B2 Impact ASA (B2I) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Very good. Welcome to B2Holding third quarter presentation. I'm Erik Johnsen, and with me today I have André Adolfsen, CFO of B2Holding, going through the financial numbers afterwards. Third quarter continued to be a good quarter for B2Holding. And despite market uncertainties, we have seen resilient collection in the quarter that passed. Let's go through the main points for the quarter. As I said, we had very good steady operations in the quarter that passed, both on the operational side but also on the collection side. Unsecured collection came in at 104.4%, and we also see that the secured collection continued with the strong momentum in the third quarter. On REO side, we passed NOK 400 million collection this year so far and the collection in the third quarter was very good. Also in the third quarter, we had an exceptional good margin on the REO profit that we had. The cost-saving program that we've been having is resilient. It's proven to be resilient and it mitigates quite a bit of the increased cost inflation that we have seen in the past months, especially. We still see some increased cost -- or capital discipline in the marketplace. We have bought portfolios in the past quarter with a higher IRR than we have in previous quarters. We will continue to focus on capital discipline as well as price discipline going forward. We placed a EUR 150 million bond in the third quarter. Very pleased with that, especially considering the market conditions that the last quarter has been in the financial high-yield market. We also repaid our third bond, the B2H03, in October together with good cash flow, good facilities from the banks in May 2023. Sale of Bulgaria is sold -- is signed. And also, we see that we get approval from the authorities, but there is possibility to question that within 14 days. So in the end of November, we believe this will be done, finalized. Let's move over to the key figures. We had cash collection of NOK 1.244 billion in the quarter, which is 9% higher than year-on-year in constant FX. Very good cash collection in the quarter. We also see that cash EBITDA of NOK 973 million is very, very good. We had adjusted profit -- net profit, of NOK 171 million, which is around 11.7% return on equity, booked equity, but also close to 18% return on market value of the B2Holding share. Book value of B2Holding share is to date NOK 12.9 per share and we are currently trading, as you all know, at NOK 8. 2. Investment -- portfolio investment is around NOK 400 million. I will return regarding the prospect for the fourth quarter. But the portfolio that we bought this quarter, as previously mentioned, we had a higher net return -- expected higher net return on those portfolios than we've been having previous quarters. André will then, of course, go through a little bit more of the financial numbers with you later. Another quarter has passed, and we continued to show good collection in both secured as well as unsecured markets. On the secured side, we see that the cash collection has been very steady over the past quarters despite a downturn in the ERC. I think we can say that our strategy to maximize value through repossession of REOs has been working very well. It's been proven this quarter, but it's been proven also the previous quarters that we've been having a good margin and that we've been having a good return on that strategy. We also see the costs coming down. This is exemplified with a number of FTEs in the countries. We are 750 at the end of the quarter. With the sale of Bulgaria, we are below 600. When it comes to the unsecured markets, we see the same. We have a steady good collection coming up now also because the ERC is now coming up. We purchased more of unsecured, so we've seen an increase in the ERC over the past couple of quarters. But we see the same. We have been having digitalization and we have been having data analytics team working actively active in the markets. We see more -- able to get more collection out of the back book. At the same time, we see the cost to collect coming down. And here again, exemplified by the number of FTEs coming now down to 1,097. This trend has been going on for several quarters, and we should see that our efficiency in the operations are increasing and also the effectiveness of the operation is increasing. That is getting more out of the back book and getting more out of the claims that we have. Now we have -- the collection industry has proven resilient, especially in the downturn of the economies. There are several reasons for this, but we see here that the growth in -- GDP growth over the past 7 years has been positive in our markets. This is exemplified with the markets that we are in, with the exception of 2020, and it's going to be positive in the next 3 years. This is data from Oxford Economics. And we also see that the inflation rate has increased quite a bit over the -- we all know that, we all experienced that, but it's expected also to come down. But the thing that they say is they do not expect the employment rate to have an impact on employment rate at this point in time. Higher disposable income has also created a cushion for household and high inflation environment. Household savings has increased during the pandemic. Also, what we see is a decrease in total debt, consumer debt, but an increase in new defaults, creating new portfolios for B2Holding. So going into what is the impact on the markets for B2Holding. We have increase in disposable income as we can see here, the net wealth. And we have seen increased savings and governmental support to limit negative impact of -- that's all going to limit our impact on collections. Short-term uncertainties are reflected also in pricing of our portfolio. The pricing had gone down, and we expect higher returns on our investments on the portfolios going forward. Now what we believe as important is maintaining discipline in the changing market dynamics. We have been buying more portfolio this quarter than previous years, and we do believe that we're going to buy more portfolio. We are certain that we're going to buy more portfolios in the fourth quarter. So the second half of this year is going to be a strong portfolio purchase. We see also in the marketplace that increased capital discipline that is driving down the prices and also driving up our net returns -- expected net returns on the portfolios. Our target has increased due to the uncertainties in the market. And at the end of the quarter, we have bought portfolios for NOK 1.4 billion. At the same time, we have committed NOK 330 million for the remaining of the year. Now we expect total investment for the year to be in the neighborhood of NOK 2.5 billion to NOK 3 billion, implying an investment level around NOK 1.1 billion to NOK 1.5 billion for the fourth quarter. Now on the back of that, I then leave you, André, to go through the financial numbers.

Thank you, Erik. So before we go into the financial details, just want to highlight an important factor that impacts not just the results in the third quarter, but has impacted our results now for several quarters and will also do that in the fourth quarter. And that is the repossession strategy that Erik has talked about. This impacts our results in a way that when we do the repossessions, we do get a collection impact in the P&L, which gives no cash impact. But when we actually sell the assets, we have a positive impact on cash EBITDA, but a limited impact on the P&L. And this is quite important, which will explain partly the financial results in this quarter, and it will be a theme throughout the presentation. So moving into the financial results. We are extremely pleased to present yet another very solid collection quarter for the company. This is explained by continued stable and actually strong unsecured collection performance, coming in at 104.4% in the quarter and in line with what we guided back in Q2. The main driver in the quarter is coming from secured cash collections. Secured cash collections came in NOK 318 million in the quarter. This is driven by the REO sales. NOK 169 million of REO sales in the quarter and the year-to-date number is currently north of NOK 400 million. So despite this growth in collection, we have maintained a stable cost base. And we do see pressure on our costs. As everyone else, we do see inflationary cost pressure, but we have maintained a stable cost base compared to last year demonstrating the sustainable cost savings we have achieved over the last 2 years. We have also booked NRIs in the quarter related to the secured restructuring as we have done over the last 2 quarters also. The NRIs related to this came in at NOK 35 million in the quarter. We have now largely concluded the restructuring, and we expect a very limited impact on costs in the fourth quarter. So the collection improvement that we have seen, combined with the underlying stable cost base, has driven growth in cash EBITDA of 3% compared to last year, but 8% in constant currency. When you look at the adjusted EBIT, it is up 2% in constant currency. So there is a clear difference between cash EBITDA and the reported EBIT number. And the difference here is due to what I mentioned, the repossession and REO strategy. So last year, we had higher repossession of assets with an impact on the P&L, which gives no impact on cash. In this quarter, we had very strong REO sales, which consequently then drives limited impact on P&L numbers, but very strong cash metrics and that's why you see an 8% growth in cash EBITDA. The adjusted net profit came in NOK 171 million in the quarter. This is up 2% in constant currency and translates, as Erik said, into a last 12-month return on equity of 11.7%. Want to note also that the interest expense in the quarter is up compared to previous quarters, and this is explained by higher -- or increased facility lines and high liquidity for the company, which I'll come back to later in the presentation. We are quite good hedged on interest rates. We have 70% of our outstanding debt hedged mainly through interest rate caps at 1% floating interest rate. I'll come more back to the investments later in the presentation, but the number in the quarter was NOK 399 million, and we have committed and closed investments of around NOK 1.75 billion for the full year. And as Erik pointed out, we do expect the fourth quarter to be our most active quarter this year. So moving into some more details on the collection performance in the quarter. As mentioned, very strong unsecured collection performance, again, 104.5% and again, in line with what we communicated back in the second quarter. In constant FX, this is the same level as we saw last year in terms of NOK collected. Looking at the secured side, I pointed out the repossessions. Repossessions were 93% last year and 82% this year. This impacts the P&L, obviously. The most positive effect that we saw this quarter was the REOs driving secured cash collection increase of 82% year-over-year. REOs came in NOK 169 million. For the full year, we're now at NOK 408 million, which is already above our communicated target from the previous quarter. And we consequently increased our target for the full year to NOK 500 million of REO sales. Moving to Slide #10, we elaborate a bit more on the cash earnings. On the left-hand side, we demonstrate the development from the cash EBITDA to cash earnings adjusted for investments and adjusted for financial obligations, interest and tax. In the quarter, the cash earnings came in at EUR 262 million. And over the last 2 years or during the pandemic, we have seen a significant deleveraging of the business. We have now started to invest at a higher pace. But as you can see, the leverage is maintained at a low, stable level. The leverage in the quarter was 2.41 or actually 2.37 in constant currency. Erik noted it earlier we have seen significant increase in efficiency and scalability across our platforms. And this is shown to a large extent in the cost base that we're able to mitigate inflation in salaries through sustainable savings made over the last 2 years. Over the last 12 months, the cost base is flat compared to last year and this is despite an increase in cash collection of 9% in constant currency. So higher activity level, flat cost base. In the third quarter, the cost was up 2%, which is driven again by the higher activity compared to last year. On the personnel expenses, we see a decline of 1% compared to last year. And over the last 12 months, we've had a reduction in personnel expenses of 2.5%. Now moving into the investment side. As mentioned, investments came in at NOK 399 million in the quarter. We have seen an increased -- or more diversified profile in terms of investments in the quarter compared to some of the previous quarters, which is coming through higher activity again across most of our markets. The third quarter is a seasonally slower quarter than the fourth quarter. And we've already seen now in the fourth quarter a volume surpassing the third quarter level in terms of investments. And we will see a much more active fourth quarter, and we clearly expect the fourth quarter to be our strongest quarter this year in terms of investments. Let me also just highlight and build on what Erik said. We have seen in the second half of this year so far a clear trend in terms of pricing in the market. The investments that we have made not just in the third quarter, but also so far in the fourth quarter shows an increase in expected net returns for the company. And we clearly expect both the increased interest rates as well as increased macroeconomic uncertainty to impact prices also going forward. Now during the quarter, we have completed an extensive refinancing of the company. This includes the extension of the RCF from EUR 510 million to EUR 610 million at improved terms for the company. It is the new senior financing agreement with PIMCO. And we also successfully placed a EUR 150 million bond in September in a very challenging capital market. Now the bond was placed with a margin of 6.9%, which clearly is not reflecting the current financial performance of the company but rather reflecting a challenging high-yield market -- or tough capital markets currently. That said, this provides us quite good flexibility in our maturity profile. And if we look at the blended margin for the company, the blended margin of the company after repaying the bond #3 in October, is 5.4%, so actually down from the second quarter. In terms of available liquidity, when we have concluded the sale of Bulgaria expected now within the next weeks, we will have around EUR 400 million -- sorry, EUR 450 million of available liquidity plus, of course, the cash earnings expected in the coming quarters. This gives us ample liquidity to grow our investments in 2023, and it also gives us more than enough headroom to grow and handle the EUR 114 million maturity we have on bond #4 in May 2023. So on the final slide I would like to bring you back to what I said in the beginning on repossessions and give you some guiding on what we expect also for the fourth quarter. Over the last 2 years, we have seen -- if you look at the left-hand side, we have seen a clear decline in book value. But at the same time, we have delivered growth in cash EBITDA. So the book value is obviously coming from NPLs. And when we repossess an asset, we book it as a REO and not as an NPL. And this impacts the ERC, it impacts the book value. But we have, for a long time, tried to convey to the market that this is the trend we will see and we're really pleased that we're able to prove over time that the repossession strategy has added value on top of our book values, not just in this quarter but over the last year actually. This is leading to a positive impact in cash metrics compared to the IFRS reported numbers. It also demonstrates that our book value control has improved significantly during the period, and we have also reduced leverage from around 3.5 to below 2.4 now in third quarter. Now going into the fourth quarter, it's quite important to notice this because we will see the same trend, but it may be even more visible in the fourth quarter, and I'll explain why. We expect a very strong cash EBITDA also in the fourth quarter driven by, as mentioned, an increased target for REO sales to NOK 500 million. But in the third quarter, we did have quite significant collections on some of our joint ventures, secured joint ventures. The cash from these collections will come into our books in the fourth quarter. We expect at least NOK 150 million to come into our books in the fourth quarter coming from these collections. This impacts the P&L limited or basically nothing. But it goes straight into -- 100% into the cash EBITDA. So we will have good REO sales, good cash from JVs and we expect a continued, stable, good collection performance in unsecured also into the fourth quarter. With that, I'll leave the word back to you, Erik.

Okay. Thank you. Okay, the summary. What we see is that we have resilient and strong collection both in the unsecured markets as well as the secured markets. REO sales continue to be good coming into the fourth quarter. We have good cost control, and also we see that some of the programs that we have made are continuing seeing that we have improvements both in effectiveness and efficiency on our platforms. We are going to have stronger investment going into the fourth quarter at a higher net return than what we have seen in the previous quarters. We were able to issue a bond in a very, let's say, challenging market conditions in the quarter that passed. And we're very pleased that this enabled us also to have a good position and good capital, let's say, ability when we go into 2023. Now we are going to have capital discipline going into what we believe is a challenging market. We believe there is coming out more portfolios and also the return on those portfolios, as we said, are going to be better. So we think we are going into a good period, but it's also going to be a challenging period given the macroeconomic situation and inflation that we all are feeling these days. So on back of that, we start with questions. So raise your hands, and we will then come up with the microphone.

Jan Gjerland from ABG Sundal Collier. I will start with one question on the buybacks versus investments you do. You said now just that you expect some more challenging macroeconomic situation, so to speak, and we haven't seen it sort of into your numbers yet in any side of collection. So this is very good, I think. But how do you review the investment profile for new ones versus your own stock still trading way below book. Is it so that the IRR, which you now alluded to, are so much better than buying your own stock, so to speak. Start with that.

We have been buying our share, thinking about the share buybacks that we've been doing. We extended the period with another 1.2 million shares that we could buy back for NOK 10 million. We still see the price of our shares trading below book value, and we believe it's a good opportunity to buy back some of our shares. Now we are limited up to 50% of our net returns from last year. So this is the last program that is coming until then next general assembly. When it comes to new portfolios coming out in the market, of course, this is our business and we are going to be in this business and we see that our portfolios that we purchased in the market is having a very good net returns and also secures good operations on our platforms. We are going for scalability on our platforms. And as we are investing more and more on some of our platforms, we also were seeing our scalability coming through. And we will continue to do that in the years to come. You will see that we will be able to scale our platforms to a larger degree than we did in the past.

Håkon Astrup from DNB Markets. Two questions. First one on your comment regarding a more disciplined market, can you shed some more light on that? Is it just that the most aggressive players are becoming less aggressive? Or is there something that you're seeing, say, across the entire market? And the second question on the cost side, you showed the graph on the FTE development. How do you see that going forward given that investment activity is picking up? Do you still expect to see a similar trend? Or is the current level a level that we should expect going forward?

Okay. I'll start with the second one we can comment. So you can take that if you want.

Yes. Sure. I mean the FTE level we have restructured the secured business. You could clearly see the decline in number of FTEs. We've now sold Bulgaria, which will take the number down to below 600. We are not in a position where we're going to continue that decline. We are taking it down to a sustainable level. We believe we can grow going forward at this cost base. But important also to notice, you see in the numbers this quarter, you will see it in the numbers in the coming quarter, the reduction in FTEs is not fully reflected in our cost base. So we expect this to mitigate some of the inflation in salaries going forward.

Can you repeat the first question, please?

Yes. The first question was regarding the more disciplined market and whether that's just some players becoming less aggressive. Or is it something that you're seeing across all market...

Yes. In most of the markets, we've seen that the number of participants in the auctions has been coming down. And also the players in the auctions are more disciplined on pricing. So we've seen the pricing levels generally come down. Also, we've seen -- which is announced by some of our competitors, they are also going to be quite disciplined. And I think this goes for most of the companies in this space. The uncertainties, and of course, rising interest rates give us room for looking at that and to be more disciplined also in pricing the portfolios, of course. But we also see that the number of defaults are increasing, at least what's been reported to us. In that regards, we also see that we expect more portfolios coming to market over the next quarters, but especially the second half of 2023.

Okay. If there's no more questions from the auditorium, we've got a few online. Okay. We'll start with a question from Rickard Hellman from Nordea. What can you say about wage inflation for B2 in 2023?

I think what we can say is that we see wage inflation like everyone else. We're obviously trying to limit it as much as possible. And we -- as in the previous question here, we have a declining FTE base at the moment. So we expect to be able to mitigate, to a large extent, this increase in -- or inflation in salaries by the restructuring process that we just have concluded in August.

Okay. A couple of questions from Vegard Toverud from Pareto. First question, the REO sales were impressive in the quarter. Is it seasonality that makes you expect less sales in Q4? And what should we expect for profitability margins on REOs going forward?

Well, the third quarter was obviously a peak after a period of March activity. The actual sale doesn't necessarily happen in the quarter. It's a long process. So timing of REO sales and secured assets in general is obviously a bit more lumpy than unsecured. And going into the fourth quarter, we have stated now a new target of NOK 500 million. So we expect around NOK 100 million also in the fourth quarter. We should not expect to see a similar margin as we saw in the third quarter. That was one asset in particular, which we have worked with over a long period. So what we have guided earlier is a margin of 15% to 20% over time. And I think we should expect to see a similar trend in margin as we saw before the third quarter in the fourth quarter.

Another question from Vegard. There were several items that impacted the financial line in the quarter. Could you give us an expectation for financial costs in Q4.

Well, as I mentioned in the presentation, we're clearly seeing an increase in interest rates driven by the higher available facility lines, both the senior facility, the increase in size of the RCF as well as an increase based on the newly placed bond. So we should expect to see an increase in interest expense due to the facility lines, but the margin on our total outstanding debt has actually been reduced quarter-over-quarter. . And in terms of other impacts, we did have a negative FX impact if you look at the second quarter this year to the third quarter. We also had an impact of the bond process, which impacted the quarter sequentially by approximately NOK 7 million. This will, of course, not be part of the Q4 net financials.

Okay. A few questions from Gustav Larsson from Arctic as well. Do you have any news on potential co-investments with PIMCO? Should we expect to see co-investments as part of the CapEx ramp-up in Q4. And on purchases, does the fact that maintaining capital discipline and changing market dynamics imply that you think NPL prices are currently high?

When it comes to investments with PIMCO, we have been looking at a couple of investments, but goes into the recycling program that we have with RCF with PIMCO. When it comes to larger investments, we haven't seen any large investments coming over, but smaller investments definitely we are running by them as part of the recycling program. When it comes to the portfolio prices going forward and if the net IRR -- net IRRs are coming up somewhat, reflecting also the uncertainty in the market. And as we said, the price discipline is definitely there. So when people -- everybody is being more disciplined, we also generally see that the prices are coming down. This is generally what's happening in uncertainty and downturn in some of the cycles. The price of portfolio has come down and the IRRs for the portfolio goes up, which means we are countercyclical to a large extent. At the same time, we see often that collection is very resilient also in the downturn of economy, at least that's what's been historically.

Okay. I think that's it for questions online. But okay, one more.

Just 2 follow-ups. Firstly, the collection, you said that we should be following or monitoring the unemployment rate even closer, so to speak. It has not picked up and you showed graph that expectation is not to be picking up. Is that the main item you look at when it comes to this? Or what should we look at when you think about the future collection of unsecured, if you could shed some light to that. And secondly, you had some negative EBIT in Southeastern Europe and some 0 EBIT in Western Europe, very good in the Northern Europe, Poland and Central. How much has these negatives impacted the cash EBITDA versus the reported EBIT? So how should we look at the cash EBITDA in the southern countries versus the northern? If you can shed some light to that as well.

So should we start with the first question. We have done quite significant analysis on our data, and I've also done it previously in this industry to find correlation between unemployment and collections. And so far, we have not seen any clear correlation. So this is obviously something you need to monitor. But so far, we have not seen any clear indication that unemployment impacts our collection to, at least not with significance. On your last question, we do actually in the presentation show the cash EBITDA per region. So you can see that. In terms of Southeastern, we had a revaluation on one of the JVs on the negative side in that region. And in the central -- in Central Europe, we had a positive revaluation due to strong collections on our secured JV in that region. So looking at these regions, it's important to note that in the Southern region and the Central region, we have not invested to a large extent for many years. We have restructured the entire business. You've seen how we've taken down the cost base by now close to 50% after the we take out Bulgaria. So we have spent time improving our collection ability, which you see from the REO sales. We have significantly taken down the cost base. And we're now much better positioned going forward to start investing in these markets. So the reason why you don't have the same contribution is obviously our investment approach over the last 2 years.

Okay. No more questions. Then I would say thank you very much for being here and also for the listener to listen in to the presentations, and see you next quarter. Thank you.

Thank you.