Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the CMG Bluware Acquisition webcast. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. To ask the question during the session, you will need to press star one one on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw the question, simply press star one one again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Kim MacEachen, Manager of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Thank you, operator. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the call. Joining us today are CEO Pramod Jain and CFO Sandra Balic. Pramod will begin with prepared remarks, and then we will open the call to questions from our sell-side analysts. If there are any questions outstanding from our listeners after the call, I encourage you to contact me directly at cmg-investors@cmgl.ca. Some of our remarks on the call today may contain forward-looking information and non-IFRS measures. Forward-looking information is based on assumptions and therefore subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected. Please reference our press release issued today, September 25, 2023, and other reports and filings available on sedar.com for information regarding these forward-looking statements and non-IFRS measures.
A reminder that this call is being recorded and a replay will be available on our website later today under the Investor Relations section. I will now turn the call over to Pramod.
Thank you, Kim, and I hope everyone can hear me loud and clear. Good morning, everyone. I'm happy to be joining this morning on CMG's first-ever conference call and to talk about the acquisition of Bluware that we announced this morning. Since this is the first sizable transaction in the company's history, this call is a way to provide more context and background on the investment and our thesis of the acquisition. My intent this morning is to go over the strategic rationale for this transaction and then leave room for questions from our analysts. So at a high level, acquiring Bluware is an attractive, strategic, and financial decision for CMG. Bluware brings differentiated technologies and expands our product portfolio to allow us to add greater value and then deepen our presence within our customers' upstream energy workflows.
Second, we are in a very good position to continue to develop relationships with Bluware's strategic customers and expand the commercial potential in both the software and the services business. And last but not least, Bluware is the right size as CMG embarks on its acquisition strategy. The purchase price reflects the risk and opportunities while providing for a strong after-tax internal rate of return under conservative assumptions. So let's start to understand about the company. So if you look at the slide three, this is about the company overview. Bluware is headquartered in Houston, Texas, and has a sizable operations in Oslo, Norway. As of the closing of our transaction, Bluware has approximately 120 employees. The business operates in two segments.
The first is a service business that has been providing tailored software and application development under long-term contracts to many of energy industry's super majors over the past 30 years. Not only it generates consistent, profitable revenue, it also has developed strategic partnerships with these leading energy companies throughout the expertise in cloud migration and advanced workflows. So this segment is important because it does provide critical insights in terms of market trends and also evolving industry needs. Very much like CMG's own consulting services, they're also helping to drive software adoption by supporting the implementation and usage. The services component has close to 70 employees, generating $17.7 million in revenue in fiscal year 2022, which is the calendar year, January 1 to December 31, and the healthy gross margins have contributed heavily towards funding the R&D of the software business.
So a second segment of the business is the software sales. This business kicked off in 2019, and even though it's still early stage, it has delivered over 40% CAGR over the past three years. The software helps the geoscientist by reducing the time spent on manual or repeat tasks and accelerates the time to operational decision-making, while allow the user to keep control of the process. In terms of the revenue in fiscal 2022, this service, this software segment generated $5.8 million in high quality subscription model recurring revenue. So like most new technology development, innovation is only possible if you have the support from industry thought-leading customers.
The same applies for Bluware, which means they have a high concentration of revenue with a small number of customers who have played a vital role in the product development and the long-term roadmap creation. Shell is the most significant from a revenue standpoint, and our shareholders will recognize and appreciate that CMG has a long history of partnership with Shell. In talking to Shell, we both see this as an opportunity to deepen our relationship. Shell respects the domain expertise and the technology innovation of Bluware and sees this acquisition as a strong union. Let me talk about Bluware products, which are summarized on the next slide, slide four. Bluware's technology portfolio has several products, but most of the revenue comes from the products I will focus here, FAST and InteractivAI, both enabled by a proprietary and industry-leading data format called VDS, Volume Data Store.
To understand VDS, think about how watching movies and TV shows have transformed over the past two decades. Some of you may remember VHS tapes, which eventually transitioned into DVDs, and at that time, DVDs were a big deal. But once compression came along, companies like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, they transformed how we watch our favorite TV shows and movies by streaming content directly from the cloud, allowing us to watch from anywhere, anytime, on practically any device. Now, you apply the same analogy to the seismic data industry, storing information offline on tapes. The oil and gas industry is starting to begin to see the value of bringing petabytes of sub-subsurface data to the cloud for archive purposes. But when it comes down to using the information from the cloud, it can be costly, and it can be cumbersome.
So once the data is in the cloud, companies soon realize how difficult it is to use. So VDS addresses that problem because it's a cloud-native format for writing, storing, and reading data. It compresses data for reduced storage requirements, but also enables live streaming and dynamic interaction with the data. So you can think of VDS as a format where music, instead of being on tapes or CDs, is in the cloud and can instantly be accessed at any point of any song. This is what we can do with Spotify, for example. For seismic data, this is powerful. This is powerful transformation, and it is why this data format has the potential to become an industry standard with the push towards cloud. It also has become a standard recognized format within OSDU, Open Subsurface Data Universe, which further supports its use and adoption.
So for some quick background, OSDU is the global collaboration of industry players. Close to around 250 companies participate in OSDU, committed to developing a standard-based E&P data platform. Because Bluware technologies have always been fully open, fully extendable, they contribute towards that open source VDS implementation to OSDU, which encourages adoption of this technology, which is now the most efficient and cost-effective way to store and use the seismic data. They also retain a commercialized version called VDS +, which is faster in terms of access than the open version and also provides greater compression capabilities. So related to VDS is another product called FAST, and FAST is a technology that allows you to take advantage of the benefits of VDS while using applications that need other data formats.
So what happens is that when you have seismic data, you stream that to FAST, and that is converted from VDS to whichever data format is required by the seismic interpretation application. It can stream the data directly from the source in the cloud, in the cloud storage, enabling more efficient workflows. So as more and more companies look to the VDS format for storing data due to the material cost savings, the need to be able to access that data and use it within existing applications will increase. FAST answers that challenge. So with data storage on the cloud and enabled storing, enabled streaming, there are applications, multiple applications for using data. This is where the next product, InteractivAI, comes in. InteractivAI is the biggest software revenue generator for Bluware.
It's a cloud-native application built around the advantages of VDS format and is optimized to take advantage of cloud computing. So a typical user would be a geoscientist who is tasked with interpreting seismic data, and as they start to begin to label the faults or horizon within a seismic data set, what InteractivAI is doing is using that input as the training for the application's machine learning, which can then, with tremendous speed and accuracy, provide vast quantities of data. So that feedback loop allows the expert user to validate the results, which means that InteractivAI is always learning the nuances of interpretation from the expert user, and it's increasing its accuracy.
So this phase of seismic interpretation, which is quite labor-intensive, can take three to four months to complete, can be done with high precision in two to three weeks, and sometimes even in hours. So the integration of sophisticated AI into the seismic interpretation workflow through interactive training and the efficiency of using VDS is that combination that sets this apart. In seismic interpretation, the geoscientists should be now able to interact with the deep learning machine, which means that they feel comfortable with the results versus a typical black box AI approach. So who will be using this technology? We estimate that the market for InteractivAI is roughly around $100 million, made of large and mid-size E&P companies, many of whom actually are already CMG clients.
Those that are constantly uploading and evaluating large assets that do require intensive seismic interpretation, can benefit tremendously from Bluware's portfolio of solutions. This would be very important to capital-intensive offshore exploration, which is very reliant on acquiring the new seismic data. So if you look at slide five, in short, why, why this acquisition is good for CMG? Number one, it diversifies CMG's product offering across the upstream energy value chain. This allows us to strengthen the value we deliver to our customers with forward-thinking, differentiated solutions. In doing so, we are deepening our relationship as a trusted partner and open opportunities to expand our share of wallet. Number two, Bluware adds a new solid state-of-the-art technology and typical technical capabilities in data management, machine learning, and AI.
We are dedicated to investing in and delivering sophisticated software solutions that are leading the path towards digitization, and Bluware's technology and skill set are an excellent fit for that vision. Number three, Bluware is a strong candidate for applying CMG playbook. We can use a similar strategy that we did for CMG in my early days here, to shift Bluware from a research-led company to a market-led one, and accelerate the commercialization of their software, while the service Bluware provides creates stickiness with large customers. And finally, number four, it presents a robust financial risk-reward opportunity, meaning that we expect to generate attractive after-tax IRR under conservative assumptions. So how does Bluware fits into CMG's acquisition strategy? Our M&A, if you recall, strategy, our M&A strategy is broadly divided into two buckets of opportunities.
Looking at slide six, first and foremost, we want to explore acquisitions that fit into the technology landscape within the upstream energy value chain. As you see today, CMG plays a key role in reservoir simulation and is expanding into production modeling. Bluware now is adding capabilities into seismic. Still, we have plenty of white space opportunities to explore in building out our portfolio of products. That does not mean that we'll be investing in all these areas, but we will prioritize game-changing technologies, finding them across the upstream energy landscape, to deepen the value that we bring to our customers. We're also looking at diversifying into adjacent industries, where our capabilities could be applied outside the energy industry.
This can include, or this might include, where we can apply our expertise in marrying the complex science and technology to our deep technical expertise in simulation, which is used in many, many industries, from mining to water management and others. So in either instance, our goal is very clear. We want to deploy our capital at attractive rates of return to build a long-term, high-quality, recurring software revenue and per-share profitability. We are being very diligent in assessing opportunities through an IRR lens, and in the case of Bluware, we have done rigorous multi-month diligence process to ensure that our risk-adjusted high IRR hurdle rate was met. So there's another aspect we think of when we look at acquisitions, which I mentioned just now when I talked about why Bluware is a good fit for CMG, which is, how can we apply the CMG operational playbooks?
Our shareholders will recall that when I joined CMG last year, we did several things to rightsize the organization, shifting mindsets and culture from research to a market-led, commercial-driven organization. We shifted some of our R&D spending to sales, marketing, and other initiatives, and this was to balance the strong products with equally strong and balanced sales and marketing abilities. We then implemented software best practices, customer segmentation, value-based pricing, building a sales pipeline coverage, also adopting a hunter-farmer sales methodology, among many things. We also introduced a performance-based culture, like, backed up by measurable objectives and key results, the OKRs. We have just started to see the results of these initiatives within CMG. This is CMG's operational playbook. We can, and we will be applying that playbook to Bluware.
Bluware software segment is in its early stage of commercialization, and we believe that we can unlock tremendous value with our operational strategy. We are actually in the process of rightsizing some of the R&D costs for Bluware and are now making sales and marketing investment similar to what we did for CMG. We'll be looking at the pricing models, we'll be looking at plans to back to base growth and upsell opportunities. I've also brought in an experienced product leader, who will work with me and the Bluware management team to accelerate the development roadmap and drive growth. So with that summary, let's address some key questions that I expect will be at the top of the minds of our shareholders. So question one, I'm sure the first question on your mind is, Pramod, what are the risks and opportunities you considered for this acquisition?
The answer is, well, first of all, no business comes without risk. Currently, Bluware has a service-heavy revenue mix and a high customer concentration, and we accounted for these factors in our valuation. The reason this is opportunistic for CMG, and why we feel this risk, these risks are manageable, is because we have a history of working with Bluware's customer base, our large customers, and we are committing to make sure that we develop those relationships, and that's why this concentrated customer base was comfortable for us. Unlocking the value of this acquisition is all about increasing the profitability and the growth of the software business, which will require an organizational shift, and that's where the CMG playbook comes in.
We're taking a research-centric company, we're applying the fundamentals of a well-run software company, investment into sales and marketing, value-based pricing, segmented, segmented customer strategy to increase the share of wallet, performance-oriented culture, and things that we do, the areas that we can build value, because, because that comes from our playbook. This won't be without risk, and we know here that execution here is the key. I also want to address the purchase price. I mentioned that we weighed the risk, the risk factors in our valuation, and you will see that we have structured this acquisition with a potential earn-out provision. This provision is tied to achieving revenue thresholds with certain key contracts. The way to think about that is, if they're not achieved, then we have mitigated our upfront purchase price.
If they are achieved, then we will have materially increased the recurring revenue stream, which would be a big win going forward for CMG, and everyone will be happy about the growth in the software business. So if we do pay out the $8 million of earn-out in the next 18 months due to the success in the software business for certain clients, we're gaining $6.4 million on recurring revenue. Question number two: Talk about competitive strategy, or what are the competitors that are using machine learning and AI in seismic interpretation? What differentiates Bluware's interactive AI product?
So yeah, there are companies that are offering solutions within seismic interpretation space, and from our diligence process, which was quite exhaustive, we believe that Bluware has the first-mover advantage in this particular niche segment, and CMG has an opportunity to increase the visibility of these solutions in the market with our strong standing in the industry. In all the customer conversations and the expert conversations that we have done during the diligence process, what we heard is that the geoscientists and the geophysicists, they don't like black box solutions. They, they want control on their decisions. They want to be involved in the process of interpretation. So the ability for the user to interact, provide the standard, train the machine, provides the transparency to the output, and that's like anybody else or any other alternate in the market. The second differentiating aspect of Bluware is around data format.
Built on VDS, it has a technology advantage as its true cloud-native solution, not a lift-and-shift product. The ability to allow for streaming data for interpretation gives the speed and efficiency advantage. The next question: Does any of this technology have application with reservoir simulation, or what synergies are possible with the current business? So in our diligence, we did uncover R&D as well as sales synergies. So Bluware has R&D engineers who are experts in high-performance computing, cloud, data scientists, and visualization, to name a few. All of these are synergistic opportunities for CMG as well. So CMG has this synergy in these areas as we continue to evolve our tech footprint. On the sales and marketing side, CMG, due to its global sales network, customer relationships, can open the sales pipeline for Bluware.
However, for our model, and also for IRR calculations, we did not account for any synergies and looked at this company and this deal on a standalone basis. One last but, critical question I think you may ask is: How do you define the success of the acquisition? Well, first, I want to be very transparent about the performance of Bluware under CMG ownership. So we will be disclosing a summarized financial table for Bluware within our regularly quarterly financial releases to make sure everyone can see the performance of the business, independent of the core CMG business. What we will watch is the top-line revenue growth of the software business, the steady state of operations of the service business, and improved profitability of the overall business. We want to hold Bluware to CMG's financial standards over time.
One more comment I'll make is to highlight that all the senior management of Bluware will remain in the company, except the current CEO, Dan Piette. So Mr. Piette will be taking on an advisory role as of today, and I will be running the company as an interim CEO during the early days, and I can do that without losing sight of the ambitious plans we have for CMG, because CMG has a strong leadership team and has a performance culture that we have established. I have now the time and freedom to focus some of my time on this acquisition, which will allow me to work closely with Bluware's talented executive team.
The entire senior management of the Bluware will remain in the company, and I will be taking on the role of interim CEO because it will allow me to spend a lot of time with the team, understand the business, allow me to give chance to think about the right leader for the company in due course. So with that context, I would like to turn the call back to the operator to open for questions.
Well, thank you, Pramod. As a reminder, ladies and gentlemen, please press star one one on your telephone keypad and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw the question, simply press star one one again. One moment while we compile our Q&A roster. Our first question comes from the line of Doug Taylor with Canaccord Genuity. Mr. Taylor, please proceed.
Yes, thank you. Good morning, and congratulations on executing on a first sizable acquisition. I'd like to start with a couple questions on the financial model. And we see the 2022 financial information you've provided. Obviously, we're almost nine months past that. So I wonder if you can comment on, you know, perhaps some more recent financial performance, either, you know, quantitative, hopefully, or qualitatively, the growth rates you've experienced in the business overall, you know, so far this year, and the trajectory of services growth in addition to the software growth that you've referenced.
Yeah. Thank you, Doug, for the question. So you're right that we're now nine months into the year. The reason why we haven't disclosed the TTM or the current financials is because the team is going through an audited aspect of the financials. So since the audit wasn't complete for this fiscal year, we wanted to ensure that we provide the 2022 numbers. And from a commentary perspective, in terms of how both segments are doing, our focus is on software, and that's why I provided context on the software business, which attracts us. And that software business has been growing at a CAGR of 40% over the past three years.
And in our full commentary, as we release our quarterly results, we will be making sure that we give enough disclosure on the financials of Bluware.
Is it fair to say from that comment that at least, qualitatively, that the services business is, you know, more stable in terms of its trajectory, over the last couple quarters?
That is right, Doug. So the service business has been around for a long time, and it has been very sticky, so, but the growth is in the software business.
Okay. A couple more questions. One, I believe I just want you to clarify the full earn-out that you'd be paying. I think you referenced $6.4 million in additional software revenue required to trigger that earn-out. Am I understanding that correct, in that software sales would be, you know, in the ballpark of $12 million for full earn-out achievement?
Yeah, that is right. So the earn-out is structured in a way that it's tied to certain contracts and the success on those contracts within the next 18 months, starting today. And it has a revenue multiple of 1.25. And it's gonna be a recurring revenue that's going to get added to Bluware software business.
And maybe one more then question if before I pass the line here. You've talked to using the CMG playbook to improve margins. Now, obviously, from 5% to north of 40% is a huge range. I wonder if I could get you perhaps to comment on what you would call success with respect to margin improvement of this asset as it grows in the coming years.
Yeah, no, that's a great question, and, as I have said before, that CMG's margins are state-of-the-art, and definitely, as we start to look at companies, we want to make sure that the valuation reflects that as well. And when I talk about CMG playbook, notice that I've focused a lot on three things. One is we wanna make sure that the service business, which has been a sticky business, also providing that stickiness to the large customer base that they have, continues to stay steady while creating opportunities for the software business. And where CMG playbook will start to come into the picture is around sales and marketing and making sure that there's right balance of R&D versus sales.
Because if you have a differentiated technology, which is first-mover advantage, and if you can add, sales and marketing muscle into it, you will start to see top line growth. Then, of course, you will also start to see margin expansion as well, but it will take time.
Well, maybe I'll come at that question in another way. You say you expect to meet IRR expectations, even under conservative assumptions. Maybe you could just refresh us on what your IRR threshold, target thresholds are.
Yeah. The range that I have given, Doug, is between 18%-20% -- north of 20%. As I've mentioned before, that this particular deal, on a standalone basis, have met that hurdle rate without you counting any synergies that we see in the joint business.
Thank you very much.
Thank you, Doug.
Thank you. One moment for our next question, please. It comes from the line of John Gibson with BMO Capital Markets. Please proceed.
Good morning, all, and congrats on the announcement this morning. Bluware obviously represents a bit of a step out in terms of the end market or target being seismic data. But, and I know you touched on the TAM being kind of in the $100 million range, but wondering, what are the immediate client overlaps you could see currently between your two offerings?
... Yeah. Thank you, John. So, definitely seismic interpretation is outside reservoir engineering and production modeling that we play in. And hence, I wanted to show that full spectra of where the entire E&P portfolio looks like, and we do want to focus on that and make sure that we have product portfolio that we can offer to our customers. So this, this technology played well, well into it. And of course, with machine learning, AI, and cloud, that is the future, of the energy industry as well. Now, in terms of the client overlap, as you know, that CMG has a large, large customer base. We have 19 out of the top 20 super majors that use our software.
If you look at Bluware's value proposition, it's around offshore and it's around large and mid-sized E&P customers who really wants to make sure that they can get the most value of seismic interpretation. If you combine the two together, there's fair bit of an overlap. Now, I do want to qualify that by saying that these are two different users. CMG is working with reservoir engineers, Bluware works with the seismic geoscientist, and the buyer would be mapping back to an asset manager or a VP of that particular asset. But we do have an extensive sales channel, and then we feel that we can add a lot of value in terms of unlocking those relationships for future sales.
Got it. I guess, to follow on that, would Bluware continue to be sold separately, or you maybe look to bundle it with your other offerings?
Yeah. So John, we will be looking at keeping Bluware completely independent from CMG. Now, as I mentioned, I'll be spending a lot of my time in the beginning as an interim CEO as I look for the next leader for the business. But in terms of the integration team and applying our playbooks, my teams from finance and other areas will come in and guide the team to apply that playbook. But to answer your question, that will be a standalone business, and we'll make sure that we provide that financial commentary and full transparency of the business performance in our quarterly reports as well.
Got it. Thanks. Last one for me. You know, going forward, it appears you're still gonna target M&A. You know, CMG has historically held cash on the balance sheet. I'm just wondering if you'd be willing to take on some sort of leverage to fund future targets?
Yeah. So John, as we mentioned before, that all options will be on the table, but it has to make sense for the, for the transaction. As you see, for this particular, transaction, we are funding through our balance sheet. We'll still have, cash available, in our balance sheet and other options. So debt and leverage definitely will be an option as we pursue other opportunities.
Okay, great. Appreciate the comments. I'll turn it back.
Thank you. One moment for our next question, please. All right, and it comes from the line of Amir Ezzat with iA. Please proceed.
Good morning, and congratulations. Pramod, you spoke to the differentiating factors that Bluware has relative to what's out there, but I'm looking to understand the proprietary nature of compressing through their format, the VDS. You know, like, what are the alternatives today for E&P companies? Are there products that allow for compressing of seismic data? Like, help us understand what's available right now.
Yeah. Thank you, Amir, and good morning. Yeah, so definitely, there are options available on the market, but this is why I wanted to give some analogy in terms of how the industry has been operating from storing petabytes of data into tapes. And there has been an industry standard format called SEG-Y, which has been out there for decades. Now, the industry is moving towards cloud, and you're not just trying to take the data from one source to another, and that's why VDS comes in and OSDU comes in. And what Bluware has done very smartly is that they have donated the freeware to the open community to allow that transition to happen. They've also built up a bunch of decoders to allow for that transformation or the handshake to be done as well.
So this is a great start for the industry to move towards cloud, and VDS, whether that's commercial version or a free version, allows you to do that.
Fantastic. I understand. Then, can VDS compression format be used in your simulation business? I know you referenced, using, like, the AI component for some of your simulation business, but I just wonder, any uses for, like, decompression?
We can learn a lot from it, right? So even in our simulation business, the data is quite, quite large. So the way they have compressed the data is phenomenal. In fact, it came from the gaming industry, so a lot of inspiration from there. But as we looked at the immediate kind of a synergy, CMG is right now one step away from leveraging that seismic data, because that data goes into the G&G side of the things, and then it flows into reservoir simulation. But our R&D engineers definitely can take a lot of learnings and collaborate together to improve the things that we do, whether that's data compression or data visualization.
Fantastic. I'm not sure you're willing to share that, but how does the margin profile look like for software versus the services component?
... Yeah, so the service business has been around for a long time and has been doing fairly decent gross margins over the last couple of decades with the large customers they've got. And when in 2019, the software business picked up, service business actually was funding that software business. So where we see coming in is that we want to make sure that those margins are protected on the services side. And as we start to transform the software business by sales, marketing, and getting more customers on board and more share of wallet, I think we'll start to see the margin expansion happening on the software side, while also making sure that services business margins are protected.
Is services still funding software or is software now, like, close to breakeven?
Yeah, you'll start to see when we start to report our, our quarterly numbers-
Okay.
You'll see more color on that.
Okay. Then are there any profitability metrics embedded in the earn-out or just the contract and sales metrics that you mentioned?
Yeah, for we kept it at top line, because a couple of customers that that did not come through from a licensing perspective during the diligence process, this was our way of mitigating the risk, and it was a win-win for both parties in a lot of ways. But so this is a revenue multiple that we have given. And look, as I mentioned before, that if we do end up paying $8 million of earn-out in the next 18 months, the recurring revenue nature, the software business is all 100% SaaS, and that's going to be phenomenal for the growth of software.
Okay. Then maybe one last one. How should I think about your appetite for further M&A? You mentioned that you'll still have, like, cash available, obviously a very clean balance sheet. Do we think of you now as, like, working on, I don't want to say integration, but, you know, like working on Bluware, before you make another sizable acquisition, or can you guys, like, move quickly on another one?
Yeah. So, Amir, I think, you're aware of the team that I've got, and my M&A team is already ready to move to a next one. But, as I mentioned before, that for me, this is about execution. And as much as my time will go for the first few months in figuring out what kind of leadership this team needs, M&A strategy is super important to us. So we are not losing sight of the fact that we need to constantly execute on CMG goals, drive that double-digit organic growth on CMG side. Now, get Bluware, start to fire up on that growth as well, but that doesn't mean that we will be taking our foot off on M&A, so we'll be full steam ahead.
Fantastic. Congrats again, and thank you for taking my questions.
Thank you, Amir.
Thank you. One moment for our last question, please. All right, and it comes from the line of Nick Corcoran with Acumen Capital Partners. Please proceed.
Good morning, and congrats on the acquisition.
Your line is open.
Thank you, Nick.
I just want to build on the question already asked. I'm just wondering what the margins profile of the business can be after about a year, and should we expect margin expansion, or are you just looking to internally fund the growth of the business?
Yeah. So, Nick, we're not, we're not looking to fund the business using any of the... Or compromising CMG's margin profile from a standalone perspective. But what we see here is, we have ran our models, and we have seen that the business can start to perform both services and software. Software mostly by applying our playbook. So it won't be at a cost of CMG. And that's why looking at this particular transaction on a standalone basis and making sure that our IRRs are met was very important.
About it, it sounds like Bluware will be, will self-financing. Is that correct?
From an operations and working capital perspective, absolutely, yes.
Great. That's all for me. Congrats again on the acquisition.
Thank you, Nick.
Thank you. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for participating in the Q&A. I will pass it back to Pramod for his final remarks.
Thank you. Thank you, operator. So thank you for all the questions. And in closing, I really want to take this opportunity to welcome all the 120 employees of Bluware to CMG team. And I also want to thank the CMG employees who have been involved in this project for months now, and it's been a lot of hard work and a lot of effort has gone into diligence over the past few months. But it's a significant effort, and now it's time to execute and deliver on our investment. So the execution will be the key. So once again, thank you for all the questions and taking the time to join this morning.
Thank you. And with that, ladies and gentlemen, we thank you for participating in today's program, and you may now disconnect.