Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining us today to review Text's performance for the second quarter of 2024, 2025 financial year. I'm pleased to share some key highlights and insights into our financial, and operational achievements during this period. Firstly, I'd like to begin with the payments received. They have grown by almost 15% year over year, and they reached $22.84 million. It's actually a record high quarter in terms of the payments, and as we run the business, that's exactly where the money come from. This is an increase of 1% quarter on quarter, which is another good thing. We will go now into MRR. That's the second metric we are reporting.
MRR stands for Monthly Recurring Revenues, and we also saw a increase in terms of year on year increase, that's 8.8%. And monthly recurring revenues were $7,040,000. However, we did experience a 0.4% decline quarter on quarter, mainly due to the drop in the customer numbers. But it was also offset by a higher average revenue per license. I'm gonna talk about it on the next slides. Now, looking at LiveChat, our flagship product, we experienced some challenges this quarter, with over 1,000 customers leaving the product. There were a couple of reasons for this drop.
It was largely due to higher churn rates, particularly in Asia, and in terms of the months, that was July, when the churn was the highest, but also there were some things that we changed unsuccessfully in terms of the onboarding process. Those changes were made in June and July, and as a result, we had been experiencing some problems in onboarding the new customers, and hence, the addition of the customers was not so... not that great. Also, those changes that we have made that have safeguarded our product against the abuses of our licenses, they also have influenced the numbers. What is important, this high number of customers churning actually did not impact MRR.
That's mainly because those customers that were churning were mainly the smallest customers. Also important thing is that those customers that we were losing were outside of our core market. So, the situation on the US market has been quite different to the one in Asia, for example. For the US, what is important, although the churn was quite high in July, in August and September, the churn rates were below 3%. And to comment on that, this decrease of the number of customers was a surprise to us. We were not expecting such a high reaction, and it has to be said that those numbers are partly the results of our own actions.
So we have made a couple of changes in the product, in the way we were showing the pricing, in the way the clients were onboarded, and the effect we can see in the numbers. The good things are that the number of new trials and qualified hot leads is increasing again because we have reverted those changes. Some of them were reverted already back in Q3, some were reverted in September, and hence we still cannot see the final effect of reverting those changes. But as I said, the main impact was on the smallest customers. In terms of the bigger customers, actually, those customers were upgrading, upselling the product.
The monthly recurring revenues from the enterprise clients have doubled, and also, we made very good changes to the product in terms of the features that prepared our customers for the intensive e-commerce activity, Q4 of the calendar year. Then we can talk about the ARPU, or we actually, although we have not changed the definition, but the name, Average Revenue Per License is more accurate. And we will be using this one from now on. ARPL has increased by 1.9% over the quarter, and hence this number per customer, per license is almost $170. Year on year, it's an increase of 11%.
So, as you can see, the higher number of churning customers actually has not influenced ARPU, it's rather the opposite. The churning customers are the small ones. One thing to comment here is also the fact that last quarter, when we had our webinar, we said that we introduce new paid feature of all AI One Plus. We are no longer offering it as a separate paid product. It's added to higher plans. It used to be $30 that the clients were paying on top of the plan. This...
The change that we have made is actually because of providing these numbers on the pricing list has to our knowledge impacted the client's acquisition, so the prices seemed to be higher for the product. We have reverted that, and now to ChatBot product. Here you can see that if you compare the numbers quarter on quarter, we have added just a couple of customers. But what is important in September alone, we have added 71 new customers. Couple things are responsible for that. First of all, and the most important one is actually that in early September, we have launched a new language model for ChatBot, and it has significantly improved the user experience for the customers, and also it boosted our conversion rates.
Then, the same model is now, since the beginning of October, released to also the entire customer base, and it should further result in reduced customer churn from the existing clients. When it comes to ARPL for our ChatBot product, it grew modestly by 1.3%, quarter on quarter. However, the one thing that you obviously see when you look at this graph is the fact that initial ARPU has decreased, and there is one particular reason for that. We have launched in mid-September a promotional offer that for the customers that have paid within the first three days of the trial.
By paying, they ended the trial, but then for a change, they just pay $1 for entire month, first month. For us, it's important to actually get the details of the credit card and to verify it, and you can... That's exactly why you can see a drop in the initial ARPU. Here, initial ARPU, unlike the whole ARPU, is that it is calculated for the entire month, so it's average across the month. Then there is actually a second part of the fees that the ChatBot customers are paying. This is the additional interactions, additional chats that the clients are paying for.
It is when they go beyond the number of chats in the pricing plan they have. They have to pay per chat, so it's actually per usage. And this number was $32 in September. And it is once again important to say that this is not included in ChatBot MRR or ARPL. Also, it's not included in MRR that we presented in the KPIs. We have more and more revenues that are beyond the subscriptions, so that includes from the ChatBot side those additional chats, but also the usage for API, also some payments for using some of the integrations. And then on the HelpDesk side, we continued to see growth.
The platform, well, the product added 29 net clients during that period, which is rather slow in terms of client addition because it was the holiday months. Then the HelpDesk average revenue per license increased by 11% during the quarter. It actually reflects quite strong product development, and this one actually has an excellent revenue retention as part of the product.
So-
Now-
It's my part, yeah?
Exactly.
Yeah. Thank you, Łucja. So to sum it up, payments received grew by almost 15% year on year, this quarter. MRR grew by 8.8% year on year this quarter. Unfortunately, there is also decline, quite some small decline quarter to quarter as growth of ARPU almost, but not fully, offset the loss in number of the customers. This loss of the customers was the result of a few things. One is really demanding environment, but also the result of our actions as we blocked, as we discouraged some customers abusing our product. But more importantly, it's also unfortunately the effect of the mistakes we made during that time.
We made some unfortunate changes to our onboarding process, which reflected in lower conversion rates in that period. One of the changes we made during that period was adding paid AI Bundle, so I would say AI Bundle is one of the things we think was the reason of lower conversion, as it's complicated the onboarding process, as it complicated process of buying LiveChat and also made it much more expensive, so we reversed these changes. We are reversing those changes because that was a process for us during September. We now gonna to observe the effect.
We really hope that the result will be returning to much better conversion rate from the previous quarters. Saying that, of course, customer churn was still very high across the board, across the geographies. But the good thing, the promising thing was the fact that during the last months, especially in September and August, we saw an improvement in our key market in the US, where actually the customer churn fell below 3%, which is one of the promising thing. The next good thing during that quarter was the good result of the upselling.
A lot of the customers actually moved from Team to Business plans, and which is really a good thing and a result of the hard work of the sales team. Actually, we almost doubled value of Enterprise plan in our MRR. It's still below 5% of the whole MRR, so it's a long way ahead of us, but that's something promising. That's actually why we even with this huge loss of the customers in the customer numbers, actual MRR is almost flat quarter on quarter, and actually payments grew during that quarter.
And the growth actually of the annual pace in terms of the payments actually sped up. Revenues of API after service grew by 16%, but it's still a very small number. It's not a huge part of the business now, but it's really a important part of the ecosystem we try to build at this moment. And so that's about the results. We just like to share some few additional things. So one of these things is context, and maybe some of you had the opportunity to see that event.
If not, there is a link in that presentation, so actually, you can see our team, which actually tried to summarize new things we added and new features we added to our product during the last month. It was the first such event organized by us. Customers, almost one thousand, some one thousand customers who actually sign up for this event. They have opportunity now to test this new feature for two months for free. We prepared some special offer for them, and actually, of course, we hope that the effect would be a nice upselling action at the end of the year.
Nevertheless, I think that can be interesting thing to see that event for those of you who actually try to look a little deeper in our product on what happening, what we are doing. On this slide, you can have some this features, you know, gathered into one slide. And of course, what actually you can see in that slide is the fact that we made some. We prepared some new changes for each of the main products. I'm especially excited about the about outbound messenger messengers features in the LiveChat. Actually, for us, it's something really new.
Because of that feature, customers is able to send activity message to end users also via WhatsApp. So also actually a very nice, very interesting new use case for LiveChat, so something we are very excited about. But also you can. A lot of features who actually are not designed for the one product, but actually are common for the one product. And that's the very important part of our strategy, and I mean building a suite. So in the previous calls, we were saying a lot about building a suite. That's the reason why we changed name of the company from LiveChat Software to Text.
We think that's actually the biggest growth potential for us. That's the biggest opportunity we have. I have to admit, although we know that we never share any timetable for adding some, for building that suite. We're just saying that's a really important thing for us. For the first time, we're sharing some developments and plans. You can see crucial things, a crucial development we actually delivered in the last time, and the things we will come to the suite in the current quarter, in the next quarter.
I hope that the actual launch of the commercial offer will be possible next year, and that's something we're really excited about. That, for us, it's a huge change and important part of building a suite actually is changing our technical ecosystem. We're adding new elements of the IT infrastructure to our ecosystem. That's very important because we have much more needs in when we think about suite, but also even without the suite, we really think that we should be able to improve, further improve quality of our product, of our service.
And that's why, and that's extremely important thing for us, we start the process of receiving certificate, SOC 2, which actually is something very important. I hope that in the first quarter half of the next year, we will have good news about this certificate. This, we want to be certified by one of Big Four companies, and that's crucial in the trying to get some big customers. Because now that's absolutely must-have when you you're talking with some enterprise customers. And having that change, that really new infrastructure, having SOC 2, we will be able to be much more successful in that negotiation with potential bigger, much bigger customers. So that's all from our side.
We'll be happy to answer your questions.
Thank you very much for the presentation. We'll now be moving to the Q&A part of the call. If you're dialed in via telephone, please press star two on your keypad. That's star two on your keypad to ask a question. You may also ask a voice or a text question if you are dialed in via the web. Okay, we'll take the first question from Mr. Matthew Babdek, MDCIT. We acknowledge your question in the previous call. Why does the company not start buying back shares, which are obviously undervalued at 10% free cash flow yield? The dividend payments are less appropriate to tax to shareholders from tax perspective. Could the company reduce the share count for 15% in five years by my calculations?
I think that the response to that question is that we are continuing our dividend policy. We have paid out the dividend for the previous year, and we are continuing this dividend policy currently. Currently, we do not have the corporate decisions for such buybacks, and this is at least currently not the direction that we'll be following.
At the end of the day, it's shareholders' decision, in our case-
At the AGM.
At the AGM, actually, a decision about, you know, putting whole profit in the dividend. I think we have, like, one vote abstaining or against, one vote, one share, and all the other votes and shares in favor. So I would say yes, in our case, we think that's, you know, shareholders' decision.
Okay, thank you very much. Next question comes from David Nelson from Blue Boat. With lower ARPL consumers churning, is this a net positive for profit margins?
I think on its own, yes. I definitely, yes. Saying that, of course, at the end of the day, when you look at the reports, when you look at the numbers, the margins will depend on many factors also. So, yes, we investing in infrastructure. We also the partner program, affiliate program is gaining more share in the total revenue, and this program is relatively expensive for us. There is also some effect from the currency on margins. So answer is yes, absolutely. You're totally right. And at this point, I'm not really sure if that really will be able to improve.
If that would be enough to show the better margins at the end of the day.
Thank you very much. Next question comes from Mr. Christopher Edberg, from Infinity Fund. Is there a seasonal effect in Q2 due to lower activity in the summer months?
So it's rather interesting question now, because there used to be before the pandemic, there used to be a seasonal effect, where July and August were lower in terms of the new customers. It has changed during the pandemic, and now I think we are back to this indeed seasonal effect, meaning that less customers should be added during the summer months. Although this quarter, in our case, there's two things were much more important in terms of the effect on the number of customers.
So the optimization changes that we made in the previous months, in June, that has resulted also in July that the customers were churning, and also those changes that we have made and have impacted the onboarding and conversion rates of the clients. So actually, those two things were much more important in our case during Q2.
Thank you very much. Second question from Mr. Christopher: Do you have any plan on developing AI agents with more autonomy and agency than a regular ChatBot?
Mm-hmm.
Interesting question.
So what we are doing is that not only you can use the ChatBot with this all AI sources, but you have, as a client, you have some autonomy to add different flows in the process of chatting with the bot. However, it's not by, exactly by developing AI agents.
So-
... it's a slightly different way that we are doing it.
At least in the ChatBot, in the case of ChatBot, as our customer, you have actually a lot of freedom to choose how the flow of the ChatBot should look like.
Okay, thank you very much. The third question, Christopher, I believe you have already answered. That's the third question about the stock buyback. So we'll move to the next question, EML from Ennismore. Are you going to disclose the precise customer numbers per product in the future, or has that been discontinued? Thank you.
No, definitely, that's our mistake, not providing those numbers in the presentation directly. Those numbers are given in the KPI reports. We'll just add those, and the presentation will include those, so no worries about that.
Absolutely. So these numbers are public. These numbers are published in the source report. So definitely we're not trying to hide anything from you.
Okay. Thank you very much. We have five questions from Ben, an individual investor. We'll go through them one by one. The first question is: What drove the ARPL drop in HelpDesk in September versus the five months?
Let me show those. So in case of HelpDesk, actually, the activity of particular customers sometimes can have a huge effect. Not sure whether that was the case now.
Not really sure about this case, but you know, I really don't think that you know, it's like the end of the good trend for HelpDesk, really. I'm not expecting that. So of course no, the mix of the customers which is coming and going is different each month. So really, we are not expecting that really on the very long run, like each month will be will translate into improvement for the RPL. But still, a tenth of the quarter, that's a very good result. 11% during that quarter, it's okay. It's really more than okay for us. So no, I really... We think that that is definitely potential in the in the in that product.
Okay, second question from Ben: What is the MRR percentage and total payments percentage between key markets and non-key markets?
So in case of MRR, it's 34% are the revenues from the U.S. Then as other important markets, we view English-speaking markets, so UK, Canada, and Australia. That'd be 12% and below five and below five for Canada and Australia. So the English-speaking markets are definitely the most important. Non-key markets, by that, what we mean mainly is. Now, when we refer to that, is actually the fact that Asian customers grew over the last quarter, is quite intensively. And their behavior is rather different to our much more loyal and stable customer base in those, as we call them, key markets.
Okay. Thank you very much. Third question: What are the plans to drive MRR and payments received dollars growth in subsequent quarters? Are there any new products that are expected to be introduced?
Yeah, we working on the new product. Actually, yes, we have some advanced works on two projects which should be new product in the future. Saying that, don't expect that very strong effect from this product. Don't expect too much from this product from the very beginning. We work on this project because we believe that it can have some potential. We think that that would be a very. It should really be completely complementary to for our suite. It's like a puzzle which pieces which just fits in that picture we creating. We don't have a strong very you know huge teams assigned for this project at this moment that are actually very small teams.
And we don't plan to not market too much launch of this product. From us, it's like starting with some, let's say, soft launch. We start with checking the business idea flows of this project. So don't be overexcited about the fact that we work with this new product because that won't be huge impact like overnight for our financial results. Also, from this, the cost side, it's not like we have a huge teams assigned for this product.
Okay, thank you very much. First question, how many customers signed up for all four products during the quarter?
That number is stable between the quarters, so we have roughly 60 customers that use all four products.
So yes, I would say a few, answering that exactly that question. Not a huge success. And actually, why is that? Why is not going so well, even in the quarter, which was really good for the sales team? The answer is here. If you look at this slide, Global Billing. We plan to release Global Billing in the current quarter, which means as for today, we can't offer you a single billings for the four products. That's not something we are proud of because that's really not a good thing.
But that also shows why we are not able to fulfill the potential we have at this moment, because we don't have a flow which help us to sell the products together. That's something we're improving. That's part of the strategy, that part of the suite strategy. But for us, it just we not helping ourselves in that matter.
Okay, thank you. Our fifth question from Ben. I understand that there's a new workflow feature in Text platforms. Are there any plans to monetize this feature as part of the suite strategy?
I think that this is something that Marcin has indicated, that we will be starting new products, and this might be one of the new ideas that we will be going with. However, such things will be initially on a very small scale. And, I mean, you cannot expect that suddenly one of our products will be a huge addition into our revenues. We are developing a couple of things inside the company. Some are tested with some of the customers. But, I mean, from the financial perspective, this won't change the picture. However, indeed, that's a part of the whole suite strategy. So, we are couple of...
We are doing a couple of things in terms of creating the whole environment ecosystem, and that also includes activities like that.
Workflows, actually interesting thing. Workflow will be monetized, can be monetized through actually API as a service platform. So you can see that this puzzle starts to fit to each other.
Perfect. Perhaps a related question from Ben. Is the suite strategy an indicator that the company will be targeting large enterprise customers in the future as a primary strategy? Will there be a consideration to build a sales team to target those customers?
It is an indication that by our suite strategy, we want to solve all the communication challenges or issues that the clients have, and we want to have a whole offer, and that will be definitely very important for the bigger customers. We will be changing things as part of the suite, that is, in terms of infrastructure, also in terms of, like, the steps that you see on this slide are all aiming at creating a better value for our customers. That also means that we will be, and we already started, to cover the steps to get SOC 2 certification. That will be definitely something of value for the enterprise customers.
But for smaller customers, this will simply mean that there will be an improved quality and efficiency of our products. Like, there is one goal for regardless of the size of the customers, to provide a very well-functioning, top-notch, product. And as a suite, that will fit more into larger customers.
Okay, thank you very much. Next question is from Mr. Klaus Leitner. How do you see net income in this quarter? You want to build a suite, meaning this is a larger investment. How will this affect your results? Do you think there will be changes in the payment of dividends?
No. So the first thing, we can uphold dividend policy. Today, we don't plan to change that. We can, of course, invest in infrastructure, especially in the IT infrastructure. We made some investment. Maybe we will have to keep some. We'll have to be cautious about looking at our financial position, because, of course, we will have to be able to cover higher bills at some point, because we start to use some additional solutions from different providers.
That doesn't mean that the level of the cost will be significantly higher than we have today, because it depends on the usage from our customers. But of course, we will have to be cautious and be ready to spend more. We need some financial results. But really, I don't think that will affect advance toward dividend, and definitely not the dividend policy. So really, I don't think that will be a huge impact on the current quarter results or the H1 results from this point.
Of course, some costs related to the IT infrastructure is already taken, is already higher at this point from some two quarters. So probably we will stay at this level, and then we'll be, you know, that will depend on how we use that infrastructure, how our business will be growing, so no, really, I'm not worried at this point.
Perfect. The next question about M&A. Do you actively seek any potential M&A, which could perhaps help with retaining and expanding your customer base? Or is there a 100% focus on organic growth?
Organic growth is by far the most important and always was our way of doing things. So that absolutely priority. But we never actually excluded possibility of some takeovers. We just never did that, but we never exclude that. So at least today, I can say that that's excluded. Sometimes we like to see what is happening in our environment. We definitely don't plan to buy users, and we don't plan to buy customers, but if there will be some which could be a really great addition to our suite, it's possible. It's not excluded. It's not excluded.
Thank you very much. We have two questions about AI. The first one comes from Mr. Eric Altman from Addington. There are many innovative ideas being developed within the AI front, such as AI Doctor ChatBot. Is Text looking to develop customer support applications for such niche markets? If so, how do you expect Text to adopt here? Or is this something that LiveChat apps marketplace, or is Text not looking at this at all? And the second question, perhaps related, is how do you think about ChatGPT and other LLMs as competition?
In terms of the first question, we are not actively looking into particular cases. However, with our ChatBot, it's AI-based, so you can use it for any application that you need, and you can also make it like custom either additions or you can add like different flows that will best suit you. So, as of now, we are not looking into such solutions. In terms of ChatGPT and LLMs as competition, I think we have already maybe not every quarter, but once in a while, we talk about the usage of ChatGPT and other LLMs.
I mean, they are the technology that definitely the benefits of using a service like ours, like our ChatBot, is the fact that you have entire control over the sources of the data for the bot to rely on. And you are in control of the input actually you are putting into the bot. So, I mean, you can rely on ChatGPT. We've seen cases like that in the past, but definitely there are also some restrictions that you have to be aware of if you use those only. And those are mainly the regulatory or the question of responsibility for things that can be made up.
Okay, thank you very much. We have a follow-up question from Matthew Babdek. Are you able to provide us with the estimates of the number of live chat clients at the end of 2024 ? Do you stay the same level as last?
So we do not give such predictions. Because that's simply because there are so many things that can influence those. So even the numbers that we have seen in this quarter, they were surprise to us, and that's partly because of the changes we've made within the product by ourselves, and we had to correct for those. So no, we will not provide such numbers.
Maybe about, you know, outlook for the current quarter. Of course, we cannot promise anything. So, of course, we now look at the effect of the reverse of the changes we made, and, you know, it's definitely we're now checking the data, looking at what's happening is definitely not. We will cover that. So, it's very difficult for us. We definitely don't want, we can't, and we don't want to promise anything. Definitely, environment is still very demanding. That's the one thing. From the other hand, this seasonality we discussed earlier, which was, you know, working against us in the previous quarter, will be. We should help us in the current quarter.
There is some good things in the-
Mm
... in the last things, much better customer churn, in lower customer churn, the US, for example.
Mm-hmm.
Also higher number of the trials, and what's more important, on qualified leads in the week we register in September. So that that's some optimistic signs. Saying that, in that environment, it's very difficult to promise anything. A quarter ago, at this call, I was saying that I think that October can be a month when from the moment we can really start to fight for the positive net additions, because then I was even obviously I wasn't aware that we actually making at that time, we making some unfortunate changes to our onboarding process.
But even then, we were very cautious and not really optimistic about net addition for the Q2. And now, starting Q3, we are, I would say, more cautious, but I think, yes, we can work on that. That's something which should be possible, should be achievable to have net positive addition, the number of live chat customers for this quarter.
Okay. Thank you very much. Perhaps we'll give another 15, 20 seconds for any additional questions. Okay, it looks like there are no further questions at this point. I'll pass the line back to the Text Investor Relations team for their concluding remarks.
So first of all, thank you for your time. Thank you for attention, thank you for the question, thank you for all the feedback we're getting. Definitely, the result we published, especially when we discuss number of the customers, this result, loss of one thousand, more than one thousand customers in that quarter is partly effect of mistake we made. So that should be said, and we can say sorry that was our all fault, our fault, that the result is much worse from what you should see, from what you should expect from us in that quarter, so we definitely not happy. Also, definitely looking at the whole picture of this quarter, let me return to the opening slide.
And I'm clicking in the better, but not the right place. Definitely, when you look at the whole picture, especially at the payments, which really show how money we earn in that quarter, I really don't think is as bad as some of the analyst and some of the investor think. So we are working very hard. We have very clear vision. We have very clear task for us. Priority is building a suite, is improve quality, is to not repeat the mistakes we made. We learned a lot during that time. So sorry for our mistakes. Sorry for, you know, disappointments in that quarter.
We working very hard on improving our products, on deliver a suite, on deliver our SOC 2 certificate, which should help us a lot, and I will leave you with this slide, which I really think is proving that it's not as bad as some of you may think. Łucja, do you like to add something for that?
No. Just thank you for listening to us and listening to presentation, and thank you for your questions. We're there for you. We'll update the presentation with the numbers of the clients. And, well, just if you have any more questions, please get back to us. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you very much. Have a nice evening.
Thank you very much. This concludes today's conference call. We'll now be closing all the lines. Thank you and goodbye.
Thank you.