Shawn O'Connor
Analyst · Craig-Hallum Capital Group
Thank you, Brian. Simulations Plus delivered another quarter of top and bottom line growth. The quarter was highlighted by continued strong performance from our software solutions with growth exceeding 21%, well above 10% to 15% historical growth rates. Accordingly, we believe that going forward, software revenues will contribute more heavily to our consolidated growth rates than they have in the past. Our service business encountered several project disruptions, which impacted the quarter, leading to an 18% service revenue decline. This decline was due to an unusually high number of projects, 9 in total, impacted by delays, holds, or drug development program cancellations, all of which occurred during the latter part of the quarter. Despite these near-term factors, we remain confident in the mid- to long-term view on the service business as we saw solid bookings and backlog growth and overall pipeline expansion during the quarter. Given our strong software mix, we were able to grow our bottom line faster than the top line, as evidenced by our strong profitability in the quarter. In fact, our net income through 9 months exceeded our total net income for all of fiscal 2020. These results reflect the accelerating growth of our software revenues and inherent leverage in our business model, and the progress we have made in expanding our profit margin. As I mentioned, this was a strong quarter for our software solutions. GastroPlus and ADMET Predictor continued to increase growth rates with drug-drug interaction or DDI and high-throughput pharmacokinetic, or HTPK, module growth of 114% and 58%, respectively. We added five new customers to the 100,000-plus license club and had 23 [technical difficulty] during the quarter, demonstrating the strength of our product portfolio combined with our efforts to both cross-sell and upsell. Monolix revenues continued to outperform our expectations with revenue up 64% from last year due to a combination of robust demand and early license renewals. This growth is now entirely organic as we have passed the one-year anniversary of our acquisition of last year. We also completed the training of a new distributor in China during the quarter, significantly expanding our addressable market. Our business development investments are paying off by increasing our sales pipeline and creating a cross-selling opportunity and deeper relationship with customers. We also continue to add new capabilities and extend our industry leadership position with the latest release of ADMET Predictor, which will allow for enhanced lead selection, enhanced performance and accuracy, improved automation, and a better overall user experience. Additionally, the newest version of the MonolixSuite is on target for release in the fourth quarter, and GPx10 is on track for release by calendar year-end. Turning to our service offerings. Our service revenue is nonrecurring and can, therefore, exhibit some measure of volatility. During the quarter, our PK/PD and QSP/QST services encountered project disruptions and mix changes that impacted the revenue growth. PK/PD projects are typically in the $100,000 to $200,000 range. We see projects accelerate to meet the aggressive timelines or delayed by issues that are out of our control. Historically, delays have been largely offset by new projects or projects pulled forward from backlog. But this quarter, several significant customer delays impacted our revenue and will continue to do so into the fourth quarter. Customers are quicker to cancel challenging drug development programs in this pandemic environment, and we saw several drug development program cancellations. Our technology allows customers to make decisions more quickly on whether or not to proceed with development of a compound. Fail fast is an industry objective, and this can contribute to our service project volatility. We also saw delays with service projects sourced in Israel this past quarter as well as from the tail end of the COVID impact. With respect to the latter, projects are often initiated based on feedback from the FDA requesting more research into specific elements of the compound. During the pandemic, the normal workflow of the FDA and with other regulators has been somewhat disruptive, and this has impacted the schedule for certain drugs to be submitted to the FDA and the time line for FDA reviews as well as clinical trial time. As a result, we saw a large number of changes and many of these notifications came late in the quarter. Since our sales cycle had been somewhat elongated during COVID already, our backlog was not at the levels typical of this business limiting our ability to backfill and reallocate resources to make up for these changes. On a positive note, our bookings during the quarter were good. And the backlog for service projects increased by approximately 5% despite the cancellation. We also added 5 new clients during the quarter, which reinforces our optimism. On the QSP/QST side, these projects tend to be larger in terms of dollars making the revenue for this work more volatile. QSP/QST had 3 very large projects that concluded late in fiscal 2020, driving higher-than-normal revenue. Further, smaller toxicology projects that are usually the result of feedback from the FDA when regulators want a sponsor to provide additional data on potential liver issues with a compound and we have the gold standard of capabilities in this area. As COVID continues to [technical difficulty] rearview mirror, we think the overall pharma development pipeline will normalize, and we will see opportunities convert to backlog and ultimately revenue. That said, our sales pipeline remains large, in fact, larger than normal with significant opportunities. Separately, we did add an additional member to the liver model consortium in the quarter, furthering our integration with industry leaders. Finally, our PBPK services reported solid performance in the quarter, and our regulatory services resources are operating at capacity. Overall, this was a challenging quarter for our service division, but the trends are more encouraging than the results show. Our services continue to enjoy healthy demand and our sales pipeline is robust and growing. The nature of these project-based revenues result in some periods of over performance and some periods of underperformance. Our outlook for the services revenue in the long run remains unchanged in its ability to contribute to our overall revenue growth, and with the accelerating growth of our software business, we continue to minimize our exposure to service fluctuations and improved profitability. Based on the slowdown in our services revenue, we are now expecting full year total revenue growth of 5% to 10%. The service volatility encountered this quarter is not reflective of any market disruption or business executions that change our long-term outlook for modeling and simulations adoption or our growth prospects as a company. While we are not yet releasing fiscal 2022 guidance, we believe that we will grow over the longer term by more than 15% annually. Breaking our fiscal year '21 full year guidance down, we expect our software revenue to grow 20% to 25% for the full year. This takes into account the 32% year-to-date growth and anticipated flat Monolix revenue in Q4 due to the renewals that were accelerated third quarter. Year-to-date, our services revenue was down 6%, and we're expecting full year to see a decline of 7% to 12%. The timing of the delays, holds in drug development program cancellations means that the fourth fiscal quarter is likely to see lower service revenues, and we don't yet have the necessary visibility to predict when these projects will move forward. Again, we view this situation as temporary and strictly related to the timing of customer projects. Let me now turn the call to our CFO, Will Frederick, to discuss the financial results.