SmartRent, Inc. (NYSE:SMRT) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Ryan Tomasello: Right. Thanks for that Lucas. And then just one final one, I guess, a bit of a bigger picture question and one that we get most often is around — thinking through the scalability of SmartRent’s business model over time, given the hardware intensive nature of the platform combined with the approach using white glove implementation, obviously, you guys talk about the benefits of the latter in terms of client satisfaction and usage rates of the product. But I think one offset to that at least perceived is the bottlenecks that puts on growth in installations. So just trying to understand how management and the Board are thinking about whether or not that’s a sustainable approach to the business over time or if there is flexibility for the strategy to evolve beyond a more people intensive installation process.

Lucas Haldeman: I’ll take that one. Ryan. I think it’s a great question. So we certainly are committed to our white glove installation, but we’re also looking at other ways that we can accomplish the same goal on a more cost effective rate for our clients. That won’t be the same level of service, but we’ve got some customers who are okay with that trade-off. So you will see us continue to work through that. I think we’re going to be slow to move it all the way from our white glove. It really is a cornerstone of what has allowed us to scale. But as we get into sort of capital constraints and budget issues, you’ll see us have other options we can pull on there. And we actually of — several clients are now doing a self-installation model where with the guidance of our friends virtually variable to complete some of installations with their own service crews.

Ryan Tomasello: Great. Thanks for all that color.

Lucas Haldeman: Thanks, Ryan.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Jason Weaver with Compass Point. Please go ahead.

Jason Weaver: Hey, good afternoon. Thanks for taking my question. At the midpoint of both guidance ranges, both for first quarter, as well as for the full year 2023, it seems you’re implying quite a market improvement in margins over the course of the year from something like negative 17%, 18% to almost negative 8% or 9%. I was wondering about the sources of that improvement. And if it’s just scale more than anything else or you have some sort of pricing updates to come up your sleeve within hardware and hosted services that you can comment on?

Hiroshi Okamoto: Yeah. Let me take that one. It’s a combination of a lot of different things that you’ve actually mentioned. I think pricing we’re seeing improvements, but we’re also seeing a lot of operational efficiencies that will increase our margins, but also on the SaaS side, we have reached a level of scale, where the additional revenues coming in at very high margins.

Jason Weaver: All right, thank you for that.

Hiroshi Okamoto: Sure.

Lucas Haldeman: Operator, I think you can go to the next question.

Operator: Our next question will come from the line of Brian Ruttenbur with Imperial Capital. Please go ahead.

Brian Ruttenbur: Great. Thank you very much. Long pause before my question. But in terms of ARPU, it went up dramatically from 2021 to 2022, I assume as you added more services, can you talk about what you see happening in ARPU in 2023 as you add additional services and where does it tap out in 2023, 2024, 2025?

Hiroshi Okamoto: Sure. Let me take that first and then Lucas can join on. I think we’ve seen kind of in terms of our increase ARPU we will continue to increase that we are really trying to push hard the cross-sell as well as the up-sell to our existing customers, which will continue to increase our ARPU.

Lucas Haldeman: Yeah, Brian, let me just add a little color to that. I think we saw dramatic increase last year. I don’t know that we’ll see that kind of a level of increase, but certainly continuing to grow that is key to our plan. And that’s part of why having the robust platform, I think is so important. It gives us the opportunity to really expand without adding new customers and we are adding new customers and we add them all the time. And so, I love that both things are there for us to continue to grow. So you’ll see that continue to go up this year and continued on going forward.

Brian Ruttenbur: Maybe you can just drill down that out a little bit more. Help me out where new customers are coming on? You gave me or gave us kind of the average, but new customers coming out at $10, $12. I’m trying to get perspective where things are? I see where your average is and how much it’s moved up?

Lucas Haldeman: Yeah. New customers are coming on more of a seven-day kind of range. And it’s exciting to me that most of the new contracts that we’re seeing come across the desk have multiple products attached to them. So that’s kind of some guidance there Brian.

Brian Ruttenbur: Okay, that’s helpful. Thank you very much. In terms of giving us an update on, I believe, WiFi deployment. I know you’re going to do a couple of beta test in the first quarter. Can you tell us about that and where we are and how that betas are going so far?