Banqup Group SA (BANQ) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Unifiedpost Group Half Year 2023 Financial Results Analyst and Investor Call. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand over the conference over to your speaker today, Hans Leybaert. Please go ahead.

Hello, everybody. Welcome on our update call for semester 1 results of 2023. As an intro, I will give you some thoughts about our evolution of the business and the things that happen in activities that happen in our market. First of all, not surprisingly, Unifiedpost has announced that cash flow breakeven is the main target for 2023. And of course, our business execution was absolutely focused on that level. So in this half year, we took the necessary measures to realize this goal. Complementary to this, we needed to prepare ourselves for this rapidly changing world where digitization becomes a fact, becomes mandatory. And we need to be ready with the right technology for all the markets where we are in. So first of all, let's zoom in on the cash flow breakeven objective. It includes, of course, that we run our current business in an optimal way. Current business, which is still a hybrid business, where the physical part and the digital part are mixed. We have to run this in the most optimal way. That means that the profitability of this business need to be optimized. And we have to work, of course, on cost level and of course, on the revenue level, but also on cost level. On cost level, we made the necessary measures. So some results are already in our figures of semester 1. But the main impact of all the decisions made will be resulted -- will come in our result of semester 2 of this year. But we are very positive about measures taken and the current evolution that guarantees us that we reach that objective of cash flow breakeven. Complementary to this, we have to invest on our core business. Our core business is creating that network in all the markets where we are present in, building the required technology to fulfill the needs of these markets in the future with a rapidly changing regulation climate. So if we look to the growth figures on the network building where we have a nice growth on bank up and a nice growth of new users on our platform. So actually, although the obligation of the regulation is still in sort of a waiting mode, our network already grows very nicely, and that's very promising. So even without an obligation, our network grows, and that's where what our objective is. So it's now for us the goal to do the necessary investments in our platform to build the right technology, to monetize that network. Complementary to focusing on the right business. And we have also done a divestment of Fitekin, decided to do divestment of Fitekin; again, focus is very important and doing the right investments in our business of the future is very important. Why we did the divestment of Fitekin? Actually, this is a good technology. It's robotic, but robotic accounting is not in the part of our scope. Robotic accounting companies are our partners, should be our partners. And so that means that others are better placed to further invest in this domain, and we can partner with them for extending our network. On the business itself, it's -- yes, we have a nice growth of nearly 10%. So business is continuously evolving. But again, what we are focused on is doing this in the most optimal way on cost level. So let's go a little bit deeper now on the platform building that we are currently in. Actually, we have done after our IPO, we have done acquisitions, acquisitions with some important technology components in the company, technology components that we need for further for being future proof on evolving business. One of these technologies was, of course, Crossinx. And we have centralized now all platform building in one product division. And to create that fully integrated actually one platform for fitting our purposes. So actually bringing together all technologies in the group, bringing it together in a completely integrated way to create one platform. One platform to serve for any type of business from the smallest one, which is the traditional Unifiedpost scope and the small one, the medium-sized one, and of course also the large ones where for typically Crossinx has its customer base. So that means that we need a platform which is scalable for all types of businesses, but using all the same components. So for us, technology should be very modular for larger businesses and integrated for smaller businesses. So this is actually the architecture that we are currently implementing based on the different technologies that we have through the acquisition. On the Integrated Solutions, let's remember that we have the document business with the e-invoicing and e-reporting popping up now as becoming mandatory over the coming years in all countries. We have our strongly evolving payments business. And more recently, with Visa, is also the tax compliance requirements are necessary for -- to complete our business. So these solutions need to be presented to the market in on one way in integrated solution package to the smaller and midsized businesses and in a modular approach to larger businesses. It creates quite some complexity. It's -- I referred to a quote, which I saw once technology becomes complex, but the world is complex. So if we digitize all processes in doing business on the buyer side, on the seller side, yes, we need to solve quite some complexity. Sometimes e-invoicing is seen as something very, very simple. But in practice, it's a quite complex technology required to solve all types of use cases in doing business. Especially on online sales complementary to the normal sales that we are used to on invoice-based, online sales is also very important. E-commerce is a very important market for us in the future to enable them that they are compliant with upcoming regulation. Another aspect in our platform building is the international context, although we have -- we must focus on domestic volumes on e-invoicing. There is also a large portion of cross-border invoicing. And typically, the regulations on Europe are focusing on these parts of the -- of transactions. So you hear me saying quite often a regulation. Regulation has become the absolute driver of our business. And if I go over the different statuses of these regulations that -- on the identity level, we have now the approved eIDAS regulation -- eIDAS 2.0 regulation, that will become active in '25, which actually states that every business and every private person must be -- must have the possibility to activate a digital identity -- legal digital identity, which is a real game changer on a European context. Actually, your identity that we all know, identity card and our passport will be digital now and can -- will be able to use in a digital way. Also, PSD3 is approved and will be active in the coming years as an extension of PSD2, the possibilities that we get there, you know that we roll out payment accounts over in 19 countries already. It will enable us to even being connected directly to the clearing network. So regulation is challenging on one hand, but on the other hand, it gives us nice opportunities to become a real robust and strong platform with a lot of opportunities. And last but not least, of course, we have the ViDA regulation, VAT in the digital age, where the European Commission has asked -- has proposed a date of the 1st of January '28 to go live. Go live means that all countries must be on e-invoicing and e-reporting by that date. European Parliament has now proposed to postpone that period, so for 12 to 24 months that will be decided in the coming months. But it's -- nevertheless, it's a period of 5 to 7 years where every country in Europe must be compliant with the e-invoicing and e-reporting regulation. That means that actually 25 million businesses and on estimation, the same number of independent workers will have the same the obligation to be compliant with this regulation for the B2B activities. This is -- if you go through in detail through the ViDA regulation, where tax is -- and the tax compliance becomes the main driver, a crucial driver actually. It's quite a challenging job to be compliant with all these regulations in all countries. And -- but that's why we did all the investments. That's why we did all acquisitions to be on that international scale to have a presence in all these countries. And now we have to integrate all the platform to have one modular platform to realize it. The first 2 countries, which are implementing this, yes, e-invoice and e-reporting regulation in a very strict way are France and Germany. Actually, France had planned to launch on the 1st of July '24. It is a little bit postponed in September, it will be announced how much time it will be extended. The main reason is that, yes, it's operationally for all businesses, for government themselves, it's a challenge on the operational side. But it's absolutely coming. And the last specifications of the French government are released on last day of July, 2 months later than expected. But with a clear detailed view on what they want to realize. And that's -- that's a huge opportunity for us, but it's an interest -- it's an important work to execute. We execute this together with the Accounting Association. As you know, we have created a joint venture with the Accounting Association in France with Ecma, actually, that operational part -- and that gives us the possibility to do the necessary investments in France to be compliant in the most optimal way with the French regulation. France announced some delay, delay from a number of months. We will see in September, what's announced. On the other hand, Germany reconfirmed his intention to launch on the 1st of January '25 with a grace period of no fines until the 1st of January '26. So the 2 largest economies in the EU have already a clear agenda and are on the road to this strict regulation. Spain is also launching between '24, '26. That's -- they are a little bit behind the statements that are made in France and Germany, but it's clear that Spain will be still be the next one. So that gives you an idea how we have to act, how we have to manage our business where we have, on one hand, running the existing business in an optimal way and a cost-effective way and on the other hand, having scalable and state-of-the-art technology to be ready to make important -- to take important parts of this upcoming market in the full digital context like they are defined and compliant with the regulation. Partnerships are important in this. So we can't conquer the market ourselves alone. So partnerships with software providers, with other technology providers like telecom companies also are important cooperation with banks even. So that means that developing that sales model to have on one hand, a compliant -- a very performant technology, we also need to have a performance sales strategy. So that's actually the targets where we have to focus on in the coming months so that our business can really evolve in the right way in the coming years based on the regulation agenda. Thank you for your interest, and let's go over to Laura.

Okay. Thank you, Hans, and good morning, everyone. I'm Laurent Marcelis, I'm CFO of Unifiedpost Group. Today, in this call, we are presenting, of course, the result of the first semester of 2023. And in the slides ahead, I will walk you through these financial figures, and I'll tell the story behind the figures or what is important to notice in the phase. Starting with this overview slide. Most important for the group, I think most of you will know that we have 2 different revenue segments. Our most important one is, of course, the digital processing and the digital processing revenue we generate from the group. As you can see in the middle for H1, we realized EUR 65.2 million of digital processing revenue. which is compared to last year, an increase by 9.9%. Remark I need to make there, which is made in the press release of the Postage and Parcel optimization services is that we are here also slightly impacted by the exchange difference between the Swedish krona and the Euro. Otherwise, this organic growth of our digital processing revenue would have been slightly higher, reaching approximately 12%. Total revenue, EUR 93.2 million for H1. Also there, the important remark is that we are on target as far as we are concerned, figures are impacted by exchange rate difference. Recurring revenue. I always wanted to highlight this. Recurring revenue for us is -- as you know, very important. It is a predictable income stream, it reduces uncertainty of one-off sales. So we try to build that. That's the focus of the company. In the future, we want to rely as much as possible on the recurring revenue. And you see that for H1, it increased slightly to 97.4% of our revenue. This is also a revenue that is scalable for the future, which we can grow upon, so important for us. As this is a summary slide, the rest of the figures, which are shown here are, of course, detailed further on in the presentation. I just wanted to highlight those 2 things on this slide. The rest of the financial figures will detail them in the upcoming slides. On our nonfinancial KPIs, you know that we are growing the network. With network, we mean companies that are really digitally connected through a cloud-based platform, so they can exchange all data, which is relevant to work together, to do transactions together. We are not alone in this [format], will never be. So we have our own network, our own network has grown with 10% in the first 6 months of 2023. That is another 100,000, to be more precise, 108,000 companies that decided to join the Unifiedpost network over the last 6 months. And for us, we are delighted with all those companies, all those decision-makers that took the decision to join the Unifiedpost network. And that brings us to the 1,000,172 companies that are today customer of Unifiedpost for their financial processes. That's a good start. And Hans mentioned it also in his presentation it's important to note that we built this customer base primarily without the regulatory tailwinds. So we are talking a lot of regulatory. We are talking a lot of ViDA, and that will increase the network further, but that is more for the future. Today, we are building this network really on our own capabilities and on companies that want to digitize their accounts payable, accounts receivable or order to cash, procure to pay processes with Unifiedpost. Over 2 million companies in our accessible network. We are -- as I said, we are not alone. We interconnect with other digital players and the 2.255 million companies are companies we can reach in a digital way, either directly because they are customers of Unifiedpost, either indirectly because they are customers on another platform where we have a connection with. Another remark on this slide. It's, of course, picked up because it was also in our press release. We have been working on our costs that was also the promise and what we said to the market that we would do. You can see that our headcount has gone down over the last 12 months. To be precise, 12 months ago, there were 1,479 people working for Unifiedpost. At the end of June this year, we were down to 1,322 or that is minus 157 people or minus 11%. So that means that if we go back to the next slide, we were able to do 10% more revenue, 10% more business, specifically, of course, in the digital part with 10% less people. So I think that is to start a very good achievement of Unifiedpost in the first semester of this year. In this slide, we dive a bit more into the revenue. I will not comment or read out loud what is obvious and the total revenue is shown in the slide how the digital processing and the Postage and Parcel is evolving over time. I will guide you to total revenue per quarter. One remark there is that there is some seasonality in our business. Important looking forward because we are talking also about the second semester of 2023, where we have ambition for our cash flow. Important to notice, and if we would have added more years, you would see that every year that this group always has a strong fourth quarter and that is also to be foreseen in the coming 6 months. Digital processing revenue to the bottom right of the slide, you see that if we compare quarter-by-quarter that every quarter, there is a positive growth of our digital processing revenue that is really the core platform revenue. We are impacted there also by -- because we take the total digital processing revenue, and you see some differences in growth and that is primarily linked to the project or license business. And if we take, for example, the growth of 24% in the last quarter of '22, that is realized by good quarter for, in this case, the license business. That's why we have a higher growth than in the other quarters. But important to note is that if we take the fourth quarter, we realized a growth time and time again. On the next slide, people following us will also recognize this slide, nothing much new. Let me just comment on the second column and the relation between the second and the fourth column. We are talking about our recurring business -- our business is recurring in nature. Our customers, we have very low churn, which is just above 2% and which remains just above 2%. They stay on the platform. They are locked in, and the way they use the platform is either recurring because it's a subscription, either it's recurring in nature. Larger companies is a business model, which is still based on transactions. So end of the month, we will invoice the customer, but it is, of course, also recurring in nature. That's a difference between our transaction business and subscription business, and we summarize it as recurring and non-recurring business. What is nonrecurring to us project business. We do small projects, primarily for large corporates, some customization or integration we do. And we also have, from time to time, as you know, license sales to governments. Nonrecurring revenue or project license revenue in first semester of '23 was down compared to last year, which means that we have no large projects and no license sales in the semester. We continue also to look at that business if we can, and we will certainly realize projects and license sales. There is a pipeline, but we are always depending on external decisions when we can take the revenue into account, and that was not the case in the first semester. The geographical split, digital processing revenue when we talk about Postage and Parcel optimization, we talk about the Nordic countries. But also when we talk about digital processing revenue, you see that Sweden today is the #2 country for our digital business, the #1 still being Belgium and the #3 the Netherlands. But if you look at the percentages or if you look at the revenue, you can see that the revenue is quite spread over the group. Postage and Parcel is different. It's a service only offered in the Nordics and then primarily the Swedish market where we offer services. That was a bit the explanation about revenue. In this presentation, we follow the structure you typically see in the profit and loss statement, that's the way finance people think and work, so we go from the revenue to gross profit. And we try to explain it also in our press release, the way to being cash flow positive and there was a plan behind. The first thing we want to do is to increase the gross profit from our core business, the digital processing revenue. You can do that in 2 ways. You can, of course, expand your business. If you do more business, you're very likely to generate more gross profit or you can improve your gross margin. And that will, of course, also generate more gross profit. We did both. We were able -- if we compare '23 to '22, we were able to increase our gross profit with EUR 3.3 million. And if you look in detail to that, EUR 2.3 million was generated by doing more business and EUR 1 million of additional gross profit was generated because we have a higher gross margin. So that's an additional EUR 3.3 million of contribution that is generated by our digital business. And that's, of course, it's something we have followed the last quarters, semesters and even years and which we will continue to do, grow our digital business, improve the margin, so that we generate more contribution from our digital business, and that has a positive impact on our cash flow. Postage and Parcel optimization services, of course, a different story. It is not a high-growth market. It is a market that will gradually be substituted to a digital business. That's, of course, also core to Unifiedpost, helping customers digitize their communication. On revenue level, we have seen that Postage and Parcel revenue is down, like I explained primarily because there is an exchange rate difference of 10% compared to last year between Swedish krona and Euro. If we look at gross margin, you see that there is hardly a difference. We were able to compensate. And if you even go further down, it has no impact at all, we here realize approximately the same gross profit from our Postage and Parcel [indiscernible] in a market as Postage and Parcel also important. Like I said, -- it's not a growth market, but we need to keep the contribution from that business ongoing also in the quarters and the semesters ahead. Going further down on EBITDA. Further down the P&L, I mean. Bottom left, you see that we improved our EBITDA, but on the other hand, that it is still negative for the first semester, improving. Looking at that needs to be -- it's clear that our operations cash flow or operating cash flow or EBITDA will need to be positive in the second half of the year, and that is what we aim for. Cost development, a lot of measures taken, in my introduction, I mentioned to you the figures on how we reorganized the group Unifiedpost by optimizing and integrating and reorganizing all teams that led to 10% less people, realizing 10% additional revenue, so very good. Is that reflected in the P&L in the first half, to some extent it is, but not at a full extent. If you look at the total cash out for R&D, G&A and selling and marketing expenses, you see that it decreased from EUR 55 million, if I made the sum, indicated on the slide. It decreased from EUR 55.1 million to EUR 53.7 million. So indeed, it decreased. But yes, we have some significant one-off costs reducing the sales, reducing our workforce. There are significant one-off costs in the first semester of '23, which means that the measures that have been taken, they will only have full financial impact in the second half of the year. Important remark is also by integrating restructuring thinking on how we can operate in a more efficient way, we reorganized quite a lot internally without taking too big steps. We did it really step by step, always thinking of consequences that customers revenue come first for the group, so we should, at any point in time, maintain our service. In the exercise, of course, people were sometimes also switched between cost categories, so that I mean with that, with R&D, G&A or selling and marketing expenses. So that makes it a bit more difficult to compare here '22 to '23. Another important remark is that we have a change between our capitalized R&D and R&D we take into expenses. Hans also talked about in his part, in the business part, that the future will be one platform where all services are integrated. And as you know from the past and also from acquisitions, we have also other products, local products, where at a point in time, you also need to decide not to further invest in new features. We'll keep on supporting the products that but not invest into new features, which means that we have a change from R&D costs from CapEx to OpEx. We take more of those costs into a direct result, which bottom line in the P&L also impact our net result. But of course, without impact on cash, and it's for us, and I think for everyone in business, cash is the most important thing in the current phase of our company. On the next slide, the equity evolution, we also always wanted to show you, not rocket science. We have an equity at the start of the period and at the end of the period and the main impact comes from the loss of the period [ Technical Difficulty ] where you see that we have now an equity of EUR 133 million. The cash evolution also compared to beginning of the period, the end of the period. The end of the period, end of June, the group had EUR 24.7 million -- 25 million of cash on the bank account and a total split between invoice financing and undrawn financing, we have a total of almost EUR 18 million of undrawn financing still available. To give you an idea what the minimum level of cash is -- and I can look at that from 2 sides. Like you know, we have a financing agreement with Francisco Partners, which we signed last year in March. There are not much confidence in the contract, but there is one and that there is a minimum liquidity level in the group needs to be of EUR 12.5 million. You can compare that with our current cash position and also with the undrawn financing combined with our part to being cash flow positive. And you can or I -- and we conclude also in our projections that we don't have a problem with the component of Francisco Partners. I said I will look at it from 2 sides. I think EUR 12.5 million is also the minimum working capital for the group. So it's quite logic to use the EUR 12.5 million. That brings me to a sort of a summary. And of course, we've already seen some questions in Q&A. We will certainly dive deeper to some of the topics. Summarized, H1 digital revenue, 10% growth. Recurring revenue, digital also 12% growth would have been higher without exchange rate difference, but we are still growing double digit and so our first goal to add contribution from our digital business to generate more gross profit. We were successful in that, and we were successful also second part, difficult Postage and Parcel, but keep the gross profit up to a level. And then, of course, the measures to reduce costs, particularly to reduce cash out and when I'm talking about costs, like I said, it's more about cash. You will see an effect in our P&L statement. But cash is king. We reduced workforce. We reduced operational costs. First results are shown. Full results will be shown in the quarters ahead. Our cash position today is sufficient to meet all confidence. And in light of future business will also be sufficient. And we continue to work, we continue our work, which we have done the last 6 months, but actually the last 12 months to make from Unifiedpost -- transform Unifiedpost from a growth company to a cash flow positive company that is the work of the 12 -- last 12 months to my and to our opinion, we are on track. We are following a plan, we are still expanding our business. We are preparing for the future. We are growing our business and on the same time, reducing our costs without hurting our services, and without jeopardizing our customer base. And as you've seen, we also were able to grow the customer base. And that is for us an intermediate update. I would say this is -- it's also half year. So the word intermediate is perhaps also well placed. It's intermediates, in my opinion, in the way that we can show to you what we are doing and what we are executing we are not there. That's also what we know, but we have a plan. We continue to execute and to follow our plan. We are still very positive about achieving the end goal of the company. First step, cash flow positive. And of course, the period after that will be even more exciting as more and more countries in Europe will move to a full digital way in working in our space, and where we expect for the company higher growth with tailwinds coming from the government and from the legislation. Thank you. That was my part of the presentation. Now checking with the operator if there are any questions by phone. Otherwise, we can move to the questions, which are asked by chat.

[Operator Instructions] Dear speakers, there are no questions over the phone at this moment. You are welcome to proceed with any written questions.

Okay. Thank you. I will read out the question and then it's -- whether it's more business, Hans will answer the question. If it's a bit more financial, I will answer it. It's quite a lot of questions. First question, it seems you are making some progress on restructuring and cost-cutting measures. However, it seems more might need to be done in H2 to hit your targets. Could you talk about what incremental measures will be taken in H2 and maybe let us know if there were any one-off unexpected cost in H1 that will not reoccur next semester. Perhaps the both of us can comment on that, Hans. Comment from my side. We will -- firstly, we have taken a lot of measures already in Q4 last year and H1 this year, not shown in the P&L statement because layoff costs, one-off costs are also in there, so you don't see the full effect of that unfortunately for us in our H1 figures. It will be shown into the H2 figures. Will there be additional cost-cutting measures? To some extent, yes. I think most of the measures have been taken, but we continue to monitor and for us it's, of course, not something which is communicated, but it is in the financial statement are going concern, and we have a concern statement for the next 12 months. And we follow that up very closely. Should we have any deviations then we will certainly take additional cost-cutting measures. That's what we do together with the management team and the Board. Unexpected costs in H1? No. One-off costs? Yes, but there are no what you could call unexpected costs that impact our results in H1 except, of course, but it's not unexpected take into account that on P&L level, the loss was impacted by taking more of the R&D costs directly into expenses instead of capitalizing them and depreciating them in the coming years. Hans, any comments you want to make on what we are going to do second half?

Well, it's important to understand that it's the exercise of keeping investments under control. CapEx and the related needs of the market. That's something that we also monitor very closely. And that's why focus on core business is so important that we do the right investments in our business of the future. So it's absolutely important that within the envelope of CapEx that we have and yes, all needs that we know and a relatively new needs that we are able to realize them. And for instance, new topic that we have to tackle now is -- that we are tackling is tax compliance, which is relatively new. But it's immediately related to the ViDA regulation. So these are things that we must be able to anticipate within the CapEx envelope that we have defined. So that also means that on -- even within the investment part and the CapEx part, we constantly will rationalize our costs and focus on the right things that we need to do.

Okay. Thank you, Hans. Then a number of smaller questions perhaps. Can you provide a clear view on customer retention rates per service provided? We don't do that actually per service because our platform is an integrated platform, and we hope that customers, if you work with Unifiedpost more and more will use a broader range of services. We are convinced that in the future, e-invoicing and e-payments will go hand-in-hand. So either you will use both or not. So we don't split it up per service. We have a split geographically. And what you see is what I said, we are just above 2% churn, which is low because you need to take into account also that some companies go bankrupt and so our churn rate is very low. We have some slight differences between countries. The more digital the country is, the lower the churn rate is. But actually, we are always talking about a very high retention rate, which is logic with our type with our business model building in network. The next question is at the general meeting, we were told that firing people is a quick way to make profit, but this will have a negative influence on the development of your products. We see now that more than 150 people have been fired in what functions did that did you cut? Hans, perhaps on the product development.

Yes, that's -- like I said in the beginning, the cost rationalization is mainly focused on the execution of our current business, which is in what I call a hybrid phase. It's a must that we do all the necessary for developing our products. There, the challenge when I talk about cost rationalization within the product development part, it is more focused on -- yes, let's say, constantly increasing needs of development because of, yes, things that elements or parts that have been new -- not features even, but new parts that need to be realized and need to be integrated in the platform. So there, we have a budget. Budget is, we want to keep our budget as it is today, not reduce it, but not increase it, too. And within that budget, we need to be able to do all the necessary on developing the products. So that -- so to pay -- to do the necessary -- to execute the necessary investment it is absolutely -- it's very important that our current -- the operational side of the business is in the most cost-effective way. So where the cost reduction that's related to that is mainly in these departments. Maybe one little remark there is that the divestment of Fitekin implicates also that a number of people will be -- will leave the company and go to the new company, but that's not included in the current figures that we represent on -- that we present as cost -- as a reduction of people. So that's not included.

Okay. We -- can we extend a bit. I don't know if I need to ask the operator because there are some unanswered questions.

Yes. Please carry on with your questions.

Okay. Perfect. Because I see it it's 11:00. I hope you have some more time, but we'll quickly try to answer all the questions. Does this take into account the figures, the divestment of Fitekin and ONEA, the 65? No. The 65 people are not taking into account in a reduction I mentioned because we are still closing the transaction, so that will be for end of October. Developments Hans talked about. And then I see some questions coming in on Valitax, Hans. Can you explain a few questions, why do we need the functionality? And why did we not develop it ourselves.

So first of all, actually, Valitax is an engine that manages all the routes of VAT and also the deductibility of VAT on invoices, actually checking invoices on the right tax levels, checking on cross-border invoices, what are the implications. ViDA is a regulation that makes that all cross-border invoices on the center side and on the invoice and the incoming side by all countries need to be reported to a Central European system, and there the sent invoice and received invoice are compared. And actually, the deductibility of tax is checked if that's applied in a correct way. So we move actually from a business where we initially sent invoices towards a digital business where we have to apply the right protocol to send invoices defined by government, by regulation, and we have to apply a specific format, specific for the countries. But now there is an additional level to it, which is actually checking the content and/or even generating the content. So this is, again, yes, let's say, a spread for us that we -- this is another type of product development that we have to incorporate in our business. So as a part of R&D, it must be included in our product development. And it's a relatively new domain for companies who are experienced in, let's say, sending and receiving services of invoices. This is -- that's another competence that needs to be complemented to our business. And we see several evolutions of competitors who do the same. Sovos has bought Saphety, which is also tax compliance software combined with e-invoicing. Pagero has announced a partnership with Thomson Reuters. So actually, tax compliancy and e-invoicing come together. So -- as it is a special -- yes, competent, not necessarily present in Unifiedpost group as a company, it's more a time efficient and practical to acquire such a technology and from there on, together with a few people experienced in this topic to take it from there. So on a time level and on a cost level, it's by far more efficient to step in by acquiring this technology and integrate it completely in our platform.

There is an additional question linked to it, Hans. Do you expect to make additional technology purchases?

Today, we have what never say never -- there is quite some evolution on the eIDAS regulation with specific requirements to have to be able to use eIDAS compliant ID wallet on one hand and on the other hand, the attribution of an ID wallet to citizens and businesses. There is PSD3 coming on, so on payment. So quite some evolution on regulation, not only on invoicing, but you can't split it from each other because legally invoice needs to be sent by a legal identity so and a payment needs to be collected by a legal representative too. So there is all is related to each other. And that means that some further R&D needs to be done. But the goal is very simple, and we need to stay in the envelope that we have defined. And then we decide or we build it or if we can make a short cut by acquiring some or buying some technology, yes, that can be more efficient. So never say never, but a CapEx envelope is a CapEx envelope, so that's -- and within that CapEx envelope, we can do a make or buy decisions.

Okay. Thank you, Hans. Could you please quantify the impact of layoff and redundancy costs in H1. We have an estimation of that figure that is not published in the press release and not published to the market, so for today's call as it is an estimate we made internally. But of course, it's easy to also make an estimate if you see with how many people our workforce was reduced and still a bit ongoing that will have a positive impact on cash flow. There's also a question on cash flow, what do we exactly mean with it? It is explained in the press release. First of all, we have the cash flow statement included. There are many things impacting us for purposes of communication in the press release itself. First of all, operating cash flow, our operating cash flow from the past was negative. What we are seeing there is that we will have a positive operating cash flow. And what we are seeing is that the operating cash flow will be sufficient by far to cover all CapEx costs in the period ahead. In the going concern statement, we, of course, take all costs into account all cash outs, but also all cash ins and the check for the going concern was also done for the coming 6 months and the coming 12 months. We also there have in the cash flow statement and impact of divestments. For EBITDA questions, there is a question on EBITDA, which is shown in the slide. I need to dive into the detail. That's a question of Michael. If that's okay for you, Michael, it's too difficult to while I am speaking, but I'll look at your questions and come back to you personally on that question. I think there are some smaller questions remaining. In light of time, perhaps a last question; one for you, Hans, what will be the core driver to boost turnover for H2 2023, what will create the growth in the second half, helping us to become cash flow positive.

The cash flow breakeven situation is, of course, a combination of further grow with a strong Q4, which is always year-by-year, we have strong Q4 situation. That helps us to bring us to the right level on the revenue. And of course, the full impact of our measures taken on cost level. The explosive growth where expect the strong growth, which could be realized by the French market is still under on hold, let's say, so because of this delay. France is growing, but not for like expected with the mandatory date of the 1st of July '24. So that means that working on that -- on the cost -- keeping the cost and the revenue and balance even without some regulations that become mandatory. That's the goal of the second semester.

Okay. Thank you all for attending the call. This brings us to the end of the Q&A. Thank you for staying with us for the additional 10 minutes we took of your time. I hope it was helpful for you in the feedback on what the performance of the company was and where we are with the realization of our strategic plan. Have a nice day, all.

That does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for participating. You may now all disconnect. Have a nice day.