Company Interview / Big brand partnerships boost Bigtincan

Key points:

Bigtincan's EY 24 financial performance improves with a shift to cash flow positive.Key partnerships boost productivity and customer experience via sales enablement and AI.Strategic funding and partnerships forecast stronger growth and enhanced financials for FY 25.

David Keane from Bigtincan shares the company's transition to being cash flow positive, achieving an EBITDA of $11.3 million for FY 24, a notable improvement from the previous year's loss of $4.9 million. Despite some regional revenue declines, Australian sales increased by 35%.

David highlights their focus on sales enablement, empowering global customer-facing teams. He mentions key partnerships with UnitedHealth Group and Nike, using Bigtincan to streamline content delivery and enhance customer experiences. Significant impacts from their AI technology, Genie AI, are also noted, enhancing productivity across their client base.

Strategic funding and partnerships with Microsoft and Apple position Bigtincan well for future growth. David indicates strong expectations for FY 25, aiming for a 20% EBITDA increase and improved cash flow. The company continues to attract significant enterprise clients like Align Technologies.

Full unedited transcript below:

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Let's get back into winning season now. Small cap software tech from Big Tin Can says it's transitioning to cash flow positive after posting EBITDA of 11.3 million for FY 24. That's up from a loss of 4.9 million in the previous year. Total revenue at $117 million, impacted by delays in some end of period service contracts, it says. Europe, Middle East and Africa revenue declining by 38% in the year, but that was partially offset by expansion in the Australian region of 35% growth, and it saw annualised recurring revenue of $116 million. Let's get some further detail off the back of those results. David Keene is the chief executive. He joins us now. David, welcome. Great to be here. Congratulations on the result. Your outlook is sounding very upbeat. Before we get to that, let's take a look back. Then How would you summarize where you're at? I would say three takeaways for investors from our results yesterday. The first one is financial. And yes, big tin cans. Financial returns for FY 24 were significantly improved from the previous year.

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You know, that turnaround from -$5 million of EBITDA to more than 11 was a significant achievement for the business, as it proved it could build this sustainable model for the company going forward. The second one, though, was really the impact in the market. We had. So Big Tin Can ended the year as one of the top players in a global market that we call sales enablement, all about empowering customer facing people to be more successful and on a global basis, beating can continue to be in the choice set of companies. And from a strategic point of view, a couple of important things. We supportive investors raised $20 million in June to support our ongoing investments in artificial intelligence based technology. We think that's going to have a big impact and is part of the reason we're looking at results for 25 that talk about improvements in our free cash flow position, improvements in our EBITDA and our IRR to grow. So we go into the year well Well-placed to be able to build on the work done in 24. We'll get to AI in just a moment. That's really a buzz word that people are attracted to, aren't they? And what's your outlooks looking like just in terms of a little more what you do for those

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unfamiliar with your company. So sales enablement uh, you assess provider for global sales training. Just expand on that. Well, it's amazing how many people when you when you break it down where you have companies that they have sellers that engage with buyers. And very often those sellers just don't have access to the information and knowledge they need to be successful. So one of our global customers is Nike. So every Nike store in the world uses big tin can, and their goal is to make sure that the experience they give to every human who comes into a Nike store is the best it possibly can be. And so using big tin can software, they automatically deliver the right information and content to every human at a Nike facility. So when they engage with the buyer, who is now better informed themselves than ever before, they're able to deliver the experience Nike wants. So what is this background data on those customers? It's about the Nike products and the way Nike wants them to sell. And if you think about everything that we all buy in our daily lives, from consumer goods at retail to financial services products to even health care, that buying experience is becoming more and more important, and our software leads

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the world in doing that for enterprise customers. So, David, you say you've adjusted your business and refocused on core profitable customers. Who are they and what have you done in that space? Well, certainly in previous years, for a lot of tech companies on the ASX, there was a big focus on growth, was growth at all cost. I think what Big Ten can realize was that building that sustainable business that could generate strong financial returns, as we demonstrated this year, was the way to build value for shareholders in Big Tim can. So we see customers in all kinds of areas that respond to that core use case of empowering the customer facing team to help their their own people to improve the way they work. For example, Citibank uses this for empowering thousands of B2B loan providers in the United States to help them to be more successful when they're meeting with customers. And it's brands like that that trust Big Tim can that is powering our business. All right. You've also mentioned here you've been impacted by some contractions there for customers, particularly what in in Europe, Middle Eastern. Well in fact actually 2023 was a challenging year. And I'm sure

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many folks that tune into your show realize 2023 was a challenging year. And it certainly was with software as well. You know, I think in that year we saw a lot of, you know, enterprise organizations, but particularly actually in the tech sector facing changes in their business model. What we saw, though, interestingly, was in the second half of our financial year 24. So calendar year 2020 for those down sales kind of significantly reduced. So we have seen a change in the environment as those down sales kind of washed through. But that did impact our full year FY 24 results. All right let's let's look ahead then. You mentioned I ought to see how you're leveraging that if you like. You got the development of a genie AI. What's that. Genie AI is the name we use to describe the complete suite of AI capabilities we've built into the Big Ten can tool. So, for example, one of our customers, UnitedHealth Group in the US, they use gene AI technology to fast track the creation of content that they deliver to all of their customer facing humans, and it's making their productivity significantly

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improved. For example, producing materials used to take UG many months from when they started designing them to when they got into the hands of their humans. It's now taking them days. That level of productivity acceleration is having a big impact on many of these customers. So geni AI enables us to take that benefit to what we believe will be thousands of enterprise customers all over the world, and we'll add to our business and help our company to continue to add more value. We've also partnered with Microsoft on works with Copilot programs that it's very interesting for tech companies because you've got the big guys, Microsoft and others who are building these core AI platforms. But to take that and make it practical for real human beings, they need partners like Big Tin Can, who can translate tools like Copilot into a practical tool that can be used by, in our case, salespeople to help them to work smarter. So our partnership with Microsoft and our growing, successful and growing partnership with Apple. A good indications of Big Tim can be regarded on a global scale as leading this market. You also secured a deal with Align

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Technologies. What was that deal? What's it amount to for you? Well, a Lion Technologies is an amazing company. If you've been out there and you've had to have braces or aligners, as they call them, you may have come across a line technologies, a line looked to try and find a tool they could use to empower the entire global customer facing team, with access to automatically created and delivered content and information so they could be more successful in their business. So we closed the deal close to $5 million in value for Big Tin Can to empower thousands of aligned humans to be more successful in how they work. And we think that kind of use case is very repeatable in our business. So to the outlook then. Yes, Dave, what are your expectations there in terms of of growing the business? Indeed. So as historically we do it, we provide a full guidance at our AGM in November, but we wanted to give shareholders a bit of a view in our outlook of what we're seeing happening right now. I think the three key takeaways are we see ongoing improvements in our free cash flow position. And that's an important part of this transition that we talked about previously. We're also very

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confident to go to the market and say we see a 20% plus opportunity to grow our EBITDA results in this financial year, and we see our IRR growing. And I think that growth is underpinned or that confidence, I should say, in the growth of IRR is underpinned by some of the results we talked to investors about yesterday in terms of the impacts of I, you know, we're seeing our customers pay as much as 28% more for the benefits of AI. Now, we don't know whether how much of that is going to stick over the full year. An AI pricing is a very dynamic thing. However, if that's continues to be the case, the company is well positioned to grow. Are you a little cautious on that front then? Because, as you say, AI does attract the eyeball, doesn't it? And you only have to look at what's happened with Nvidia given the huge expectations priced into that company. Indeed, perhaps, though, there's a bit of a rethink underway now. Yeah. And whereas Wall Street's saying, well, those returns aren't going to be immediate, going to be longer term. It's a very, very good point for people to think about. But what we understand from working with our actual customers is AI is simply a capability that adds more value. It's not in itself some

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magic bullet that's going to change results for this company. And I believe for many others, it's about how do you incrementally add value. And our business plan has been built with that in mind, incrementally add value, build on the technology we already have, but help our customers to build it. And we're doing it with and out of an Australian base. We have some of the world's smartest team working on this here in Australia, as well as in the United States and in, in Europe. And those humans work together to build what we think is the leading platform for AI and sales enablement. David, how's your funding at the moment? You did to a $20 million cap raise. Where did you deploy those funds and expectations for further? Well, actually, the company is well funded, and we did talk to investors yesterday about the planned use of those funds, provided significant detail in that we do expect to deploy those funds in FY 25, but not all of them. It's going to be a staged deployment. The company is really well set now with with its model with with these free cash flow results and improvements we're forecasting in those. I think the company is well set up to execute on its business plan now, and build value for shareholders and the team into the future. Well, speaking of which, I mean, your share price has been under considerable pressure over the

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past 2 or 3 years. You're not alone. Clearly, and particularly in the small cap space. What's it going to take to turn that around either? Well, I think a lot of people felt that it was. And it is challenging to take these companies that have been investing ahead of the revenue and now turn them to be companies that are making money. It's a very difficult thing to do if you're competing in a global space, how do you do that without breaking the business? And I want to credit the entire Big Ten can team because the team got together and said, we can do this. We can adjust this business to deliver the results that shareholders expect, but also build the future of the company. And I think that is something that a lot of shareholders have been doubting about. Many of these businesses, I think, including us. But these results give some concrete evidence that the strategy we we plan to execute on was delivered in FY 24, and we've given some views and where we think FY 25 is going to be. And if we execute well, there's an opportunity for this company to to grow.