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

Ladies and gentlemen, a very warm welcome to our analyst conference today on the first quarter of the current fiscal year 2023 at Bechtle AG. I greatly appreciate your interest in what we have to say. The first quarter was a very successful one for Bechtle AG, as you'll see, when you look at the figures that we've published just this morning and that I'm sure all of you have. At the same time, it was an eventful quarter that showed differences, especially between the segments that we're not really used to at Bechtle. Have not had that for a long time. From my point of view, these major fluctuations are clearly a reflection of the current overall economic situation, which continues to be characterized by many uncertainties as well as by inconsistent news, which sometimes are rather positive, but sadly seem to be following a trend towards the negative at present. And this also has an impact, at least in part on our customers and on their willingness to make investments. We will look at this more closely in later sections. Today's presentation will once again have 4 major parts, as usual. In the following presentation, we will, as usual, take a somewhat closer look at our business development, key performance indicators year-to-date for the first quarter of 2023. This will be followed by a look at our shares, specifically the share price development as measured against the indices. And as usual, I'd then like to emphasize some of the highlights, important strategic, qualitative and nonfinancial events that, from our point of view, at least, are material to the future development of the company. And towards the end of my presentation, we'll look at the assumptions and objectives regarding the economic development of Bechtle in the current financial year on the basis or against the backdrop of year-to-date developments. But let us first look at the topic of business development. As already mentioned, as far as the overall development during the first quarter is concerned, we have reason to be very satisfied. It is primarily our public sector customers as well as our key account business that has provided a strong impetus for demand. However, among our traditional SME customers, we've observed some more restraint, especially in our most important global markets, Germany and France. As such, this is not dramatic, thanks to our two-pronged distribution model. We were able to compensate for this situation very well. Nevertheless, this development is an indication of just how uncertain, fragile and heterogeneous the overall economic situation is at the moment and in the current year. Let us start by taking a closer look at our successful first quarter. And as usual, we'll begin with the development of our business volume. During the first quarter, our business volume grew by nearly 16%. Considering the overall situation, this is unreservedly a very big success. Organically, our growth amounted to a still impressive 12.9%. Looking at the segments, we can see that the way these have shifted. We've grown more strongly in the IT system house and managed services segment. What we are seeing reflected here is the resurgence of public sector customers who are currently making fewer investments in traditional hardware and more investments in services to operate their IT. Furthermore, our greater engagement with large customers is having a positive impact. Overall, demand for more complex projects involving multi-cloud transformation has increased. And in this segment, we are benefiting from this effect to an above-average extent. In the IT-E-Commerce, we were able to achieve growth of a good 7.5%. However, we are observing a certain degree of saturation among customers, at least in the short term, when it comes to demand for classical infrastructure for PCs and notebooks in particular. What is also playing a role here is the restrained exercised by our SME customers in France and Germany that I've mentioned before, which has its origins in the political circumstances in France as well as in the overall challenging economic situation in Germany. And with that, let's move on to our revenue. This is where it becomes apparent just how much the application of IFRS 15 as an accounting standard happens to obscure our view of the real development of the business. We just saw that in terms of business volume, IT-E-Commerce has grown by 7.5%. In terms of revenue, that is excluding software revenues, this growth is reversed and to a decrease by 0.4%. The explanation for this lies in the positive performance of our software business. And this development once more illustrates that the proper approach when reporting our revenue development is to always address our business volume as well to have a reliable insight into our business development. However, I do not wish to gloss over the fact that quite irrespectively of IFRS 15, the figures of our German and French companies in the IT-E-Commerce segment have turned out to be disappointing. On the one hand, this is where it is making itself felt that German SMEs are currently exercising more restrained in terms of investments in the classical infrastructure business. On the other hand, this reflects the effect of large customer projects in the prior year quarter, which could not be realized to the same extent this year. Bechtle has very strong development at group level, given the widely divergent development of the 2 business segments once again shows very clearly just how important it is for our business model that we are combining both sales channels under a single roof. This brings us to our earnings development. So let's take a closer look at our EBIT. Overall, meaning at group level, we can, for sure, be very satisfied with our earnings development with an increase in EBIT of 7.5%. We are at a good level. We have managed to, more or less, maintain the margin and are therefore also on track with our guidance. The fact that our margin has decreased by a mere 20 basis points is quite remarkable, especially given the increases on the cost side. However, in our EBIT as well, a considerable disparity between the segments is reflected, which is unusual for Bechtle. EBIT for the IT system house and managed services segment increased by 19.1% in the period under review. What this reflects is a strong demand by our customers for any projects related to digital transformation. Furthermore, the fact that the distribution of bonuses was modified by the manufacturers who have been paying more money for the development of corresponding expertise on the [ parts ] of Bechtle has noticeably helped us here in the back-end margin. In the IT-E-Commerce segment, EBIT declined by 11.7%. While the contribution margin in our trading business has remained at a high level, ultimately, the growth we showed was not enough to fully compensate the increase of our cost base. That said and to conclude the analysis of our key figures, let's look at our operating cash flow. The cash flow from operating activities in the first quarter was at minus EUR 20.2 million. While this means that we are not yet in the positive range, we have nevertheless shown significant improvement compared to the prior year's quarter, as you can see here. This is mainly due to 2 developments. First of all, the outflow of funds due to a buildup of inventories was significantly lower compared to the prior year's quarter and the strong reduction in trade receivables, in particular, had a very positive impact. We are convinced that this is where we're already seeing a positive effect of our newly aligned receivables management. What burdened us was a reduction in trade payables. But then again, this is merely the countermovement to the strong buildup at the end of the year. So here too, this is a development that is a seasonal one, which is typical. Overall, we can state that we continue to be on a good track and that we do not have to worry about Bechtle's financing ability. This brings us to the topic of staff development. As of the 31st of March 2023, Bechtle had 14,324 employees. This is 10.5% or 1,358 more people than in the same quarter of the previous year. However, on the basis of acquisitions alone, 399 new colleagues joined Bechtle, which is about 30% of the overall increase. From a purely organic point of view, employee growth was only at 7.4%. Compared to the growth in business volume, this is still very moderate, which given the current economic situation, certainly makes sense though, from an entrepreneurial point of view. On the one hand, we must, of course, keep personnel costs under control here and keep a close eye on personnel costs. But on the other hand, we must not lose sight of the future viability of Bechtle, since, as a service provider, we will generally be needing more employees for our future growth. Let us now move on to the development of our share price. Although the stock market year 2023 has been quite positive so far, but unfortunately, we cannot speak of a really sustainable upswing. The war in Ukraine continues to weigh on the stock markets and combined with inflation and the interest rate policy of the central banks and the resulting economic implications. Uncertainties about future developments do the rest. We see these influencing factors both for our Bechtle's share and for the indices. At the beginning of the year, the price of our share initially recovered from the low levels at the end of the year. Since February, we have been in a more or less stable sideways movement together with the corresponding indices. That's how I would describe the chart that you can see in front of you. It seems as if the market participants are waiting for further developments in order to then take either the bull or the bear side. It will certainly be exciting for all of us to see how the stock markets will develop further. The corresponding scenarios still show a rather wide range. With that, let's move on, as usual, to what we consider to be the nonfinancial special events in the first quarter of the current year. And we can roughly assign the highlights to 4 strategic fields of action, which is our own digitization, our M&A activities, our relationships with manufacturers and not to be forgotten, the future viability of our company and of our employer brand. Let us start with a news item that expands our customer portfolio. After a successful test phase, we have now extended our e-commerce offer to companies with up to about 50 employees, which so far were not part of our customer range. We want to strongly expand the possibilities of autonomous business via our online platform for these newly addressed companies in the next few years. And for this, we want to further strengthen the e-commerce business and tap into a new customer target group. The reason why I referred to the strategic development under the term digitalization is that we cover this customer group autonomously via our central web platform, bechtle.com, which means purely digitally without interaction with a salesperson. The next highlight concerns our international M&A activities. We continue to be very active in the European M&A market and have already made 3 acquisitions in this year. With tangible benefits, we have acquired a value-added reseller in the U.K. The company is based in the city of London and has an excellent reputation and also very high profile in the industry. In the '21-'22 financial year, tangible benefits turnover was around EUR 70 million. In the Netherlands, we acquired the VMware and Software Specialist Fondo. With Fondo, we are joined by a service provider for modern workplace, multi-cloud and Software as a Service joining the Bechtle Group. In the last financial year, Fondo achieved a business volume of around EUR 41 million and thus complements the portfolio of services. What we have not shown on the map is an acquisition in Switzerland. There's SGSolution AG, a company specializing in 3D printing and they're joining us. SGSolution has only 4 employees, and that is why we did not cover that acquisition with any kind of communication. But the enterprise holds the distribution rights for the HP Jet Fusion 3D printing technology for the whole of Switzerland. And in that respect, it is a strategically important acquisition for us also with regard to our previous 3D printing activities and their future perspective. The next highlight concerns a partner award and one that we are particularly pleased about. Two of the Amplify Impact Awards, which are presented for the first time by HP, go to the Bechtle Group. The award recognizes the sustainability performance of partners in a total of 6 categories. In the category of global business excellence, the price went to Bechtle. And in addition, our French subsidiary, Inmac, received the Climate Action Award for the region, Southern Europe and France. This not just underlines our close partnership with one of our most important manufacturers. We also show once again that when it comes to sustainability, we are one of the pioneers in our competitive environment. The next highlight may surprise you because it is about our construction activities. And don't worry, ladies and gentlemen, Bechtle is not merely investing in, what in German, we call, concrete gold, so brick-and-mortar, if you want. But our investments in new buildings stand for 2 things in this context. First, we go where future technologies are located because that is where we see ourselves. That is how we see ourselves. And secondly, to remain an attractive employer also in the future, we need to offer our employees an interesting and an inspiring working environment. This is what we are now realizing with the Munich and Neu-Ulm locations, taking bold steps into the future. Let us then conclude with our outlook for the current financial year. We published our forecast for the 2023 business year only about 2 months ago. So in that respect, nothing much fundamental has changed for the time being. However, in recent days, we have all noticed that the signals from the German economy, in particular, are no longer quite as promising as they seem to be back in January or February. The pleasing increase and rise in the sentiment indicators was now followed by, I'd say, rather weak figures in March for incoming orders and in particular, for export. What do we at Bechtle read from this? The uncertainties regarding the economic development continue to be very high. So at least at present, unfortunately, there can be no talk of an easing of the situation. And what does that now mean for Bechtle? We have very significant revenue growth. We are currently above our guidance. And with the earnings and margin development, we are exactly on target. Against this background, it is understandable that we confirm our forecast and remain confident for the 2023 fiscal year. However, our confidence is based on certain assumptions, in particular, that the overall economic situation will improve again in the course of the year, particularly in the second half of it and that our core SME customers will therefore say, be more ready to invest again. We see that our business model is intact also at difficult times and helps us to balance out such imbalances between the segments. Nevertheless, in the further course of the year, we have to make sure that the gap between the segments or the economic developments in the segments closes again or at least does not open any further. But all in all, we are and remain confident and optimistic. And in concrete terms, that means we continue to want to significantly increase our business volume and our turnover as well as our pretax result. The EBIT margin should be at above the previous year's level, so no changes to our guidance for the current financial year. Thank you so much, ladies and gentlemen, for our development in the first quarter of 2023 and for the outlook for the rest of this current year. Thank you very much. And I now look forward to your questions. [Statements in English on this transcript were spoken by an interpreter present on the live call.]