Welcome to Zenvia Q4 2021 Earnings Conference Call. Today's speakers are Mr. Cassio Bobsin, Zenvia Founder and CEO, and Shay Chor, 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'll be able to ask your question live. At this point, a request to activate your microphone will appear on your screen. If you do not want to open the microphone live, please write down "no microphone" at the end of your question.
In this case, our operator will read your question aloud. Now, I would like to welcome one of the speakers for today, Mr. Cassio Bobsin, founder and CEO. Sir, the floor is yours.
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Zenvia Q4 and full year 2021 earnings call. I'm Cassio Bobsin, founder and CEO. Today, we're going to present the key highlights of the period and provide you with an update on our business. Let's start at slide four. Q4 was a very strong quarter that closed an excellent 2021 for Zenvia. We delivered again on what we promised investors during our IPO process. Solid revenue growth and strong growth margin expansion year-over-year. Revenue went up 0.6% in Q4 2021 compared to Q4 2020, and 42.5% in the full year. While D1 and SenseData acquisitions contributed to this total, we highlight our solid organic growth of 32.8% in 2021.
It is the direct result of our client base going up 25% to almost 12,000 customers, and our last revenue expansion reaching 122%, up by almost 8 percentage points from last year. Adjusted gross profit went up 147% in Q4, and 78% in 2021 to BRL 198 million. Adjusted gross margin was 32.6% in Q4, adding 13.3 percentage points, and 32.3% in the year, adding 6.4 percentage points. We've been building a long-term vision from the ground up. We spent the first years mainly focused on developing one-way communication and becoming the leader in mobile services and SMS push and resolve.
It was only in the last couple of years that we started our transformation to become a fast company focused on customer experiences, aiming to provide brands with a unique platform to unify end-to-end CX communication in Latin America. We are currently in the phase of enabling journeys that happen when the end customers of our clients are engaged in a variety of ways across their life cycle through multiple channels that are enabled by our communications platform. We already foresee and prepare for our next phase, which will be focused on enabling experiences, allowing end customers to experience a streamlined relationship with the brand, no matter the channel or moment in time. Latin America has enormous growth potential as it is in the early stages of digital transformation and adoption of technology, especially in the small and medium companies. Our execution will be data-driven.
By using multi-channel engagement solutions and data analytics, we can provide our clients with actionable insights enabling them to generate automated, customized actions in different touch points of the customer journey, creating more and more personalized and seamless experiences to end customers. Let's take a closer look at how we have been evolving our value offering to clients and end customers, what we already delivered in 2021, and where we are headed moving forward. 2021 was a year of important milestones for us, from brand positioning to new products to M&A, and obviously the year of our IPO. During the year, we repositioned our brand and evolved our culture to align the company's ambitions and long-term vision with our beliefs and behaviors, making sure we recognize the value of our humans and maximize value to our stakeholders.
Combination of these two elements is key to pave the way for us to achieve our goal of becoming a global platform and empower companies to create a new world of experiences. Our internationalization plans were implemented with the acquisition of Sirena in the second half of 2020, and the launch of our operations in Mexico. In 2021, international revenues already represented roughly 6% of total. To improve our CPaaS offering, we have launched new products such as Trusted SMS, and also added new channels such as RCS and Instagram API. We were very active in the last three years in M&A, as we have completed five acquisitions that are effectively transforming our company. Our M&A strategy involved in acquiring companies that complemented our technological ecosystem, added solutions, new geographies, and a pool of talent.
Integration of these companies will radically transform our value offering to clients in the short and medium terms, while enhancing free cash flow, base, and max revenue expansion. In 2021, we implemented the integration of Sirena, with full integration achieved now in Q1 2022. Working together with D1 team to map and understand the synergies which lets us accelerate the integration. SenseData integration is on track with back-office activities and structures already fully integrated. SenseData plays an important role as it changes the core of our platform by adding data analytics and AI. At Movidesk, we expect to close this transaction now in the second quarter. The best way for us to understand the facts of this integration is by putting ourselves in the client's shoes.
We have been doing this by incorporating SenseData in Movidesk solutions into our own customer service and implementing changes that ultimately improve our very own customer experience. It's already had tangible impact in the onboarding of new clients, for example. In this sense, we're happy to report that we received important information with the RA1000 seal from Reclame AQUI in January. This distinction was granted to 25 companies in Brazil, and it means that our clients recognize that we provided them the best customer experience. I would like to quickly share with you three different cases that attest how we can help brands. One of the largest stationery retailers in Brazil started its relationship with us when they needed an SMS broker. The relationship then evolved, and they started using our conversational platform, turning Zenvia into their trusted advisor and provider for end-to-end tech solutions.
Through a strategically designed journey, they were able to use WhatsApp, which enabled their sales people to reach out to customers as soon as the pandemic lockdown started to offer products. After 90 days of lockdown, they had already reached 35% of revenues through online and WhatsApp sales. One of Brazil's unicorns, a well-known real estate platform, is in the midst of starting its journey through WhatsApp to revolutionize the local real estate market by facilitating deals among sellers, buyers, and renters. Here we're working closely with them to understand their business needs and evolve the product according to the market requirements. Through our Voice of Customer program, we brought their team closer to our R&D and product teams, and we're able to jointly build the product roadmap. Same solution helped them record improved performance.
Ânima Educação, one of the largest education conglomerates in Brazil, uses Zenvia products to provide self-service solutions to their students who no longer need to interact with human agents to address most of their needs. This allowed Ânima Educação to gain 40% in productivity in their customer care, leaving their agents to support a broader number of students who indeed require human interaction. What's even better, the level of satisfaction from students with the automated journey totally aligned with the ones held by human agents. Finally, IPO in July 2021 was a special occasion when we saw the market welcome our investment thesis, and that's what we have been doing since then, expanding Zenvia and preparing it for the next level of customer experiences in Latin America and globally. Looking ahead, we are now at an inflection point in our expansion route.
2022 will be the year when we lay out the foundation for the profitable growth ahead, accelerating the integration of all businesses into one powerful platform, deploying new go-to-market strategy to provide the best SaaS experiences for brands, allowing them to offer an unparalleled end customer journey. In this sense, we released in mid-February our decision to accelerate the D1 integration as we have been seeing strong demand for highly customized end-to-end customer journey solutions. We are ready to speed up both platforms and team integration to better serve our enterprise clients. Our goal is to move these customers from base communication processes into a journey-wide implementation integrated and leveraged by data and AI, all in one single platform. We expect to extract several synergies from this integration.
This will allow us to offer a much more comprehensive suite of products and services for the brand that want to improve their customer journeys. As you can see, all we do aims at evolving our value offering, always focusing on generating value to the end customer. This has always been our priority, and I dare to say that this is the main differential between us and our peers in the region. Everything we do at Zenvia has the end customer first. This may seem pretty obvious, but it's not. We analyze every step of the customer journey, which will allow us to transform journeys into experiences, benefiting them, the brands, and ultimately us. We combine recurring with usage-based revenue models that allows us to grow with our customers.
We initially adopt a landmark expansion strategy in which we introduce our platform based on one simple use case, and then develop the customer relationship over time by upselling and cross-selling. That's the main reason why our top priority for 2023 will be connecting our SaaS product with our platform core in order to create a unified end-to-end experience. This will allow our clients to further engage with our platform, leveraging adoption of multiple use cases that covers different parts of the customer journey. We believe we're now very well positioned to do what you do best and make the amazing customer experience for our current and new clients. Very proud of the results we achieved in 2021 and excited about the prospects for 2022.
We expect to keep a strong pace of growth in 2022 as we see increasing demand for our services and a lot of opportunity for growth. We're focused on integrating and launching new products and services that will help us pursue even more substantial organic growth in 2022. I will now pass on to Shay, who will discuss our key financial metrics in more detail and will be available for the Q&A.
Thank you, Cassio. Hello everyone. Thanks for joining us on today's call. Let me share with you some thoughts on our results. The combination of organic growth, solid client retention, and acquisitions boosted our revenues in the year. Our clients grew up 25% to almost 12,000 clients. Our net revenue retention rate ended the year at 122%, up almost 8 percentage points from last year. In the chart on the top right, you can also see the contribution of organic growth and acquisitions to our revenue. D1 and SenseData contributed BRL 41.5 million to the consolidated revenue, while BRL 141 million were organic, representing a 33% growth. Another important highlight is the quality of our revenues. Out of the total, revenues from beyond SMS termination were 35% in the year.
If you look at Q4 2021 alone, it is already over 40%. We're very proud to see the peak of this transformation, as only two years ago most of our revenues were from SMS termination. Even within 2021, if we look in Q1, we started the year with only 16% beyond SMS termination. For us, this is an amazing indicator that we are moving in the right direction. The increase in revenues was also a profitable one, and this is important because we promised this during our IPO. Adjusted gross profit increased 147% when we compare Q4 2021 to Q4 2020, with the adjusted gross margin expanding a solid 13.3 percentage points to almost 33%.
In the year, adjusted gross profit increased 78% to almost BRL 200 million, with the adjusted gross margin expanding 6.4 percentage points to 32.3%. It is important to highlight that this improved revenue mix helps soften the Q4 seasonal impact of higher SMS volumes over profitability, mainly related to Black Friday and Christmas. As you can see in the chart at the right, 77% of our adjusted gross profit in 2021 comes from beyond SMS termination. This is a direct result of our diversification strategy and recent acquisitions, and as we move more and more to become a SaaS company. To finalize, we are introducing our guidance for the fiscal year 2022. As Cassio pointed out in his remarks, 2022 will be the year where we lay the foundation for the profitable growth ahead.
We expect our revenues to be within the range of BRL 875 million-BRL 925 million, representing a year-over-year growth of 43%-51%, with organic growth standing between 32%-34%. We also expect adjusted gross margin to be within the 35%-36% range, representing a year-over-year expansion of 2.7 percentage points to 3.7 percentage points. This concludes our prepared remarks. We can now move to the Q&A session.
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'll 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 Andre Salles, Sell-side Analyst from UBS BB. Andre Salles, we are now opening the audio so that you can ask your question live. Please go ahead.
Hi guys, can you hear me well?
Yes, yes, we can.
All right. Thanks for the call and thanks for taking my question here. I have a question on the revenue breakdown here. It's really positive that you guys grew SMS non-SMS revenues to 35% during the full year. We're trying to assess the short-term dynamics of it. How is the breakdown if you can give more specific on the breakdown for Q 2021, and what to expect for the upcoming quarters? Thanks.
Thanks for that question. Specifically in Q4, revenues from beyond SMS were 21%. As you can see in our presentation. I'll let Cassio discuss the trends.
We're seeing this continuous growth for our solutions that we've been launching and also the ones that come from acquisitions. As this layer of solutions that drive different parts of the platform, something like that, we're seeing this match up with a higher pace than the SMS revenues. We're seeing actually these first insights beyond SMS growing up on a quarterly basis. We expect that in 2022 to also keep the same kind of dynamics.
Got it. Super clear. Thank you.
Thanks for your question, Andre. Now the next question comes from Enrico Trotta, a sell-side analyst from Itaú BBA. We are now opening the audio so that you can ask your question live. Please go ahead.
Sure. Good morning, guys. Can you hear me well?
Yep. Yep. Go ahead.
Oh, hi. Hi, Cassio. Hi, Shay. Two quick questions here. One, also again on the share here of the beyond SMS termination in the revenue mix. We know that of course you have been increasing these numbers as you mentioned 41% in Q4. It has been growing consistently. Also, of course, you have the acquisitions. We know during the Q3 you have a seasonality effect as you guys mentioned on the SMS, right? If you were to adjust, I don't know if you have this kind of pro forma number, but if you adjust for the seasonality effect of the Q4, what would be the share of beyond SMS termination? This would be my first question.
The second question, I don't know if you could comment a little bit about the cross-selling opportunity, the cross-selling evolution here of the more profitable solution or the API-based solution. If you could also what percentage of the clients that are using SMS are also using more than one solution here on the API based kind of build. If you could provide a little bit more details here on how this has been evolving. That's it on my side, guys. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you, Enrico. I'm not sure if we have. Caio, do you have how would be revenue from non-SMS if we were to assume the seasonality?
We can assume we have a bit like 20% higher than the average for SMS. We'd assume that the beyond SMS revenue will grow for 5 percentage points around 45%, I would say. Something like that.
Cassio, can you comment on cross-selling, what we're doing, how this is evolving?
Yeah, definitely. Henrique, we approach this as the numbers for our cross-selling. It's fair to say that we're structuring different approaches for customers to adopt more widely our whole platform. We have, I'll say more than 5,000 customers that are using solutions beyond SMS currently, which means it's becoming a strong part of our market presence, these new solutions that we're launching. The way these customers usually start nowadays, most of these customers start based from solutions other than SMS termination, as most of the reason we're seeing because the demand is huge. We do, of course, the cross-sell, but it's not solely these revenues from beyond SMS. It doesn't come solely from a cross-sell.
They come especially from new customers arriving at Transact. Sometimes it's both ways that the people start with SMS and then go into one of our solutions. On the other side, it can come from one of our beyond SMS solutions and then use SMS all the time. This is basically how the dynamic works for SMS. Caio, I think you can comment on the kind of number of cross-selling in total, right?
Yeah, you are right. Yeah, that's right.
Perfect. Thanks, Caio and Shay. Thank you very much, and have a nice day. Thank you.
Thanks for your question, Enrico. Now the next question comes from Diego Aragão, Sell-side Analyst from Goldman Sachs. Diego Aragão, we are now opening the audio so that you can ask your question live. Please go ahead.
Yes. Good morning, guys. Thanks for taking my question. I guess my question is just like a follow-up on this, on the revenue mix. I mean, please correct me if I'm wrong, but if we would assume this, you know, 41% SMS revenue in the fourth quarter, and according to, you know, what we can see for the full year 2021, we are getting here into a negative margin on the SMS business. Is this right, or what we are missing here? Thank you.
Yeah. Thank you, Diego. Caio, do you want to share? I can tell you these some numbers, but Diego, I can tell you this. It's not negative. Definitely Q4 has a lower margin in the SMS business, and the reason being is because the seasonality is because of the client mix that impacts the seasonality. The profitability is slightly smaller, for instance, in Q4 versus Q3. Actually, it's not negative. We can just decline, and I'll help you with the math.
Okay. All right. Sounds good. Thank you, Shay.
Okay. Thanks for your question, Diego. Now the next question comes from Andre Salles again, sell-side analyst from UBS AG. Andre Salles, we are now opening the audio so that you can ask your question live. Please go ahead.
Right. Thanks guys for the follow up here. I have a question on marketing. I just want to put dynamics of R&D and commercial expenses here, as it seems still increasing during the fourth quarter. In terms of percentage of revenue, which level does the company understand that it should be the normalized level of R&D and commercial expenses going forward?
Thanks, Andre. Cassio, do you want to take this?
Sure. In terms of percentage, Cassio can disclose maybe what we have, before that, right?
Yeah. We understand that we have some room for growth, especially in R&D, because we came from a few years back of less than 5%, and we only aiming for the next years to reach a level between 13%-15% of the net revenue. For sales in marketing, we already think that we for now in 2021 and the beginning of 2022, we reached the level that we think is good for the company to sustain the growth it had, and it's around 13% occasionally to 14% of the net revenue.
Super clear. Thanks, guys.
Just a reminder. Again, 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 the microphone. If you prefer not open your microphone, please write down, "No microphone," at the end of the question, and our operator will read your question aloud.
Andre Salles, I'll take it. I have a question here on the web chat. Cassio Bobsin, can you comment on the integrations of the companies that you acquired, how those are going?
Yeah, definitely, Caio. Talking about most recent acquisitions, we finished integration process during last quarter. The company D1 that we acquired middle last year, we've been now into a full mode integration. We're expected to finish the process during the next couple of months. It's quite interesting the way we're being able to realize synergies as we've been integrating different teams and talking directly to customers and offering our whole portfolio for customer experience solutions. It's quite interesting. Things are going in the right direction of the whole integration. Talking about SenseData, we started the integration process. We just finished phase one, which means the corporate structure.
Now we're going to phase two, which means approaching the product platform so we can benefit from the different functionalities and possibilities that we can create by combining both platforms. Talking about Novida, as we mentioned before, we expect to close the operation in Q2. As with Kogniz, of course, we start first with the corporate integration and then we go in the same way by integrating the platforms so we can bring the whole path of customers that have this kind of demand that we prefer together with different parts of our portfolio to benefit from Novida solution as well. Also, of course, we connect our whole platform with Novida, so we can increase the value for these more than 3,000 customers that we currently serve.
That's pretty much how it's been going in terms of integration. We're very happy and excited with what we have, what we've been seeing in terms of benefits for customers and what we're able to pull in terms of synergies and opportunities, considering on top of, with each acquisition to expand our TAM. As we deliver the integration, we create even more value with the same customer that we're serving.
Perfect. Now we have a next question. It comes from Diego Aragão, Sell-side Analyst from Goldman Sachs. Diego, we are now opening the audio so that you can ask your question live. Please go ahead.
Yes. Thanks for the follow-up, Caio. Now, look, given where the stock's trading and the price, I mean, would you consider doing like a share buyback program or something like this? We're getting a lot of questions from investors and, so I was wondering if you could just share your, let's say perspectives, given current, you know, market environment. Thank you.
Thanks, Diego. What we can tell you is, when we consider our capital allocation, especially in light of other questions that we get, in terms of additional M&A, what we can tell you is all the M&As that were must-have, we did. There could be one or two small that they are nice to have, not urgent to be done. With all the crisis, interest rates going up, we decided to take a step back and preserve some of the liquidity that we need to run the business.
In terms of a share buyback, it's part of the consideration when we decide how to use capital, right? At a certain point when we decide to resume allocation for M&A, one of the considerations will definitely be if it's better to buy our own shares or to buy another company. That will depend on valuation, that will depend on a couple of things. It's definitely an alternative that we have.
That's great. Thank you, Shay.
Thanks for your question, Gabriel. Now we have another question from
[inaudible]
Analyst from. We are now opening the audio so they can ask your question live. Please go ahead.
Hey, guys. Now, another question here, regarding competition, that I'd like to understand from you guys how is the competitive environment. We have been seeing different players here looking at communication and also experience platform. We have been seeing a lot of different players willing to enter the ecosystem and in this creation of what our ecosystem also involves several solutions that Zenvia is offering right now here on the communication side of the business. How has been the competition, if you could elaborate a little bit on that, if this has been impacting current levels, I mean how do you see this by next year, if you could provide more granularity here on this level. Thank you.
Thanks for your question. If you're happy with anything. Yeah, very good question. Talking about the competitive dynamics we have our part of the business as part of the CPaaS where we started. The CPaaS market is already a competitive market, and we are very used to these dynamics, especially on paying customers. I would say that hasn't changed since the last couple of years in terms of competing in the market. When we look at SaaS verticals, the difference for even for CPaaS, then it's much less than that is for the SaaS market. I haven't seen any change on that front. Looking at SaaS, customer experience SaaS solutions, which are the majority of our beyond the CPaaS revenues.
Here we see a huge demand for different solutions and ways to improve customer experiences and the dynamics of competition on the solutions may differ for each class of solution. It starts either with mostly competing with niche SaaS companies across different markets and regions across LATAM. For each one of these solutions, when we face competition from global players, we are very efficient in competing with these global companies. Why? Because we are successful in achieving a high growth pace of the solutions throughout the region.
As we have more on the integration of these solutions into the core of our platform, we expect to create a very unique growth in the market as customers will be able to implement and test different solutions and benefit from the data that we are able to provide, and insights we're able to provide. Also, of course, a multi-channel approach. As we are CPaaS platform and we work full stack, we're able to help these customers with that solution considering the whole bunch of channels they need sometimes to provide and awesome services and process.
Basically looking at this landscape for SaaS customer experience SaaS offerings, we don't see any high competition or even if some players or some partners bringing one of the solutions on the platform, we don't see it as something of an impairment to our strategy, because it's quite unique and the way we've been evolving all that, we expect to be really successful as we evolve that integration. That's most of the focus for 2022. As I mentioned, we already have very interesting and highly competitive solutions for the market.
As we invest more on these solutions and as we scale them to the markets and assessing the high demand, we expect this would be interesting in terms of how the portion that would represent in terms of our revenues and results over time.
Thanks for your question. This concludes our question and answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Mr. Cassio for his closing remarks.
Thank you very much, all of you for joining our session. It's been a great year and looking ahead at 2022, we expect to really focus and a lot of the business has been working on and seeing all that evolve into our strategy in order to fulfill our vision and deliver our purpose of creating a new world of experiences for end customers and empowering all of those businesses across the region to really make a difference in how people enjoy and experience their services, engaging with brands. Thank you very much and see you next time.
The conference has now concluded. Zenvia's investor relations team is at your disposal to answer any additional questions. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect. Have a nice day.