Arribatec Group ASA (ARR) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, and welcome to the second quarter presentation for Arribatec in 2026. My name is Ole Kjolvik. And with me, I have our newly appointed CFO, Bent Hammer. Together, we will go through the business highlights, and Bent will share the financial review of this quarter. If you have any questions along this session, you can use the web form, submit them, and we will do our best to answer them at the end of this session. And also if you want a more in-depth discussion, you can also use the web form to ask for our investor meeting. Let me start with a short overview of Arribatec before we go into more details. We are a global team of about 250 people plus long-term contractors. And in H2 or H1, I mean, we served around 800 clients across all industries. We will get back to the numbers. But in short, our revenue grew 8% over the last 12 months, and we delivered a double-digit margin in the quarter. When it comes to the mission, it's simple. We use technology and proven methods to improve the way organizations work. Arribatec is built around three business areas. Business Services, which is our largest area, delivers products and services around ERP, financial planning, analytics and our own software. The team runs transformation projects from start to finish, defining their requirements to implementation and ongoing support. Cloud delivers flexible and secure cloud services to both private and public clients. This includes hosting across hybrid and sovereign environments, cross consulting, outsourcing and full cloud solutions. EA-BPM delivers enterprise architecture and business process management, hence the name. In short, they help organizations work smarter and faster and staying in line with internal and external rules and regulations. Together, these three areas deliver business-critical systems and services that clients depend on every day. Our people have the deep expertise in the services and software we deliver as well as the industries we serve. I will now give you some highlights from the business in the second quarter. After that, Bent will take you through the financials in more detail. There are four things I would like to highlight from this quarter. First, we continue to improve profitability and cash generation. Second, I will go through how each business area performed. Third, EA-BPM had a strong quarter. I will share more from their turnaround. And last, I would like to give you a short look into one of our client projects. Let me start with the overall profitability and cash. EBITDA improved again this quarter, and the margin is now above 10%. The improvement comes from the turnaround in EA-BPM, tighter cost control and better use of our own people. Revenue was flat in constant currency. The reported decline is mainly a currency effect together with a short-term softer demand in parts of the business. The cash generation is strong. We turn almost all of our EBITDA into cash, which gives us room to invest and to pay dividends. As you can see, we paid dividend of NOK 1 per share during the quarter. In short, we are earning more on a slightly smaller top line and the cash follows the earnings. Then to the three business areas. I will go through them one by one, starting with Business Services. Reported revenue came down, but in constant currency, the area grew slightly. So this is not a broad softness across the area. The weakness is concentrated in the U.K. and Central Europe, while the Nordic business is performing in line with the plan. What we are seeing in those two markets is a normal swing in the cycle. The timing of tender processes, project start-ups, contract signings varies through the year. So it's a phasing effect, not a loss of demand or customers. The margin came in below our own expectations, and that follows the same phasing just explained. What gives us confidence is that the pipeline is at all-time high. We have responded to a historically high number of tenders, and we also have embedded AI in both our deliveries and our products, which is strengthening how we deliver. On that basis, we expect the phasing effect to unwind and support growth in the second half. EA-BPM is a clear positive this quarter. Revenue grew and the margin improved significantly. The initiatives we started have delivered, bookings are strong and the market is favoring the core deliveries of this area. I will come back to EA-BPM on the next slide. Cloud is still undergoing improvements and has full management attention. On the revenue decline, Q2 was impacted by client loss and a few client scope reductions, all from prior periods. Those contracts have run off and only now work their way through the P&L. In Q2 itself, we have had no new losses and the client base is stable and the pipeline is solid. The margin effect of this was largely offset by the cost measures we implemented in March. We acted ahead of this revenue impact, which is why profitability held up better than the top line. The measures are not complete and the initiatives are still underway and is expected to contribute further through the second half of the year. So we are not on the target we want yet, but the direction is right, and we are on track. Looking ahead, demand for sovereign cloud and the compliance requirements following the EU AI Act gives this area a real tailwind also into the second half. Yes. So EA-BPM, let me spend a minute because this is a great example of a great turnaround. We -- so some of the actions we took was to put in a new leadership, and they've built a new commercial setup. They have rightsized the organization and taken out cost. We have also renegotiated contracts with both clients and partners, including our extended partnership agreement with QualiWare on better terms. And also, they have changed the way the team works and which also, again, has lifted the utilization. The result is a strong margin expansion and growth at the same time. And that combination is what we are aiming for with profitability as the priority. The core deliveries are business advisory, enterprise architecture, business process management, governance and management systems. In practice, they help organization document, improve how they work and stay compliant while doing it. And this has just -- yes, has just become even more relevant during the time of digital transformation. So they have a solid client list in both public and private sector. You can see some of the clients listed on this slide. So over to the client project. This is a project driven mainly by business services. So Höegh Autoliners is a leading global provider of ocean transport in the roll-on, roll-off segment, and they are listed on the Oslo Stock Exchange. So the task is to build and implement a global ERP platform, which naturally includes, given the size and type of business, many legal entities, different regulations and reporting regimes. And there's, of course, no room for disrupting the daily operations. We deliver one common ERP platform across the group with integrations to all their related business systems, and we have a dedicated project team working with them and creating a long-term partnership. And the client receive a standardized system, processes and data, better transparency in reporting and a platform that can scale to their needs. Before we move into the financial review, I would also like to share some insights on our client base. Our revenue is well spread across many clients. No single client dominates. The top 10 and top 50 together make up a limited share of the total. That means we are not depending on one or two large accounts. Most of our revenue comes from clients we also served a year ago. That's a sign of trust and long-term relationship and gives us a stable base to build on. But we also keep winning new clients, even though the share from new clients is slightly lower than last year. And yes, I would say some variation is natural. And with a strong pipeline, we expect the number of new clients increasing in the time to come. When it comes to the FTE development, it hasn't been very much variations. The headcount is flat compared with the same quarter last year. So we deliver a better margin with roughly the same number of people, which is exactly what we want to see. During the quarter, we did some rightsizing, mainly in cloud. That follows the reorganization I mentioned earlier, and it brings us back in line with what we added or in line after we added people gradually through last year. Recruitment is selective. We hire where we see strong demand and where the work is already there rather than adding up capacity and hoping it fills up. So the aim is simple. Keep the organization lean and grow the team where the clients are telling us. Okay. That was what I wanted to share from the business highlights. I will now give the word to you, Bent, sharing some of the financial review from this quarter.

Great. Thank you. Yes. As Ole Jakob said, revenue came in at NOK 139.4 million. Adjusted currency, that is on par with the same quarter as last year. The Norwegian krone has appreciated, and that works against our reported top line. So, this is a currency effect, not lost business. For the last 12 months, the story looks even better, with revenue up to NOK 581.4 million, which is up 8.1% year-on-year. On profitability, adjusted EBITDA margin improved from 9.8% to 10.9%. For the last 12 months, this margin sits at 9.9%. This is our sixth consecutive quarter of profit. So, I think I can safely say that the turnaround from 2024 has been successfully completed, though further improvements are still expected. Adjusted EBITDA improved by NOK 1.2 million to NOK 15.2 million in the quarter. And this bridge shows how we got there. And there are two forces working against each other. Working against us is the revenue, which was negatively impacted by the appreciation of the Norwegian krone. That is the same currency effect that I referred to on the previous slide. And working for us is cost. We reduced costs more than -- the reduced costs more than offset the currency headwind, and that is what delivers the net improvement. This is the cost discipline we have described for several quarters -- rightsizing, high utilization, and cost containment now showing up as numbers rather than an intention. The point I would like to draw from this bridge is the quality of our earnings. We improved profitability in the quarter where currency was against us and the market was mixed. That improvement sits on our side of the ledger, which means it does not depend on the krone moving back in our favor. We generated a seasonally strong cash flow from operations of NOK 8.3 million in the second quarter. We do a lot of annual billing at the start of the year, which explains the high cash flow in Q1 and the subsequent negative impact on net working capital. Therefore, a more interesting look is at the cash flow generated from operations in the last 12 months, which is amounting to NOK 64 million. That represents an EBITDA-to-cash conversion of a full 99%. And this enabled the payment of the NOK 1 per share in dividends that we paid in June, and it also explains the steep reduction in the cash balance at the end of this quarter. However, we are still left with a cash balance of NOK 27 million, as well as an untouched credit facility of a further NOK 20 million. So to sum up, four things to take with you for the time ahead. The pipeline, bid activity is up across all business areas and the pipeline is solid. We expect it to materialize progressively through the second half. Margin, the operational initiatives are continuing, and we expect them to support margin expansion. Our particular focus is cloud, where the priority is to bring the area back to an acceptable margin level. We are not there yet, but on track. AI and digitalization, we see strong customer interest in data, ERP and AI-enabled solutions, which falls under our core deliveries. And lastly, the balance sheet is strong and cash generation is solid, and this gives us the financial flexibility going forward. Thank you. That concludes what we had to present in the interim report for Q2. We'll be now happy to entertain any questions you have that you may post in the chat, and we'll be back to answer those.

Hi, and welcome back. We have received one question. I will read it out loud. Does Arribatec have any plans to initiate a share buyback program in the future? Good question. We haven't announced it as a plan, but it's always an option. It's part of the tools we have in our toolbox. We have an ambition, as I wrote in the CEO comment, to return cash to our shareholders while also having a financially robust business. That's also proven with the dividend pay we did in June. That's all from our operations. So the dividend comes from cash we have earned the last 12 months. So yes, it is an option. It's something we consider, but we haven't announced or have anything specific at this moment. Let me just have a look if there's other questions that have been sent. It's a question written in Norwegian. Do you have any successful AI projects towards clients that wish solutions tailored for their own company? This is then not necessarily against Microsoft, but other types of problems or workflows you have solved. It's a very good question. We have several AI projects towards clients, and we also use AI, both in the products that we deliver, but also to solve challenges or issues that the clients have where we use AI as a tool to solve it and creating products that they can have over time as well. So yes, we tailor this to our clients. Yes, we use all kinds of different AI module tools, platforms to -- specifically towards the needs of the client.

I guess we can mention the Nexus platform that we have developed that we use is an AI development platform that we use to, for example, build add-on solutions to Unit4, like IFRS 16 leasing module as an example. So yes.

And what that has given us, the Nexus platform, is that our clients have a specific need. And in the past, before we had this Nexus platform, it took some time to develop this. But now we can do it in, yes, a fraction of that time. So it's quite the difference. Let me see if there's any other questions. How sustainable is NOK 1 per share in dividends, still preferred dividends over buybacks? Yes, I understand that you preferred. Well, we haven't said -- our ambition is to continue to pay dividend and return cash to investors or shareholders. That's something we tend to keep and continue doing. But we haven't fixed our specific price per share yet. So it depends on how the business is going, if we're going to use the money from the operations to invest or do other things. But of course, it's part of our ambition to keep paying dividend.