Sapiens International - Q3 2022

Transcript

Operator (participant)

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Sapiens International Corporation's 2022 third quarter financial results conference call. Sapiens third quarter 2022 earnings release was issued before the market opened this morning and has been posted on the company's website at www.sapiens.com. All participants are presently in listen-only mode. Following management's formal presentation, instructions will be given for the question and answer session. I would now like to hand the call to Ms. Dina Vince, Sapiens' Head of Investor Relations. Dina, would you like to begin?

Dina Vince (Head of Investor Relations)

Thank you, operator. I would like to welcome all of you to Sapiens conference call to review our third quarter of 2022 results. With me on the call today are Mr. Roni Al-Dor, President and CEO, Mr. Roni Giladi, CFO, and Mr. Alex Zukerman, Chief Strategy Officer. Following the summary of the results, we will all be available to answer any questions. Before we start, I would like to remind everyone that this conference call may contain projections or other forward-looking statements. The safe harbor provisions in the press release issued today also apply to the content on the call. Sapiens expressly disclaims any obligation to update or revise any of these forward-looking statements, whether because of future events, new information, a change in its views or expectations or otherwise. On today's call, we will refer to the non-GAAP financial measures.

A reconciliation schedule showing GAAP versus non-GAAP results has been provided in our press release issued before the market opened this morning. A replay of this call will be available after the call on our investor relations section of the company website or via the website link, which is available in the earnings release we published today. I will turn the call over to Roni Al-Dor, President and CEO of Sapiens. Roni.

Roni Al-Dor (President and CEO)

Thank you, Dina. I want to welcome everyone to our call today. This quarter, we deliver solid results despite the currency headwind. Our revenue reached $119 million, and on constant-currency basis, we grew 8%. Operating profit this quarter reached $21 million, representing an operating margin of 17.6%. On the constant-currency basis, our operating profit margin was 18.9%, showing continuous improvement quarter-over-quarter for the past year. The DNA of Sapiens is coded for growth with profitability. Given the scope of our business, global footprint, broad product offering, large existing customer base, we have many levers we can push to drive our business in challenging time, including managing profitability.

When growth takes longer, we can use competitive advantage to expand our business pipeline, upsell to our existing client base, close new deals, and take the necessary measures to improve profitability despite the effect of currency headwind. This quarter, we have several examples of how we are doing it successfully. During the third quarter, we successfully expand our customer base globally. Now more than ever, we are engaging with customers that operate in multi-countries, and we can offer them wider range of products and services. Strategic investments we made in the recent years, such as Dutch and the Nordic region, we have become highly productive. In North America, we are making significant progress with our three core solutions, P&C, Life & Annuities, and workers comp, as well growing with our business application solution like reinsurance and life components.

We continue our go-to-market platform offerings with a focus on cloud native deployment, which is our default and preferred approach. More than 90% of our new logo wins are on the cloud. We also see a trend of our existing customers transitioning from on-prem solution that we sold years ago to our current cloud solutions. The global insurance software vertical is highly attractive. We are still in the early days of incredible industry transformation, as insurance carriers continue to transform their core system to remain relevant, competitive and compliant. As a global player with multiple product lines and cloud capabilities, Sapiens is positioned in a sweet spot to reap the gain of this opportunity. Our cloud contracts are usually multi-year, long-term contracts, as well as embedded additional cloud solutions, and therefore increase our revenue by customers for the long term. Looking at our regional performance.

In Europe, we are proud of our best-in-class products in P&C and life and our considerable geographic footprint. We are engaged with multinational higher sales carriers and seeing larger deals that include more products and services. In the Dutch region, we expand our presence with an acquisition in 2020. We are becoming a market player as we win new logos in Germany while building a solid pipeline for the future. VVaG, a German leading provider of insurance to the agriculture industry, recently signed with Sapiens to replace its current system with our modular and complete core system on the cloud to enable continual end-to-end processing. In addition, another large German player is in the final stage of contracting with Sapiens. In the North America market, our investment across our three core solutions are paying off.

In the core life and annuities product line, we recently signed a new contract with a major financial services entity that selects Sapiens to Life & Annuities insurance services in the Americas. Sapiens' award-winning core suite Life & Annuities and DigitalSuite, that solution will provide our next generation customer service and services experience. Another prospect is currently in the final stage of contracting. In the workers' compensation space, which suffered heavily during the pandemic, we see improvements in the pipeline as well as the sales stage that we are involved in. The P&C line of business is gaining momentum with growing pipeline and advancing in the sales stage. Our business application solutions, such as reinsurance and life components, continue growing. For example, AEGIS, a leading mutual insurance company, signed for Sapiens ReinsurancePro to enhance its new customer internal control process, automatic calculation, and reporting.

Sapiens ReinsurancePro replaced AEGIS current application. As part of our continuous enhancement of North America operations, we welcome back Gary Sherne, who is rejoining Sapiens as the EVP Chief Revenue Officer. In his new role, Gary will oversee all of Sapiens's North America go-to-market activities and will be leading the charge to accelerate growth by winning new logos and expanding new business with existing customers. Next week, November seventh to the ninth, we are hosting our customer summit for North America in Washington, D.C. At this event, we will meet face-to-face with many customers for the first time in the two years. Over 450 guests, including customers, new prospects, InsurTech partners, industry analysts, and thought leaders, will participate in over 50 breakout sessions over the course of these three days.

This event is always a great opportunity to enhance our relationships and showcase our product and solution. Rest of the world, which includes South Africa and APAC, are emerging markets for Sapiens. We are experiencing a growing demand for Sapiens for both P&C and Life & Annuities. Our rich product portfolio allows us to expand and deepen relationships with our customer and grow our wallet share. Our digital cloud-native insurance platform provides comprehensive and holistic solution, combining core data analytics and digital experience, all deployed in the cloud. Accordingly, most of our new core solution deals include additional Sapiens modules, such as Sapiens Intelligence for data and analytics, Sapiens DigitalSuite, Sapiens Cloud Services, and our business application. Our digital offering continues to progress and gain traction, both as an integrated module on top of our core solution and as a standalone proposition deployed over non-Sapiens systems.

Another example is our latest win in North America. I mentioned earlier where our digital capabilities were a critical factor in the transformation project. On the M&A front, for the last two years, we have been active, but decide not to proceed with several opportunities due to high valuations. At this stage, we are evaluating several opportunities for acquisition, but remain committed to our approach of paying reasonable valuation that benefit our shareholders. We have dedicated team working on the M&A front. To summarize, our business is strong. We are growing 8% organically on the constant currency basis while improving profit and gradually shifting to the cloud. I remain confident about our long-term outlook to our business. There are many aspects of the Sapiens business model that set us apart from our competitors.

First, a large percentage of our revenue comes from existing customer, and we continuously add new customers. Second, we have a diverse competitive product offering. Last, we have a global scale and cost-efficient operating model which combines offshore and onshore to allow us to remain efficient while growing. In Europe, we continue to lead the market, both in P&C and life, in all countries where we operate. I'm positive about our progress with our North America pipeline and the number of prospects that have positioned us as a preferred vendor and enter the blueprint process. I would like to turn the call to Roni Giladi, our CFO. Roni.

Roni Giladi (CFO)

Thank you, Roni. I will begin with a review of the third quarter of 2022 non-GAAP results. All comparisons are year-over-year versus Q3 2021, unless otherwise stated. I will follow with comments on the balance sheet and cash flow and wrap up with our guidance for 2022. Only for this quarter and the remaining part of 2022, we have decided to add additional disclosure to explain the tremendous impact of the currency headwind on our revenue versus the comparable period. Revenue in the third quarter of 2022 increased to $119 million, up 0.5% from the third quarter of 2021. On a constant currency basis, our organic growth rate compared to Q3 of 2021 was 8%.

Our revenue would have been $8.9 million higher than in Q3 of 2022. Even when compared to Q2 of 2022, on a constant currency base, our revenue would have been $3.1 million higher than reported. Our revenue in North America amounted to $49.6 million, slightly higher compared to Q3 of 2021. We see for the first time that North America will grow during 2023. Our European revenue amounted to $56.9 million compared to $59.7 million in Q3 of 2021. The impact of our weaknesses in European currency versus the U.S. dollar was material to our revenue from the European region.

On a constant currency basis, our revenue in Q3 of 2022 amounted to $65.7 million, reflecting organic growth of 10%. This demonstrates our strong performance and leading position in the Europe region. Revenue from the rest of world, which includes South Africa and APAC, grew 28.6% to $12.6 million in Q3 of 2022 compared to the same quarter of last year. The growth is coming mainly from the P&C. Currency fluctuation in this region was immaterial. Gross profit in Q3 of 2022 was $53.5 million at a similar level as in Q3 of last year. Our gross margin this quarter was 45%, 10 basis points lower compared to Q3 of 2021.

Despite the currency headwind and increased labor cost, we have maintained our gross margin percentage. On a constant currency basis, our gross margin was 110 basis points higher, reaching 46.1%. Operating profit this quarter reached $20.9 million, slightly lower compared to Q3 of 2021. Operating margin amounted to 17.6% this quarter. On a constant currency base, our operating profit margin amounted to 18.9%, showing continuous and steady improvement during the past years. This quarter, we celebrated growth milestone with over 5,000 employees and contractors, and we continue to grow. Our offshore ratio this quarter passed for the first time 50% benchmark. This is a significant milestone and a key parameter to our continuous improving operating margin. Interest income in Q3 of 2022 amounted to $82,000.

During the quarter, we had the venture interest expenses of $680,000, offset by income of $600,000 for mainly interest investment and hedging transaction. Net income attributable to Sapiens shareholders for the quarter amounted to $16.9 million compared to $17 million in Q3 of 2021. EPS for the quarter amounted to 30 basis points per diluted share, compared to 31 basis points per diluted share in the third quarter of last year. Turning to our balance sheet. As of September 30, 2022, we had cash and cash equivalents and short-term deposits totaling $166.9 million and total debt of $80 million, which is scheduled to mature in four equal annual tranches until January 2026.

During the third quarter of 2022, we generated adjusted free cash flow of $1.9 million. The low adjusted free cash flow was a result of the delay in signing new deals because of the macroeconomic environment, which translated to reduced upfront payment from new customer as well as reduction in deferred revenue. In addition, a contributing factor was a slowdown in collection impacting our DSO that increased from 59.7 days in Q3 of 2021 to 69.1 days this quarter. During the third quarter, we paid a dividend of $0.23 per share, reflecting total dividend of $12.7 million for the first six months of 2022. As per our dividend policy, we will announce the second half of 2022 dividend when we publish our Q4 results.

I would like to turn now to our guidance for 2022. In the previous quarter, we have provided guidance that still included $10 million at risk due to the macroeconomic environment, which could cause delay in signing new deals. We now can say that $4 million out of this $10 million at risk materialized. In addition, the European currency continued to weaken versus the US dollar since our last guidance as of August 3rd, 2022. The impact of the currency headwind from our previous guidance amounted to additional $3.5 million. Therefore, we are revising our guidance to a new range of $472 million-$478 million from $480 million-$485 million. At this stage, we are confident in the business.

However, we are continuing to be exposed to the FX impact. Our new revenue guidance reflects a growth of 2.5%. If we measure our organic growth on a constant currency basis versus last year, it would have amounted to 8.4%. As we all know, the currency impact on the global companies such as ours that have a large operation in Europe and that report in U.S. dollar is tremendous this year. Just to provide a better understanding, U.S. territory and rest of world were not impacted by the currency headwind, but our European territory lost on a constant currency basis around $27 million in revenue. Moving to operational margin guidance. Despite the continuous weakening of FX from last year and the previous quarter, we are reaffirming our profit margin guidance range of 17.5%-17.7%.

Our profitability level is affected mainly by our revenue, as we do not have proportional correlation between revenue and expenses in the local currency due to our offshore business model. Our profit is significantly impacted negatively in territories like U.K., Denmark, Switzerland, Sweden, and is being offset in countries where we have more cost than revenue, such as India, Israel, and Poland. To summarize, although our operating margin remain at the same level as of last year at 17.6%, on a constant currency basis, we are improving our operating margin to a mid-range of 18.9% in 2022, an improvement of 130 basis points. Sapiens' business model is solid, strong, and prove itself even in uncertain times. From financial perspective, we continue to grow within our growth range of 8%-11% organically.

We continue to improve our profitability, and we are paying dividends on a semiannual basis. From business perspective, we are diversified in many aspects, such as having several core system and business application solution covering both P&C and Life & Annuities. We are a global company operating in more than 30 countries. We are providing both licenses and implementation and post-production services to our customers, and having more than 600 customers, with no customer generate revenue higher than 5% of our business, and our top 10 customers represent only 26% of our business. All of that provide business flexibility and risk mitigation to our shareholders. With that, I'm turning it to Roni Al-Dor. Roni?

Roni Al-Dor (President and CEO)

Thank you, Roni. Overall, our business model is built to wisely navigate the changed global economic environment. We are dedicated to driving shareholder value, as evidenced by our commitment to growth and improved margins. With that, operator, we are now ready to open the call for Q&A.

Operator (participant)

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 are using speaker equipment, kindly lift the handset before pressing the numbers. Please ask your question in a loud and clear voice. Your questions will be polled in the order they are received. Please stand by while we poll for your questions. The first question is from Dylan Becker of William Blair. Please go ahead.

Dylan Becker (Equity Research Analyst)

Hey, guys. I wanted to kind of touch in on the delayed kind of contract that you talked about. I guess maybe how have the customer conversations continued to trend over the last kind of several months here? How is the emphasis on digitization versus them maintaining kind of that status quo shifted at all? What's enabled them to delay here? Has that strategic prioritization on core modernization really shifted at all?

Roni Al-Dor (President and CEO)

Hi, this is Roni Al-Dor. To answer your question, there are several topics. The main delay is on the, it's on the contract and the final decision. I think we continue to see demands from the market. The sales cycle in our business is long. I think at this time, everything around the contract and the commercial side and the negotiation in this area taking longer and longer. We in Sapiens also to protect ourselves, we are also giving some hard time to our customer because we are entering to what we call blueprint stage to make sure that we and the customer understand the size of the deals. When this is the majority of the delay to closing the deals. We are still see demands.

In terms of competitor situation, we are in a good shape. We have a very good win rate, but it's still delayed because they're all processing.

In the in-sales process, you have, we call it, three phases. You have to bring the opportunity then to sell it, to convince the customer that we are the right one, and then to close it. The closing part taking longer and longer.

Roni Giladi (CFO)

Dylan, I would like also to add. You asked also about digital in this deals. We can say that majority of our deals that we are signing today include cloud services and digital solution. We are happy with it. Regarding the delay in the decision, this is we can say in very late stage of the process with the customer, and we also had additional solution like mobilization, that the customer pays upfront payment for additional work until the legal team are finalizing them. We are not seeing them cancel, only pushing to the right.

Dylan Becker (Equity Research Analyst)

Got it. Okay. Yeah, still very late stage. More a matter of timing than anything. Okay, that makes sense. I guess too, you noted on the call or you just noted earlier in your commentary, the emphasis on migrating those existing customers that had made decisions in the past towards your kind of modernized cloud solution here. Can you walk us through maybe what the economics look like relative to that migration opportunity with those customers, maybe compared to a net new deal? How are you thinking about incentivizing maybe this more captive audience as you think about capitalizing on, again, the existing customer base, which should be lower touch kind of in nature?

Roni Giladi (CFO)

Thank you, Dylan. First of all, I would like to split this to two. It's the new deals that we see more than 90% of all the new logos that we sign are taking our core system on the cloud, and with additional digital services. This is factor number one. Regarding the existing customer, that we have more than 500 customers that still are not on the cloud. This is not a matter of that we can push them, this is time that will eventually evolve. This is a long process. Existing customer that would like to go to the cloud will probably pay additional $1 million or $2 million in a given year regarding the hosting services, tier one, where they're agnostic to AWS or Microsoft Azure, the IT services and the managed services.

Potentially $1 million-$2 million, but again, this is very long process that will happen in the next few years. We are just starting this process. We can see a few examples that we already succeeded, but it's only the first step in the journey.

Dylan Becker (Equity Research Analyst)

Got it. Okay. That makes sense. Maybe one last one, if I could squeeze it in here, too. Around kind of the cloud capabilities in Europe as well. You've been acquiring and to towards domain expertise here. Maybe to what extent do you guys start to see that benefit of that local expertise in regions, given the complex regulatory framework and maybe some of the international data initiatives proposed in these regions? Seems like that'd be a competitive advantage for you guys, but wonder if you're seeing that play out in your customer conversations. Thanks.

Alex Zukerman (Chief Strategy Officer)

Hey, Dylan Becker, this is Alex Zukerman speaking. Spot on. I think this is a tremendous differentiator and an added value for us in our European operation. The fact that we can bring on one hand our global view of the industry and our global R&D efforts together with a very strong local presence that resonates very, very well with the local customer base. Our German teams and our Spanish teams and our Danish and Norwegian teams, they are making a huge impact and the difference in our ability both to sell and to deliver. We see the customer appreciation for that, and definitely it provides us value in a really good understanding of the local capabilities, local regulations, local needs, and being able to insert them into R&D plans on a global scale.

We find this combination that works very, very well and very well accepted by the market.

Dylan Becker (Equity Research Analyst)

Got it. Thank you, guys.

Operator (participant)

The next question is from Chris Reimer of Barclays. Please go ahead.

Chris Reimer (Equity Research Analyst)

Hi. Thank you for taking my questions. I wanted to ask regarding gross margins. Considering the amount of new logos you mentioned 90% already a few quarters, it's been pretty high, the mix of cloud new deals. When do you think we might be seeing an uptick in gross margins as a result of the mix in product? We see uptick currently already in Q3 in the result. We see the reported one is 45%, but if we look at the constant currency basis, we are already at 46.1%, more than 100 basis points compared to previous year. This is coming from mainly from the offshore operation.

Roni Giladi (CFO)

Over the last year, we increased the offshore ratio by 5%. We passed the offshore ratio by from 45% to almost slightly above 50%. This is one factor. The uptick moving to the cloud will not happen in the first or second year, probably will be in the third and going forward because initially initial step are additional investment that we need to provide to the customer. Probably from the third year going onwards, from new logos moving to the cloud, we'll see uptick also. Thank you. That's helpful. Just in terms of the delays in deal closings, you may have mentioned it before and I missed it, but is that something you're seeing in a particular region, or is that something you're seeing across geographies?

Alex Zukerman (Chief Strategy Officer)

We see this trend globally. Global view in North America, Europe, and APAC, and South Africa. Globally.

Chris Reimer (Equity Research Analyst)

Great. Okay. Got it. Thank you. That's it for me.

Operator (participant)

If there are any additional questions, please press star one. If you wish to cancel your request, please press star two. Please stand by while we poll for more questions. There are no further questions at this time. Before I ask Mr. Al-Dor to go ahead with his closing statement, I would like to remind participants that a replay of this call is scheduled to begin in two hours. In the U.S., please call 1-888-269-0005. In Israel, please call 03-925-5938. Internationally, please call 972-3-925-5938. Mr. Al-Dor, would you like to make your concluding statement?

Roni Al-Dor (President and CEO)

Yes. Thank you for joining the call today. We look forward to speaking with you soon, and we are always happy to answer any following questions. Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. This concludes the Sapiens International Corporation third quarter 2022 results conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may go ahead and disconnect.