CapMan Oyj (CAPMAN) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

A very good morning to you all, and welcome to CapMan's full year results presentation. My name is Joakim Frimodig, I'm the CEO of the company. The year 2022 was an excellent year for CapMan. We exceeded all of our financial targets and all of our operating segments, improved their profitability. The weaker market situations had to date only had a limited impact on CapMan. And overall, I'm really pleased with the development of the company in the last 12 months. But today, we are not only announcing a record result. We have a lot of other news as well. We are announcing significant changes to the top management of CapMan, changes that will strengthen our ability to execute on our new strategy that we launched last autumn. We are also announcing the sale of our subsidiary, JAY Solutions and also announcing the Board's proposal for dividend distribution for last year. The proposal is a distribution of EUR 0.17 per share, which would imply a growth for 10 consecutive years, which is a strong achievement. I will tell you more about all of these topics during this presentation. Let me start by going through the financial results for last year. Our strong performance and growth continued in 2022. Our group turnover increased by 28%, and this was a combination of a growing fee base and increased carried interest income for CapMan. Our fee profitability, which is one of our key strategic topics, grew by 26%. The fee base grew, and we kept cost increases on a moderate level. Our EBIT and EPS grew by 25% and 23%, respectively. This was a combination of the beforementioned fee profit improvement, carried interest increase, but also very strong fair value changes and investment incomes last year. And if we turn these percentages into actual numbers, you can see our record result here, our assets under management at year-end stood for the first time at over EUR 5 billion. The quality of our assets under management is also better than ever before. Turnover landed at EUR 68 million and the recorded EBIT was EUR 56 million. Our balance sheet continues to be strong. At year-end, equity ratio was 53%, and we had liquid assets of EUR 56 million. And as said, dividend distribution growing for 10 consecutive years based on the Board's proposal. This confidence in raising dividend highlights our belief in the long-term growth of our operation. I mentioned that we have exceeded all of our long-term financial targets. You can see the targets here. When it comes to growth, we aim for over 15% annual growth. And this we have exceeded in 2022, but also exceeded over the longer term, if you look at the 2017 to '22 average. We aim for a return on equity over 20%. And last year, we clearly exceeded that with 32%. And if you look at the longer-term historic average, we are not quite at 20%, but very close at 17%. And the balance sheet equity ratio, we target over 50%, and we have been exceeding that target both in the short term and the long term. And if we look at the quarterly development on a group level, you can see both turnover and EBIT and the steady progress that we have made in the last 3 years. So steady improvement, both when it comes to the top line and the EBIT, which I'm really, really proud of. And also, if we take a bit longer time series and we look at the EBIT of CapMan, you can see that after the COVID impacts on CapMan in early 2020, we have really taken a step-up in our profitability level -- so clearly above EUR 10 million each quarter since then. And if you look at the total EBIT post COVID in approximately 2 years' time, that has been over EUR 100 million. If we then move from the group level to look also at our segments and their performance. First, a reminder of our business and earnings model. We are reporting 3 separate segments: the management company business, our service business and then our own balance sheet investments as the investment business. And if you look at our earnings components, roughly, you could say we have 3 main components. So fee income from the management company and service business, carried interest income from the management company business and then return on own investments and fair value changes from the investment business side. Maybe one thing worth noting on this slide is that following the sale of JAY Solutions yesterday, our service business now consists only of the procurement service caps. And as I said, happy to see that all of our segments improved their profitability in 2022 and also to see that the best improvement was in the management company business. Their EBIT up from EUR 13 million to EUR 22 million last year. That's an improvement of almost 70%. Also, our service business improved by 35% and the investment business continued to deliver very strong results in 2022 on the back of a very strong development already in 2021. Here, the improvement 9%. And as mentioned before, if you look at the EBIT of the totality plus EUR 13 million or 25%. Our fee base has grown steadily. This is the combination of our management company and service business turnover. So starting in 2017 from below EUR 30 million level, we are now at a level of approximately EUR 70 million. This implies an average annual growth of about 17%. And in line with the nature of our business, this growth has been steady. And also going forward, what we expect is that the fee-based turnover will continue its steady growth, but also that the share of carried interest income continues to grow as it has done in the recent quarters. We have an ambitious growth strategy -- and I'm happy to say that we can execute on that strategy largely with the existing talent and resources that we have in-house. This means that the additions to our cost base are relatively moderate that we are targeting to achieve the ambitious growth targets. And if you look at the cost base development last year, we increased the total cost by approximately 9% if we exclude the [ PSP ] costs earlier in the year, which was of a onetime nature. So personnel costs, excluding that increased by EUR 2.6 million, and a large part of that was increase in variable personnel expenses, bonuses due to the strong performance of the company last year. And looking at the other costs, you can see a moderate increase there in line with a growing headcount. So then combining the fee-based top line and our costs, you can see that our fee-based profitability has continued to improve and is actually now on a record level. So carried interest service fee profit and management company fee profit in total EUR 28 million at the end of 2022 on a 12-month basis. And the average growth here when it comes to the fee base has been approximately 43% per annum going forward. And we expect this to continue to be strong in the coming years as well. The balance sheet is solid, and we have good liquidity. So book equity at the end of the year was EUR 142 million, which implies an equity ratio of 53%. Liquidity is also good cash at hand, EUR 56 million. And in addition, we have an undrawn credit limit of EUR 20 million. So we have the financial stability to weather any market situation, and we have strong liquidity for investments and to support the growth of our fee-based operation. If you look at our own balance sheet investments, their fair value at year-end stood at EUR 169 million. And our outstanding remaining commitments to fund were EUR 89 million at year-end. We are, on average, targeting 10% to 15% return on our own fund investments and last year as well as 2021. Both years, we clearly exceeded that target. And last year, the return was 25%. Here, we can see how our investments are divided by different investment areas. And I think the main point here is very good diversification. So in total, investment capacity, EUR 225 million, EUR 56 million of that in cash, which implies EUR 169 million invested into the private markets, and that EUR 169 million invested across private equity, real estate, infrastructure, venture capital as well as fund of funds fairly evenly distributed. Last year, our fair values in total increased by EUR 37 million. We know that the market situation was challenging and that valuation levels came down. But offsetting those negative impacts, we saw very strong development in several of our assets. And also, we were able to successfully complete several exits that had a positive impact on fair value as well as cash flow and also carried interest income. And this diversified balance sheet and own investments we have built over the last few years. You can see the increase in diversification. And in this prevailing market situation, this diversification provides us with a very good balance overall. Let me then take a strategic view and start by highlighting the key focus areas of the strategy that we launched in September last year. We have an ambitious growth strategy whereby we are looking to double the size of our company in the next 5 years. This will be achieved through a combination of organic growth and also M&A actions. The core in our strategy as the core in CapMan overall is top investment performance, active value creation, creating value in our funds and in our products. This is at the very heart of what we do. And I'm very happy to see the improved performance overall for CapMan as a group. More and more of our funds are in the first or second quartile in their international rankings. We are looking to scale up the existing strategies and products. In the 5 years preceding this strategy period, we were launching a lot of new investment areas, a lot of new products. Now we are going to scale up those products going forward. ESG is a core theme for us, and what we are going to do is integrate ESG into all of our business activities, not only as a support function, but the core part of all of our investment and other activities. CapMan, as I've said before, is all about talent and people. The people are the ones creating the value, creating the success of CapMan. And therefore, it's crucial for us to be the home of top performers for us to be able to attract the best talent in the industry. We are going to drive up shareholder value in coming years through a combination of growth and improved earnings quality. Focus will be on continued growth of fee profit but also a stronger and steadier carried interest income stream. And as I said before, our organic plan will take us far. It won't take us to our final objective. We need to add M&A or other large scale new growth opportunities on top of the base case organic plan and those we are actively working on. Here, you can see the development of our assets under management from 2016 to 2022. Investor demand overall for CapMan products has remained on a good level despite increased uncertainty in the fundraising market. Overall, last year, we raised some EUR 650 million in new assets under management or 13% increase. And also in the last quarter, Q4, this gross increase was approximately EUR 140 million. But if you look at the net figure, that's substantially lower than the gross increase in assets under management. This is due to the fact that last year, we made several large exits that did decrease our assets under management, but at the same time, had a positive impact on fair values, carried interest and cash flow. Also contributing to the lower net number is a change in the NAV of some of our open-ended funds and the termination of older funds, which in turn has improved the assets under management quality and the average fee level. Therefore, the growth in management fees has been faster compared to the growth in AUM. We remain positive and confident in the continued growth of our assets under management, which we continue to see growing this year. And as I said, the quality of assets under management has improved over the last few years. Here you can see the remaining fund lifetime of our assets under management from 2017 to '22, and you can clearly see the steady growth in [ Evergreen Capital ] and in funds that have more than 5 years in tenure left. So we have been able to shift this in a positive direction in recent years, and we foresee this trend to continue. On this slide, I'd like to firstly highlight the lower row here. This is how the new assets under management that we raised last year has been distributed. You can see that most of it was invested into open-ended fund structure. Most of it came from international investors, and most of it was raised in the real estate and infrastructure investment areas. And why I want to highlight this is when you look at the upper row, this is what we are targeting for our strategy period as a whole, where we see growth in AUM coming from. And you can see that the sources in 2022 are very much aligned with what we see also for the coming years. This is our current fundraising pipeline. We have several fundraisings ongoing. What we are seeing due to the market situation is a slowdown in the market. We see that some of the fundraising take longer time than what we have originally planned, but also that they are moving forward. And we expect several closings in the first and second quarters of this year, particularly highlighting the Social Real Estate Fund on the real estate side, the Nordic Infra II fund on the infra side and then also capital intake through CVS products over the coming quarters. And overall, as I said, we expect continued growth in assets under management this year. Last year was an active year for investments. We have seen some slowdown in activity during the last quarter of the year, but we still see that activity is on a solid level. So in total, in 2022, we did 15 new investments. We have been deploying capital from our new funds but we still have a lot of dry powder. So approximately 1/3 of our assets under management is still uninvested, and we see a lot of interesting opportunities in the market to deploy that capital during this year. We were also able to make several successful exits last year, and these exits, as I said before, have been driving our fair value changes, our cash flow and some of them also boosting the carried interest income for the year. ESG, we took a significant leap forward in our ESG efforts last year. And I'm particularly proud of the fact that last year, we committed to our science -- the science-based targets in February that we were able to score very highly when it comes to employee satisfaction and all higher level for CapMan and also that we included, for the first time, ESG targets in variable remuneration on the CapMan group level. Going forward, we are going to raise the bar further. Next year, for example, we are going to establish a road map for reaching carbon neutrality at CapMan and also define the year when CapMan will be net 0. A lot of work is going into the ESG part. We have also been adding a lot of resources on CapMan group level to improve our capabilities on this front. Last year, 2 of our [ fan ] funds entered carry Growth Equity [ 1 ] and Nordic Real Estate [ 1 ], and we made several exits from these funds that were then recorded as carried interest in CapMan's accounts for last year. There are several remaining assets in these funds when exited, they will provide further carried interest income to CapMan. At the same time, we also have a number of other funds that are developing positively and are moving towards carried interest income in the coming years. And as I said, one of our strategic objectives is to grow this part of our earnings and also make this income stream steadier. Today, we announced that we sold our subsidiary, JAY Solutions. And going back a few years, you might recall that in 2019, CapMan acquired JAM Advisers and that in 2020, we divided this business into 2, what we today call [ CBS, CapMan Wealth Services ], our interface to slightly smaller local institutions, the wealth service part, which is an integral part of CapMan's strategy and business. And then the other part, JAY Solutions, where we have reporting analytics and data management services. We developed this from a support function into an independent service business. We developed it from almost 0 revenue to approximately EUR 2 million revenue business. And today, we announced the sale of JAY Solutions to the Swedish investment company [indiscernible] in investment for a purchase consideration of approximately EUR 8 million or 4x sales. JAY'S contributions to CapMan's profitability last year was negative. This is very good news for JAY Solutions. They get a good new owner. It's good news for CapMan. We are releasing a lot -- the majority of the funds that we originally invested into JAM Advisers to this transaction while still remaining the core part, CBS. Also, CapMan's headcount decreases by approximately 20 employees, and it frees a lot of resources within the group. So very good solution, I think, for all parties involved. CapMan's objective is to distribute an annually growing dividend to its shareholders. And with the Board's proposal for dividend distribution and distribution for last year, this would be the 10th consecutive year that we would raise this number. So in total, the Board is proposing a EUR 0.17 per share distribution from last year, that implies about EUR 27 million. And what we are proposing is that the dividend would be paid in 2 installments, 1 in the spring and 1 in the autumn. And this 17% distribution can be compared with an EPS of 26% for last year. Just to summarize, already mentioned long-term financial objectives and how we have developed last year. So we are very much aligned – [ we'd beat ] the targets and are committed to these targets going forward as well. Here is our outlook estimate for 2023. What we are saying is that we estimate assets under management to grow in 2023, and our objective is to grow the operating profit excluding carried interest and fair value changes. As in previous year, due to the nature of our business, we are not providing a numerical estimate for 2023. We announced a number of significant changes to the top management of CapMan changes that will support us in executing our strategy going forward. We announced that I will step down as CEO of CapMan in March this year to take over the role of full-time Chairman of the Board is, of course, being subject to the decision of the Annual General Meeting. As full-time Chairman, I would besides normal Chairman do this also focus and support the CEO in the execution of our growth strategy, particularly concerning M&A and other large-scale strategic projects. I'm really excited about this new role. But at the same time, I'm also really proud of what we have achieved during the last few years during my time as a CEO. We have been able to improve the performance of our business. We have more than doubled the size of the company on most metrics, and we've been able to provide significant return to our shareholders on average approximately 20% per year. And I'm confident that with these changes that we are announcing today, we can support a similar or even better growth track going forward. But with me stepping down as CEO, it means that CapMan will also get the new CEO in March. And I'm really delighted that the Board has elected Pia Kall to become the new CEO of CapMan. I'm confident that Pia is the right person to take CapMan to the next level, and I truly look forward to continuing my cooperation with Pia, now in new roles. And at this point, I would like to introduce Pia to the scene here to introduce herself and her thoughts about this news. Welcome, Pia.

Thank you, Joakim. It's great to be here and really excited about the joint journey ahead. here. Maybe to start, I could open up a bit about my background and the experience that I hope to be able to bring to CapMan in this new role. So I've done a lot of different things during my career, but over the last about 10 years, I have worked with and in stock-listed companies in different roles, both from the management group point of view like in CapMan, but also before that, at [ Autotek ] and from the Board of Directors' point of view, where I serve on the Board of [ Elis ] at the moment. At the same time, as having the experience from the stock-listed world, as my role has been Head of [indiscernible] at CapMan, I have also been very deep in the private asset investment space and all the handicraft that comes with that one from fundraising to making new investment transactions, driving value creation in portfolio companies and also realizing that value. And -- but if we really truly privileged about is the opportunity to now bring both of these sites into my role as CEO, both the stock-listed world, but also the private asset investment part. And in a way, I think in a nutshell, that is what CapMan is about. And also, when I look ahead, I think the priorities are very clear. We set the strategy in the fall and now it's time to execute on that. If you think about the strategy, there are 2 things in the heart of the strategy. There's an ambitious target to continue to grow assets under management, and we have a vision to be the most responsible Nordic private asset company. And I think we have a unique setup of CapMan to really merge these 2 and drive these 2 objectives. The setup we have with specialized dedicated investment teams, enables them to really focus on the investment activities in their specific strategies and that way, drive value creation and drive returns in investments and in our funds. That's a prerequisite to then have successful fundraising, and that's a platform to add new products and new strategies. All of this increases assets under management and creates value for shareholders. At the same time, we are there investing in mid-market companies, infrastructure assets, real estate and that gives us an opportunity, and I would almost a responsibility to be part of driving a sustainable -- sustainability change, support these assets is really transforming towards more sustainable operating models. And that way, we can merge financial returns and [ creative ] financial success with also a positive contribution to society on environmental, social and governance issues. And this is the part that I feel truly excited about. At the same time now, I also want to take the opportunity to lift up 3 colleagues who will be joining the management group as of March. [indiscernible] has been the co-managing partner with me in [indiscernible] since 2017. He is a very experienced private equity professional. He's also an excellent people leader. And Johan will continue as managing partner for [indiscernible], which creates continuity for the team and for the fund and investments there. And naturally then [indiscernible] takes a [ seat ] in the management group. Anna Olsson, joined CapMan in 2021. And over the past year, she has done a fantastic job in really taking our ESG topics forward. And with the commitment we have to sustainability, I think it's more than natural that [ Anna Olsson, a seat ] in the management group. And then [indiscernible] together with his partner colleagues in special situations, they have really established that as a new investment strategy for CapMan, and it's also first of its kind fund in Finland. And with the new investment strategy in place, also he is joining the management group. I really look forward to work with these colleagues and all the other ones in the management team already and continue their cooperation with Joakim.

Thanks, Pia, and welcome to this new role.

Thank you.

So there was a lot of news from CapMan today. But as you can see, the company is in great shape, and I'm confident that we can continue to grow and create value for all of our stakeholders and our shareholders and that the organizational changes that we are announcing today will further support that goal. Thank you.