Okay, good morning and welcome to the CIDODE Virtual Microcap Conference, and thank you for joining us today. I'm Ania Soderstrom, Senior Equity Analyst here at CIDODE, and as I mentioned, next up we have Freightos. We have Zvi Schreiber, he's the Chairman and CEO with us, and we also have Pablo Pinillos, CFO, and Anat Earon-Heilborn. She's the IR, and we will start with a presentation by the management team, followed by Q&A, and if you would like to submit a question, you can do so in the Q&A function at the bottom of your screen. With that, I'll wish you welcome.
Thanks, Ania. Hi everyone, I'm Zvi Schreiber, I'm the founder and CEO of Freightos. I'd like to start by just quickly telling you why and how I started Freightos 13 years ago, and then I'll jump into the slides. I'm a software guy, I've got a background in software, I've been creating software companies before, but for just two years, in 2011-2012, I was managing a hardware company called Lightech, making electronic power supplies for LED lights, and I sold that company to GE Lighting after two years. During those two years, I was doing international shipping, so it's the only time in my career I was dealing with physical goods, and we were shipping China to US, China to Europe, shipping by ocean, shipping by air.
I was kind of shocked back then, and it hasn't changed all that much, but I was shocked that there was no website where I could see all the prices and compare. When you called up a freight forwarder—freight forwarders are like the travel agents, the companies who arrange shipments—when you call up a freight forwarder to get a price quote, back then you would wait two or three days, and the price quote would be non-binding, so it didn't match the invoice anyway. I was like, you know, guys, I'm not the first guy to ship something from China to the U.S., why is this so manual and so obfuscated? Anyway, fast forward, we've spent the last years digitalizing the industry. The industry is still mostly offline, so we're still at the beginning of that journey, but we've already established ourselves as a leader.
We're doing well over a million digital bookings a year, which is still a small part of the industry, but we are the leaders in digitizing this huge industry, and it is a big industry, hundreds of billions of dollars. As you know, if you buy a product in the shop in America or in Europe, for that matter, 90% of products are shipped. This is really the backbone of the global economy, the global physical economy in many, many ways, and it's about time we got digitalized. Let me dive into the presentation, disclaimer, disclaimer.
Because we're a marketplace or a platform, we like to start with the number of transactions, in the same way that if you're Uber, you know, even sometimes before the revenue and EBITDA, your key KPI to see if you're winning is how many rides are hailed with Uber taxis, or if you're Booking.com, you look at the number of nights booked, that's your first indication that you're really becoming the leading marketplace. We do the same, we track each quarter, even before we announce financials, we announce also the number of transactions, and look at this, it's grown like three and a half X in the last three years, so it's been growing very rapidly, it's been growing every quarter, and let's look at the quality of the network, you know, a healthy marketplace, there's many buyers, many sellers.
In our case, as I'll explain, it's actually a three-sided marketplace. We have carriers, we have freight forwarders, and we have the importers and exporters, and we've got a strong position in all of them. We have 13,000 importers and exporters, lots of little ones, but some big names that you see here, like Electrolux and Rockwool and other famous names who I don't have permission to show their logo, 4,000 freight forwarders, and 71 carriers, mostly airlines, but also getting started with ocean liners as well.
Of course, financials are critical as well, and you'll see that our revenue has been growing every single quarter, our margin is very healthy, our non-IFRS margin has been growing consistently, it's now 74%, we're aiming to get it up to 80%, so we've got some growing high margin revenue, growing margins, and the plan is this, we're not yet break even, and that's because we want to, there's such a big opportunity, we want to make sure we're investing money in sales and marketing, investing money in research and development, we don't want to break even too soon, we've got the cash to keep investing, we've got more than $30 million in the bank as of the last report, and so the idea is to keep investing but also keep growing, each quarter pretty much we lose less, you draw the line and you'll see that by the end of 2026 we'll be break even, EBITDA break even, and very shortly after that cash flow break even, it's almost the same, and we have plenty of cash to get there.
Even if you see that we're losing money, it's intentionally, we want to invest that money to keep growing, and then we'll break even when we get to a suitable size in the next year. Okay, let's talk a little bit about the market and the opportunity that we have.
Zvi, I'm sorry to interrupt, did you want to share the slides or?
I am sharing.
Because I can't see them.
Oh goodness, it says it very clearly, you are screen sharing. Maybe, if any of the participants can see my slides, please just put it in the chat or the Q&A.
Oh yeah, they can see them. I'm sorry to interrupt, I just cannot see them. Okay, sorry about that.
Okay, all right, let me just get that up again. Now I've lost them, of course, hold on one second. Okay. Okay, good. This is the least that you need to know about our.
Zvi, you're not sharing the slides, you're sharing the.
Do you want me to share my slide?
Give me one second. It says now it's paused, and I don't know why. Share. Share. Okay, how about now?
Perfect.
Okay, apologies for the small technical issue there. All right, good. This is kind of the least that you need to know about our industry. You've got the importers and exporters. Now we're all doing business to business, we're dealing with commercial things, we're not dealing with small packages to consumer, we're dealing with pallets and full containers, and our end customer is the importer or exporter. In the industry, they're known as the shippers, but that gets confusing, so I'll just call them importer or exporter. You've got the freight forwarders. Freight forwarders are a bit like the travel agents for the industry, but it's more complicated than a travel agent, because when you buy an airline ticket, you walk yourself on the plane, you walk yourself off the plane.
Cargo doesn't do that, so a freight forwarder has to take care of the first mile and the ship or the plane and the last mile and the customs and the insurance, they pull that all together. It's a big industry, there's 100,000 freight forwarders in the world, the biggest freight forwarders do tens of billions of dollars. Some freight forwarders you might know, some of the biggest American freight forwarders are Expediters, CH Robinson is a trucking company but also a very big freight forwarder, but in the world, some of the biggest freight forwarders are DSV, Kuehne+Nagel, and then also DHL and UPS also have a freight forwarding division separate to the small parcel division. Then you've got the actual carriers, they're the ones who are transporting the goods.
We work mostly with a lot of success with airlines, starting to get going with ocean liners. They've been very slow to create digital connections, but that's happening. We're interested in trucking as well. We're not focused on the trucking market per se, there are other companies who do a digital platform for trucking, but we are very interested in trucking when it's part of an international shipment, so trucking the first mile to the port, the last mile from the port, that is within our wheelhouse.
What happens today, we've started to change it, but still, most transactions today are offline, and there's emails going between the importer and exporter, emails the freight forwarder says, "I want a quote," there's usually two freight forwarders involved, one at the origin, one at the destination, they email the carriers, there's Excel sheets flying around, and a very, very manual process, and we've started to digitalize it, but still most of the industry is offline, which is good, it means there's a big opportunity for us to grow. The industry has all the problems you might expect from an industry which has so many human intermediaries, it takes, still, if you're not using Freightos, it's still common to wait two or three days for a price quote, there's big discrepancies, the prices aren't consistent, the prices aren't binding, there's wasted capacity, wasted carbon emissions, wasted time, etc.
If I may for a second, sort of zoom out to a 100,000 feet view, this is how I like to look at our mission sort of from a strategic perspective. In the first decade of this century, even starting a bit before that in the 1990s, B2C, business to consumer, e-commerce started to take off, and there were many individual retailers like Zappos and dedicated retailers like Amazon, but then what happened is Amazon actually switched their business model from being primarily a retailer to being primarily a marketplace or a platform, and in every area, the marketplaces won most, so you know, hotels started selling online, Marriott started selling online, but Booking.com is worth a lot more than them, some taxi companies went online, but Uber's worth more than most of the taxi companies combined, so being a platform is a very exciting business model.
In the second decade of this century, B2B started going online, and again, there were many individual companies like Dell and thousands of others who started selling B2B online, but again, the biggest winners were platforms like SAP Ariba, Magento, Amazon themselves have a small footprint in B2B as well. Now, in this decade, in the 2020s, it's finally time for international business to business to go online, it's a lot more complicated because it requires shipping and also foreign currency, etc., and we're positioning ourselves to be the platform for business to business, global business to business e-commerce.
Okay, so let's drill down a little bit, I've said we're a platform, but if you're interested in investing in Freightos, it's worth taking a few minutes to understand a little bit more detail about how our business is structured, and so we, first of all, when you look at our financials, the first thing you'll notice, and Pablo will present it later at this time, there's two segments, platform and solutions. What does that mean? Platform means transactional revenue, any revenue which is tied to a specific transaction, it could be a flat fee or a percentage, and we actually have two parts to our platform.
One is called just Freightos, which is connecting the importers and exporters to the freight forwarders, and the second part of our platform, which for now is actually called WebCargo by Freightos for historic reasons, is connecting the freight forwarders to the carriers, mainly the airlines, but also a lot of emphasis on going with the ocean liners.
If you know the world of passenger travel, there's a very nice metaphor or analogy, Freightos is a little bit like Booking.com or Expedia, it's a public site where any customer, in this case an importer and exporter, can compare prices, and WebCargo by Freightos is actually analogous to Sabre or Amadeus, you may be familiar with those companies, if you're not, you can look them up, or you can even search your inbox, you'll find that many times when you buy an airline ticket, till today, it's issued by Sabre or Amadeus, so they provide the digital infrastructure to connect the travel agents, in their case, to the carriers, and they've been doing that for decades, these are very profitable, stable companies.
Now, when I and the team wanted to start Freightos those years ago, there wasn't, you know, it would have been nice if there was an Amadeus and we could just connect and start selling like Expedia did, but there wasn't, so we built our own, we built the Amadeus as well as the Booking.com as it were, and that's why we ended up with two parts of our platform, so that's part of why it took us more time and money to actually complete our solution, but it also means we have an even bigger opportunity and an even bigger moat to competition, because there is no Amadeus that someone else can connect to and get started.
Now, all of that is the platform side, but there's also a solution side, we didn't invent this, it's a very winning strategy to sell software together with marketplace, actually Sabre and Amadeus provide software to travel agents as well, or OpenTable provides software to restaurants and then also provide a marketplace for restaurants, so it's a SaaS-enabled marketplace as a winning strategy, and that's what we do, so we have a SaaS business and a data business, which are subscription businesses with recurring revenue, and those we call solutions, and so you'll see in our revenue platform, which is transactional, and solutions, which is subscription, and these things all go together, in most cases, it's not like two separate businesses, it's two models, but it tends to be the same freight forwarders who buy on WebCargo and sell on Freightos and use our SaaS and sometimes use our data as well, so this all goes together very nicely with the same customers.
Okay, I get asked a lot about the impact of tariffs, so I thought I'd just take that head on and save you all putting it in the Q&A later, so here's our perspective on tariffs. First of all, if I look at the big picture, world trade isn't going anywhere, even we'll see whether, right now there's optimism because the more punitive tariffs were paused for 90 days, hopefully they stay paused, so right now there's some optimism that we've avoided an extreme trade war. Even if there is an extreme trade war, it takes many years to build factories and supply chains, manufacturing isn't all going to come back to America tomorrow, the Americans don't want those jobs in most cases, so world trade is here to stay, and the big opportunity, you know, the bigger trend is that there's this huge industry which needs to go digital, and in the big picture this doesn't change the opportunity that we have. In the short term it can be both a headwind and a tailwind. It can be a headwind because there can be short-term impacts on lanes, for example, when for a few weeks there was a 145% tariff on Chinese goods coming to America, it did reduce our transactions in that particular lane. Luckily that lane is a small part of our overall transaction, so it didn't have a meaningful impact, but of course we did see a drop in volumes in that lane during those weeks. On the other hand, the positive thing is that volatility can actually increase platform usage, so people who get lazy and say, "I'm always importing from China, I'm not going to bother using a marketplace," suddenly they need to find shipping from Vietnam or from somewhere else, then actually we actually find more usage for a marketplace when there's volatility, so it's good as well.
Of course, we're continuing to monitor and respond, I don't want to be complacent right now, it looks like there won't be an all-out trade war. If there is an all-out trade war, it could be at least temporarily a headwind, it could also in some other ways be a tailwind. We're keeping a close eye and responding to as things develop.
Okay, so a little bit about the industry traction and then I'll hand over to Pablo, we talked about the transactions which are going every quarter, the network, we've really got an amazing list of airlines, freight forwarders, shippers, importers and exporters, that is, who work with us, and we've got this double, you know, the exciting thing about a marketplace is that you get this network effect, a two-sided network effect, that all the sellers attract buyers because there's interesting stuff to buy, and all the buyers attract sellers because they want to fill their planes and their ships, but in our case it's actually a three-sided marketplace because we have the carriers and the freight forwarders and the importers, and there's a fantastic growth dynamic, even if we didn't spend money on sales and marketing, we would continue growing to some extent.
All right, good, so let me hand over now to Pablo to take you through the financials at a high level, and we'll try to leave five minutes for Q&A at the end.
Sure, so do you want me to share my slides, dear Glee?
Yeah, please.
Sure, just one second.
No, here. I cannot share. Here it is, sorry.
Yeah, here I have it, here I have it.
There it is.
There it is, so hi everyone, I'm Pablo Pinillos, CFO, and I'm going to talk a little bit about the financials. As Zvi said at the beginning of his presentation, you can see a very nice growth year over year. Last year we finished at 23.8%, and we are targeting to grow between 20%-30% to 29.0%-30.6%, that we aim to continue that trajectory, growth trajectory over the years, you know, as a long-term strategy and long-term growth strategy that I will show later on. As you can see, our revenue breakdown is basically in two different areas, solution revenue and platform revenue, both continually growing. Solution revenue right now represents two-thirds of our revenues, and platform revenue is one-third of our revenues, but over time, we expect that platform revenue will grow much, much faster.
The reason why platform revenue will grow much faster is because, as you understand, the characteristics of that revenue is basically two levers, take rate and growth rate. From a take rate perspective, Freightos, the Freightos platform, we have a very healthy take rate. We need to double down on helping that platform to grow, and WebCargo, we have a really healthy growth rate, but our take rate is not as healthy as in the freightos.com, so we're working very hard to get to that point where we can grow both platforms and get a healthy take rate.
We have a very high capital efficient growth, you know, gross margin evolution, very healthy gross margins, you can see over time, quarter over quarter, that we've been increasing that gross margin, and as Zvi said at the beginning, we aim to finish at 80% of non-IFRS gross margin probably next year or the following one, and we are very efficient from our sales and marketing expenses, as you can see on the right side, as a percentage of the GBV last year, compared to other platforms, we finished at 1.6% overall, cost of sales and marketing, versus others that you can see on the right that they are efficient but less than we are right now.
We are tracking, we are in a really good track and really looking to get profitable next year, in Q4 next year. You can see our adjusted EBITDA, how it's evolving, and you can draw the line with the revenue growth and the efficiency that we are getting from a bottom line, that we will get a bit positive in Q4 next year. From a cash management, we manage our cash very closely, we finished the quarter at $36 million. With that, it means that we will not need to raise any capital over the following years, you know, at this stage we have enough capital to be profitable at the end of next year.
This is our guidance for next year, the guidance that we made public two days ago, you know, from Q2 and fiscal year transactions, growing between 20%-30% almost number of transactions, GBV, revenues, and getting our adjusted EBITDA to the right levels to be able to be positive in Q4 next year. This is our long-term growth model. We have to be able, we want to be able, and we believe we can be able to grow our transactions and our GBV between 20%-30% year on year, and our revenue growth between 25%-30% over year. The gross profit we will get between 70%-80%, as I said, and reducing the adjusted EBITDA margin 8% - 10% points every year, and turning positive during 2026. Just last slide, our capital structure at the end of last quarter, 52.1 million total company shares outstanding, including strategic sales holders, as you can see over there, Qatar, FedEx, LATAM, employee equity grant 6.5 million, and we have public warrants at the price of $11.5 of 14.9 million, and with that, we can open for questions.
Good, thanks Pablo, so I see a number of questions here which I'll take. There's a question here for Pablo, I wonder if you have an answer, how does our margin profile compare to peers and what drives the difference? So think about that for a minute in terms of the margin, I'm not.
Yeah, I can talk a little bit about that. As you have seen, we have two revenue streams. We have one revenue stream that is SaaS business, and a second revenue stream which is more transactional business, a platform business, getting efficiency. The SaaS business is a very healthy profile from a SaaS business perspective, as you can imagine in the SaaS world, and we are doing a lot of efficiencies in the transactions, so that is helping us to get more efficient and get into the levels that we want. If you compare to peers from a marketplace and platform perspective, their gross margins are lower than where we are.
Yeah, and what drives the difference, I think, look, let's just explain, what are our cost of goods sold, right, what's the 26% that isn't gross margin, is mostly support, a little bit sometimes we handle payments and then there's credit card fees, but most of the cost is support, and the way we drive that higher is by making our support more automated, we make the product more and more self-service, more and more, you know, automated support, and as we scale and as we invest in research and development, we're able to reduce our support cost, some other marketplaces may be either they're less efficient in terms of the automation, but also if they're B2C and they're always doing everything with credit cards, that can also impact their margin, whereas we have a lot of transactions where we don't need to handle payments and our margin is higher as well. Okay, how does the company set pricing, how does any company set pricing, we do, you know, we do a market survey and we see how much the market can take, you know, we set prices on the transactional, it's either a flat fee or it's a percentage, usually if we handle payment it's a percentage, if we don't handle payment it's usually a flat fee, and we aim to, you know, we invest in research and development, we aim to add more value to the transactions and then the market is willing to pay us a higher fee, so it's all about understanding how valuable we're proving ourselves to the customer, and then negotiating that they should pay us a fee accordingly. Same with the SaaS, you know, we charge per either per user per month or more often per site per month, and it's a negotiation, you know, we have a set price and then sometimes there's a negotiation, but it all really depends on our ability to keep enhancing the software, using AI more and more of course, more and more AI features in our software, and the more valuable our software becomes, the more we're able to increase our price and to avoid too much negotiation around that price. Okay, what is the greatest obstacles that you face in growing the top line, first of all we are growing the top line, so there are no obstacles which are blocking us, but there are lots of things we would like to clear, one of them is that it took us long enough, it was only in 2020 that we had a sort of a good number of airlines starting to connect to us digitally, and with ocean liners we're still not there, we have a couple of big ocean liners, but the ocean liners finally being ready to create a digital connection would certainly help our growth, but then again, you know, we're going to grow regardless, but that would help more. Okay, let's go on, we've only got a couple of minutes, I'll buzz through these, will the firm need to raise capital over the next two years, no, we don't need to, we have enough money to get to break even, and certainly if the price remains at this level, you know, there's no appetite of our board of directors to, you know, to dilute our shareholders at anything like this price, remember that a lot of our big sophisticated investors actually paid $10 and still think it's worth that, and so we don't need to raise money and we probably won't raise money because we have enough cash to get to break even, the business is moving ahead nicely. Yeah, the share price has performed unusually poorly, what do you think Wall Street is missing, it's a great question, Ania sort of asked me that as we were preparing for the call, I don't know, it's a great, you know, it's a great, it's a huge opportunity, I mean we could literally, if we keep performing, eventually we could grow faster, we could be the next Booking.com, which is worth $100 billion, there is that kind of scale of opportunity here, so it's a very exciting opportunity, we don't have a lot of competition, we're clear leaders, which is very, you know, the most important thing, I think that, look, we're still relatively micro-cap and a lot of investors that just don't look at that, we seem to have a bit of a stigma just because we went public through a SPAC, now that doesn't change our business, but there seems to be a little bit of a, a lot of unworthy companies went public through a SPAC, so I think there's a bit of a stigma which eventually will shake off, but yeah, I look at it as an opportunity, hopefully. Okay, I think we've only got a few seconds here, long term, what factors are most likely to cause a material change in demand, is it simply global GDP, does nearshoring play into this, look, we're the leading digital platform and we've only, we've digitized single percentage points, so you know, if World Trade grows a few percent with GDP, that's great, if global trade shrinks a few percent, you know, because of nearshoring, it probably won't happen, but it's not impossible, it makes very little difference, we can still grow thousands of percent, and so that's really, you know, the overall growth, the industry goes up or down a few points, makes very little difference to the overall opportunity. Okay, I think I've got time for one more very quickly, can you compare and contrast your business to Flexport, so yeah, so Flexport is a well-known digital freight forwarder, unlike us, they are a freight forwarder, they are themselves a freight forwarder, so they've got higher revenue, much lower margin, probably single digits, if they're even making a profit, or gross profit, you know, probably single digits, maybe 10, maybe teens at most, and they're a customer of ours, they use our technology, so our position is very much to be a neutral platform, and I think that's a great position, their position is to be an actual service provider and to compete with all the freight forwarders using technology, and that's a different model with advantages and disadvantages, and we're very pleased to work with them. All right, I think we're at time here actually, there were one or two questions I didn't get to, apologies for that, but feel free everyone to send an email to ir@freightos.com, and we'll be sure to get back to you, thanks.