Cyviz AS (CYVIZ) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hi, and welcome to the Q4 earnings call for Cyviz. I am Espen Gylvik. And with me, I have the company's CFO, Karl Peter Gombrii. We're going to take you through the agenda today, a quick Q4 brief, then performance 2020-'24, some business highlights, of course, the financials of Q4 and 2024, a little perspective on our priorities and bets in the outlook section, and then we open up for Q&A at the end. So let's kick it off. So first, happy to announce the best financial result in the company history. We had a very good Q4, and it caps off the best full year performance on record, hitting all financial KPIs. Revenue in the quarter of NOK 189 million, which is up NOK 21 million compared to Q4 last year and a full year revenue of NOK 595 million, which is up NOK 10 million from 2023. Very strong good development on gross profit in the quarter, NOK 96 million, 50% margin, is up NOK 7 million from last year. And of course, the full year gross profit of NOK 313 million, which is 9% up from previous year. Quite pleased with that, and we will talk more in depth on the drivers for that. EBITDA in the quarter landed at NOK 19.8 million, which is down NOK 0.2 million compared to Q4 last year. We'll talk more about that as well. And of course, the best EBITDA in the company history of NOK 36.2 million for the year, which is up NOK 8.3 million compared to 2023, and it gives a 30% growth in EBITDA for the year. Solid order intake of NOK 181 million in the quarter, and Karl Peter will talk more about what that means for the order backlog when we enter 2025 and full year order intake of NOK 620 million. So in summary, a solid good year. We have delivered on the type of ambitions we had as a company on the financials and built a solid baseline for a successful growth in 2025. So I hand it over to you.

Thanks. So the standard slide, looking at the 12-month rolling trend on select KPIs. Order intake, as Espen mentioned, of NOK 620 million, which is quite strong. It's down 30% on last year, which is related to a very large order with Aker BP in December last year. I'll get back to that in a minute how this works. But overall, order intake solid. Gross profit, NOK 313 million for the last 12 months, which is an increase of 9% compared to last year. And then lastly, the EBITDA, which is up 30%, which Espen also mentioned. But overall, a healthy development.

And just as a short side note, I think for those that remember when we went public, we set an ambition on growing our financial KPIs with a CAGR of 30%. And as you can see in the upper right corner, as of today, we are at 34% on order intake, 29% on revenue and 33% on gross profit. So I just want to emphasize that we really strive to deliver on the commitments we give every single day. And I'm happy to see that whatever we said back in December 2020 seems to be delivered also now in 2024 and going into 2025.

So a quick deep dive into the order intake. So this is looking at the order intake on a quarterly basis, not 12-month rolling, and it's pretty evident what happened in Q4 last year when looking at the overall trends. The graph in the middle is depicting the underlying order intake that is except this very large order, which have deliveries spread across multiple years. And the pointer is showing that both Q2, Q3 and Q4 this year are strong. Q4 this year is the fourth highest order intake on record. And that takes us to the order backlog after the end of the financial year, which stood at NOK 380 million. So yes, just trying to depict that this is, as we and management, see a solid development, and we're quite confident with the backlog as it stood at year-end. Margin trend, gross margin continuing a positive trajectory. This is driven by continuously larger orders with repeat customer, which increases overall efficiency, and predominantly more recurring revenue. We have repriced both SLA agreements and service and maintenance agreements. And we have also done some price increases, which is kind of the underlying explanation.

Yes. And I think the important note here is, we have evaluated all our customer base and the models we have had. And as part of the professionalization and the type of structural work we do on the OpEx side, we have looked into all the customers and seen that there was a lot of customers historically that dragged the support and maintenance agreement without activating it. Hence, it didn't drive any type of additional revenue connected to those deals. And now we have made it mandatory for every single Cyviz customer to have a support and maintenance contract tagged to the purchase of a Cyviz solution. And of course, that supports the journey towards a larger ARR base and hence, also stabilizing the margin picture more for the company.

And then I'd also like to draw the attention to the dotted line for a minute that would show the quarterly development. And as you can see, it fluctuates quite a bit. That's normal for the project business. The last 5 quarters have had an elevated margin. This relates to project costs and how kind of the timing of it. And we do expect a reversal of this elevated level in Q1, which is natural, and it does not kind of indicate any changes to the underlying business. It's simply the project nature, but it's worth noting. All right.

So let's look at some of the highlights. So we can start with the quarter. As mentioned earlier, it was a good quarter. I think I will start by looking at the bottom part of this slide. I mean, we made a cautious strategic decision back in 2021 when we started to carve out the long-term strategy for the company and acknowledge that we had a very soft or weak type of vertical baseline of the company. But with the product portfolio and solution portfolio, that should be relevant for a lot more verticals, and we started to like go after a lot more strategic verticals beyond the energy sector that was like the core for the company. And you can see here in Q4 that we continue to do business in the government and defense sector, corporate technology. Yes, the energy sector is quite significant in the quarter. But as you will see on the next slide, it levels out much more over the year. So it's part of how project business nature is. And Aker Solutions and Aker BP stood for a significant amount of the order intake in the quarter, impacting, of course, positively the size of the energy sector in the company and also then reflected over to the European share of the regions for the quarter. But Aker BP continued to buy one of our most significant strategic customers. We have a fantastic relationship with them, continues to develop. SEC out of Saudi continues to invest in Cyviz. I think an important parameter to mention here is, historically, we have done a lot of boardrooms and meeting rooms. 2024, we managed also to start moving Barco, one of our competitors out on the control room side with that customer. I think it serves as a good sentiment for the quality of our people and our solution. Again, a new logo in Saudi, quite important for us, another company that we can continue to develop. One of our first type of deals in the French market, which is important for us to expand our market in Europe. And we continue to do consistent business with large companies like KPMG, et cetera. So overall, quite good spread in customer logos, both new and existing. And if we move to the next slide and take a look at the full year. I think this actually reflects the first thing I tried to say on the previous slide. The value of having a lot more verticals to work with. Of course, it opened up a much bigger market for us, but it also serves as some sort of like a cushion or buffer. If some type of things happen in the global market on one way or the other, we still have the flexibility to move in between verticals. If there is a slowdown in one vertical, we can focus more of our efforts into others. Hence, we are less vulnerable for type of fluctuations or issues coming in the market. And I think most people since COVID and the war in Ukraine and Russia have realized that there are things happening all the time. So I think this is a solid fundament for us. And probably even more important is when you look at the regions for the full year, it looks to be like 1/3 by all the regions. And I think that, together with the vertical strategy, serves as the best type of cushion to balance without providing a lot of risk for incidents happening in the marketplace. So quite happy with where we have come with the strategy on verticals and growing the regions. So let's take a more deeper look into the Q4 financials.

So Espen already touched upon this in the introductory slide, at least for the Q4, I'll be fairly brief. Revenues up by 12.4% in the quarter to NOK 189 million. Gross profit, I mentioned that briefly before, still at a historically high level. For EBITDA, in line with last year. And then bookings down for the reasons that we've covered in depth earlier in the presentation. Moving over to the full year results. I think this is kind of a more relevant look at the company because it kind of irons out the quarterly fluctuations. Revenues fairly flat, but gross profit high, so up by 9%. These two are closely tied together. And that results combined with diligent OpEx control and EBITDA of NOK 36.2 million, which is the best in company history, which we're really happy about. And then bookings, again, we touched upon this. We are confident with the bookings. They have been strong for the last 3 quarters. This is simply related to that large order last year. I think that kind of summarizes the financials of the P&L.

And I think what this actually indicates and says, when we started this year, we said the focus would be operational excellence, focus on cash, securing, I mean, the journey towards a much better profitability and put more of our emphasis and resources along those 3 areas. And I think this describes quite well that we have had some sort of success with those strategic bets going into 2024, and we will accelerate that. Let when we now kick into 2025 with continuous focus on operational excellence, professionalism, disrupting the market and focus on cash and profitability and not at least growing the ARR part of our business.

And you mentioned the cash part, and that's perhaps the part I'm most happy with. Very solid operating cash flow, both for the quarter and for the full year. It's been a quite extensive focus for us to improve operating cash flow. Obviously, the results is kind of the underlying driver, but also more focus on collection, how we manage cash. So overall, for the quarter, a positive operating cash flow of NOK 33.7 million and for the full year, an operating cash flow of NOK 40.6 million. Collection has improved quite substantially, as is evident looking at accounts receivable for the full year, where we have a positive contribution of about NOK 33 million. I think the other thing I'd like to mention here is the Q4 inventory reduction. We mentioned last quarter that we had an elevated inventory situation due to large deliveries in the Middle East, and that has, as expected, normalized. Kind of pulling this together to the kind of higher-level picture. Operating cash flow, as mentioned, was NOK 40.6 million. Investments slightly less, which took us to a free cash flow of NOK 0.4 million, which means that we're kind of self-sustainable, also taking into consideration investments, CapEx. The CapEx bit here is the kind of dark blue area, which is R&D, which is absolutely key for what we're doing in the coming years and what will drive the ARR. We mentioned this in depth in the Capital Markets Day, but that's kind of what this is all about. But overall, from a cash perspective, things are developing in a favorable direction, which I am very pleased with.

We are all very happy with that. And I mean, you can see the numbers. We are adding NOK 12 million more compared to 2023, purely on the R&D side. And that is only related through the type of strategic change we do on the software platform and also on the partner journey that we are heading into now in 2025 to broaden our opportunities in the marketplace, improve our margins and, of course, drive a much, much larger portion of the ARR that we talked about in depth on the CMD.

And then for everything that we are going to do in the coming 5 years, we now have a good platform. We're profitable. We have the kind of the distribution of both customers and geographic presence and also cash positive, which kind of forms a platform for the changes that we are doing.

I think when I stated quite clearly at the CMD that why we are doing what we are doing now is because the fundament is there. It has taken us those years to develop, I mean, technology to get the house cleaned and in order, get the processes and frameworks and the control in place. So I mean, there's never been a better time for us to go after those opportunities than right now. So let's move to the last part. And I think that sums up quite easily what we have talked about for the last 15, 20 minutes. It's all about driving profitable growth, still to our core business, which is like our turnkey business, where we go out and work with large customers, provide the best possible experience for them. But now build on that 26 years legacy of in-house development on hardware and software and take the advantage of package our core technology and enable and provide that to partners so that they can go out, add third-party components and provide Cyviz solutions and experience to a much broader audience in the marketplace. And of course, the cost optimization that we continuously work with, I mean, that's an ongoing. It's something that will always be here, and we will try to be as prudent as we can and use our investments for delivering on the future strategy, which is, again, scaling through partners with the integrator kit. An Integrator kit is Cyviz's core technology, and our newly developed software management platform that we now have 16, 17 global and regional partners signed up for to take out to customers in the marketplace. And that's a pure software SaaS business. And of course, through all of this, be that company in our industry, that there to drive disruption on how we do things and how we sell to customers and how we use our technology to provide a lot more benefits and solutions to our clients. And I think during the year, we will have a chance to talk more about additional things we are looking into to enhance the disruption. And we will also, for the first time in the history, start reporting on ARR from Q1 because it's one of the key strategic bets we have as a company this year to grow the ARR base and the SaaS business. So you should expect us to talk about that on every quarterly, I mean, earnings call this year. So with that, I think we say thank you and open up for questions. Let's see if there is any questions.

None currently. No. It seems that we were pretty clear then.

Yes. And it might be that a lot of people participating today was part of the CMD Day as well. So hopefully, we managed to be at least clear and transparent in what we say. So if there's no more questions, I just want to, on behalf of Cyviz and myself and Karl Peter, say thank you for participating, and looking forward to talk to you again when we present our Q1 numbers. Thank you.