Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Nayax fourth quarter and full year 2021 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question-and-answer session will follow the speaker's prepared remarks. Should you need assistance, please signal the conference specialist by pressing star then zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Miri Segal, CEO of MS-IR. Please go ahead.
Thank you, operator, and everyone for joining us today on this call. With me on the call today are Yair Nechmad, Nayax Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, and Sagit Manor, Chief Financial Officer. Following management's prepared remarks, we will open the call for the question-and-answer session. Our press release and supplementary investor presentation are available on our investor relations website at ir.nayax.com. As a reminder, during this call, we will be making forward-looking statements. All forward-looking statements on our call today are based on assumptions and therefore subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from those projected. We have no obligation to update these statements except as required by law. You can read about these risks and uncertainties in our earnings press release issued earlier today and our regulatory filings. In addition, today's call will include a discussion of non-IFRS measures.
These measures should be considered as a supplement to and not a substitute for IFRS financial measures. Reconciliation to the nearest IFRS measure can be found in our earnings press release issued earlier today. All key performance indicators are intended to evaluate our business and properly measure factors in the macroeconomic environment to guide and support our decision-making. These key performance indicators may be calculated in a manner different from the industry standard. Finally, please note that all figures in today's call will be reported in U.S. dollars unless stated otherwise. Yair will start the call with strategic and operational highlights. Then Sagit will go through the financial results for the quarter. With that, I would like to turn the call over to Nayax's CEO, Yair Nechmad. Yair, please go ahead.
Thank you, Miri, and thank you to everyone for joining us on our conference call. As you can see from our earnings press release, we had a great fourth quarter that summarized an excellent year with broader-based strength across the business to demonstrate that the continued focus on our strategic investment and execution has yielded another quarter of strong financial results. Let me begin my remarks with our fourth quarter highlights. Total revenue for the quarter was $34.4 million, an increase of 40% from Q4 2020, and an increase of 11% compared to Q3. Recurring revenue, which is comprised of our SaaS subscriptions and payment processing fee, grew approximately 66% over Q4 2020 to reach $21 million in revenue and accounted for 60% of our total revenue, compared to 51% in Q4 2020.
Our customer growth of 58% year-over-year was significant as we added 11,000 new customers in full year 2021, resulting in processing of 795 million transactions for the year, almost double the transactions processed in 2020. In Q4 2021, 247 million transactions were processed through our managed and connected devices, resulting in a growth of 84% compared to Q4 2020. Overall, our fourth quarter results reflect continued strong demand for our end-to-end commerce payment solutions, along with focused execution by the entire Nayax team in advancing our key growth strategies. The strong momentum we are seeing in the business give us confidence in updating our midterm outlook and reactivating our long-term outlook. We will discuss this in more detail later in the call.
Q4 capped off a remarkable year for Nayax, and I would like to highlight our key accomplishments and milestones in 2021 that position us well to continue the execution of strategic initiatives and capitalize on our multiple growth levers that we see ahead of us. The completion of our initial public offering was an important milestone in the company's history as it strengthened our leadership position in the independent market, broadened our presence in the new and untapped markets, and allow us to scale to a much larger company. More importantly, it allow us to continue driving product innovation across our product portfolio so that we can solve our customer challenges today and in the foreseeable future. Nayax is at the forefront of the acceleration of payment and commerce digitization, which is driving multiple secular tailwinds.
These tailwinds have created a large market opportunity which we are now in a strong position to capture in both the near and the long term. The broadening of our product portfolio and our marketing initiative to bolster our customer base remained a top priority throughout 2021. These investments have resulted in powerful growth drivers within our existing customer base and produced industry-leading net retention rate of 134%, indicating the mission-critical nature of our solution and our impact as a long-term partner in our customers' success. I'd like to highlight some Q4 key notable wins as a result of these initiatives. Nayax continues as the global industry leader, offering in the U.S. the most innovative compliance and secure EMV solutions. We announced the first unattended payment solution provider to offer incremental authorization of EMV compliance, multi-bank transaction for food and beverage customers.
With that, we are solving the negative consumer experience prevalent across the unattended retail industry without a multi-bank transaction payment solution, while also helping lift operator revenue through our increased average transaction value. We also continued the momentum in the U.S. with additional deployment of our solution to tier one customers, including strategic national accounts like Waterlogic and customers that are part of the largest vending franchisee groups like Five Star Food Service. In Mexico, Grupo Bimbo choose Nayax to expand its business going forward. Additionally, in Q4, we launched our Canadian eCom shop, joining our U.S. eCom shop introduced in early 2021. This launch continue our global expansion and allow our customers to purchase our best-in-class cashless solution 24/7. In Europe, we are expanding our footprint in Italy by signing our first value-added reseller named Product Service.
In the U.K., we successfully extended our contract with Airserv for an additional three years as the main solution provider. Weezmo, our fully-owned subsidiary operating in the field of interactive customer web-based receipts, enabling omnichannel marketing solutions for retailers, had a great success in Europe by signing a new agreement with the distributor in Spain and Portugal. In Australia, Nayax commenced in rolling out payment solutions for PepsiCo sites. I'm also delighted that we stay focused on building a global footprint that extend our reach and diversify our revenue sources. Nayax has a strong presence in four major regions of the world. At the end of 2021, more than 44% of revenue was derived from Europe, over 33% from North America, 12% from rest of the world, and 11% from Australia.
We are successfully expanding our footprint while establishing our presence in key areas of the world that are still poised for growth as they transition to cashless payment solutions. On the M&A front, we executed on our targeted M&A strategy by acquiring two companies that not only support our long-term growth strategy, but also enhance the value of our platform, extend our technology leadership to other retail platforms, and accelerate our expansion strategy. In 2021, we acquired Weezmo, and as mentioned above, it is a startup in the field of interactive customer-level digital receipts, enabling omnichannel marketing. Integrating Weezmo platform will hold a great deal of promise for extending and enhancing our consumer engagement and omnichannel platform. We also invested into Tigapo, a smart AI cloud platform that offer a complete management and payment solution for amusement parks in the family entertainment center industry.
In January 2022, we continue our targeted M&A strategy with the announcement of the On Track Innovations, OTI, acquisition, which is expected to close by the second quarter of 2022. This acquisition is an important step in our market expansion strategy and accelerate our growth opportunity in under-penetrated regions such as Japan. As we look forward, I'd like to emphasize our long-term growth strategy to remind you of our multiple growth levers in our six key areas of focus. Land and expand strategy. As we consistently gain the trust of customers, we expand within their install base and offer our solution to enhance their business. Win new large enterprise and SME customers globally. Continue to innovate and develop new solutions. Continue to expand internationally. Enter emerging high-growth verticals. Pursue targeted strategic M&A.
Looking ahead, these multiple growth levers, combined with 13 years of experience in the unattended business, increase our visibility and confidence in our growth trajectory. We expect that 2022 will be a year of continued investment in product innovation, global expansion, and customer engagement to capture the larger opportunity in both the unattended and attended market, which we see ahead. However, I want to remind everyone that Nayax will continue to balance revenue growth with a focus on profitability as we did for the past several years. While we continue to expect our revenue growth to maintain its strong pace, we remain committed to becoming profitable by early 2024. Sagit will provide additional details later on the call.
At the heart of this is an unrelenting commitment to the success of our customers regardless of geography, currency or type of payment. We believe this is a critical part of Nayax business strategy and a key element of the Nayax founder-led culture. With that, I will now turn the call over to Sagit . Sagit?
Thank you, Yair, and good morning, good evening, everyone. As Yair indicated in his opening remarks, we had an excellent Q4, ending on a strong note for the year 2021. Before we turn to the financial highlights for both Q4 and 2021, I'd like to remind everyone how our revenue model works. Nayax has a powerful business model driven by diverse and visible revenue streams with a strong focus on recurring revenue. Recurring revenue, consisting of SaaS subscription and payment processing fees, represents 60% of our total revenue today. We expect this revenue source to continue to drive the majority of growth going forward as we're consistently growing our customer base. Let me provide some additional information about our business model. The three main revenue streams are derived from POS devices or point of sale, monthly SaaS subscription, and payment processing fees.
The POS revenue for the device itself has a one-time fee recognized when the device is shipped. Devices we sell are enablers for growing the number of our managed and connected devices and, in turn, create recurring revenue from SaaS and payment processing. The revenue generated by sales of POS devices tends to be sensitive to cyclicality. The monthly SaaS subscription for connection allows for access to our telemetry and software management platforms. This includes the management suite, connectivity, telemetry, and support services. Payment processing services are determined by the percent charged from the total transaction value per month. The recurring revenue from SaaS and payment processing represents the core value our customers derive from our platform and the value add they see from increasing sales on one hand and cost savings on the other end.
With every incremental device that we sell and connect, we establish long-term relationships that help fuel highly profitable recurring revenue streams. For example, revenue from customers that initially purchased our solution in 2018 grew more than 4 times between 2018 and 2021. Now let me turn to the financial highlights for Q4 and full year 2021. Nayax delivered excellent Q4 results across our key financial metrics. We reported strong customer growth, higher demand for our managed and connected devices, and strong increase in our recurring revenue. Total revenue for the quarter was $34.4 million, an increase of 40% from Q4 2020, and an increase of 11% compared to Q3. For the full year 2021, total revenue was $119 million, an increase of 51% compared to full year 2020.
Growth in managed and connected devices continued to reflect strong demand, growing 40% year-over-year. As a reminder, these figures will consistently increase as we sell more POS devices and capture a larger market share. Another indication of the growing demand is the significant increase in transaction dollar value, which almost doubled this year to $1.4 billion, compared to approximately $800 million in 2020. This is another catalyst driving a growing contribution from recurring revenue that Yair highlighted earlier and providing healthy recurring revenue growth margin, which remained strong and stable in 2021 at 57%. I'd like to highlight the strong increase in recurring revenue, which is an important growth indicator for us. Our recurring revenue grew 66% year-over-year in Q4, and 61% for the full year 2021 over 2020.
For full year 2021, recurring revenue now accounts for 60% of total revenue, compared to 55% in full year 2020. Turning to gross margins. As previously communicated, cost of goods sold grew in Q4 due to the global shortage in components. As a result, our gross margin in Q4 declined to 35% compared to 40% in the previous quarter. Gross margin for the full year 2021 was 40%, a decline from 47% in 2020. The main driver of the decline in gross margin is due to ongoing global component shortage and supply chain dynamics which we believe are temporary and already seeing some improvements as we enter into 2022. Our efforts to overcome these challenges based on what we can control include several mitigating steps to manage the price increase.
They range from opening a new manufacturing line to redesigning our products using different and available components. We've also established a global agent network for purchasing available components in the open market and extending the component suppliers pool for long lead items. We are taking these measures in an effort to continue our strong POS devices sales, which lead to new customer acquisition and extend our relationship with existing customers. As Yair noted earlier, this land and expand strategy is one of our key long-term growth drivers. As previously mentioned, last quarter, we made a strategic decision to maintain our product selling price, supported by our strong balance sheet, to reflect our commitment to our customers and their growth trajectory, which will invigorate our long-term expansion plans. We have continued with this practice in 2022. Moving to adjusted EBITDA for 2021, adjusted EBITDA was -$4 million.
This reflects the temporary increase in our product costs, as well as the increase in operating expenses from investments in talent acquisition, customer base extensions, and product innovation. Additional investments also include higher go-to-market expenses and enhanced infrastructure to support our global growth as we become a much larger company. However, on a like-for-like comparison to 2020, adjusted EBITDA, including a bonus for non-sales employees that was introduced in Q3 for the first time, as well as excluding product cost increase, on a comparative basis, the adjusted EBITDA improved to $1 million. Lastly, we ended the year with cash and cash equivalents of $87 million. For the year 2021, the use of proceeds from our initial public offering was allocated to strategic investments as mentioned earlier. That resulting in negative cash flow from operations.
As we get closer to the end of first quarter of 2022, we continue to see the global acceleration in payment digitization and e-commerce, the shift in consumer behavior towards cashless payments, and the momentum in our business. We believe the large market opportunity in unattended is just getting started, and our differentiated position set us up well to capture the long-term opportunity. As before, we will continue to balance top-line growth with a focus on profitability. We have a clear line of sight to profitability and plan on achieving it in early 2024. Let me provide some color. As I stated earlier, we have already started our strategic investment in the second half of 2021, and we expect those investments to continue in 2022 and early part of 2023. However, the pace of investment should begin to slow down by the end of 2023.
We also expect our hardware gross margins to return to levels of around 20%-30%. The combination of strong top-line growth, slower pace of investment in late 2023, and improved hardware gross margin provides a clear path to profitability. Turning to our outlook. Based on the performance of our business in 2021 and the momentum we see heading into 2022, we believe we are well positioned to deliver a strong top-line growth as we've shown consistently in the last several years and remain optimistic about our growth trajectory. With that, we are raising our midterm outlook and reiterating our long-term outlook. Annual revenue is now expected to reach $220 million in the midterm, fueled by organic growth and strategic M&A.
The accelerated growth rate target is now updated to 35% in the medium term, with customer growth, increased market penetration, and continued expansion of our platform serving as the main growth drivers. As for long-term outlook, gross margin in the long term is expected to reach 50% by providing leasing options for IoT POS and by growing our recurring revenue. Our long-term adjusted EBITDA margin guidance is set around 30%. Looking ahead, we are very excited about our strong long-term growth drivers and the large market opportunity. In the near term, we expect to continue seeing margin pressure compared to pre-COVID levels related to the sales of POS devices. As previously communicated, we have made a strategic decision not to pass increased component costs to our customers through higher device sale prices. Our durable business model is demonstrated by our diverse customer base verticals and geographies.
With strong secular tailwind and with our industry-leading net retention revenue, we believe we have a clear opportunity to continue drive revenue growth in the future. I would like now to turn the call to the operator so that we can take your questions. Operator?
We will now begin the question-and-answer session. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. If at any time your question has been addressed and you would like to withdraw your question, please press star then two. At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster. The first question comes from Dominick Gabriele with Oppenheimer. Please go ahead.
Hey, thanks so much for taking my questions. The revenue was much better in the quarter. Obviously you're talking about, you know, a pretty good acceleration in revenue growth. Maybe you could just talk to us about, you know, what's coming from the existing base versus, you know, all the client wins that you've talked about over the last year, and how that mix is affecting the acceleration in revenue growth. Thank you. I have a follow-up.
I think I can answer this, starting with Marat, and maybe Sagit will follow up. If you can see the diversity of customer base, how it's
Yair, we lost you.
Hold on a second. Okay, sorry for that. Can you hear me?
Yes.
Okay, just to come back to this, you can see that the way that we are holding our customer or serving our customer, there are more than 73% of our customers is long tails. Actually, this year it's almost 74% of our customers. We're seeing these customers are the bread and butter of our growth into the future. We believe this is what we can project in terms of the way that we're addressing our revenue into the future. I believe that what we're seeing in terms of the growth coming in is the land and expand base that we're having.
We demonstrated this in the presentation as well, that for example, the customers of 2018 is more than 4 times servicing their revenue from last in the last 3 to 4 years. This is continuing there and happening all over again and again. When we are acquiring a new customer, which is starting with a very small part of the fleet, like 5 machines, 10 machines, it is not really substantial in our revenue. You can see that the land and expand is growing more and more. Same but when we acquire a new customer, which is big account, which is more than 1,000-2,000 units, that affects immediately on the growth of the quarter or the year itself.
Basically, we're balancing between the long tail and the tier one customers, and we're seeing more of the customers that are within our base, 60-70% that represent our growth. This is why we can see the future, a very bright future regarding how to project our revenue.
Okay, great. You know, if we think about some of the pricing pressures, and you talked about it on the connected POS segment in particular, you know. You also talked about some offsets that you're gonna try to put in place. Can we just talk about, you know, which ones of the strategies offset the pricing? I believe this is really on the expense side. You did mention again that you're not willing to, you don't wanna, you know, pass on some of these costs on the revenue side to your customers. If you just talk about the timing of some of these offsets, that you have in your strategy and which ones are the biggest lever versus the smallest lever, and how we could actually see those flow into the EBITDA margin over time.
Thanks so much.
I think again I will take it and maybe Sagit will continue. There are two parameters that we look in and both of them are under our control. One, of course, is the investment in terms of talent and employees and R&D that support our goal, which we control, and we're optimizing this, and we see in the future. That's what Sagit mentioned, that we optimize all of it during 2023, then we become much more profitable. The second thing is in terms of the logistics and operations that and also Sagit mentioned, is that we're opening a new factory, a new line which is outside of Israel.
Just by that, we'll make a lot of difference to our costs. Of course, all the engineering part that we're doing within the board to overcome shortage of component and to change the board according to what's available components in the market. All of this is already seen in terms of marked signs that we see in Q1 2022. We believe we are past the bottom of the downside of the gross margin. Sagit maybe should add some more color to this.
Sure. Thank you, Dominick. Good to hear it from you. Exactly as you mentioned, on the cost of goods sold, we've implemented several mitigating controls and steps to control the cost. One of them is that we established a new manufacturing line outside of Israel. We've changed the electric board to be able to use available and different components. We are basically now established as a direct agent that can buy components, available components, in the market to control both the lead time as well as the price. If I, you know, if I conclude all of those things, both continue to see the growth and exactly as you said, we've raised our midterm revenue projection as well as the percent of the growth.
That's one, continue to grow from a revenue perspective beautifully as we have done in the last several years. Going back to levels of 20%-30%, how about the gross margin that we believe we can reach in the next couple of years? I'll touch on that in a second. Three, moderate the investment, as I mentioned, in talent acquisition, product innovation, and customer base expansion in early 2023. All of that can control better the gross margin as well as the bottom line. On the revenue or on the gross margin side, I would say that, you know, the component shortage is a global issue that we are fighting daily.
We're very grateful that we didn't have to close any manufacturing line, but we're able to manufacture as much as we need. However, it does affect the cost of the products.
Okay, thank you. I'll jump back into queue.
Yeah.
We do have a follow-up from Dominick Gabriele with Oppenheimer. Please go ahead.
Okay. That's great. I mean, look, there's a lot to talk about, so I mean I might as well ask a few extra questions. A lot going on here. I mean if you just think about the demand for products, you know, within your geographies, obviously what's going on in Ukraine with Russia, you know you see some companies pulling out of Russia. You know are there any impacts that you calculated among your geographies, given what's going on in Europe, that could affect the growth trajectory in any way or your outlook? Thank you.
Again, thank you, Dominick, for the question. It's very thoughtful. We don't see anything regarding the immediate impact on our business in terms of Russia and Ukraine. Actually, we're not operating in Russia and Ukraine. We don't have any kind of customers or significant customers that are based in Ukraine. I don't know how to really address this in terms of a projection in Europe. But I believe, you know, war is not the best thing in terms of the economy.
Still with our business, with how we're operating and which customers we are serving and how spread we are even in Europe, 28 countries that we are working with and serving what we call basic FMCG products is not something that usually affected by any kind of war, inflation or things like this. It's not really affecting us. You know, it's this is the present. I don't know what will happen in the future regarding whether Europe will be part of it or not. We believe that our trajectory is firm, and we believe that we can deliver even with this condition, we can deliver growth that which will accelerate.
Great. Maybe one more area here. You know, when you think about the investment initiatives that you would like to accelerate, you know, over the next, say, year or so, can you just walk through in maybe more detail exactly what some of those investments are and how that affects the growth of expenses? That'd be great. Thank you.
I think the main thing that everybody has to remember or to remind everybody that what Nayax is doing is actually dealing with all the long tail of retailers. It's in terms of retail, it's actually called the nano merchants. We are expertise in terms of creating these nano merchants and all the onboarding and all the friction behind their business to make it a very profitable business for Nayax and for them.
The idea behind this is a lot of automation, a lot of operation that is to taking out all the friction that's taking care of, for example, the cable feed, the MVP, the eShop that we're building, the ability of connection between all the platform and enabling the customer to really make it very fast in terms of setting up himself immediately after around 10 minutes when he's in front of the machine.
All this is creating a lot of challenges in terms of how to collect the data, how to put it directly to the customers and make sure that while he's at his office or mobile or consumer's engagement, all of this is coming in in very smooth way that enable the customer to stay with Nayax and to keep running the business with Nayax and growing with Nayax. We see this with a net retention of 137%. That's a remarkable number in terms of what you can see in terms of long period of customers.
Churn, which is less than 3%, it's unbelievable number in terms of when you look at the small businesses around the world, any category is not reaching this level of so low churn. This is the expertise of Nayax, and that's why we believe we are so strong in our position, in our brand recognition, creating a lot of impact on the retailers, on the unattended market. This is the more we are becoming expert in this, the more the flywheel of Nayax will grow. That's the beauty of the business model of Nayax.
Great. Thanks so much.
This concludes our question and answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Yair Nechmad, CEO, for any closing remarks.
Thank you very much, operator. Before we conclude the call, I want to share with everyone, that earlier this quarter we announced confidential submission of a draft, registration statement for proposed initial public offering. The commencement of the proposed U.S. initial public offering is subject to completion of the SEC review process and determination of the share price and market and other conditions. More than that, I want to thank everybody for joining the call, for the questions, and the interest in Nayax. I'm proud of our overall performance in our first year as a public company, and feel that, we are just at the early stages of a tremendous growth opportunity in the cashless payment market.
Our remarkable achievement in 2021 and the strong results in Q4 are testimonies of our long-standing culture devoted to customer success, rapid innovation, and teamwork. I want to thank the entire Nayax's team for their dedication and their commitment to these values and executing our strategic plans. We look forward to sharing more of this journey on future calls, and thank you very much for joining. Lastly, I'd like to express our empathy and support to our development team in Ukraine. We are in contact daily with them, and I'm happy to report they are all safe and sound. Thank you everyone, and have a good day.
The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.