PAR Technology Q4 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Quartr
Provided by Quartr
February 28, 2025

There are 13 speakers on the call.

Operator

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the PAR Technology twenty twenty four Fourth Quarter and Year End Financial Results Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen only mode. After the speakers' presentation, there will be a question and answer session.

Speaker 1

You.

Operator

Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded.

Speaker 1

I would now like

Operator

to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Chris Burns, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations and Business Development. Please go ahead.

Speaker 2

Thank you, Daniel. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today for Par Technologies twenty twenty four fourth quarter and year end financial results call. Earlier this morning, we released our Q4 financial results. The earnings release is available on the Investor Relations page of our website at partech.com, where you can also find the Q4 financials presentation as well as in our related Form eight K furnished to the SEC. During our call today, we will reference non GAAP financial measures, which we believe to be useful to investors and exclude the impact of certain items.

Speaker 2

A description and timing of these items along with a reconciliation of non GAAP measures to the most comparable GAAP measures can be found in our earnings release. I'd also like to remind participants this conference call may include forward looking statements that reflect management's expectations based on currently available data. However, actual results are subject to future events and uncertainties. The information on this conference call related to projections or other forward looking statements may be relied upon and subject to the Safe Harbor statement included in our earnings release this morning and in our annual and quarterly filings with the SEC. Finally, I'd like to remind everyone that this call is being recorded and it will be made available for replay via a link available on the Investor Relations section of our website.

Speaker 2

Joining me on the call today is PAR's CEO and President, Savneet Singh and Brian Menar, PAR's Chief Financial Officer. I'd now like to turn the call over to Savneet for the formal remarks portion of the call, which will be followed by general Q and A. Savneet?

Speaker 1

Thanks, Chris, and good morning, everyone. We reported $105,000,000 in revenues in Q4, an increase of more than 50% year over year. Subscription services ARR more than doubled to $276,000,000 from last year and 21% organic growth when compared to Q4 twenty twenty three. Alongside this revenue growth, our non GAAP gross profit grew organically 30% year over year. Adjusted EBITDA came in at $5,800,000 more than doubling the sequential previous quarter, continuing to show the long term margin expansion potential.

Speaker 1

The growth in profitability in the quarter was driven by both operator and engagement cloud. Operator cloud ARR grew organically by 26% in Q4 when compared to the same period last year. ARR for this business unit now totals approximately 117,000,000 including delegates. Operator cloud growth is being driven by increased new customer wins, upsells and bookings from planned relots with existing customers. Par POS signed eight new customer logos in the fourth quarter with all of those new customers selecting multiple products from Par.

Speaker 1

This continues to validate our better together thesis while increasing our LTV per customer meaningfully with no additional cost to acquire. We're excited about the projected velocity for Burger King as well in 2025 across both par POS and par ops. Having recently expanded our partnership with Burger King to include our par ops product line, we're working closely with BK and using Q1 to fine tune the sequencing of rollouts between both products to enable a combined and mutually agreed upon implementation rollout for 2025. We expect significant and accelerated implementations from Q2 onwards. This is an exciting change as it demonstrates our better together thesis working at one of our largest POS customers.

Speaker 1

We currently have approximately 1,500 BK sites in backlog with a robust white space ensuring excellent 2025 visibility and acceleration in potential. While combining a second product to the BK rollout temporary slows our pure POS rollout in Q1, adding a second module dramatically increases our LTV. We would make this trade every time and importantly, a combined rollout is the right thing for franchisees as well. We will never sacrifice customer success for short term gain. Partnership is what drives our long term strategy.

Speaker 1

At the very end of the quarter, we announced the acquisition of Delegate and we immediately kicked off a rebrand of our back office initiative into the new Par ops, which includes the Delegate and Data Central product modules. Our integration with Delegate and the team has been better than expected and we are seeing strong customer interest including among marquee Tier one accounts as we continue to build out our par data platform. Delegate not only boasts a highly synergistic product offering that will accelerate cross sell, it also affords entry into more than 25,000 sites covering 40 of the top 50 restaurant concepts. Further, it comes with a seasoned management team now driving the combined par ops business. It's important to note that Data Central finished up the year with a strong Q4 through targeted cross sell growth across our customer base.

Speaker 1

This growth will accelerate as we are forecasting ParOps to have its strongest growth year yet in 2025. We have begun the work on product unification efforts with Delegate that includes single sign on and real time data flow, a big step in building towards our data platform. The initiative is highly strategic and underscores our continued drive towards a Better Together platform that is not replicated anywhere else in the enterprise market. We will be sharing additional details as the year progresses on this exciting initiative. Now to report on our payments business.

Speaker 1

As we exit 2024, Par payment services continue to drive high transaction counts and processing volumes across our customer base as we look to more stores to take more stores live while driving better payment processing economics. Notably, we continue to see strong interest in our Punch Wallet with more customers onboarding every quarter, including Paris Baguette, Gold Star Chili and Runza in Q4. Additionally, we successfully cross sold a Tier one customer with approximately 1,000 locations on our payment services. This customer's conversion will positively impact our results over the coming quarters and is a further example of our Better Together project win. As our customers continue to unify their above store and in store processing with Parpay, the scale of our datasets across loyalty, ordering and POS product puts Par in a unique position to leverage tokenized information to drive actionable insights, mapping known and unknown customers and personalizing communications to drive higher ROI and increased lifetime value.

Speaker 1

We are the only company in the enterprise who can link off premise and on premise tokenized data with royalty data all the way to the back of house. This is a moat that is hard to replicate. There's a growing trend in the industry towards disjointed multi vendor solutions that attempt to stitch together guest data, payments and ordering across multiple third parties. But integrations alone don't create intelligence, first party data does. Many attempt to take pieces of payment data and combine them with external systems, but because Par owns the full technology stack, everything we do is first party, ensuring true data integrity.

Speaker 1

Some would have you believe that restaurant technology should be run outside the POS, fragmenting operations across multiple platforms. We see it differently. POS is and will always be the true control center of the restaurant. After all, 80% of transactions still happen at the POS. It's where real time transactions, menu data and guest interactions all converge.

Speaker 1

Payments, loyalty and ordering are not separate systems. They are part of a restaurant's mission critical platform. That's what makes our approach fundamentally different from the rest. Rather than layering on third party processors and intermediaries, we are removing inefficiencies, giving our customers lower processing costs, higher authorization rates and full control over the guest relationship. Looking ahead for the year, our pipeline remains robust for our payment offering across both par clouds ensuring we capture new growth opportunities.

Speaker 1

Moving to our Engagement

Speaker 3

Cloud. Engagement

Speaker 1

Cloud ARR reported 15% organic growth in Q4 when compared to the same quarter last year. ARR now stands at approximately $159,000,000 for the Engagement Cloud and includes Flexure and par retail. Our strong execution in this business has led to several new Tier one customer wins. Our Engagement Cloud continues to exceed standards and dominate the loyalty offers and engagement market with consistently strong interest from existing and new customers. With increasing customer headwinds in 2025, many brands are doubling down on digital technology to drive increased consumer frequency and retention, notably through enhanced investments in loyalty programs.

Speaker 1

Punch is seeing continued product and sales consistency by delivering growth, both with new customers and expansion with existing brands. Punch is the market leader for restaurant loyalty and delivers stability and innovation to our customers. This quarter, we achieved multiple large customer win backs who had previously churned from Punch for pure guest data platforms, but then returned back to Punch. Most notably, a Tier one table service chain and two well known casual dining enterprises were part of this transition back to Punch. Moving to par retail.

Speaker 1

In the convenience and fuel industry, our team executed the launch of a major multi thousand unit brand and additional major upsells with our largest customer in Q4. We brought to market the first fully integrated major oil and branded retailer program in the industry. Beyond our exciting customer wins, the par retail product continues to expand to serve the fuel and convenience industry. In Q4, we successfully launched gamification, updated unified e receipts, enhanced punch card functionality and optimized member surveys with our focus on developing features that drive incremental outcomes like more visits, more gallons and bigger baskets that continue to deliver value for our customers. As our customers look to us to expand our platform into the industry specific white space, we are looking to accelerate innovation efforts in the retail vertical through M and A.

Speaker 1

We are targeting strategic opportunities in the near term that will add additional value to our customers and their members. Moreover, we are beginning to see our integration synergy efforts begin to flourish as we have streamlined our efforts across the retail and restaurant space. We've seen already this is allowing us to focus our R and D and sales efforts between industries to maximize profitability, accelerate innovation, all while improving customer satisfaction. Briefly touching on hardware, I'm pleased to report that we have reversed recent trends and increased our hardware revenues by 7% in Q4 versus the same quarter last year. Several key global brands have approved our newest platform, the Parwave, and we are seeing increases in both domestic and global sales.

Speaker 1

Also contributing to the turnaround was our new ParClear drive thru solution that is setting the standard for drive thru comps. With an open architecture that will enable users to leverage the power of AI for the drive thru, ParClear is positioned to be not only the industry leader in QSR drive thru systems today, but also the preferred platform for the future. Our hardware and POS software divisions are partnering closely on product to ensure that ParClear adds to our strategy of better together innovation. To summarize, we remain very bullish about the future of foodservice technology and Par's continued role as a leading enterprise provider. In 2025, we foresee our ability to execute on both our historical growth rates and deliver on the biggest M and A pipeline we've seen to date.

Speaker 1

I view this time as a great opportunity for us to make bold bets and strengthen our market position. I'm confident in our ability to consistently innovate and provide value to our customers for years to come. Persistence trumps everything and I believe we'll come out as the winner in the enterprise. By raising the bar for execution and investing in our products and teams for the long term, we are well positioned to drive durable growth in the category where the opportunity will continue to grow for the foreseeable future. Brian will now review the numbers in more detail.

Speaker 1

Brian?

Speaker 4

Thank you, Savneet. Good morning. We closed out 2024 with another successful quarter for Par. Subscription services continue to fuel our organic growth, while our team continues to execute with fiscal responsibility. As a result, adjusted EBITDA for the quarter improved $3,400,000 sequentially from Q3 and $13,100,000 compared to Q4 prior year.

Speaker 4

This positive movement is indicative of our ability to continue to drive growth with profitability. Now to the financial details. Total revenues were $105,000,000 for Q4 twenty twenty four, an increase of 50% compared to the same period in 2023, driven by subscription services revenue growth of 95%, inclusive of 25% organic growth. Net loss from continuing operations for the fourth quarter of twenty twenty four was $25,000,000 or $0.68 loss per share compared to a net loss from continuing operations of $22,000,000 or $0.77 loss per share reported for the same period in 2023. Non GAAP net loss for the quarter of twenty twenty four was $37,000 or effectively $0 per share, a significant improvement compared to non GAAP net loss of $12,000,000 or $0.43 loss per share for the prior year.

Speaker 4

Now for more details on revenue. Subscription services revenue was reported at $64,000,000 an increase of $31,000,000 or 95% from the $33,000,000 reported in the prior year and now represents 61% of our total par revenue. Excluding par retail and task group, organic subscription services revenue grew 25% compared to prior year. ARR exiting the quarter was $276,000,000 an increase of 102% from last year's Q4 with engagement cloud up 150% and operator cloud up 60%. Excluding par retail, task group and delegate, total organic annual recurring revenue was up 21% year over year.

Speaker 4

Hardware revenue in the quarter was $26,000,000 an increase of $2,000,000 or 7% from the $24,000,000 reported in the prior year. Sequentially compared to Q3 this year, hardware was up $3,000,000 or 15% driven by an increase in volume attached to our software customers. Professional service revenue was reported at $15,000,000 an increase of $2,000,000 or 17% from the $13,000,000 reported in the prior year. The growth was driven by recurring revenue service contracts. $9,000,000 of the professional services revenue in the quarter consisted of recurring revenue, a 25% increase versus prior year.

Speaker 4

Now turning to margins. Gross margin was $45,000,000 increase of 21,000,000 or 86% from the $24,000,000 reported in the prior year. The increase was driven by subscription services with gross margin of $34,000,000 an increase of $18,000,000 or 116% from the $16,000,000 reported in the prior year. Subscription services margin for the quarter was 53% compared to 48% reported in the Q4 of the prior year. The increase in margin is driven by a continued focus on efficiency improvements with our hosting and customer support costs, as well as accretive margin contributions from recent acquisitions.

Speaker 4

Excluding the amortization of intangible assets, stock based compensation and severance, total non GAAP subscription services margin for Q4 twenty twenty four was 64.7% compared to 65.3% for Q4 twenty twenty three. The modest tick down was driven by a shift in product mix post 2024 acquisitions. Gross margin continues to improve across our products and we expect total non GAAP subscription services margin to continue to improve from this current baseline. Hardware margin for the quarter was 26% versus 29 in the prior year. Hardware margin in Q4 twenty twenty three was positively affected by one time inventory adjustments.

Speaker 4

Our focus of demonstrating value for our price with improved operational efficiency has allowed us to improve hardware margins during the year and finish 2024 with full year hardware margin of 24%. Professional service margin for the quarter was 28% compared to 10% reported in the prior year. The increase primarily consists of increases in margins for field operations and repair services, substantially driven by improved cost management and reductions in third party spending. In regard to operating expenses, GAAP sales and marketing was $10,500,000 an increase of $1,000,000 from the $9,500,000 reported for the prior year. The increase was primarily driven by inorganic increases related to our acquisitions, while organic sales and marketing expenses decreased $300,000 year over year.

Speaker 4

GAAP G and A was $31,000,000 an increase of $12,000,000 from the $19,000,000 reported in the prior year. The increase was primarily driven by non GAAP adjustment items for M and A transaction fees and stock based compensation, as well as inorganic increases related to our acquisitions. GAAP R and D was $17,000,000 an increase of $3,000,000 from the $14,000,000 recorded in the prior year. The increase was primarily driven by inorganic increases related to our acquisitions, while organic R and D expenses decreased $500,000 year over year. Our team was able to effectively drive cost efficiency and properly prioritize resource allocation, which enabled us to continue to drive innovative outcomes without incremental costs during 2024.

Speaker 4

Operating expenses excluding non GAAP adjustments was $47,000,000 an increase of $9,000,000 or 25% versus Q4 twenty twenty three. And excluding inorganic growth, organic operating expenses increased a modest 2%. The organic increase was primarily driven by variable compensation and benefits. Exiting Q4, non GAAP OpEx as a percent of revenue was 45%, a 900 basis point improvement from 54% in Q4 prior year. Now to provide information on the company's cash flow and balance sheet position.

Speaker 4

As of 12/31/2024, we had cash and cash equivalents of $108,000,000 and short term investments of $500,000 For the year ended December 31, cash used in operating activities from continuing operations was $21,000,000 versus $32,000,000 for the prior year, representing an improvement of $11,000,000 Cash flow metrics improved throughout 2024 and we exited the year with positive operating cash flow of $3,000,000 for the fourth quarter. Cash used in investing activities was $180,000,000 for the year ended December 31, versus 8,000,000 for the prior year. Investing activities included $3.00 $9,000,000 of net cash consideration in connection with our recent acquisitions and capital expenditures of $6,000,000 for developed technology costs associated with our software platforms, partially offset by $96,000,000 of cash consideration received in connection with the disposition of Parcovenant and $37,000,000 of proceeds from net sales of short term investments. Cash provided by financing activities was $279,000,000 for the year ended December 31, compared to cash used of $2,000,000 for the prior year. Financing activities was substantially driven by a private placement of common stock to fund the STUSO acquisition and the credit facility entered into to fund the TASK acquisition.

Speaker 4

Subsequent to the 2024 fiscal year end, the company issued $115,000,000 of convertible notes and utilized the net proceeds from this offering to repay in full credit facility. These transactions enhanced our capital structure by extending our debt maturity profile and significantly reducing our go forward cash interest expense. I would now like to take a moment to reiterate and thank our Parr team on how they managed a successful and action packed year, both from an operational and business development point of view. We pride ourselves on making accretive capital allocation decisions and through our focus on operational execution, position par for sustained growth and success. As a result, the par exiting 2024 is a marked improved and better positioned organization than when we entered the year.

Speaker 4

This is clearly demonstrated by some key financial metrics. ARR more than doubled during the year increasing 102%. Locations utilizing our SaaS solutions doubled with over 140,000 locations at the end of twenty twenty four. Non GAAP consolidated gross margin increased by seven twenty basis points to 50.3%. Q4 non GAAP OpEx as a percent of revenue improved 900 basis points compared to prior year.

Speaker 4

And Q4 adjusted EBITDA improved by $13,100,000 compared to Q4 prior year. We are proud of what we have been able to achieve, but we are by no means content in where we stand and look forward to continue executing to our strategy as we progress through 2025. I'll now turn the call back over to Savneet for closing remarks prior to moving to Q and A.

Speaker 1

Thanks, Brian. Let me wrap up with a few key messages before we open the call for Q and A. 2018 was a year of

Speaker 5

and we

Speaker 1

are pleased to have closed it on a positive note with a strong Q4 performance and maintaining category leadership in Foodservice Tech. We had a key objective in 2024 and that was to grow sustainably and efficiently to build our business for the long term. To this end, our team executed on three main areas. First, we focused on driving organic ARR growth and sustained momentum in our software business. We worked on initiatives to improve our products and operations, cross sell our entire software portfolio and sign new customers.

Speaker 1

As we spoke about earlier, all of our POS deals in the quarter were multi product deals and equally important was our upsell into our biggest POS customer. Our flywheel continues to expand through Better Together strategy, which is based on product innovation and ROI, not predatory pricing tactics. Second, we execute on a targeted and meaningful acquisition strategy to strengthen our product offerings, expand our TAM and build out a global capability to serve foodservice enterprises. Our expansion into C stores and international markets has created a truly new TAM for us and our acquisition of Delegate is already accelerating our flywheel for existing customers, including our largest and most strategic. We also divested our legacy government business that now enables us to 100% focus on our core markets.

Speaker 1

M and A is core to our product strategy and our integration efforts are what drive our robust cross sell. PAR has over many years invested in building a deep leadership bench that can digest and optimize investments. As companies join, they become part of a cohesive culturally aligned PAR where we add to, not detract from their product aspirations and go to market motions. We cross pollinate leaders quickly and unite core operating structures and this synergistic approach to M and A is what sets us apart from other foodservice technology companies or sector investors who operate a collection of siloed entities and masquerade as multiproduct while really just being single threaded multiple times over. Better Together is what we live every day at par and I'm extremely proud that the vast majority of our executive leadership team has risen the ranks at par over many years and in multiple roles.

Speaker 1

This is our key to turning inorganic growth into sustained future organic growth. We are a team of seasoned operators with a holistic view of our business and industry. Finally, we remain fanatical about managing our operating expenses by continually optimizing our cost structure. As a result, we maintain top line revenue growth and have now delivered two quarters of strong adjusted EBITDA growth. While I'm extremely proud of our revenue expansion, I'm equally proud that non GAAP gross profit grew organically by 30% this quarter and our adjusted EBITDA well more than doubled quarter over quarter.

Speaker 1

Today, our sales and marketing R and D expenses are now well within our long term goals of 1525% respectively, far ahead of schedule and I believe this shows the upside of our to our long term margin goals for the company. With 2024 firmly in the rearview mirror, we look towards 2025% with confidence and optimism. For 2025, we feel confident in committing to continue to grow our business at 20 plus percent annual raise for the year. Our growth quarter to quarter will never be linear, but I feel confident that over the course of the year, we'll continue to hit our targets while continuing to drive EBITDA. What's more, we see a number of key levers that create upside to our year.

Speaker 1

While there's still a lot of work ahead of us, we are confident that our balance sheet, cost discipline and execution strategies will enable us to continue to grow our business sustainably. As always, I want to thank my Parr teammates for their hard work in driving these results. Our shared belief that today is day one drives our collective hunger and ambition. I also want to express a deep appreciation to our customers, partners and shareholders. Thank you for your time this morning and we will now open the call up to questions.

Speaker 1

Operator?

Operator

Our first question comes from Mayank Tandon with Needham. Your line is open.

Speaker 6

Thank you. Good morning. Congrats, Savneet, Chris and Brian on the quarter. Savneet, I wanted to start with the upsell into BK. Does this change the timeline of the rollout?

Speaker 6

I believe the rollout was expected to be completed sometime in spring of twenty twenty six. Does this in any way change the timeline of the 7,000 plus locations? And also does it change the ARR opportunity, which I believe was something in the order of low 20s millions? Is that going to be meaningfully different based on the upsell?

Speaker 1

Yes, yes to both. So it will probably push us out at the quarter, quarter and a half. Q1, as I referenced, we're sequencing the rollout. So that starting in Q2, we can do a combined rollout. So while it will slow down, call it Q1, just a pure POS rollout, it will really accelerate Q2 onwards.

Speaker 1

As I mentioned, that's a trade with you all day long, because to your second point, it significantly adds to the ARR in that opportunity. As you know that we disclosed that the pure POS deal was around low 20s. This adds to that pretty meaningfully. We haven't disclosed that number quite yet, but we feel really excited. As I said, while it pushes out the rollout a little bit, it dramatically increases the LTV and operating cash flow that this deal will generate over time.

Speaker 6

Got it. And then maybe as a follow-up, I would just ask around the quarterly cadence. I get it, you said it's not going to be linear, there will be some volatility. But any color you can provide in terms of the various revenue buckets, how we should think about the quarterly cadence? And also the same question around margins, should we expect sequential improvement or are there other factors we should consider as we're modeling for 2025?

Speaker 1

Yes. So I think that you should see meaningful margin expansion in the second half of the year, as well as acceleration of revenue growth in the second half of the year tied to this partly to this, this question you just asked. Remember, we're going from one product to two products, so it's a lot more revenue opportunity and in a condensed period of time. So you'll see that. So Q1 and Q2, we'll be investing aggressively to make sure we can knock that rollout out.

Speaker 1

And again, you should take it and everyone else should take it. The fact that we're expanding our relationship is a hugely positive sign that we're doing hopefully doing a good job in earning their trust. So you'll see in the back end more revenue growth, more significantly more EBITDA expansion because of that rollout accelerating. Plus, as we mentioned on the call, we have a large payment services deal rolling out that also hits the second half as well as the convenience store deal that I mentioned on the call. These are all really exciting things, very forecastable.

Speaker 1

These aren't sort of like let's hope. These are all in forecast. And as I mentioned, we've already booked over 1,500 BKs and we're in January, right, so or in February rather. So there's a lot of room for excitement in the second half of the year here.

Speaker 6

Great. That's all good to hear. Congrats on the quarter. Thanks, Mike.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from Stephen Sheldon with William Blair. Your line is open.

Speaker 7

Hey, thanks for taking my questions and a lot seems like to be excited about. I just want to follow-up on Burger King. Can you just remind us what all is included in that contract now? So I think it's initially par POS potentially menu link. I think you're saying now the contract includes par ops, obviously, as you talked about very encouraging expansion.

Speaker 7

But when you say par ops, I mean, are they adding both Data Central and Delegate or just maybe just talk about all the products that they're actually going to be picking?

Speaker 1

Sure. So there are our core deals for POS and historically parts of menu link, but POS is the vast majority of it. And our expansion into par ops is on data central. But without question, we're sixty days into the Delegant acquisition. We'll certainly be trying to bring that opportunity into that as well.

Speaker 1

No guarantee it happens. But I think the better together point is resonating with them and obviously all of our customers given the attachment rates right now. So it's still start with one product and hopefully we can add more if we do a good job.

Speaker 7

Got it. That's helpful. And then just on 2025, I appreciate the commentary that you're confident in 20% annual growth rates. But just is there any way to roughly frame how you're thinking about organic ARR next year,

Speaker 6

just given what you can see

Speaker 7

in the pipeline and kind of current implementation schedules? Just any way to refine that a little bit more?

Speaker 1

Yes. I mean, I think from what we see today, like I said, the second half will have sort of have higher growth rates in the first half, partly because of the three deals I mentioned, the payment services deal going live, Burger King acceleration from from end of Q4 and then the convenience store deal that goes live as well. So we have a lot of visibility into the second half for that acceleration. And so the way I think about it is 20% plus you should have higher than that in Q4, lower than that in Q1. And again, Q1 being the slowest one because of the Burger King coordination we talked about.

Speaker 1

But in aggregate, we feel really, really good about the year. We have never had so much visibility when it comes to the rollout of these deals that I mentioned. So we feel super confident in the year with the visibility we have today. And as I mentioned, those three deals that I mentioned that have that are key for the second half of the year, these are signed, committed, booked, these aren't sort of pipeline.

Speaker 7

Got it. That's helpful. Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from Will Nance with Goldman Sachs. Your line is open.

Speaker 5

Hi guys. Good morning. Congrats on all the good things you guys have going on. I wanted to ask just on the restaurant space more broadly, there's been a lot of focus on the consumer and specifically the trends in restaurant sales and how

Speaker 6

does it tell you about the

Speaker 5

health of the consumer?

Speaker 1

I'd say it's not categorical. There are we see sort of a wide disparity of outcomes. In the full service dining space, we see a slowdown. Ironically, that's been really helpful in our Punch business because those firms are really investing in loyalty. And I think you heard me say, we had a couple of people that had previously left Punch to try consumer data platform type products come back to Punch.

Speaker 1

I think that's a direct result of what's happening in that sort of full service dining market. And then in our kind of core QSR, fast casual space, it's certainly seeing a slowdown. It's not what it was, but we're not seeing negative comps across our base. In fact, our base is still up low single digits. So we sort of been lucky in that the customers we sell to tended to outperform the restaurant industry in aggregate.

Speaker 1

So in general, our base is still growing. There are bankruptcies happening, but there are a very small portion of our base. And again, that's just a little bit of luck in the makeup of our current customer base. Where we see the most disruption, and I would say it's significant, is in single stores and small chains. We see numerous chains kind of sub-thirty units, 40 units.

Speaker 1

Again, we don't play a ton here, but we see that space and there are a lot of those ones that are experiencing tremendous pain. And I think the reason why is that when you're at that size, you don't yet have a big enough brand to sort of have those sticky customers have been around a lot long enough generally. And then two, I don't think you have the investments in technology to fight back. And so the larger brands I think are going to do better because they have the ability to invest in and Punch as an example, the ability to invest in our data platform to bring customers back in. So, in aggregate, our base is still growing, single digits, which is great, at low single digits.

Speaker 1

So it's better than the rest of the industry, but there's a lot of disparity amongst the chains.

Speaker 5

Got it. Super helpful. I appreciate all the fossil detail there. And just maybe a quick follow-up on the hardware inflection that you guys saw. We heard from one

Speaker 1

of your competitors yesterday and

Speaker 5

it sounds like they're expecting around a 20% drop in hardware revenues. So I guess what have you guys been able to do differently to reaccelerate that business? Are any is any of the momentum that you're seeing competitive wins? And just how are you thinking about the hardware refresh cycle?

Speaker 1

So I think there's two parts to it. So, one is, we sell to enterprise and I'd like to say enterprise is a product business. You got to have the better product. And so I think, if you look at the data, we think our products are winning because they are standalone best in class products. And so I think that really helps us.

Speaker 1

Specifically, we have had really strong attachments of our hardware product to our software customers. So even I won't name it, but even a large dealer to it that we're not picking for hardware have now started to adapt more and more for hardware. And it's that better together functionality that I mentioned. The idea that your hardware company is also your software company, so it's also your service company, your call center, it makes life a lot easier. So it's the same better together thing that's happening.

Speaker 1

And so we continue to see, call it, attachment into the our core software customers drove it. On the legacy non software customer side, it's not been a big change, but we have we've made some real investments into this drive through product. And as you've probably read in all the restaurant companies, there's a big move to voice AI in the drive thru. And so we believe we'll be a preferred partner there, given that we are a software company that sells hardware now. And so I think that will be a nice driver of hardware growth going forward.

Speaker 1

Brian, anything else? Yes. I was just going

Speaker 4

to add in regards to the software attachment, the fact that our location size has doubled, has been given us that much larger audience to be able to have that attachment to. And so that's happening as we're some of the hardware only type of competitors are actually seeing a downturn. Maybe in certain areas, we actually continue to have a larger white space to be able to support that. So that's been able to help us against what you're seeing in other areas.

Speaker 5

Awesome. Appreciate all the color guys. Nice job today.

Operator

Thanks. Thank you. Our next question comes from Samad Samana with Jefferies. Your line is open.

Speaker 8

Hey, good morning. Thanks for taking my questions. Maybe Stephanie, first, just I know you mentioned the drive thru hardware and how it's kind of a lead class and allowed your customers to leverage AI. My ears perked up a little bit about that. Is that AI that you guys have homegrown that will be embedded in that?

Speaker 8

Is that you guys working with third party platforms

Speaker 1

that enable it? And then maybe help

Speaker 8

me understand, is the path to monetization there through APIs? Or is it your own product that you're providing? And then I have one follow-up.

Speaker 1

Yes, fantastic question. So, yes, so we build the drive thru hardware, so think of that as the headsets, the base stations, but we are also in the park clear, it's a cloud offering. So we will be charging subscription software to allow you to manage your drive through. Now why that's important is that through that, to your point, there will be an API that allows the voice AI companies, which there are dozens of them out there, to plug in directly to the base station so that they can run their tech. So we aren't going we aren't yet going to be the company that's sort of selling voice AI technology directly and trying to be an ordering company there yet.

Speaker 1

It might be something we explore in time, acquisition or not, but we're kind of watching it carefully. However, if you're plugging into our base station, you're going to be paying us fees to do that and to enable that. And so it's a way for us to make money on the potential growth, but importantly, we're giving them a service that makes it a lot easier for them to run their platforms at these restaurants.

Speaker 8

Great. And then maybe just to switch gears a little bit. On the pipe side, it's great to hear about the customers boomeranging back. Maybe could you give us a little bit color of maybe what made them churn in the first place? And with that context in mind, what convinced them to come back, right?

Speaker 8

Putting those pieces together, I think would be very helpful.

Speaker 1

So, we had a couple customers, I don't exactly know maybe a year ago, two years ago, sort of say, hey, we don't want to do a loyalty program. We want to use something more like a CDP system or a guest data platform. The idea being, we'll be targeting customers directly. Loyalty customers are 20% of our base. We want to target everybody else.

Speaker 1

And candidly, those are really good sales pitches, but in reality, they don't they're not yet developed enough to drive the ROI that a loyalty program today. And in the end, I think brands need both. I think you need an awesome CDP system that can target customers on a very personalized level, but you still need these loyalty programs that build really engendered loyalty. Loyal customers are repeat visitors, they're high margin, they are the advocates of your brand everywhere you go. And so I think what those brands realize is, hey, we thought we're going to have loyalty across our entire set of customers, so why do we need just a loyalty product?

Speaker 1

And they ended up moving back realizing, one, the products that exist today that are trying to build that promise aren't yet ready. And two, candidly, ROI went down dramatically. And so it really was validating that the Punch product creates real true ROI back to the customer. And then I think as those customers continue to evolve data platforms, they'll end up picking the Par data platform because when you can combine their loyalty, first party loyalty in Par plus they're sort of called tokenized data in a data platform plus all the operations back office we have. That's sort of the point that I was making.

Speaker 1

I think it's a real note that we have that nobody will be able to compete with.

Speaker 8

Great. I'm going to squeeze the third one in here. Any type of information here beside delegates, financial profiles, maybe growth rates, margin structure, and how you're thinking about it for 2025?

Speaker 1

Sure. So when we closed the deal, it was about $19,000,000 of recurring revenue. Historically, the business had grown well over 30%. I want to say mid-30s and so it's been a really fast paced grower. It exited 2024 marginally profitable.

Speaker 1

And we're hoping for this year, obviously, for that to be our fastest growing product outside of payments and ordering. And we will certainly drive meaningful EBITDA. So it's kind of exciting to have the product that we think we can push through quickly. And as you've kind of seen, when we acquire business, we tend to ramp up revenue quickly. What's exciting about Delegate is that it's so synergistic that once we figure out single sign on real time data flow, it'll be hard for customers to say no.

Speaker 1

So I'm not saying it's going to keep growing 35%, but it will be I certainly believe it will be additive to our growth rate.

Speaker 8

Great. Congrats on a really transformative 2024. Thank you.

Speaker 6

Thanks, Matt.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from Eric Martinuzzi with Lake Street Capital Markets. Your line is open.

Speaker 9

I I wanted to ask about the subscription service gross margin. That non GAAP number was 64.7%. It was below what we were forecasting for Q4. In your commentary, it sounds like you expect that to be a trough. But I was just curious, where do you expect it either for the full year 2025 or a year from for Q4 twenty twenty five?

Speaker 4

Eric, appreciate the question. Yes, you're correct. There was it came down from a year ago. It was really driven by our most recent acquisitions and kind of absorbing that in. Across our products, we continue to see the margin improvement that we've been driving towards.

Speaker 4

So nothing operationally changed. It may have then kind of reset a baseline and as you continue to kind of grow off of that. So how you've been seeing the margin improve quarter over quarter, not significant amounts, but call it your 50 to 150 basis points. We expect that to continue as we move forward here in the near to medium term.

Speaker 9

Okay. And then just a housekeeping item here. Your pro form a share count, you finished out Q4 with $37,200,000 of diluted weighted average shares. What is that post delegate?

Speaker 4

Yes, we're just north of $40,000,000, Eric.

Speaker 9

Got it. Thank you.

Speaker 7

Sure.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from Adam Wyden with ADW Capital. Your line is open.

Speaker 10

Hey guys, really, really, really good profit. So just a couple of things on the gross margin again, Brian. So some of this is from the purchase. You expect so if you expect that gross margins are going to improve 50 basis points to 150 basis points per quarter, you would expect your incremental gross margin rate to be materially higher on your subscription software pretty much every quarter throughout the year. Is that right?

Speaker 4

Correct. And that's going to be so both top line, right, subscription services being our growth driver right now at 61% of our total revenue. And as Stephanie mentioned, we expect call the 20% plus increase year over year within the margin actual improving itself would actually have a multiplier effect in regards to gross profit margin increase.

Speaker 10

Right. Yes. I mean, look, I would think the payments and delegate and all these things, I mean, StuZo, that you don't have a ton of like piloting and hosting. I mean, I would think that your incremental gross margins on some of these I don't know cash very well, but I would think the incremental gross margins on a lot of these products should be seventy, seventy five, 80, maybe even more something like menu also, you're sort of getting you're leveraging all the R and D and as you ramp menu, I would think you'd have really high gross margins on a lot of these on the organic sort of prospectively. So I know last couple of quarters you've had some sort of purchase accounting stuff and I know you had something with STUZO that lower gross margin that was sort of a purchase accounting thing, but I would think like sort of prospectively as you ramp 20% organic ARR plus, you would get high incremental gross margins going forward?

Speaker 4

Yes. And it's not going to be like a significant increase from what we've seen trended over time, right? It's a nice I wouldn't say it's modest. It's something we kind of pride ourselves in how we improve it. And as you know, it varies also depending upon the kind of types of products, right?

Speaker 4

Generally, a POS kind of product might have a little bit heavier in R and D than a back office, and you can see that across the industry, right? But we focus on each of our areas to make sure that we see and push the teams in each of the areas to incrementally improve their margins.

Speaker 10

Okay, great. And then my second question is back on M and A. Obviously, we've seen some other companies buying stuff, I guess, smaller stuff. But when I look at sort of other companies that sort of are sort of one of one assets in enterprise, I guess maybe one example would be like ServiceTitan, although they're sort vertical stack software for small businesses, they sort of are the only game in town, sort of the vertical sort of end to end product. Those companies are sort of growing high teens and they're trading at like 12 times revenue.

Speaker 10

I'm sort of curious how you think about sort of doing M and A in the context of where your cost of capital is. I mean, on our math, I mean, obviously going into today, you guys were sort of in the fives on an EV to ARR basis depending on how you value the hardware business. I mean, it doesn't feel like you have a ton of spread on the companies that you're buying. I'm just curious like how do you think about sort of getting your cost of capital up to do M and A? Is it do you think that you're going to get your multiple back up?

Speaker 10

Maybe comment on that and just sort of the duration of the growth that it's not just about 20% ARR growth this year, but that you have a multi year runway to it. I mean, I'd love to sort of see how you think about sort of those two sort of concepts together because the multiple structurally hasn't really expanded over the course of the last twelve months, right? I mean, if you really think about where the business was sort of 16 or whatever fourteen months ago pre government, pre task, pre delegate, your ARR per share has grown meaningfully faster than sort of the multiple. And so I'm just curious

Speaker 2

sort of how

Speaker 1

you think about that. Yes, let me just jump in because we got three more four more calls after. So short answer is, in the end, numbers matter more than anything else. Accounting is the language of business and our numbers will dictate how our stock performs. And I think our numbers are great and strong and getting better and better.

Speaker 1

And I believe that markets reward the durability of revenue, ostensibly believe in the durability of cash flow. And I think we are continuing to demonstrate that over and over again. And I believe we will get rewarded for that. In the end, software companies multiples should contract when growth slows, when your TAM gets to the end of it and you become your rule of 40 flips to all cash flow versus growth. We don't have that situation here.

Speaker 1

In fact, as you heard in my commentary, while our growth won't be linear, like there's a lot of really nice upside here in second half of the year that will also happen the following year. And so I think that I don't know how you get to the five number, but I think we feel really confident that we're one of the few software companies our size that will be able to continue to grow at rates that are higher well above the median, if you will, and continue to drive impressive profit numbers. And so the multiple rewarded, the numbers win in the end. It doesn't matter what I say or do, in the end, the numbers matter and we'll get there. Specifically to your point on M and A, you and I have talked about this extensively, but when you're using multiples, it's a relative game.

Speaker 1

And so if we're trading at, I don't know, seven times current ARR, we will set the benchmark for the market. And there are very few companies that have metrics as good as ours. And so I suspect that we will buy them at a discount to that multiple. Now are there certain assets that we might not be able to buy because we're not trading at a while multiple? For sure, but there's not a lot of those and a lot of those that we want and not a lot of those that would make sense in our flywheel.

Speaker 1

So as I said in the script, we've got a really strong M and A pipeline. Every time I've said that, we've executed upon that. So I think you'll see us continue to do that. And the critical part in my script was, M and A for us is a product strategy. It's not a let's go buy some bunch of revenue.

Speaker 1

It's how do we create a product to increase our organic growth and then our long term profitability. And so we feel really good about that today. And if I didn't, I would tell you, hey, M and A is not going to be part of our strategy, but we're on the first call of the year and we're talking about it here. So I think you could take that as don't feel the multiples holding us back from being acquisitive right now.

Speaker 10

I was just going to clarify on the ARR multiple, like when you look at sort of ServiceTitan and even Agilisys post sell off, those companies are still trading at like double digit sales multiples on this year. And I was talking about sort of a five, five point five times on '26. And when you look at the company on a '26 ARR or 26 EV to EBITDA, I mean, there's a massive gap between companies like Toast and ServiceTitan and even Agilisys post a 40% decline. So I'm just highlighting the fact that like we're executing on many levels better than these other companies from a growth and incremental margin perspective, but we continue to trade at a discount. So I hope we can figure out a way to narrow that discount, because I think this is a best of class company.

Speaker 1

And look, the numbers drive that. So our numbers will drive it and I'm so confident we'll get there. All right. Thanks, Adam.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from Andrew Hart with BTIG. Your line is open.

Speaker 11

Hey, thanks for the question. Savneet, obviously, I think a big message today was the better together that you're pushing on. I guess as ARR has doubled the past year, business has scaled much more robust platform right now. Can you just discuss a little bit how some of your conversations with these larger enterprise CTOs have evolved just from a brand perspective and sales pipeline perspective?

Speaker 1

Absolutely. Listen, I thank you for pulling out the script. Listen, like I said, we signed eight POS deals in the quarter, which is impressive in the enterprise space. All of them picked multiple product. We upsold our largest customer another product.

Speaker 1

Clearly, the flywheel that I talked about is working and Delegate is really going to accelerate it. Adam sorry, the color before Adam talked about it, but it's a beautiful thing when it's working. My conversations with these organizations, I think we're setting up for a really interesting outcome. As consumers there's consumer uncertainty right now and so restaurants are now really focusing on digital efforts because they're trying to create efficiencies in the back of house and pull you in the front end. And so they're creating more investments in technology.

Speaker 1

However, they're making those investments in technology without increasing their staff. In fact, many restaurant companies are flat staff, particularly in the operations and IT space. And so how are they going to do that? They probably don't want to add three more vendors. They probably want to attach it into par.

Speaker 1

And so I've had a couple of sales process I've been a part of where it's very clear that the reason why they love us is not just because our products are best in class, it's because they can just trust the existing PAR relationship. And so we've spent an incredible amount of time and effort rejiggering our teams focusing on that account management side so that we can bring in those products. And I just want to be clear, we do not win because we bundle, we win because the products work better together. And my push to the delegate team that now runs the combined part of Data Central is the win for here us is not is that a year from now or six months from now, a customer looks and says, oh, when I had Delegate and Par as two separate vendors, it was a different experience than when I had it under one roof at Par. And I can't stress you how powerful that is to the end customer.

Speaker 1

And we've got a lot of amazing examples of how we're winning deals by just showing that in a demo saying, hey, guess what happens, if you've got punch and brink, look at this unique functionality you can have at the POS that others can't. So, it really is a theme. I think candidly, we were probably really too early on this thesis. We've been talking about it for a long time, but it's certainly playing out. And again, I never would have dreamt that all of our deals in a quarter were multi product deals.

Speaker 1

That's a really exciting change for us.

Speaker 11

Thanks. And then thinking about 2025, you talked about the Burger King expansion, the payments deal, the convenience deal. I think there's a lot of moving pieces. Another one is, I guess, StuZel gets layered into organic and TASK gets layered into organic. So can you maybe talk about some of the things that can drive much higher than 20% growth, some of the things that you really have to execute on?

Speaker 11

And when you think about TASK and STUSO getting layered into organic, how have those business has been coming along as we get ready for 2025?

Speaker 1

Great question. So one is getting our acquisitions to become organic will certainly help us. STUSO, I suspect will grow faster than 20% a year. The TASK has two businesses TASK and Flexure TASK itself will grow greater than 20% a year. Flexure might will be sort of posted the engagement cloud growth rates and then Delegate will go well above the 20%.

Speaker 1

So as we lap the acquisitions, you will have faster organic revenue growth because the acquisitions in general, we look to buy stuff that's growing faster than us. So that's just mathematically a nice part of it that happens. And actually, I didn't mention it on the other question, but that will also help the back half of the year as we lap the acquisitions. Second though, and listen more importantly, it's our ability to execute upon the deals that we have in place. So our plan, if you will, to get 20 plus percent growth assumes a relatively conservative rollout at our largest POS customer.

Speaker 1

We want to blow through that and I know our partners at that company think we can do even double of what we're going to do. And so that's number one. Can we execute on that? Number two is in par retail, the team has done an incredible job. I really think leadership there has done a great job of driving that business, but we have tremendous levers in driving real upside to our deals there because in certain deals in par retail, our pricing increases based on our performance.

Speaker 1

And so as we have great performance, the pricing goes up quite meaningfully there. And then third, is our ability to execute and get deals live and earlier than we expect. And that's something that I think our team is feeling really good about today. We'll see as it progresses, but there are a couple of really meaningful levers to sort of that I see us out there. And then the last thing I'd say is that as we fold in these acquisitions, they do create an accelerated go to market motion because now we can pull in data center faster because the customer already uses delegate as an example.

Speaker 1

We can pull in stuff faster and so it's just short in our sales cycle. That might not be the big lever, but I think over time it creates a nice ability to shorten sales cycles also. Thanks again.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from Charles Naughton with Stephens. Your line is open.

Speaker 12

Hi, good morning and thank you for taking my question. I wanted to drill into the previous question a little further, specifically around TASK and the international opportunity. Clearly that expands your TAM. It sounds like it's growing in excess of 20%. But I was wondering if you could speak more broadly about the international opportunity, how you see that playing out and any more specific color around TASK would be helpful as well.

Speaker 1

Absolutely. And give us another quarter because we're going to we're making a lot of investments and changes there. We'll kind of talk about it in the next quarter or so. But I think right now core markets we're focusing on are sort of the APAC region where we've got really strong foothold. We are winning the sort of marquee brands in Australia and New Zealand and that part of the world.

Speaker 1

And we've got a long really nice pipeline we've got to execute on. So what we're really kind of helping the team is operationalize that part of the business so that they can become as programmatic as we can about getting sites out the door. It's a small business, so it hasn't gone through that scaling, if you will, of how do you add a thousand sites a quarter or something like that. And so we're working to kind of implement that. We took one of our best leaders at par, put him in charge of task and he is driving that.

Speaker 1

And so we're going to focus on that region first, pull that forward, do a great job. We have already, I think, brought in one or two really high quality brands that are U. S. Brands that want to expand to that region to partner with us there. That's crazy exciting for us because then obviously we can grow them in other parts around the globe.

Speaker 1

But we're trying to master that one region and then we'll kind of expand outside of that.

Speaker 12

Got it. And as a follow-up, I wanted to ask about the hardware margin. Nice little uptick this quarter. I apologize if you touched on this already, but could you maybe talk about the drivers of that expansion during the fourth quarter as well as how we should think about that margin within hardware going forward. Are we sort of at peak margins within that business or could we potentially see more expansion as we move through 2025?

Speaker 4

Yes. So we've been in both the hardware and some of the professional services actually linked to the hardware, we've been able to increase margin percents year over year as you saw. We're now like in the mid-20s for hardware, which we're proud of, right? Some of the best hardware products are out there like in the low 30s. So we would like to continue to increase.

Speaker 4

We understand we'd only be modest work where we're going to get from that. And then from the actual professional services, as you saw, we went up from 10% last year to a 28%. And so now we've been consistently in the mid to upper 20s in professional services. And that's correlated as we continue to grow some of our hardware business that that would also increase from a revenue and then it's recurring revenue. So it gives consistent margins below that.

Speaker 4

But I would not expect us to have significant margin improvement in both in the hardware professional services, but we are proud of how we've improved that over the past couple of years.

Speaker 12

Got it. Appreciate all the color guys. Nice quarter. Thank you. Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from Anya Soderstrom with Sidoti. Your line is open.

Speaker 3

Hi. Thank you for taking my question. Most of them have been addressed already and congrats on the great year here. I have one question in terms of the Tier one pipeline. Have you seen that expanded?

Speaker 3

And how are you talking to those potential customers in terms of upselling as well? And how are you going to be able to take on a Tier one customer in the near future given the expanded rollout with BK?

Speaker 1

So, Q1 pipeline remains strong. I think the change we've seen is clearly the mid market is really picking up for us. So it's kind of nice to see that. As far as being able to roll out additional concepts, we feel very good about that. With BK, this rollout has been planned.

Speaker 1

The additional part of the rollout is a new module, a new product. So it won't impact kind of the core POS pipeline that's been strong for some time here. So I don't think it will have an impact. And as I said, in Q1 and Q2, we're making some real investments to make sure we don't have any stumbles there. I think it's one of the mistakes I see our peers make and we used to make years ago is you spend all this time getting software right, but then you get the rollout because you didn't hire enough bodies or training.

Speaker 1

And so we're we over invest in that now because I think getting that right pulls revenue in faster and you make it up in spades down the road.

Speaker 3

Okay. Thank you. That was all for me. Thanks, Anya.

Operator

Thank you. I'm showing no further questions at this time. I would now like to turn it back to Chris Burns for closing remarks.

Speaker 2

Thank you, Daniel, and thank you to everyone for joining us today. We look forward to updating you further in the coming weeks and days. Have a nice day and a great weekend. Thank you.

Operator

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now

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PAR Technology Q4 2024
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