It is Quartix. Andy Walters is with us. Welcome, Andy.
Thank you. Yeah, very pleased to be in the show. Thank you.
Yeah, sorry, we're running slightly late, but we've got three new companies on the show, of course, so it's always good to get as many questions out. You'll have as much time as you need at the end because the bash is next, and that's with all the investors, so it's not a problem. Great. Take it away. Tell us how things are going.
All right, thanks very much, David. I will share my screen. Hopefully everybody can see that.
Yeah.
Good.
Perfect.
Yeah, what I'm going to do, firstly, thank you, everybody, for, you know, participating in this. I appreciate there's an awful lot else going on in the markets at the moment, so the fact that you're spending a bit of time listening to me is much appreciated. I'm going to start off by, and apologies for those of you who know the business, but I'm going to start off with a very simple and quick explanation of our business. I am the Chairman of Quartix. I founded the company back in 2001. I retired in 2021, and my retirement turned into a sabbatical a couple of years later when I came back to the company. I'll cover that a little bit more later on, but let me just—what we do today is exactly what we set out to do 24 years ago.
My original business plan, you know, we're still following it today, bluntly. Our target market is typically owner-managers, so businesses which are small to medium-sized companies operating a fleet of vehicles where the driver in the vehicle is not actually a driver by profession. That driver, the person who is driving the vehicle, they are typically providing a service for our customers on site. Typically, think in terms of plumbers, electricians, carpenters, and so on. Any skilled workman who needs to go to site to carry out some sort of service for the end user, effectively the end customer. Our customers use our software principally to help them improve the efficiency of their business by increasing the capacity. The way in which we can provide that service is by fitting a tracking system to their vehicle.
Those vehicles tend to be small vans, so they could be panel vans, they could be car-derived vans, they could be cars, or they could be small trucks. The important difference between our system, if you like, and a lot of other vehicle tracking systems you might be familiar with, is that our customers are typically earning money when the vehicle is stationary. They are not in the transport or logistics business. They are earning money when their employee is actually performing some kind of service for their customer, their end customer. You can think of the software that we offer as being almost like an addition to their operational payroll or other accounting systems or business management systems. We help them get more done in the day. It's as simple as that.
Those tracking systems transmit information over the 4G network back to our servers, and then we distill that into operational information, which is provided either by our web application or our mobile application. I just move forward. I started the company, as I said, in 2001. We launched in France in 2010, added the USA in 2014, and more recently, Spain, Italy, and Germany. Today we have over 300,000 vehicles under subscription. That was, you know, we're now 310,000. I should say as well, many of you will have seen, I hope we put out a Quarter One update this morning. My intention in this presentation is to integrate the bits of that update in the presentation to bring you right up to date. All of the intellectual property in the service that we offer is in-house owned and developed.
The intellectual property is all our own. We operate it as a subscription service, as I mentioned before. That was how we set out in 2001. I wanted a business which operated on the basis of a subscription model. In 2001, we had to start out because we were funding ourselves in charging for the hardware. By the time we got to about 2010, in the middle of the credit crunch, it obviously helped us enormously if we could offer our customer no upfront costs. Since 2010, we shifted completely to a software-as-a-subscription model. We have been operating under that basis for a long time. A little bit more about our customer base. Our target market, as I said, is small to medium-sized enterprises, and they're providing, as I called it, site-based services. They're in the construction and building sectors.
They provide service repair facilities, management, security, landscape grounds maintenance, a huge number of possible applications for our technology. More recently, we've been much more involved as well in public sector contracts, housing associations, emergency services, and utility companies. Today, 60% of our customer base is outside the U.K., and that represents about 45% of our subscription-based value. The reason for the sort of the imbalance there is the newer we are in a market, the more likely we are to have a lot more smaller customers who hopefully over time will grow with us, whilst naturally some of them will fall by the wayside. That's the nature of the SME market that we target. I just wanted to—sorry, let me just go back briefly.
Perhaps just a sort of—I mean, there are some questions that come up on a regular basis, so let me just try and answer those before we go too much further. People ask me, "Why has our technology not been replaced by phone tracking, for example?" You might have seen on that first slide, an important point for our customer is making sure that they're cutting out things like fraud and wastage, so jobs being done for cash at the weekend and so on. Clearly, if you're using the driver's phone to track where they are, then they simply leave that phone at home and use their employer's vehicle without needing to worry about being tracked. It just really hasn't taken off, even though we've had GPS in smartphones since 2007 with the launch of the iPhone. We don't see that as a problem.
I also get asked, "What about OEMs?" Surely OEMs are going to replace your market at some point. That bluntly, when I started the company in 2001, I was concerned about that when I found out that one of our competitors had done a deal with Ford in the Ford Transit. Back in 2002, I was a little bit worried about that, but it has never materialized because in our business, our customers generally have a fairly broad range of vehicles. They might have some, as I said, panel vans. They may have car-derived vans from different manufacturers. They'll have some cars. Maybe they'll have some flatbed trucks to deliver goods and so on. They want a single software tool that they can use to manage that entire mobile workforce. They do not want to be going into a range of different software tools to get into that.
Now, that plays a part when you look at heavy goods vehicles and you look at transportation. If the vehicle is worth, I don't know, tens of thousands, many tens of thousands of vans, and maybe it's a 30-ton truck or something of that sort, then clearly it becomes much more about the vehicle and the efficiency of running that vehicle than it is about the person in the vehicle. As far as our customers are concerned, it's the person that costs the money, not the vehicle. Our system is designed very much to optimize the effectiveness of the tradesperson in the vehicle. That's an important distinction that if a company is operating a fleet of heavy goods vehicles, it often will work with the supplier of that to use their telematics system.
Now, there are a number of reasons why I came back to the business, one of which was really that it just seemed to me and some of the other founder shareholders that the business was losing a bit of momentum and losing a bit of focus in terms of the customer base in the U.K. and the customer base in the States had started to decline, which is not natural. It never had done in the previous 20 years. And customer acquisition was slowing down. This graph shows customer acquisition cumulatively as we ran through the year of 2020. Clearly, you can see in Q2 of 2020, it slowed down because of COVID. Generally speaking, those graphs have been stepping upwards each year. What we could see was in the first half of 2023, the gradient there was starting to decline as those customer base.
The company, in our view, was taking its eye off the ball. It was trying to diversify by providing a number of other services. That was taking its eye off the ball and the focus. What we managed to do last year, I came back to the business in October or the very end of September 2023. Just before I returned, I learned that the board had acquired a loss-making business in Germany, which had some software to underpin one of the new products that they were offering. Unfortunately, bluntly, it was a business that brought a lot of operating costs to Quartix, but no revenue at all. They had committed up to EUR 4 million to buy this business. I would like to be able to explain why they thought that was a good idea, but I am afraid I find it inexplicable.
I came back to the business, and soon after arriving back, I basically got due diligence carried out on the business that they'd acquired. We were advised and took the view that it had no value and started liquidation eventually. I mean, we offered the business back to the original shareholders of the German company, but they did not want it back, even at no cost. We had to work our way through, unfortunately, the winter of 2023 into 2024. I had to work my way through laying off the staff on the business that they'd acquired and putting it into liquidation. I also parted company with the PLC board of Quartix. We have a new PLC board today. We basically got Quartix to focus very much more on the core business, which you can see the result of with the amber line.
If I add the blue line, you can see how we've started off this year. We're up on last year. I'm very pleased with the progress that we're making. Now, customer acquisition and obviously increasing the rate of customer acquisition leads to growth in our annualized recurring revenue. This is the most important forward-looking indicator of future revenue. Last year, with that additional focus, and also for the very first time, I'm coming back to the business. With the world having been through the greatest inflation it had seen for decades, and me probably with the sense of, well, you know, what's the worst that can happen if I put prices up, given what the previous board had just done to the company?
We increased pricing by a modest amount, 3%, which, I mean, in the general sense or general trend for subscription businesses, I mean, pretty much every subscription I've got, whether it's Spotify or whatever, has gone up by an awful lot more than 3% over the last couple of years. We added 3%. That obviously helped us. In addition to that, we're in an incredibly good year for new business. We managed to take those subscription revenues up by GBP 3.5 million versus GBP 2.1 million the year before. What we have said this morning is that we've had an extremely good start to this year, having taken the value of our subscription base up by a further GBP 2 million in the first quarter of the year, which essentially is kind of what we achieved in the first half of last year.
Good progress there as well. Now, the third thing I'm going to talk about, having talked about customer acquisition, annualized recurring revenue, the next bit of jargon is net revenue retention. That is, you know, what percentage of revenue from last year's cohort of customers do we retain over the 12 months? If we didn't win any new customers, what would our revenue be? In 2024, we managed to retain 95.7%, which was an increase of 2.7 percentage points from the previous year. On top of that, we were able to add record levels of new business to take our ARR up to GBP 32.2 million. By way of update this morning, we've managed to take our net revenue retention a little bit further to 96.3%. We're targeting further improvements in that. My goal is to get, you know, closer to 100%.
I don't think we'll get to 100%, but I think over time we can increase it further. You know, we've been able to add to that. Now, let me just go through the same sort of graphs with annualized recurring revenue to show you again the progress that we're making. Here you've got 2020. You can see that dip, the flattening off between March and April as COVID struck. 2021, 2022, what you can see in 2022 is once again, the gradient was starting to drift away by the mid-year point as focus was getting lost in the business. In 2023, the red line shows therefore that it dipped back. That growth came back to just over 2 million. What we achieved last year was this. 2024, that price indexation at the beginning of the year, followed by the rest of the line as shown.
What we announced today, that blue line, and before anyone gets too excited, that blue line is not going to carry on going up at that rate. The line will flatten off. The reason for that is we have completed about 75% of the price indexation this year. We have increased prices by a bit more, just over 5% this year. A little bit more than we did last year. Largely, I feel that we're still catching up, frankly, from those two years of raging inflation when the board, for whatever reason, did not increase pricing. That is where we're at at the end of the first quarter. We have still got about 25% of that price increase to go. I think the important point, the point that I'm really excited about is in that.
Just over GBP 1 million of that GBP 2 million of growth in the subscription base, just over GBP 1 million of it, about GBP 1.05 million, came from price increases, but GBP 950,000 or just under came from strong growth. We have a very strong first quarter in terms of new installations. That, you know, that in itself is very pleasing considering last year we managed GBP 3.5 million for the year, including about GBP 1 million of price increases. Generally speaking, things going quite well on that front. This graph is quite, from my perspective, is very interesting because obviously if you look at the top left, this is showing our annualized recurring revenue in millions of pounds sterling by country.
What's interesting there is the darker green is showing where it was at the end of last year and the lighter green showing where it was at the end of 2023.
Now, if you look at the top left-hand graph, you kind of get the impression that Italy, Spain, and Germany are pretty small. If you look to the bottom right, that is showing the absolute contribution to ARR growth last year. From that, you can see that Italy, Spain, and Germany are making a pretty decent contribution to our overall ARR growth. You can also see that in the U.K., that renewed focus helped enormously in turning a situation around where in our most mature market, we were struggling to add much in terms of ARR. The USA, which, you know, in my view, have been messed around with a bit, we have turned from a deficit of GBP 200,000 to growth of GBP 200,000. You know, really good progress in those markets, but quite interesting to see, I think, where the absolute ARR growth is coming from.
Let me run quickly through the financials. We saw 8.4% revenue growth last year. The important point for me is that growth in ARR. ARR grew by 12.2%. ARR growth is, you know, is the indicator of next year's or this year's 2025 revenues effectively. Unsurprisingly, in 2023, ARR growth was about 8.5%. You know, lo and behold, revenue growth in 2024 was about 8.5%. You know, the important indicator for me is ARR growth. It is quite stating the obvious that one of the things I think the company had not been getting right over the last couple of years is that ARR growth has to, or ARR has to grow at a faster rate than overheads. It is as simple as that, really. That is how simple our business is.
Gross profit, the gross profit margin is somewhat flattered there because we had to take a provision, I'm sorry, 2024, 69% is a real number, but 2023, it was somewhat depressed by needing to take a provision for some upgrades in France. It was not quite as much of an increase in gross profit margin as you would see from that. Adjusted operating profit, however, and that is having taken an adjustment for that upgrade out, we managed to grow that from GBP 5 million to GBP 6.3 million last year. Earnings per share, we turned the, you know, unfortunately, 2023 was the first year in which the company had recorded a statutory loss, which is very disappointing for two reasons. One is I had to write down the total value of the acquisition that they'd made in Germany.
Secondly, as soon as I got back to the business, I realized that the company had a liability that had not been announced for the upgrades in France. You know, we turned from a loss per share to earnings per share. Free cash flow, I'll cover that a bit more later on. We doubled free cash flow last year, but it is still pretty weak in comparison with our historical performance. Let me come back to that. We think it is useful to show segmental analysis. It is split out to show you bluntly just how much we spend on customer acquisition, which kind of frightens some investors, I know. We have taken our total fleet business and then split it into these two segments, fleet telematic services and customer acquisition. That left-hand column is showing you how much money we spent last year in winning new customers.
because it is a subscription business with them paying very little or having no invoicing upfront, we do not get that much from them in the first year. In fact, typically we get half of one year's subscription revenue, as you can imagine. On average, we are going to get six months' subscription fees from the customer. Fundamentally, you could say we lost GBP 7 million. Last year, we spent GBP 7 million on acquiring about GBP 4 million or just under GBP 4 million worth of recurring revenue. From the customers from the previous year, we got a contribution of about GBP 17.5 million. It is kind of up to us to decide how we want to, how much we want to spend on customer acquisition because that drives our growth for the future.
That leads to our total fleet numbers, from which, unfortunately, last year we had operating costs, which we did not declare as, you know, exceptional. The acquisition, the German acquisition, effectively cost us about a net GBP 350,000 of operating costs last year. The total business operating profit just under GBP 6.5 million, but fleet itself without the German acquisition was about GBP 6.8 million. Another important point from the financial point of view is, as I said, I have liquidated Konetik, we are nearly there, we are having liquidated the Konetik acquisition. I mean, bluntly, I made a lot of changes to the, we parted company with the board, we reduced costs there, we reduced costs in a number of other areas. Overheads in the second half were lower than the overheads in the first half. That chart splits them out.
They were lower by a significant enough amount for us to be able to spend more money on marketing. We spent more money on marketing, particularly on advertising and promotion. That helped in terms of growing customer acquisition. I would say that in the second half of last year, because we had additional money available to invest in marketing, and I really wanted to put the new emphasis back on growth again, you know, we did not always get the efficiency or the returns that we would expect on some of that. The goal this year, as we have said in the trading statement today, is to keep overheads pretty much where they were last year in the second half, with some small increase that, you know, for inflationary pay rise that we put through at the end of the year.
To achieve more from that. I think in the first quarter, that's exactly what we've done. We've achieved a lot more whilst keeping overheads pretty much under control. That was overheads. I started talking again about cash flow. This is going to look like one of those charts that, you know, this is what cash flow would have been if we didn't have to spend lots of money on various things. I appreciate it doesn't always come across that well coming up with an underlying figure. Just to explain briefly, we reported just under GBP 2.6 million. We had Konetik capital expense we couldn't get out of. I had operating expense I couldn't get out of with the acquisition that had been made. It all signed, sealed, and finished before I came back to the company.
That upgrade I talked about as well, we spent over GBP 1.3 million on that. Plus, in addition to that, we added to stocks of product to satisfy that. I mean, the good news, the first quarter update is our free cash flow in the first three months has been GBP 1.3 million. We're starting to rebuild our cash balances on the balance sheet. That's good news that we're starting to get back to the business model we used to have. Product development on the left-hand side, they've talked a little bit about hardware. Fundamentally, customers don't really know that much about the, you know, we fit the hardware as long as they get the software and reports that they're interested in. They're not so bothered about what the hardware is, but we're obviously bothered about the cost of it, and particularly with the upgrade program in France.
I kicked off at the beginning of last year a development program to reduce costs by as much as we could. The manufacturing costs are otherwise as much as we could. We have taken effectively about GBP 8 per unit out of the manufacturing costs. That particular unit accounts for about 7,000 units a month of our output. That is not insignificant in terms of profit. That said, because we amortize the cost of the units installed in the vehicles over 20 months, as we start developing or delivering that in July, that is going to be some time before it really has a big impact on the P&L, but it will have an impact on free cash flow, obviously from day one. A byproduct of that development, if you like, was much improved performance. We are now tracking four different constellations of satellites.
We managed to update our mobile app and commissioned and developed that during 2024 and an initial release of our new web application. We're going to carry on to see if we can accelerate that development further this year. Another question that comes on a pretty regular basis is, what about succession planning? You know, I was clearly keen on retiring in 2021. I think, look, my only answer to that is I returned to the business to try and restore shareholder value. I mean, you'll see from the annual report, I didn't come back for the salary. I wanted to restore the value in the company's shares for all shareholders. I have an excellent management team, the executive management team. I'm not involved in, I don't attend those executive management meetings.
They have been allowed to run and get on with the business without any distraction or, you know, diversion from the PLC board. I think they're doing a cracking job. They are the people who have achieved the figures that I've shown you over the last few slides. I think we've got a lot more to come. I think the other important thing is you look at the date at which each one of them joined the company, there's an awful lot of experience there in that management team. Summary and outlook, quite a lot on this slide, but I mean, I've covered all these key points. Record growth in ARR last year of GBP 3.5 million. Clearly, we're hoping we might do a bit better this year.
We took our net revenue retention to 95.7%, record levels of customer acquisition, increased profit before tax by 25%, and we made substantial reductions in overheads in the second half. We have been able to increase investment in sales and marketing. The French upgrade program I talked about is well on track. We've got manufacturing cost reductions coming through in the second half. The nightmares of 2023 are resolved. We have new products coming through, which are going to help enormously. In terms of outlook, very strong start to 2025 with record levels of performance on all key business measures. As far as we're concerned, the six target markets we're in, they offer excellent potential for future progress. We've got plenty of scope to fill out each of the channels in those markets before we go into new geographies.
We've achieved GBP 2 million of ARR growth in the first quarter, which is equivalent to what we did in the first half last year, which in turn is equivalent more or less, just more or less to what we did in the whole of 2023. Good growth in ARR, which is a forward-looking indicator. We intend to keep our overheads broadly in line with what they were at the second half of last year. We are very confident in the outlook for 2025 and beyond. That's it. I'm sorry, I've tried to keep it as short as possible. I hope I haven't used up too much time.
No, that's really excellent, Andy. Thank you. All good to hear. There are quite a few questions, which is equally good. I'll start off with Ian. Certainly, I know Ian likes to look deep into some of these presentations.
Ian says, "Congratulations on running a very successful business in this sector." Welcome back. Looking at you and the SaaS micro-caps , you obviously have the right sector, light haulage versus heavy haulage. Also, you achieve it with very little annual CapEx comparatively. It's a tough world you operate in, though, and with a current share price at no higher than it was 10 years ago.
Thank you.
You and your shareholders deserve better compared with so many other companies and sectors. Any thoughts on that?
Yeah.
More a long-term statement.
I think when, yeah, sorry, I mean, when we came out with our annual results, I think our share price was GBP 1.55. I think I figured out that that meant we'd grown the share price by one penny for every year after the first closing day in 2014. Yeah, no, it's not great.
Thank you very much. Look, I think it's going to take a while. I think 2023 was a bit of a nightmare year. I can't explain quite what happened. I wasn't in the room. It takes a while to rebuild investor confidence, really, I think.
Yeah. Now, Dave says, "That was an excellent presentation. According to your website, you are the only executive director. Please advise how long you intend to remain out of retirement."
Yeah. I think I clearly made a mistake stepping off the board while I still had my shareholding. I intend to remain as an executive director or certainly as chairman for as long as I've got my shareholder. It's simple as that. You know, I and my family, we own, I think, about 27% of the business. Foundership, we have about 50% between us.
I'm not going anywhere anytime soon while I have that shareholding. I simply won't run that risk again.
Great. We only have to worry if you leave and sell up. Okay. Now, Martin says, "Who are your executive team?"
The executive team, that's the team of people I presented on that slide. They run the business. You know, unfortunately, what I've had to do over the last 18 months has largely been the nasty stuff of laying people off and closing Konetik down and allowing them to get on with the business. It hasn't been a huge amount, I have to say.
Yeah. That's been a tough ask. Now, Leslie wants to know what strategies are being implemented to improve customer retention. Are there plans to enter new geographical markets?
I will take the second point first.
At the moment, we don't have plans to enter new geographical markets. In each market we're present in, well, not in each one, but let me say, in the U.K. and in France, we have four separate routes to market. We have our own direct marketing and telesales. We have distribution. We buy price comparison leads, and we have field salespeople. We have that in the U.K. We have that in France. We only have typically about two of those channels in each of the other four markets. We need to fill out those. We have plenty of scope for growth in the U.K. and France through those channels. Really what we've got to work on is building those other channels out in those other four markets.
That certainly for the next couple of years is going to give us much better return than entering new geographies. Sorry, what was the first part of the question again?
Let me go back. Let's have a look. The first part was what strategies are being implemented to improve customer retention.
You know, it's always, I mean, it's funny enough, part of it is actually looking at the front end. I mean, so in terms of customer attrition, you know, we operate on the basis of offering customers a subscription where we're not taking any money off them upfront. With a lot of customers, I think we just need, frankly, we need to be, you know, we lose customers who bluntly we shouldn't have taken on in the first place because they weren't creditworthy.
You know, part of it is improving our credit checking in some of our new markets. We do not have quite the same data that we have in the U.K. We have better performance in the U.K. than we have in some of our newer markets. There are a whole range of things. We have a team of people who are focused on that. There are things like where customers carry out their own installation that we need to be able to check remotely. We do check remotely on the quality of the installation they have carried out to make sure they are getting the best from the service. We have over the last few years moved to the point where probably 40-50% of our new business is installed by the customer themselves, which has a risk.
It's lower cost, but it has a risk in terms of customer retention.
Yeah. And one from Mark. Is there a market for your telematics with insurance companies for both commercial and domestic clients to which the premiums can be decided based on the driving performance?
Yeah. We were in that market. We entered that market in 2010. We took a strategic decision in 2016 to get ourselves out of that market because the margins weren't there. Typically, the devices we used were just 14 months on average, and that just didn't fit my idea of a recurring revenue business. That's why we pulled out of that. It became largely a hardware supply contract, and that's not what I set the business up for. I wanted a subscription business.
Yeah. Good point.
I know it's usually the younger drivers, I think, that need it, but probably only for a very short time whilst they're getting their experience.
You're absolutely right, David. In fact, they need it for two to three months. Although they would be sold it for the first 12 months, the highest risk of a young driver killing themselves is in the first two to three months. That's it. It's not the whole of the year, the first two months.
Yeah. Very good. That wraps up all the questions. I think there are no more there. Thank you to you, Andy, for joining us on the show. Always good to have new companies we can look at. You will be really welcome to come and join us in Chiswick. I know Paul Scott met you privately, and he's always at every show we have in Mello.
Be very welcome. Join all the groups of investors that we have at these shows.
Thank you very much, David. Thank you for inviting us to participate as well. Thank you.
No problem.