Arribatec Group ASA (ARR) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to this fourth quarter presentation for Arribatec. I'm happy to be here now to be able to talk you through what we have been doing over the last quarter, both from a financial perspective, but also from an operational and market perspective. So without any further ado, let's get into the material. So fourth quarter actually shows that we have an all-time high revenue of NOK 141 million, and that is a 21% -- or more than 21% growth compared to same quarter last year. The entire increase or the entire growth actually stems from organic growth. So the organic growth then also on 21% for the quarter-on-quarter. For the full year, we are reporting NOK 505 million in revenue. This is then a 22% growth also year-on-year. But there, on a yearly basis or annual basis, the organic growth is 11.2%. We continue to build recurring revenue. For the quarter, it is NOK 50 million, and that compares to NOK 37 million 1 year ago, so a 35% increase. Also, we see that our recurring revenue accounts for 35% of our total revenue for the fourth quarter. For the full year, we are recording NOK 184 million, and that compares to NOK 146 million for fourth quarter in 2021. That represents a 27% increase year-on-year. And on an annual basis, recurring revenue accounts for 37% of our total revenue. Lastly here, adjusted EBITDA for the quarter is minus NOK 4.5 million, and that compares to NOK 1 million a year ago. What should be noted here is that we have, in addition to what we report as adjusted EBITDA, we have also spent NOK 1.6 million in building up new business unit for the Rambase activities. And therefore, you will see that the underlying operational performance, so to speak, is NOK 2.9 million for fourth quarter 2022. If you look at the annual number, the adjusted EBITDA for the group is negative NOK 26.1 million and with a margin of minus 6.8%. Last year, we had -- or not last year, but in 2021, we had an adjusted EBITDA of minus NOK 1.6 million. So let's see or look at some of the highlights that we have chosen to include here. First of all, as I said, it's an all-time high revenue, NOK 141 million for the quarter, and we are pleased seeing that we continue to grow quarter-by-quarter. I also would like to talk a little bit about the financial performance for the month of November. There, we actually reached an all-time high monthly revenue of NOK 50 million, and that translated into an EBITDA for the month of NOK 3 million positive. So that is, for me, very encouraging. And it shows that once we get up the volume, this will materialize as a positive EBITDA. We continue to win large contracts, and we are also winning new contracts where more than one business area is delivering both services and products into our clients. We have been pressing for this over the last quarters, and I would say that now we see that the cooperation and the in-sale where more than one business area participates really has an impact on our chances to win new business. I also would like to highlight the announcement we made almost -- it's a month ago about the fact that we landed a -- or we signed an agreement with Thon Hotels for our Hospitality business area for the check-in/checkout solution. For us, this is immensely important and a signal to the market that we are able to compete and to win business for our smallest business area, Hospitality. Also would like to talk a little bit about our Marine business area. As I have mentioned in previous quarterly reports, we have been restructuring Marine all the way through 2022. And formally, we ended the restructuring process late December. And we have now saved or we have achieved an annual saving of NOK 26 million for Marine. And that for us is very, very important in order for us to get the profitability of the whole group up. We also announced that we managed to sell one of the IP rights to a software we called Performance. We sold it for NOK 9 million to an Italian company. And Marine -- Arribatec Marine is now able to solely focus on InfoShip, which is the core asset management, quality and hotel defect software that the company has developed many, many years ago, and that is the core revenue-generating activity in the business. So now Marine has been -- is done restructuring, and it's all about growth and increasing revenue from existing customers and winning new customers. I would also like to emphasize that we are seeing increases in public cloud capacity, and we have consciously built up our capacity and our ability to take on more business. The new integrated cloud concept that we have developed over the last few months will be launched fairly shortly. We have great expectations to how we choose to go to market with our cloud activities, and I hope to be able to show you how we are progressing next quarter. We also see that large existing customers -- or we also have a large existing customer that will significantly increase their cloud engagement with us due to the fact that they have acquired one of their large competitors. And the combined new company will continue with us, but it will give -- and it will give us increased revenue from the combined company. Lastly, I would also point out that we have what we would call home-shored our software development activities from Poland back to Norway. This is done so that we can be -- let's say, our go-to-market efforts increases with speed and efficiency. And overall, we expect about NOK 7 million in annual savings for this change. So to the geographic revenue growth and the share of total. So fourth quarter, Norway delivered NOK 84 million of revenue compared to NOK 73 million same period last year, 15% growth quarter-on-quarter. And Norway accounts for 60% of the total revenue for the quarter for the group. EU and U.K., numbers there are total revenue, NOK 45 million. That is 18% above what we had exactly 1 year ago. And it accounts -- EU and U.K. accounts for 32% of our total group level revenue. The rest of the world, which means U.S., has had a good quarter. We have NOK 11.8 million recorded as revenue in U.S., and that compared to NOK 5.3 million last year. So we see a 126% increase quarter-on-quarter. And U.S. now accounts for 8% of the total revenue of the group. Annualized, Norway, NOK 305 million and accounts for 60% of the group. EU and U.K., NOK 163 million by end of 2022. That is -- it compares to NOK 111 million last -- or 2021. So they account for 32%. And lastly, U.S. goes from NOK 29 million in 2021 to NOK 37 million in 2022. So we see growth in all geographical areas for the entire Arribatec Group. And here, I would like to talk to you a little bit about what we are doing on the market side. You see here a chart showing how many transactions and the value of the entire new business that we have secured during fourth quarter. So we have signed agreements, 98 agreements in total, for a total combined value of NOK 130 million. And I think it's worthwhile to noticing that second quarter -- sorry, third quarter in 2022, we had signed a new contract of NOK 83 million. So it's a very healthy growth also from third quarter 2022 to fourth quarter 2022. And we see that we are seeing a lot of demand for services from all our business areas. And we should not anticipate too much about second quarter. But I can say that we are optimistic about the order and the contractual discussions that we currently are having with our both existing and new clients. A few highlights from the contracts that we have on during fourth quarter. Financial -- the first one you see on the left-hand side here, a Norwegian financial institution, NOK 7 million for 1 year. That is basically Azure consumption, and it's an extension of an ongoing agreement. And the contract started running already in December 2022. Civil engineering firm, NOK 2 million, pure cloud consulting work and will be running through the entire 2023. Then we have a large Norwegian power grid company. A contract value, a new ERP system for -- the value of the entire contract is about NOK 10 million, including recurring revenue of around NOK 1 million per year. That work has already started. And in addition to delivering ERP systems and consulting, we are including integration work as well as business analytics. And this being a power grid company, it's also worth noting that we now are getting quite a few companies within the power transmission space. And we feel that the blueprint we have for how to implement Unit4 solution for them is working very well for us and very well for the customers. Thereafter, we see here the fourth transaction or agreement for a software development company. We are delivering pure consulting to them at the value of 4 -- a little bit more than NOK 4 million. That would be ongoing through the entire 2023. And lastly, and this is one of the most exciting transactions or agreements that we have signed, it's for a large European-based engineering group. We have a, call it, scope extension of NOK 5.1 million for now. We expect that to grow significantly beyond NOK 5.1 million. But the exciting thing here is that it started as a business services project where we will -- where we were implementing ERP Unit4 solution to the client. Now we have also been asked if we can provide business process management and enterprise architecture services. So we will have -- our estimate is up to 2 full man-years of that service to the same client. And for us, this is very exciting, and it shows that we are able to broaden the scope and the deliverables to our clients. This slide is included just to show you how we are working in the market and how it fluctuates during the year. For 2022, we signed a total of 630 new contracts and/or scope extensions for a combined value of around NOK 375 million. I can -- we are working very, very hard on the business development side. We have increased our BD and sales staff by 9 people. So we are now more than, call it, 25 people in total. And we see that we are getting higher volumes per month in new business. So this is a very conscious choice for us. We have said that we are building the, let's say, groundwork, laying the foundation for a company that can take a lot more business. What we are doing now is building the pipe and building the volume -- business volumes that we're going to be working on for the next quarters. So this is very exciting news, and it's very exciting to see that the volume is picking up. I also want to just remind you about our organizational setup. We have divided our business into 5 different business areas, where of the 3 dark-blue ones that you see here represents EA-BPM, Business Services and Cloud, they account for 90% of our total revenue. And they are interdependent to a certain degree, meaning also that it is -- once you are in bid, for example, selling ERP systems and services, it's very natural to continue discussing business process management and enterprise architecture with the same clients. Underpinning all this, you have our Cloud activity where we can offer any services from taking over the entire management of the IT landscape for a client to just giving also specific consulting for solving certain problems or certain considerations that the clients might have. So those 3 business areas go hand-in-hand. Then you see the light-blue ones, that is our Hospitality and Marine business. They are operated a little bit more independent of the 3 other ones. But we are looking for a significant growth for Hospitality and a buildup of Marine now that we are done with the restructuring process. This slide is busy, but I just want to show you how the different business areas are performing. I would like to start with Marine. We said in -- we went -- third quarter last year was positive EBITDA. Now in fourth quarter, we see a negative EBITDA, but this includes a write-down of IP rights after we have sold the Performance IP rights, and the underlying operating results adjusting for this write-down is actually breakeven. So we still have Marine where we want them to be, and new business and increased business volumes will drive up the operating result or the EBITDA for Marine. Hospitality has a large percentage growth, however, it's from a low base. So I will not put too much into that now in the terms of percentage growth. But what I can tell you is that we have a significant amount of discussions going with both independent hotels, medium-sized hotel brands and also with large global groups. So we are very, very excited about what we now are -- or we are excited about the visibility and the interest that we now have from the market for our services. Business Services for -- up on the left-hand side, as I said, NOK 75 million in revenue for the quarter, a 16% growth compared to last year. The EBITDA margin is not something that we are happy with. They should be much higher. And as you may remember, previous quarters, the EBITDA has been around NOK 8 million, and we should get there and beyond as soon as possible. And we do not see that this NOK 0.3 million is representative, partly because it includes the cost of building up the Rambase practice, Rambase being another ERP system that we are using in the marketplace, and also that we have done some write-downs on account receivables at the end of the year. So overall, we are seeing growth. We are not happy with the margin in Business Services, but we are confident that we will get it back to where it should be. EA-BPM has the best quarter ever. The revenue is NOK 27 million. That's a growth of 23% compared to the quarter -- same quarter last year, all organic. And we are showing an EBITDA margin of 31%, and that is for us very exciting. We have a super-focused management team who is driving chargeability of the consultants. And we are winning business based on our ability to help our clients through the analysis of the business processes and help them model them. But most -- or almost as importantly, we are now able to support them also with cloud operations and other business services, be it, for example, ERP solutions. Cloud growth rates are exactly where we wanted to be. Margin is not acceptable. We will increase it during the next quarters, and we expect a solid growth in the quarters to come and with an improved EBITDA margin. Then let me just remind you how we look on a global scale. Today, we are present in 16 offices around the globe. We have actually closed down several one-man offices in order to make our organization more efficient and cheaper to operate. We are a total of 405 employees across the 5 business areas and the support functions. And we have clients in -- or we have more than 1,500 clients globally. You can see from the map that our main footprint is in the Nordics and Continental Europe, but also with offices in U.S. and in Singapore. Headcount-wise, we started the year with 403 employees, and we're ending it with 405 employees. This also reflects the reduction in headcount in Marine at the same time as we have built up capacity in other BAs. So while the headcount seems to have been stable during the year, there has been a shift out of Marine, reductions in Marine, but building up, in particular, in EA-BPM and Business Services. So to the numbers. We are seeing here the last 5 quarters and how each of the business areas has been performing. If you look at the column to the right, you see the NOK 140 million that represents the revenue for fourth quarter of 2022. 35% of the revenue is recurring, and 40% of the revenue is outside of Norway. Both these 2 parameters are strategically important for us. You also see that all business areas is recording growth for quarter-by-quarter, except Marine, where we have taken down the revenue as -- or as we have been restructuring the business. Too much internal focus for too long has led to some loss of revenue. Looking at EBITDA, on the right-hand side first, the full year EBITDA of -- for the company is positive for Business Services, EA-BPM and Cloud, while it's negative for Hospitality and Marine. As I've said in my previous presentations, we expect to get both Marine and Hospitality into profitable territory in -- during 2023. So we are optimistic about how we will perform financially for the entire 2023. Again, the EBITDA on the left-hand side for the quarter, the most important thing here, again, is to notice that Marine, the underlying operational result is basically breakeven. However, the EBITDA as reported is negative NOK 4.2 million due to the write-off of the IP rights on our balance sheet. Cash flow development. If we focused on the red frame here, we see that we ended third quarter this year -- or 2022 with NOK 39 million in cash, and we are now NOK 1 million higher at the end of fourth quarter. What needs to be said here is that the working capital has improved dramatically or significantly where both accounts payables and accounts receivable position has, in total, improved by NOK 22 million. And that for us is a significant improvement compared to previous quarters, and it has had a good impact on our cash position. What also is important is what I say in the last bullet here. As of today, we have NOK 69 million in cash and unused credit facilities. So basically, NOK 50 million in cash and NOK 20 million in undrawn facility with Danske Bank. So this for us is also a, I would say, comfortable liquidity position. Balance sheet development, it doesn't move much from quarter-to-quarter. So for fourth quarter, a total balance worth NOK 515 million. The equity position is NOK 282 million, which is -- equates a 55% equity ratio. So no big changes here. Equity development. We -- due to the net loss for the fourth quarter, our total equity is down from NOK 309 million in the third quarter to NOK 282 million in -- at the end of the year. So lastly, a little bit about outlook. First of all, we expect higher growth rate in 2023 as compared to 2022. And that means we, as I said, we grew by 21% in 2022. I think we can do better in this year. And there is no planned M&A activities in the company. The growth will partly be driven by partnerships, our partnerships with Unit4, Hypergene and Rambase. And we continue to, of course, land new contracts for all these 3 software packages. We have -- and we see that there are several large public sector projects out for tender. And several of them will make decisions towards the end of first quarter or early second quarter. And we are optimistic about our chance for success with several of them. We also see a robust demand for cloud services, and we believe that will drive and propel revenue growth in our cloud operations significantly during the year. And we are building a solid SaaS revenue base here. Currently, 75% of the revenue in Cloud stems from SaaS. Growth from Marine will primarily be driven by industry or the cruise industry. We have several large international cruise operators who have re-approached us after knowing that we have completed our restructuring and now wants to discuss business opportunities together. And we think that is very excited, and we look forward to work with them going forward. Lastly, we will continue to focus on improving efficiency and chargeability among those business units where it's naturally to push on chargeability. And we do this in order to improve profitability for the entire group. Lastly, and now I just want to mention, we just announced that we will do a so-called reverse share split. This is done because it's a requirement from Oslo Børs. If our share price stays below NOK 1 for too long, we have to bring it back above NOK 1, and that is what the reverse split is doing. It's important here to notice that there is no change to the value -- underlying value of the company. We have to issue 3, and that's, I mean, 1 to 3 shares in order to get to a number of share -- total number of shares outstanding divisible by 10. So there is no drama in this announcement. It's just a practicality that has to be taken care of. So having said that, I will now open up for questions and answers from the listeners to this broadcast.

Being informed that some of you have had problems actually connecting to the live stream, I apologize for that. But rest assured, the entire presentation will be available on our website. So now I would like to answer some of the questions that has come in. And the first question is from one who wonders whether SolaaS still is a priority for us. And to that, I would like to say that we do offer SolaaS, meaning Solution as a Service, to our customers, and we will do so. But it is, let's say, depending on the size of the project, it depends on the combination of services and products that the customer is looking for. And it's also depending on whether the customer would like to have a SolaaS in its true form where there is no upfront investment, but rather several periods of fixed payments. So we still offer this to the market, and we will continue to do that going forward. Secondly, yes, there's a question here regarding what our gross margin is on recurring revenue. And that all depends as with not very many other things in life. So for example, for Hospitality, the recurring revenue there, since it is our own IP, will approach a very, very high number, well above 70%. So that is a true SaaS delivery with really high margin. Other recurring revenue streams, such as business support to our customers or the development and maintenance of software will have lower margins in line with what we get from regular consulting services that we sell to our clients. So it varies from, like I say, low teens to well above 70%. So that is the answer for that question. And so far, that is what I have here. One second, I'll check for other -- yes, no other questions has come in. Again, we apologize for some -- for those of you who has not been able to join us from the start. But as I said, this will be posted on our website, and the recording will be available. So thank you for showing up today, and looking forward to talking to you again in a couple of months. Thank you.