Perfect Corp. (PERF)
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15th Annual LD Micro Invitational 2025

Apr 10, 2025

Alice H. Chang
CEO, Perfect Corp.

Asks or try to find the right product for their skincare, not only male or female, but even men today. It's very difficult to understand because things get very personalized. You know, everybody's just got a different type of needs for different products. It becomes a barrier for consumers to do their own shopping. Just one second. Can we turn off the—

I'm sorry.

It's a little bit distracting.

No, you're great.

Maybe it's a bit too early for party time. Thank you. Today, our company has two main business models between the B2B and the B2C. As of last year, 60% of our revenue came in from the B2C segments, and 40% from the B2B. The B2B is a very traditional SaaS model, where we license our AI and AR technologies, mostly for virtual try-ons, to be placed in the retailers or retail environment. I'll share with you some success stories and videos in a moment. The revenue is mostly recurring subscription where the enterprise subscribes to these services typically on a yearly basis. We have a subscriber retention rate , of over 90-95%, on average. On the B2C side is what people call the premium model.

We operate a family of six to seven different mobile apps on the App Store where people can download the app for free to be unlocked for the premium feature for the first seven days. After the seven days, if they like the product, they can unlock with a premium subscription. Typically, subscription is about $39 a year or $5 a month. Those are photo apps, video apps, and I can now show you in a moment. Starting from the B2B, one of the biggest achievements we have accomplished in this company in the last 10 years is being able to win the trust of these big logos in the beauty sector. Now we serve up to 730 brands on our platforms. Most, majority of them are beauty brands. You see many of these big logos that you might be familiar with.

These are our long-time, yearly contract customers. In the platform that we have built, every quarter there's a new collection of beauty products that comes to market. The beauty brands are using our platform to digitize these products and offer that as a virtual product that people can try. Accumulated, you have now over 822,000 beauty products that people can try virtually. This makes this the biggest AR beauty product database in the world. Here, I'll give you a bit of a twin, to show you how the progress was. Suddenly, it wasn't easy. It always started really difficult from one, two, three. Once you get into the scale and management, it becomes unstoppable. On the left-hand side, you see the number of brands that are on our platforms quarter to quarter. Last reporting quarter in the last year, we had 732.

You know, for the last few years, the CAGR had around 23, and it grows. It is almost very organically that every quarter now, because we are number one brand in this segment, that a brand of either size, big or small, that comes on this platform, on average, about 20-30, and we increase every quarter. On the right-hand side, you see the number of SKU, which is also important because when we charge the customers, they are mainly based on three different things. How many services they license. We have a family of, you know, 1,000 if not more of these SaaS services. They may start with more modules, but then they upgrade sales over time. As any SaaS company would do, they try to sell them more services. The second is, try to deploy in more countries.

Typically, they'll pick a particular country in mind and then expand to a continent or expand eventually to global scale. When they do that, and most of these clients are multinationals, when they do that, our service charges for that as well. The number of SKU that they have on the platform, as I mentioned, on the right-hand side. Another great news to share with you that happened just recently, we completed our first strategic acquisition in January. We acquired Wannaby from Farfetch. Wannaby is, similar to us, but they only operate the B2B segment for fashion, especially for shoes and bags. This has been the area that we have been considering to expand, organically. We had the opportunity to acquire this asset from Farfetch.

Farfetch went through some restructuring, and they were trying to dislodge from this segment of the asset because they are much more ready as a vendor rather than a technology company. We found we are really becoming the ultimate powerhouse on this segment, not only covering beauty but also refashioning. What does it mean? WANNA was founded in 2018. It's around 30 professionals, and they serve, kind of adjust the industry to us. Mostly, as you can see here, the big logos are on the fashion brands. We are now incorporating that into our platform, as of now. Here, you use a bit of idea. On the left-hand side is what Perfect Corp as it was prior to the acquisition. This includes AR makeup to try on jewelry.

You see the lady, she's trying to make a look on her face, including virtually, but it looks super real. The earring that she's wearing is actually created virtually. We can actually use smartphones for the skin analysis or try different accessories. On the right-hand side, you can see the complementary solution that was acquired for the Wannaby acquisition, based on the shoes. It's very cool. They can try different sneakers, different types of shoes, different high boots, open heels, and others, and then scarves and bags. These all facilitate and help e-commerce. One of the biggest friction for e-commerce is people want to try it, and, you know, if you can't deliver sample, it's too costly. Having AR technology helped it in a great way. The synergy between these two companies, again, the product will expand it beyond just the traditional beauty.

There's a huge synergy in the business because now there's opportunities to cross-sales between the different client groups and, of course, brand intelligence. So Wannaby, it's about 30 people. They are all located in Europe, between Portugal and Lithuania. And so now we have a bigger presence in Europe as well. Moving on to B2C apps. This is what I call the franchise of the YouCam apps. These are the families of apps under the YouCam brand. The hero product are the first two, YouCam Makeup and YouCam Perfect. These two are generating the majority of the revenue for the B2C subscriptions, while the other is also starting to contribute part of the revenue. Here are just some highlights of what this product does. YouCam Makeup is your personal AI makeup artist.

It incorporates so many of these recent AI features that people can either retouch the photo. They can try different styles. They can try different hairstyles, different. More recently, we see a lot of young people very bit obsessed about, you know, face reshaping, body tuning, and all these features. The YouCam Perfect, YouCam Makeup is about 80-90% female audience. There's no surprise there. YouCam Perfect is a little bit more balanced. It's about 60/40, 60% female and 40%. I think men are also starting to take a lot of photos. You can apply different features, and have different, you know, generative AI like LLMs and other functionalities. One thing that we track very closely is how we monetize these apps. As I explained in the beginning, it's through a subscription.

We pay a lot of attention in terms of how much we can convert these users into paying subscribers. As of our last reporting quarter, we achieved a historical high, just a little bit over a million active subscribers. Again, those are paying, you know, about $39 a year or $5 a month. About 90% of the paying users are opting for the ad component. This is a high-frequency used product. You take a photo almost every day. Either they stay with the free with very limited features or they go with the full version, only two basis. We are seeing good headway, you know, for the last quarter in this segment. Going more into the product, the time's limited, so I'll jump real quick in here.

We infused AI and video at the very beginning in 2015, way before anybody thought about it. As a matter of fact, we were not the first company to do virtual trial. There were many other companies before us that did, but they all kind of failed to deliver, the quality, the precision, or the makeup. Because they were not using artificial intelligence technology, right? Back in 2015, we were one of the very pioneers. That was a time when our developers were looking at, if you all remember, AlphaGo and, you know, how AI was coming with deep learning. We started to challenge, how can AI help e-commerce, right? That was kind of the early, task.

We noticed that, you know, if we'd be able to use AI to track moving objects in the video very nicely, very well, and recognize those objects, we might be able to create a better experience for virtual trial. That is how we did with virtual product, virtual trial for makeup back in 2015. Since then, about every two years, the model gets upgraded. More recently, you know, you know about large language models and other generative AI, which get incorporated into our families of services. Again, repeating myself a bit here, we offer a complete line of beauty AI services, anything from makeup to skincare to nail, nail tutorials and others. The other big part of the B2B product is the skin AI. Consumers also spend a lot of money for, you know, wellness and personal beauty.

We offered, you know, the world's first HD skin analysis just using a smartphone or using an iPad instead of a huge medical device, which is bulky. More and more of these smaller, maybe sometimes long-tail shops are also starting to adopt this technology when engaging with the consumers. The service has been medically graded, trained with medically graded images, verified by dermatologists. For the fashion part, it's anything from earrings to watch glasses, rings and more. I will show you how this is using real work. The first example I'll show you here is how WANNA is using us in their apps. If you go to WANNA and you go to shop for beauty products, they start trying on options in there. Right?

If you have a browsing product, you can turn on the camera, and directly from there, your face starting on the camera, and you can, you know, the daily she's swiping left and right, and the color of the shape of the lipstick is changing. She can try this right after. It's just a much better experience than just looking at the photo of the product, right, or a sample image of a model. You want to try that on your face to see that match your style, that match your skin tone. We launched this about two years ago. We want to continue to expand it. Another example is how Amazon utilizes us. This is for our technology for manicure, for nails, for hands. If you go to Amazon, and this is a brand called Avivos, you can try virtual manicure.

Again, the AI will detect the tips of your hand, your fingers, or your nails, and then overlay instantaneously in real time different styles they can try. This is something we just launched last week, Sephora. Sephora is putting analysis technology into the app. When you go to Sephora and you try to understand better your skin, it just takes you a few seconds to take a scan of your face. Then based on different parameters, it is linked actually to the inventory system at the back end. Sephora will recommend to you what is the product for your skin. About for more than five years now. Here, for example, the Pro Max Cosmetic was branded under a sale group, right? Consumers can just, with one tap, try all the products in other ones.

You can even have the tutorials, right? Once it is finding your style, the second thing is learning the techniques, the different layers, the different colors, how to match that. We use AR technology to accomplish that. These are just other examples of how we are doing stuff for watches, and then how is the media format, right? Here, for example, you see here from Gucci and Adidas, not only watching, browse, video ads on your browsing, but now the experience is you turn on the camera, right? You know, this lady's doing that right now there in the left. Now she's trying that product directly from the media. If she likes it, she taps a shop now and takes her to Alpha to Sephora to wherever she wants to buy.

The middle one, you see the technology working for your twist. That works for watches, that works for jewelry, for bracelets, and other technology, other products. We also have a great partnership with different tech giants. All these big logos that you see there, they are using our technology. Google uses us in YouTube and Google Search when it comes to beauty product virtual trial. When you are on Google Search and you try to search, for example, a bag twist, twist it, it does not only give you the review or what you like or the price about it. Now you also have the option to virtually try it on directly from Google Search. That technology is powered by Perfect. Snap is one of our strategic investors, invested now in the Series C and then did a follow-up on the IPO.

As well as Alibaba . Alibaba was our biggest investor in the Series B within a year ago. We have a solution for. Last year, we did just $60 million in earnings, about 12. The quarter four, the last quarter was about 12. Always try to, you know, solutions that we see now today on mobile devices is so good that, you know, the opportunity is for us to grab. The third one, again, going through the acquisition of Wannaby, we're expanding into the fashion and jewelry AI. This is, again, expanding to new type of clients, from Switzerland, from Italy, from the US as well. On the B2C side, there's a huge momentum going on with rollout. Our app about once every three weeks.

Every three weeks, there's something new that comes into the app, and mostly, I would say, all of new apps, all new features these days are B2C generated AI type of apps. This is where we are to bring that and then roll out very quickly to the market. Then continue to look for synergetic and many opportunities, you know, something that I understand, kind of just into our business, something that will be a selling for your growth, from acquisition rather than just organically. With that, you know, that's my quick intro. Obviously, we have five minutes, you know, for any Q&A and question that you should answer. Thank you.

Yes, sir. Just a question of the month. Any impact tariffs?

Yes, I was expecting that one. We are in a software IP license, which luckily is not subject to any tariff as our own business itself. However, our client are mostly beauty companies, which are mostly global, means they do a lot of import and export. They manufacture here. They're selling there. We do expect that these tariffs will eventually hit them, right? If that will happen, that means that their gross margin probably goes down. That might limit their spending in innovations, or they might start cost-cutting in other places just to have better margins. Certainly, you know, there's no sense of optimism at this moment, right? We kind of very briefly on and working with our clients. Frankly speaking, they don't really know too much what's going to happen, especially some of our clients.

They do a lot of business in China, and that would be a problem because, you know, they are going to export, they typically export products to China. What we saw in the news, that would probably be severely affected. We will wait to see. I'm in New York this week to meet with some of our clients as well to listen to what they have to say. But, you know, as part of our core business, it's not much affected, especially the B2C part, which is 60% of the revenue. Certainly not affected because these are just online media consumptions.

I think what I have correctly are your EBITDA, which is not something you disclose. Looks like it's in close to $11 million. Is that mean you're trading at 1.9 EBITDA?

No, I don't think our EBITDA is at $11 million. One of the things are, you know, we still have a lot of cash, so it's not a surprise that we, a lot of our net income comes from interest, right? I think if we calculate EBITDA, typically we move interest from that. Then our EBITDA, I think it's about $1 million, if I remember right. Again, the market, I don't think they appreciate so much with so much cash. EBITDA value sometimes is only when you come in with such big, large cash. It was partially raised on the IPO proceeds, but even before that, because the cash flow was in positive for many years, we think either we're bringing more cash in there.

From inflation and everything that happened in the last two, three years, I was kind of wanted to wait a little bit before the big booms, right? The cash is there, you know, waiting for the opportunity to be borrowed. Certainly, as you know, as you probably hear from many companies along today that everybody was thinking, you know, they are on the value. We have seen the same way.

I think I saw the gross margin drop from 86 to 74. Was EBITDA?

Yes, it was increased on the B2C. Percent. Previous year, the B2B was slightly below 55%. As this part of the ratio has been changing quite substantially in the last two years, our profit margin has been dropping. I don't expect to go much lower than 78% or 74% now because, you know, in most cases, it's really 70%, right? There's no other cost that we pay inside the Apple. Apple is just for iOS. Talk about this, you know, the big majority come from iOS devices, but they still continue to be done on a more dominant market in 2025. There's no more questions. Thank you for attending.

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