BIMobject AB (BIM) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, everyone, and welcome to this webinar. It's a sunny Friday afternoon in Malmö, and we are ready to present our Q4 and end of year presentation to you. So on this call today, we have 2 of our usual panelists remote -- on the road actually. So today, we will have a prerecorded presentation of the actual report, and then we will follow that by a live Q&A session. So as usual, you can send your questions to us at the e-mail you see here on the screen [email protected], and we will pick up as many of them as we can at the end of the presentation. So before we start, I'm going to present to you the people speaking on the call today. My name is Lisa, and I'm hosting the call for you. I'm also going to be joined by Martin Lindh, who's the CEO of BIMobject Group. We're going to be joined by Johan Dyrssen, who is the product manager for the Bim.com design app, and we have Per Goransson, the CFO of BIMobject Group. But without further ado, let's get started with the presentation part. So we move on to the recorded presentation, and we see you again for the live Q&A part. So your questions again, you can send them to [email protected].

Warm welcome, everybody, to today's Q4 presentation for 2024. It's the year-end summary as well that we're going to do in this presentation. My name is Martin Lindh, and I'm the CEO of BIMobject Group. Let's start with the quarterly business update. The quarter of Q4 went in pretty much the same pace as we have been running in the rest of the year. We had a continuous growth in the ARR despite the challenging market environment. We also had a good growth in net sales, along with a fairly streamlined cost base from a historic perspective. And we saw some nice increase in the growth rate or monthly downloading users and furthermore we are still in strong cash position also after the end of this quarter, just above SEK 200 million in liquid assets. In the quarter, we also had a couple of events that we shared with the market. There was first a strategic partnership with a company called Green BPM in the U.S. and CMS provider called AVAIL, which is, you can say, the second largest company in the U.S. market, providing BIM files and project support to the project side in the U.S. market and that is important for us to connect to and we'll provide better intel to building product manufacturers operating in that market. Then just after the quarter, we actually had quite some press releases. First of all, we had a new user record, 5 million, which we performed the market about. We also then started to launch some products and new platforms. Bim.com is 1 of them, EandoX, but also the design application which we announced today, which is an upgrade of our previous Bim application. And we're also prelaunching this new version to this market. And this is also why we have invited Johan, who will talk a little bit more about this application later on. In the quarter, obviously, quite a lot of focus around all of these product launches, but also the continuation of scaling up our offering in the Swedish and Nordic markets. which has been a bit of a testing ground for us throughout the year. And also on testing some of these products we are working with, one of those being a product database that we're piloting. But let's move on, and we'll take a look at the quarter-to-quarter performance. And as you can see here, net sales continuing in a healthy direction and mainly driven by the ARR increase that we had in the quarter. Secondly, we have had an increased spend level in the quarter. And you can see here a little bit in the EBITDA, but Per will later on go in more detail to what this is all about and how we invest in future growth. Finally, we are still in a good cash position with a cash runway of 5 years. With this, let's look a little bit on the market side because we have been in a quite tough market environment and still is. But I think we have come, hopefully, you never know, given all the different events around the world. But hopefully, we've come a little bit in -- at least in a turning point where you can see the market is changing a little bit of direction. So when we look on the European markets, what we see there is that, hopefully, we have reached some type of bottom now and that hopefully, going forward we will move into a low to moderate growth. And quite interestingly here is that the Nordics is a bit leading the way, which we, of course, are happy to see being a Swedish company. But then also, if we look at the U.S. market, that has served us well through the last year. That is expected to continue to grow in a healthy pace, although a bit lower than it has been. But this is basically also our experiences up until today that it has been moving on quite well, both in last year and the start of this year. All right. And then a bit additional mention to the Nordic market and not so much the market in general, but I think much more of how it's going for us there. And we listed it in the previous quarter as well, but I think it's an important follow-up to do also this quarter. So here, we're testing the broader offering to a lot of different stakeholder groups. And we can see that we have a good traction here also in Q4 and particularly, we saw a doubled inflow of ARR from new building product manufacturers. And we can really also see that we get synergies between the different solution areas helping to drive clients to our platform. Yes, and with that, let's move in and look at 2024 in a more reflective manner to see what has happened and what's it all about? And to start with this, I think we should, first of all, just take a brief view of the entry of the year. And this is -- was all about a revitalization strategy we had for the company that we've been working with since the end of 2022. And that strategy was all about reposition us as a company to create growth momentum and also to build some new initiatives. And that we have been preparing the company for quite some time. And also given the low activity level we saw during 2024 in the construction sector, we were actually quite well prepared for it because we had really tried to trim a lot of things in the company. And what it started with was a very important event. And that was -- that we had a full acquisition of CarbonZero, and that actually helped us to have a very clear focus of what we needed to do. So and that actually helped us to look at our company as 1 company, and we started something that was called Project 1, which was an internal project but with the mindset of 1 platform, 1 company, 1 story and really try to solve the problems of the industry. And that we had experienced from several years before, where we had done a lot of research on what's needed and all the challenges that are coming to us as an industry that we need to help the industry with. Also, that led us also to be much better at focusing at that multiproduct approach. So really avoiding all parallel development and really focusing on different solutions that we found absolutely necessary for us to help the industry in this transition. And also, we started to deploy some of these products and go-to-market approaches in the Nordics, and that's also why we have reported a little bit more on this region than the others. All in all, this transitioned us as a company to much more of a Platform as a Service solution, where we have now started to talk about ecosystems of products and then how it's all connected. And then in the beginning of 2025, or actually late 2024, we're also starting to have more discussions around investments into growth. And this is us moving into much more of a scale-up phase as a company because now when we have tested these products in the Nordic market, we are now ready to move and scale it up to other places as well. And that requires quite actually a lot of technical upgrades in different angles, but also, of course, the go-to-market model and specialized salespeople and so forth that we will need to invest in. And this also started off with the launch of Bim.com and launch of EandoX is a complementary product and now the designed application as well. But more on that shortly. So if we first start to look at us as a group, a little bit what has happened is that we now I mean, the sort of like the vision or the aim or mission we're following is being the world-leading platform as a service provider making the building industry smarter, faster and greener by connecting building projects with reliable product information. And I know that's a lot of work, but it actually contains very important things. And 1 thing here, as you can see to the right side is that we are trying to help a lot of different groups of our industry that are like key stakeholders, you can say, that are involved in pretty much any building that you build. But they need to collaborate and they need to share information in order to work effectively, and this is what we're all about. What makes us different then? Well, there is some really important challenges of the building industry, is 1 of the least digitalized industries in the world. BIM adoption is just above 50%, basically. You also have all the climate challenges of 40% of climate impact basically comes from the construction industry and you have all the regulations that follows that, that the industry needs to comply to. And you also have the problems around efficiency and the problems of inconsistent data and so forth. And we really want to make sure that we help the industry to solve all these problems, and this we do by connecting 2 sides of the industry. One of them is that the whole product side. I mean, any building you build is the sum of all the products in it. All the reports you do is the sum of those products combined values and all of that. So it's really like a big LEGO we're talking about here in 1 sense. And of course, it's very important that building product manufacturers gets their data in the right format. And so that they share it to the rest of the industry. And this is not only important for everything else, but also for themselves because they also need to comply to different regulations and so forth. And by having good information on the products, they will help other people as well later on in the process. So here, of course, it's very important to find a good -- provide good solutions that help them with this product information and make sure that it's connected. Secondly, it's the project side of the industry, where architects and engineers create the intent of the building and constructors come in and build it and you also have the property owners on this side that overseas all building process and take care of the building afterwards. And of course, on this side, they are also in quite large need of getting right information and also to be compliant and all of those things for making sure that also you make the right product selections. And that is, of course, super important the whole product selection part because this really defines the end product that you get with the building and this is what we really want to be able to help them with in the best way possible. So in its essence, what we do is that we connect these 2 sites. And this is what makes us unique, and this has been 1 of the core challenges of the industry while also you have all of these problems. If you're not good at product selection, you will have problems with climate impact, you will have problem with low efficiency and all of that. So this is what we want to help the industry with. And the way we want to do it is to connect it through 1 sort of like main platform, Bim.com, which is basically how we approach the industry and how we connect and provide solutions to it. And what we are working on quite a lot and quite intensely during 2024 but also going forward is to connect everything to 1 ecosystem. And I hope that for many of you who have been following us for quite some time, it starts to be much clear of what we're doing, how it is all connected. And we will come in and talk a little bit about some of these new products here to make sure that you get better insight in what they do and how they work to complement the ecosystem we are providing to the industry. But yes, let's move on to the first product, EandoX. So EandoX is a new software that we have spent quite some time and efforts to develop and it's a novel software we have launched, which is an environmental product performance software. And what does that mean? Well, I think you can think about it as climate data is becoming more and more important and becoming a vital part of the product information of products. And what EandoX does is a little bit being as an ERP in a company. It's a software that can make sure to measure and people can work with that type of product information that is connected to climate data. And it can connect to different suppliers in a quite smart way to make sure that you get an accurate measurement of the CO2 impact and also for all other environmental aspects of that product. And this is super important to have for reporting needs. If it's ETS or CBAM or CSRD but also, if you want to proactively work with the CO2 impact, get us low and as optimal value as possible. And this is why this is such an important tool because it really helps our building product manufacturers to provide products with as good performance as possible, and this will be a good benefit to them, but also to the building projects as such. The tool is built in a way that building product manufacturers themselves with very limited assistance and primarily by themselves, can actually create some quite advanced measurements of their products. And so we see this as a nonexpert tool that we are supplying the industry with. It's also an industry-agnostic tool. So meaning that many of the things we developed are for the construction industry, but this particular tool is actually for any type of product producing company so that they can measure the environmental impact of their products. And just to give you an example where this is really important, this is 1 of the regulations that has been introduced a couple of years ago but it's or like elevated for 2025. And this is CSRD, which is basically how larger company in Europe are mandated to report on environmental data in their annual reports. And this is also going to be audited by auditors and is, of course, super important to get right. And the lower companies need to set -- have already set or they also now must have targets that they need to fulfill, and also they need to reduce their emissions over time. And what EandoX does, which is very important here is that it helps really to define what these values are and reduce them. So when we talk about CSRD basically what happens. You can see that in the bottom right corner here is that you have a supply chain. And if you produce a door, for instance, that door will be connected with, for instance, a CO2 value. Now when a company reports on that, they report through CSRD in 3 different buckets, you can say, Scope 1, Scope 2 and Scope 3 where Scope 1 and 2 is emissions related to the company itself, the first company here, the company factory. But what they also need to do is to report on Scope 3, which means that this is the old emission that is related from their suppliers of the different components of the door in this case. And what's important here to understand is that more than 80% of product companies typically come from their suppliers. So if you don't know but from your suppliers, it's very hard to improve your metrics and this is why the specific information is especially important and also to be able to capture it from the supply chain because suddenly now, this company factory can drive the benefit of what the suppliers do. Let's say, for instance, the supplier 1 installs solar panels and have much greener electricity to its production than we can through the software help the company factory here to have a lower emission because the suppliers have lower emissions. Also, what if this company factory here shift suppliers to another supplier, which with even lower emissions, they will also reduce their emissions and thereby reaching the target and helping everything to move in the right direction. But that's a little bit about the EandoX. And I think we will come back to that and talk a little bit about that more in coming quarterly presentation. But now let's move over to our application, which we presented earlier today. And today, I have with me Johan Dyrssen, who's been with the company from the start and been involved in many of the different initiatives we have here in BiMobject, but it was I think in the summer of 2023 when you started to join this new team and lead it on the product side to build an application for the designers that we have connected in our ecosystem. So Johan, please present to us a little bit about this application.

Absolutely. Thank you, Martin. Yes, so this new application, exactly what Martin said, we started developing some time ago. And in the beginning, it was a very, of course, content-heavy application in that sense, connected to BiMobject. But today, we have an app that we have been focusing for the last 6 months primarily to connect to the Prodikt platform as well because we see by connecting BiMobject and Prodikt we can actually offer very good workflow for users designing buildings. And right now, especially if they're using Revit as their primarily design software.

Which is -- if you look at BiMobject, it's really the main...

The main one our users use, absolutely. Absolutely. So this new application is a tool for architects and engineers to now, going forward, be able to actually do climate calculations and LAC specifically an LCA calculation on their Revit model. And of course, if the user is already using Prodikt, it's nothing new for them. But what this now offers up is the connection straight from the Revit model to the Prodikt platform. Historically, users have to import data in other different ways there. But now we have actually connected the model straight to the platform. But we're also utilizing that climate calculation through the app as well. So when a user connects the model within the context of the app, they get a first insight into how the building is actually performing so now it becomes a real design tool for architecture and engineers that empowers them and allowing them to do more data-driven design. They can now see and make conscious decisions on the material choices they do and the product choices they do basically.

I think if we go back -- when you started, I know we have been doing a lot of research looking at the needs of architects and engineers really trying to build up different parts of this sort of gap that we see in the market that they need, and you have built now a couple of different modules. But then we also saw an elevated interest in getting this LCA connection to this tool. And it's pretty cool now how we connect and really try to leverage the strength of different technologies of this ecosystem we're building around Bim.com. And I mean, how was the sort of like the dialogues with architects around it because I know that Prodikt in itself was a big improvement in just a way that you could automatically calculate all these values and all of that. But what sort of like led to the need of having it in this application?

First of all, the Prodikt concept of automatically mapping the objects you have in your model to real product data makes up for a really fast, I mean really good workflow. The second part is where we are in dialogues with architects, for example, see that now with a lot of the legislations coming into place in different countries, especially here in the Nordics first. It's still unclear maybe for a lot of people how to work with product data on this level. So the goal here is to make as easy as possible application to use for them, where the goal here is to -- you see the work in Revit, you sit and model. You build up your geometry and you design as and then there. And then as soon as you connect application here and actually are ready to do a climate calculation, it should be super easy as a first step into this and I think I have a small demo with me here just to prove how easy it can be.

Yes. And really, what it does, if I understand correctly, is that, I mean, the architect now becomes much more empowered. And instead of sending these to a consultant for several weeks and getting a result at the end of the project, they can now make smarter choice already from the start and do different directions, if needed or like test different materials or these different designs and have a much stronger design early on that they can perfect in a smarter way.

Exactly. So the idea here is that I mean firms that maybe don't have a sustainability expert in-house can work much, much more efficient in this way, but also have more and better dialogues with the clients on what type of materials actually affect the building at the end.

Very good. All right. So that's -- and normally, I guess, this over the years took quite a long time if you look back in time and then the Prodikt has reduced it quite a lot. And now what are we seeing here in this short sequence here.

Exactly. In the first picture, you saw a Revit model. So it was a building in Revit. And then I open the app and I connect it to that Revit model, and then I press sync, and this is the result here. A very clean overview of the health of your project. So this is then mapping the different objects, have designed a new model. We are automatically connecting that to our product database and use that as climate calculation. And it gives the user here instant overview of the performance of the building and the material choices they have made, the product choices they have made. Now it always becomes visible and now they can take action on that and do improvements.

And it's not only 1 parameter to CO2. It's more. It's the full set, I guess, through the LCA or...

Yes. We are focusing here first, the LCA for A1 to A3. So we are a little bit -- we want to give the users a tool here that empowers them from their early design phase. Should I go with concrete, should I go with other type of materials in a building, what type of impact the material choices I do have. But it's, of course, with the connection of the Prodikt, you can then take the project seamlessly without breaking the chain of data here and continue to work with it and connecting the rest of the stages as well, I mean Prodikt supports all the stages down to C&D level as well. And again, you can also do a full climate declaration there.

And this is 1 step, and now you're testing it right now.

Exactly. So right now, we're giving access to existing customers here in Sweden. And then, of course, we're going to continue to iterate with more features, make it more powerful, but also taking it to more markets over the year.

Nice. Thank you so much, Johan. Thank you. Great to have you here. All right. With this, I think it's time to hand over to Per to go through the quarterly financials.

Thanks, Martin. I will start with a look at our revenue split by type quarter-over-quarter. Following our ARR development, we recognized a 7% growth in recurring platform revenue and then all our underlying solutions and offerings are growing. In the Nordics, fully as a circular business model, as Martin described, and in terms of the revenue, best traction in the fourth quarter comes from our product solutions towards building product manufacturers and that is done in the Nordics through the circular business model, but also continued strong development in the U.S. market, while the rest of EMEA is still on a weaker note. Within the platform business on top of the recurring revenue, we had a not insignificant SEK 0.9 million from campaigns in the quarter. Services revenue performed in line with the previous quarters at SEK 7.5 million. If we look at our cost development, we clearly see how we increased the investments in product development and also commercial solutions. Other external costs increased 29%, and that is in all material effects related to external consultants and primarily within the product development services. On the personnel cost side, it increased 8% and will also continue an upward trend in 2025 as we hire and onboard new colleagues to the company. That is both within the commercial side as well as within the product development side. And if we take a look at the full income statement, we see that we grow as a company on most accounts, while the result has also successfully improved despite no currency effects in the net sales, as it is based on average rates, we do have positive effects in other operating income coming from revaluation of certain balance sheet items at year-end. Our financial net has also been strong throughout the year, and that is due to good and stable yields from the short-term investments. In total, EBITDA landed at minus SEK 3.8 million equals minus 9% of net sales and EBIT of minus SEK 6.3 million equals minus 15% of net sales. Again, in total, successfully improved and the full year, it's the company's best financial results so far. And a quick look at our assets in the balance sheet. We end the year with SEK 203 million in short-term investments and cash equivalents. Short-term receivables are stable and intangible assets increased somewhat due to the increased investments in product development. We have no loans to credit institutions and so we are well funded for 2025.

Great. Thank you, Per, for those insights. And now let's share some concluding remarks on this presentation, and we will then move on to the Q&A session. So first of all, we see a slow recovery that's expected to come in 2025, moving the market in a positive direction. Secondly, we've had a recent launch of Bim.com and then the related new products earlier mentioned in his presentation today. And finally, we're moving as a company into more of a scale-up phase as a company, where we're now trying to scale up the products we have been earlier launched in Nordics markets, to other markets and invest in the technology to expand further. And with that, we thank you all for listening in and open up for the Q&A session.

Thank you. All right. So we have a few questions coming into our e-mail [email protected]. I think not surprisingly, most questions today are centered around the Bim.com design app and to an extent also Prodikt. So we have some questions here around the user base, the number of downloads we had, how we plan to monetize on this feature. So I think we will start with just opening up. Martin, maybe you can start elaborating a little bit on the design app and what the plans are.

Yes, sure. I think 1 thing here that might be good to mention as an introductory due to this topic is that -- of course, we through Bimobject.com have a lot of users connecting to our platforms. And of course, maybe there are some of these users that we can monetize on and so forth. But I think it's very important to understand that there is a difference on a general user of that downloads objects on BiMobject and what is potentially paying user that can be it can be quite complex relationships, and this we will try out, but it's not necessarily a user that downloads objects, that is the one that are buying certain applications and so forth as an architectural firm and all of that. So I think it's important not to draw any too quick conclusions on what it could be and how it will develop. But this we will learn as we work with these different solutions, and we added modules and all of that. But when it comes to these questions that we had, I think we are now entering a very interesting trials in the Nordics and we have been transparent with that before that when we add modules, we're going to test them and see how we can monetize and where we will provide sufficient values and so forth. And this is what we now starting to engage in a little bit. We're not charging for this first test that we are doing because it's connected to the Prodikt users. But maybe you can also elaborate a little bit on where we are and how you think about these things?

Absolutely. So like you mentioned, right now, we are focusing on the existing Prodikt users. But with that, of course, when the time comes and we open up the app for new users that being the BiMobject users or completely new users that have not been using the BiMobject platform or the Prodikt platform, for example, we want to explore these different options. And like you mentioned, I mean, we have developed this modular in that sense that where we have this new LCA feature, for example, which is then very much aligned with how the Prodikt business model looks like. And then what we would like to try there is to connect it to that model in the first steps. But then, of course, there are other models in -- modules in the app as well, like we have libraries and storage cap and these type of things that we would like to explore.

Excellent. And the app is, of course, closely related to Prodikt. And we also got a question here about the next generation or the next iteration, maybe we should say, of the Prodikt platform. Do we have any update on that?

Yes. I think 1 way of describing this is that now when we're working with the concept of Bim.com, and we are connecting products and sharing features, all our products become much more closely connected in that sense. And especially in this case also when it comes to the design application and Prodikt, you can see the design application also has an improvement of Prodikt because it's so closely connected and also when we have now engaged in these parallel streams of the different products, we're also working in a way where we're going to launch the more smaller releases than going for like big launches in that sense. So I think that can be much more expected as for the different products going forward, we will launch different updates instead of 1 big launch of the product. So yes, so I think that sort of like describes on how we work both with Prodikt and other tools to build these upgrades.

Thank you, Martin. And I think that concludes the questions around the app. So we also had a question here about the development in the Nordic market. So both in the report and in the presentation, Martin, you mentioned here that the client inflow in the Nordic doubled compared to previous quarters. And this is, of course, then the region where we are hyping this broader circular offering. So the question here is if we can provide some type of information on what type of clients these are and what part of the offering is it that they're buying at this point?

Yes. Thank you. That's a good question. I think it should be clarified a little bit because what I was referring to here was building product manufacturers, which consists -- is the largest customer segment that we have in our company. And this, of course, was therefore quite interesting to see that we have this development in this region where we're now combining all of these offerings.

Excellent. And then 1 final general question. What is our view on future expectation for the cost development and or expectation for how ARR is expected to grow.

Yes. Thank you for that 1 as well. I think the boring answer to this one here is that we don't provide forecast. But what we can do is to elaborate a little bit on the situation and what we are doing at the moment. And you can say right now for us as a company, I mean, our main focus right now is to get our products ready. It comes with some basic functionality of them, but also to make them international scalable. And as I mentioned earlier in this presentation, it can be sometimes a bit tricky and complex to get them ready. And this is what we have a lot of focus on and therefore, also have an increase in cost. And then when you do that, of course that would affect the cost side. But hopefully, also we will have good effect on the top line. I mean that's why we're doing it, because we really believe in this. But I think this is -- the thing about ARR, you never really know exactly how it will come, where it will come and all of that. and it depends a little bit on, of course, when products gets ready, but also how we can build adoptions in different countries. And we will test different markets, and we will see where it will take on for which products and if we should go deeper into some markets or not. And when we do that, we also need to invest in sales capabilities of those markets to really get a strong foothold in this more comprehensive offering that we're in. Okay. So what does that say? Well, that says that we are very focused right now to get this right and pursue this. But also, I mean, we as a company, we are very flexible, and we are very conscious about the cost development and how to measure the effect and make sure that we put the resources in the right place. So if we find something that works, we will put increased efforts into it. If it takes too long time or something like that, we will calibrate as we go. And therefore, it's a little bit uncertain, but this is how it is when you scale up companies like this. But we're very focused, and we are doing all we can to get this ready and scale it up.

Thank you. And I think that concludes the question part. So you can always reach us at this e-mail address, [email protected], if you have more questions. Other than that, thank you to Martin, Per and Johan for joining on the call, and thank you to all who listen in. We will see you on the next call. So have a nice Friday. Thank you, everyone.