All right. Good morning, everybody. I'm John Davis, the payments and fintech analyst here at Raymond James. We're excited to have the entire Shift4 management team, our Founder/CEO, Jared Isaacman, CFO, Nancy Disman, and President and Chief Strategy Officer, Taylor Lauber. I know there's some people who may be new to the story, Jared, so maybe we'll just start with a general overview of the business, the verticals you serve, and also really how the business has changed since you went public about three years ago.
Sure. Yeah. Again, my name is Jared Isaacman, started the company, in 1999, so 24 years ago. 16, parent's basement, really cool story since. Beginning days, we were very much just a general practitioner of payments. That was a period of time that was all about just acceptance. You know, people wanted to accept credit cards pretty easy. We saw that trajectory, pretty early on, wasn't going to go to a great place. You had to be able to add more value than simply just an approval or a decline. We were very, very, very early adopters of an integrated payment strategy before anyone really called it integrated payments. What did that mean?
It was really just owning more links in the value chain, bundling, you know, point-of-sale system software or commerce enabling software with hardware, put a SaaS bow on it and bundling payments along the way. It was a great way to arm our distribution partners with a real right to win in the market. What we found is we were able to attract higher quality customers and then retain them longer. That journey that we've been on almost our entire existence was pretty much focused on a single vertical, which was restaurants, grew incredibly fast. I mean, 24 years in business, we've grown revenue year-over-year, every single year, even through every downturn.
Our early success in integrated payments, kind of fueled our strategy where we went out, acquired additional software companies within the restaurant vertical, so we could serve pretty much from your, you know, Irish pub on the corner all the way to, like, The Cheesecake Factory and some of the biggest restaurant brands in the country. We went and we finally IPO'd in June of 2020. Really interesting time to go public when you predominantly serve restaurants during a pandemic. We grew payment volume double digits in 2020. We also grew revenue year-over-year in 2020. That was not because somehow our restaurant customers were immune to the realities of the pandemic, it was because we took a lot of share that year, just as we've done pretty much every year in our existence.
What we've done, especially over the last five years, is diversify into other verticals. Basically take the same magic that helped us be very successful, winning in the integrated payment space within restaurants. We moved into hotels, sports and entertainment stadiums, nonprofits, travel and leisure, e-commerce, gaming, and we have, you know, quite a bit of momentum across all of these verticals right now. Give you a sense, our payment technology touches about a third of the restaurants in the country, about 40% of the hotels in the country. I'd say all the best NFL teams use Shift4 payment technology, which is pretty much about half at this point. We have some real signature wins within every one of our verticals driving our growth.
About $200 billion-plus in payment volume that's growing very, very quickly. We grew what is our number one KPI, which is our end-to-end payment volume, where we kind of own the whole stack, about 53% year over year, which has actually been relatively consistent for, I think we have, like, a 48% five-year growth CAGR in volume, which again, is largely a factor again of just taking share in these various verticals. One interesting note, just to kind of bring you back to where we are today. Throughout our 24 years, we've pretty much derived 100% of our volume and revenue from serving customers in the United States, which is probably the most competitive payment market in the world.
We were pretty excited at the end of 2021, we announced we have a very, very signature customer, like a true monster, $10s of billions a year payment volume eventually, that we are going to follow literally all over the world because they're already taking payments in pretty much almost every country in the world. We would follow them into these various regions and then not only profitably follow them into those markets, we will also bring all of the magic, all the products, the services, the 500 unique commerce enabling software integrations we have into those markets, which presumably are a little bit less competitive than where we found success in the U.S. for some time.
First step of that journey was announcing an acquisition for Finaro, a European payment platform, as well as some other PSPs and have pretty big ambitions to, you know, expand globally.
Okay, great. You guys have a pretty impressive midterm top-line outlook of, you know, 30%+ revenue growth. Maybe just talk about the drivers there, break it down between your kind of high-growth core gateway conversions as well as the new verticals.
Yeah, sure. I'll start with it. As you mentioned, we've set out a year ago a medium-term outlook that would deliver about 50% end-to-end volume growth. That's KPI that Jared mentioned. That's effectively the payment volume flowing through our rails where we own the full stack for the merchants, and that would translate to about 30% net revenue growth. Now if you're kind of so understand the difference between those two. Jared talked about the evolution a little bit. We went from serving small hotels, small restaurants to big restaurants to big hotels to stadiums. We've been on this march up market where our average customer joining us today is about twice as big.
We're able to add payment volume at this really consistent 50% rate, despite the fact that the number keeps getting bigger every single year. That's this march up market that we've been on. One thing that Jared didn't touch on, but I think is really important to our growth philosophy is we've been reasonably acquisitive with M&A, and we tend to acquire payment assets that have this, like, captive base of customers inside of them. He mentioned these restaurant software brands that had served merchants for, you know, 20-plus years, but had never captured the payment volume on them. We acquired a payment gateway that operated much in the same way.
This gives us this really large embedded base of customers that are using pieces of our technology but have yet to give us merchant acquiring volume. A lot of our growth every single year is simply taking this base of customers that are using some piece of our technology and saying, "You can consolidate what had historically been a fragmented stack." In any given year, about half of our customers are migrating maybe from our gateway solution over to our end-to-end, or from just using us in their restaurant as a software provider to using us for the full stack for both the software and payments. That drives, as I mentioned, about 50% of our growth. The other 50% are merchants that are using software that's compatible with our platform, and we're a natural home for that.
Jared mentioned our dominance in kind of the hotel vertical, serving about 40% of the hotels. When you think about a property like this, there are really only two platforms in the world that can actually support it. The reason for that is you can go from, you know, any number of a dozen different restaurants to the salon spa to the front desk, every one of those different point-of-sale software suites has to be compatible with the same platform for the operator of a hotel like this to get the right perspective. That half of our share that we get from winning new customers is really the scarcity value of the platform that we've assembled over the years, and how few choices these mega merchants have and where to send their payment volume.
How that all translates into 50% volume growth, we're very fortunate that our model is every year, the annualization of all the customers that joined us last year is usually the biggest portion of our growth. We know how many customers joined us the year before, when they joined, what their annual volume is going to be. As we send out a guide towards about 50% volume growth this year, we know that a healthy portion of that's just going to come from the customers that joined us last year. Another portion is going to come from what you defined as our high-growth core. These are restaurants, hotels, basically the business we were at the IPO, whether that's conversions of merchants using existing pieces of our technology or net new wins.
Lastly, Jared mentioned, you know, pretty quickly all these new verticals. Every one of them has a TAM that's pretty comparable to these markets that we've dominated for a longer period of time. That's likely to fill the gap and with increasingly volume coming from international, which we're really excited about it. Again, we've been predominantly U.S. I think we only started processing a little bit of international volume just this year, and the world's a big place, and we've already got these embedded growth drivers, meaning merchants using point-of-sale software all over the world that's already compatible with Shift4. Now that we have more international payment acceptance capabilities, we can grow into those geographies.
Okay, great. You know, I think when we sat here last year, we talked about your new verticals. You're starting to ramp a lot of them. Maybe, Jared, as you sit here today, a year later, like, maybe give us an update, you know, what's gone better? What's gone worse? Just your overall view of kind of the new verticals and where you're ramping?
Yeah, great question. November 2021, just a few months prior to this conference, we came out, established our midterm outlook, and said, look, we're going to grow payment volume 50% year-over-year, you know, over the next, you know, the next several years. We'll grow net revenue 30% over the next several years. The rationale behind, you know, or the build-up to that is, look, we still are very dominant in our what we call our high-growth core, which is basically complex restaurants, hotels, and retail, not to mention this huge funnel of gateway volume that will inevitably, like $150 billion worth of volume, will inevitably make its way over to our full-stack, which comes with like a 4x-5x lift in gross profit, and the customers save money.
That's like the anchor to the midterm outlook. We are now in all these new verticals with a huge TAM, a significant right to win, and like an anchor customer leading the way. Nonprofits, it's St. Jude. Gaming, it's BetMGM. you know, e-commerce, international expansion is one very strategic customer. That was still the hardest part. When we were here, you know, a year ago, talking about, you know, delivering on our midterm outlook, year one was going to be the hardest, no question. Because you might have had all these signature wins, these new verticals. You didn't have the integrations done. You didn't have the volume flowing. You had no assets internationally to follow that mega customer. Like, you had more than a nice start, but year one was the toughest.
We established that before, you know, there was a global crisis, you know, in Europe, before interest rates were going up, before mega inflation. We had 53% or 54% volume growth last year. Tons of progress in every one of the new verticals. High growth core, complex restaurants, hotels, and retail is still the biggest driver of our growth cause we're so advantaged in that space. Every one of those new verticals is delivering like crazy. By the end of this quarter, we'll be processing for BetMGM in every one of the states they're licensed in. We've added, like, 2,000+ nonprofit customers. You know, we've expanded in travel and leisure with two additional wins.
Every one of those volumes is contributing, you know, meaningfully higher, like, than they were at the time last year. Now we'll be able to continue to follow, you know, those verticals outside of the U.S. into all these new markets we're entering into.
You know, you touched on it a little bit earlier, but the gateway conversion strategy has been a big topic since you've been public. I think on the earnings call last week, you said we're kind of in the bottom of the second, I think is what you referred to it as.
Yeah.
I mean, it was $180 billion, I think, when you went public. you know, maybe just talk a little bit about. I think the strategy has also evolved.
Yeah.
a little bit. Just talk about gateway conversions for a minute.
Yeah. I guess, you know, Taylor mentioned before, you know, we've been, you know, sort of reasonably acquisitive, you know, we are. You know, first 14, 15 years of our history, we self-funded the business entirely out of our own cash flows, EBITDA positive since 2004. First time we ever took on any outside capital or really debt was to complete our first acquisition in 2014. What I'd say throughout our history is, we've never bought a business that contributed to our number one KPI, which is end-to-end volume, which is what drives the whole business, our full stack.
What we're really good at is identifying assets that have a substantial integrated payment volume opportunity inside it and unlocking that and generating a ton of value. Great example we acquired, Taylor said, "Hey, there's only two companies really in the world that can address complex, you know, hospitality environment." It's Shift4 and it's one other, and basically, we split the Las Vegas Strip, to give you an example. Like split all the mega resorts across the country. We bought these like EBITDA neutral gateway platforms that at the time, I mean, you're talking like nearly, you know, a quarter of a trillion in payment volume on it, and they were making, like, $0.02 a transaction.
They were outsourcing the rest of the full stack to all these other various merchant acquirers and processors that were adding no value to the commerce experience at all. It was like a super dated model. We acquired them, vertically integrated it, just are gradually migrating this like $200 billion, at least at the time, now it's, you know, it's probably in the $150 billion range because we've been pretty successful at it, over to our end-to-end stack. In doing so, the customer actually saves money. They're not dealing with four or five different vendors to deliver a commerce experience. They're dealing with 1. Their overall cost of the solution goes down. From our perspective, we go from like, you know, making, you know, a couple basis points to like 50 basis points.
It's, you know, even after like, various economic participation of partners, it's still like a 4x to 5x uplift in gross profit every time it happens, and it's literally throwing a switch. That's been, as Taylor mentioned, about 50% of our production every month is customers making that migration. To your point of like, how's the strategy evolved? Well, it was entirely a carrot first approach, for like, for maybe our first three years or four years of the initiative. Now, it's a little balanced where there's some carrots and there's also some sticks. Like, we have a lot of resources tied up maintaining these various gateway connections and software integrations where we're receiving such an incredibly small portion of the payment economics despite driving the entire commerce experience.
We're not going to let that go on and, you know, indefinitely. Despite all the carrots that we offer, there are some nudges. We're further monetizing those gateway connections where we're trying to at least get our participation in the payment economics to a generally comparable level as if it was full stack, in which case we're relatively indifferent. That began like a year ago, and that's like super early innings. It'll be a very, you know, decent contributor to overall margin expansion and free cash flow this year, which has been doing great, just fine from last year as well. Still bottom of the second on our gateway conversion opportunity.
All right, great. Maybe we'll touch on macro. Obviously, you guys, a lot of restaurants, hotels, you have a pretty good view. You know, how have you thought about conservatism, the guidance? Like, what have you assumed in your outlook this year for high 20s revenue growth? Are you seeing kind of pockets of weakness? You know, just any sort of macro color would be great.
Yeah. I think, you know, we came out, Taylor last year was probably a little more conservative than others in kind of being cautious as we approach the macro. When we set the guide this year, the low end of the guide has some assumption around a slight pullback from a macro perspective. You know, when we look at our mid to kind of the high end of our guide, that's kind of steady-state, you know. If the economy has a rebound that's unexpected, you know, that would really be plus plus to our guide. You know, where we're performing now, macro looks good. You know, everybody's kind of holding their own. We ran scenarios anywhere from kind of a -8 to a +6 when it came to same-store sales.
I think what's important when you think about our guide and some of the comments that Taylor and Jared have made is we've got a pretty good line of sight. You know, 2022 is a real ground-setting year for us and, you know, kind of really pivoting the model into these new verticals. When you think about the new verticals and as they go up market, those take a little bit more time to implement, a little bit more time to win. We know what's coming and that really informed the guide even more than the macro.
Yeah. Just to maybe layer on a little bit with it, I mean, you know, we put out a guide that said, you know, we'll grow payment volume 40% year-over-year in a mild recession. If business is usual, we'll grow it at, like, 51%. I don't know anyone who could come out there and put, you know, 40% year-over-year volume growth when there's like a real consumer slowdown. I think really the confidence that comes from that is really just annualized Q4 exit rates. It's like, and that's seasonally not one of our one of our strongest quarters, you know, relative to other quarters that are out there.
You know, what I'd say is that we have this unique ability to grow even without winning new customers, just based on all the software customers we touch, all of our gateway volume. It's how we were able to grow payment volume, our number one KPI, double digits during a pandemic in 2020, the worst time possible, including we grew net revenue double digits that year as well. Yeah, same store sales, a healthy consumer is really good for us to continue to, like, set up, you know, a lot of good beats and raises. A lot of what is going to help us achieve our guide is continuing to win share, and a lot of it is the share we already won, we already won last year.
Again, like we're, you know, three weeks, you know, to go basically in this quarter, I'd say like, you know, this is looking pretty good.
Great. I think one of the big positives last week was the margin guide I think surprised a lot of people, you know, calling for 500 basis points of margin expansion. Nancy Disman, maybe talk a little bit about the drivers there. Also, I think a big portion of that's coming from insourcing, maybe spend a minute explaining what insourcing is for those maybe newer to the story and just the drivers to margin.
Sure. The historical model for the company was very partner-centric. When you think about the distribution for that historical high growth core that Jared went through, we always had a residual payment to those partners. We made a pretty strategic decision with the launch of our SkyTab initiative that we were going to control our destiny a little bit more. During Q3, we actually insourced a lot of those distribution partners. The way to think about that model is we took on their whole business, right? So we decided to have kind of local field representation with that insource. By doing that, yes, we, you know, there's an economic uplift, you know, kind of at the top for eliminating those residuals.
From an SG&A perspective, we actually took on more SG&A because we brought those businesses and all their infrastructure, their facilities, their, you know, their service vehicles into the Shift4 family. I think what's more important to focus on is that now most of our model is direct. All of these new verticals that we're talking about, sports and entertainment, sexy tech, Not for profit. Everything is direct, you know, I think it's a little bit lost that we've always had a direct model. The unit economics on every new deal are improved. That's really a direct flow through. You know, the infrastructure it takes to support that high growth core, you know, lots of small and mid-sized restaurants is completely different than when you launch, you know, when you move up market for enterprise customers.
We're just able to support them in a much leaner model. You think of our gateway strategy, right? Improved economics on the gateway, prior to end-to-end. You know, every single kind of strategy we put into place and kind of the hard work really was during 22. Most of that is flowing through at a higher margin, to the bottom line and absolutely to free cash flow as well.
You know, you used to be able to say that like a founder-led business implied emphasis on free cash flow generation.
Mm-hmm.
I think Silicon Valley has steered that a little off the rails for the past decade. Jared mentioned it, like first 15 years of this business' history, it was self-funded. I don't think there was a concept of a series ABC in Far Hills, New Jersey in 1999. You know, there's always been an emphasis on it. I actually like to point out regardless of kind of the initiatives in any given year, we expanded margins, I think 300 basis points, you know, the year prior to last. There's always been a margin of focus on it. I think there's actually more of an investor focus on it now than necessarily a change in priority inside the company.
But it's a really important thing for us and our vertical and a huge strategic advantage. We talk about, you know, companies we consider some of the best in our space, a company like Stripe laying off 1,000 people as they have to sort of force to get a lot more cash flow discipline inside the organization. In the same quarter that we can hire 400 through the initiative, the insourcing initiative that Nancy mentioned and expand profit margins at the same time. Less important in our minds is the incremental growth from kind of one quarter to the next or one year to the next, and just what do the best competitors in the fintech space have to do in the current market environment? They have to get extremely cost disciplined extremely quickly, and they've never done it before.
That to us presents a really interesting strategic advantage. While we're all very kind of cautious around macro, we're actually leaning forward knowing we've got profit margins that support like an aggressive go to market, at a time when I don't think many of our competitors can.
If I can pile on, I know you're hearing from all three of us, but I think there's a lot in, you know, people that are relatively new to Shift4 in here. as mentioned, like I'm completely allergic to the idea of growth at all costs. You'll find margin later, and there will always be more cash. Like I can't stand that. In 2021, in like a period of like immense, you know, market exuberance, we raised like $1.2 billion of converts at, you know, 0% and a 25 basis point coupon and just sat on it and didn't deploy it despite like a lot of encouragement.
The beginning of 2022, when it seemed like the world was getting shaky ground, we basically came out events like this and all others and said, like, "We know exactly what to do in these times." You know? Like we've grown through downturns before. Like, we know what it's like to fear not having cash and be able to generate it yourself. Watch us, you know, dial in and focus on actual real needle movers this year and discard everything else. We're able to do that without like doing layoffs like a lot of traditional tech companies.
We added a lot of headcount and expanded margins by focusing exactly on the needle movers. You can kind of take that same, you know, that same philosophy is being applied towards our 2023 guide right now, where we say we have 2,300 employees. We exited off the fourth quarter. We're going to keep headcount flat, we're going to keep expenses flat and show you exactly how like a real business is supposed to scale, without spending at like a ludicrous level, and that's how you deliver the margin expansions and free cash flow expansion that we've been doing.
Great. Maybe to follow up on that, just talk a little bit more about the competitive landscape today. You know, you have some competitors that are losing money. You alluded to that. You know, where are we? What kind of potential advantage are you going to have in a downturn because you do have cash flow and you know, you mentioned right off the bat that restaurants are very competitive vertical. Maybe just update, you know, what the competitive landscape looks like today.
Well, I think first is like, this is probably the hardest part of the Shift4 story is, first of all, we're in like the most complicated end of the commerce spectrum. Everyone knows who, you know, Square and PayPal is very visible over here. Go all the way over here, this is where we are. We're behind the scenes at all the big, you know, hotels, restaurants, resorts, and we're across lots of different verticals. There is no like kind of easy answer. In restaurants, it's always Toast. Great. Toast is awesome. It's Toast and Shift4. We have the market.
We're the ones, you know, basically taking everyone through this upgrade cycle of legacy Windows-based POS systems or non-integrated terminals, and it's both products ring up a cheeseburger just fine, I promise you that. You know, there's not a lotta innovation going on in that process. There's little things about whether you choose to, you know, go after capital or payroll or something, those are sizzle features I like to talk about. In any case, like both are doing just fine. We'll continue to both win a lotta share of the market. I think we have like a little bit more disciplined approach. You know, I think our unit economic model is better. We have a lower customer acquisition cost, but both will do just fine at the end, at the end of the year.
What I would say is like we've been competing very effectively growing payment volume restaurants for a really long time when our competitors had an unlimited checkbook. Imagine how we'll do when they actually have to try and, you know, get profitable. They're the ones that are going to have to adjust the model, not us. That should be advantageous for us. I'd say, like keep in mind, like we're in a lot of verticals. We're growing very fast in the hotel space, which is a completely different competitor that, you know, is not as well equipped, for example, as Toast in the restaurant space. We've been growing lodging volume faster than any other vertical category. Sports and entertainment would be a totally different competitor. In retail, we power UPS Stores.
Like that's a totally different competitor in that space. What I'd say is like we don't blindly enter any new vertical unless we have like a real technological point of difference so that we can deliver a lower cost of service, still maintain good, healthy spreads for us by like a pretty well-known customer in every one of those verticals to build on. Yeah, I mean, those are.
Cool.
That's kind of the story.
We have a few minutes left, so I'll open it up to the audience. If anybody has a question. If not, I'll keep going.
As you guys continue to penetrate
No market, particularly for larger retailers that need an omni solution. You guys are POS-based and rolling it out that way. We've got online competitors, including the ones you named, trying to come at you from the first direction.
Yeah.
That'd be the first question. The second question is just in terms of the ancillary services as you become more of a platform called Sizzle, Capital, Payroll, among other things, there's a lot of things you can go into growth hacker-wise. Which do you believe are kind of the most prioritizing value?
Yeah. Let me if I can start from, like, the sizzle feature stuff. That obviously varies by vertical, right? You know, the sizzle features for a restaurant point-of-sale system are going to be very different than what is valued in a stadium versus a gaming customer. What I'd say is, like, I mean, we have a very, very tight feedback loop with our customers and our various partners to know what's working and what doesn't. We tend to build out sizzle features that kind of matter more towards up-market customers. I mean, tell you very quick, if you're going out with a capital offering and a payroll, like, and a payroll offering, you're going for a very small customer. You're going for a new restaurant, new retailer, and you want to make their life easy, everything under one roof.
Our restaurant customers are Tao, Hakkasan, huge, Caesars. They're not going to be able to loan them money at an attractive rate. They're probably not going to switch their payroll. What do they care about? They care about, like, business intelligence products, loyalty, totally omnichannel. If you have, we have probably 40% of the in-venue casinos. If they have, like, BetMGM also an online presence, they're going to want to link that world, that data between the two. That's where you want to put a lot of your energy towards. We're absolutely building out Sizzle features. Some of them you can monetize for sure, especially in the e-commerce world, fraud and risk scoring.
You know, our e-commerce products is evolving very, very quickly for a very, very large strategic customer. You're also solving a lot of pain points to be able to enable them to conduct business all over the world, which is our number one strategic priority right now is, you know, to continue to expand, to put ourselves on the same kind of playing field as your, you know, your Stripes, your Adyens of the world, who are really in a league of their own from a global commerce perspective. That's a super high priority for us. I think in retail specifically, like, where we're putting our energy would absolutely be in that global commerce capability. We do just fine from omnichannel.
I mean, almost all the hotel operators that we have today, we do all their online reservations, all their e-commerce all over the world. Mandarin Oriental, you know, Hilton would be another good example. We totally have the card-present, card-not-present capabilities to handle complex commerce. The big emphasis is to take it all over the world, and then any of the sizzle features we build along the way will be very specific to solving those verticals problems and generally upmarket complex merchant problems as well. If you wanted to add anything?
No, I did. If you think about a deliberate strategic focus for us, it's on big merchants that use lots of software. You know, we've seen over the past decade that every software company growing up knows a lot of, for a lot of reasons that were taught to them by, you know, the likes of what Jared created a long time ago, capturing the payments at the time you sell the software to the merchant is a huge revenue driver for the business. We don't like to compete in markets where a merchant can adopt a single piece of software because of that competitive dynamic. We've had this focus on really complex, big merchant environments where no one piece of software gets to say, "Everything's mine." This hotel being an interesting example of that, stadiums being another one.
Big retailers don't fall too far from that. Jared mentioned The UPS Store. Believe it or not, there's six pieces of software inside of that tiny, little, complex merchant environment, and then there's 6,000 locations. We find that the air gets really thin in those environments where you need to be able to support all of the software. It creates this really interesting kind of technological flywheel, which is any software company that wants to come sell their product into a hotel is calling Shift4 'cause they know they can't actually even take the sale from a hotel unless they're compatible on our platform. It kind of ensures the technical relevancy of our platform by having good software companies call us.
It, again, keeps the air really thin. There's only, you know, a very small handful of providers that can actually support the merchants of that caliber.
Any others?
All right, I'll wrap up with one last one here. We talked a lot about international expansion. I think the balance sheet's levered 2.7 times. You know, is there a particular region that you're focused on? Where are you willing to kind of take the balance sheet from a leverage perspective for the right deal?
I mean, internally, we talk a lot about getting to critical mass. I mean, it is even for the greats like Adyen and Stripe of the world, like, they don't own the rails in every continent. It's incredibly hard. I mean, Visa, Mastercard was originally a nonprofit, intentionally tried to set it up so local banks in various countries would have a lot of control. The way you get there is you absolutely have to own a certain number of rails to attract the attention of kind of the regional players in other markets to get a one-to-many, you know, integration going, and then you do some, like, organic expansion to fill in the gap. We have, you know, North America and Europe.
We're organically expanding into, you know, Eastern Europe, some organic expansion up into, to Canada and the Caribbean. We need another continent. The nice thing now is that, you know, unlike 2021, you know, and 2022, like, there's actually quite a fair number of options up for consideration. You know, you have VCs and PE that have pulled out of entire hemispheres. You know, capital markets are closed. SPACs are gone. Then you have public companies that have various international assets that are parting them out right now.
I'd say, like, this is, you know, for us who have raised a lot of, lot of cash, have a, you know, pretty low levered balance sheet, de-levering rather quickly, it's a pretty good time for us to weigh the various pros and cons of these various assets to close out some of these geographic gaps. It's the number one priority. I'm sure you'll hear more in the future.
All right, great. I think we're going to have to leave it there. Thanks, guys. The breakout's in Cordova five.
Cool.
Thank you.