Wejo Group Limited (NASDAQ:WEJO) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

John Maxwell: I would say that as we increase our SaaS type offerings in our product set–you know, as you know, our first couple of years were really primarily a data licensing relationship. The key to having a higher NRR, and we’ve done a lot of benchmarking and studying on this, is really ultimately it’s those capabilities that customers will expand on. We do have a good expansion set with customers. We see that going increasingly out, and so what we do is we measure the beginning of the year customers on January 1, how do they do all year long, did they increase, decrease, did they leave. We have very few leavers, by the way, and typically it’s because they’ve changed business strategy in a couple cases where they’ve gone out, but we have very, very high core retention, and then we add capabilities as we progress. We believe that as we move forward on product development, you’ll see that number actually rise, but we feel good about that number as to where it is.

Jeff Meuler: Okay, and then on the further reducing the burn rate and the announcement from last week, can you just help me with where are you on actioning those expense saves? Just trying to understand how quickly you expect to get down to that $3 million or so monthly burn rate.

John Maxwell: Yes, so we’re–actually on the people side, we’ve taken the actions that we need. It was a combination of contractors and existing employees. We’ve notified employees at this point, and we would expect that the full effect of that will be felt starting in the third quarter. We’ve also–we are in the process of moving to a nearly virtual, not 100% virtual but nearly virtual office infrastructure. Certainly we’re going to have meeting space and capabilities for people to meet because that’s important, but the main infrastructure will reduce, and then we really looked hard at the way that we are on-boarding things like data and the impact that that has on cloud, and just took another really hard scrub. We have also taken a hard look at the way we’re pricing, to make sure that we’re pricing for the maximum effect in the market, and all of those things really are either being implemented now or have already been implemented, so we’ll start seeing the effect, I would say by third quarter.

Certainly second quarter will improve a little bit, but third quarter will improve a lot and by the fourth quarter, with that combined with revenue growth, we’ll really see significant improvement.

Jeff Meuler: Got it, and then I recognize that you’re prioritizing spend on or more near term revenue opportunities, but just as you manage the expense base, what are the more ambitious initiatives or beyond 2024 revenue opportunities that you’re prioritizing, I guess, maintaining some level of investment in?

Richard Barlow: We continue to do modest investments in edge-based technology and the processing of data. We believe the combination of edge-based processing of data and the synthetic build of a data asset continues to be highly relevant in automotive, especially as now AI is becoming more important, so we maintain some modest investment and we expect that to have a benefit for us the end of ’24 and beyond, so what we call neural edge, we continue to do some modest investment and get an interesting amount of demand from OEMs.

Jeff Meuler: Got it, thank you.