Sangoma Technologies Corp Q2 FY2025 Earnings Call

Thank you for your patience. This is the conference operator. Welcome to the Sangoma Investor’s Conference Call. This conference is being recorded. I will now hand the floor to Samantha Reburn, Chief Legal Officer. Please go ahead, Ms. Reburn.

Thank you, Operator. Hello, everyone, and welcome to Sangoma's Second Quarter Fiscal Year 2025 Investor Call. We are recording the call, and we will make it available on our website for anyone who is unable to join us live. I'm here today with Charles Salameh, Sangoma's Chief Executive Officer, Jeremy Wubs, Chief Operating and Marketing Officer, and Larry Stock, Chief Financial Officer. Charles will provide a high-level overview of the quarter. Jeremy and Larry will then take you through the operating results for the second quarter of fiscal year 2025 which ended on December 31, 2025. Following their presentation, we will open up the floor for Q&A with the analysts. We will discuss the press release that was distributed earlier today, together with the company's financial statements and MD&A, which are available on SEDAR+, EDGAR, and our website. As a reminder, Sangoma reports under International Financial Reporting Standards, IFRS. And during the call, we may refer to terms such as adjusted EBITDA, which is a non-IFRS measure that is defined in our MD&A. Before we start, I'd like to remind you that the statements made during the course of this call that are not purely historical are forward-looking statements regarding the company or management's intentions, estimates, plans, expectations, and strategies for the future. Because such statements deal with future events, they are subject to various risks and uncertainties, and actual results may differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements are discussed in the accompanying MD&A, our annual information form, and the company's annual audited financial statements posted on SEDAR+, EDGAR and our website. With that, I'll hand the call over to Charles.

Thanks, Sam. We appreciate you all taking the time to join us today and for your continued interest in and support of Sangoma. I'm pleased to share our Q2 FY 2025 performance. Our focus remains unwavering, and we're fully committed to driving sustainable, profitable growth and delivering long-term value to our shareholders, clients, and our partners. It's been 14 months since we began this transformational journey, and I'm proud of the tremendous effort and the results the team has achieved during this time. This journey has deepened our understanding of the viability and profitability of our various product lines, particularly in Q2. This knowledge has enabled us to refine our strategies, prioritize our investments aligned with our core business and our growth objectives, while increasing profitability and free cash flow. Our vision has always been to position Sangoma as a highly innovative communications platform company, delivering high-margin recurring revenue streams. This quarter, with our financial position strengthening faster than anticipated, as Larry will describe, we are accelerating our efforts to build on this foundation. Our FY 2025 priorities have shifted accordingly, reflecting a stronger focus on core business alignment and long-term growth investments. Since launching our go-to-market transformation in May of 2024, our efforts were heavily weighted towards transactional non-recurring product revenue to drive customer acquisitions and to create the cross-sell and up-sell opportunities. Simultaneously, we have been building momentum in larger, more profitable recurring revenue deals, which tend to have longer sales cycles, while also refining our partner ecosystem to support these long-term goals. We have leading indicators that Jeremy will discuss later on that support the MRR momentum and strategy, although it is taking a little longer than anticipated. One area of our business that is under review is our third-party hardware resell business. While not core to our long-term strategy, it provided an opportunity to expand our client base, particularly in the federal government sector and provide some improved top-line growth. Entering fiscal 2025, we had expected to leverage the award of a GSA Certificate, which essentially allows companies to sell products and services to the U.S. Federal government to establish the groundwork for future recurring revenue streams within the U.S. Federal government. However, recent shifts in government spending and administrative processes have created a lot of uncertainty in this segment, not just for us, but for many other industry players that serve this market. For example, a nearly $1 million U.S. Federal government opportunity, which we were well positioned to secure, was placed on hold in December of 2024. This uncertainty was reinforced with further executive orders by the new administration to freeze all government hires, sending a clear signal that the spending patterns had dramatically changed. In Q2, in this area of our business, it declined by $1.2 million compared to Q1, excluding the $361,000 that rolled over from the previous quarter. While the remainder of our business was beginning to show signs of sequential quarter-over-quarter growth, we now see limited potential for the third-party hardware resale segment to contribute meaningfully to our FY 2025 growth objectives. Rather than pursuing lower margin hardware sales to offset this decline, which we could have, we chose to realign our efforts and more importantly, our SG&A investments towards high-value opportunities within our core business. By prioritizing emerging mid-market opportunities and high margin recurring revenue streams, we are positioning Sangoma for long-term success along with the core strategies we have discussed previously. Building on the momentum from Q1, we continue to make meaningful progress into Q2 across key go-to-market initiatives. These efforts, which include expanding accounts, securing new logos, and closing larger strategic deals, are driving measurable results and reinforcing our commitment to long-term growth. This quarter, we further increased our investment in CRM and ERP systems, process automation, and competency rescaling, all of which are nearing completion and already delivering clear benefits. Operational efficiency has improved significantly with strong cash conversions, cash from operations, while client satisfaction and NPS scores have reached new record highs. Additionally, churn rates have seen a remarkable improvement dropping back to below 0.95%, a significant improvement from our 1.1 a quarter ago and back in line with historical averages. This not only reflects the growing strength of our client relationships but also validates the focus of our transformational efforts towards securing long-term recurring revenue streams. We've also reached key financial milestones well ahead of schedule, successfully achieving our fiscal year end debt target of $55 million to $60 million. This enhanced financial flexibility enables us to take bold strategic actions, expediting the divestiture of non-core assets while efficiently allocating capital to continue bringing down our debt. These processes are already in motion, and we are excited to move forward. As we discussed in previous calls, the divestment of non-core assets should have a significant positive impact on our profitability, enhancing both gross margin and EBITDA margin, while creating new opportunities for innovation through both build and buy strategies. As a result, we are making the deliberate decision to adjust our year-end revenue guidance to reflect the strategic shift away from transactional lower margin third-party hardware resale and an acceleration of our investment in our core business and strengthening the profitability of Sangoma. This move aligns with our long-term focus on investing in high-margin recurring revenue opportunities and optimizing the quality of our revenue streams. While this adjustment impacts top-line revenue expectations, our overall profitability outlook remains unchanged, and all other metrics remain at or ahead of plan. These actions underscore our focus and unwavering commitment to driving sustainable, profitable growth. Before handing it over to Jeremy, I want to reiterate our strategic priorities as we continue to evolve the business and align with our long-term goals. First, expanding our portfolio through acquisitions and potential divestitures, which are already underway and aligned to our core platform. Second, driving organic growth within our existing partner ecosystems and new partners. Third, prioritizing high-margin recurring revenue solutions in key verticals, such as healthcare, education, and distributed enterprise. Fourth, optimizing operations to deliver record efficiency and client satisfaction. Finally, maintaining disciplined financial management to navigate the macroeconomic and political uncertainties, while ensuring flexibility for future opportunities. By staying focused on these priorities, we are confident in our ability to drive and deliver greater value to our stakeholders and position Sangoma for its next phase of growth and value creation. Now I'll hand over to Jeremy to discuss the quarter in more detail.

Thank you, Charles. I'm happy to share today's update on our operational progress. We continue to see positive trends in our KPIs across our core product categories, and this gives us confidence that the underlying growth engine is building in the right strategic areas. When Charles and I joined in late 2023, Sangoma was a company that had grown through 11 acquisitions. We knew we needed to build a scalable foundation, focusing on our MRR services to drive profitable growth. It took us time to evaluate and restructure how each of the product lines fits within our ecosystem. We mapped out product roadmaps and assessed the viability and profitability of each. The 11 product lines were consolidated into six main lines, two of which make up our core essential communications platforms and two that are value-added pieces that support our strategy. The remaining two lines serve complementary customers but we consider them peripheral to our long-term plans and business model. Our highest margin revenue comes from our MRR-driven communications platforms, including UCaaS, CCaaS, and CPaaS technologies that we deliver through hybrid and cloud solutions. We are focusing our investments here and continue to innovate through new AI-powered services that target industry verticals like enhanced conversational interaction voice response for the restaurant industry and patient relationship management systems for healthcare. In Q2, we continue to make steady progress on the key performance indicators discussed last quarter, showing our growing traction within the mid-market enterprise. In our large deal pipeline, we saw a 6% increase in the number of deals with over $10,000 MRR created in Q2 versus Q1. Improving the mix, 75% of the $10,000 deals were UCaaS versus 60% in Q1 and 55% in Q4. Normalized churn, as Charles pointed out, our churn rate has returned to historically low levels below 0.95%. And our revenue split, 83% of our revenues are from business services and 17% from product sales. Finally, our NPS scores, our net promoter scores, are up 150%, the quarterly average net promoter since we started to measure this in Q4 FY 2024. The second piece of our MRR offerings is our infrastructure platforms, which includes services like SIP trunking. Two years ago, this area was underinvested and stagnant, but we've since revitalized it. Our infrastructure platform is a high-margin business for us, and revenue has grown by more than 10% in the first half of fiscal 2025 over the prior year. Our recurring business areas are now seeing momentum with larger, more sophisticated opportunities, and this gives us confidence that our strategy is working, but the growth takes longer, as these MRR deals have sales cycles of up to 6 to 12 months. Additionally, we have two value-added pieces to our portfolio that provide higher margin MRR while complementing our platform strategy. One is Open Source solutions. We are proud of our role as the primary developer and sponsor of the Asterisk platform and FreePBX project, the world's most widely used Open Source communication software. We provide on-prem and cloud solutions to support these large communities, and we focus on modernizing this business with new cloud-ready software releases and modern new SKS features like transcription. Second is Sangoma’s hardware with premise PBX and analog VoIP gateways. Developed in-house, this is a high-margin product revenue that supports our end-to-end solution strategy, which is a vital value add for customers in key sectors like healthcare, hospitality, and education. Together, these four product lines are our highest margin generating assets, forming both the core and value-added communications platform solutions. The remaining segments are access and managed services and our third-party product resell. One provides MRR, the other provides NRR, which we consider preferable to our long-term strategy and business model. As Charles mentioned earlier, our ongoing system upgrades are on track for April, and we will enable unified quoting, cross-selling, and billing through our new ERP system. With this strong foundation in place, we are in a much better position to scale. I hope this provides more context about our strategic decisions, the foundation we have built, where we are seeing progress, and why we remain confident we are on the right path. With that, I'll now turn it over to Larry to provide an update on the financial results for the quarter. Larry, over to you.

Thank you, Jeremy, and welcome, everyone. We appreciate you joining us for today's call. Last quarter, I discussed some of the key metrics that I monitor to track our financial health and drive our strategic execution. These include metrics such as net cash provided by operating activities, working capital and cash conversion, net debt, revenue, consistent gross profit and gross profit margin, and adjusted EBITDA dollars and percentage. In Q2, we tracked to or ahead of our plan across nearly all metrics, despite the challenges in our third-party resale business that Charles mentioned earlier. Cash performance remained a key highlight during the second quarter. We generated $11.9 million in net cash from operating activities, a 30% increase over the prior year period. Fiscal year to date, net cash from operating activities reached $24 million representing a 41% increase over the prior year. Our cash conversion from EBITDA once again exceeded 100% due to effective working capital management. We converted 118% of our adjusted EBITDA in Q2 into cash flow, up from 88% conversion in the same period last year. In Q2, we generated an additional $1.1 million in net positive changes to working capital, building upon the $3 million generated in the first quarter. This was driven by positive $2.3 million from collected trade and other receivables, plus $0.7 million from inventory. Thanks to our strong cash flow generation, we have continued on our accelerated debt reduction schedule, retiring another $8.7 million in total debt during the second quarter. This enabled us to effectively reach our target debt position of $55 million to $60 million two quarters ahead of schedule. By the end of the second quarter, our net debt decreased to $43.3 million from $52.4 million at the end of the first quarter, resulting in a trailing 12-month net debt to adjusted EBITDA ratio of about 1.03x from 1.23x in the first quarter. We will continue on our cash allocation methodology of paying down debt. By reducing net debt alone, we are creating value for our equity holders. It also allows us to move into the next phase of our transformation. We can now speed up our exit from non-core activities and concentrate our investments on our more profitable monthly recurring revenue platforms. Furthermore, our strong cash flow and debt capacity should allow us to increase growth and scale through acquisitions. Moving on to the P&L. Revenue for the second quarter of fiscal 2025 was $59.1 million representing a decline of $1 million from the first quarter. The sequential decline resulted from a $1.2 million decrease in third-party product resales, while the remainder of our business grew sequentially quarter over quarter. Gross profit was $40.5 million. We maintained gross margin at 68% of revenue, the same level as the first quarter, by not pursuing low-margin revenue at the expense of profitability. Similarly, compared to the first quarter, adjusted EBITDA improved by 3% to $10.1 million while adjusted EBITDA margin improved from 16% to 17% of revenue despite the decline in top line. Our decision to accelerate strategic alternatives has led to our changes regarding guidance. We are advancing our core platform strategy through a focused strategic realignment that should strengthen our business fundamentals, delivering clear improvements in both gross profit margin and adjusted EBITDA margins over time despite lower projected revenue in fiscal '25. For fiscal '25, we are lowering our revenue guidance range to $235 million to $240 million from $250 million to $260 million, while our adjusted EBITDA guidance range remains at 17% of revenue and is being revised to $40 million to $42 million from $42 million to $46 million. As you can see from these numbers, the net effect of lower revenue for the second half of the fiscal year has had a relatively small impact on adjusted EBITDA, and adjusted EBITDA margin is expected to improve. We firmly believe that these are the correct actions to accelerate our path towards our next phase of growth and value creation. Looking ahead, as we focus on core assets, we expect to shift towards a model with over 85% recurring revenue, gross margins near 80%, and adjusted EBITDA margins approaching 20%. As always, we thank the men and women of Sangoma around the world whose hard work and dedication shows up every single day. That concludes our prepared remarks. Operator, let's open up the call for some Q&A.

The first question comes from Gavin Fairweather with Cormark. Please go ahead.

Hey, good afternoon.

Hey, Gavin.

I wanted to start out on your partner program and the launch of the new Pinnacle Partner Program. I think that was officially launched in November. Maybe you can just discuss how you've designed that program to ultimately drive more sales into you, and then also what you're hearing in terms of feedback and what you're seeing on acceptance of that new program in your partner network?

That's a great question, Gavin. I mean, our partner show program is really about building intimacy and trust with our key partners, right? We've got partner tiers and programs. And obviously, we want our partners at the top of that tier, which means close, intimate relationships, which means us bringing them leads, them bringing us leads, and building really a sustainable, repeatable committed program with them, wrapping extra marketing support, driving customer events. And I'd say we're seeing really good success with those partners. A lot of it is focused, probably not surprisingly, around some of our UCaaS assets or CX assets, those high-margin product lines that are important to us. Our goal is to move our partners up those tiers, right, to get them to do more business with them to benefit from incremental discounts and margin and marketing investments that help them to be excited about bringing us new business. So we've seen good momentum with it. We're excited about it. It's still early days, but it's really helping to build that pipeline.

Yes. I'll just add a couple of comments to that. Gavin, the whole idea of the partner program, I mean, the title is Pinnacle. You can name anything you want. But the idea is really about partner segmentation. And as we get into more of these solutions that have a lot of generic natures to them, a lot of these customers' partners have been selling components as we get into more bundles. These partners are looking for ways to penetrate value through these bundles. The Pinnacle program allows our partners to work with us, in some cases, at the top of the Pinnacle program, co-developing opportunities within very specific segments and industry verticals that we could penetrate and go deeply with. For that, we're getting some very strong support. We've got partners who have lined up. We've got specialties in areas like hospitality or MDUs, healthcare, education, who really want to work with us to develop solutions with our portfolio and what they bring to the table to co-develop solutions for their end customers, which create higher MRRs for them, higher commissions for them, and higher commissions for us or MRR for us. And they're really seeing this as a proactive attempt to try and go after very specific industry verticals using their expertise within these verticals. These partners are no longer seeing us as another generic flavor of UCaaS or CPaaS or what have you. The program allows them to specialize in these areas and allows us to go deeper in the industry vertical segments, which is where I think all the value lies, is turning this technology into contextually meaningful solutions for these industry verticals and spoken in a language they can understand. These partners are really coming forward with both the combination of an industry focus that we're placing and the fact that we have a replacement for what the market has been doing with traditional players in the prem markets compared to what we have at Sangoma.

That's very helpful. And next for me, on the services line, you referenced a drop in churn, but we did see a bit of a decline sequentially this quarter. So maybe you can help me reconcile those statements. Curious if the dip was tied to maybe some earlier churn and stability has improved?

Well, look, in my statements and basically what's been going on, I think we're about two or three quarters ahead in our financial strength of the company. Therefore, two, three quarters ahead in our inorganic growth. If you go back to my Q1 or Q4, I told you we're going to grow the company three ways, inorganically, organically, and through geographic expansion. I think we're about two or three quarters behind in some of the organic activities in terms of getting that stimulated. We're seeing great KPIs. We believe that segment is going to come back. The organic growth is going to begin to produce results. And so what we've done is we decided, look, let's just double down on accelerating the organic growth, moving away from some of the lower-margin transactional products that have had sort of more immediate revenue. As a result, you're going to see a little bit of a change in the way the financials have come out this quarter. But we think that this is an opportunity for us to, given our financial strength and the accelerated position of our balance sheet, to really accelerate the inorganic engine of the company and really sort of push on the core strategies where we're starting to see some momentum and also starting to see some demand. And to aggressively pursue that, the inorganic element plays a very important role in accelerating that organic engine, and that's how we sort of decided to make that decision this quarter.

Last quarter, Gavin, we saw an increase sort of quarter over quarter in our larger deal pipeline. I talked about that on last quarter's call. Same thing kind of through this quarter, 6% increase, I mentioned earlier, in large deals. The challenge, as Charles mentioned, the sales cycles are long, right? So it's six to twelve months before we start to see that pick up. So what you're seeing is we've got a little bit of time still because of the sales cycle and even implementation cycle before we start to see that kind of sell through and push the services line up.

That's helpful color. And then on the premise PBX business, are you what are you seeing after the NEC kind of announcement that they're exiting the business? Are you seeing additional partners coming to Sangoma? Any share gains in that space? What are you seeing on that side?

We're seeing partners come to Sangoma. It takes a little bit of a while to kind of get certified and trained in our platform, getting used to it. We're seeing more quotes, it's similar, like we're seeing the quote and the activity. We're starting to see a little bit of those results flow through. It just takes a little bit of time for those partners to get comfortable with the new platform, get trained, get certified, and kind of get out selling. We think we'll see similar things. We think there's some other partners or other technology vendors similar to NEC who will be sort of backing out of the market a little bit and we see more opportunity there coming.

Yes, I'll just reinforce that we've had a couple of partners that we will announce as we progress through the quarter. These partners are focused on specialization within particular NEC verticals to create meaningful solutions for specific industries. Some of these partners are starting to understand our efforts to take our Essential Communications platform and tailor it to a particular vertical. They are coming forward, especially in education. We currently have a partner interested in collaborating with us on the premise side, who has lost their NEC partner and is now aiming to target school boards on the East Coast of the United States. These engagements are starting to thrive, as Jeremy mentioned. However, it will take some time to finalize sales, execute, and convert these into revenue over the next few quarters. Partners are stepping up with both the focus on industry that we are emphasizing and the fact that we offer an alternative to what traditional players have been providing in the premise markets, compared to what we have at Sangoma.

Helpful. And then maybe lastly are you anticipating any kind of impact on working capital where we notice it at all in the financials? And maybe if you could discuss how we should think about the one-time expenses trailing off?

Sure, Kevin. Good question. So we're tracking to what we've said throughout the year at about $2.1 million in total ERP costs. You're seeing that in the adjusted EBITDA number. We're not excluding it when we talk about it. We're tracking to that. We're on track for an April go-live. We will certainly see some efficiencies from that. We've not yet modeled all of that out completely, so I won't talk about it in any more detail right now. But we'll certainly see efficiencies from both time and cost as we move that forward. But we are tracking time-wise and dollar-wise, we're very happy about that.

Great. I'll pass on. Thank you.

Thanks, Gavin.

The next question comes from David Kwan with TD Cowen. Please go ahead.

Hey, guys. Just want to get a better understanding of the decision on the low-margin hardware resale. So I assume you're talking about VoIP supply. Are you looking to kind of wind it down or are you maybe looking to try to sell it? And what are the other low-margin noncore product lines that you're looking to deemphasize?

So I guess I'll start in general. It's not just VoIP supply. We think there are several units this company came out of 11 acquisitions over seven years. I've been talking a lot about that. Over the course of the last 14 months, we brought those divisions together into really six lines of business that we're going to be talking a lot more about. Just through that, we've got to understand the various business model structures between NRR type businesses, MRR type businesses, the profit profiles of those, the revenue profiles of those, and how they all fit into the core strategy. This is not just about one division. This is about what I've been talking about for almost a year now is that at some point, as we get into the integration, we get to the core of the company, and we understand where the sustainable long-term profitable growth is going to come from, we can make decisions about the divestiture and acquisition strategies that would sit on top of an integrated organization that has a full CRM and a full ERP. The original plan was that we would use some of the short-term MRR business, particularly in the back of a GSA certification, which was an award that we were given to operate within the federal government of the United States to sell hardware because we had the capacity to do so. It was an established division. Obviously, after the elections, and certainly with the pause on a major deal that we've been well-suited to get, we decided there's no purpose to go after this. The federal government is under a lot of uncertainty right now. I'm not betting on this side of the business. The SG&A and the investments that I was going to put into this side of the business to capture that revenue, because it doesn't come free, you've got to go and invest in it. We decided to pull back that incremental investment to go after this incremental NRR business and move it towards the core platforms to accelerate our growth in the core area of the high-margin business. That's sort of how we're looking at it. And now we're basically sustaining this business. We're not winding it down; we're just sustaining it. We're looking at options on what we can do with this business. But what I'm not doing is continuing to double down on investment to go after lower-margin revenue for the cost of just hitting top-line revenue. If the federal government business was there and it was going to grow and it was something I could count on, and I would have put the money into it, we would have got the top-line revenue. We would have used that as a base to maybe upsell and cross-sell. But given the uncertainty of the federal government business right now, it's hard to make any decisions going forward. Given our accelerated financial strength, we've decided to put our money towards the core business. We're seeing KPIs showing up there, and we're seeing deal sizes getting bigger. We think we can take the company towards 80% plus or more profit, given where we are right now at 68% to 70%. This is the right thing to do for the company. It does have an impact on top-line revenue, but it's part of the plan, David, I've been talking about for some time. I think when I came and talked to you guys at TD Bank, I'd told you that I had a bunch of assets in my portfolio that I may or may not pull out and decide to sell. We have the option, given the strength of our balance sheet right now, to make some of those plays earlier than we anticipated, and we're taking that bold option to do so.

I'd just add one quick comment, Dave, too. I mentioned it earlier. We have these six product lines. Two of them kind of fall into this category. What's good about it is we've already organized it and optimized it, right? So, it's efficient. It's a very well-run product line, all six of the ones that we have. So, they're attractive to lots of audiences in the industry. So, it's we're not at the beginning of the process. We haven't evaluated the 11 acquisitions, categorized them to 6. We've done the categorization. We've optimized and organized them. Now it's about being definitive on where we want to go next and how do we drive the most profit and benefit for our shareholders.

No, that makes sense, guys. I appreciate the color there. Obviously, a lot of talk about tariffs right now, even if they're put on hold at least for Canada in particular, for at least a month here. Can you talk about maybe what you guys are doing to mitigate the potential impact if the tariffs do get implemented or potentially increase?

Sure. We believe that the impact of the proposed tariffs would be relatively immaterial. We didn't see much impact from the Chinese tariffs in the past. We have sufficient inventory to support the current business for the next several quarters, and we also have so many options to ship manufacturing to optimize and reduce our exposure. We've got inventory already in the U.S. and many options to make sure that we can do that with minimal to no impact.

That's helpful. So, are you guys looking to maybe try to accelerate getting more inventory into the U.S. while there's, I guess, less tariffs coming out of Asia in particular? And can you talk about where your contract manufacturers are based?

So our contract manufacturers are based in several locations, some in China and some other locations, which are not subject to tariffs and haven't been talked about. So we don't believe there'll be any impact. We can move that manufacturing fairly quickly from that point of view. We're always looking at inventory. We have sufficient inventory in the U.S. currently that would satisfy what we plan to sell. So we don't expect to see any issues with that. As a point of reference, Vietnam is another facility for us other than China. So we thought about this in the past and really set it up. So we should be fine from that perspective.

That's great. One last question. Obviously, one way I think you can help mitigate that impact of the tariffs is expanding geographically, and you talked about it in the past as well as this call. So maybe can you talk about how that work has gone so far in terms of growing your business outside of the U.S. in particular, which is obviously the vast majority of business? And where you see international revenue potentially getting over the next, call it, three to five years?

Yes. We've seen a performance improvement in the international market. A number of those things have been focused a little bit more on the hardware side of our business. Charles talked earlier around one of the other questions around NEC. Although they've exited the market in the U.S., we've gone pretty aggressively after that business, not just in the U.S., but in other geographies. Some of the analog gateway business, some of the other things I mentioned earlier, those are areas that we've seen growth in. So we've had a stronger year-to-date in international than we have in the past. The kind of question remains, there's still a lot of untapped opportunity in the U.S. So we're going to continue to put a lot of first power and pressure there, particularly on some of the U.K. assets.

Yes. I want to emphasize the strategic aspect of our growth. While we are seeing increases in the international community, including the U.K., India, Asia Pacific, and Korea, it has surprised me how much geographic reach the company has and how we haven’t fully utilized it. We've been primarily focused on internal improvements such as setting up the right ERP, consolidating platforms, implementing CRM systems, enhancing cash flows, and reducing debt. These are essential steps to position the company for sustainable long-term growth with various options. One of those options, as I’ve mentioned, is expanding our international channels. The company is already well-positioned for this, thanks to Jeremy’s efforts in building these markets. Now, with our strong financial position, we are going to consider geographic expansion as a key growth element. The markets in Europe, especially in the U.K., appear very favorable for our solutions. We have the opportunity to look beyond our own borders. Despite current uncertainties in the United States due to geopolitical issues, there are new markets that Sangoma can access, which we have only recently identified. We are starting to see promising progress, especially with Jeremy's focus, resulting in quarter-over-quarter growth and influencing our strategies on executing some of our inorganic options.

That’s great. Thanks, guys.

The next question comes from Mike Latimore with Northland Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

All right, great. Thank you. So you talked a little bit about de-emphasizing some of the transactional revenue and then the pipeline on larger deals is picking up nicely. I guess, when do you see that all kind of balancing out leading to sort of maybe stable sequential growth in services?

I believe we are ahead of schedule by two or three quarters on our inorganic strategy. I want to commend my colleague, Larry, for providing me with the flexibility I requested and doing so ahead of plan. However, we are lagging by two or three quarters on some organic activities, which I attribute to a straightforward issue. We focused on the NRR business due to the Federal Government opportunity we saw, positioning it as short-term recurring revenue. It was an accessible market for us, given our lines of business and portfolio. However, circumstances changed after November, and we're all feeling the impact. It's not just us; I've been in the tech industry for 32 years and have spoken with CEO friends across various tech companies, and they all express similar uncertainties regarding their R&D expenditures, expectations from federal government spending, and future developments. This uncertainty has led us to concentrate on our core business, which may allow us to narrow the lag from two or three quarters to possibly just two. We will keep you informed on our progress.

Yes. Okay. Very good. And then on the, you said the pipeline of larger deals grew 6%, I think, sequentially. What is sort of the average deal size you're looking at now for new logos? And it sounds like it's grown. If it's grown, is it more a seat counter or types of services, number of services?

I think there's a couple of things. When I gave some of those metrics before, I was just talking about deals over $10,000. We're seeing an increase in deals over $10,000, so depending on the customer, the partner, the size varies. There isn't really a clear kind of average, I would say. It again depends on the partner type and customer. We also saw an overall increase in bookings. Bookings were up about 10% this quarter over the previous quarter. So, not just large deal size, overall bookings are up. And then, as I mentioned earlier, our trucking or infrastructure business, that's our lift as well, up 10% the first half of this year over the first half of fiscal last year. I think the challenge for us is, as Charles said, the cycles are long. We're trying to see what we can do to accelerate and refocus this SG&A in a way that will help enhance our growth.

Yes. Okay. And just last one on the channel itself. What are you seeing in terms of the spiffs and the residuals and so forth? Any notable change there the last couple of quarters?

No, I think it's pretty consistent. Everybody is pretty aggressive in the market doing system incentives. There's a bit of a necessary evil. Our strategy, however, we got to play in that space. It's part of the industry, but our strategy is to focus on creating more relevant industry vertical solutions. We've got kind of key partners that we're working with. You saw the press release. We talked about CallMyDoc. We talked about some innovation we're doing in the restaurant space. Those are opportunities for us to go and grab share, create more value for our partners, for our end clients and really to help us to move forward on that acceleration of our services growth. The sort of traditional market stays the same. The way people are behaving, we'll play in that space. But we've got an alternate strategy that's more about value and creating value for our customers and partners, building a more sustainable growth strategy.

Yes. Makes sense. Okay. Thank you.

Thanks, Mike.

The next question comes from Robert Young with Canaccord Genuity. Please go ahead.

Hi, good evening. Just a question on the shift in the guidance. I wanted to understand the if the difference, I guess, is about $17.5 million at the midpoint. Is that entirely the third party? And then I'm a little confused why the guidance for EBITDA margins isn't moving higher. That strikes me as it would be a meaningful shift in the margin structure and the mix shift. Maybe just help me understand that and bridge to that other statement that 85% services and 20% EBITDA margins is the path. Maybe if we just try to flush out those pieces so I understand better.

Yes. So I'll start. The guidance for 25% still includes the revenue from the businesses that we've identified as non-core. As far as not enough where we are in that process, that's included. What we've also said is that the investments we're making in that type of business, we're going to shift that to some of the higher margin kind of business over time. But those cycles take a little bit longer, right? So really, three things went into that revenue guidance, right? We specifically reduced because of the change in the federal government spend. We planned to leverage that GSA license, and we did have a clear line of sight on that. But that changed under the new administration. Second, the decision to accelerate the divestiture of non-core assets and shifting our focus to the higher margin, but that takes a little bit longer. We'll see that show up later on. That's the tie-in really back to what we said future, 80% plus margin and then seeing increased EBITDA margins over time. So in reality, when you put those all together, that's why the future would look like that and why our guidance for this year is where it is.

I get a lot of questions about guidance, Robert, and I get a lot of the analysts asking me all the time, what's the future of Sangoma look like? We adjusted the guidance to shift away from the low-margin business into the high-margin categories in terms of both investments and our expectations. But I'm also giving you a sense of our accelerated M&A strategy, which we now can do because of our position relative to our financial strength. What does the outlook look like for the company? We're building a company that is a core platform player company that will be fundamentally focused on higher-margin, long-term recurring revenue streams that are consistent. That core of our business allows, we believe, allows us to get to a company that is growing at a very consistent rate with recurring revenue streams at over 80% margin. That will come after the work has been done on some of the acceleration work on the M&A side and certainly the refocusing of our attention and SG&A dollars on trying to grab low-margin revenue.

All right. That's very helpful. And when you say path to 20% EBITDA margins, is that something that you're thinking of aligned with all of those pieces, like something that's near-term, like within maybe one year? Or is that more of a longer-term aspirational?

No, it's kind of in line with where we're taking the company and the core business, right? It considers everything, the non-core activities, the accelerated divestitures, all the talk I've been giving you about why I'm doing all this non-sexy work of building proper ERP systems and proper CRM systems that enable automation to occur inside the company, streamline the company, create the efficiencies for scale at a much lower cost point, which then improves our overall EBITDA and gross margin. All of this work is necessary. We're now getting to the point where we're ready to execute all those faster than we anticipated. We thought we were going to need a little bit more time. The shareholders will appreciate high-margin recurring revenue on the foundation of a strong, more efficient company. This should start producing much better margins, much better EBITDA, and a more efficient company as we scale into a high margin recurring revenue business. This shift has happened between November, really after the election, and where we are today.

Okay. And then congrats on getting down to that debt range. That's nice to see. I think you said more M&A, continue to pay down debt. Is there any more you can give us around that? Are you already building a pipeline of M&A? Is that something you can move quickly on? Or should we think about debt just dropping down here in the near term?

No, I think you're going to see both. You are witnessing a very fiscally responsible management team here. Debt will continue to be paid down so we can take advantage of not only our negotiating power with the financial institutions in terms of anything we want to do on the acquisition side. Having a lower debt position helps our interest costs, and we're going to accelerate that element of our growth plan that I launched in the first quarter of this year, which is the inorganic component. As to pipeline, we are actively engaged in discussions right now with various different types of companies. We're looking at various options. We have many options, as I said, in terms of the acquisition side from geographic expansion to adjacent market expansion to buttress type acquisitions to transformative acquisitions because the debt is coming down and will continue to come down while we go through this process of looking for the ideal company that creates shareholder value and fits our core strategy, which we're now crystal clear on. At the same time, the divestiture components of the company will also accelerate, and we're in the process of that. They're underway as well. How they play out over the course of the next couple of quarters will really be defined by the market and the opportunity available to us. But we're not in any major rush to do this. We know we will begin to execute the second arm of our go-to-market transformation, which is inorganic growth.

All right. And maybe one last little one. There was a comment from Cisco that they saw their collaboration segment. They saw a jump in orders, double digits orders, they said. They said it was driven by more focus on Return to the Office. And I think they had some AI product tied to their WebEx suite. I noticed you had an AI release. Are you seeing maybe a little more interest in the market, that same sort of bookings activity? And then I'll pass it back.

Yes. We've definitely seen some more activity. We have a subscription option for what we call Scribe, which is transcription services. We've seen that pop for sure. We haven't necessarily seen a larger pipeline. We've seen more people take up the feature of some of the AI tools like the transcription. So, we are seeing a benefit from it, but not more orders, say larger average order size is probably the best way to put it. The mid-market tends to be a little more bundled in or optional than what Cisco might be seeing in a large market. There's definitely opportunity there, and we're capitalizing on it.

All right. Thanks.

Thank you.

This concludes the question-and-answer session and today's conference call.