BIMobject AB (BIM) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Q3 report. We will soon start with the presentation. And if you have any questions during the presentation, please send them into ir@bimobject.com, and we will get to them at the end. So for those of you who meet us here on a regular basis, you will notice that our brilliant host, Lisa Norlander, is down with the flu today, so we will cover for her. As always, you will hear from me, Sofia Hylen, who is the Interim CEO of BIMobject; our CFO, Per Goransson. And today, we also have Pia Engholm with us, who is the Chair of the Board. The agenda today consists of business updates, both the recent events and the strategy refresh, and then we will also, of course, get to financials. Lastly, we will wrap up with a Q&A. So let's get to it. In the quarter, we experienced a flattish turnover growth, impacted by a minus 5% effect from currency fluctuations. We see that ARR growth improved from earlier number this year, and we delivered an ARR growth of 7%. And here, we also see that September was standing out as a particularly strong month. And as you know, the vast majority of our revenue comes from bimobject.com. And our other products are gradually increasing their contribution to the overall revenue, but still the vast majority is bimobject.com. When we're looking in Q3 specifically, we can see that the growth is mainly driven by customer acquisition in our bim.com Connect offering. We will talk about this a bit later, but that means that the new customers we're referring to are new building material distributors. And the other part is the improved retention for bimobject.com. Our EBITDA stands at minus SEK 6.9 million, and this can be compared with the plus SEK 1 million that we had in Q3 last year. As mentioned in previous quarters, we will also talk about this today, the operating result that we see is mainly due to our strategic product development investments, and we will talk about what they are leading to later on in this presentation. And also worth noting that we mentioned in the report is that Q3 is always favored by vacation effects. And as can be read, our current cash position is SEK 171 million in liquid assets. Moving over to the business events. A few weeks ago, we announced the appointment of a new CEO. We look forward to welcoming Niklas Agevik to the organization. And until then, as also previously mentioned, me and the rest of the company are working full speed ahead on delivering on our strategy every day. More details will follow on Niklas when I hand over to Pia in just a few minutes. During the quarter, we have also launched the copilot feature EandoX and completed the acquisition of GreenMetrica and related IP assets. We also sent out just a couple of days ago, a press release regarding the BIM Connect agreement with SEG, the Swedish Electricity Wholesalers, and we will cover this one a bit more in depth later on. So with that said, I would like to hand over to Pia.

Thank you very much, Sofia. I'm not going to be long. I just wanted to say that we are very happy to welcome Niklas Agevik to BIMobject. We've had a long recruitment process looking for specific skills, and we really feel that we have found what we've been looking for in Niklas. He brings commercial drive, operational focus and entrepreneurial energy. We really think that's the right combination for BIMobject's new strategic focus and our next phase of growth. Niklas will assume the position no later than the 16th of March 2026. And as Sofia mentioned, in the meantime, she and her team continue doing a fantastic job of keeping the engine running and delivering on our strategy. That's it over to you again, Sofia.

Thank you, Pia. Great. So let's look into this strategy that we have and the industry that we're in. So today, we have a situation where product data is fragmented, siloed and inconsistent. And it's extremely difficult to retrieve product information at scale. It is often scattered across manufacturer websites, product sheets and multiple databases. When you then find it, it can also be presented in various different formats. Are you using kilograms are you using grams, which unit of length are you using? It also -- it's very likely that the product information that you retrieve is not reusable across companies due to that they're each using their own software and their own systems. So even when high-quality data is found, it often loses reliability and the necessary details for the other stakeholders when it's shared in the process. And product data is needed in order for us to be able to build and every building project involves hundreds of manufacturers and millions of data points. So what we then want to do is to solve the industry's need by simplifying and standardizing this complexity. So in short, product data is everywhere. Still, it's never where and when it's needed. Leveraging our position, our industry knowledge and AI competence, we believe we actually can overcome this challenge. And we believe we not only can overcome it, but also transforming it into a valuable and efficient resource. Because products -- the projects need product information and products need to be specified in projects, and our platform will act as a bridge between projects and manufacturers. So you recognize this picture if you've been here before. At the heart of our strategy is our core. Our core is our centralized structured and trusted dynamic data model that stores and refine product information. This core ensures that product data is reliable, that it is enriched and usable across the full building cycle. Then we compile product data. Compiling product data means that we are enabling manufacturers to create high-quality, standardized and ready-to-use product data. And this data is structured to meet the needs of the real projects. Then we consume or we ensure that the stakeholders who need it can consume data. And the consume part for us ensures that this product data that we have compiled is not only accessible but also actionable. So we deliver the right data to the right stakeholder in the right format at the exact moment it's needed to drive, for example, design decisions, compliance or sustainability reporting. By this, we enable property developers, architects and engineers to consume reliable product information so they can make informed decisions. And last but not least, we connect the industry stakeholders and their data all in one place. And this can be through integrations with databases or through our clients' internal systems. And to make this strategy work in practice, we first help manufacturer to gather all their product data in one place. And what can product data be then? It can be -- it can come in many forms. Like a BIMobject, it can be a life cycle assessment or an environmental product declaration or just an Excel file with different parameters. And we have tools internally such as EandoX, where customers can upload, create and update their data more easily. This means that everything is streamlined and centralized to ensure that the information stays reliable and up to date. Next, we make it easy for others to use this data. So we have different stakeholders, architects, engineers and property owners who can access the same trusted information at different points in a project in the point where they need it. For example, architects can get early access to life cycle data to support better design decisions through the design app and product and property owners can use the same data for procurement or sustainability reporting during and after construction. So with that, we wrap up this section. And before moving into financial, we will, as always, look at the progress we have made within our different areas. So let's start with an area we haven't mentioned that much before, the core. As I mentioned, the heart of our business model is our data model. This is also the key to truly become the global leading provider of building product information and by that, achieving our North Star to deliver the right data in the right format in the right location to the right stakeholder. Obviously, we have data models and databases today in our different products, and we will use the learnings from them in our next-generation database. This development has started and will gradually be released throughout 2026. When this is in place, this will, for example, solve the customer pain of updating different databases since the data will be in a modular and structured format, which will enable us to share data in the way the database or the data user needs it. Over time, this will also open up for future and new revenue streams from our customers, mainly the building product manufacturers. Taking a look at EandoX, which is our -- one of our products within Compile. For those of you who are not that familiar with EandoX. It is a software that helps manufacturers to create EPDs in minutes compared to several hours and consulting hours as it's done today. EandoX is built on cutting-edge technology, and I would say that it is one of the most advanced tools on the market. If you go back 1 or 2 quarters, you can also see a demo of how it looks like. An example that of a new release that we have done this quarter is the Copilot AI feature in EandoX. This feature is applying AI-powered functionality to reduce manual work in the data gathering, which can be really time-consuming and turn this into structured data. So the result is an agentic workflow, which creates life cycle assessments and EPDs independently. And this can, among other things -- among many things, result in significant time improvements. This feature is currently available to a select number of customers during the test phase, and we continuously invite more users into it also as they're passing our AI training, which we hosted for the first time earlier this week. And then finally, let's spend some time on Connect and specifically on how our current solution to building product distributors work. And the reason we have chosen to spend some extra time today on this is because this is a solution area where we frequently get follow-up questions and also since we've seen the first proof of concept this quarter by being able to expand not only in Sweden, but also outside Sweden. So our customer is the building material distributor, let's call him Kim. Kim works at a large distributor who stocks tens of thousands of SKUs for contractors, builders and municipalities across the Nordics. Kim is pragmatic, he's competent, and he is also under constant pressure to deliver reliable, traceable product data to his customers. He's also juggling suppliers, systems and sustainability targets during his daily work. Kim's company supplies the materials that keeps the building projects moving. That can be everything from concrete, insulation to every screw and every seal. And he, of course, wants this company to work with the best suppliers, both providing the best price to his customers, but also with stronger sustainability numbers. Kim is working with multiple sources of product data, but this is usually not traceable. It also comes with unbroken or broken data links back to his suppliers. And just finding and compiling the data for his thousands of SKUs is too time consuming. And even if he would get to it, less than 10% of the products in his catalog have environmental product declarations, EPDs. So creating -- and why is it like that then? Yes, because creating and verifying EPDs have historically been taking a long time, expertise and money. And as you then maybe can guess, we also have a solution in this in EandoX. Anyway, what Kim then says is that with BIM.com, I both access product information from the product database, and I can also add climate data to all my SKUs, making it easier to negotiate with suppliers, provide our customers with climate calculations and Scope 3 reports. So our solution for building material distributors leverage the creation of generic data as well as our library of specific data. So how it works then is that the distributor starts by providing us with their article data. We match that with product data in our database and enrich the product data with specific data where it's available and generic data for the remaining products. And then we feed it back to the distributor. So this puts us in a unique position in the market, handling millions of articles in the Nordic distributing market and beyond. And we can also, by this supplying them with a high quantity of products and still be able to provide them with high-quality outcomes. And this can be seen in the growth of this product. And an example you could read about earlier this week, which is our contract with SEG, Sveriges Elgrossister or the Swedish Electricity Wholesalers, which is a trade organization for electricity wholesalers in Sweden. And the agreement basically means that our database and SEG's database will share product information from their owners. And SEG's owners include, for example, Ahlsell, Kesko, Rexel, Solar and Sonepar. And this integration will simplify the dissemination of current and reliable product information to the market and also our technology to be able to generate climate data for the climate impact of all products, which is really valuable for SEG. And we will see this agreement and this contract materialize commercially into revenue early next year is the estimation. And speaking of money, I will now hand over to our brilliant CFO, Per Goransson, to share more about the financials.

Okay. Thank you, Sofia. And as you already mentioned, our ARR grew 7% year-over-year -- flip to the next slide here, 7% year-over-year and 3% quarter-over-quarter. And the growth in the quarter is a clear improvement, underlying driven by stronger retention within bimobject.com and upgrades in Connect for distributors. The ARR metric is primarily connected to future revenue and recurring revenue. Net sales recognized in the quarter decreased year-over-year, and that is due to currency effects, not least the weaker USD. And in total, we have minus 5% from FX. The drop in services revenue is considered normal due to vacation period effects. If we go over to the cost side, we continue to invest in development. But in Q3, we're also seasonally favored by vacation period, hence, the drop in costs quarter-over-quarter. Overall, the cost base is plus 12% versus prior year and primarily related to higher costs within product development, but also increased commercial investments. For quarter-over-quarter comparison, it's worth to note that Q1 and Q2 also included some restructuring costs. And overall, I would say that our cost base is today in line with strategic plan. If we move over to the full income statement, we continue to see stable net sales, but with the FX headwinds. In Q3, we got the vacation effect on the cost side, which makes EBITDA relatively stronger in the quarter. EBITDA at minus SEK 6.9 million versus SEK 1 million prior year. Depreciation and amortization costs increased due to the acquisition and increased capitalized work for own accounts. EBIT at minus SEK 10.2 million versus minus SEK 0.8 million prior year. And the financial net is relatively strong in the quarter due to realized gains in interest funds within current investments.