FalconStor Software, Inc. (FALC)
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Earnings Call: Q4 2022

Mar 15, 2023

Operator

Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us to discuss FalconStor Software's Q4 2022 and full year 2022 earnings. Todd Brooks, FalconStor's Chief Executive Officer, and Vincent Sita, Chief Financial Officer, will discuss the company's results and activities, and we'll then open the call to your questions. The company would like to advise all participants that today's discussion may contain what some consider forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from the forward-looking statements. These risks and uncertainties are discussed in FalconStor's reports on Forms 10-K, 10-Q, and other reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission and in the company's press release issued today. During today's call, there will be discussions that include non-GAAP results. A reconciliation of the non-GAAP results to GAAP has been posted on FalconStor's website at www.falconstor.com under Investor Relations.

After the close of business today, FalconStor released its Q4 2022 earnings. Copies of the earnings release and supplemental financial information are available on FalconStor's website at www.falconstor.com. I'm now pleased to turn the call over to Todd Brooks.

Todd Brooks
CEO, FalconStor

All right. Well, thank you, Clark. I appreciate that, and I'd like to thank each of you for taking your time to participate in our call today. Q4 was obviously an important quarter for FalconStor as we increased our hybrid cloud annual recurring revenue, delivered positive net income, added new customers through our partnership with IBM, expanded our MSP business, and improved legacy customer retention. FalconStor is a trusted data protection innovator, and we enable the world's most demanding managed service providers and enterprises to modernize their disaster recovery and data backup operations for the hybrid cloud world, protecting data across on-premise data centers, private cloud, and public cloud environments. Migration to the cloud, data center rationalization, and increased leverage of outsourced managed services are top priorities for enterprise CIOs.

Our fundamental macro shifts to its FalconStor Software and technology in 20 years, 20+ years of market experience are well aligned. Our solutions deliver increased data security and provide for quick data recovery, including recovery from ransomware attacks. Our solutions accomplish these while driving down long-term data storage footprints by up to 95%. Our hybrid cloud data protection solutions excel in four key areas. First, in scalability, as our solutions enable customers to protect their mission-critical enterprise workloads. Second, in off-site protection, as our customers have flexibility to leverage any data storage medium from tape to modern object storage, whether that storage exists on-premises or in the cloud. Third, in cost savings, as our industry-leading patented data deduplication technology empowers our customers to decrease their data, their backup data storage, by up to 95%.

Fourth, in hardware vendor flexibility, as our solutions integrate with IBM's Power System hardware and Intel-based hardware. Packaged together, these advantages give our solutions competitive differentiation, especially within the IBM-centric enterprise IT environments. We're excited by the growth markets that we serve and their ability to drive significant recurring revenue growth for FalconStor in the future. Data Protection as a Service, hybrid cloud, and managed IT services are growing quickly and are clear reflections of macro shifts in our industry to which FalconStor technology and experience are well aligned. In fact, the Data Protection as a Service market is predicted to grow by 31% annually to $104 billion in 2027. The worldwide hybrid cloud market is predicted to grow by 20% annually to $204 billion in 2027.

The managed IT services market is predicted to grow by 8% annually to $355 billion in 2026. Our go-to-market focus on hybrid cloud partners like IBM and managed service providers like Service Express will be key drivers for FalconStor to generate consistent and meaningful recurring revenue growth over the next several years. For 2023, we have initiated three key strategic initiatives. Give me 1 second here. Sorry about that. First, on expanding our differentiated hybrid cloud data protection leadership position for the tens of thousands of companies that operate IBM Power Systems environments. Secondly, on extending our IBM-centric hybrid cloud data protection position into Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and AWS public cloud environments. Third, on accelerating our ARR run rate growth while continuing to deliver consistent profitability and limiting risk.

In line with these strategic initiatives, we are pleased with the hybrid cloud reseller agreement we launched in late Q2 2022 with IBM to provide several new joint solutions which combine FalconStor StorSafe VTL software with IBM Cloud Object Storage, IBM Power Hardware, and IBM Power Virtual Server Cloud. We are even more pleased to report that our sales began to increase with IBM in Q4. Our joint solutions migrate and optimize data protection for IBM customers, and these joint solutions include, first, an optimized backup and restore solution where enterprises running their IBM applications on premises or in the IBM Power Virtual Server Cloud can now utilize our joint solution to securely and efficiently back up to IBM Cloud Object Storage.

Our joint solutions include a cloud migration solution, where enterprises needing to migrate their existing on-premises IBM Power applications to the IBM Power Virtual Server can now utilize our joint solution to take a secure snapshot and restore it in the cloud, maximizing application availability and security. Finally, the joint solutions include an advanced hybrid cloud backup solution, where MSPs looking to use the cloud for a secure air-gapped offsite location can now utilize our joint solution on premises and pair that with a cloud instance or multiple cloud instances for secure and encrypted offsite backups. Partnering with IBM is clearly a material step forward for us and should be a significant contributor to our long-term strategic goal to significantly increase our hybrid cloud recurring revenue. Now, let's move on to our results. In line with our...

Actually, we've seen material revenue growth since launching sales with IBM and with IBM partners, especially in the H2 of 2022. To illustrate this growth, that's our relationship with IBM started right at the beginning of the H2 . We believe it's helpful to compare the H2 of 2022 with the H1 . While total GAAP revenue, as we reported this afternoon in our earnings release for the full year of 2022 declined compared to 2021, our total GAAP revenue for the H2 of the year increased 26% as compared to the H1 of the year. Within that total GAAP revenue, the ARR run rate of our hybrid cloud business increased by 48%.

Within the cloud, hybrid cloud revenue piece, our MSP ARR run rate increased by 36% in the H2 compared to the H1 . We are pleased with this early validation of our hybrid cloud relationship with IBM, but we believe that we can increase these growth rates even further. A couple other points. As an aid to our hybrid cloud and MSP ARR run rate growth, we retained 100% of our hybrid cloud customers in the H2 . That storage capacity used by our install-based customers increased by 3.3% on average each month. In addition to the strong customer retention and to the install-based capacity growth, we saw wins across all three major global regions, the Americas, Asia Pacific, and EMEA. We also won our first customer with the Microsoft Azure IBM Power Virtual environment offered by Skytap.

Finally, we secured several key customer references, which we'll review here in a minute. It's also important to note, though, that we generated this revenue growth in the H2 while controlling our operating expenses and delivering positive net income in the H2 of the year. As mentioned, we've secured several key customer references, and these include testimonials from Tupperware, Kyndryl, CITY Furniture, and Service Express. I'm not gonna take the time to read each of these references during the call, but they are available on falconstor.com, and we obviously leverage these within IBM and FalconStor marketing material. At this point, I'll turn it over to Vincent to provide a more detailed overview of our Q4 and full year of 2022 financial results. Vincent?

Vincent Sita
CFO, FalconStor

Thanks, Todd. We start with the income statement, looking at Q4. If we could flip to the next slide. Looking at Q4 results, we closed Q4 with $2.5 million in revenues, $2.2 million in gross profit. Our operating expenses were also $2.2 million. Therefore, our net operating income was essentially breakeven or a net operating loss of $19,000, and our net income was positive $20,000. This compares to year-over-year as follows. Revenues declined, as Todd mentioned, on a year-over-year basis, 40%, from $3.7 million- $2.5 million, a decline of $1.2 million. Our operating expenses were 27% or $800,000 lower than Q4 of 2021, $2.2 million versus $3 million prior year.

The revenue decline was partly offset by the expense savings. Net operating income was $300,000 lower in 2022 versus 2021, so it was negative $19K versus $243K previous year, despite the top line revenue decrease of $1.2 million. After accounting for income tax provisions, our net income in Q4 was slightly higher, was higher in Q4 this year than Q4 of last year. It was $20K positive versus $333K negative. If we look at the H2 of 2022 versus the H1 of 2022, we see a marked improvement as clearly outlined with Todd's comments. Having launched the sales with IBM and IBM partners in the H2 of 2022, we generated the following.

We closed H2 of 2022 with $5.6 million in revenues compared to $4.4 million in the H1 of 2022, an increase of 26%. Gross profit was $4.9 million versus $3.6 million. Operating expenses were $4.5 million versus $5.3 million in the H1 , a decrease of 14%. Operating income was $4.4 million in the H2 compared to an operating loss of $1.6 million in the H1 . Finally, from a net income perspective, we generated $0.2 million in the H2 compared to a net loss of $2 million in the H1 of 2022. If we move on to the next slide, we look at the balance sheet.

We ended the quarter with a cash balance of $2 million compared to $1.7 million on September 30th, 2022, and compared to $3.2 million on December 31st, 2021. An increase of $0.3 million from Q3 this year, but a decrease over last year of $1.2 million. Looking at Net working capital, Net working capital cash excludes contract assets and deferred revenues but includes the redemption value of our term notes, ended at $1.2 million, an increase of $0.3 million from Q3 2022, and a decline of $2.4 million from Q4 2021. We closed the quarter with $2.3 million in accounts receivable, accounts payable and accrued expenses of $1.8 million, and deferred revenues of $5 million. Todd, I'll turn it back to you for some final comments.

Todd Brooks
CEO, FalconStor

All right. Thanks, Vincent. I appreciate that. You know, we are absolutely encouraged by the growth that we delivered in the H2 of 2022 and by the progress that we've made with our IBM relationship and in other areas. We obviously have a lot of work in front of us to increase those growth rates even more and to remain profitable and to expand our growth into some other areas. We're excited by the markets we're serving and the competitive differentiation that we deliver to our managed service provider partners and our enterprise partners and enterprise customers every single day. With that, let me, Clark, ask you to see if we can open up the line for questions.

Operator

Absolutely, Todd. If anyone has a question, you should see a little questions dialog off to the right. If you don't see it, you may see a red rectangle with an arrow pointing to the right. If you click on that, it should open up the dialog and, if you have any questions, you know, please just type them in and then I can then read the questions off to Todd and/or Vince, see if we can get them answered for you. We'll open this up for just a little while and just let me know if there's anything you'd like to ask. I'm not seeing anything yet, Todd. No hands raised.

Todd Brooks
CEO, FalconStor

All right.

Operator

Obviously appreciate everybody attending.

Todd Brooks
CEO, FalconStor

Yes, absolutely. We will see everybody next time. Thank you.

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