Zenvia Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Quartr
Provided by Quartr
April 5, 2023

Key Takeaways

  • The company has fully integrated its recent acquisitions (D1 and Movidesk) into a unified CX SaaS platform in Latin America, setting the stage to exploit white-space opportunities and embed AI-driven personalization and automation.
  • Q4 delivered the highest quarterly profitability since IPO, with gross profit surpassing BRL 100 million, a 58.6% gross margin, and positive EBITDA and operating cash flow.
  • SaaS revenue grew 44% year-over-year in Q4, SaaS ARR reached BRL 239 million, and SaaS now represents 34% of full-year revenues, with a long-term goal of 70% of gross profit.
  • Cost-saving measures—including a 9% workforce reduction and other expense cuts—will yield approximately BRL 70 million in annual savings from 2023, while earn-out payments have been extended to reduce 2023 cash needs.
  • 2023 guidance targets BRL 830–870 million in revenues (≈12% growth), SaaS up 30–42%, flat CPaaS, and EBITDA of BRL 70–90 million (≈10% margin), maintaining a focus on profitable growth.
AI Generated. May Contain Errors.
Earnings Conference Call
Zenvia Q4 2022
00:00 / 00:00

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Eric

Good morning, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Zenvia Q4 2022 and full year earnings conference call. Today's speakers are Mr. Cassio Bobsin, Zenvia founder and CEO, and Shay Chor, CFO and Investor Relations officer. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded and a replay will be available at the company's IR website, where you can also access today's presentation. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the prepared remarks, there will be a question and answer session. For the Q&A session, we ask you to write down your question via the Q&A icon at the bottom of your screen. Your name will then be announced, and you will be able to ask your question live. At this point, a request to activate your microphone will appear on your screen.

Eric

If you do not wish to open your microphone live, please write down, "No microphone," at the end of your question. In this case, our operator will read your question aloud.

Cassio Bobsin
Cassio Bobsin
Founder and CEO at Zenvia

Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us at Zenvia earnings call. I'm Cassio Bobsin, founder and CEO. Today, we're going to review our performance for the fourth quarter and full year of 2022. Let's start on slide 4. When I look back to 2022, the main word that comes to my mind is integration. As you all know, integrating an acquiring company into a business is a complex task, especially in our case, as we're building a unified CX SaaS platform, which requires a full integration. I'm happy to report the end of the year with D1 and Movidesk totally integrated into Zenvia and with earn-outs already negotiated.

Cassio Bobsin
Cassio Bobsin
Founder and CEO at Zenvia

This means we're now more than ready to fully explore the synergies that come from offering the most comprehensive CX SaaS platform in Latin America through a full suite of products: attraction, conversion, service, and success, and accelerate our growth. As we have been saying every quarter here, there is still a huge white space opportunity in the CX SaaS market in Latin America, and we have just began to tap it. There are also big opportunities coming from AI that I would like to discuss with you. We are one where generative AI will generate massive opportunities within the SaaS industry, allowing hyper-personalization based on actionable insights. It is a brand-new world for CX, and we are very excited to be a leading player in it, as we've been already integrating ChatGPT technology in our platform.

Cassio Bobsin
Cassio Bobsin
Founder and CEO at Zenvia

Throughout the year, we expect to drive a whole new set of automation and efficiency improvements for our platform as we take advantage of these new technologies that are being widely demanded by our customers. I will now turn the floor to Shay for his remarks. I'll be back after that for the Q&A.

Shay Chor
Shay Chor
CFO and Investor Relations Officer at Zenvia

Thank you, Cassio. Hello, everyone, and thank you for being with us today. In the last quarter of 2022, our strategy focused on balancing growth and profitability, I can affirm that we did that. We are reporting solid evolutions on gross profit and margin, which allowed us to generate positive EBITDA and operating cash flow. These were indeed the best quarterly profitability metrics since our IPO, the first quarter where we surpassed the BRL 100 million milestone in gross profit. We did this despite the challenging and more competitive environment that we experienced not only this quarter, but most of the year. Even though our total revenue dropped 8% year-over-year as a result of our focus in a profitable CPaaS business, the SaaS business continues to top line perform expansion of 44% when comparing Q4 2022 to Q4 2021.

Shay Chor
Shay Chor
CFO and Investor Relations Officer at Zenvia

Our gross profit jumped 65%, adding 26 percentage points to our adjusted gross margin that reached 58.6%, which attests to our full commitment and path towards profitability. Let's take a look at the same picture for the full year. For the year, we can see double-digit growth in all metrics. We grew revenues by 24%, gross profit by 68%, and gross margin by 12 percentage points, leading us to a normalized EBITDA, which excludes non-cash impacts from earn-outs and impairment of BRL 23 and a half million. This is directly related to a combination of solid SaaS growth and more profitable CPaaS, added to our focus on strict cost control and cash preservation in the year. Let's take a look at how each of our businesses contribute into profitability.

Shay Chor
Shay Chor
CFO and Investor Relations Officer at Zenvia

Here on this slide, you can see the breakdown of our gross profit mix by SaaS and CPaaS, and its evolution throughout the year. We can see sequential increases in both SaaS and CPaaS margins, which means that our focus on profitability paid off. CPaaS delivered a solid 41% sequential increase and a 62% expansion when compared to the second quarter, when we started to see a more competitive environment. Our SaaS business surpassed the BRL 50 million gross profit mark this quarter, an 18% sequential increase, leading to 102 and a half million BRL in total gross profit. Comparing Q4 to Q2, the increase in gross profit was 33%. Let's now look at this data in terms of weight in our financial metrics.

Shay Chor
Shay Chor
CFO and Investor Relations Officer at Zenvia

As we've been saying since our IPO, we are on a mission to transform Zenvia into a SaaS company, and I'm very proud to report that our SaaS business is close to reaching a quarter billion BRL in size, with an annual recurring revenue of BRL 239 million in December. Net revenue expansion total 124% in Q4 compared to 122%-123% in Q3 2022. Even though Q4 is seasonally a strong quarter for CPaaS because of high holiday sales like Black Friday and Christmas, our SaaS services represented 41% of the total revenue in the fourth quarter, a large sequential improvement from Q2, when SaaS was only 29% of total. For the year, we already see 34% of our revenues coming from SaaS.

Shay Chor
Shay Chor
CFO and Investor Relations Officer at Zenvia

In terms of gross profit, we had a split result this quarter, with SaaS representing 53% of gross profit for the full year. Looking ahead long term, we expect SaaS to represent about 70% of our gross profit. We're just beginning to tap the huge white space in the SaaS market in Latin America. We are working hard and confident on our strategic planning. Let's now move to the next slide to comment on the evolution of our gross margin. On this slide, we present our gross margin evolution since the beginning of 2021. We have delivered on the promises made during our IPO. We have expanded our margins in Q4 significantly, a double-digit expansion from both the IPO in Q2 of 2021 as well as from the same quarter last year. From Q1 2021 to Q4 2022, it more than doubled.

Shay Chor
Shay Chor
CFO and Investor Relations Officer at Zenvia

We reached a gross margin of almost 59% in Q4, taking the full year margin to 44% as you can see in the orange bar to the right. This is above the top range of our updated guide for the full year 2022, yet another proof that we are walking the talk on our path to profitability. Looking ahead, it is worth noting here that we do not expect gross profit for 2023 to remain at the same level reached in Q4. We'll discuss this in more detail in our 2023 guidance in more minutes. Let's move to the next slide. In this slide, we show how organic and inorganic growth contributed to 2022 revenue. The three more recently acquired companies, D1, Movidesk, and SenseData, added BRL 156 million to our consolidated net revenues for the year.

Shay Chor
Shay Chor
CFO and Investor Relations Officer at Zenvia

This number compares to BRL 41.5 million in contribution in full year 2021, when we consolidated only four months of D1, two months of SenseData, and zero revenue from Movidesk. It is worth noting that ex M&A, our revenues grew 5% year-over-year, while our gross margin jumped a solid 33%, once again demonstrating the result of our strategy to focus on increasing the profitability of the more mature CPaaS business. Let's now address our efforts on the cost side that were relevant to our full year results. As of July of last year, we have begun implementing cost-cutting initiatives, especially as we accelerated the integration of the acquired companies and started extracting synergies.

Shay Chor
Shay Chor
CFO and Investor Relations Officer at Zenvia

In addition to reducing non-personnel G&A expenses, such as consulting and travel, among others, we also announced in November a downsize of our corporate structure equivalent to 9% of the total workforce in Latin America. We incurred a one-time expense of BRL 5 million that was registered this quarter, mainly related to severance. In turn, we expect to capture approximately BRL 70 million in reduced cost in 2023 onwards, being BRL 40 million from the downsizing and BRL 30 million from the other cost-cutting initiatives. We have been pursuing a more efficient operation since the second half of 2022 and will continue to do so constantly to improve EBITDA as demonstrated in the next slide. As a result of a very well executed strategy in a very complex environment, we recorded in the fourth quarter BRL 23 million in normalized EBITDA, evidencing the profitability of our operation.

Shay Chor
Shay Chor
CFO and Investor Relations Officer at Zenvia

A closer look at the quarterly trend in this chart shows how our EBITDA improved quarter after quarter during the year, with Q3 putting us at breakeven for the first nine months of the year. Q4 led us to beat our guidance for 2022. During the quarter, we registered a goodwill impairment of BRL 136.7 million in the SaaS business related to the slower revenue growth in the medium and long term on the back of a more challenging macro backdrop and a higher discount rate reflecting an increased perceived risk. Including the non-cash impact from the goodwill impairment and earn-out expenses, our reported EBITDA was negative BRL 189 million in the quarter and negative BRL 214 million in full year. You can find a detailed EBITDA reconciliation in our financial statements.

Shay Chor
Shay Chor
CFO and Investor Relations Officer at Zenvia

Let's see how our full 2022 EBITDA compares to historical numbers on the next slide. Here you can see the evolution of our EBITDA metrics in the last five years. We are happy to see the reverse of the negative trend as a direct result of the decision to pivot Zenvia into a SaaS company, bringing this performance back to the profitability path that has always been part of the 19 years of our history. It has not been easy, especially given the complex macro environment. It has paid off.

Shay Chor
Shay Chor
CFO and Investor Relations Officer at Zenvia

Both the quarterly trend we saw in the previous slide with a strong exit rate for the year and a history of delivering profitable operations shown in this slide makes us confident in our capacity to deliver not only a solid EBITDA expansion in 23, as we'll discuss in a minute, but also a new record in EBITDA generation the next couple of years. More than generating solid EBITDA, we have been very much focused on converting this EBITDA into cash. This slide shows that our operations generated a positive BRL 27 million operating cash flow. This is a combination of our focus on profitability coupled with a strict working capital management, allowing us to maintain a healthy CapEx level to keep investing in innovation. Even after paying interest and amortizing debt, our cash flow would still have been almost BRL 10 million positive in this quarter.

Shay Chor
Shay Chor
CFO and Investor Relations Officer at Zenvia

Before we move to reviewing how we did against our 2022 guidance and provide guidance for 2023, I would like to quickly remind you of the agreement with D1, Movidesk, and SenseData to extend the payment agreements of the earn-outs, which allowed us to drastically reduce our funding gap until the end of 2023, as you can see in this slide. We were able to reduce the total amount to be paid in 2023 to approximately BRL 62 million, down from BRL 420 million by extending payment schedule to the fourth quarter of 2026. To finalize, let's review our 2022 performance versus guidance and discuss our expectations for 2023. This slide summarizes our 2022 guidance versus actual figures.

Shay Chor
Shay Chor
CFO and Investor Relations Officer at Zenvia

In terms of revenues, we remain within guidance ranges for all provided metrics, with CPaaS closer to the low end, while SaaS revenues were practically in the mid-range. In turn, all profitability metrics were above guidance. Gross margin came at 40%, above the 40% we guided, with both SaaS and CPaaS margins also above guidance. CPaaS was 31% against 27%, and SaaS was 68% against 65% guidance. The year-over-year evolution of the gross margin was 11.7 percentage points, well above that 7.7 percentage points at the top of the range. Finally, normalized EBITDA of BRL 23.5 million reais that was also above our guidance of between BRL 10 million-BRL 15 million. With a solid delivery on our 2022 numbers versus guidance, we are introducing our guidance for full year 2023.

Shay Chor
Shay Chor
CFO and Investor Relations Officer at Zenvia

We expect our revenues to be between BRL 830 million and BRL 870 million, implying a 12% top line growth at the middle of the range, boosted by a 30%-42% expansion of our SaaS business, while CPaaS should stay flat, reflecting its more mature stage. Our gross margins should remain at a similar level compared to 2022, as we expect the higher SaaS in the revenue mix should be offset by lower margins on CPaaS. Finally, we expect our EBITDA to be between BRL 70 million and BRL 90 million, implying that our EBITDA margin should be close to the 10% level, putting us on track to deliver the 15% mid to long term level that we presented during our 2022 Investor Day.

Shay Chor
Shay Chor
CFO and Investor Relations Officer at Zenvia

With this review of a solid quarter and high confidence in our business for 2023, we conclude our prepared remarks and are ready to take your questions.

Operator

We will now begin the question and answer session. Once again, for this Q&A session, we ask you to write down your question via the Q&A icon at the bottom of your screen. Your name will then be announced, and you will be able to ask your question live. At this point, a request to activate your microphone will appear on your screen. If you prefer not to open your microphone live, please write down "no microphone" at the end of your question, and our operator will read your question aloud. Our first question comes from Gabriela Morais, sell-side analyst from Itaú BBA. We are now opening the audio so that you can ask your question live. Please go ahead.

Gabriela Morais
Sell-side Analyst at Itaú BBA

Hello, guys. Good morning. Thank you for taking our questions. We have two points here on our side. The first one is regarding profitability. We saw an important expansion in profitability this quarter, and we would like to know that, besides the cutoff in workforce, what are the main other drivers or initiatives to boost the EBITDA margin in 2023? The other question is regarding the top line dynamics in the communication as a service division. When do you guys expect to see some start of improvement on the revenues growth in this segment? That's basically it, guys. Thank you very much.

Shay Chor
Shay Chor
CFO and Investor Relations Officer at Zenvia

Set. Thanks, Gabriela. I guess Caio can take us with the details. Let me just give a brief reminder here. We are expecting approximately BRL 70 million in savings in 2023, coming from all the effort that we did as of mid-year of 2022. Approximately BRL 40 million comes from personnel, as we've been saying, and there's about BRL 30 million in other lines. Caio can provide some details on where these BRL 30 million are coming from.

Caio Figueiredo
Caio Figueiredo
Executive at Zenvia

Yeah, of course, Shay. The BRL 30 million mainly coming from the reprioritization of our initiatives. We are starting to map. We did map already all the expenses that we can cut and not impact the performance of the business, or we can do without third party, do it ourselves. Coming from consulting, coming from also travel expenses and so on. We did a really detailed job here on mapping all the expenses that we could cut without impact the performance of the business.

Shay Chor
Shay Chor
CFO and Investor Relations Officer at Zenvia

Gabriela, I'm sorry, you cut a little for me. Can you just repeat your second question?

Gabriela Morais
Sell-side Analyst at Itaú BBA

Yeah, sure. It's regarding the revenues growth in the communication as a service division. When do you guys expect to see some improvement in the revenues growth of this division?

Shay Chor
Shay Chor
CFO and Investor Relations Officer at Zenvia

Okay. As we've been saying, for our CPaaS business, as the end of Q2 of 2022, we started to see increased competition with some players even going to a price that from our perspective would lead to negative profitability. We decided to try and find the right balance between growth and profitability. It has been very volatile from this perspective from what we see in the market. The second half of last year continued with this strong competition. We are seeing the market less competitive in the first months of 2023. In our guidance, we embedded about flat in terms of CPaaS.

Shay Chor
Shay Chor
CFO and Investor Relations Officer at Zenvia

It will essentially, Gabriela, depend on how the market behaves in terms of pricing. This is not a business where we look into margins in terms of profitability. We look into profitability in terms of absolute reais generated because this business generates cash, and this cash is the cash that we use to continue investing in expanding our SaaS business. Because we stopped looking into margin in percentage terms and start looking in absolute reais terms, we are less concerned with how top line behaves, and we are way more concerned with how much gross profit we are generating. As long as gross profit is growing, that's what we'll be aiming at.

Shay Chor
Shay Chor
CFO and Investor Relations Officer at Zenvia

That said, again, we are seeing the market in the first months of 2023 behaving much better in terms of pricing than it was in 2022. I don't know if Caio or Cassio has anything from a more high level perspective to add here.

Cassio Bobsin
Cassio Bobsin
Founder and CEO at Zenvia

I think you nailed it, Shay. We're seeing a market that is keeping strong pace in terms of demand for CPaaS, although at some times it becomes more competitive. We should be able to achieve what we are focusing on, which is profitability, and that's doing pretty well. Looking forward to see a nice way to move into the whole year in terms of profitability from CPaaS.

Gabriela Morais
Sell-side Analyst at Itaú BBA

That's super clear, guys. Thank you very much.

Operator

Well, the next question comes from Leonardo Olmos, sell-side analyst from UBS. We are now opening the audio so that you can ask your question live, or I can read it here. I will read it. Hi, good morning. Leonardo Olmos from UBS here. One question from my end. Please discuss the expected evolution for the shift in revenue mix. When do you expect the revenue to grow back again? What is the new normalized growth rate we should expect from Zenvia? Thank you. Have a good day.

Cassio Bobsin
Cassio Bobsin
Founder and CEO at Zenvia

Shay, I'll take this from.

Shay Chor
Shay Chor
CFO and Investor Relations Officer at Zenvia

Okay.

Cassio Bobsin
Cassio Bobsin
Founder and CEO at Zenvia

The shift in the revenue mix and then, like, how, what we expect, and then you or Caio can complement on the expected numbers. Looking for the big strategy, the big picture of the strategy that we're doing here, we're seeing the SaaS business that's going onto a healthy growth over these couple of quarters. We expect 2023 to keep the same pace of healthy growth, which means sustainable and not focusing on the growth that would be very costly to achieve, but growth that can be sustained over time with healthy rates. That flows to gross profit and then flows to EBITDA, as we understand that the whole market is expecting us and the whole tech industry to generate at some point.

Cassio Bobsin
Cassio Bobsin
Founder and CEO at Zenvia

How we're going into that direction, balance with CPaaS is the one that we look for, how much we're able to achieve in terms of growth on CPaaS while we're, you know, considering gross profit, as Shay already mentioned. We're seeing both businesses doing pretty well, and we're seeing very high demand. We're seeing them getting back to growth, and especially when we look at gross profit growth. That's the way we're driving both parts of the business into the numbers that we pick to drive in terms of what we expect looking 2023 and forward. Shay or Caio would complement on the numbers, the normalized growth.

Shay Chor
Shay Chor
CFO and Investor Relations Officer at Zenvia

Thanks, Cassio. As we've been saying, and our guidance is detailed in this, and there's a reason for that, right? We, as we said, our CPaaS business, we expect it to be flat. Again, the reason is that for that specific business, we are not concerned with how our top-line grows as much as we are concerned with how our gross profit and EBITDA and cash generation evolves. We are looking more on the CPaaS business on a gross profit and EBITDA basis than revenue growth. You should expect it to be flat. If it goes well, and as we've seen improved, you can assume that low single digits could be done.

Shay Chor
Shay Chor
CFO and Investor Relations Officer at Zenvia

Again, at this point, we would prefer to be on the safe side and wait to see if the competitive dynamics improve. As for the SaaS business, we continue to see the SaaS business growing at around 30% a year. Q4 it grew 40%, 44% on a pro forma basis. We continue to see a combination of net revenue expansion with clients being added. That's the normalized level you should expect for the different businesses. Don't know if Caio wants to add anything to that.

Caio Figueiredo
Caio Figueiredo
Executive at Zenvia

Sorry. Yes, Shay, of course. It's important to add here that we expect growth, although we see a flat in CPaaS revenue from 2022 to a full year view. We expect growth at the second half of the year because the first half of 2022 was a strong half for CPaaS in terms of revenue. In the second half of 2022, we start to feel the stronger competition. We had a little bit of reduction on our CPaaS revenue. We expect the growth to come back in the second half of 2023. That's important too. They will make the year flat, but it's important to highlight that.

Operator

Well, again, if you have a question, please use the Q&A icon at the bottom of your screen to write it down. We'll open your microphone. If you prefer not to open your microphone, please write down "no microphone" at the end of your question. Our operator will read your question aloud.

Shay Chor
Shay Chor
CFO and Investor Relations Officer at Zenvia

Eric, I'll take a question here. Do you expect to have to raise debt or equity this year to give yourself more breathing room? We are working with several different alternatives to give us breathing room. That on top of the earn out renegotiations, as we announced late last year. The answer is yes. We've been discussing with banks, possibility to extend maturity of the short-term debt that we have maturing this year, and all other instruments and alternatives that are available to us. Obviously, we understand that there is still some funding gap.

Shay Chor
Shay Chor
CFO and Investor Relations Officer at Zenvia

We will take all the measures, and we expect to be a matter of weeks and not months, to be able to come back and announce to the market that we are on the right track to solve our short-term funding gap. There's a follow-up question on the same topic, which is cash flow for 2023. If we assume BRL 80 million in EBITDA at the mid of the range of the guidance that we provided of BRL 70-90, BRL 80 million in EBITDA. We expect CapEx to be around BRL 40-45 million. That's EBITDA minus CapEx, close to BRL 40-35 million.

Shay Chor
Shay Chor
CFO and Investor Relations Officer at Zenvia

Then we have approximately BRL 40 million-BRL 45 million in interest to be paid. That gives you an idea of cash flow expectations for 2023, and that's why we see that there is still some funding gap that needs to be solved in the next 12 months. Another question here: with a strong gross profit margin reaching over 55%, why is the gross margin guidance for 2023 almost unchanged year-over-year? I'll let Caio answer this one.

Caio Figueiredo
Caio Figueiredo
Executive at Zenvia

Yes, of course, Shay. We have two reasons here. First is because of the SaaS business. We expect a little bit of reduction on margins because of the better allocation between costs and expenses for the acquired companies. We did a really strong job on allocating better what is really cost and expenses. When we are migrating some cost and expense, they'll reduce a bit of the margins when comparing to 2022 from the acquired companies because they are smaller, they don't have the accuracy that needed in terms of allocation. That's reason one. Reason two is also we due it to the market environment for CPaaS that we're seeing, we're expecting Not keeping those margins that we saw in CPaaS during the year.

Caio Figueiredo
Caio Figueiredo
Executive at Zenvia

We expect a little bit of reduction in order to guarantee the flat number revenue you saw between it and the growth that we expect in the second half of the year. That the main two reasons.

Shay Chor
Shay Chor
CFO and Investor Relations Officer at Zenvia

Thanks, Caio. Eric, can you report to see if we have more questions?

Eric

Yes. If you have a question, please use the Q&A icon at the bottom of your screen to write it down, and we'll open your microphone. If you prefer not to open your microphone, please write down "no microphone" at the end of your question, and our operator will read your question aloud.

Shay Chor
Shay Chor
CFO and Investor Relations Officer at Zenvia

There's another one interesting here, and I'll pass that to Cassio. Would you guys add in the reports Rule of 40 for Zenvia. Cassio, I think it's interesting for you to discuss not only Rule of 40, but all the SaaS metrics that we look at into our day-to-day decisions.

Cassio Bobsin
Cassio Bobsin
Founder and CEO at Zenvia

Yeah, sure. We love SaaS metrics, these are the, well, the ones that we apply internally to check the healthiness of the business. Looking at specifically this concept of combining growth rate and profit margin. As we're walking towards the path of interesting profitability, this exact number is going to have a very interesting balance in the next couple quarters as we are forecasting around 10% of the margin. From 2024, we are seeing, I mean, from the beginning of the year to the end of the year, we expect it to be a rising of this margin.

Cassio Bobsin
Cassio Bobsin
Founder and CEO at Zenvia

We're seeing a very interesting balance of how we're able to manage this growth rate with a bit of margins. We do have two different businesses, which means CPaaS has different logic comparing to SaaS, which makes a bit more difficult and tricky for us to disclose just for a portion of the business. That's why we and the auditing team prefer not to explicitly declare this kind of combined metric ’cause it would become a bit more, I mean, tricky to report both CPaaS and SaaS. We do use that for SaaS, and it's doing pretty well in that sense.

Shay Chor
Shay Chor
CFO and Investor Relations Officer at Zenvia

Thanks, Cassio. Next here, two questions on balance sheet. First one, what contributes to the BRL 120 million increase on trade payable, year-over-year? Caio, can you take that?

Caio Figueiredo
Caio Figueiredo
Executive at Zenvia

Yes, of course. In trade payable, we have mainly the carriers. The carriers that we have, they use our that we use for CPaaS for the all the message that we use as in the CPaaS, mainly in the CPaaS business. Also the increase comes from the Twilio agreement that we have because volume of Twilio that use our infrastructure here in Brazil, it's increasing. That makes our total payable to the carriers higher. That's the main reason why this trade payable higher from when compared to the last year.

Shay Chor
Shay Chor
CFO and Investor Relations Officer at Zenvia

Just to add here for clarification, our agreement with Twilio is for revenue anticipation, right? Twilio pays us three months in advance, so there is a positive working capital from this perspective because we get revenue from Twilio ahead of our payment to the carriers. It has been one of the tools we've been using to improve our working capital metrics. The second question on balance sheet is: can you explain how the liabilities from acquisition increases from BRL 280 million to BRL 350 million sequentially? Shouldn't the payment negotiation with the One Sense Data and Movidesk reduce the liabilities instead of increasing it? Back to you, Caio.

Caio Figueiredo
Caio Figueiredo
Executive at Zenvia

Yes. No. The payment, the total amount should not reduce because we renegotiated the method of payment, not in one installment, in several installments until 2026. The overall payment, amount of payment kept the same. Actually, when we renegotiated, especially Movidesk, we needed to recognize on our balance sheet the amount that was not recognized in the past years. That's why the increase. The overall amount that we should pay did not change, so as expected. That's why the increase. The only change that we had here was on how we pay those earn-outs.

Shay Chor
Shay Chor
CFO and Investor Relations Officer at Zenvia

Can you provide some color on your recent ChatGPT integration? Is there strong demand from clients? In general, what you're most excited about AI integration at Zenvia? That's for you, Cassio.

Cassio Bobsin
Cassio Bobsin
Founder and CEO at Zenvia

Yes. As all of you have been checking on all the evolution of generative AI, we have been working with Microsoft and, you know, OpenAI to integrate this technology into our products. We launched a couple weeks ago the first integration for creation of, generation of, campaign content, and we've been evolving into other fronts of how to use the generative content into the different processes of customer experiences.

Cassio Bobsin
Cassio Bobsin
Founder and CEO at Zenvia

I would say we're seeing very interesting opportunities to help both sales reps or customer service agents using our tool to be more productive with ChatGPT suggestions of next best answer, and also analysis of ongoing customer interactions to get a better review of these interactions so you can then act on the best interest of the company and also of the customer. Been working into different fronts to help customers into the different parts of our product usage. Being testing different opportunities to adopt ChatGPT into the whole UX or UI of our platform. There are many fronts being worked on at this time, at this moment, but we expect next couple weeks to release more couple to our customers.

Cassio Bobsin
Cassio Bobsin
Founder and CEO at Zenvia

Some of them are in beta with a few customers. We're very actually very excited 'cause we're seeing that this technology is really practical and can really be useful right on as our customers are using our different solutions. We also see demand from companies to integrate ChatGPT into their bots or automation journeys. Although we understand there's a bit of I would say a lots of excitement, some of these have to take into consideration that it's a bit it's a bit early to let your brand be served by a ChatGPT fully automated bot 'cause at some times can be can get out of control. I mean, you don't control the output 100%.

Cassio Bobsin
Cassio Bobsin
Founder and CEO at Zenvia

That's why we're seeing that most applications would be either in a very controlled environment or to accelerate the operations for customer service agents or sales reps and, of course, all other kind of content oriented process within customer experiences overall. Having said about some of these examples, we're looking at the big picture, and it's very important evolution of the whole industry, the whole CX industry, being able to add this sort of tool in a very easy manner and becoming accessible for everybody. There's lots of excitement, and now we're making it work with our customers, and it's doing pretty well in that sense.

Operator

This concludes our Q&A session. I'd like to turn the conference back over to Mr. Cassio Bobsin for his closing remarks.

Cassio Bobsin
Cassio Bobsin
Founder and CEO at Zenvia

Thank you very much for all that. This year, we're very happy to achieve, during 2022, our guidance, and some top points even exceeds our guidance. We're looking forward to 2023 to have a great year, a year where we are starting to benefit from all the acquisitions that we made in the last couple of years. Now fully integrated, being able to then to benefit from all the synergies. Our customers are very excited about all the opportunities we're being able to drive to them, not only on the AI side, but especially on the unification and integration of our solutions into becoming very clearly a unified CXaaS platform that will lead this whole evolution and transformation of the customer journey. It will be a great year, and thank you very much for the attention and for the time.

Cassio Bobsin
Cassio Bobsin
Founder and CEO at Zenvia

I hope you'll see on the next one.

Operator

The conference has now been concluded. Zenvia IR area is at your disposal to answer any additional questions. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect, and have a nice day.

Executives
    • Caio Figueiredo
      Caio Figueiredo
      Executive
    • Cassio Bobsin
      Cassio Bobsin
      Founder and CEO
    • Shay Chor
      Shay Chor
      CFO and Investor Relations Officer
Analysts
    • Eric
    • Gabriela Morais
      Sell-side Analyst at Itaú BBA
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