Rimini Street, Inc. (NASDAQ:RMNI) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

The structural issues that I stepped into effect and make changes on, we’ve done. I feel really good about where we are. I think that we’ve held it around just shy of 80 sales reps as we said we were going to do, while we continue to focus on performance on a rep-by-rep basis. And our close rates were strong. Our close rates on the proposals, as I mentioned, north of 50%, again, very strong. So I think we’re seeing all the factors we would want for accelerating growth and creating an accelerating growth environment, including those pipeline growth. So I think all those factors, and if we see the economics hold, I’m actually in Singapore today, I’ve been down in Asia for over a month meeting literally hundreds of customers and prospects. And I can tell you that the feeling that we have the right mix of product, services and solutions today with a wider breadth, I feel very, very confident that we’re going to be in that growth trajectory.

So let’s keep the guidance conservative. And so again, we don’t get out ahead of ourselves. But again, beat and raise is the cadence we want.

Jeff Van Rhee: Maybe a quick one for you, Michael. On the gross margin side, on the non-GAAP, you’re guiding 61.6 to 62.6, so call it 62 at the mid roughly. You put up higher than that obviously. Two questions, what are the puts and takes there? Why the decline? And then also the longer-term model previously issued was for mid-60s gross margin. So what are the drivers for lower gross margin? And is that mid-60s still the valid target for the target model?

Michael Perica: Thanks, Jeff. And certainly, I would like to reiterate comfort with our long-term model. What we’re seeing with regard to our mix, you’ve seen a lot of the press on the introductions, it was a heavy investment year. We believe we have the majority of that behind us through Q3. We saw the leverage in Q4. So conservatism, I would highlight similar to Seth noted on the top line relative to the gross margin, but certainly nothing that gives us any concern with our ability to meet our long-term and intermediate-term targets.

Seth Ravin: And, Jeff, to add on that, you look at the gross margin, I mean, we kept it above 60%. While we built out an entire suite of products on our own capital, and of course, you’re going to take some hits in the gross margin, but if you look at it, we’ve kept it within one to two percentage points of revenue for that investment. So we’ve managed it, I think, very, very well to get everything done that we’re doing. And the — when you talked about the puts and takes on the margin, one of the — that we’re giving up a little bit is we’ve got new products. Our AMS product line, we have hundreds of employees and you’re going to have a much lower initial gross margin on that until we hit scale. We believe that once we hit $1 billion in revenue, we will achieve the scale across all those product lines. And that’s why that mid-60s gross margin target is absolutely still the model.

Operator: Our next question today will come from Brian Kinstlinger with Alliance Global Partners.

Brian Kinstlinger: My first question, it’s some follow-ups to the questions already asked. Let’s start with the quarter’s revenue. Sequential growth was the strongest — well let me say it this way. Since 2017, you only had 1 quarter with a sequential growth of $7 million, and that was in, I believe, the fourth quarter of 2019 when you won one of your largest customers. So can you first help us understand what drove the sequential revenue growth? Is it 1 large customer? Is it lots of new customers? Is it some customers’ work turned off and got turned back on? Just trying to understand. Or is there a nonrecurring piece that’s unusual this quarter?