Good morning, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Zenvia's Q3 2023 earnings conference call. Today's speakers are Mr. Cassio Bobsin, Zenvia's founder and CEO, and Mr. 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 questions 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 your 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 our speakers for today, Mr. Cassio Bobsin, founder and CEO. Sir, the floor is yours.
Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us at Zenvia's third quarter 2023 earnings call. Thank you all for being with us today. Our results for the third quarter showed the consistency of Zenvia's strategy as we continue to balance growth and profitability. During this quarter, we were able to accelerate revenue growth, especially in the CPaaS business, while maintaining healthy profitability levels. This type of recent results attests to our ability to quickly adapt to various market scenarios, while continuing to invest in new technologies, such as generative AI, to strengthen Zenvia platform and exceed expectations of our customers. We completed the integration of Movidesk in the second quarter, and recently we began the integration of SenseData's team and processes, which we expect to complete throughout 2024.
Our strategic acquisitions are allowing us not only to expand our portfolio and market presence, but also to bring more value to our customers, who are starting to benefit from our end-to-end solutions being deeply integrated and bundled. That lead us to our One Zenvia vision, which we briefly shared last quarter. That is to combine all of our solutions, tools and technologies into a unified customer experience platform, enabling all of our customers to provide fluid, personal and engaging experiences for its end customers. We'll benefit from our original leadership on the CPaaS market and its new technological advances, with the power of our CX solutions coming both from R&D and M&A initiatives into a unified offering that is expected to be rolled out throughout 2024.
As I mentioned, the CPaaS market continues to advance, as demonstrated by our partnership with Google for the launch of Google Messages RCS, or Rich Communication Services. We're incredibly excited by the potential of RCS as a natural evolution of SMS, bringing rich interactive content that boosts marketing campaign results as compared to traditional SMS. By the end of 2023, Google expects to reach 1 billion RCS users, making it an opportunity that we must capitalize on. We are highly motivated by the ongoing evolution of our platform and its potential, as we look forward to sharing more information with you in the coming months. Now, I'll hand it over to Shay to cover our performance in the third quarter.
Thank you, Cassio. Hello, everyone, and thanks for being with us today. Let's start on slide five. I'll start by saying that the third quarter results attest to the consistency of our strategy to balance revenue growth and profitability despite the complex macroeconomic climate in Brazil. During this quarter, we delivered double-digit top-line growth in both SaaS and CPaaS, while maintaining healthy margins. Specifically in CPaaS, we saw an opportunity to gain market share with certain large enterprise customers. We believe this move is instrumental to set the foundation that will allow us to cross-sell our SaaS products in the near future, evolving from bundle packages to one single unified offer. This is what we're calling One Zenvia. Now, looking into the numbers, total revenue increased 21% year-over-year to BRL 290 million, from a fairly stable client base of 13,600 clients.
We registered growth in our SaaS business across all customer profiles, while the growth in our CPaaS business was mainly driven by the expanded SMS volume with large enterprise customers, as I just explained. Gross profit reached BRL 83.9 million, down 3.1% year-over-year, with gross margin decreasing 9.6 percentage points to 38.4% due to lower margins in both segments. In the SaaS segments, the lower profitability is a result of the still complex macroeconomic environment, which is mainly affecting our consulting businesses. While our large enterprise customers remain cautious on their investment decision during this quarter, we have already seen early signs of improvement in Q3, but the higher impact will be seen in Q4, 2023.
In the CPaaS business, as I just mentioned, we saw an opportunity to accelerate revenues and gain market share with strategic large enterprise customers, while keeping profitability at healthy levels. To attest to our strategy to balance top line growth and profitability is paying off, we delivered an EBITDA of BRL 16.5 million in the quarter, up from BRL 9.9 million in Q3 of 2022, marking the fifth quarter in a row of positive EBITDA. Let's now take a look at our key financials for the first nine months of 2023.... Looking at the first nine months of 2023, makes it even easier to understand our decision to accelerate revenue growth in the quarter, while maintaining profitability at healthy levels.
Revenue growth in the quarter led to a catch-up in the first nine months of the year, when compared to the same period of 2022. And at the same time, we saw strong margins across the business lines that led to a gross profit growth of 13% year-over-year, and gross margins growth of 4.5 percentage points to 44.1%. Moreover, normalized EBITDA in the first nine months of 2023, reached almost BRL 56 million, compared to 0 in the same period of last year. On a reported basis, our EBITDA was BRL 55 million, an improvement of BRL 80 million when compared to the negative BRL 24.9 million, reported in the first nine months of 2022. We'll talk about EBITDA in more detail soon.
Our stronger EBITDA and better working capital management led to solid operating cash flow of almost BRL 124 million in the nine months period. Now, let's compare the third quarter of 2023 to the second quarter of the year, which shows our continued progress in growing revenues. Here on this slide, we can see that sequentially, we grew consolidated revenues by 13.3%, with double-digit increase in both segments. This was driven by the recovery in profitable SMS volumes from some CPaaS large enterprise clients, but also due to the growth of our SaaS business. It is all important to remind you that our CPaaS is a mature business, and our strategy is to have the cash generation from the CPaaS business, funding the expansion of our SaaS business.
Despite that, we may come across with opportunities to gain market share at healthy, profitable levels, which was the case in the third quarter. While this may create some volatility in the contribution of CPaaS to the revenue line, it does not affect the trend of having SaaS increasing as percentage to gross profit, as you can see in the next slide. As you can see here, while the CPaaS contribution to the top line was higher in the third quarter when compared to nine months results, the trend on gross profit is the other way around. While we continue to be the undisputed leader in CPaaS in the region, it is important to remind you that CPaaS is a volume-based business and therefore volatile in nature. Reason why we decided to pivot the business to add value to the channels in first place.
In terms of size, our CPaaS business ended September with an annual recurring revenue of BRL 233 million. On the negative side, the downselling large enterprise in our consulting business pulled net revenue expansion down to 102%, compared to 120% in Q2 of 2022. As I explained earlier, we have already seen early signs of improvement in the conversion of our sales cycle to large enterprise customers in Q3, but we expect most of the impact to positively impact revenues in Q4. Let's now see how our margins perform within the strategy. On this slide, we can see the performance of both businesses in terms of profitability in the first nine months of 2023, compared to the same period of last year.
If we isolate third quarter of 2023, our gross profit for both businesses went down year-over-year, mainly due to lower gross profit from large enterprise customers in CPaaS. However, when we look at the results accumulated in the first nine months of the year, we see solid performance in both businesses with increased margins, demonstrating our ability to navigate this dynamic, competitive environment without losing focus on the medium- and long-term profitability. The performance of our CPaaS business in the first nine months of the year has been above our expectations. Given our leadership in the Brazilian SMS market and the more balanced market dynamics, we've been able to leverage a more efficient cost structure to gain market share with certain strategic large enterprise customers, which led to the strong recovery in SMS volumes with healthy profitability levels.
CPaaS also delivered a solid 13% increase in gross profit when compared to the first nine months of 2022, reaching a gross margin of 33.2%, up five percentage points. We are confident that this strategy will help us improve our relationship with these customers, allowing us to capitalize on cross-selling and upselling opportunities. Also, our SaaS business, despite facing the downselling large enterprise on our consulting business, reached BRL 134 million in gross profit in the first nine months of the year, a 13% increase compared to the first nine months of 2022, and reaching a gross margin of nearly 64%. This is mainly related to revenue growth and the consolidation of Movidesk.
Moving to the next slide, we highlight our EBITDA evolution since the second quarter of 2022, which is a direct result of the decision to pivot Zenvia into a SaaS company and focus on improving profitability. It has not been easy, particularly given the complex macro environment, but as you can see, our strategy is paying off with the third quarter of 2023 marking the fifth consecutive quarter of positive EBITDA. EBITDA was positive BRL 16.5 million Reais in the quarter, up from BRL 9.9 million a year ago and BRL 15 million in Q2 of 2023. The stronger EBITDA is mainly related to the gross profit expansion I just explained, coupled with the execution of our savings plan initiated in July 2022.
The disciplined execution of this efficiency plan led to an 8.4% drop in nominal G&A expenses, reducing the ratio of G&A as a percentage of revenue to 16.7% in nine months of 2023, from 18.5% in nine months of 2022. Also, in Q3 2023, we had a BRL 0.6 million impact from non-cash earnouts expense related to SenseData. Year to date, our EBITDA already totals BRL 55.7 million, on track to meet the guidance for the full year.
In fact, our last 12 months EBITDA of BRL 79 million is already within the our guidance range. In terms of cash flow, we ended September 2023 with a solid cash balance of nearly BRL 120 million, in line with the previous quarter, and a direct result of our focus in cash preservation without jeopardizing sustainable growth. The combination of stronger EBITDA and a stricter control of working capital was enough to pay for capital expenditure and debt service accumulated in the year. Now let's discuss our guidance for 2023. To finish, I would just like to reiterate the guidance we previously set for 2023, as we are confident with our performance so far, and we are expecting a good Q4, which normally boosts our revenue and will positively impact our EBITDA, which, as I just said, is already on track to meeting the guidance.
With this, we conclude our prepared remarks, and we are ready to take your questions.
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.
Here we go, get one here, on the webcast. Can you comment on your consulting business and why it has been so difficult to make it work?
I'm gonna take this one. So, when we are addressing the enterprise market, this year has been a tough year, a tough environment, which means, decision making cycles are taking longer than expected. That's why, even though we're bringing new enterprise customers, especially to our SaaS offerings, it is taking longer than expected to ramp up their revenues. Hence, we expect in the next couple of quarters to get this on track, especially as we're seeing new logos coming and new projects being under launch phase. It's still not appearing in our results, but we expect in the next couple quarters to have a higher flow of enterprise customers coming and impacting our revenues.
Thanks, Cassio. So, I'll keep going here. We saw an acceleration of CPaaS in the third quarter. Seems completely different from H2 of last year. Can you comment on this different dynamic?
Sure. Last year, we had a very tough competition on the CPaaS space. We've been talking about that, about that in the last couple of quarters. We were able to get back with more competitive approach this year. So that's why we're getting back our market share and also advancing more than we had in the past and with profitability. So we're being able to combine more aggression, combine more aggressiveness on the market with a positive flow of cash coming from this business. We see the market, even though it is a mature business, it still has lots of opportunities for us, considering we are the largest players on the region.
So we're able to benefit from that position in the market to bring, especially big customers that are driving their growth on the space with Zenvia. And these same customers, we're exploring new opportunities with them to also advance more into the solution side, which means the SaaS revenues within the same customers. So we're getting more presence on the CPaaS space and expect that in the short to mid-term, to also benefit us on the SaaS market as well.
Thanks, Cassio. Can you give us an update on earn-outs due next year? Have you been able to restructure any more of those? Are you trying to restructure some of your debt?
So I'll take this one. Yes, as we've been discussing with you since Q2 of this year, we've been discussing with all our creditors, banks, and including the sellers finance, to restructure, continue restructuring as we did. This is an ongoing conversation. We have time helping us here because markets seem to be improving somewhat in terms of credit and funding alternatives. And due to our effort in generating EBITDA, but also having a very strict control of working capital, we've been able to push our cash and our liquidity to put us in a better position to renegotiate that.
We hope to give you news on this sooner than later, but we continue being comfortable with the timing of those renegotiations.
... Another one for you here, Cassio. We saw a hype with ChatGPT and AI. Following that hype, what has changed or evolved? What trend are you seeing?
We're seeing that, the, what, what we had in the beginning, which is the beginning of the hype curve, is, another, a thought that it would dramatically change everything in a very short term, as every new technology, that's just the initial hype. But what we are seeing is that the, the benefits and, and the use of generative AI into our solutions is coming, and it's, starting to get traction within our products. We had a handful of different initiatives being tested with customers, and now we're starting to deploy them and, have them, scaled to customers. And this goes from, simple understanding of what, of what is the next best answer for the customer, up to insights on what is going on with customer support or sales.
So there are some improvements that are very useful for customers. Then in the mid-term, we expect that the way companies build their processes, and when they make these processes available on conversational interfaces such as WhatsApp or Google RCS, that generative AIs will be mixed with structured natural language understanding processes, which is like the Watson technology did before. So we're seeing these two technologies being mixed so they can provide a reliable and service for customers, of course, and also good in terms of conversation, so it can be more fluid than Watson-based chatbots.
So that's starting to occur, and we expect that next year will be the year that these generative AI technologies will be fully deployed to most of our customers.
There's one for me here: You're the cheapest enterprise software company in the world, valuation-wise. When can we start to consider stock buybacks? So we are not against stock buybacks. It's just a matter of timing and use of capital and capital preservation, right? We're still, as I previously answered one of the questions about our funding gap and liquidity, so that is a priority now over share buyback. Once the funding gap and our liquidity situation is behind us, then we can discuss all sorts of how to return, to accelerate capital return to shareholders. One here for you, Cassio. Can you elaborate more on the RCS that you mentioned in your prepared remarks? How is that different from SMS?
Any idea of potential market size versus SMS cannibalization?
Sure. RCS is a technology that's been evolving for about a decade. It's part of GSM protocol. And since Google started pushing that technology a couple years ago, it was up till this year not yet deployed within carriers. This year, 2023, is the year that carriers arranged and deployed the technology, so that's the year things started ramping up. So we partnered with Google to bring that to the market. And what basically RCS does is a smooth transition from SMS to more rich communication model with customers.
Which means you have 100% coverage when you're sending a message, because it just fall- the fallback goes over SMS, but for those end users that have a handset compatible with RCS, they have a much richer experience. That's nowadays available not to the majority of end users, even though we cover 100% with SMS fallback. And over the next two or three years, we expect that 60%-80% of users will be RCS compatible.
And that means, in terms of business, that from Zenvia perspective, creates lots of opportunities for upsell, 'cause when a user receives a rich message, it brings more interactions with that message, which means better conversion rates, possibly a conversation over the message, which leverages all of our conversational platform and AI capabilities. And also the message itself, from the simplest message up to the rich message, brings more revenues, talking only on the pure messaging side. So for us, and that's why we're leading that transition from SMS to RCS, brings lots of different opportunities for upsell and, of course, better experiences for end users and better results for our customers.
... Another one here. Can you provide color on why the number of customers in your SaaS business was lower quarter-over-quarter, and why your net retention keeps going lower? Cassio, can you address that one?
Yes, of course. So talking first about the net revenue expansion, as Shay said, that impact is related to the consulting part of the business, where we saw some revenue churn come from clients, huge clients from last year, because our net revenue expansion use last 12 months as basis. But we already see recovery in Q3, the pipeline, the pipeline recovery, and in Q4, we expect increase on also the net revenue expansion. Regarding the number of clients, the clients that we lost between quarters is not relevant in terms of revenue. And as we said, we increased our revenue quarter-over-quarter in the SaaS business, and we still and we still have a lot of opportunity in the cross-selling basis.
That's why we focus a lot on One Zenvia, because we have a huge client base with low cross-selling. That's a huge opportunity for us. So it doesn't, it's not a huge, it's not some issue for us losing clients, especially number of clients, especially because of their small revenues.
Hugo, can you re-prompt to see if we have live questions?
Again, if you have a question, please use the Q&A icon at the bottom of your screen to write it down, and it will 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.
We have no more questions here, Hugo, on the webcast as well.
This concludes our question and answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Mr. Cassio Bobsin for his closing remarks.
Thank you, everyone, for joining us, today. We're very excited with, this year and especially next year coming. We expect to have you guys on our next call. Thank you very much. See you.
The conference has now concluded. Zenvia's IR area is at your disposal to answer any additional questions. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect. Have a nice day.