Growing interest in the OpenAI framework, driven by multi-modal, multi-domain technology integration, is accelerating this momentum. This evolution positions RADCOM to help operators enhance their network with real-time intelligent user experiences. We participated in NVIDIA GTC and Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in March, where we showcased our solution with ServiceNow and Amazon Web Services. There was much interest in our innovative solution providing predictive customer experience insights and customer intent. At both events, we held numerous meetings with prospective strategic partners and customers with potentials to generate sales opportunities. We also recently participated in FutureNet World, where our Vice President of Marketing and Business Development spoke at a panel about AIOps and generative AI-powered operations for the future of telco. In June, we will participate in DTW Ignite, which is part of the TM Forum's Global Alliance of Telco and Tech Companies.

We will showcase our new agentic AI use cases with our partners, and we will be collaborating on two TM Forum's Moonshot Catalyst programs. The first is an AI-driven telecom experience built on TM Forum Open Digital Architecture, ODA, and powered by agentic AI. The Catalyst program includes RADCOM, together with Salesforce, AWS, Verizon, Calvi, TELUS, among others. The second is a Catalyst program that explores hybrid satellite communications and 5G networks, particularly for high-impact scenarios such as emergency response and remote business operations. RADCOM is part of this Catalyst program together with companies including Bell Canada, Oracle, Airbus, EUTELSAT, OneWeb, DigitalRoute, and more. Turning to slide 14 to summarize, the first quarter of 2025 continued the growth trajectory of our record-breaking 2024, positioning RADCOM well to continue its sixth consecutive year of revenue growth.

Our record result and positive momentum reinforced the strength of our technology, positioning us well for the year ahead. We are raising our full year 2025 revenue growth outlook from 12%-15% year-over-year to 15%-18% year-over-year, with a midpoint of $71.1 million, representing a 16.5% increase compared to 2024. With that, I would like to turn the call over to Hadar Rahav, our CFO, who will discuss the financial results in detail.

Hadar Rahav (CFO)

Thank you, Benny, and good morning to everyone. I will mainly focus on our non-GAAP results during this call, unless otherwise stated. A reconciliation of non-GAAP to GAAP measures is included in today's presentation in slide three, as well as in our first release issued earlier today. Additionally, all comparisons are on a year-over-year basis, unless otherwise noted. Now, please turn to slide 16 for our financial highlights.

First quarter revenue grew by 17.5%, reaching a new company record of $16.6 million. At the same time, we continue to manage and control our expenses while investing strategically and efficiently in increasing our investment in sales and marketing. This resulted in our highest-ever non-GAAP operating income of $3.1 million and 90% of revenues for the quarter. Our non-GAAP gross margin for the first quarter of 2025 was 76.3%. Please keep in mind that our gross margin may vary based on the revenue mix. Our non-GAAP gross R&D expenses for the first quarter of 2025 were $4.3 million, up 5.8% year-over-year. This reflects our focus on innovation and portfolio expansion. We will continue to invest strategically in R&D to develop additional automation, GenAI, and agentic AI-based capabilities, and support our strategic partnership and productization plan.

We received a grant of $25,000 from the Israel Innovation Authority during the quarter, compared to $209,000 in the same quarter last year. We expect the Israel Innovation Authority grant to remain at a similar level as the first quarter of 2025 in the second quarter. Our net R&D expenses for the first quarter of 2025 were $4.3 million, an increase of $418,000 compared to the first quarter of 2024. We continue to actively promote our offerings to existing and prospective customers, which resulted in $4.2 million in sales and marketing expenses for the first quarter of 2025 and an increase of $461,000 from the first quarter of 2024. During the upcoming quarter, we expect a gradual increase in sales and marketing to support an increasing pipeline of opportunities and expand our coverage and lucrative region.

Non-GAAP revenue expenses for the first quarter of 2025 were $1 million, a decrease of $145,000 from the first quarter of 2024. Thanks to increased revenue and careful expense management, non-GAAP operating income for the first quarter of 2025 was $3.1 million, 19% of revenue, and an increase of $1.4 million from the first quarter of 2024. Net income on a non-GAAP basis for the first quarter of 2025 was $4.1 million, or $0.25 per diluted share, compared to $2.8 million, or $0.18 per diluted share for the first quarter of 2024. On a GAAP basis, as shown on slide 19, our net income for the first quarter of 2025 was $2.4 million, an increase of $1.7 million compared to the first quarter of 2024. At the end of the first quarter of 2025, our account was $318.

Turning to the balance sheet, as shown on slide 22, thanks to our strong result, we ended the first quarter with the highest cash, cash equivalent, and short-term bank deposit of $99.1 million, which reflects a positive quarterly cash flow of $4.4 million. That concludes our prepared remarks. Thank you, and I will now turn the call back to the operator for your questions. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, at this time, we will begin the question-and-answer session. If you have a question, please press star one. If you wish to cancel your request, please press star two. If you're using speaker equipment, kindly lift the handset before pressing the numbers. Please stand by while we pull for your questions.

Operator (participant)

The first question is from Arjun Bhatia of William Blair. Please go ahead.

Arjun Bhatia (Research Analyst)

Great. Thank you so much.

Benny, your comments on what you're doing with agentic AI were pretty intriguing. I'm curious if you could just maybe expand on the sort of functionality that you're planning to build yourself, where maybe that interacts or integrates with what your partners are doing. How do you plan to monetize this? Are your agentic capabilities going to be monetized, or is that something you plan to include in the product platform for your customers? Thank you.

Benny Eppstein (CEO)

Hi, thanks for the question. I'm sorry, the line was not 100% clear, but I think I've captured the question. We do plan, we do invest in R&D when it comes to generative AI and agentic AI use cases. We closely collaborate with our partners. When it comes to monetization, we have different models we're discussing as we speak right now.

We're pretty flexible, and there's various types of models to address that. I'm happy to take you through that in a separate call.

Arjun Bhatia (Research Analyst)

Okay. Understood. And then just maybe for Hadar, the free cash flow generation has been pretty nice, at least thus far in Q1. Where do you think that can go this year and beyond? And as you keep generating cash, what are you thinking in terms of use of capital as you get more and more on the balance sheet here?

Benny Eppstein (CEO)

Sure. We're looking into different candidates when it comes to acquisition, M&A. There's a few opportunities that we are addressing as we speak. Maybe the second half of the year, we will consider some other actions. Right now, our first priority is to look into M&A. We're looking at it very carefully, and the plan is to do something around our ecosystem.

Arjun Bhatia (Research Analyst)

All right.Perfect.Thank you.

Benny Eppstein (CEO)

Thank you.

Operator (participant)

The next question is from Ryan Koontz of Needham & Company. Please go ahead.

Ryan Koontz (Managing Director and Research Analyst)

Great. Thanks. Really nice quarter there, guys. Starting with your comments about 5G standalone core progress for the industry, can you share any thoughts about where, in terms of global customer count for RADCOM or even your pipeline of customers, what kind of growth do you expect we'll see year-over-year from maybe exiting 2024 to exiting 2025 as to how many production-scale standalone networks that you see in your customer base? Any kind of high-level growth you think we might see there?

Benny Eppstein (CEO)

We're projecting similar pace when it comes to growth. This I would see. The more 5GSA is progressing, we see higher demand for customer management and real-time user analytics.

As of for now, I think, as you saw, we raise our guidance, and I think we will continue similar type of growth. Hadar, do you want to comment on this?

Hadar Rahav (CFO)

No, I'm good, Benny.

Ryan Koontz (Managing Director and Research Analyst)

Okay. That's great. You made a comment about gross margins going forward can vary on mix. Can you unpack that a little bit as far as your current mix of revenues and what some of the puts and takes there across different sources of revenue and how that affects gross margin?

Benny Eppstein (CEO)

Sure. Let's give Hadar to take this question.

Ryan Koontz (Managing Director and Research Analyst)

Yeah. Sure. Yes.

Hadar Rahav (CFO)

Thank you, Benny. So usually, our gross margin is very between 72%-76%, and it's depending on the revenue mix. This quarter, we had less third-party components, which improved our gross margin. Does that answer your question?

Ryan Koontz (Managing Director and Research Analyst)

Yeah, it does. Thanks.

Do you have much services mix, professional services in that mix?

Hadar Rahav (CFO)

No.

Ryan Koontz (Managing Director and Research Analyst)

Not much. Okay. Great. Super. Last question, if I could, here on ServiceNow relationship. As we think about the opportunity to scale there, you think about your customer base and their current customer base among operators. How do those compare? Is there a lot of overlap today, maybe a few key customers driving that? If the ServiceNow customer base provides you a sizable opportunity to grow your customer count, that would be great. Thank you.

Benny Eppstein (CEO)

Sure. I absolutely believe that the partnership with ServiceNow will expand and increase our pipeline, our opportunities. ServiceNow is almost installed in most operators that we are working with. Our lucrative market, just to remind you, is North America, Europe, and Japan, and we see them playing significantly in those regions.

Obviously, they have more coverage than we are, so it's definitely opening doors for us to introduce our solution to more and more operators across those regions. That's really great to hear.

Ryan Koontz (Managing Director and Research Analyst)

Thank you for that, Benny. Maybe last one, if I could sneak it in, about your relationship with NVIDIA. What is the deployment model there for integrating that technology? Do you simply need access to customer-located servers, or will you be packaging your own cloud infrastructure with NVIDIA with your products? What's the deployment model for that?

Benny Eppstein (CEO)

I think the beauty here is that we're talking about a DPU that can be installed in any server, like a standard server out there. We can basically replace their E-card with the DPU and get much better performance when it comes to what we discussed earlier, the user analytics space.

This is what could drive both automation, AI, and CCO reduction for our customers. As mentioned on the call earlier, we're already doing some trials in labs with a few of the tier-one customers and looking forward to extend that to production.

Ryan Koontz (Managing Director and Research Analyst)

Got it. That sort of infrastructure would be part of your customer's private cloud, typically?

Benny Eppstein (CEO)

Yes, but it also could be part of the AWS installed base as well. It is both.

Ryan Koontz (Managing Director and Research Analyst)

Got it. That's all the questions I've got. Thanks for that.

Benny Eppstein (CEO)

Thank you.

Operator (participant)

This concludes the RADCOM first quarter 2025 results conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may go ahead and disconnect.