Earnings call transcript: Kinaxis Q1 2025 beats earnings expectations

Kinaxis Inc. reported its first quarter 2025 earnings, surpassing analyst expectations with an earnings per share (EPS) of $0.8747 against a forecast of $0.7647. The company’s revenue reached $132.8 million, exceeding the expected $132.17 million. Following the announcement, Kinaxis’s stock experienced a slight uptick of 0.12%, reflecting cautious optimism among investors. According to InvestingPro data, the company maintains strong financial health with a GOOD overall rating, supported by robust growth metrics and cash flow scores.

Key Takeaways

• Kinaxis exceeded both EPS and revenue forecasts for Q1 2025.
• SaaS revenue grew by 16%, contributing to robust overall performance.
• The stock price increased modestly post-earnings, nearing its 52-week high.
• Strategic partnerships and AI innovations are central to future growth.
• The search for a permanent CEO continues, presenting a potential risk.

Company Performance

Kinaxis demonstrated strong performance in the first quarter of 2025, with an 11% year-over-year increase in total revenue. The company’s focus on SaaS offerings paid off, as this segment saw a 16% growth, highlighting the effectiveness of its strategic initiatives. The ongoing demand for supply chain solutions, combined with Kinaxis’s innovative AI integrations, positions the company favorably against competitors like SAP and Blue Yonder.

Financial Highlights

• Revenue: $132.8 million, up 11% year-over-year
• Earnings per share: $0.8747, beating forecast by 14.4%
• Adjusted EBITDA: $33.1 million, up 46% with a 25% margin
• Profit: $15.9 million, up 157% to $0.55 per diluted share
• Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR): $372 million, 14% growth

Earnings vs. Forecast

Kinaxis exceeded expectations with an EPS of $0.8747, surpassing the forecasted $0.7647 by approximately 14.4%. Revenue also outperformed estimates, reaching $132.8 million against a forecast of $132.17 million. This performance marks a continuation of the company’s trend of exceeding projections, driven by strong SaaS and AI product offerings.

Market Reaction

Following the earnings announcement, Kinaxis’s stock price increased by 0.12%, trading near its 52-week high of $137.06. This modest rise suggests that while investors are pleased with the earnings beat, they remain cautious due to ongoing strategic uncertainties, such as the search for a permanent CEO. InvestingPro data indicates the stock is currently trading at elevated valuation multiples, with analysts maintaining a bullish consensus recommendation of 1.9 (where 1 is Strong Buy and 5 is Strong Sell).

Outlook & Guidance

Kinaxis has set a revenue guidance for 2025 between $535 million and $550 million, with expected SaaS growth of 11-13%. The company aims for an adjusted EBITDA margin of 23-25%. Key strategic focuses include further AI product integration and refining pricing frameworks to capitalize on market opportunities. With a market capitalization of $3.8 billion and a five-year revenue CAGR of 20%, InvestingPro data suggests strong fundamental momentum, though investors should note the stock’s RSI indicates overbought conditions.

Executive Commentary

Interim CEO Bob Curtau highlighted the strategic importance of Kinaxis’s solutions, stating, "Customers are seeing our solutions as strategic not only for the environment we’re in now, but it has reminded them that they need these kind of products to deal with other kind of complexities in the future." CFO Blaine Fitzgerald added, "We are winning the best deals that are out there right now," emphasizing the company’s competitive edge.

Risks and Challenges

• The ongoing search for a permanent CEO could impact strategic stability.
• Market saturation and intense competition from established players like SAP.
• Macroeconomic pressures and supply chain disruptions pose potential risks.
• Dependence on AI and technology integration may face implementation challenges.

Q&A

During the earnings call, analysts inquired about Kinaxis’s software margin improvements and expansion business drivers. The company also detailed its professional services revenue strategy and emphasized its commitment to AI and partnership initiatives, addressing concerns about competitive positioning and future growth prospects.

Full transcript - Kinaxis Inc (KXS) Q1 2025:

Conference Operator: Good morning, and welcome to the Kinexus Inc. Fiscal twenty twenty five First Quarter Results Conference Call. Currently, all participants are in a listen only mode. Following the presentation, we will conduct a question and answer session. Instructions will be provided at the time for you to queue up for questions.

I’d like to remind everyone that this call is being recorded today, Thursday, 05/08/2025. I will now turn the call over to Rick Wadsworth, Vice President of Investor Relations at Kinaxis Inc. Please go ahead, Mr. Wadsworth.

Rick Wadsworth, Vice President of Investor Relations, Kinaxis Inc.: Thanks, operator. Good morning, and welcome to the Kinaxis earnings call. Today, we will be discussing our first quarter results, which we issued after close of markets yesterday. With me on the call are Bob Curtau, Interim CEO and Chair and Blaine Fitzgerald, our Chief Financial Officer. Some of the information discussed on this call is based on information as of today, 05/08/2025, and contains forward looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties.

Actual results may differ materially from those set forth in such statements. For a discussion of these risks and uncertainties, you should review the forward looking statements disclosure in the earnings press release as well as in our SEDAR plus filings. During this call, we will discuss IFRS results and non IFRS financial measures, including adjusted EBITDA. A reconciliation between adjusted EBITDA and the corresponding IFRS result is available in our earnings press release and MD and A, both of which can be found on the Investor Relations section of our website, kinaxis.com and on SEDAR plus The webcast is live and being recorded for playback purposes. An archive of the webcast will be made available on the Investor Relations section of our website.

Neither this call nor the webcast may be rerecorded or otherwise reproduced or distributed without prior written permission from Kinaxis. To begin our call, Bob will discuss the highlights of our quarter and recent business developments, followed by Blaine, who will review our financial results and outlook and open the line for questions. We have a presentation to accompany today’s call, which can be downloaded from the Investor Relations homepage of our website. We will let you know when to change slides. Over to you, Bob.

Bob Curtau, Interim CEO and Chair, Kinaxis Inc.: Thanks, Rick. Good morning and thanks for joining us today. I’m pleased with the first quarter results and I wanted to highlight three key items. First, it was a solid quarter for new business, including record expansion business volume for the first quarter. Our ARR grew 14% as reported and in constant currency.

SaaS growth was 16% or 17% in constant currency. Second, we continue to make progress with profitability as adjusted EBITDA was up 46% and the margin hit 25%. Lastly, it was our third consecutive quarter delivering Rule of 40 plus performance. We view this consistency as key to evaluation that better reflects our elite positioning in the vertical software universe. This performance allowed us to maintain all guidance elements for the year, including SaaS revenue growth, total revenue and adjusted EBITDA margin.

And we are also on track towards our midterm goals. As always, we added important new customers in the quarter and enterprise class companies continue to be the biggest cohort. We’re so fortunate to be able to name a sample of our new customers today. For example, we’ve helped orchestrate the supply chains for global leaders like Sun Pharma, which extends our success in Asia. Based in India, Sun Pharma is the world’s leading specialty generics company with $5,800,000,000 in revenues and more than 40 manufacturing facilities.

Sun Pharma provides high quality, affordable medicines to more than 100 companies around the globe. Workwear Outfitters based in The U. S. Is a leading manufacturer of innovative work apparel and footwear for workers with brands like Kodiak and is exclusive licensee for Dickies apparel in the B2B channel. Delta Faucet Company also headquartered in The U.

S. And who we know through Delta and Peerless brands among others, offer purposeful practical plumbing fixtures that solve our everyday needs. Demand AS headquartered in Denmark with over 22,000 employees is a global leader in hearing healthcare and manufacturing of hearing aids dedicated to improve the lives of people with hearing loss. Veolia, a U. S.

Subsidiary of a French based company, which provides water treatment and sustainable solutions for industrial and municipal clients. Finally, we’ve signed in one of the world’s largest companies in the semiconductor ecosystem by both revenue and market cap. Our market share keeps growing from successes like this as we continue to win the most important and competitive opportunities across all markets and geographies. Ongoing growth of the customer base, balance across geographic and vertical markets and revenue tiers remains a significant opportunity for Kinaxis. As we briefly mentioned on our last call, we struck a new partnership with In for to help accelerate that growth and I’m so pleased to be able to share more details today.

The new relationship with In is focused on mid market, the street manufacturing companies and the high-tech, industrial, consumer durables, automotive and aerospace and defense verticals. Together, we are integrating In

for CloudSuite for discrete manufacturing with Kinaxis Planning One, the Maestro solution package that offers core fundamentals like supply and demand planning and inventory management. This partnership will create an entirely new channel by activating a mid market team of sellers in North America and Europe within In for. We’re excited to see this initiative moving forward. While winning new customers will be a major part of the Kinecta story for many years, I’m very pleased that in Q1 and for the second consecutive quarter, over half of gross additions to ARR came from existing customers. Thanks to rapid expansion of the customer base in recent years, exciting new product launches and an increased focus under Mark Morgan, we continue to see more expansion business than ever in our pipeline.

I’m also very pleased with the meaningful improvements we made to our go to market team and approach. While started several years ago through geographic expansion, adding VARs and solution extension partners and moving to public cloud among other initiatives, we took another major step last year by adding Mark and key regional leaders who know how to operate at scale and who are sharply focused on progressing our best opportunities. We’re winning the market and together with the most referenceable customer base in the supply chain software industry. These improvements have seen us become best in class and how we approach the market and service our customers. As always, one critical reason we win remains our product leadership.

We are thrilled that Kinaxis was recognized as a leader in the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Supply Chain Planning Solutions for the eleventh consecutive time. Based on analysis of both our completeness of vision and our ability to execute, We take pride in consistently strong positioning in this important report. But there is no time or place where our product and go to market leadership shines more than at Connections, our flagship industry conference. This year, a record 1,000 attendees or almost 30% more than twenty twenty four came to Austin to hear, see and interact with the latest in our market leading innovations. At Connections, we announced an important partnership with Databricks.

Together, we will strengthen Maestro’s data fabric to help customers quickly and easily unify their data, accelerate AI adoption and bring together information from core systems like inventory and procurement, alongside external inputs such as weather patterns, market signals, all within one governed environment. The result will be faster insights, greater execution agility and a more resilient innovation ready supply chain. In Austin, customers and prospects were hands on with our next phase of AI innovation, including out of the box AI agents to monitor, predict and take action in real time for automation of key tasks like inventory management and disruption mitigation. Attendees were even creating their own AI agents on Maestro, showing how AI driven supply chain orchestration can be accessible to businesses at any stage of their AI maturity. Conference scores also saw firsthand how new generative AI functionality will make interacting with supply chain data even more intuitive.

In addition to creating customizable dashboards, C suite users to technical experts will be able to query digital twins by asking questions in dozens of natural languages and receive instant insightful answers to complex questions. This allows interdisciplinary teams to analyze scenarios, assess risk and make informed decisions without requiring AI expertise. Look, naturally at Connections, it was impossible to have conversations with supply chain leaders without discussing the global tariff issue. As longtime followers of the company, you understand that Maestro has been specifically built to handle disruptions of any kind and few have been more significant for our customers than the current tariff crisis. Consequently, we recently launched Kinaxis Tariff Response, a professional services offering for prospects that allows them under a limited time engagement to provide Kinaxis experts with key supply chain data, so we can show how Maestro can simulate tariff exposure, run strategic scenarios and make data informed decisions quickly.

The service can be live in as few as twenty one days, giving planners access to tariff modeling without the cost or complexity of building it internally. Interest in this campaign from prospective customers has been encouraging. Tariff response provides a meaningful preview into the power of Maestro, so we expect some engagements from this program to convert to new subscription business in the coming months. Overall, I’m very pleased with the progress in the first quarter and for the remainder of the year. We aim to deliver on a few key items, ongoing delivery of quarters that support our full year 2025 outlook and midterm ambitions.

More new market leading customers coupled with a more balanced contribution to quarterly ARR growth from expansion business and many new name accounts. We are setting up initial customers for our exciting new generative AI and AgenTeq AI products and initiating a new pricing framework to better reflect and take advantage of the more universal integration of AI through Maestro and the higher value it brings. And lastly, a new full time CEO. We’re adding exceptional talent to our company now. We’re working well as an experienced collaborative senior team and delivering rule of 40 quarters, all of which gives us the privilege of being patient and finding the absolute best person for the role.

As with any global software company, we do remain mindful of the significant challenges our customers face in the new era of global trade. But we are confident in our elevated go to market team and approach, our product leadership and the breadth of growth opportunities in front of us. Kinaxis today is better organized than ever to take a full advantage of the incredibly dynamic supply chain orchestration opportunity that lies ahead. And with that said, I’m going to turn over the call to Blaine.

Blaine Fitzgerald, Chief Financial Officer, Kinaxis Inc.: Thank you, Bob, and good morning. As a reminder, unless noted otherwise, all figures reported on today’s call are in U. S. Dollars under IFRS. If you move to Slide nine in our investor presentation for Q1, I’m very pleased to report solid Q1 results that set us on a good path to achieve our fiscal twenty twenty five goals, both on an as reported and constant currency basis.

New business remains strong sustaining the upward trend in our ARR growth. Our profitability in Q1 was strong again as was our trailing twelve month free cash flow margin, particularly if you adjust for the impact of one time outlays related to our tax restructuring and litigation settlement, both of which we discussed on our last call. Our mid term profitability goal of consistent full year normalized twenty five percent adjusted EBITDA margin and consistent annual Rule of 40 performance aspirations are both clearly in view. Now let me walk you through our Q1 twenty twenty five results compared to the same period last year. Total revenue was $132,800,000 up 11%.

SaaS revenue was $84,900,000 up 16%. Our subscription term license revenue was $9,000,000 in line with our expectations given renewal cycles and up 34%. Professional services revenue was $33,300,000 down 3%. We see this largely as a reflection of ongoing success in our long term strategy to move an increased share of professional services work to our partner network. Maintenance and support revenue was $5,500,000 up 15%.

Our gross profit was strong, up 19% to eighty six point five million dollars or 65% gross margin compared to 61% in the same quarter last year. The software margin was 80%, up from 76% due in part to higher subscription term license revenue and lower amortization, thanks to an intangible asset we retired last quarter. Professional services gross margin was down to 21% from 24% consistent with partners taking on more of the services work. Adjusted EBITDA was extremely strong, up 46% to $33,100,000 or a 25% margin versus 19% in the comparable quarter. This reflects numerous factors including our revenue growth, higher gross margin and lower operating expenses as a percentage of revenue as we continue to focus on profitability and gain further operating leverage as we scale.

Our growth and profitability performance resulted in Rule of 40 performance for the third consecutive quarter calculated by adding SaaS revenue growth and adjusted EBITDA margin, our usual approach. Our profit in the quarter was up 157% to $15,900,000 or $0.55 per diluted share versus a profit of $6,200,000 or $0.21 per diluted share a year ago. We are proud of the significant improvement. Profit benefited largely from the same factors that supported our strong adjusted EBITDA performance. Cash flow from operating activities, dollars 31,600,000.0.

That compares to $32,000,000 in Q1 twenty twenty four. Cash, cash equivalents and short term investments were $314,600,000 up from $298,500,000 at the end of twenty twenty four, despite the one time payment made in Q1 relating to tax planning and litigation settlement. If you move to slide 10, our trailing twelve month free cash flow margin remains strong at 18.7%. Absent the tax planning and settlement amounts, trailing twelve month cash flow margin would have been 24.4, a great reflection of our increased focus on profitability. On to slide 11.

Our ARR or annual recurring revenue grew to $372,000,000 representing 14% growth both as reported and in constant currency. The split of gross additions to ARR between new name accounts and expansion business was 47% to 53% in Q1. This is the second consecutive quarter where expansion business was the bigger contributor. Our pipeline for 2025 remains more tilted toward expansion opportunities than in prior years, which we believe is a reflection of recent growth in our customer base, more product to sell and our heightened focus on this important sales motion. Moving to slide 12.

Our SaaS and total RPO balances remain very strong growing to $767,000,000 and $812,000,000 respectively with three year CAGRs of 2019%. This metric continues to highlight growth in our subscription business and our elite gross customer retention. More details on our RPO could be found in the revenue note for our financials. Looking at slide 13, while mindful of the impacts to our markets of the volatile macro environment, I’m pleased to reiterate our 2025 guidance. Total revenue of $535,000,000 to $550,000,000 or $545,000,000 to $560,000,000 in constant currency, SaaS growth of 11% to 13% or 12% to 14% in constant currency.

We continue to anticipate seasonal trends to apply with Q4 historically being our strongest bookings quarter. Subscription term license revenue of $16,000,000 to $18,000,000 approximately one quarter of the total amount will be recognized in the second quarter and the remainder split over the back half of the year with Q3 being somewhat higher than Q4. We continue to expect adjusted EBITDA margin to be between 23% to 25%. Finally on slide 14, we’ve continued to be active on our normal course issuer bid. For the quarter, we purchased 157,428 shares and at an average of U.

S. Dollar price of $110.49 for an investment of roughly $17,400,000 Our NCIB goes through 11/05/2025. Overall, I’m pleased with how the business is executing. This is our third consecutive Wheel of forty quarter. Despite the challenges to customers of a constantly changing tariff environment, new business in the quarter was solid and kept our ARR growth rate on a good trajectory.

Adjusted EBITDA margin and free cash flow continue to move in the right direction, reflecting dramatically improved profitability. And our mid term financial aspirations are all intact. I’m excited for the coming AI transition and what it will mean for our differentiation and growth ahead. As always, thank you for your ongoing interest in Kinaxis’ support to date. I will now turn the line over to the operator to start the Q and A session.

Conference Operator: Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. And your first question comes from the line of Sagar Karri with BMO Capital Markets. Your line is open.

Sagar Karri, Analyst, BMO Capital Markets: Hi there. Good morning. This is Sagar on for Thanos. My first question is regarding your software margin. So the margin was the highest in several quarters.

So how should we think about that trajectory as we continue as you continue your migration to public cloud?

Bob Curtau, Interim CEO and Chair, Kinaxis Inc.: Question.

Blaine Fitzgerald, Chief Financial Officer, Kinaxis Inc.: Just talk about we’ve always had a discussion saying our our software margins should be over 80%. And, obviously, the migration to public cloud, in the early days put us a little bit south of that. We’re we’re really happy with where it’s going. Obviously, it’s it’s still early days. I think the subscription term license revenue, it helped us out a little bit in this quarter.

So we need to make sure that we take that into consideration as we move forward. But we are consistently focused on trying to move that, at a consistent rate above 80% as we move forward. The public cloud migration is going very well. We’re seeing some economies of scale as we continue to move that forward with our APAC team already moved over. And Europe is next in line where we’re well on our way to migrating that customer base.

Sagar Karri, Analyst, BMO Capital Markets: Thanks. And just another question. I know you’re hedged from an FX perspective. So although given the appreciation of the Canadian dollar, how do we think about the potential impact on OpEx and margins as those hedges start to roll over?

Blaine Fitzgerald, Chief Financial Officer, Kinaxis Inc.: Great question. Over the next six months, I feel pretty good. We’ve been what we do is we hedge about six months in advance. So as you’re well aware, the Canadian dollar was in that CAD0.68 to CAD0.69 place that helps us out quite a bit on the bottom line. And we do have a substantial amount of expenses that go through our P and L that come from Canadian dollars.

So we’re going to benefit from that advantage over the next six months. Obviously, we’re sitting closer to $0.72 right now. And so in the back half of the year, we’ll continue to monitor that. But I think we’re in a great spot. Obviously, with everything going on in the macroeconomic environment, we’re not exactly on tariff firmer.

So I think we have to recognize that there could be still some volatility in exchange rates. But I think we’re in a great spot with the Canadian dollar and our hedging program is doing exactly what we hope to do with at this stage.

Sagar Karri, Analyst, BMO Capital Markets: Perfect. Thank you. And I’ll pass the line.

Conference Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Lachlan Brown with Redburn Atlantic. Your line is open.

Lachlan Brown, Analyst, Redburn Atlantic: Hi, Bob, Blake, Rick. Good morning to you. Strong delivery of bookings in what is usually a seasonally low quarter. Could you just talk to the success behind this? And did the trade uncertainty bring a pull forward of demand?

Or were a lot of these bookings going to the pipeline at the end of twenty twenty four?

Bob Curtau, Interim CEO and Chair, Kinaxis Inc.: If I maybe I’ll go first, Rick, and then you can jump in. Like we had an unbelievable connection. We already saw the level of increased interest with the number of people that attended the event. We just finished the Gartner Group Conference this week. The level of enthusiasm as measured by the attendance at our part of the events, just the sheer quantity of people in our booth on a relative basis was terrific.

We’ve won some of the most important customers in each of the industries we’re serving over the last four or five quarters that create an incredible reference base. And our go to market execution is obviously in a really good place. And then the last part of it is we’ve got some really great products that we’ve already released in 2024 that are starting to pick up and AI gives us another bookings capacity. So look, I feel like demand is good. Our competitive win rate is strong.

Our references are the best. So we gave we believe that our guidance is in good place and the wildcard is the economy and how that plays out. But generally, I would say that the company is in a really, really good period right now.

Blaine Fitzgerald, Chief Financial Officer, Kinaxis Inc.: Maybe I’ll no. That’s fair. Extra extra color on that if if that’s alright. The when when we got through q four, we had a great run up in q four, we we emptied the the coverage at that stage in terms of there was very few push deals that moved into Q1. So the fact that they had an amazing Q1, our highest incremental ARR for Q1 that we’ve ever seen is a testament that the team is executing at a different level than we’ve ever seen before.

I think, one of the big things that I’ve noticed over the last couple of quarters is some of our metrics are starting to change. The conversion rates that we’re seeing, especially in q four and q one are much higher than we’ve ever seen before. The pipeline is healthy. I’m pretty excited about some of the names I see in the Q2 pipeline and that large enterprise cohort that we always seek out seek to win. We’re seeing a lot more of that in our in our pipeline, which is great.

And you know what? We’re winning the best deals that are out there right now. I think our our q one deal that we didn’t name the name of the company, but that was the deal that everyone when everyone wanted to win, and we’re very proud that it came to us. So things are things are rolling right now.

Lachlan Brown, Analyst, Redburn Atlantic: That’s very clear. It’s a strong outcome. And maybe on the guidance, so good delivery on the SaaS constant currency up in 1Q of 17% year on year. You’ve maintained the ’25 guidance of 12 to 14%. I understand perhaps taking a cautious view on the total revenue given it incorporates the discretionary professional services.

But given SaaS revenue is recurring and more visible, just any commentary on the reiteration of the guidance would be helpful.

Bob Curtau, Interim CEO and Chair, Kinaxis Inc.: I mean, I can give you my view on that. We didn’t Blaine and I didn’t talk about it before the call, but in in a ton of detail. But given the the economic backdrop that we’re seeing, we put in what I would call a responsible view of 2025. And if we were going to revisit it, it’d be better to do that coming out of the second quarter. That’ll really give us a good opportunity to understand what the macro effect is going to be.

But against the backdrop that I just described, we’re feeling very good about our guidance.

Lachlan Brown, Analyst, Redburn Atlantic: Very helpful. Thanks for the questions.

Conference Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Richard Chu with Scotiabank. Your line is open.

Sagar Karri, Analyst, BMO Capital Markets: Hi, good morning. This is Richard in for Kevin today. So my first question, can you talk about the drivers of your expansion momentum and how that compares to previous quarters? I’m just wondering how much of the expansion is coming from an uptick in customers running scenarios versus, say, adding new modules, the expansion or adding new geographies?

Bob Curtau, Interim CEO and Chair, Kinaxis Inc.: Think it’s coming from a balanced, well organized, high highly performing software company. We we basically are focused on making customer getting to the outcome that customers are looking for. We’re continuing to drive the highest level of reference with our customers. Our product and engineering team is delivering on new innovation at a higher speed than our competitors. We have a core capability with Maestro that is solving the problems of today.

And we put a go to market discipline in that is about really making sure that we’re creating the tension for our company through marketing, working on the pipeline in a way that we’re doing what I call company to company execution. We’re meeting CEOs, we’re meeting the CFOs, and we’re supporting the Chief Supply Chain Officer. We’ve extended our pipeline through partners. That’s something we’ve been working on for years, and we’re starting to see the payback on that. And the most striking thing about connections was how many world class customers that were on stage describing the value and impact of our solutions on their business.

And all of that comes together in a way that we can continue to really take this company forward. I don’t blame, would you add to that?

Blaine Fitzgerald, Chief Financial Officer, Kinaxis Inc.: No, that’s exactly it. We I sometimes put in order and I I’ll give you a little more clarity on on some of the the drivers like new Maestro environments as customer expand with us is is has was the biggest contributor to some some of the expansion. But what I’m really happy about is the new applications, and we got to see that firsthand. That was, like, our number two scenarios and number three. But, the new applications, we thought firsthand at at Connections where, I’ll give you an example.

Enterprise scheduling, there was a number of deals that signed while we’re at at, just before we we got into the connections, which which helped out. Supply dot a I, one of our newer modules. So it we probably renamed at some point to supply optimization. But that that new module is is on fire right now in terms of how it’s being brought on by by customers. So environments, applications, and scenarios was the main drivers, but we’re we’re really happy that, obviously, the new applications are are especially that enterprise scheduling and supply optimization are are doing extremely well at this stage.

Bob Curtau, Interim CEO and Chair, Kinaxis Inc.: And just just one thing one thing on the volume of scenarios that are being run due to tariffs is directly related to the value our clients are getting from our solution. So, yeah, it brings in some revenue, but it reinforces what we heard consistently from our customers is that they’re so happy that they have Kinaxis in these times. And that leads to an even greater referenceability of our customer base.

Sagar Karri, Analyst, BMO Capital Markets: Right. That’s helpful. And can you also provide some commentary on net retention? I know you disclosed that it’s higher than 100%, but how far like, how it’s been trending so far in 2025? Can you talk a bit about any relative differences between retention for your largest clients versus more the mid market?

Blaine Fitzgerald, Chief Financial Officer, Kinaxis Inc.: Yeah. We it’s obviously two components that our our gross retention. We think we have best in class. It’s between 95 and a %. We’re extremely proud of that, and it’s a reflection of why we are in a position we are with the Gartner MQ.

But then when you go to NRR, we’ve only disclosed we’re over a %. It’s moving in the right direction, getting better and better. Obviously, happens when you have two quarters in a row where the expansion part of the business, it seems to be more to ARR than the new logos. So we’re we’re starting to see a little bit of a flywheel starting and and seem to see seen some improvement on that NRR. But at this stage, we’re we’re still sticking to our our disclosure, which is it’s consistently over 100% and we have a nice healthy margin right now.

Sagar Karri, Analyst, BMO Capital Markets: Got it. Thank you for taking my questions. I’ll pass the line.

Conference Operator: And your next question comes from the line of Richard Choi with National Bank Financial. Your line is open.

Mike Stevens, Analyst, National Bank Financial: Hi, good morning. It’s Mike Stevens on for Rich here. Congrats on the quarter, very strong. Just wanted to dig into, mentioned the revenue tier opportunity. And I don’t if you could provide some color on kind of how much your customer base now is on your revenue tiers or volume based pricing and where you see that going with some of the AI products upcoming.

And then as a follow-up, you know, how many you think that could impact the revenue model going forward?

Bob Curtau, Interim CEO and Chair, Kinaxis Inc.: Well, we’re Sure. Go on. I’ll I’ll I’ll You wanna go ahead, Blaine.

Blaine Fitzgerald, Chief Financial Officer, Kinaxis Inc.: I’ll I’ll start and you can jump in, Bob. Yeah.

Bob Curtau, Interim CEO and Chair, Kinaxis Inc.: Yeah. Sure.

Blaine Fitzgerald, Chief Financial Officer, Kinaxis Inc.: The where so we we do have some volume based pricing that that occurs. What you’re referring to is, a new pricing package that, and and some some planning that we’re we’re working around with the some of the new AI modules are coming out. So we do get extra variable revenue from number of orders, number of scenarios. But, as we move forward, we are looking at a hybrid approach to, with consumption based pricing that, will be effective with the deployment of our AI, solutions. We, obviously, connections, we we did, the team did a great job of showcasing why it’s so important, why it’s gonna help, a lot of organizations become more efficient, more effective, and more accurate as they as they plan for their supply chains.

We do have a healthy amount of demand right now. We are capping the amount of initial customers that are going through this just to make sure that we obviously go through an appropriate beta deployment of this, but we we have more than enough demand to to cover that. And so we’re we’re at this point, we’re over 50% of them will not have, the tool in the initial initial month, but then, we expect to have a pretty a pretty nice onslaught of of customers coming on board with that. We have been testing this out already. We, I think I’ve talked about this in the past.

We have a, almost like a help button or a chatbot that, what it does is it takes 14,000 pages of of Kinaxis documentation on how to use Maestro effectively. And that’s being used more than we’ve ever seen before. It’s the highest adoption we’ve ever seen of any module. For the customers that could potentially use it, we’re sitting right now at 75% that are are using it. And that’s just a testament to the demand that we have with our AI products.

Now when we move on to chat with data and AgenTeq AI, which are both coming out this year, that pricing and packaging tool. We are we are, in an urgent mode right now and prioritizing that to get that out to make sure that people understand how this will work with the revenue tiers and the consumption pricing that’ll be, along the way with that as well. So we think that will help with our revenue growth, but, I think, we have a little bit of planning and work to do to make sure that it rolls out effectively.

Bob Curtau, Interim CEO and Chair, Kinaxis Inc.: Yeah. I’ll add to it. It’s not going to have an impact on the shorter and medium term revenue. You don’t have to start changing your models. But the industry is moving this way.

And the reason for it is that it ties value to consumption. It is becoming a more normal way of making sure that as you consume capacity, you you you get the appropriate cost base with that capacity, particularly around AI solutions. More and more, we’re we’re exploring, and we’ve been working on transactions that allow that increase the contract increases with the consumption of the solution, both traditional SaaS and consumption pricing. And so look at it, this is something that we’re starting to develop as a modern company. It’s not as dramatic as the kind of economics that you saw when you went from on premise to cloud in terms of how the revenue tracks.

But it’s got similar economic opportunities that I’ve companies that have helped make that transition. And customers are asking for it. They’re seeing it from other vendors. And so we’re working we’re in the early days of working through this, and you should think about it as a company that you know, is committed to modernization is listening to our customers and finding ways to make sure that as our customers get value, we get paid, but also give them pass to get value in a way where they can control consumption more. Simple as that.

There’s a construct called product led marketing where if you can let customers have broader access to your solution, then they’re gonna find ways to use it more within their organization. And so all of these things are things that are, you know, on our mind as we look towards the future and as we lead this market around artificial intelligence and GenAI solutions.

Mike Stevens, Analyst, National Bank Financial: Okay. No. I really appreciate that color. Thank you. Just just, one last one.

You guys have obviously talked a lot about what you guys are doing differently and how you’re innovating. Just in terms of, like, a big win, like, the the semiconductor company, maybe if you could just narrow down the top cup couple of, differentiators that you think led them to to go with you guys versus competitors?

Bob Curtau, Interim CEO and Chair, Kinaxis Inc.: I mean, I’d love to tell you about all the problems our competitors have, but I’ll hold myself on this call. We we look at I’d probably say the number one thing is these are very educated clients. These are the most sophisticated consumers of software and some of the most important companies in the world that have consistently picked us over the last four or five quarters. And the first thing that they look at is, am I going to be successful with the project? Is this a solution that I can get quick time to value?

And we do that better than anybody in the industry. Secondly, references count. And if you cross go across our industry sectors, the ones that we’ve doubled down and are focused on. We have the leading companies in virtually every one of those industry categories already using our solution. And they talk to each other.

And they’re not just looking to understand the differences in our product versus others by listening to Kinaxis. They go out and do the research and see the value that the biggest companies in the world are getting. Number three, the differentiation really gets enhanced when you start looking at the challenges that are faced in things like this tariff complexity. And when I was at Connections, one of the very, very senior executive for one of the biggest pharmas in the world, life science and science company, told me, we are so happy that we picked Kinaxis, and the only mistake we made is waiting too long. So when you have customers in a conference telling other customers that that is the way, they should have gone or should go, that’s helpful.

And then these large companies already have experiences with, you know, some of our competitors like SAP and others. So, you know, they they can see the differences in the way we approach the business versus our competitors. So right now we got it going. Like, we’re winning all the important deals and it’s because of the product, it’s because of our culture, it’s because of references and we expect to keep that going.

Mike Stevens, Analyst, National Bank Financial: Great. Awesome color. Appreciate the insight, guys. Cheers.

Conference Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Chetan Sukumar with Stifel. Your line is open.

Chetan Sukumar, Analyst, Stifel: Good morning, gents, and congrats on the quarter. I want to touch on go to market. You guys talked about seeing higher conversion rates and now you rolled out the tariff response offering, which I think should benefit your pipeline. Can you speak a little bit about some of the more recent changes in your go to market approach to support this elevated demand backup that you’re seeing? What’s working?

What do you need to improve on?

Bob Curtau, Interim CEO and Chair, Kinaxis Inc.: I mean, look, we’re always gonna try and improve, but, I mean, we did a lot, over the last year. If you look at the differences in execution, it’s just palpable. Right? So where do we start? We we have added talent throughout the organization.

We’re supporting we already went in a lot of, you know, big customers. We were focused on net new. This is not a new phenomenon that I just described with the most important companies in the world, you know, decided on Kinaxis. But now we’re supporting the existing teams and adding to those existing team with a huge amount of talent input. We’ve got better process.

We’re doing more company to company selling. Our pipeline is growing. The way we work with customers to make the decision has improved, accelerated in their ability to make decisions faster. So we got Mark Morgan that’s leading it, who’s world class, you know, arguably biased, but one of the most experienced and capable executives in this category. So, you know, all those things are working for us.

And then on top of it, we’ve really, really upgraded and set a different set of expectation for our installed base, working with our customers. Some of the most important companies in the world were using us in, you know, maybe two or three divisions when they’ve got 30. And and our game plan coming into this year starting, you know, q two, q ’3 last year was to really mine these incredible customers that are global. So I take a look at it. It’s just every quarter we’re just trying to get a little bit better and we feel like we are.

Chetan Sukumar, Analyst, Stifel: Great. Blaine, maybe this question is for you. On cash flow, can you remind us on your CapEx commitments in the course ahead here? And how do you expect free cash flow margins to track relative to EBITDA margins over the near to mid term and longer term?

Blaine Fitzgerald, Chief Financial Officer, Kinaxis Inc.: Yes. There’ll be that’s a good question. So we had a nice healthy difference this quarter and we’re going to have that probably a difference for the rest of 2025 just because of how the trailing of those two payments we made in Q1 will play out. But as you as we the reason why we gave the adjusted free cash flow was just to show how close it is to adjusted EBITDA. So if we adjusted it up to where we think it will be normalized going forward, we’re actually fairly close.

It’s twenty five percent versus 24.4%, which is the kind of what we our expectations were. So as we potentially see our adjusted EBITDA continue to rise in the number of years ahead of us, free cash flow should be pretty close to it. We are going to be a little bit higher on CapEx this year versus what we’ve had in 2024 just for some the end of life of some of our data servers that we have to play out for especially on the North American side to make sure that we get over the line before the full migration is done. But we don’t anticipate that we will get much higher than where we are in 2025. So that CapEx fees should be a little bit thinner.

And as I said at the beginning of this, we expect that EBITDA and free cash flow will be fairly close together compared to maybe some of our peers.

Chetan Sukumar, Analyst, Stifel: Thank you very much. I’ll pass the line, gents.

Conference Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Stephanie Price with CIBC. Your line is open.

Stephanie Price, Analyst, CIBC: Hi, good morning. I wanted to chat about professional services. Revenue this quarter looks like it declined year over year. I assume part of this is the proportion of services completed by SI Partners. But just curious if there’s anything else to call out there.

And also, guess, current guide assumes that PS growth will really reaccelerate. And hope you can chat a little bit about the drivers that you see for the rest of the year.

Bob Curtau, Interim CEO and Chair, Kinaxis Inc.: Yes. Look, we have dove in on this. You know, if you look at what’s going on in the general economy, you wanna make sure that this is, you know, not a leading indicator on, you know, a challenge for our professional services organization. But you gotta understand, like, I’ve done this before, and the first thing that you check is how’s our backlog. And it’s phenomenal.

Like, the combination of what you would look at in in net new wins plus the extension of the opportunities that we’re creating with our installed base to extend the capability. Clearly, when you make a shift to partners to give a little bit more color on that, it’s a double impact. The first impact is you seed fairly significant partners to some of the or revenue to some of the most important partners in the world that can take equally take on these major transactions like, you know, e and y and Accenture. And then and then more and more, we’re also seeding revenue where we’re doing joint implementations. And that’s gonna become more of the phenomenon, Stephanie, is that second category where where you would have we might have been prime.

And for purposes of skills transfer and customer outcomes, that part of the revenue will also go to the partners and we’ll lead them there in some cases, but in some cases they’ll be lead. So that ends up being pretty quickly from say two years ago, 60% of the backlog or the potential pipeline for services. So there’s not a demand issue. I think in this macro environment and maybe it goes back to guidance, we got to be cautious and service is one of those things that you’ll see the impact of a difficult period. But it’s more the economics of making a shift to give a lot more revenue to the professional services organizations that you’re seeing.

And what I’ve done this before, which I did at SAP, we did at Altus Group, it can be a little bit choppy because you’re trying to formulate your backlog into something that’s going to make sense for the customer and make sure that they get a good outcome. So you’re seeing some of that. Like every quarter with professional services, sometimes there’s some timing things coming out that go on around that. So it’s really the economics of that shift.

Stephanie Price, Analyst, CIBC: That makes sense. And then just maybe touching on the broader space, so with the strategic acquisition announced recently, just curious about your thoughts on consolidation here and your interest in M and A at this point?

Bob Curtau, Interim CEO and Chair, Kinaxis Inc.: Well, has not worked. It’s part of the reason that we’re beating companies like Blue Yonder, EDA Open, which is a mess. And if you look at our strategy and where we’re going is that we wanna serve all we want from the center of supply chain planning and through the advent of orchestrating orchestration, you know, we we’re in a place where we can give the information. We can drive the orchestration through all parts of the supply chain without having to buy software in each of those categories. And so the trends are such that we can be the control tower, the orchestration point, the autonomous supply chain planning across the whole ecosystem.

And that’s why we signed partnerships with Databricks. That’s why we’re doing work with In for and more to come on that front. We think we can we can really, really solve a complete view of the supply chain with our strategy. And where people have tried to do M and A to do it, it’s been a disaster. And we’ve probably if we look at M and A, it’s all with a view to the future and this orchestration strategy that we’re looking at.

And then secondly, we’ll continue to do share buyback as we go forward. We’re going to be generating a lot of cash. And we do have opportunity to go after what I would call innovative companies in this orchestration mindset.

Stephanie Price, Analyst, CIBC: Great. Thank you very much.

Conference Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Mark Schappel with Loop Capital Markets. Your line is open.

Mark Schappel, Analyst, Loop Capital Markets: Hi, good morning. Thanks for taking my call and nice job on the quarter. Bob, earlier you noted that the firm was leaving guidance unchanged despite the solid start to the year mainly due to macro uncertainties. Just wondering if you could provide additional commentary on what’s changed with respect to buying behavior over the past ninety days or so?

Bob Curtau, Interim CEO and Chair, Kinaxis Inc.: I mean, we’ve seen enthusiasm clearly for our product like virtually, you know, I talked about Gartner Group, I talked about connections, I talked about our pipeline. If anything, you know, maybe I would say that you’ve got to be on your game. Like I mentioned this briefly to sustain not just our company for all software companies, the growth that we want and frankly to set ourselves up for the future quarters and even into 2026. You better be talking to the CFO. You’re competing for capital against other priorities in these companies.

There’s definitely pressure on capital. You see it. There’s so many companies in other industries that can’t even give guidance, abandon the idea of giving guidance, right? So those things we observe, but we worked pretty nicely through the quarter. It’s consistent with how Mark and I think about being an enterprise software company.

You should be talking to the CFO anyways and other parts of the company. The the need to absolutely improve your execution and alignment with companies is enhanced in this environment. And, so far so good. We feel as you know, we did confirm guidance, but we’re also being cautious against that. For us so far, great quarter.

Things are going well. People see our solutions, both existing customers and new as being really strategic not only for the environment we’re in now, but it has reminded them that they need these kind of products to deal with other kind of complexities in the future. But yes, you got to be on your game in this environment. There’s no doubt that as an enterprise software company that you’re competing for capital right now in a very cautious world.

Mark Schappel, Analyst, Loop Capital Markets: That’s helpful. Thank you. And then as a follow-up, I was wondering if you could just expand a little bit on your partnership with Databricks. For instance, is the arrangement strictly a technology partnership at this stage or is there a co selling component to it as well?

Bob Curtau, Interim CEO and Chair, Kinaxis Inc.: It’s technology, joint development. We’re already in market together, exploiting relationships and developing that opportunity. It’s a it’s a part of our buy build partner strategy, meaning that with there’s some parts of the Databricks capability that, you know, in the past we might have tried to build ourselves. And by working with Databricks closely, we’ll find ourselves in a place where we can absolutely go faster. We can tap into the development talent.

They have their technical conference coming up. I think it’s in June. We’ve got seven or eight people going to that. They’ve been on-site with us. And it you know, they’re very, very excited about the partnership as we have.

It it actually you know, there’s three very senior executives at Databricks that, know, either directly worked for me or worked in my organization. And similarly, Mark has very good relationships with some of the Databricks team. And it comes back to what I described with customers now where if you’re going to be selling these kind of complex, high value, high priced solutions, you better have a relationship across the organization. What we set up with Databricks is a situation where we’re not only connected to the technical group, we’re connected to the senior executives at their company. And Andrew Bell is going to be speaking at their conference coming up as well.

So, yeah, it’s got the makings of a great I’m not declaring victory, but it’s got the makings of a great partnership in the form that we want to develop these kind of partnerships in the future. Thank you.

Conference Operator: Thank you. I’m not showing any further questions in the queue. I would now like to turn it back over to Rick Wadsworth for closing remarks.

Rick Wadsworth, Vice President of Investor Relations, Kinaxis Inc.: Thanks, operator, and thank you, everyone, for participating on today’s call. We appreciate your questions and your ongoing interest and support of Kinaxis. We look forward to speaking with you again when we report second quarter results. Bye for now.

Conference Operator: Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes today’s call. Thank you all for joining. You may now disconnect.

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