Bob Shepardson
Analyst · Cowen
Thank you, Ido and hello, everyone. I'll start with a review of our operating metrics and financial results for the fourth quarter and the year, then I'll discuss our outlook and guidance for 2023. I'm pleased to report that all of our key operating metrics are trending in a healthy direction. Active providers is an important metric of the sustained value our clients see in our platform. We ended the fourth quarter with over 107,000 active providers, representing growth of over 11% compared to a year ago. As a subset, active providers employed by our clients grew 12% versus last year. We anticipate that our number of active providers will continue to rise as we migrate and implement existing and new clients onto our Converge platform. Another important metric is our average annual contract value or ACV which is a good indicator of the value we are delivering to our clients and the success of our land and expand strategy. Health plan ACV increased over 19% to $863,000 in 2022 compared to 2021. ACV for health systems saw a 13% increase to $401,000. This is in line with our expectations during this time of the Converge transition as clients focused on migrating to Converge. We expect ACV to continue to expand as we look to grow our footprint within existing clients and add new clients over time. Total visits were approximately 1.7 million in the fourth quarter, an increase of 10% compared to last year. Urgent care visits drove most of this increase in what was the first real flu season since the onset of the pandemic. This surge in on-demand urgent care visits resulted in scheduled visits being 63% of the total, down from a prior range of 70% to 75% over the last couple of years but still up significantly from approximately 30% pre-COVID. For the year, scheduled visits comprised 70% of total visits. We continue to make steady progress migrating our clients to the new platform and we are proceeding according to plan. In Q4, successful migrations drove visits on Converge for the quarter to 28% of total and that number has continued to increase during Q1. And now on to our financial results. In a transition year with many moving elements, we are pleased to have been able to achieve our revenue guide and exceed our adjusted EBITDA guide for 2022. Total revenue was $79.2 million for the quarter which represents growth of 9% over Q4 of last year. Total revenue for the year grew 10% compared to last year to $277.2 million. Subscription revenue was $30.7 million in Q4, relatively flat compared to the year ago quarter. For the year, subscription revenue grew 12% to $120.9 million. During the year, subscription revenue growth was positively impacted by the inclusion of a full year of revenue from our 2021 acquisitions of SilverCloud and Conversa and was challenged by the temporary impact on bookings we had expected, while we focused on completing the Converge build-out, successfully migrating our existing client base, plus strategic client deployments. The diversity of our revenue stream proved to be a real asset in 2022 as AMG and client-related implementation services delivered strong growth for the year, supporting our overall growth rate during this time. Moving to visits. In Q4, AMG visit revenue was 12% higher than last year at $35.1 million. Visit revenue was strong this quarter and in fact, was just shy of Amwell Medical Group's all-time high of $36 million in the second quarter of 2020 at the peak of the pandemic, demonstrating the enduring value of this service to our clients. For the year, visit revenue grew 7% to $124.3 million. Now on to some detail on visits. AMG visits grew 23% for the quarter and 11% for the year, with average revenue per visit at $71 and $76, respectively. As I mentioned, the early onset of an unusually heavy flu season drove urgent care volumes higher and hence, revenue per visit lower for the quarter. As we have said previously, while our AMG business is an important differentiator in the market and critical to many of our clients, our primary focus going forward is to drive high-margin recurring revenue associated with sales of the Converge platform plus a growing number of modules, automated care programs and services like AMG. Our services and Carepoints revenue grew 18% to $13.5 million in the quarter and 14% for the year. This strength was driven substantially by professional services revenue we earned as we implemented strategic clients on to Converge. As we have discussed on prior calls, revenues of this type highlight the strategic long-term nature of our client relationships and the ROI they see in deploying our platform. Turning to profitability. Fourth quarter gross profit margin increased 250 basis points versus last year to 42.4%. For the year, gross profit margin increased 80 basis points to 42.1%. Gross margins may continue to fluctuate a bit from quarter-to-quarter depending on revenue mix. Contributing to the increase for the quarter were a higher proportion of urgent care visits at AMG and a higher margin mix of services and Carepoints revenue. Over the long run, it's our goal to drive a steady revenue mix shift towards high-margin recurring software revenue in pursuit of our long-term model. Turning to operating expenses. During the fourth quarter, our progress in developing Converge across the meaningful threshold in our overall project plan. As required by GAAP, we capitalized $10.2 million of development-related efforts in the quarter. Adjusting for these capitalized software development costs, R&D expense increased by $1.6 million in the quarter to $37.8 million. As we have discussed, we believe that 4Q '22 represented our peak R&D spend. And given our progress in delivering Converge, we expect that R&D spend will decline sequentially on an absolute basis over the course of 2023. Fourth quarter sales and marketing expense increased 9% compared to a year ago. This was driven by higher sales and marketing activity across the board as we prepared for our January commercial kickoff meeting and ramped our overall sales efforts, reflecting the completion of Converge. We made some changes in our sales teams to align our resources around solution selling which are aimed at driving pipeline development, deal velocity and deal size. G&A increased 9% sequentially, driven primarily by the recognition of deferred noncash compensation associated with the terms of our SilverCloud acquisition. Adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was negative $43.4 million, bringing the metric for the year to negative $175.3 million. As we discussed on our third quarter call, Q4 completed a full year of careful expense management around headcount and we achieved synergies from the early integration of our recent acquisitions. As a result, we achieved better-than-anticipated adjusted EBITDA, both relative to our preliminary guide for the year as well as versus our updated guidance last quarter. Transitioning to the balance sheet, we ended the quarter with $538.5 million of cash and marketable securities. We are fortunate to have a substantial cash position as it provides the resources to fund this temporary period of investing and the flexibility to pursue strategic opportunities that are aligned with our goals. Turning now to our 2023 outlook. 2022 ended with puts and takes for our business which we carefully assessed in arriving at our guidance range. First, we experienced both continued impact from COVID and an early and severe flu season which may not recur this year. As a result, we took a conservative approach and are assuming normalized AMG visit activity of 1.45 million to 1.65 million visits. We also look carefully at the spending environment, taking into account conversations with our clients. As Ido mentioned earlier, a challenging macro environment presents us with headwinds and tailwinds. On the one hand, the heart of our value proposition and our partnering approach directly addresses the budgetary and operational challenges our clients and prospects are facing today. This is driving demand. On the other hand, these challenges may also impact expansion and deployment cycles for our solution that are difficult to predict at this time. Finally, we anticipate steadiness in our services and Carepoints revenue which we believe will remain at approximately 10% of total revenue. Considering these factors, we expect revenue to be in the range of $275 million to $285 million for the year. Given sales cycle timing, we anticipate the majority of the bookings we generate this year will come in the second half of the year. So a portion of the bookings momentum we aim to generate this year will translate to revenue growth in 2024. Next, some color on subscription software revenue growth which is a primary goal for us. As we emerge from this time of transition and continued migration, we are turning our attention to reaccelerating client bookings via expanded use of new modules on Converge. With Converge ready and reference clients building, we anticipate a return to strong software bookings momentum. Therefore, we believe software revenue will grow faster than our overall business in 2023. Now on to our guidance for our progress toward profitability. For the full year 2023, we expect our adjusted EBITDA to be in the range of negative $150 million to $160 million. Much of the expected improvement in adjusted EBITDA will come from the anticipated reduction in R&D spending layering in over the course of the year as we have planned. Wrapping up our guidance, we are encouraged by our progress to date. All of our key metrics are trending favorably and we have put much of the risk of our transition behind us. Our teams are executing in product and client migrations and we have earned the validation that our anchor clients ascribed to our approach to the market. The clients we have implemented on to Converge report a very high level of patient and provider satisfaction and technical success and they give us valuable referenceability with our prospects. Our ROI case studies are fueling robust conversations with our substantial pipeline of upsells and new logos. Before I conclude my remarks, I would like to comment on our long-term model as we outlined a year ago. As we enter the next chapter of our transition, we remain confident in the components of our long-term model which describes our path to cash flow breakeven and remains our goal. We believe our differentiated approach to enabling digital care delivery positions us well to deliver sustained revenue growth and expanding profitability over the long-term. Thank you for listening. With that, I'd like to turn the call back to Ido for some closing remarks. Ido?