Columbus A/S (COLUM) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Columbus Annual Report 2020. [Operator Instructions] I must advise you, the conference is being recorded today on Tuesday, the 16th of March 2021. I will now hand the conference over to your first speaker today, Hans Henrik Thrane. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Tracy. So welcome, everyone, to Columbus' presentation for the Annual Report 2020. And my name is Hans Henrik Thrane, and I'm acting CEO and also Corporate CFO in Columbus. So let's go through our agenda on Slide #4. So I'll start the presentation and will walk you through the highlights of -- and financial review of the year. 2020 was the last year of our 5-year strategy, we call Columbus 2020, and I'll briefly cover the main highlights of our strategic results, then I'll make a brief update on our Focus23 strategy, and we will end the presentation with an outlook for 2021 and a long-term guidance followed by Q&A session, where we hope for a lot of questions. So let's go to Slide 5 for the presentation. During 2019, we did a lot of initiatives to boost organic growth and as a result of these initiatives, Columbus started out in 2020 with a strong organic growth. However, when COVID hit in March, a lot of customers paused their investments due to the uncertainty in the economy. This pausing consequently impacted our business negatively. The biggest impact to our business was the lockdown in U.K. and U.S. while our businesses in Scandinavia got through the crisis slightly easier. Despite the global pandemic, we have seen progress in many areas of our business, especially our business units Dynamics Sweden, the Baltics and Norway delivered strong top line growth. With the lockdown, we managed to turn our product delivery into almost 100% remote in a very short time. Despite the remote delivery, we have succeeded in delivering and supporting our customers 100% remote with high-quality, within time and on budget. We have had significant focus on improving our customer experience and creating value for our customer. As a result, we have improved our customer loyalty significantly and have reached solid results. With our Focus23 strategy, we aim to improve customer loyalty even further. In November, we launched the Focus23 strategy with the objectives to unleash the full potential of Columbus. We'll get to Focus23 later in this presentation. Finally, I want to thank all our employees for their commitment and efforts, and I'm very proud to see how our global teams have shown resilience in a year with a global pandemic affecting our business in many ways. And I'm glad to see that our employees loyalties have stayed strong during the year. During Q4 and beginning our 2021, we are starting to see our sales pick up with the growth outlook for 2021. So now we move to the next slide, Slide 6. In 2020, we have stayed Columbus through a challenging year due to COVID-19 impact. Considering the pandemic, we ended the year with satisfying results. 2020 was financially affected by 2 extraordinary elements. This was a reversal of earn-out and the loss of fixed price projects in Norway. Normalized with these items we delivered a normalized EBITDA of DKK 117 million, which is a decline of 7%. We made this normalization to better understand the performance of the underlying business. Due to the sale of our software company and the closing of our Spanish subsidiary, these entities are now consolidated on a single line in our P&L, both for the comparison numbers 2019 and the 2020 numbers. So in the numbers we now walk you through is excluding to Greece and Spain. This is what we called continued business. COVID-19 has affected our markets in different ways, especially our markets in the U.K. and U.S. have been significantly impacted by the global pandemic with major lockdowns. But in general, all our businesses were somewhat impacted by this uncertainty. Consequently, our total revenue declined by 6%, and organic revenue declined by 9%. Columbus Care continued to progress with the revenue increasing 12% to DKK 152 million. Recurring revenue is increasing and now constituting 25% in 2020. Cloud continues to grow rapidly with 41% growth. Normalized EBITDA decreased by 7% to DKK 117 million due to the declined revenue. Since COVID-19 stroke the world, we have continuously adjusted our business in terms of cost and capacity to the changing market conditions. With the tight control of our cost, we have reduced the negative impact on EBITDA. The normalized EBITDA margin is stable at 7.3%, which is an increase of 2%. So next slide. This is Slide 7. So on this slide, we have illustrated the bridge between our reported numbers and what we call the normalized numbers. The customer provision is related to the Norwegian fixed price project we have previously disclosed. In Q4, we made a settlement with the customer, and therefore, we will not have any further negative impact from this project. The reversal of earn-out is primarily related to the fact the closedown of the Spanish subsidiary has had a negative impact on the earn-out, and it was part of the iStone acquisition. So the key takeaway from this slide is that despite a revenue decline, we managed to improve our normalized EBITDA margin in 2020 due to a tight cost control. Next Slide 8. So just a brief comment on the income statement. As we concurrently have monitored and adjusted our cost and capacity, our staff cost has slightly decreased compared to last year. This is primarily related to capacity adjustment back in March and April. Other external costs decreased by 17% in 2020 to DKK 147 million, primarily related to less internal travel costs. We are currently hiring again in some of our business as we start to see demand picking up again. Financial expenses are increasing and as a consequence of the additional committed line of credit we engaged in earlier in the year -- back in 2020, and it is further impacted by currency adjustment related to intercompany balances. It is also here in the P&L where you can see the one line consolidation of the so-called discontinued operation To-Increase and the Spanish entity. This is the second last line in the P&L. Next slide. So we are now on Slide 9. As part of executing our Focus23 strategy, our software company To-Increase was sold. The sale to Gilde was completed January 26 in this year. The total net proceeds of DKK 115 million, corresponding to DKK 858 million, were paid in cash at completion. The sale of To-Increase will impact the corporate equity by approximately EUR 90 million or DKK 671 million. Next slide. I will now present the financial value drivers. Due to the sale of our software company, we do not report on the financial value driver Columbus Software as this is not part of the continued business. Next slide. I'm now on Slide 11. As a consequence of the COVID-19 market condition, our Service business declined by 6%. Columbus Care continued to progress with an increase of 12%. In Q4, we started to see an increased demand, and we are currently staffing up across our business. However, as we are not yet at the same capacity level as last year, we foresee a small decline in our business in Q1 2021. The efficiency in our Service business is at the same level as last year, however, with a reduced number of people. Slide 12. Recurring revenue increased from DKK 395 million to DKK 409 million or a growth of 4%. Recurring revenue now constitutes 25% of total revenue. This growth is primarily driven by progress in our Columbus Care and Cloud Services. Next slide. So I'll now go through the Geographical and Business segments. So let's go to Slide #14 with Western Europe. In Western Europe, revenue declined by 1% to DKK 1.4 billion. Adjusting for the acquisition of Advania the revenue declined by 4%. The revenue decline is mainly due to customer pausing their investments due to COVID-19 in Denmark and U.K., which is only partly offset by an increase in Norway and Sweden. EBITDA is negatively impacted by a customer project in Norway and the closing of our entity in Spain. But positively impacted by the iStone earn-out, as mentioned in the beginning of the webcast, where we pay out less earn-out than initially expected. Reported EBITDA increased by 18% to DKK 173 million. Therefore, normalized EBITDA increased by 32% to DKK 152 million. Great thanks to our teams in Western Europe. And now I am on Eastern Europe, Slide 15. In Eastern Europe, revenue was stable with DKK 148 million, due to a revenue increase in Estonia and Lithuania. However, the growth was offset by a decline in Russia of 7%. Service revenue grew by 1% and Cloud revenue more than doubled. License revenue declined 15% due to Cloud transition. And recurring revenue increased by 6%. EBITDA declined by 8% to DKK 13 million in 2020. Thanks to our teams in Baltic and Russia. Now to North America on Slide 16. Due to the continued and massive pressure of COVID-19 in U.S., the turnaround was slower than expected. This resulted in a revenue decline that was mainly driven by a continued decline in service revenue and decreasing in U.S. investments. This is also changing the way customers are engaging with us. And in order to meet the market demand, we have separated the businesses in 2 separate units that support improved customer engagement, one, focusing on larger customers and one focusing on small and mid cap -- mid-market customers. Consequently, revenue decreased by 17%. However, also here, a tight cost control, we managed to improve EBITDA by DKK 7 million to DKK 12 million. Next slide. So now I'm on Slide 17, and talking about closing our Columbus2020 strategy. Closing the year 2020, we sunset our Columbus2020 strategy. With achievement in our Columbus2020 strategy, we have reached most of our ambitions and we now have a solid starting point for taking Columbus to the next level. The Cloud adoption has been one of the biggest growth opportunities for Columbus during the past 5 years, and we have grown our Cloud business significantly. Today, Columbus is positioned among the leaders within cloud and digital transformation in our key industries. The acquisition of iStone gave a solid market position, primarily in Sweden, and expanded our position in Norway. With our 9 Doors to Digital Leadership, we expanded our traditional ERP services and solutions to address the customers' entire business challenges. From 2016 to 2020, revenue grew by 59% and EBITDA grew by 44%, including the discontinued operations and acquired businesses. Overall, we are satisfied with the execution of our Columbus2020 strategy. However, our organic growth has been on the lower side. Organic growth is central in our Focus23 strategy, and we believe, we have a strong foundation for driving organic growth in the coming years. Next slide. So I'm now on Slide 18. So now I'll present a very short recap on our Focus23 strategy presented back in November last year. So next slide. We have a dominating position within Cloud ERP market, covering both Microsoft Dynamics and M3. In fact, with Infor M3, we are the global leader. Columbus is a Nordic leader within e-commerce, and our application management services has grown to a significant size with a deep catalog of services. Further, our offerings within modern workplace and data analytics has grown significantly over the last 2 years, but are still relatively small businesses. Since 2015, we have developed a well-established service catalog covering a wide portfolio of relevant digital solutions for our customers. This is what we call the 9 Doors to Digital Leadership. In comparison with many of our usual competitors, Columbus has a well-established set of global delivery centers that gives us additional access to great people and talent. When we engage with customers, we are known for high-quality in what we do and are in control of our risks. And then a very key in our new strategy, the ability to measure customer satisfaction and loyalty. This is a key in delivering more services to our customers and to get better references. We have a well-established measure for Net Promoter Scoring and have improved the NPS significantly over the last 4 years. And last, but not least, our financial position is strong in terms of financial leverage and cash generating. Next slide. In this picture, we have collected digital market expectation, matching our 9 Doors to Digital Leadership. Our 9 Doors to Digital Leadership, in fact, covers most of the digital needs for our customers within our core industries: food, retail and manufacturing. So what you should take away from this picture is that there is a great potential in what Columbus brings to market. Next slide. On Slide 21. So with a solid starting point and a great market opportunities, Columbus has developed the Focus23 strategy to leverage this market situation. This slide is our elevator pitch on our strategy. Columbus will becoming a global consultancy extending with more digital advisory. We will grow the business by focusing on our industry legacy within food, retail and manufacturing. With that dedicated focus, we aim to reach a market position as trusted digital adviser. To execute, we will focus our organization, operations and business applications to operate more focused and efficiency to clear the path for a smooth collaboration and knowledge for entering. We'll continuously improve our service offering and turn these services and solutions into higher customer value. And we will continue to improve our high customer satisfactions to maintain and create customer loyalty. This is the key in our executing of organic growth and margins. So the overall objective is to increase the value for our customers, improve customer satisfactions and thereby increase organic growth and improved EBITDA margin. Next slide. With our Focus23 strategy, we have the ambition to claim a broader and higher value position in the market in order to create a sharper competitive edge or what you can call a space of blue ocean within our industries: food, retail and manufacturing. Combining IT application consultancy also called system integrators and more system agnostic digital advisory is intended to create a unique space for us. So as the picture illustrates, we will grow moving Northeast in the diagram, expanding by increasing our focus and services to larger customers and more digital advisory. We believe we are able to make this transition as Columbus has global reach at national presence, well-developed global delivery models and a wide portfolio of services and solutions and a strong industry focus. Next slide. Growth through focus. This picture is to illustrate how Columbus intends to grow organically. The diagram is 3-dimensional. By focusing on customer developing and targeting our larger customers, we get access to larger investments. This is the horizontal line. The vertical line is the next dimension. Here, we focus on maintaining and improving customer loyalty through trust and value creation for our customer. This dimension is key to unlock the value potential at our customer. With trust and advisory, we will be able to deliver more of our services and solutions to the same customers. And this goes into the third dimension is to increase the number of solutions or services to each of our customers or what is also known as the share of wallet. By leveraging our advisory trust and loyalty, we believe that we can create value by serving our customers with a number of different solutions and services. So all in all, growth and focus on the larger customers, customer loyalty and a broader set of services. So now I'm on Slide 24. With the direction for our Focus23 strategy, the market potential and our strategic goal in terms of market position and ambitions, I will now go through the strategic elements that covers what we will do in order to execute on our ambitions and why? We have grouped our strategic programs into 4 elements. We call these 4 elements: Focus & Simplify, Empower, Sustain and Delight. And Focus & Simplify is the foundation element in our strategy. This element is about creating a foundation to make collaboration in terms of customer engagements simpler and more customer focused. The next element, Empower, is essentially about our people and competencies and what we are able to serve our customers with our 9 Doors to Digital Leadership. And Sustain is about contributing to the global sustainability agenda, both internally and for our customers. The last element, Delight, is about creating and maintaining customer loyalty through continuous value creation, trust and advisory, so the customers demand more of our digital services and be an advocate for our services and advisory by referring us to new customers. Currently, detailed programs are being developed within each strategic element. We expect to be more explicit about this development in our future reporting. So that was the recap on our strategy. So now I'm on Slide 26, which is about our outlook and financial guidance for 2021. Based on the financial performance in 2020, current order book and pipeline forecast, our guidance for the full year 2021 is as follows: we expect revenue to be in the range of DKK 1.7 billion to DKK 1.8 billion, corresponding to a growth of between 0% and 9% growth. EBITDA is expected to be in the range of DKK 125 million and DKK 150 million, corresponding to a range of 2% decline to a growth of 18% compared to 2020. And then our long-term ambition with our strategy is to be able to gradually increase organic growth to a minimum of 10% annually from 2023. Next slide, please. So with our divestment of To-Increase and the big sales proceeds, the Board of Directors proposes an extraordinary dividend of DKK 6 per share, which will be adapted at the Annual General Meeting, April 27, 2021. Next slide. And our upcoming events with the first upcoming event being Annual General Meeting, April 26, is on the slide here. So that's all what I said. So now I'll hand back the conference to Tracy for taking questions. Thank you.

[Operator Instructions] There are no questions coming through on the line, sir.

Okay. If that's the case, then let us conclude the call.

Thank you. That does conclude our conference for today. Thank you all for participating. You may all disconnect.

Thank you.