Bechtle AG (BC8.DE) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Ladies and gentlemen, it is my pleasure to welcome you to our analyst call on Q1 of Bechtle's 2022 financial year. I'm very pleased about your interest. After 2 years of COVID, we may have all hoped that things could not get any worse. The war in Ukraine showed us that this was an illusion. The suffering of the people is, of course, what matters most. This is why as early as March, Bechtle AG, too, donated EUR 250,000 to UNICEF to at least alleviate the suffering of the children somewhat. But we also have to bear in mind the possible effects on the economy as a whole. As you're all aware, many GDP forecasts have been lowered noticeably in the past few days and weeks. It is all the more reassuring for us at Bechtle that we have had an extremely successful start to the year in Q1, thanks to our stable business model. The presentation today is divided into 4 parts. We start by taking a closer look at the key financials of the first quarter of 2022. Afterwards, we'll look at our Bechtle share and the share price development. Followed by some important strategic and qualitative nonfinancial results that are essential for the future development of Bechtle. And finally, the last section will be about at least trying to take a look at the coming weeks and months of our financial year. But first, business development. We already communicated the key financials for Q1 in our ad hoc announcement on April 27. So you already know that we continue to be very successful in the first quarter of 2022. The demand situation is still good. We have not yet seen any major restraint or even budget cuts on the part of our customers. Nevertheless, the global supply chain problems continue to have a negative impact. However, the situation in Q1 was not quite as tense as in the fourth quarter of 2021. This is impressively shown by the development of business volume. Business volume growth in Q1 was almost 8%. And that's after we already grew by over 11% in the first quarter of 2021. So we were running against very challenging year-on-year numbers. Organically, growth was 7.5%. Just to remind you, we introduced business volume as an alternative performance indicator after the accounting changeover to IFRS 15. This ratio shows the gross revenues of Bechtle, i.e., turnover, including the software business. Why is this an important ratio? It shows us how we develop an important future segments like the software business. When looking at the segments, we see the same structural development as in the previous year. Consolidated growth was driven primarily by the IT e-commerce segment. We will go into the reasons for this in more detail when we look at our top line figures in a moment. In the IT system house & managed services segment, delayed shipments had a stronger impact, especially in the context of large volume project business and framework agreements, which characterize this business. And this brings us on to turnover. The development of sales revenues points in the same direction as that of business volume. However, as in the previous year, you can see in the first quarter of 2022 that our software business and especially our Clouds business are outperforming our hardware business, which is struggling with supply bottlenecks. This is why top line growth is somewhat lower than business volume growth. However, we can be very satisfied with our largely organic top line growth of almost 7%. To be honest, we would not have expected such a significant increase in our current environment. However, a look at the regions also shows how much our business model contributes to this gratifying development. We were able to more than compensate for the relative weakness in Germany with the very positive development of our European locations. Let's now take a look at our revenue development in the segments. Here, we see the positive development in our IT e-commerce segment even more pronounced than when looking at the regions. However, this development cannot be attributed to our internationality alone. It also reflects the different business structure in the business segments. Business and IT e-commerce is more short term. Orders are often smaller and customers are generally more flexible when it comes to switching to alternative products. Against this background, it was easier in this segment to serve our customers' inquiries and orders despite the delivery difficulties. The IT system house & managed services segment, on the other hand, is more strongly characterized by large volume project business, as already mentioned. This is aggravated by the fact that project business and framework agreements are often based on a concrete, sometimes custom-configured product. We still see the longest delivery times in these areas of our business. And this, of course, had an impact on growth. Let's now take a look at our EBIT. Our bottom line result is indeed very gratifying with an increase of EBIT of 21.2%. However, we must not forget at this point that in the previous year, we saw a negative one-off effect of around EUR 13 million due to risk provisioning. There were no comparable effects in this amount in the reporting quarter. This explanation is not meant to diminish the positive development, but it is important to put things in perspective. EBIT in the IT system house & managed services segment increased by 14.4% in the period under review. We were able to grow the share of service in our sales revenues mix. The elimination of COVID restrictions facilitated providing services at the customer site or on-premise once again. In the IT e-commerce segment, EBIT grew by 34.5%. We saw a very positive development here, especially in France. And so to conclude the analysis of our key figures, the obligatory look at operating cash flow, which was influenced by the current supply bottlenecks in the first quarter. Cash flow from operating activities was minus EUR 127.1 million in Q1. The reasons for what I deem to be a very negative trend are obvious. Cash flow is strongly influenced by the high level of inventories. We are still faced with a situation where inventories largely contain products tied up in projects that could not yet be delivered due to individual components of an overall orders still missing. We hope to be able to gradually reduce inventories over the course of the year. For the time being, however, we do not see a lasting improvement, if anything, what might be called stabilization at a high level. However, this does not jeopardize Bechtle's funding. Thanks to our financial strength, we can cope with a negative cash flow even over a longer period of time. This brings us to look at headcount development. As of the 31st of March 2022, Bechtle had 12,966 employees and thus, 5.4% or 660 people more than in Q1 last year. This headcount increase is mainly accounted for by new hires, 120 people joined Bechtle via acquisitions. This increase in staff numbers continues to be moderate, especially when compared to the growth rates in the past quarters and years. Incidentally, it reflects our conscious decision in view of the prevailing uncertainties not to go full throttle when it comes to hiring new staff. Bechtle has successfully positioned itself as a reliable and attractive employer in the IT industry. We, therefore, assume that we will be able to increase our staffing levels again when the economy as a whole and the IT market recover. Let's now come to the development of our share price. Unfortunately, look at the share price development on capital markets currently shows a constant downward trend. And we're all aware of the reasons for this: the war in Ukraine, problems in global supply chains, uncertainties regarding the overall economic development, the fear of inflation and the interest rate policy of the central banks. This trend has also had a negative impact on our Bechtle's share. The share price has been under pressure since the beginning of the year, although it recovered somewhat in March around the publication of our full year figures and our positive outlook for 2022. But since April, it has followed the steady downward trend of the market as a whole. Tech stocks, in particular, came under pressure and as such, Bechtle was unable to buck the trend despite its sound economic performance. And with that, let's move on, as usual, to what we consider the nonfinancial highlights of Q1 2022. The highlights can be [ assigned ] to the following 4 fields of action: our internationalization, our shareholder structure, our cloud portfolio and further steps in the implementation of our international acquisition strategy. Let me start by talking about the personnel matter that is important for our further internationalization. In March, Bechtle AG expanded its team of executive vice presidents in e-commerce. John Malone, who has been managing Director of Bechtle, Director in Ireland since 2010, was asked to also fill this new position of Executive Vice President for the activities in Ireland, Southern Europe and Eastern Europe. In all of these markets, Bechtle has achieved high growth rates, but they continue to offer significant growth potential. In addition, within the IT e-commerce business segment, John has taken over sales responsibility for internationally operating customers in order to coordinate activities between the European entities of the Bechtle Group. Apart from this, he is responsible for international manufacture coordination. Talking about our international presence, let's take a look at our Global IT Alliance, GITA for short. GITA has welcomed the U.S. IT service provider connection as a new and old member, so to speak. Connection was a founding member of GITA in 2013 but had left the network in the meantime and has now joined it again. The listed company is based in New Hampshire and supports small and medium-sized enterprises as well as enterprise customers and public administration. The company is represented in 8 U.S. states and operates nationwide. This will help us to improve our access to U.S. companies, which operate internationally. Let us now turn to a topic, which relates to Bechtle's shareholder structure. This also shows the long time horizons in which Bechtle thinks and plans, importantly so. Our anchor shareholder, Karin Schick announced a few days ago that she will be establishing a foundation under the name of her parents, Gerhard and Ilse Schick. As many of you know, Gerhard Schick is one of the founders of Bechtle. And together with Ralf Klenk as Co-Founder, he shaped the company for decades and led it to great successes. The Schick family is the largest shareholder in Bechtle AG with a 35% stake. Karin Schick will initially contribute 4.5 million Bechtle shares from her shareholdings to the foundation's assets. This corresponds to 3.57% of the share capital of Bechtle AG. The other shares held by Karin Schick are to be transferred to the foundation after her death at the latest. This is intended to secure an anchor shareholder for Bechtle AG for generations, who will safeguard so to speak, the company's entrepreneurial long-term development. Let us also take a look at our steadily growing Bechtle Clouds portfolio. As a matter of fact, our established multi-cloud portfolio with unified cloud operation services for hyperscaler cloud forms from Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud has been significantly expanded. The corresponding managed services are provided by Bechtle in a standardized manner through our own service factory. With this step, Bechtle has opened up additional options for fast cloud-based IT transformation, especially for medium-sized customers. Last but not least, let me talk about a recent announcement, which is a wonderful combination of the topics of internationalization and M&A. At the beginning of this week, we announced the acquisition of the Dutch company, PQR B.V. PQR is an IT systems house, which was established 32 years ago with a strong customer focus in the public sector and a key area of expertise in hybrid cloud environments. With this step, we are consistently implementing our extended acquisition strategy. Since 2021, the strategy for our IT system house & managed services segment has been to also focus on locations outside the DACH region, therefore, outside of Germany, Austria and Switzerland. PQR was founded in 1990, has 170 employees and is based in Utrecht in the Netherlands. And to anticipate possible questions you might have in this regard, our M&A pipeline, ladies and gentlemen, is indeed very promising. We assume that this will not have been our last acquisition this year outside of Germany within Europe. Finally, as usual, we would like to provide you with our outlook for the next months in fiscal 2022. First of all, let me state that what I said back in March continues to be true. And this is what I said then, "it has rarely been as difficult as right now to look reliably into the future. Uncertainties regarding the economic development are particularly high, especially against backdrop of the war in Ukraine. In addition, the IT market continues to be burdened by the many problems in the supply chain" of what I said back in March. Something that is new now are the lockdowns in China which have been complicating matters further, and which are not exactly improving the situation in the supply chain. I'm sure you've all seen the pictures of the thousands of containerships stuck outside Chinese ports, and you know what the impact is around the world. That's why it is still true that no one will be able to tell you reliably at the moment how the next few weeks and months will develop. However, this does not change the fact that we, especially, continue to be optimistic about our business in the further course of the year. This optimistic outlook is based on certain assumptions; however, we can by no means be sure that these assumptions will really occur. However, if our assumptions are correct, we can remain confident about the current year. This is why we are confirming the guidance, which we issued on the 18th of March. We aim to significantly increase sales revenues once again as well as our pretax results. The EBIT margin is expected to be at the level of the previous year. All in all, we remain confident and optimistic for the current fiscal year and beyond. Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. Please feel free to ask your questions in German or in English straight after my presentation. [Statements in English on this transcript were spoken by an interpreter present on the live call.]