Arribatec Group ASA (ARR) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Arribatec Group's third quarter presentation. As in previous quarters, we will look at financial performance and some operational aspects of the business. So without any further ado, let's get into the material. So first, our revenue was NOK 118 million for the third quarter. This is a 25% increase compared to same quarter last year and a 12.7% organic growth. Recurring revenue at NOK 44 million, up 11% compared to last quarter and recurring now accounts for 37% of our total revenue. Adjusted EBITDA, a negative NOK 6.7 million, which is similar to clean EBITDA, and that is a margin of negative 5.7%. Geographical performance. First, if you look at Norway, we had a total revenue for the quarter of -- sorry, NOK 70.2 million, that is a 12% increase compared to same quarter last year. Continental Europe and U.K. accounts for NOK 39 million for the quarter, that is a 52% increase compared to last year. However, we have acquired Integra during fourth quarter last year. So the growth partly comes from that acquisition. Now you can see Central Europe -- or sorry, Continental Europe and U.K. accounts for 33% of the total value or total revenue of the company. U.S. NOK 8.9 million revenue, 8% of total group revenue, and that's 10% up compared to last year. For -- so far this year, EA-BPM have secured 30 deals and scope extensions for a combined value of NOK 74 million. What you see on this slide is the 5 largest contracts with important clients for us. And I will not go through the individual aspects of each of these deals just showing you that we are on a continuous basis signing meaningful and sizable deals for EA-BPM. We will come back a little bit to the operational performance later in the presentation. Business Services has so far this year, secured 250 new deals for a combined value of NOK 140 million. Some of the smaller, let's say, scope extensions that are happening on a daily and weekly basis has not been included in the statistics because we are not keeping track of all of those in our CRM system. However, also here, showing you some of the meaningful larger deals that we have secured during the quarter. So these 5 contracts combined account for NOK 27 million in new business. Most of them are starting up this year. Again, this slide shows how we have been signing up deals per month per business area. And as I said, for the first 10 months of this year, we have signed globally 530 new contracts and scope extensions for a combined value of NOK 300 million. An important thing to note here is that the cloud numbers here do not include the contract that we announced in second quarter of this year. That was a contract for a, let's say, platform delivery to a civil engineering contractor in Norway. The contract has not been included in the statistics just because the final agreement has not yet been signed. We expect it to happen very soon this quarter. Looking at the individual business areas and the performance. First, Business Services, a total growth compared to last quarter of 46% and a revenue number of NOK 67 million with EBITDA margin of 10.3%. As I said, 250 new contracts so far this year were at a combined value of NOK 140 million. Organic growth is 20% when we adjust for the acquisitions we made of Integra in the U.K. back in fourth quarter last year. We have a very good cooperation with all our partners, in particular, Unit4, Rambase and Hypergene. And the 2 last ones are now fueling growth in the Nordics for Arribatec and we are very satisfied with the cooperation we have together with our partners. We expect similar activity in the second half of 2022 compared to the first half of the year. EA-BPM, so far in 2022, 130 new contracts for a combined value of NOK 74 million. We have the revenue growth only 1% compared to last year, mainly caused by a delayed startup of large projects where we hired new people in, and we also mobilized for a given start date. However, the start date pushed out to the right and we lost revenue and EBITDA as a consequence. We have, during the year, increased staff by 22%, and this is all to accommodate for growth in new contracts that we see -- we have in the pipeline. We are still waiting for a couple of large public sector bids to come out to the market, and we are prepared to bid for several of those. Cloud has seen a revenue growth of 28%. We have signed a total of 70 new deals with a combined value of NOK 48 million so far this year. Again, this excludes the large NOK 60 million deal that we announced at the end of June this year. EBITDA still reduced due to price increases from our main suppliers and a delay for charging all that out to our clients. We are working hard to get this back on track. We have a robust pipeline for the remaining of this year and also well into next year. And we are -- we have just hired a new sales rep in Bergen, and we are interviewing for sales reps in both Oslo and Stavanger. So we believe to see a significant growth for cloud going into 2023. Then the 2 smaller, call it, verticals, Hospitality, a very large growth when you compare to last year. However, the base we comparing to was very low. We have now a revenue of NOK 1.2 million and we see a significant shift upwards in demand for the Hospitality products after a fairly busy summer for hotels in the Nordics. Hospitality continues to win basically all tenders that they are bidding on, and we see an increasing interest also from larger Norwegian hotel brand names. We have good dialogues with them, and we hope to be able to bring more good news to the market in this respect. Lastly, just a update on the pilot project we have done for Flytoget. We have now installed the prototype ticket machine in Oslo S. It was put there just a week ago. And so far, very good feedback from Flytoget, who is the customer on this project. Lastly, Marine. There are a milestone reached since we have, for the first time, been able now to report a positive EBITDA of NOK 600,000 for the quarter. That is after a reduction of revenue of 6.3% compared to last year. The positive EBITDA is driven by a reduction in staff levels and -- we are also considering divesting part of our IP -- software IP in Marine and some of the associated production resources. Going forward and into 2023, the entire focus in Marine will be on growth. And we are having very good dialogues with several of the largest cruise customers for upgrades of -- or system upgrades for their fleet. People & Organization. You have seen this slide before. The main change here is that we have reduced from 28 to 23 offices. We have still presence in all the same countries. However, we have closed down a couple of smaller 1- and 2-man offices and combine them with other existing offices in order to save costs and improve financial performance. I'll show you a little bit more details on headcount. You see now we have increased from 423 -- sorry, from 403 employees by the end of last year. We have added 37 during this year. And you can see here that the majority of the increase has come in the Cloud number from 38 to 56, that is actually some internal reshuffling of organizational units that accounts for half of this growth. However, we are staffing up to prepare for increased business volume, and we have been able to -- it's increasingly difficult to find much of the talent that we need, but we have been very, I would say, both good in attracting those capacities and competencies that we need, but there is a struggle on a daily basis to find and attract and keep our staff. So we are happy where we are now. And we are prepared to continue to add people if and when the business volumes demands it. So to the financials. This chart, again, you saw this also in the second quarter presentation. It shows our revenue development over the last 5 quarters, divided by each of the 5 business areas. On the top, you can see that our recurring revenue on a group level stays around 37%, while revenue outside Norway is increasing. Both these are, for us, strategic important -- strategically important and we continue to focus on bringing up recurring revenue by developing own IP and also further growth outside Norway. The seasonal variation that you see here is apparent. The third quarter was -- we had a summer break in the Nordics in July and the summer breaks in Continental Europe during August. So we expect higher activity level going into Q4. Here, you see the relative size of the business areas, including external revenue and internal revenue. Business area -- Business Services, NOK 67 million; Cloud NOK 28 million; EA-BPM at NOK 20 million; and Marine at NOK 13 million, even though we had a decline in revenue in Marine. We look at EBITDA, as I said earlier, we are very happy now to have brought Marine into positive territory. That's a milestone for both for Marine and for the group. And Hospitality now, as I said, we have very good traction in the market. And once we get the volume in Hospitality, we will rapidly see that the bottom line is improving and we are working hard towards that target. Cash flow development. We ended the quarter at the end of September with NOK 39 million in cash. And we should also add that today, after a very solid focus on improving working capital, we have NOK 62 million in cash and credit facilities in the organization. That includes a new credit facility established with Danske Bank, which is now our main banking relation. And of the liquidity position of NOK 62 million today, NOK 14 million is restricted cash. Most of that related to bank -- sorry, bank guarantees on -- for office rent contracts. Balance sheet. It doesn't move much from one quarter to the other. We have a total asset of NOK 556 million by the end of third quarter with an equity ratio of around 60% -- sorry, 56%. We have goodwill of around NOK 205 million that relates to the acquired 7 companies, and we have intangibles at NOK 96 million. So we have -- and lastly, we have an equity of total NOK 309 million on a group level. Lastly, I just see how the equity has developed from third quarter. As you know, in July, we did a repair issue for the larger share issue we did in April. Repair issue brought in just short of NOK 2 million. And we have a net loss after tax of NOK 16 million, which brings the equity for the period down to NOK 309 million from NOK 324 million previous -- previous quarter. A few words on the outlook. We continue to focus on efficiency and chargeability and that in order to drive profitability higher for the group. Partnership with Hypergene and Rambase, we believe will grow -- drive our growth in both Nordics and U.K. And those 2 partnerships are very useful and interesting for us going forward. We are planning to take EA-BPM outside Norway during 2023. And we think that will boost clearly, the activity both on the group level and for EA-BPM in particular. Hospitality, we plan for them to go breakeven during 2023. And that is on the back of increased demand for the services and products that Hospitality bring to the market. As I said, Marine, the cost base adjustment has now for all practical purposes been completed, and we are now focusing on growing the business for Marine. That will primarily come through dialogues with existing customers and large cruise companies doing upgrades of these systems. Lastly, I just want to remind all of you that most of our larger internal integration projects are now being completed. So all the dialogues we have internally now relates to growth and how we can improve the performance of the entire group. Our outlook is good. The pipelines are looking healthy for 2023, and we are positive for what's going to happen now over the last -- or the next 4 to 5 quarters. That brings us to the end of the presentation, and I'm happy to take any questions if there should be any. We have, as you know, made it possible for the U.S. viewers to post questions written. I get the message here that we have not received any questions. So with that, I would like to thank you for attending and wish you a good day. Thank you.