In Q3 2024, CM.com reported the second consecutive quarter of record Gross profit. Compared to the same period in 2023, number of messages and pay volumes increased. Annual Recurring Revenue grew for the 14th consecutive quarter, while margins improved and OPEX decreased by 19%. Operational momentum remained good as new applications were developed and new order intake continued to grow, both locally and internationally. A notable innovation is the launch of the AI Playground tool, earlier this week. It is the first tool of its kind that enables companies to experiment with AI in their business model. Following the good performance so far this year, CM.com improves its 2024 EBITDA outlook to € 16-18 million, while keeping OPEX and Free Cash Flow guidance unchanged.
Breda, The Netherlands, 18 October 2024
Q3 2024 Highlights
EBITDA grew YoY to € 4.7 million, compared to € -0.8 million in Q3 2023
Gross profit grew 6% YoY to € 21.1 million
Gross margin improved to 32.2% versus 31.6% in Q3 2023
Normalized OPEX decreased 19% YoY to € 16.4 million
Number of FTE decreased 14% YoY to 676
Revenue grew 3% YoY to € 65.4 million
Annual Recurring Revenue grew 7% YoY to € 33.6 million
Q3 2024 Business Highlights
CM.com is selected to become the primary and exclusive ticketing platform for a main attraction in Paris with 12-14 million visitors expected annually
CM.com completed the development of its “GenAI Playground” tool, which enables customers to discover the AI use case in their businesses, compliant with EU legislation. The launch of the tool was earlier this week and confirms CM.com’s role as leading innovator in GenAI solutions in Europe
CM.com expanded the contract with a renowned Dutch retail chain store, to renew their physical infrastructure in 1300 stores across Europe
CM.com successfully sold tickets for the TeamNL House during the Olympic Games in Paris
Rich Communication Services (RCS) has been launched as a new channel for our Connect product portfolio
Outlook
CM.com improves the guided range for EBITDA to € 16-18 million from € 14-18 million for FY 2024
CM.com reiterates its guidance of Normalized OPEX to decrease at least 15% YoY in FY 2024
CM.com reiterates to turn Free Cash Flow positive in H2 2024
Message from the CEO
This year really is a transformational year due to the developments in AI. CM.com is heavily invested in AI. A journey that started already with the acquisition of CX Company in 2020, when we took our first steps into the enterprise AI world with world class Natural Language Understanding to understand the intention behind consumer requests for our clients in verticals like Utility, Insurance, Mobility, and many others. We continued our journey by applying this powerful technology onto the conversations of the clients of our next acquisition RobinHQ, more in the e-commerce space. With
the acquisition of Building Blocks a few years later, we were able to add a very powerful predictive AI model to our platform, which really enables our clients to get to know their customers better on a huge scale. Last year, we invested in combining all these technologies into our single platform, which combines enterprise software with many communication channels and is used by thousands of business customers around the world.
This year we truly witnessed the value of one CM.com platform. We saw a huge uptake in the use of our Generative AI engine, since it was fully integrated into our Conversation AI and Mobile Service Cloud solutions, and we’re now seeing our Mobile Marketing Cloud clients using our newest AI features to drastically improve their multichannel campaigns they run on our platform. More is happening every week. Last week we heard one of our clients sharing on stage at an industry event how our AI technology saves them 600k euros annually in their customer service department, while
their customer satisfaction score was going up. One of our clients, which is a huge consumer brand, decided to roll out our Marketing Cloud into 28 new countries. Just this week we launched our AI Playground, where everybody can play around with our newest AI technology and build AI knowledge assistants. There is much more to come as we’re now entering the age of the AI Agents, that not only can assist our business users and their consumers but are also capable of coming up with plans and can execute actions on their behalf.
We’re not only developing and selling AI solutions, but of course we are also implementing AI solutions in our own organization. According to plan, we see that step one is always; get your data straight, step two is: gather meaningful insights, and then and only then, you’re able to really automate tasks with AI. A few remarkable examples of the last couple months; we are now monitoring our messaging traffic and payments transactions with AI, which saves a lot of time and reduces fraud. We were also capable to drastically shorten the onboarding time for new payments clients from days to minutes. For our ticketing business, we’re now capable of designing and building branded ticket shops in seconds instead of hours, by leveraging our AI capabilities on our platform. So with the help of AI we can now say: we are doing more things, with less resources. If you see our figures, you’ll see our improved efficiency is reflected in it.
Coming up this quarter, we’ll be delivering a lot of big projects for our new clients. We’ll deliver the primary and exclusive ticketing platform for a main attraction in Paris, we’ll renew a payment infrastructure for a multinational retail chain, and we’ll implement the full CM.com Engage portfolio for another large global retail chain. We are looking forward to the first outcomes of various new RCS activities in the four countries where we are fully operational with this new and innovative Rich Communication System. The first clients in Spain, France, the UK and Germany are testing various cases with Messaging combined with Payments and Ticketing, features that are natively available on our platform. We have high expectations because, according to Gartner, CPaaS is in the top 3 of fastest growing technologies in the Enterprise Infrastructure Software space, next to Security and Database Management Systems.
This year CM.com celebrated its 25th anniversary. The past 25 years have been exciting and innovative. We could not have done this without our talented workforce. CM.com will continue to invest in its products and services to be able to offer its clients innovative solutions that add value to their business proposition now and in the future. By offering our workforce the right tooling and an entrepreneurial work environment, we want to remain at the forefront of innovation for at least the next 25 years.
Jeroen van Glabbeek
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