Uzabase : 【Delayed】Long-Term Strategy Briefing Report

Uzabase, Inc.

Long-term strategy briefing for 2025

December 17, 2021

Event Summary

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Presentation

Moderator: Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for attending our briefing today. It is now time for us to start Uzabase Inc.'s briefing on long-term strategy. I will give guidance on how to send questions. If you are joining in online, we have prepared a Q&A service called Slido. Please send your questions through this service. The secretariat has shared the link to Slido on the Zoom chat. Please access Slido from there to send your questions. If you are joining us in the venue, we will accept your questions after the presentation. If you have any questions, please raise your hand.

This venue is being live streamed. So, when you're asking questions, you do not have to mention your name or affiliation. Please share just the question itself. We have also handed the QR code to Slido at the reception. We are also free to use it. You can use Slido to send us questions any time during the presentation.

First of all, I will introduce the corporate officers present today. Uzabase Inc., Co-CEO, Taira Sakuma, nice to meet you. Co-CEO, Yusuke Inagaki, nice to meet you. CFO, Daisuke Chiba, nice to meet you. These are the 3 speakers present today.

Sakuma: First of all, I would like to extend my appreciation for your attendance today. I'll be very happy to talk about our long-term strategy. In the past, whenever we held an online financial results briefing, many people have attended online. And I would like to also take this opportunity to thank you for that. The previous time, I was absent because I had acute appendicitis and I was suffering at the time, so my apologies. I have fully recovered. I would like to take the lead here.

From 2021, earlier this year, we have changed our management formation to a co-CEO style, and we have always looked at what it is that we aim to make happen. And for that, what kind of indicators that we will be following, I'll explain these things in full.

There are three main premises regarding the material. First with regard to EBITDA, from next term going forward, we would like to introduce this stock compensation plan into our remuneration system. So, from next fiscal year onward, we would be announcing adjusted EBITDA. This is after taking into consideration the influence of the stock compensations.

Second, our past consolidated results figures will continue to include Quartz.

In terms of the third major point, reporting segments will change, as you see on this slide. Currently, what you see on the right side is the planned segmentation from 2022. In summary, we're going to just have SaaS and NewsPicks. SPEEDA and other B2B business will be grouped into one segment.

And the AlphaDrive/NewsPicks business, which is the enterprise service section of NewsPicks, will be included in the SaaS segment. All of our SaaS businesses use NewsPicks content, and segregating just AD/NP would not match the real picture, so they will be disclosed together as SaaS. Regarding NewsPicks, I think we can present it in a clear and simple structure comprising advertising, paid subscription, and others.

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First, I would like to give a bit of a recap of who we are. We were established in 2008. We have 743 employees, and we generate JPY11.6 billion in consolidated ARR: SaaS ARR at JPY9.1 billion, and NewsPicks ARR JPY2.5 billion, respectively. Some of the numbers have been shifted from NewsPicks to SaaS, namely the AlphaDrive portion of JPY600 million has moved over.

Uzabase has the policy of sustained growth with stable earnings, as shown in the ARR. In terms of the share of subscription revenue at NewsPicks, it's 73%. Apart from that, we have NewsPicks advertisement sales and also some consulting revenue within SaaS.

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On this page, you can see the overview of our Company. Domestically and also internationally, we have launched many products with many ongoing endeavors.

In 2013, we launched NewsPicks and also expanded SPEEDA to overseas markets. There have been major developments in the past five years: we have FORCAS launched, and INITIAL has become our subsidiary, as well as AlphaDrive and MIMIR. In the past two years, we launched FORCAS Sales, SPEEDA EXPERT RESEARCH, SPEEDA Edge, and SPEEDA R&D plan.

Quartz is a business that we had to pull out of. But as you see here, in terms of M&A of Saas businesses, INITIAL, AlphaDrive, MIMIR, have all shown good success. I would like to talk about them afterwards.

We have largely two types of services. One is SaaS, and we deliver value at the very center of management that has to do with business strategy, customer strategy, and organizational strategy. We support agile management, which adapts to changes in a speedy manner. And the other pillar is NewsPicks, which is a leading business news media in Japan.

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