Eltel AB (publ) (ELTEL) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, everyone, and welcome to this live webcast. Today, we will present Eltel's third quarter of 2022. My name is Elin Otter, and I'm Head of Investor Relations at Eltel. With me today, I have our President and CEO, Hakan Dahlstrom; and our CFO, Saila Miettinen-Lahde. Hakan and Saila will present the results, and we will open up for questions after that. Throughout the presentation, you can e-mail your questions by clicking on the icon next to the presentation. We will also take questions on the telecom. With that, let's move to Page 3, as I hand over the word to you, Hakan.

Thank you, Elin. Good morning and welcome to all of you. Looking at the third quarter on the Eltel, it's an exceptional quarter with a lot of great wins when it comes to new contracts signed. And that is, of course, something that we are very happy and pleased about. My perception is that we see a market where the increase of supply is less than the increase of demand. So I think we have a good opportunity to keep up this good development we have when it comes to signing new contracts. So that will support our growth, of course. However, looking at this year, 2022, I find it to be a difficult year when it comes to profitability-wise. In the third quarter, we have a margin of 2% and that was not done without significant effort and a bit of one-offs when it comes to less admin cost. So inflation impact us, of course, and I will talk more about that in a second or 2. I will also talk a little bit about the strong megatrends that we see and what type of opportunities that opens up for us. But we also need to take action within Eltel to meet these opportunities and catch that. And to do that, we have established a business development function, and I will talk a little bit more about that later on. But now let's go to Page 4 and look on the contract, the major contract that we have signed during this third quarter of '22. First of all, here, the great contract with Valokuitunen. It's about fiber-to-the-home in the Finnish market to a value of EUR 200 million. And this get into play immediately in September when we signed it. This is a significant ramp-up from what we do today with that customer. So we expect this to be twice as much as we have done before. So we are now in the beginning of that ramp up. Then as you can see here, we have a handful more new contract. I would say that looking at the totality here, 2/3 of this business is -- business that we defend and 1/3 is new money. So that's really important and an achievement that I'm really happy for. This high demand in the market is, of course, really great to see. However, we see that there is a shortage of resources, and we are struggling to be able to ramp up accordingly to customers' expectation as we speak. Let's go to Page 5. We can now see the impact of inflation. And this, I have to say, it's more widespread and larger than what we previously have thought or anticipated. And this is, of course, impacting our profitability. And as a part of our Q2 report, we made a statement that it will be impacted between EUR 5 million and EUR 10 million. And our perception and estimate today is that it will be above EUR 10 million. It also is more complex to work with this index and get cost compensation from the customer in this aspect. So it will take us a bit longer time. And I just have to admit that we overestimated the degree of compensation in our previous communication. With this said, over to you, Saila, on Page 6.

Thank you, Hakan. Now looking briefly for the numbers in a bit more detail. For the total group, in terms of the third quarter, we actually reflecting partly what Hakan already told in the good market demand. We showed a net sales increase of 6.8% and in our Nordic segments by 7.1%. And as said, we are actually having more to do than we can accomplish at the moment as the customers' investment levels are sufficient or substantially raising from last year when partly COVID was still impacting negatively. In terms of the operative EBITA, unfortunately, indeed, if we hate to quote one main reason for the shortfall compared to last year, that would be inflation. In the segments, I will go to some more details country by country, but asset inflation is the main driver. And with that, the year-to-date operative EBITA came to EUR 2.1 million or 0.4% versus EUR 7.8 million a year ago. For the quarter, we maintained the level at EUR 4.1 million. Moving on to segment Finland. Finland has been our steady performer lately, and that was continued in the third quarter with net sales increase of 1.5% to EUR 79.1 million. Year-to-date, we unfortunately saw a bit of a decrease to -- by 4% and that was partly due to still work being postponed partly due to material shortages or resource shortages and of course, still catching up from the strike that we saw in the spring time as well as the long winter. But with that said, on the positive side, the net sales indeed is showing a good basis for longer-term development with the good new agreements signed in Q3 that Hakan already referred to. On the profitability side, operating EBITA for the quarter remained at 6.2%. And actually slightly improved to 4.5% year-to-date and this is indeed, despite the increased costs of materials and subcontracting. And whilst COVID, by and large, has subsided, we still actually saw a quite high sick leave rate, especially in September in Finland due to the pandemic. And as already mentioned, we're still playing catch up for the strike and long winter, which is also affecting our profitability throughout the year actually. Moving on to Sweden. Sweden has been showing a promising development in net sales throughout the year. And we're, of course, happy to note that the third quarter continued with that trend. And the net sales grew by EUR 14.7 million in -- 14.7% in local currency in the quarter. And year-to-date, the growth was 13%. And of course, we have Smart Grid projects in Sweden that are ramping up nicely and performing well. That is producing part of the growth, but also our main business, our core business in communication is showing growth as well. On the operative EBITA, we have been on a long journey from red numbers to hopefully reaching back numbers soon. And with that, the third quarter showed us finally reaching a 0 result. However, for the year-to-date, we're still in the negative territory with minus EUR 2.2 million, however, slightly improved from last year. And one of the major factors affecting the profitability in Sweden is a quite high employee turnover. And that's actually comes then with reduced efficiency, reduced utilization due to recruiting, training and time spent on nonoperative activities in that sense. And beyond this and the inflation also in Sweden, we have actually spent money and sort of incurred costs in relation to the One Eltel efficiency program. Moving on to Norway. January, September in Norway showed quite nice growth in net sales, 13.5% year-to-date and 13.8% for the quarter. And that comes from the fact that investment levels in Norway are indeed recovering after the COVID impact last year. And therefore, especially fiber and 5G volumes are much higher than last year. And we're also very happy to note that also we're seeing some growth in sort of new customers, which is something that we're very much focusing on during the year and also, of course, going forward. The profitability development, unfortunately, has been negative, both for the third quarter and year-to-date. That is primarily attributed to a change in business mix or production mix and also being impacted by inflation and the sick leave rates plus then also employee turnover, which is of norm, as well as the other Nordic countries. With Denmark, Denmark for the first time in quite some time in the third quarter was basically more or less comparable to a year ago. With that, we showed net sales of EUR 17.8 million, which is in line with last year. For the year-to-date, we are still seeing the quite substantial impact of the in-sourcing of a major customer. And therefore, year-to-date, the sales came down by 22.2%. This said, looking forward, it seems that we have reached and passed the bottom in Denmark, and we have also in Denmark, gotten good new agreements, building the backlog and building the foundation for the future and especially the GlobalConnect agreement that we announced earlier in the summer is one of those significant ones. On the operative EBITA, we reached a modest positive remark of EUR 0.1 million versus EUR 0.2 million last year. And whilst the change is not big, then of course, inflation played a part in this -- in Denmark as well. With that, we move to Other business. And there, we saw slight growth in net sales, both for the quarter and year-to-date. And whilst the growth was a few million, the majority of that actually came from Poland, somewhat surprisingly, but that was due to execution and realization of projects that were actually postponed from 2021. Our good performance Smart Grids in Germany, continued good performance, also showing some slight growth. And in terms of our margins and the profitability, Smart Grids in Germany continue to perform very well. High Voltage, which is primarily these days in Poland, unfortunately, does continue to suffer from challenges in the local market, including the impact of the war in Ukraine as well as inflation at large. And with that, the High Voltage business showed a EUR 6.4 million EBITDA loss, which is, however, slightly better than the minus EUR 7.6 million a year ago. We also note that the Power Transmission International business is basically operationally all closed. No projects ongoing. We still have some administrative closing operations ongoing there. Still last year, PTI contributed positively to the result. However, this year, it is just the ongoing closing cost, which makes a bit of a difference in the overall picture for other business. With that, to my final slides, referring to the group balance sheet. And unfortunately here, we have to note that the inflation and other factors that have been impacting also our profitability are showing also on the balance sheet side. With this, the leverage has increased as has net debt, although, of course, part of this is also the seasonal variation, which reflects the high buildup of net working capital in the summer and fall seasons. The net working capital, which, like I said, is showing seasonal variation is somewhat higher than last year at the same time. And part of the increase relates to inventories, which we have built for the coming winter to make sure that we have the materials available needed and also in the effort to optimize the cost of the materials in the inflationary environment. And also affecting the net working capital, we saw basically in all of the Nordic countries, quite substantial COVID-related support from governments. And during the course of this year, those support mechanisms have come to their end. And this, unfortunately, then has shown is an increased net working capital for us. But with this, this concludes the financial part of the presentation, and I will hand this back over to Hakan.

Thank you, Saila. Thank you. This is the last time you will see this slide. We have shown this many times, and we are now at the third phase of our journey, and we will now focus on growth and then business development in adjacent market going forward. So a very positive shift in our focus, and we will open up a little bit today to see how this will be done. So first, just touch base on the targets. We have shown this before and we just would like to confirm them today. We will stick to them. The demand is increasing. And with that, I see a possibility to also increase prices. That is an important part to reach this 5% EBITA margin. But of course, this new adjacent business that we see close to what we have done traditionally is also a key component to do this. And then, of course, we will continue to work on operational excellence because also there is a cost factor in our journey towards 5% EBITDA in 2025. We believe that we're going to be able to create a growth between 2% and 4% yearly and have a leverage between 1.5% and 2.5% when it comes to net debt in relationship to EBITDA in 2025. And dividend and payout is subject to later and we will come back to that when that will be on the agenda. By that, over to Page 15, and I would like to say a few words about the very strong megatrends that we see in our markets. This development is opening up new opportunities for us. And to be able to capitalize on this, we need to increase our effort in business development. So we have established such a function during the autumn, and we are sort of having part of that team or that capability up running today, and we will be able to finalize this during December and January. So that's something that I'm very happy for, and I believe we're going to have great use of going forward. This will help us to find new businesses very close to what we have done traditionally, where we have -- the point is that we can use the existing competence, create synergies between countries, export a business success from one market to another market. By this, we could increase the speed as we are developing our business. Then one area that is an example of this, and I would like to open up a little bit how we see the wind power market in Finland. This is a growing market, we see that wind is and will be very crucial for the green transformation in Finland as in the rest of Europe. And according to external sources, we see a significant growth and within this time frame, we expect the capacity to increase many times. And we believe that today, there is plans to build a capacity of more than 44 gigawatt. Of course, many of these projects will not happen. So there is a lot of dropout of this type of project, but we can see that there will be a significant business here going forward. And we believe that the onshore part will happen before the offshore. So the focus short term for us, on Page 18, you see how we would address this wind power market in Finland. And we believe that there is an addressable market for us that consists of the transmission line and the cabling from the grid and transmission to the substations. We also believe that the substation is a thing for us, and we will address the whole substation but not the main transformer. On the wind park as such, the balance of plant, this is something that we have experienced of and we will be able and have an open mind to build this part also going forward. So from the total market value of somewhere between EUR 1,500 million per year, we believe that our portion next year, addressable market for us will be close to EUR 400 million. And also during '24 and '25, a bit more. And project as we are active in today are within substation and transmission line. But we have, as I just mentioned, also been active in balance of plant. So we estimate that our market share during this year would be in the neighborhood of 4%, and we have net sales today of EUR 11 million within wind power in Finland. Our ambition going forward here would be to catch 10% of this addressable market within Finland during 2025. So with that, this is one example where we do business development in adjacent business to broaden our customer base and broaden the portfolio of what we're offering in the market. With this said, I believe it's time to open up for questions. And Elin?

Thank you, Hakan and Saila. As said in the beginning of the presentation, you can e-mail the questions by clicking on the mail icon next to the presentation. And first, let's go to the phone conference and see if we have any questions there.

[Operator Instructions] The next question comes from Robin Nyberg from Carnegie Investment Bank.

Robin here from Carnegie. A few questions. First, related to Poland, that has been quite challenging for you. Could you comment how much capital is the Polish business tying up at the moment? And what are the plans over there?

We have not really previously discussed the actual tie-up of capital in actual amounts. But I'd say that overall and looking forward, we continue working with the project portfolio and sort of getting to a closure the older projects that are basically causing the majority of these problems. At the same time, we're increasing our operations in services, which is much lower risk business. And of course, then considering various restructuring options for the business in Poland, working hard on that. But as said, the market, of course, in Poland has been challenging already for some time. And the war in Ukraine and the neighboring country has certainly not made, unfortunately, the situation any easier.

All right. You have signed many contracts during Q3 and inflation has been quite high. Is the inflation reflected in the pricing of these new contracts?

Yes, we believe so. We have made sort of a forecast of how we see the cost development going forward. And in some contract, we have price arrangement so that the price are committed for the first year, and then it will be a negotiation and discussion around pricing for the rest of the contract. So of course, we came into this inflation not really prepared. I think we have to admit that, but we are working hard on sort of putting up the structure and the arrangements so we can deal with it going forward. But it is a quite complex subject, yes.

Okay. Fair enough. Then related to cash flow, net debt has been increasing and there is a quite clear seasonal pattern in cash flow during the year, but should we expect better cash flows in Q4 and lower net debt? Or how should we think about that?

I think the seasonal variation is something that we would also sort of expect going forward. So that, I think, is a safe expectation. However, as I noted already, the net working capital has suffered both from certain inventory buildup, which will probably remain over the next few months due to the projects that the inventory is being built up for and also the ending of the COVID support. So seasonal variation, yes, but the amount of it, we cannot exactly comment. But the pattern in itself, we do believe will remain.

There are no more questions at this time. So I hand the conference back to the speakers for questions from the web.

Thank you. And we have received quite a few on the web. I will start with a few from Adrian at ABG SC. You had a good momentum on orders in Q3. Can you remind us of the lead times for when this will start to be seen in sales, particularly the major Finnish FTTH?

Yes. The agreement is valid from September this year, and we start to ramp up immediately as we have signed it. However, there is a delay, and it takes us both time and cost to ramp it up. But that large, great contract, we are very happy for that. But it comes with that positive task, problem to ramp it up, of course, and we are working on that as we speak. As I said before, 2/3 of this contract is existing business. So it's very much that we defend the business we have, and that is very important, of course, because the profitability is hard -- very hard when we do big changes. So to defend the existing business is important, and I'm really happy for that. And then we have a bit new business in Denmark, but also this large contract that means a significant ramp-up in Finland, fiber-to-the-home. But it's sort of valid from the day we have signed them.

You note that you are seeing more widespread cost inflation than you initially expected. Can you break down the cost items and give some more color on in which areas you're seeing the most effect from higher costs.

If I start -- from the beginning, we talked about fuel and material and that sort of have had a significant cost increase. I believe everyone have seen that. But it turns out that everything that we spend money on have higher cost today than what we expected in the spring and early summer. So it's about equipment and tools. It's about everything that we consume. So -- and also that some market, if I take the Polish market as an example, the inflation in the society is so significant that we have to compensate our staff for that more than once per year. So we had a salary increase in the spring, and then we had to also make adjustment of salaries during the autumn. Just because they can't really cope with the situation, and we have to sort of take care of our people and make sure that they also want to stay with the Eltel going forward. So it's, I would say, in all areas. And then it's a little bit different phasing from country to country but a significant cost increase.

Yes. I mean that basically covered, I think, pretty much the -- maybe as a slight addition to your comment related to Poland and the personnel there. Then of course, the higher-than-normal personnel turnover in Nordic countries also has an impact. And typically results in some sort of inching up of the personnel cost as part of that as well.

It does.

Thank you. Can you give us an update on the time line for moving on higher cost to customers? And also perhaps quantify how much of an effect cost inflation is currently having on group margins? And I think you touched a bit upon that in the presentation.

Yes. Good and bad. We have large frame agreements, and they are having a long lifetime. And it's, of course, on top of our mind how we can work with price and how we can make sure that we get coverage for the cost increase we have. However, it takes time and it's not that easy when you have this type of large frame agreement that have 2, 3, 4 years lifetime ahead of us. So -- but we are working on it sort of, but I can't really quantify how long time it will take or what effect we can see of it.

Yes. I think one easy step to think about it is that indeed some of the indexes that have been built into the agreements or that might even be existing and older ones are sometimes checked yearly, which means that there are some milestones on that front coming only just next year, while some have already taken effect during the course of this year.

You mentioned increased investment activity among customers. How confident are you that you will be able to capitalize on that rising demand given the shortage of skilled labor?

Well, that's a very good question. And it's one of our top priority question is how we can become a more attractive working place for the people that have an interest to work with Eltel. It will take time, and it is quite costly also to do the onboarding and training of new people. So we see an impact, as we speak, on utilization due to this. But I would like to be optimistic here and see that of all things we could have as a task, this is one of the best. We have the task to grow our company and the demand is higher than supply. And that will, of course, give us the opportunity to work on the pricing as we just talked about. So I think there is a good momentum. It is an increased demand for sure, and we will try to utilize that. But it's very hard to say what type of effect and which quarter you will see it. It takes time to find the people.

And this is the final question from Adrian at ABG SC. Are the issues with employee turnover, leading to lower utilization rates affecting you mostly in certain geographies? Or is this a group-wide issue? Also, do you see this as a -- do you see this problem as temporary or structural?

Yes. I would hope it would be temporary. I'm a fair that it might not be. It's a little bit too early to say if it is a structural problem or not. The impact is largest in Sweden, but it impacts all markets. And yes, it impact the utilization. It does. We can see that.

And this labor shortage and staff turnover is quite a hot potato here in the chat function. So moving on to Joonas Ilvonen from Evli. He wonders are labor shortage an issue in other countries besides Sweden?

Yes, it is. It is absolutely. And we try to -- it is both people that we would like to have within our company, but also subcontractors and entrepreneurs that we would like to use in our project like for excavation. And we try now to find new ways of working to be able to increase the capacity without sort of increasing the cost level in the market. So we -- yes, we try different things to make sure that we could increase our capacity to deliver to the customer. But yes, and it's on all markets, not only Sweden.

And spinning once again around the staff. This is a question for Mr. [ Peter Eeklo ]. What has done about staff turnover?

Yes. It's sort of the full spread. We work with questions like employee branding. We have to be able to build a workplace that is very attractive. Our people are something that other companies would like to use, of course. So it's everything from employee branding, how we could retain, how we could recruit and we have sort of a group-wide initiative to build a better process and be more active in this area. I think that -- particularly if you look at Sweden, where we have had large ramp down the last 2, 3 years. It has not -- might not have been top of mind. Here, we have to come back and become better in this aspect. But I would say it's something that is important for all segments and something that we talk a lot about.

I believe we have reached the final question from Joonas Ilvonen at Evli. Could you elaborate on the Norwegian production mix change?

Okay. Yes. Up to recently, we have had quite large project in urban areas when we deploy fiber-to-the-home or fiber passing household. Those areas in the Norway with the customer we have, have now been done. And the project, each of them are smaller and they are in more rural areas. So this puts new prerequisite for the rollout of the fiber and it has an impact on our profitability.

Well, thank you. Thank you, Saila and Hakan. There are no further questions, so this will conclude the call. Please continue to follow us and feel free to reach out to me if you have any further questions. We present our year-end Q4 report on February 16, and I hope you will join us then as well. Thank you for joining.