Arribatec Group ASA (ARR) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Arribatec's fourth quarter presentation. We will dive right in and first go through the highlights for the quarter. We have a quarterly revenue of NOK 143 million. That is just slightly above where we were a year ago, so a 2% growth, and I'll come back to the underlying reasons for the growth. We have an EBITDA of NOK 1.8 million for the quarter, which is an improvement of NOK 11.5 million compared to same quarter in 2022. And from a cash standpoint, we are at the same level as we were at the end of the same quarter a year ago. So, in other words, we have NOK 39 million in cash at the end of fourth quarter 2023. What we also observe is that year-to-date cash flow for the entire year of 2023 is improved by NOK 60 million compared to the full year 2022. And that, of course, is an important aspect of our financial performance for the full year. Also, for the first time, we have all our 5 business areas are showing positive EBITDA at the same time in the same quarter. That is also a milestone for us as a group. Lastly, I want to highlight that we have signed a total of 497 new contracts and scope extensions for a combined value of NOK 215 million. That's in the last quarter. Here, let me talk a little bit first on the revenue. As I said, a growth of 1.7% or 1.8%, all of it is organic, as it has been over the last 4 quarters. I'll have a separate slide about the background for the growth. Recurring revenue is at NOK 55 million for the quarter. That is up 11% compared to where we were a year ago, and it accounts for some 39% of the total revenue in the group. EBITDA is a 118% growth compared to a year ago and shows NOK 1.7 million with a margin slightly above 1%. If you look at the revenue distribution at the lower end of this slide, Norway accounts for NOK 96 million. That is up from NOK 84 million a year ago, is 14% growth compared to last year and accounts for -- the Norwegian revenue accounts for 67% of the total group-wide revenue. Europe accounts for 29% of the total revenue in the group, and that is slightly down compared to where we were a year ago. Revenue from rest of the world, which is really North Americas, is down by 50% to NOK 6 million in the fourth quarter, and it accounts for 4% of the group total. This slide you have seen several times. We still have 17 offices around the globe, and that is within 10 different countries. At this point in time, we are a little bit more than 400 people, so 402 people in the organization, and we have about 1,700 clients, from large global corporations to smaller companies across the world. It's a slide that I believe you have seen before. It shows how we have divided the company into 5 business areas with the large three ones being EA-BPM, Business Services and Cloud -- are industry agnostic and the larger business areas. The 2 smaller ones at the bottom, Marine and Hospitality, are more single-focused industry verticals, clearly, then serving the Marine segment and the Hospitality segment. Business Services has about 175 people employed. And it accounts for -- I don't know if you can see this middle of the circle, but it says 50% there. So, Business Services accounts for almost or around 50% -- 50% of the total revenue in the group. EA-BPM, Enterprise Architecture and Business Process Management, has 75 people and accounts for around 20%. And the same goes for Cloud. That has also around 20% of the total revenue, but employs around 60 people in 3 locations, being Hamar in Norway, Bergen in Norway, and also in Granada in Spain. Marine, centered in Italy, have 35% to the -- sorry, 35 people in the organization, accounts for about 8% of the total group. And Hospitality, 15 people here in Oslo. And at the end of the fourth quarter, they accounted for around 2% of our total revenue. But as you will see a little bit later today, they are growing quite fast. So here, you can see then the 4 -- sorry, the 5 business areas with performance metrics. First, let me talk to you about Business Services. As you can see here, we had actually a negative growth in the fourth quarter of 2023 compared to where we were a year ago. Total revenue of NOK 70 million, a EBITDA margin of 4.4%, and a total EBITDA of NOK 3.1 million for the quarter in EBITDA. So, while all the other business areas had growth during last quarter, the business area, what we call Business Services, so as I said, a decline of 6.5%. These have a couple of -- there's a couple of reasons for this. First of all, in the Nordic markets, we see and we continue to see a challenging market for installation of large, new ERP projects. In addition, the drop in revenue from ongoing ERP projects is largely a consequence of Unit4's announcement back in October last year that it would stop support for the on-premise solutions by the end of 2025. This caused several customers to reassess their relationship with their ERP provider. And also, it led to delay and halt of several of their ongoing ERP projects. We see this situation as transient, and we do experience many opportunities being created for cloud migration and the related digital transformation project for existing and new Unit4 clients. Our project pipeline for this type of transformation project is being built, and we should -- and it should provide us with additional work for several years to come. So, we see this dip in Business Services as a thing that we'll work ourselves through and come out on the other end with being back on the growth path in that business area as well. For the EA and BPM, we saw a 5.5% revenue growth in last quarter with total revenue of NOK 29 million and an EBITDA margin of 19%, which translates into NOK 5.5 million in actual EBITDA. Cloud, also growth at 3.7% and total revenue of NOK 31 million. The EBITDA margin there is 0.8% for the quarter and a just slightly positive EBITDA. If you see this as opposed to the 2 next ones, Hospitality and Marine, we see very strong growth in both those 2 business areas. Hospitality, even though we come from a small base, more than 400% revenue growth, and they're showing a total revenue of NOK 6.1 million, which is a record for Hospitality for this -- since the start, EBITDA margin of 44% and NOK 2.7 million in EBITDA. We expect the -- of course, the revenue is still growing. We have the Hospitality engagement with Flytoget, where we delivered both software development and hardware for new ticket vending machines. That helps, of course, to lift the revenue, and we are confident that we will continue to work closely with Flytoget also after the project comes to an end. In addition, we have secured several new hotels and installed new kiosks in Hospitality during the quarter. And all these things point in the same direction, further growth, higher profitability and more customers. If you then lastly look at Marine, we see a strong 50% plus growth and a NOK 12.8 million revenue. That is -- means the company is back to where we were prior to starting the restructuring of Marine. There is a 25% EBITDA margin, and that translates into NOK 3.2 million in EBITDA for the quarter. And the margin here is a good reflection of the additional profitability we get in the business areas where we have a, let's say, large volume of owned IP sold into new and existing customers. Moving on, this continues to be a busy slide, but what we're showing here is the quarterly development in revenue. And the bars here are divided into sections that each represents one of the BAs. So, we can see the development in Business Services where we have a slight dip now in the fourth quarter compared to the fourth quarter in 2022. But what really this shows is that we have seasonality to our business, and we have -- we are living through those ups and downs. And we expect that we should be able to grow also or see a healthy revenue development also for first quarter 2024. Total recurring revenue is now at 38% of our total revenue. And also, if you look at revenue outside of Norway, it now accounts for 33% of the total revenue, which is a little bit down to what it used to be. And that is partly because we saw the effect of the Unit4 announcement hitting us mostly in Continental Europe and in U.K. I also wanted to show a chart that, on a quarterly basis, show a 12-month trailing development. So, this means that, when we are looking, for example, at Q1 '23, we are looking backwards 12 months. And we see then that, for that quarter, the revenue was NOK 529 million. And as we -- we can clearly see the upward trend quarter-by-quarter. And we are still a growth story, and we continue to add on new customers and win new projects in order for us to keep the momentum up in the company and continue the growth journey. So, we can see that the white bars here, the last one, NOK 573 million, that is the full year 2023. That compares to NOK 505 a year ago, and before that, again, NOK 414 million in trailing 12 months revenue. So, the growth story is intact, and we are working hard to make the curve steeper. And the way to make the curve steeper is to continue to sell and sign new contracts. This chart shows, on the left-hand side, how much business we have signed up each quarter over the last 8 quarters. And you can see here that we signed a total of 497 new contracts with a total value of NOK 250 million. And that compares to NOK 128 million a year ago. And we are very, very happy with this volume of new business being taken on board. You can also see then, on the right-hand side, that all business areas are actually having a higher success rate or ability to sell new business compared to where we were a year ago. So, this is a good development, and it bodes well for the future. So, this slide we have looked at in previous presentations. And the first thing I want to point out is that cash flow from operating activities for the entire year of 2022 -- 2023, sorry, is improved by NOK 60 million compared to 2022. That is a significant development for the group. Also, you can see here that we are stable at the end of each quarter. We have around NOK 40 million available in the bank. And that, for us, is a comfortable level in terms of managing our cash situation. We are -- as of February 5, we had NOK 72 million or NOK 73 million in cash, where of NOK 8 million -- NOK 8.5 million were restricted cash. In addition, on top of that, we had the credit facility with Danske Bank, our main bank relationship. That was -- it's NOK 20 million, but it was unused. So, the cash situation as of today is comfortable and where we want it to be. Then let's look at the balance sheet. Again, this quarter, as well as many of the other quarters, there is not much changing in the balance sheet. We have, if you look at the equity side, on the left-hand side of the slide, NOK 262 million in equity. That translates to around a 52% equity ratio. And on the asset side, there is really not much movement, so I'll not spend much time on this. So, to outlook, we continue to see a robust demand for cloud services, which will obviously grow or drive growth for our Cloud activities, and also an increasing demand from the market for managed IT services, which basically means that our customers come to us and ask us to manage all or parts of their IT infrastructure. Cloud migration, as a consequence of the Unit4 decision to stop the support of their on-prem ERP solution, will drive higher activity in Business Services and in our Cloud operation. However, it's hard for us to, at this stage, see when this transformation wave, so to speak, will start. We have dialogues with currently more than 50 customers who want help with this, and we expect that backlog to grow. We expect Hospitality to grow significantly over the next quarters. We are building SaaS revenue and the Flytoget will be with us for still quite a few months, increasing our consulting revenue and software development revenue. Marine continues to grow, both on the back of tenders that come to the market, but also we have -- we would like to mention that we have broken into the Greek market, won our first contracts there. And we are also actively talking to Scandinavian ship owners and also German ship owners. So, we think that Marine will see a healthy development during the next quarters. Our partnership strategy will continue and additional partnerships is being and will be pursued and established. We also see that demand for automation -- automating work processes is growing, and we expect this to, over time, become a meaningful revenue stream for us. Lastly, again, we will never stop chasing better margins and focus on improving EBITDA margin will continue. So, having said all that, I am open for questions. I'll give you a couple of minutes to register the questions. Thank you. Okay. Welcome back. We have got one question here, and that pertains to the reason behind the development within business services in Europe, in particular. As I said and as we have written in our report, several of our largest clients have postponed or terminated projects and activities that we were involved with due to the fact that they have to reassess the situation now that they see that they are going to have to move to the cloud with their ERP systems. This, we think, is, let's say, a situation that will take some time to work through, but that we will have -- get back to a normal levels, revenue levels, when the clients actually decides to move to cloud, and we will help them through that process. That is -- one more here. Yes, that was the questions that we received. I thank you for listening in and looking forward to talk to you again soon. Thank you.