Excellent coverage on Dubber ARR ! Topical as ever

@value investor

having been a longterm holder, it's difficult not to agree with you.

The negatives are pretty apparent:

• huge increases in costs. Staff costs are nearly 10million just for the last quarter. Product manufacturing and operating costs were over 8 mill. almost bugger-all of these were due to marketing/advertising and product development which I would be happy to see, assuming it would drive future growth
• a drop in revenue this quarter vs last. There were some excuses, see announcement, and I understand getting timely payments of telecom companies can be extremely difficult but it is a red flag.
• dilution is ongoing and significant (as per last post from value investor)

The positives still exist:

• fat bank account with 78mill in cash and 30mill drawdown available
• cash burn is reducing (if one assumes receipts return to previous trajectory). They make a point of stating that growth in ARR is picking up faster than core opex.
• headline ARR is increasing nicely.
• number of providers and subscribers continues to trend up, which one assumes is a lead indicator.

On balance, though, I am now increasingly doubtful. There is no mention of ARPU, just a statement that partnerships "are leading to opportunities to offer higher ARPU products". There is no mention of any of the other metrics one would expect from a SaaS company (churn, NRR, CAC/LTV etc), which I am sure would be mentioned if they were positive. The benefits of scale and exponential unit economics that a Successful SaaS should demonstrate, do not appear to be eventuating. Perhaps it is a bit too early and/or this business has a higher fixed base than I had appreciated? Perhaps the size of the opportunity will, in time, dwarf the fixed costs?

The story still sounds great, right? The leader in voice recording for multiple massive telecom providers, partnered with Cisco, expanding into Zoom and similar teleconferencing apps...and so on.

I still hold, but sold down 50% earlier in the year shortly after the big rush following a Motley Fool buy rec - which was an opportunistic but lucky move, as this last 4c shows.

Love to hear others' thoughts.

C

Cracking update on latest 4c

finally getting some traction in ARR rather than just signing up service providers. 
 

disc: held

30 April 2021
Dubber March 2021 Quarterly Activities and Business Update
Dubber Corporation Limited (ASX: DUB) (‘Dubber’ or ‘the Company’), the leading global Unified Call Recording & Voice Intelligence cloud service designed for service providers and businesses of any size, is pleased to release an update on the Company’s operating focus along with the Appendix 4C for the quarter ended 31 March 2021.
Highlights:
• Annualised Recurring Revenue (ARR) increased 20% QoQ ($5.6m) to $34m and 158% pcp ($13.2m)
• Revenue increased 54% ($2.32m) to $6.6m QoQ and 152% pcp ($2.61m)
• Operating cash receipts increased 54% ($2.31m) to $6.55m QoQ and 362% pcp
• Dubber users now exceed 380,000
• The Company has a strong balance sheet, with in excess of $37.7m as at 31 March 2021 Growth in all key metrics – Users and ARR
During the March quarter the Company’s key metrics all experienced substantial growth.
User numbers grew at a record rate for Dubber’s SaaS monthly subscriptions. The Company expects user growth to increase significantly in the current quarter due to new initiatives including the launch of its Foundation Partner Program. Foundation Partners embed Dubber services within their offering as a standard and in-built feature – from which both Dubber and the partner then benefit from upgrading users to richer functionality and offerings.
The March quarter represents a milestone period relating to comparative user growth quarter on quarter.
The Company expects to receive Foundation and consumption-based revenues moving forward with larger and varying user attachment rates to those revenues. Therefore, as previously indicated, the key growth metric relating to short term growth is the Company’s Annualised Recurring Revenue (ARR) which has grown by $5.6m, to in excess of $34m.
   DUBBER CORPORATION LIMITED | ABN 64 089 145 424

  Telecommunications Networks Growth and Yield
The Company continued to expand its footprint of service provider networks along with increasing penetration and revenue yield from its current telecommunication and Unified Communication (UC) platform partners.
AT&T
During the quarter, the Dubber platform went live on three AT&T networks: AT&T IP Toll-Free, AT&T Hosted Voice Service (HVS), and Cisco Webex Calling with AT&T. All three of these networks target large enterprise, government, education, and business clients. The HVS and Webex Calling networks are already providing positive uptake in SaaS monthly subscription users and services.
AT&T’s IP Toll-Free is a major global network carrying calls for the largest organisations in North America and is billed on a per minute consumption rate. Dubber’s recording, API, transcription and AI services will also be billed on a per minute rate at accretive unit increments, thereby introducing meaningful consumption based revenue streams to Dubber.
Currently, AT&T and IBM are engaged with existing mutual large enterprise customers to demonstrate the value of the newly available services on the platform which add substantial insights to those organisations, enabling them to gain valuable business intelligence from their voice data.
The Company expects the Dubber platform to be live on additional AT&T networks in both the short and medium term.
Unified Call Recording Momentum
The Company has previously referenced Unified Call Recording (UCR) which defines the Company’s unique value proposition of unifying call recording and voice data at scale. UCR reflects how businesses and individuals work today, particularly in Covid-19 driven ‘work from home’ settings and hybrid work environments.
 DUBBER CORPORATION LIMITED | ABN 64 089 145 424 2

The Company has recently become one of only two vendors certified for Compliant Call Recording for Microsoft Teams.
Dubber is already the embedded and only recording offering for Cisco’s Webex Calling platform with the Company expecting to substantially extend its relationship and availability with Cisco Webex in the near term.
During the quarter, the Company also announced availability of a Unified Call Recording solution for Zoom that allows for secure compliance and voice intelligence call recording for Zoom Meetings as well as Zoom’s recently launched cloud phone service, Zoom Phone.
Typical business communications usually involve the use of desk phones, mobiles, and UC services such as Cisco Webex, Zoom and Microsoft Teams. Dubber is uniquely placed to be able to capture recordings and voice data from all services and store them in a single location, the Dubber Voice Intelligence Cloud, where they can be managed centrally.
Behind these UC platform announcements is an industry trend whereby large global service providers are releasing their own network offerings in conjunction with cloud collaboration platforms like Zoom Phone, Microsoft Teams and Cisco Webex Calling. Dubber has detected a pronounced acceleration of telecommunication services moving to a cloud environment, either from traditional telecommunications carriers or by stand-alone UCaaS services in the last two quarters. By virtue of its unique ability to be embed into the fabric of a network and operate at scale, the company is a significant beneficiary of this trend and we believe it will continue to accelerate globally in the quarters ahead.
Foundation Partner Program
The Dubber platform has been designed specifically for large scale availability across telecommunications networks, as opposed to legacy bespoke recording products for enterprises, which are largely tied to on premise equipment, capital expenditure and call centre environments.
The Company expects several of its service provider partners to deploy the Dubber platform as a standard feature across their network base as “Dubber Foundation Partners”. The Company is actively engaged in discussions with major service providers to become Foundation Partners and expects the first initiative of this kind will take place in the current quarter.
This will provide the Company large scale customer reach into end user accounts for jointly upselling additional services, including extended storage, transcription, AI insights and more.
Steve McGovern, CEO, Dubber:
“We are delighted to have delivered such a strong quarter, achieving outstanding growth in all of our key metrics.
The company is very well positioned to continue to take advantage of the major shift towards cloud based and ‘work from anywhere’ communications we are seeing in all our geographies. Governments and businesses understand the need to act on the requirement to capture conversations and voice data across their entire business. Ever expanding requirements to record and store conversations for proactive compliance and dispute resolution, and, revenue, customer and personnel intelligence all continue to drive the need for voice data and intelligence at scale. We remain very positive as to Dubber’s growth and leadership.”
Related Party Expenses
In line with requirements of lodgement of the attached Appendix 4C, the Company advises that payments shown in Item 6.1 of the Appendix 4C are in relation to Executive and Non-Executive Director remuneration (including superannuation) and form part of the operating expenses for the March quarter.
This ASX release has been approved for release to ASX by Steve McGovern, CEO & Managing Director.