Forum Topics PRO PRO ASX Announcements

Pinned straw:

Added 5 months ago

17/11/23 Prophecy Q1 FY24 Business Growth Update

@JPPicardsummed it up well in his straw, this was a poor update from PRO compounded by the fact that management tried to convince us otherwise. One bad quarter is never a problem and should be expected every now and then, but you want to see management acknowledge it, comment on what went wrong and how things are progressing moving forward.

Headline ARR going backwards is not a good look, digging deeper shows Legacy product revenue winding down (previously flagged so not an issue) and a decline in Snare maintenance renewals. That is somewhat expected as the business model shifts to subscription, but the quantum of the fall ($3.4m to $2.5m in one quarter) with only a modest increase in the Snare subscription ARR ($4.2m to $4.6m) was larger than expected. eMite growth was also modest ($14.9m to $15.4m) and couldn't offset the declines in Legacy or Snare maintenance revenues.

Even removing Legacy and Snare maintenance revenues, eMite and Snare subscription revenues only grew 4% quarter on quarter, below historical trends and growth targets of management. Again, quarter to quarter can be lumpy given enterprise deals so no reason to panic, but you would like to see management acknowledge the weakness rather than ignoring it.

There were some positives in the update, the imminent signing of the first non-Genesys or Amazon eMite client is great news and is the first sign PRO can attack the much larger TAM outside of their core platforms. The commentary that they expect to be cashflow positive for the half and full year is interesting and I am keen to find out how that will be achieved. In FY23 there was a big split in 1H and 2H cash collections as large customers are invoiced in the 2H, the point where cashflow was -$3m in the 1H and $2m in the 2H. I would suspect to be positive cashflow there is likely a shift in collections to smooth out the seasonality, because without that a cashflow positive 1H would result in a very strong full year result given the usual strength of the 2H.

Wini
3 months ago

Well things can change fast! Three months ago I commented that the 1Q24 update from PRO was poor, but that one bad quarter is not a problem and realistically should be expected every now and then. Still true, but it is nice when a company can recover from a poor quarter with a great quarter the next one.

The headline numbers are solid, $11.6m revenue, up 29% on last half. Not unexpected, PRO started the year with a healthy unearned income balance to unwind into reported revenue:

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The cost base has been ~$11m the last two halves suggesting PRO is now scaling and will be approaching profitability, but I expect a modest loss with general business growth and inflation pushing costs slightly higher.

But it was the recovery in ARR that really makes this a strong result. After a weak 1Q where headline ARR went backwards with legacy software starting to roll off and Snare maintenance revenue reducing as well, slower than expected growth in "true" ARR couldn't offset at only $900k incremental ARR.

2Q was much stronger however, with headline ARR up $2m despite the remaining legacy software revenue rolling off with as a $400k headwind. The $2.3m true incremental ARR is PRO's best since winning Humana as their largest customer two years ago.

Speaking of Humana, the commentary was that they and Airbnb (another large customer) had upsells to their ARR through the quarter, significantly de-risking concentrated customer churn.

At a $41m market cap with $10m cash in the bank and $22m true ARR PRO looks very cheap on an ARR multiple for a software business rapidly approaching scale.

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as usual good summary. I was more worried about 1H result because A) 1Q was weak and B) it announced some random announcement regarding a partnership with Devo before the 1H result ( I thought this was something like 3DP tactics or what)

Now that it has a strong update for 1H, I am taking the partnership announcement with Devo much more seriously.


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Wini
3 months ago

Agree @Valueinvestor0909 at first I thought the Devo announcement seemed like a fluff one that could have been a paragraph in a quarterly update, but on a closer read it is more than your usual reseller/distribution partnership. Devo is integrating Snare into their cyber security software for all customers, new and existing. Given it's usage based pricing there may have to be an upsell to customers to convince them to use Snare but it's certainly a step up from a traditional partnership. This paragraph is the key to the announcement I think, signalling PRO view Snare as an add on to other products:

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@Wini Agree, I did some digging around and Devo is already advertised to their clients as follows here

52b33166ca582c9f3488605314ce4c99a68b97.png


and it seems, based on its website, it has number of clients ( devo raised $100m last year with $2b valuation so it must have significant revenue )

and 2 days ago, it has updated its document webpage : https://docs.devo.com/space/latest/479363146/Devo+Endpoint+Agent+2.0+by+Snare

So yeah, it does look promising.

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Wini
2 months ago

@Valueinvestor0909 I think today's announcement with more detail on the Devo agreement shows some of the promise is already coming to fruition. While the original announcement was positive, my worry was even if Snare was integrated into Devo's software there would still be some form of upsell required to customers to use it. But the announcement today clarified the go to market and it's extremely positive for PRO:

07be62572796efb4b3daea3a788ad6dc0dc871.png

~$5m in incremental ARR as they bring Devo customers onboard over time (aiming for the next 18 months), with no additional cost to the end customer and PRO not having to invest any sales resources into winning customers. I'm sure there will be customer support customers, but this looks like ~$5m of incremental revenue at very high margins.

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Devo partnership looking better by the day. Attended an Investor call and heard that not only this partnership doesn't require any selling or implementing effort. It is implemented in their cloud so no hosting fees either. Looking forward to seeing the majority of 5m falling to the bottom line from FY25 onwards.

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lastever
a month ago

Hi @Valueinvestor0909, I also attended and agree it sounded on track.


However, I didn’t understand his reply to the question about how much of the expected $5 million ARR from Devo was already accounted for by Prophecy in currently published ARR projections. Did you catch that?

10

Last published ARR (24.9m) was at the end of 1H 24 and that didn't include any devo contribution. after 1H, they published that 1st devo customer is live and 1m of ARR is expected to be added by mid CY24 ( not sure if it would eventuate before the close of FY24)

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Wini
a month ago

@lastever PRO define ARR as recurring revenue in the last reported month x 12, so until they are actually generating revenue you won't see Devo in the ARR numbers. It was a bit confusing because they don't report it normally, but Brad mentioned something like the $5m is CARR, and will convert to ARR as customers are onboarded and commence billing. I think based on the commentary so far they expect about $1m to be recognised in June this year, contributing to the ARR at that point.

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