Aqualis ASA (ABL) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everybody. Thank you for coming along. I'm David Wells. I'm going to have pleasure in giving our Q4 results for 2019 and also talk a little bit about 2019 as a whole. So I'll be giving -- talk mainly on the operations and give some color on some of the things we've been doing with some high-end numbers. And I'll be joined by my colleague, Kim Boman, who'll -- our CFO, who will be giving some more detail on the financial numbers. So our forward-looking statement to start with. Let's talk about 2019 to begin with. It's really been a defining year for the company. And I really truly mean that. During the course of the year, we have really grown the size of the company. We've more than doubled it to -- in size, not in -- in terms of numbers of staff, in terms of numbers of offices, in terms of revenues, and we've made great strides forward in bringing these 2 companies together. We're offering more service lines to the industries. We're closer to the insurance companies. We were -- we've had greater response from clients to approve this coming together of 2 companies. And of course, with that, there's been an awful lot of internal looking and aligning 2 quite different organizations, I guess, into -- under one umbrella. So I think we've made great strides on that. We have now ended the year with all offices working together, all in the same buildings. We're working as a single company. We've aligned everybody going forward. And with that, there's been an awful lot of internal company management focus on that and a little bit less focus on the external markets as we bring ourselves together. But pleasing to say that the revenues end of the year, pro forma revenues are more or less identical from the previous year. So we haven't had the normal dip that sometimes you get after bringing 2 companies together. And we ended the year with a pro forma positive EBIT. A stand out start of the year has been our renewables arm. Revenues up from organic growth by about 46% over the course of the year. So that's a really, really stunning piece of work from those guys. And looking forward, it's looking quite exciting for them as well. If we move forward to Q4, revenue is USD 18.8 million, up slightly on the previous quarter. Normally, we'll be looking back on the previous quarter of the year behind. We've actually found this quite difficult after the merger because Braemar Technical Services had a different reporting time line and pulling numbers out was quite difficult. So the first 2, 3 quarters up until Q2 of this year, we'll be looking back quarter-by-quarter until we can have a direct comparison on the previous year's quarter. So as I say, we're slightly up on the previous quarter, which is good. Billing ratios have been maintained. Integration process, on the way. Cost synergies, no reason to change numbers. Everything is looking quite good on that particular front. We've got a slightly improved cash position that we had in the previous quarter. And I'm very pleased to say that we are proposing to make a dividend of NOK 0.2 per share, moving to a semiannual dividend schedule. So I hope that's pleasing. It's certainly a reward from our side for the support that shareholders have given us, and we are very keen to be looking forward to making continued dividends. For those of you who don't know the company that well, I'll just to give a little bit of detail about what we do in our core services. We are a high-end consultancy, focused on the offshore markets, the global energy, shipping and insurance industries. We have 3 main sort of types of work that we do: the project consulting; accident prevention; and incident management, mainly with associated risk. Everything we do is really about minimizing risk, it's for our clients, minimizing risk for the insurance companies and trying -- and when accidents have happened, and we're assessing those damages, is really to minimize the consequences of those damages. So it is a risk-focused company. We have 4 main business streams: the renewable side, which I'll go into more detail shortly, but it's offshore wind; the offshore oil and gas side, shipping is the -- the bluewater shipping, the bulk carriers, the container ships, the tankers, those type of large vessels; and then the adjusting arm, which is focusing on the energy markets and expert with this work that we do for insurance companies and for high-end clients. Our global footprint is extensive. There is none of our rivals can possibly match this, 48 locations in 31 countries as we stand. We do have intentions in 2020 to extend that footprint. We will be opening up more offices, and we're just going through the process at the moment of just doing business plans to get those approved and put forward. But I say this is -- we are definitely the largest independent global consultancy in the type of work that we do. We break that down to business streams. The offshore site is just under half, marine is about 1/4 of our business, renewables is over 1/8 now, increasing quite large -- quite fast. We started when we brought the 2 companies together, it was around about 10% of our revenues. Over the last 6 months, we've increased to 13%. We expect further increases going forward in 2020. And our adjusting is perhaps the smallest arm at the moment. And it's never we've had some weakness. When we brought the 2 companies together, we did lose a few staff. I think some of our competitors saw this as an opportune -- they were opportunistic to try and get some of our staff, so we did lose a few at beginning, which caused a little bit of a dip in our revenues, but we have now rearranged our personnel around the world, promoted from within, and we're recruiting quite heavily in that arm. And I'll give you some more details about loss adjusting later on, but that has been the one area perhaps a weakness since the merger. If you break down the segments, about 1/4 of our business comes from Asia Pacific, about 1/4 comes from Middle East, slightly Europe and America is around about the same size, and renewables is about, I'd say, 1/8 of the business, 13% of the business, with a total revenue of just under USD 74 million. So we talk about renewables. This is a very exciting business line at the moment. The project pipeline is really, really ramping up at the moment. There are so many projects coming online in a second. As you can see the numbers there, 2019 has started from quite a low point on this chart. But 2020, 2021, 2022, there is an enormous ramp-up of projects coming online, and this excludes China. China is quite a difficult market for us to service. So we're looking outside of that country as we look at numbers. And what's really quite interesting is that the market share from the top 3 suppliers, which is very, very dominant, you see in 2013, they had 68% of the market. As we move forward, that market share is coming down quite dramatically. There is many more players coming into the market, more investors, more utility companies, more new players moving in. And most of those companies do not have the infrastructure of, say, the likes of Ørsted. So they need consultants, they need people like us to assist them to get their show on the road. So we think that's quite exciting, and we're certainly seeing signs of that coming forward at the moment. And we have some quite exciting new projects, which are just about to come to fruition, I hope, and hopefully this time next quarter, I can tell you some more details about them. Some of the work we've done. So in 2019, we worked on 27 different wind farms. Total capacity of 19 gigawatts, which is a fairly sizable chunk of the global remit there and 46% revenue growth during the course of the year. And our geotechnical department, which sits within our Renewables section undertook 620 soil boring analyses, which gives you an indication of the amount of work that's coming through. Interesting little work that we did here in North Korea is really focused on the preinvestment of wind farm and approving to use sort of Floating Lidar System for assessing data to make decisions on whether the wind farm is viable or not viable. So quite interesting, quite a break away from what we have done traditionally, which is good. Because we're trying to change ourselves more into consulting away from providing people for our clients. Another piece of work, which is quite interesting as well, working for Mainstream in Vietnam. It's a new area of work for us. It has been the -- putting together of the specifications for the ITT for the wind turbine package and putting all those documents together for going out to tender into the market. So another piece of high-end consulting right at the start of a wind farm, and we hope that will lead on to other things going forward. So as you can see from there, Vietnam, South Korea, those Asia Pacific countries are really showing quite a lot of promise for us and quite a lot of promise for the renewables industry. If we go to the offshore side, I think we're still seeing signs of uptick in that market. If we look at these 2 graphs here, what is interesting is that in the last couple of years, there's been an awful lot of extra spend on the onshore side of the market, that seems to be tailing off at the moment, and there seems to be more and more spend coming on to the offshore side, and the offshore side is where we are totally focused and that gives us quite a lot of confidence moving forward. We also watch jack-ups, in particular, because we do a lot of jack-up attendances and jack-up is shallow water, the areas where we work. And we can see a general uptick in the market there. So the number of jack-ups working at the moment is around about 350. It's been generally trending upwards now for the last 18 months, and that's a good sign for us. And the same for floaters, we don't do much work on floaters, but floaters have stabilized and are ticking along on a fairly uniform basis at the moment. So where do we stand on the offshore side? We attended on board over 600 rig moves during the course of 2019. As you -- as I just mentioned there about 350 rigs are working, so most rigs move around about 4 times a year. You can see the size of market share that we have around the world. We're very dominant in that area attending not only from a marine warranty aspect, but also from a provision of tow masters and rig movers. We carried out over 300 Marine Warranty projects during the course of the year and worked for over 200 different clients. So it gives an idea of the extent of our footprint and the extent of the work that we carry out for our clients. The project I put up here is just a typical example. It's just to show that we do get to the other end of the spectrum. And this was a decommissioning of a jacket in Thailand. The first one that was done there, a jacket and topside was taken out and taken back to a local shipyard for dismantling. Interesting thing about Thailand is they have quite strong remit there that as soon as the platform falls out of use, it has to be dismantled within 3 years and that gives quite a lot of potential in that part of the world for further work on this particular area. On the Marine side, Marine side is ticking along quite nicely. It's not going up or down, spectacularly, in either direction, but it's still a very strong business line for us. But within that, in 2019, we received about 1,900 instructions from over 600 clients during the course of the year looking at damages worth over $0.5 billion. If we put out these numbers, that's around about 5 claims a day are coming through to us on the Hull & Machinery side and the P&I side, which we're trying to drive at the moment. We've also won 6 contracts very recently in the second half of the year, providing technical due diligence to banks, to ship owners associated with mergers, refinancing, where we're going to look at the whole fleet of ships to see how the operational status is, see their efficiencies, see how they're operating, see the viability of the assets themselves. And that's an interesting area for us because there is a big chunk of work that comes through when we get these jobs and keeps us quite busy. A scenario we've been looking at for many years, but really haven't got into it, but suddenly, we seem to be making good progress in that area. Loss adjusting, again, this is the area where we had a little bit of difficulty after merger. We lost a number of good staff and some of whom come back in afterwards, I have to say, but we have been refocused on that. But we received -- we still received 275 instructions during the course of the year, and we worked on all 5 of the largest casualties in the Lloyd's market in 2019. So we still got a very good name in that market. And as I say, we're recruiting quite hard at the moment. And I think in 2020, we will get that business line back up and running and performing properly. Still very strong in Asia Pacific, still very strong in Americas. Europe is the area where we've had a little bit of difficulty. I put up one example here of some typhoon damage in China in the Bohai Bay area. A typhoon called Lingling came along in Q3, Q4, did a lot of damage to 16 platforms, and we're working quite hard on that one there with our client, CNOOC, to assess the damages that have been associated with that cyclone. ESG. Since the merger, we've been really focusing on ESG to formally come to grips with how we're going to move forward, and -- so we put together a strategy, which we've called internally AqualisBraemar2030. I'm pleased to say that last night, we were accepted by the UN Global Compact to do our ESG reporting through that for a zero carbon emission company. I think our minds have really been focused in 2019 by the effects of the Australian bushfires and also the mild winter we've had in the northern latitude this year and it's really sad to -- I think the world is aware of our responsibilities. That bottom part there, the quote, "Energy and the oceans are at the center of our business." They very much are the center of our business and the sustainability of both is hugely vital to us. So we'll really be focused on that. And as we make the energy transition from fossil fuels to renewables, we want to be right in there and part of that process. So going back to metrics, Q4 backlog. We have measured this improvement in the last quarter, up to $13.8 million. It's almost a 10% increase on the previous quarter. This covers actually just the offshore section and the renewables section. We can't measure very easily the marine and the loss adjusting side because that tends to be claims as they come through and tends to be quite hard to realize in terms of backlog. But numbers are increasing. That's another indication to us that the market is improving. Quite a lot of that's driven by renewables. But also in the oil and gas side, we have made some pretty good -- we've had some pretty good successes recently, and we've had some more successes going into Q1, which has been good. Staff development, we have maintained the number of staff from end of Q3 to end of Q4 at around about 420 people. Our subcontractor basis has slightly improved in Q4, which is always the aim of the company to have more subcontractors that are working because it gives us a more flexible cost base. But the fact we've maintained number of staff, the fact we're increasing number of staff going forward from now is good, and I would like to think at the end of Q1 that we'll be in a better position even again. Billing ratio, obviously, is an important metric. We've had to slightly change the way we report this going forward because the methodology used by Braemar Technical Services is different to the one we had in Aqualis Offshore previously. 69% is where we stand at the moment. 69% is good. We'll be aiming to achieve better as we move forward. But if you put this back in perspective between the period of March and December of 2018, in Braemar Technical Services, their average utilization was 53%. I think you can see here that we've made moves forward in terms of bringing that utilization up and improving numbers. So with that, I would like to pass on to Kim Boman to give you a little bit more detail about finances.

Thanks, David. To make the financial performance more meaningful, we have included pro forma combined figures for adjusted revenue -- for revenues and for adjusted EBIT. BTS was fully consolidated into our figures from Q3 2019. Our adjusted revenues increased from last quarter with 5%, and it's a decrease of 4% from Q4 '18. If you look on our performance versus Q4 '18, the Aqualis part revenues were slightly up, while BTS was slightly down. The main driver for the revenue increase within the Aqualis was within renewables, and the reduction for BTS was mainly due to a reduction in revenues for adjusting. The adjusted EBIT has increased from 2% to 4% from Q3. The margin improvement that we are seeing is driven by the synergies that we have been able to realize and the increased cooperation between offices. The synergies we estimate or the synergy target remains the same as from last quarter, $2.5 million, and we have realized $1.9 million in run rate synergies as of Q4. The remaining synergies we expect to realize mainly during Q -- or mainly during the second half of 2020 once we have one joint ERP system across the group. It's been a challenge to operate our business from a back-office view and reporting view with different ERP systems, and some part of the ERP system not very fit for our business. And we have taken steps to move over to the Aqualis ERP systems for the enlarged group. So for our offshore business, we have mainly now moved over to our current ERP systems in former Aqualis, while for the marine and adjusting business, we plan to do that by the summer this year. The process to move over to our new ERP system will commence in Q2 2020. And we're very excited about the opportunities that it will -- that this will allow us to improve operations, improve processes, reduce admin time. It will also allow us to reduce the working capital, which I will revert to on a later slide. The -- we have also worked on developing a new analytical tool that is built on our existing ERP system, which will make it more easy for management to get the grasp of our business. With the enlarged group, it's a challenge to have control, and we are very excited with the new tools we will now implement at the end of this quarter. This will allow our management to have information quicker, better information, and it will be easy to deploy across the group. So this will allow our management team to make quicker and, hopefully, better decisions, and thereby, driving our business. We are investing in technology and systems. We really believe that this is key. We don't believe we want to automate. We want to have information at hand. And this -- we see this as a competitive benefit versus some in the market. This is the first quarter where we have split out renewables as a separate segment. So we have -- there are now 4 regions as separate segments plus our renewables business, which is set by or led by the offshore wind consultants. The Q4 figures in the graphs excludes BTS figures, while the Q3 and Q4 figures for '19 is for enlarged group. If you look on the performance in Q4, the improvements are driven mainly by Middle East and Americas. The performance in Europe has been weak. We expect that to turn into '20. And we see positive steps being taken. The -- our key regions remains Middle East and APAC. We also see -- as David pointed out in terms of the integration and what we have been through, we are seeing increased cooperation across the offices. So we see increased -- and you see that in the figures, you see increased intercompany revenues. So for us, it's the complexity in terms of managing the business, but there is a real benefit in terms of realizing the opportunities that we see globally. So the sharing of opportunities is a key factor for us to be successful in this business. Moving to the income statement. I'll just point out a few of the items on the P&L. There's some negative finance income of $0.6 million, which is mainly related to reversal of income accruals that we have taken over the past quarters, which are related to warranty claims from the BTS transaction. These claims have been adjusted by reducing the purchase consideration as a final fair value adjustment in the purchase concentration. The finance expense of $0.6 million relates to revaluation of warrants given to Braemar in connection with the transaction. So it's a -- this is a noncash effect. We are maintaining a solid financial position. The cash is slightly up from Q3 now at $10.9 million. The balance sheet includes a capitalized lease of $2.4 million, which is related to our property leases. The working capital has decreased from $26.3 million to $25.8 million. However, this is mainly related to an accounting provision. So in underlying, the working capital is roughly at the same level in Q4 as Q3. We are not pleased with the speed we are able to improve the working capital in the group, and it's a high focus area for us. So as we have -- we commenced the process in Q3 to improve the working capital. So we have seen some positive steps or positive results, but they have been countered by some negative effects in other areas. We are confident that we will be able to improve in 2020 and reduce our working capital ratios. The first phase of the program is focused on information flow, work processes and culture and that's an ongoing process. The second phase is related to the implementation of a new ERP system, which will be -- which is targeted to be in place by this summer. The implementation of phase 2 of the program will enable us to do quicker invoicing, have better information, have more easy processes. Right now, it's a bit of a challenge with information flows with the ERP systems we have now in place are not optimal for our business, which means that we need to use a lot of time to get information and analyze information and digest information. And this slows down our ability to follow up outstanding receivables and also invoice. So we are not now in -- we are not yet there where we should be, but we will be there this summer. As David mentioned, our Board has proposed a dividend of NOK 0.2 per share, roughly $1.5 million. We're very pleased that we're able to start to repay back to our shareholders, and our integration is now well on track. We have a liquidity buffer, and we will repay part of that cash now back to shareholders. And our intention or the Board's intention is to have another dividend in the second half of 2020. We will also -- or the Board is also proposing to move to a semiannual dividend schedule. This will allow us to improve the capital efficiency by returning cash quicker to shareholders. We have also included our group targets. They remain largely the same as in Q3 with a revenue growth of 5% and an EBITA margin of 10%. The dividend policy have been amended to reflect semiannual payments. With that, I'll leave the word over to David.

Thank you, Kim. So with this, I conclude the summary and outlook as we see things at the moment. I do think that we're in a good place. I do think the market has improved across most of our business lines. I do think there is a lot of opportunities out there. And with the benefit of having the merger behind us, particularly in the front office, we are in a good place to move forward. What's been quite pleasing is that January and February, over the last 3 or 4 years, has actually been quite a difficult period for trading. We've started well in 2020, started better than perhaps we expected and it gives us more, more feeling of positivity. And we see that elsewhere as well. We see increased number of jack-ups working, we see the offshore wind market improving and we see our loss adjusting side will be developing as we recruit more people. The negative we do have is the effect of the coronavirus. We don't quite know what that means to us yet. We do know that in China, where we had quite a good month in January, we are expecting February to be a bit more difficult because of the inability of our staff to move up and down the coast. Whether that migrates out further, we just have to wait and see, but not quite sure. When you look at news at the moment, the number of new cases in China is reducing, yet it's increasing in other parts of the world. So I think we just have to wait and see what that brings. But we do expect some negative effects, particularly in the Asia Pacific in Q1. As Kim said, we are very focused at the moment of improving our cash efficiency and with the ultimate aim of returning cash to the shareholders. Actually, I think we've made a lot of achievements. We've made a lot of progress. There's been a lot of distraction on ERP systems. But I think the education and the understanding of our staff now exactly what we're trying to achieve has finally got through, and I do expect that we'll start seeing some results in 2020. So that is quite pleasing. And I think that will actually close out the loop with the merger that we have done, and we'll be a much more efficient company going forward. Yes, we spoke just briefly about dividends and getting those going again, and I think that perhaps the bottom line there as well is also quite important. We will be on the lookout for further consolidation opportunities. The market does need still further consolidation. There will be opportunities out there. And if we can grasp them at a good value for our shareholders, we will certainly be looking at that. So thank you, everybody. Thanks for coming along. And I appreciate your attention.