Thanks, everyone, for joining. Thanks, Eric and Shige, for coming here. I have to read a quick disclosure. My name is Arjun Bhatia. I'm the analyst here at William Blair that covers Ooma. For a full list of disclosures, you can go to williamblair.com. We're going to do, Eric and Shig, I'm going to walk through some slides, give a little background on the company. If we have time left at the end, we'll open it up to Q&A, and we will be in here for the breakout as well. There'll be an opportunity to ask questions after the presentation is done. Without further ado, thank you guys for coming. I will let you take it away.
Thank you very much. It's really great to be here. You save the best for last, the end of the day. Perfect. Yeah, it's my pleasure to tell you about Ooma. I'm going to go through this relatively quickly so we save time for questions, but I hope you enjoy the presentation. Pardon me. First of all, our obligatory safe harbor statement about forward-looking statements. I want to make sure we note that. We're a provider of communication services. Think about cloud telephone service. UCaaS, sometimes it's called Unified Communications as a Service. We bring that technology into four separate segments for the business. I'll talk about each of those four segments and what's exciting about them and what we're doing in each one of them.
You know, in general, we like to say that we transform sophisticated technology into elegant, simple communication solutions and make it accessible to everyone. That's really part of the art of doing this well. Not only coming out with great features, but making them digestible and making them at a good value. You put all that together, and I think that's how you really win in the space. A quick snapshot of Ooma today so you kind of know where we're at. We're, last four quarters, $259 million in revenue, growing 7% year over year. We did adjusted EBITDA of $25 million over the last four quarters, up 24%. We have a committed strategy towards growing EBITDA every year, and I think we're doing a nice job of that. Shig will take you through that. Annual exit recurring revenue, $234 million, with a good retention.
We're basically a recurring revenue business at high 72% margins. There's a lot of value for us to then take and put back into the business to drive further growth and differentiation. That's how we're applying most of our capital, but we are also increasingly bringing more to the bottom line as well. We like to talk about our core users. We have over 1.2 million core users, but that does exclude what we're doing in some additional areas of business, which I'll get into as I go through this. All told, we're about 1,100 people worldwide. Good size, no debt, profitable, growing. I mentioned we're in four segments. This slide encapsulates what I think of as the first two segments of the business. On the left is our residential product line.
This is for basically homes that want to have a great phone service at a very low price. We're ranked number one by Consumer Reports. The two on the right here, small business and larger enterprise, are kind of our business UCaaS solutions. We focus between those two primarily on the middle, Ooma Office for small businesses. We like to say we offer small businesses the opportunity to sound like a big business at a small business price. Focusing in on that small business segment with the unique needs of that segment has allowed us to create a lot of differentiation in the market. Small businesses do not have IT departments. They need to be able to set up and run this stuff simply, but yet still get very powerful features. We think we put the best package in the industry together.
Our Ooma Enterprise, we focus it in certain verticals particularly, and one of our biggest is hotels and hospitality. We have over 500 hotels in North America today, involved with us either for Ooma Enterprise or some other things we do. You know, it's an exciting set of capabilities here in these two segments. And, you know, to give you a little bit more sense of why we think it's exciting. For small business, think about where they're starting from. They probably have a few phone lines coming into the business, and that's all they have. With Ooma, they can step up to communicating through IP phones, desktop apps, mobile apps, connect in more ways. They can do calls, but they can also do messages and chats now in their business. They can communicate through video, through faxing. They have got more dimensions involved.
Finally, they can set up a whole range of features to enable how they're contacted, get things recorded, transcribed, connect with their CRM solutions, have their contacts always with them. It's just a powerful set of capabilities, which we're bringing them to from probably just having a few lines into their business. Not only that, but we can usually provide all these capabilities while also saving them money. Overall as a business, our RPU runs about $15 and change. That's a blend of Ooma Telo in the $9 and change range and Ooma Office and Ooma Enterprise at a much higher level. It's interesting that even at that $15, we can drive 72% recurring margin per user. That gives you a sense of how low we've gotten our costs in the business.
We put a lot of work into building a very efficient platform so that we can grow very cost-effectively and bring the best value in the industry. We like to think that if we can put the right features together, simple and easy to use, along with great value, that's how we win. Now, underlying all of that is our platform, which we've put, you know, 15 plus years into to create a capability of delivering great voice quality, customized solutions where needed, really great reliability, ease of use, putting it all together in a package. We span everything from one user businesses to our largest customer, which today is over 70,000 users in 32 countries. We do it all based on the capabilities we've put into our platform.
As I said, you can see at the bottom of this, Consumer Reports ranks our residential solution number one, has for many years. And the readers of PC Magazine, so customers, have rated Ooma number one for small business for many years as well. We're very proud of both of these since these are, you know, external validation of what we've built. Looking at the market and where it's going, we still think that there are many business lines in North America yet to convert to a cloud-type solution. We estimate there are something like six million businesses in North America with one to 20 employees, probably half of which have yet to move to the cloud. There is a big market opportunity to go after. Ooma Office in particular is focused on capturing that as we go forward.
Sorry, this slide is out of order, but it does not matter. I mentioned there are four segments for the business. I have talked about two: residential phone service, small business phone service, and enterprise together as UCaaS. The other two segments are replacing copper lines with a dedicated solution, which I will get into, and serving customers with a wholesale platform that they can take and make their own. Now, why is each of these important? In the first, we estimate 10 million lines in the U.S. alone that are going away. They are being shut off, and they are also seeing their prices go up. You know, a lot of those lines go to equipment that does not convert over to a fiber or standard internet connection. Think about alarm panels, door entry systems, elevator phones, gate phones, call boxes around a campus, fax machines in hospitals.
All those customers are faced with, "What do I do? My copper lines gotten too expensive. It's going away." We have a drop-in replacement for that. It's called Ooma AirDial. It's a piece of hardware that connects up to our cloud, all custom built and designed to give the customer a way to keep their equipment running. I'll talk more about that in a minute. On the wholesale side, there are many carriers and others serving probably 50 million plus users around the world that have built their solutions off of wholesale platforms they've gotten from others, particularly BroadSoft and Metaswitch. Those platforms are older. They haven't kept up with the latest features and capabilities. We believe those carriers are looking for new solutions.
The 2600Hz platform, which I'll also talk about more in a minute, we think, is the ideal solution for the future, for wholesale customer needs. Coming back to AirDial for a minute, why AirDial? These are some of the common applications that I mentioned previously. You know, no one wants to touch their copper lines going into their elevator phones, but they're forced to. They have to. You look at AirDial, you've got a product that can sustain the equipment and bring you more advanced features like the ability to manage all your lines from one desktop portal, get alerts when things happen, set up multiple paths of connectivity so that if one path might have a problem, the other one kicks in, and the end equipment never knows there was a glitch.
These are some of the unique capabilities that make AirDial special. This is a key growth area for us. One of the things we're very proud of is that we now have over 30 resellers signed up and reselling AirDial in the marketplace, including big partners like T-Mobile and our most recent new big partner, Comcast. Comcast is just rolling out, and it's really exciting because of the reach they have and the big companies they work with. It really gives us the opportunity to bring AirDial into a whole segment of the market that I think will value it. We're really excited about extending our reach and growing faster with those partners. We've set a goal. Our goal is to get to 300,000 lines on AirDial. If we can do that, that's about $100 million of additional recurring revenue annually for the business.
It's big. 2600Hz. What's this thing about? It's a white label capable solution, but it's also built in a very modern way with about 300 APIs in the system, which allows someone who adopts it to make it their own. They can add features, build on it, really implement new capabilities. That's exciting, and that's what makes it the right platform for the future for a carrier who's looking to make a decision for the long term about where to take their business. Here again, we think we have a very big opportunity over the longer term to really win big partners and customers. Our biggest accomplishment, which we announced last year, was the announcement that Service Titan is building new applications on this platform as a major customer win for us last year.
Our go-to-market is really a little different in each of these four segments, but you can kind of add it up as we have direct sales capabilities, inside sales capabilities. We sell through resales and partners. Even on the residential side, we go through retail. We do a lot of online marketing, but we do some primary advertising. You'll hear us on the radio talking about Ooma Office. Increasingly, we're working towards geographic expansion, although primarily outside of North America, that's mainly been with our largest customer, Regis, who I mentioned earlier. With that, let me summarize and just say small businesses, underserved needs, big markets still to go. Large businesses with customer requirements, that's where we target Ooma Enterprise, particularly in the hospitality segment. Businesses stranded by copper line sunset, we've got a solution.
That's a market that's just really developing and will particularly be big over the next five years. Telecom resellers modernizing their platform and geographic expansion. It's a big future for us with the applications we have today and just leveraging them for future growth. Now, let me turn over to Shig.
Excuse me. Ouch. Hello, everyone. Thanks for joining the meeting, presentation today. I'm just going to spend a few minutes talking about financial overview and profile in a little more detail. First slide here on the left-hand side was showing the annual revenue on a historical basis. You can see that we did about $257 million of revenue last year in total. Good thing about our revenue composition is that 92-93% of our revenue is on a recurring basis. It's very, very predictable.
That includes both the subscription revenue on residential, and also on business, and also includes the new exciting opportunity for AirDial subscription as well. We just reported Q1 last week or so, which was $65 million of total revenue. Again, continue to have a high portion of recurring revenue. This chart shows the composition of business revenue versus residential revenue on the left-hand side. The key message here is that we have an increasing proportion of business users. What that means is that it not only grows revenue faster because the business subscription revenue is growing faster than residential, but also it possibly impacts the gross margin. The subscription margin on the business subscribers is a little bit higher than the residential customers. More business subscribers we have, the better the gross margin.
We also have core users on the right-hand chart, which is the underlying number of users for business and residential. Although the business core users, you can see that we still have million users decline just a little bit this past quarter for known reasons. We had the one large customer who was going through some adjustments, which is behind them. We think they stabilized. We believe that we are going to go back to growth mode for the core users and recurring revenue in the coming quarters. Here is the ARPU. ARPU stands for average revenue per user on a monthly basis. As Eric mentioned earlier, this is the combined blended ARPU metric. It is $15.37 in the most recent quarter. Business ARPU is running over $23 a month on average and the residential over $9.
Again, going back to what I said earlier, which is more business users we have, the higher gross margin we can generate because cost structure is a bit similar on the gross margin basis across the two platforms. We also consistently increasing the annual exit recurring revenue, AERR, and which also speaks to the fact that we have a high proportion of the recurring revenue every quarter, every fiscal year. Here is the gross margin. You can see it on the left-hand side that we have a 73% of the subscription margin and then 63% of the total gross margin. Aside from the subscription margin, we have the product and other gross margin. When you blend the two, you get 63% total. Again, 93%, 92% of recurring revenue is generating 72% of gross margin on a consistent basis.
On the right-hand side, it was showing a roadmap to better gross margin. Again, with the growth of the business, subscribers on a recurring revenue, we're expecting that the higher proportion will continue to have the increasing effect on the gross margin overall. Here's a nice chart showing our trend on the adjusted EBITDA, in dollar terms and also the free cash flow we generated on a trailing 12-month basis. As you can see in the last four quarters, we stepped up on both adjusted EBITDA and free cash flow quite a bit. We have been showing quite a bit of improvement in operating leverage, particularly for R&D spend. We used to spend 19% of revenue on R&D. Most recent quarter, we reported that we spent about 17%.
We expect, we have expectation to get that down to, let's say, 16-15% in the next year or two, mostly because the heavy investment for the growth areas, AirDial, or the higher tier service for Ooma Office, those have been already spent in the past. Now we are being more efficient on our R&D and as we focus on our growth on the top line. That is how we are showing operating leverage in addition to the improving gross margin in the coming years. By the way, to the extent that we have increased free cash flow quite a bit in the last four quarters, you might ask, what are you doing with the capital allocation?
To the extent that we have an opportunity to acquire, inorganic growth, typically what we want to do is to acquire business, small business user base. We have done that in the past and we have a good template to do that. We typically like to acquire $10 million-$25 million revenue, business user base. That is a very cost-effective way to acquire, and we want to be very disciplined about how much we pay for those kind of acquisitions. That worked well for us in the past, and we want to repeat that if the opportunity presents. In the meantime, we're using free cash flow to buy back stock. We actually spent about $12 million in the last 12 months to buy back our own stock. This is a quick overview of a balance sheet.
So we have $19 million in cash and no debt. And again, we can choose to accumulate cash, but we're choosing now to buy back the stock. We believe our stock is undervalued. And, so we believe that that's a best way to return cash to our investors. We continue to generate healthy cash flow from operations and free cash flow, as I said before. Our capital spending is fairly consistent, about, you know, $1.5 million a quarter or so on average. So we're not a CapEx heavy company. And so, as we continue to grow further, we don't think that profile changes, which also allows us to increase the free cash flow as well in the future. So this is the last slide, but I want to share with you a short-term and long-term financial model.
So you can see the Q1 result, but in it's actually set of one to three years in the midterm column to the second from the right. But it's actually one to two. That's what we're aiming for, which is to really get to at the bottom, as you see, 11%-14% adjusted EBITDA. We think we can get to almost 11% by the time we get to Q4 this year. And the really continue to show the further improvement in our operating leverage, again, in the R&D and maybe some sales and marketing as well, in addition to improving gross margin. And that's how we get to that, you know, close to the mid-teens in the next couple of years. And, we also think we are on a way to get to 20%-25% and we'll, model to the far right, let's say four to five years.
We want to double the revenue from where we are, from the growth of AirDial Eric talked about. We think that's another $100 million opportunity in that timeframe, four to five years. We are going to see continued growth in Ooma Office and other solutions, perhaps some 2600Hz also adding to this growth to get to double the revenue from where we are. Which also means that as we have more business subscribers, as I said earlier, we think we can add to the gross margin, recurring margin. Instead of 72%, we see ourselves getting to mid-70s on the subscription margin, which also raises the overall gross margin and the further operating leverage in every OpEx line you see here to close a gap between, let's say, mid-teens to 20-25%. That is a long-term roadmap on the financial side.
I think that's the last slide. Thank you very much.
Thanks. Questions?
We got some, the last on the last slide, just checking on the financial model. I'm curious how you think about free cash flow conversion as margins ramp and you get a few different kind of, I'll say growth drivers. Like, does that go up or is it kind of, you expect them to stay at the current?
Is the free cash you're talking about?
Yeah.
Yeah. I do think that the free cash would increase commensurate with the expected growth in EBITDA. And, as I said earlier, we're not a CapEx heavy company. Our growth doesn't require heavy CapEx investment. And also, take example, AirDial. Eric talked about signing up nice partners to resell AirDial.
The beauty of that is that the partners would do the selling motion, which also means that we do not have to carry a big sales force to realize that top-line growth via the AirDial, which allows us to be more efficient on the sales and marketing as well. I think all these things considered, I do think the free cash flow will increase commensurate with the growth of EBITDA. Okay. Yeah.
On your business, on your core business side, you are doing 23% monthly RPU. What, like, how are you, is that go-to-market motion largely inbound and indirect, or do you have salespeople? How are you pushing that and making businesses aware that, hey, we have Ooma's out here for this?
Yeah, our go-to-market varies a little bit by segment.
If I look at the three segments that make up business, with small business UCaaS, we do a lot of online marketing and inside sales. We do a lot of outreach in different ways to try to get a customer to call us. We have very good conversions when they do. For Ooma AirDial, we obviously sell through resellers, but we do a lot through channel agents. It has proven to be a new product category for channel agents. It has given them additional opportunity. We have had good success. Also, we have had special relationships. We announced last quarter that Marriott certified Ooma AirDial for all their properties. That has given us a great boost with going after AirDial, AirDial at Marriott. There are at least 5,000 Marriott properties in North America. There is great potential there. When you get to 2600Hz, the customer set is more well-defined.
There's probably a couple thousand key customers to go after. We can do that with a direct sales team and more direct outreach. Appreciate the questions. Can I answer anything else?
How does like specific industry or verticals of the hospitality hotel is benefiting your overall business? What is your strategic plan with concentrating specific verticals going forward?
Let me start by saying we think in the world of cloud communications, you have to pick segments where you can put together the winning package. If you try to be everything to everybody, you're really not going to do that well. That's why we focus on small business. Within larger business, we pick certain areas like hotels and hospitality that have special needs. For instance, our hospitality solutions connect up with many different hotel management systems.
We're very good at blending analog phones in rooms with digital phones at the front desk or maybe the back office. That's a package that the hotels need help with to implement. We found good success, focusing there. That focus allows us to be stronger. As we go forward, we are doing more of that. We find even with our small business solution, we're increasingly targeting it towards certain verticals. For instance, relatively recently, we announced an integration with Clio, which is a CRM for law firms. That's given us a nice boost in that vertical. We do more of that as we go forward.
In those partnerships, are you, do you go to market together with Clio and Service Titan? Or in Service Titan, I think you're maybe white labeled.
Yeah, Service Titan is just a customer, a white label customer. Sometimes yes, to some degree more than others. Sometimes we refer leads to them. They refer leads to us. Sometimes, people even do resell our solutions. It just varies by what the customer finds or the partner finds best for their business. I think the key for Ooma today, we've got a solid business, strong financial balance sheet, and we're serving big markets. I think we've got, we've put a lot of work. I mean, at the height, we were spending 25% of revenue on R&D. We put a lot of work into building great solutions. Now, as we go forward, we're trying increasingly to focus on capitalizing, in these markets.
It is also important to, we'd like you to understand that we're highly differentiated from just traditional UCaaS solution providers.
Particularly when it comes to AirDial, which is a very unique solution on its own and a huge opportunity with a tailwind, copper line replacement. We also have 2600Hz, which the other UCaaS providers do not really have, which is a unique platform. We think it is very flexible and able to provide a very flexible solution to carriers alike. We are very differentiated.
All right. We hit zero, so I think that should call it. Thank you. Thanks for asking questions today.
Thank you.
Appreciate it. Thanks for breaking.
Thank you.