Zenvia - Earnings Call - Q4 2024

Transcript

Operator (participant)

That today's conference is being recorded, and a replay will be available at the company's IR website, where you can also access today's presentation. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the prepared remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. For the Q&A session, we ask you to write down your question via the Q&A icon at the bottom of your screen. Your name will then be announced, and you'll be able to ask your question live. At this point, a request to activate your microphone will appear on your screen. If you do not want to open your microphone live, please write down, "No microphone," at the end of your question. In this case, our operator will read your question aloud. Now, I'd like to welcome one of our speakers for today, Mr. Cassio Bobsin, founder and CEO. Sir, the floor is yours.

Cassio Bobsin (Founder and CEO)

Good morning, everyone. I'm Cassio Bobsin, founder and CEO. Thank you for joining us here today. I'd like to start by talking briefly about the AI revolution we are all witnessing. As we look around the world, here in Brazil, it's clear that AI is no longer a promise. AI has become a strategic priority for companies looking to reinvent how they connect with customers. In global markets, we see AI driving everything from personalized product recommendations to proactive customer service. Brands are using AI to automate workflows, understand intent in real time, and scale human-like conversations across channels. In Brazil, this trend is also accelerating. Businesses of all sizes, from large banks and retailers to fast-growing startups, are all integrating AI into their CX strategies to improve efficiency, reduce response times, and deepen customer relationships. Customers today don't leave on a single platform.

They move across WhatsApp, Instagram, email, chat, SMS, always expecting fluid, personalized, and consistent experiences at every touchpoint. That is why AI is not just a tool. It is now a core pillar of how companies engage with their audiences and how they can sell more and serve better their customers. This is exactly where Zenvia's focus is: empowering businesses to unify those interactions and bring intelligence, context, and skill to every conversation, no matter the channel. Let's see the next slides. This AI revolution marks the beginning of our new strategic cycle that we announced in January, as it builds on what we achieved in 2024 and sets the stage for more innovation, efficiency, and value creation moving forward. Strategic cycles play a critical role in shaping the direction and growth of companies and allow us to adapt to market changes, focus our resources, and position ourselves for long-term success.

It is always worth remembering that Zenvia's mission, since our inception over 20 years ago, has always been to revolutionize the experience that customers have with companies and brands. We recognize three distinct strategic cycles so far in this mission, and we just closed the third one and launched the fourth one, as you can see in this slide. We had our first cycle, which was basically our startup phase after being born in a garage as an SMS provider, then evolved to the second cycle, where we expanded our messaging capabilities and consolidated ourselves as the leading SMS broker in Brazil with a series of acquisitions. The third and latest strategic cycle began in 2018, when we decided to evolve from a leading Brazilian CPaaS to become the most comprehensive CX SaaS in Latin America.

After a series of acquisitions held before and after our IPO of companies that not only complemented our CPaaS business but also reinforced our strategy and vision for the future, all overcoming challenges in their integration, we officially launched the Zenvia Customer Cloud in 2024. Zenvia Customer Cloud is the culmination of this vision, and it's now our core business moving forward. As of January 2025, we have entered our fourth strategic cycle, centered on accelerating the growth of our newly defined core business. Let's dive in on Zenvia Customer Cloud on the next slide. We're truly excited about Zenvia Customer Cloud and the immense potential it brings to our company. This platform represents a pivotal milestone in our journey and in our commitment to enhancing customer experiences.

Zenvia Customer Cloud is powered by AI-driven solutions and robust data analytics and is designed to adapt seamlessly to businesses of all sizes and across diverse industries. Clients already using it report enhanced customer engagement, increased sales, and reduced costs. Zenvia Customer Cloud was born with AI at its core to help companies not only automate but truly operationalize intelligence, especially when managing the experience of thousands of customers in a single unified environment. It is important to highlight here that the launch of Zenvia Customer Cloud was leveraged by two important and strategic initiatives: the use of product-led growth (PLG) strategies and our international expansion in Latin America. Our PLG strategies give users flexible and self-service access to our software. They can start small, explore features at their own pace, and scale in an easy way as their needs grow.

This is all made possible by integrating our services into this unified platform, which makes the experience intuitive and adaptable for businesses of any industry and size. Because it fits so well with our clients' needs, it leads to higher adoption, stronger long-term relationships, and a scalable revenue model, positioning Zenvia for sustainable growth in a fast-moving market. Another key differentiator is our shift to a volume-based pricing model, where clients pay based on the number of interactions they have with their clients and prospects rather than the traditional perceived SaaS model that we had before. This approach is enabled by the extensive use of AI in our software, which minimizes our customers' reliance on human agents, enhances efficiency for their operations, and unlocks greater revenue generation potential for us with much less complexity.

Our international expansion, particularly in Argentina and Mexico, where we already had a presence, is performing well and delivering results. These international clients are already delivering a solid contribution to the success of Zenvia Customer Cloud, further validating our strategy. The initial results we already achieved with Zenvia Customer Cloud in these first months leave us energized and optimistic about the opportunities that lie ahead after this challenging 2024. As we enter this important new strategic cycle, we are laser-focused on driving organic growth by leveraging our unified platform and market opportunities, evolving and accelerating our partnership ecosystem, boosting profitability through smarter operations and efficiency, while reducing leverage to re-strengthen our financial foundation. At the same time, we're committed to building the optimal capital structure to support our ambitions and ensure long-term resilience.

These combined efforts are expected to position us to unlock meaningful, sustainable value as we move forward in our journey. I'll now hand the call over to Shay to present our foundation performance, and I'll be available for the Q&A session later on.

Shay Chor (CFO)

Thank you, Cassio. Good morning, everyone. Let's start on the next slide and continue talking about Zenvia Customer Cloud, as Cassio just mentioned. This slide brings a snapshot of Zenvia Customer Cloud, which was officially launched back in October 2024 and generated revenues of around BRL 180 million in the full year of 2024. We closed the year with almost 6,000 companies already using the platform, 20% of which were international companies, mainly from Mexico and Argentina. In terms of growth, we estimate that this operation will expand by 25%-30% in 2025, achieving a gross margin of between 68%-70% and positive EBITDA margin. Our estimates are based on solid data, showing the market is set to keep growing at a strong double-digit pace in the coming years.

On top of that, our new unified operating model with advanced automation and AI, and the acceleration of our partner ecosystem, puts us in a better position to make the most of these opportunities. Let's now move to the next slide and talk the numbers from the quarter and the year. Q4 was a particularly challenging quarter for us, as several headwinds converged and weighed on profitability despite continued top-line growth and disciplined cost management. Starting on the left, we can see revenues reaching BRL 231 million, up 7% year over year. This was primarily driven by strong volume growth in CPaaS, which offset declines in SaaS revenues. However, as we move to the next chart, we can see the pressure on margins. Our adjusted gross profit declined 60% to BRL 49 million, with gross margin decreasing to 21%. There were two main drivers behind this.

First, on the CPaaS side, we saw higher mix in the quarter coming from strong growth but at lower margins. This was further impacted by a BRL 27.8 million SMS cost adjustment related to the full year but only recognized entirely in Q4, rather than being spread across previous quarters. As you can see in the center chart, this had a major effect on our CPaaS gross profit and margin. If we exclude this one-time item, CPaaS adjusted gross margin would have been close to 22%, which is much more in line with our expected range of 20%-25%, as opposed to the reported 4%. We view these impacts as non-recurring and expect margins to normalize progressively over the course of 2025 as we move on with our strategy. Second, in SaaS, margins declined to tighten profitability from our enterprise clients, who continue to operate in a highly competitive environment.

Additionally, we incurred higher costs related to the launch of Zenvia Customer Cloud. As we continue rolling out this new operation, we expect to see better results from our SaaS segment throughout 2025. As a result of both these effects, CPaaS adjusted gross profit was only BRL 6 million, while SaaS reached BRL 43 million, with margin declining in both segments. EBITDA, when excluding earn-out expenses and the SMS impact I just mentioned, closed the quarter at BRL 35 million, a 6% decline versus the BRL 37 million recorded in Q4 of 2023. We expect this level to be our recurring quarterly EBITDA going into 2025. Let's now move to the analysis of the results of the year. In this slide, we show our annual revenue and non-GAAP adjusted gross profit over the last three years. On the revenue side on the left, both segments presented growth in the periods.

The CPaaS market proved to be much more dynamic and volatile than expected, expanding 25% year over year between 2023 and 2024, after growing only 3% in the previous year, while SaaS remained in a highly competitive environment, growing at high single digits in the same period as compared to double digits the year before. This revenue performance, along with the margin impacts we just discussed, particularly from Q4, drove the overall gross margin compression in the year, as seen on the chart on the right. Looking ahead, I would like to emphasize again here that we have been investing a lot on the integration of the SaaS solution, and we expect to start to leverage on the growth of SaaS under Zenvia Customer Cloud.

As we move more and more into it, integrating all businesses into the new business model, the company is increasingly transitioning into a full SaaS model, generating MRR through monthly subscription, seats, and usage volume. Let's now look into the profitability for the year in more detail. This slide gives us a consolidated view on how gross profit and margin performed in 2024. Again, profitability was impacted by the newly acquired CPaaS clients with lower margins and the competitive environment for enterprise on SaaS, along with the cost adjustment we just discussed. I would like to highlight here that despite the impact this quarter, we believe this strategy with the newly acquired CPaaS clients will pay off over the medium to long term as we deepen this relationship, and we do not need additional G&A expenses to manage them. Moving on, let's now discuss our G&A.

Over the past two years, we've stayed laser-focused on tightly controlling costs, currently BRL 33 million in G&A expenses in total, thanks to our streamlining efforts that started at the end of 2022, when our G&A to revenue ratio reached almost 23%. As you can see in this slide, this ratio went down to 12% in 2024 from 16% in 2023 and from 19.5% in 2022, down by 760 basis points in this two-year period. We are very proud to have been able to pivot the company this way, improving both the productivity and profitability, which are vital for this next phase of growth, as Cassio mentioned in his opening remarks. As we enter 2025, we remain committed to keeping our focus on streamlining our operations to drive efficiency.

We announced in January a headcount reduction projected to generate cost saving of an additional BRL 30 million-BRL 35 million in 2025, even after accounting for severance expenses. We are also counting on AI and automation to have an even deeper impact in streamlining efforts moving forward. As a result of all our efforts on both the revenue side and the G&A side, EBITDA multiplied by almost five times in these two years but fell short of the full year 2024 guidance for the reason I already explained. Even though our revenues went up 19% year over year to BRL 960 million and the G&A expenses went down 11% year over year, it was not enough to offset the lower gross profit margins.

We are frustrated that we couldn't reach our EBITDA guidance for 2024, but at the same time, we're confident about 2025, given the early improvements we are already seeing in the first months of the year. Moving on to the next slide, another key index that we always like to highlight is our EBITDA minus CapEx. This metric not only highlights our operational efficiency, but also helps you understand how well we are positioning ourselves to deleverage, fund future growth, maintain financial flexibility, and reward shareholders. As you can see in this slide, in 2022, when we deducted the CapEx from our EBITDA, we still saw a negative figure. It turned positive in 2023 and improved even more in 2024, even considering the increase in CapEx related to the investments in data center this year.

When we look year over year, our EBITDA minus CapEx improved BRL 26 million in 2024, but for the two years, the performance is even better and improvement of BRL 53 million. We also ended the year with a cash balance of BRL 117 million. We expect EBITDA to continue growing at a faster pace than our CapEx, as it has been the case for the last few years. CapEx for 2025 should remain in the same level of 2024. Zenvia Customer Cloud is the growth engine for our company from now on. Moving on to the next slide to talk about our next steps. As we move into this next phase, our focus remains clear. We continue to accelerate organic growth, supported by the increasing scalability of our new platform.

At the same time, we are streamlining operations even further, with AI playing a key role, not just in how we serve clients, but in how we operate internally with greater efficiency and intelligence. As a means to sharpen our focus on our core business and drive the expansion of our ecosystem, we'll carefully evaluate opportunities to divest non-core assets, as we disclosed in January. We believe we own assets that hold significant value in their segments, and an opportunistic divestment could play a key role in optimizing our capital structure. As we embark on our new strategic cycle, we are focused on expanding Zenvia Customer Cloud in Brazil and Latin America. Our priorities are accelerating organic growth while continuing to deleverage the company.

We are working hard for these actions to result in a more efficient company with exceptionally solid business metrics, enabling us to unlock value to our shareholders. I could not close this call without thanking you all for your support in 2024, which, as I said in the beginning of my prepared remarks, was a transformative year for us. We appreciate your continued trust as we move ahead. We are committed to building a profitable and exciting future for Zenvia. Based on what we have seen so far, we expect to report a good start for the year with Q1 numbers by mid-June. We cannot anticipate a specific number at this point, but I can say that we are seeing revenue growth picking up, SaaS margin recovering, and EBITDA tracking at healthy levels. With this, we conclude our prepared remarks, and we are ready to take your questions.

Operator (participant)

We will now begin the question and answer session. Once again, for this Q&A session, we ask you to write down your question via the Q&A icon at the bottom of your screen. Your name will then be announced, and you'll be able to ask your question live. At this point, a request to activate your microphone will appear on your screen. If you prefer not to open your microphone live, please write down "no microphone" at the end of your question, and our operator will read your question aloud. Our first question comes from Armagan.

Two questions from me. Can you take it, Shay?

Shay Chor (CFO)

Yeah, yeah. I'll read it, and I'll answer.

Operator (participant)

Okay. Thank you.

First question, could you provide clarity on Zenvia's full year 2025 revenue outlook? Specifically, how should investors model the customer cloud segment's 25%-30% projected growth in relation to your traditional SaaS CPaaS business lines? To what extent do you anticipate customer cloud revenues to cannibalize existing revenue streams versus creating net new growth?

Shay Chor (CFO)

Thanks, Army, for your question. I'll start by trying to separate the revenues here so it's easier for everybody to understand. When we think about the SaaS business, the entire SaaS business in 2024, we generated approximately BRL 320 million in revenues. Given that we stated that Zenvia Customer Cloud was about BRL 180 million, that is the part that we are saying is going to grow about 25%-30%, the BRL 180 million that we generate under Zenvia Customer Cloud.

There are still about BRL 140 million in other SaaS businesses that we expect to be flourished to 5% growth. So it's a SaaS; we can even consider that SaaS legacy business. So those are businesses that in the M&A that we did, they don't fit under Zenvia Customer Cloud, but they still generate decent revenue, and they still generate decent profitability. So those are businesses that we'll keep investing to make them updated, but we'll not put a lot of efforts to keep growing those businesses. There are important clients that are with us for a while, and we'll keep them with us investing in what they need, but there will be no effort as we are putting effort on Zenvia Customer Cloud. Now, on the CPaaS business, it's actually been surprising us; 2024 was surprising in terms of growth.

We understand that this business should be growing between 5% and 8%, but it grew way faster than this in 2024. We are anticipating a 2025 that it's growing. It should move back to that 5%-8% growth, but in the first couple of months of this year, we are seeing that CPaaS continue growing fast.

Second question, could you provide an update on the current status of your planned divestments? Has the company established any specific milestones or timeline for completing this process that you're able to share with investors?

We are not able to share any specific details on divestments. As we said on our January 13, 2024 statement, we'll be opportunistic on evaluating divestment alternatives. The main focus of the divestment is to improve our capital structure, so deleverage balance sheets. That is what investors should have in mind.

On top of that, obviously, we'll continue doing all liability management that we need to do to deleverage balance sheet. If you look into our financial statements that we published late last week, in the subsequent events, we detail that we renegotiated debt with the debts that we have, the loans that we have with banks. Most of them, we were granted a six-month grace period on the principal amortization. That is the kind of thing we'll continue doing in parallel to divestment, because divestment we don't control. We need to be opportunistic. In any case, we need to continue doing liability management to make our EBITDA fit into our capital structure. I'll keep going here because I see there's no live questions, okay?

Operator (participant)

Okay, Shay, thank you.

This is one for Cassio. Now that AI is a reality, as you mentioned, what are you seeing as a new hot topic or things that Zenvia is seeing that could happen differently in 2025?

Cassio Bobsin (Founder and CEO)

As during 2024, we built the foundations to blend AI into the core of our Zenvia Customer Cloud. We see that the adoption of simple use cases that was the beginning of AI into the platform is now evolving into a more interconnected use case, which combines the data that companies have, considering the history of their customers' transactions, the history of past interactions with these customers, to then create more sophisticated customer journeys and experiences for these customers. We're beginning to see the adoption of agents that we are offering our customers within Zenvia Customer Cloud to automate some more complex journeys and complex interactions that use that data to help end customers to solve their issues, to understand what is the best offer for them, to anticipate what could be offered for them in terms of marketing offerings and so forth and so on.

We are starting to see the use of the combination of data and past interactions into more personalized experiences for end customers.

Thanks, Cassio. Another one here for you. I remember at some point you talked about charging per interaction. The SaaS industry is mostly on a per seat basis. Can you elaborate more on this?

Sure. Historically, SaaS companies charged their platform, their software per seat, which is like a legacy from the old ways of selling software per license. As we see the adoption of SaaS, even though it evolves, human agents operate in the software. When you go into automation and AI, you expect customers to use your software not for increasing the amount of human agents using the software, but going deeper into how to use data and use AI to create more value for their operations, for their businesses. What we changed planned is something that in the next couple of years will be the major trend in SaaS is not to charge per seat solely, but migrate that to per usage. Per usage, depending on the business and the software that you're providing, means different things.

In our case, as we are providing software for customer experiences, it makes sense to charge companies in terms of how many interactions they have with their end customers. Hence, we did that movement last year. Now we charge our software, the whole of Zenvia Customer Cloud, per interaction with end customers. What happens when we do that is that we do not limit that many the way human agents are using the software, but we actually estimate them to adopt different features that would provide, for instance, chatbots or agents for marketing purposes or automation over campaigns or ways to help these human agents to be more productive. This for companies actually helps them to be more efficient, to reduce costs. From our perspective, we are benefiting our customers, and at the same time, we are capturing more volume and more revenues from these same customers.

As they use more our software, we are able to charge more per usage. We see that this is the way we are going to, over the next couple of years, be able to monetize our customer base more and more. Our customers usually start with one use case, usually no automation or a very simple use case, and over time, they begin using our software for other use cases, for other departments, for other parts of the customer journey. That brings, of course, more interactions that are managed by our software. That is why we see that we will create, and it is already creating, a positive flow in terms of revenue from some customers.

Okay, moving forward here. Back on the divestment, can't you also not share if there are buyers even interested at this moment? I understand you can't give specific details, but is there any serious interest currently?

Shay Chor (CFO)

Unfortunately, we cannot provide any details on divestment. I can ensure you all that we've been working hard, looking into all alternatives and options that we have. Again, we cannot share any further details at this point. Another one here for you, Cassio.

I have noticed that in the past few months, there has been a bigger focus from the team on the franchise model as well as partnerships. Could you talk us through what the ultimate vision is here? Are there customer acquisition tools, retention, or pure play monetization opportunities?

Cassio Bobsin (Founder and CEO)

Sure. As we've been evolving Zenvia Customer Cloud, we understood that for companies to go deeper into the usage of the platform, to create journeys that go end to end from marketing to sales to customer service, customer engagement, sometimes it's necessary not only to have the software available, but also to have someone by your side that is a specialist on your kind of company and your vertical and your region and that kind of use case you're trying to evolve. We always had some partners working with us to help on these use cases. As we saw last year, this demand for more sophisticated usage of our software, we understood that there was a very interesting opportunity to evolve these partners into franchises where these partners, they not only help us to sell the platform, but also help customers to achieve their operating results.

We have been evolving that model since the end of last year. It is going much better than we expected. We are aiming to scale that even more. We are not disclosing many numbers at this time, but over the last couple of months, we are going to be able to disclose how these new sales channels are performing. I would say that over the next couple of quarters, it will become the major sales channel for Zenvia. We are adding a new sales channel. It is performing pretty well. We expect that it will help us to achieve strong growth in the next couple of quarters.

Thank you, Cassio. Moving forward here, will 2025 gross margin for both SaaS and CPaaS get back above 2023 levels, or will it stay below that?

Shay Chor (CFO)

For those who are not in front of the numbers, just to help you guys here, the gross margin on the SaaS business in 2023 was 46%, and on the CPaaS, it should be in 2024, it was 26%. Looking into 2025, on the SaaS business, we should expect gross margin to be back to the levels of 2023. Let's call it between 45%-50%. On the CPaaS business, the 26% we presented in 2024 should be a normalized level. Slightly below that, maybe closer to 25%. I would say that it should be closer to 2023 levels in terms of the SaaS business and close to 2024 levels in terms of the CPaaS business.

I'll keep going here.

I understand you're not providing at this point any guidance for 2025. Could you tell us what are your main goals or challenges for this year?

Cassio, I'll start with pure financial, and I'll let you run through operations and strategic, okay? In terms of financials, I would say that main goals for 2025, first is to leverage balance sheet and align our EBITDA, better align our EBITDA to capital structure of the company. The second thing is do better than we did in 2024 in terms of EBITDA, in terms of profitability. Those are the main goals for us from a pure financial perspective. Cassio, I don't know if you want to add something in the operations or products same.

Cassio Bobsin (Founder and CEO)

Sure. As you all know or you're aware, we've been operating CPaaS as a mature business. Also, as I mentioned, we have the legacy SaaS that we are continuing to operate, but we expect mature growth. When you look to Zenvia Customer Cloud, our focus of investment of the last two, three years, we are seeing an amazing performance. We're seeing a big evolution of the software, of customer experiences, and that is resulting in not only a strong customer acquisition, but especially more engagement from our own current customers using the software. We're seeing more adoption of the software. I would say at least around half of our customer base using Zenvia Customer Cloud is already using for two or more use cases, meaning more than 10 times what we had before Zenvia Customer Cloud.

That not only gives us strong retention of these customers that go into a more deep adoption, but we see that they grow their revenues with us. This combination of a stronger customer acquisition and a deeper adoption of our software, combined with our usage-based business model, is generating a very interesting combination of revenue growth for Zenvia Customer Cloud. As gross margins for this business are pretty healthy, we are seeing that over the next couple of quarters, we will be able to make this business become the strongest portion of the whole company, generating cash. It is already a bit positive. All this combined gives us a very optimistic overview for 2025.

Shay Chor (CFO)

Thanks, Cassio. I got another one. Seems to be the last one for the time being.

How should we look at EBITDA margins for this year? Same story as the gross margins. Again, we're not providing specific numbers.

As I mentioned, we are targeting, and one of our main goals for 2025 is to improve EBITDA from what we delivered in 2024. I cannot share any specific level, but I can say that we are aiming at doing better than we did in 2024. Hugo, we have no further questions here so far.

Operator (participant)

Again, if you have a question, please use the Q&A icon at the bottom of your screen to write it down, and we'll open your microphone. If you prefer not to open your microphone, please write down no microphone at the end of your question. Our operator will read your question aloud.

Shay Chor (CFO)

I guess that's it, Hugo.

Operator (participant)

Thank you, Shay. This concludes our Q&A session. I'd like to turn the conference back over to Mr. Cassio Bobsin for his closing remarks.

Cassio Bobsin (Founder and CEO)

Thank you, everyone, for joining us on this call. 2024 was a very challenging year for us. We see that on the other side, we were able to base all the foundations during the last year that are now becoming the basis for our 2025 high expectations. We are seeing that the market is pretty healthy, and our performance is doing amazingly well on Q1. We expect that to continue over the next couple of quarters. I expect to see all of you in the next couple of weeks so we can share our Q1 numbers. See you, and thank you very much.

Operator (participant)

The conference has now concluded. Zenvia's IR area is at your disposal to answer any additional questions. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect. Have you all a nice day.