KORE Group Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:KORE) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Romil Bahl: Yeah. Thanks Scott. Look, we’re certainly very excited about the — sort of, I’ll call it potential acquisition, right? Because while the agreement is, of course, definitive, the close is ahead. I mean, it’s just such a great fit with our core business, right? Our IoT connectivity business. It fits right in there. It accelerates the journey we’re on. It adds some complimentary capabilities. We certainly think there’s a best in market type eSIM offering when you put the Twilio Super SIM together with KORE OmniSIM. Anyway, all these aspects that the people, world class, I think this is going to be a very meaningful acquisition in terms of strengthening our core business. But at the same time, we sort of have to recognize two things, right?

One, it is not going to be material to our overall numbers, right? And so, there are no sort of disclosure requirements. Two, and perhaps more importantly, we have to be respectful of Twilio. Twilio’s a public company. They do not disclose these numbers. Today, we are not going to disclose them. Certainly not until we close and most likely not even after that. So, apologies. But I’m not going to confirm or deny those numbers you came out with there, Scott.

Scott Searle: Okay. Fair enough. But if I could, Romil, just following up in terms of the opportunity there, besides some of the technology value, they have a very valuable developer and customer based community. Is that part of the excitement there? Are there — is there a way to kind of talk about monetizing that opportunity set within Twilio? And also just curious, does Twilio get a Board seat? Are they planning on holding the stock? Any other color you could provide on that. And then I had one other follow up.

Romil Bahl: Okay. Yeah, no worries. And again, thank you and certainly understand the line of questioning and frankly, I appreciate it. Look, so, first of all, you are very correct that the digital front end and I think I said this in my prepared remarks, but we really believe that this is the strongest capability for the digital consumption of IoT in the market, period, right? And as you would recognize, if I was to sort of simplistically divide up the technology stack and services to provide world class IoT services to the market into three areas, right? The first being all of the backend kind of carrier relationships, the 45 MNO backend integrations that we have, the satellite Laura stuff that we can do, et cetera. That’s one category.

And as you know, we are absolutely the global leader in all of that. The second big component is the connectivity management platform itself. And our seven engines and our IoT, our core one IoT platform, ConnectivityPro on top of that has emerged — has really leapfrogged much of the market. And so, we’ve been all over that. And so, if you really say, okay, the next three years, et cetera, would’ve been around building out that digital front end, building out, I mean, we’ve — we’re sort of in experimental/early stage with our own developer ecosystem, with our own digital front end console and so on. It is so complimentary to get this set of assets from Twilio, which by the way includes a relatively rich patent portfolio and some IP. But also just importantly, these people, their experiences, right?

That they will massively accelerate our development of these things. And look, they were just born digital. They were born in Twilio. That is what Twilio does is this cult, developer persona, kind of following that they have. So, you’re absolutely correct that that is one of the most exciting parts of this story. The second sort of excitement that we have is, of course — and look, I mean, assuming June 1 the close happens, yeah, the first six, seven months will be focused primarily on ensuring their customers are having a very seamless experience, are feeling very good about our expanded capabilities, that sort of thing, and being a part of kind of the new KORE as their key supplier and partner. But we’ll also be focused on driving profitability improvements, which we’re very confident will lead to accretive 2024.

I think much of 2024 then is about, on the one hand cross selling, right? Cross selling Super SIM and the multi Z capabilities into our customers and to cross selling our deploy, manage, scale, our IoT managed services, maybe even our downloadable eSIM to existing Twilio customers, right? Even as we’re merging the product set. And around the end of 2024, right, give or take a few months, we should have been able to put together, we should be able to put together the best of Twilio Super SIM and KORE OmniSIM. I don’t know what the marketing team will end up recommending for a name, but let’s call it the Super OmniSIM for now. That Super OmniSIM, if it’s the market leading product, we believe it can be, will start to drive real revenue synergies going into 2025 and beyond.

And at that point, we won’t be just talking about accretive, we’ll be talking about excitingly accretive going forward. So that’s sort of the vision we have for this. And I apologize if I missed a second part of your question because I got so passionate about the first one.

Scott Searle: No, no, no, that’s fine. And lastly, if I could, and I’ll get back into the queue, but just want to clarify comments about sequential progression of revenues as we go into the first quarter. I thought you said we should see sequential increases, but wanted to clarify, is that just on the connectivity and services front, is that an aggregate for KORE proper, the entire entity? And particularly around ARPU? We’ve been going through the transition of sunsetting for 2G and 3G connections, now that we’re past that and you’re starting to add higher value video and CRO opportunities, did we finally start to see the ARPU starting to move back in the other direction? Thanks.

Romil Bahl: Yeah. No, really good questions. Yeah. Look, we were relatively confidently stating without providing guidance on the last call that, even net of the $24 million hole, right, the $12 sort of headwind from our largest customers LTE transition project going away, and then the 2G/3G revenue of about $12 million in 2022, that was obviously not going to be replicated in 2023. But despite that we thought we could put up growth numbers organically, kind of in the mid to highest single digits. And you undoubtedly used some percentage in there, Scott, and then sort of subtracted that from 310 to 320 to get to your number, which again, I’m not saying is off the mark. But what I will say is that absolutely organically we still believe we’re doing that, we’ll show that in Q1 when we come out here in a few weeks and continue to believe that sort of the worst is behind us.

In terms of the ARPUs, look, we are just delighted that they are stabilizing, right? And frankly we’re quite happy if they stay stable, because any ongoing decline per megabyte is made up for by the use of higher and higher bandwidth in most customer use cases, right? So, that’s a good outcome for us, right? From a 20% price decline type place over many of the last four or five years. Could there be upside on the ARPU? Sure. I mean, there could be, right? But it will probably take us well into kind of real 5G, right? And a lot of high bandwidth usage before that will truly happen. And I wouldn’t hazard to put a timeline on that per se. I continue to believe it’s possible. And certainly hopeful, but couldn’t tell you exactly when.