Esker SA (ALESK) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good evening, everyone. Thank you. Thank you for joining us for this presentation of the half year financial statements of Esker. My name is Emmanuel Olivier. I'm the worldwide Chief Operating Officer of Esker. And I'm going to be talking through our 2021 half year results, give you some information about what happened during the semester and how we see the rest of the year. And so that's going to be maybe 20, 25 minutes or so. And then of course after, you're going to be able to ask every question you'd like an answer for. So I think we have pretty much everybody, so I'm just going to get started. I think that you all see my screen. Is that okay? Yes? Do you see my screen?

Yes. We all can see you. Yes.

All right. Perfect. You cannot see me because I don't want to -- it's complicated enough. But if you see the slides, that's what's most important, more important than me. Okay. Well, let's move to the presentation. So this semester has been an interesting one, as you can guess after the first semester of last year, which was heavily impacted by COVID. So it was clearly an unusual semester in that it was really marked by the recovery from COVID, particularly when comparing to the first semester of 2020. But nonetheless, we had some excellent results from a revenue perspective, revenue development perspective, from a sales perspective. Bookings in particular were -- have been very good throughout the semester. And profitability actually has followed the revenue trend and has improved very significantly during the semester, and that's what I'm going to be walking you through. So half year sales revenue was EUR 64 million, over EUR 64 million. And that's 22% growth in constant currency rates compared to what we had in the half year 2020, and 19% expressed in current rates. The impact is going to be mostly the U.S. dollar that was slightly down against the euro during the semester. And that's been driven by, as usual, cloud solutions for Esker. Those solutions alone have been growing 26% in constant currencies for the semester. And they do represent now 93% of the company business. The vast majority of Esker, or almost 100%, cloud business now. In terms of bookings, we've seen a very solid, very dynamic increase of our bookings expressed in -- we now express that in annual recurring value, annual recurring revenue. That amount was -- has grown 64% compared to what we did last semester. I'm going to give you more information about that. And clearly, there's a base effect there, particularly in Q2 of last year. But nonetheless, that's a very solid performance in terms of bookings. So bookings amounted to EUR 6.6 million for the semester compared to EUR 4 million that we had in the first semester of last year. So again, it's the annual -- it's the average annual recurring revenue represented by -- in the contracts that we signed during the first half of the year. We continue to invest in the business as we always do. So in our case, investing in the business is mostly recruiting people, recruiting talent. And we definitely continue to do that. The average headcount for Esker during the semester was growing. It has grown 12% this year compared to last year, and that means another 85 people on average for the semester additional on the Esker headcount. And the focus this year has been mainly in sales, R&D and consulting services in terms of the effort, but it's fairly spread out on the departments, as we'll see a little bit later in the presentation. So obviously, those new recruitments are meant to fuel the growth that's expected in the second half of the year and going into 2022 and 2023, obviously. The operating income for the semester increased very significantly, plus 53%. Essentially, the expenses grew a little bit less than the revenue, and that translates into more profitability. We did have some savings due to COVID. There was very little travel happening as you probably can guess even today. So we're definitely saving some money there. We've learned also to work remotely, both internally and with our customers and prospects. So we're saving some money there. Trade shows as well have been held mostly online. There's been minimal amount of on-site activity during the semester from a marketing standpoint. It's hard to tell when that's going to come back. Probably not this year, maybe a little bit next year, but hard to tell at the moment. Net income also increases 40%. I'll give you all the details on that. It's 40%, not 53% like it is for the operating income, mostly because of exceptional items we had last year that had a positive impact on the P&L that we just don't have this year on the financial statements. Other things that are worth noting. Some of you may remember that last year, we took 3 loans that had been guaranteed by the French government for EUR 11.5 million. That was going into the COVID crisis, and we did that as a precaution as we really didn't know how our customers were going to behave, particularly in terms of payment to us. And so as a precaution, we took those loans that were given by the government as a -- or guaranteed by the government at a very interesting rate. It turned out that the business was doing very well, we didn't really need those loans anymore, and the cost was going to increase this year. So we paid them all back in April for EUR 11 million. And we just didn't use those at all. From an exchange currency standpoint, the -- like I said earlier, there's a little bit of a negative impact, EUR 1.2 million roughly on the top line, or 1.8% of the top line, and about EUR 400,000 on the EBIT. That's mostly coming from the U.S. dollar. So the performance that we're having has been achieved despite the fact that currencies fundamentally did not help us during the semester. We also had a quite significant dividend increase in the first half of the year, about 51% increase compared to what we gave as a dividend the year before. We're going to see that on the cash flow statement. We paid EUR 0.50 per share in June of 2021 compared to EUR 0.33 in 2020. Focusing on the revenue. You've seen that already in our revenue announcement early in July. But mostly it's about the SaaS trends. That was growing 37% in Q2 and 26% for the semester. So that's really driving the growth that we've seen during the semester. I'll give you more information on that a little bit later. Implementation services have grown 13%, a little bit less than SaaS, and that's normal. There's a bit of a delay between what's happening on the SaaS front and implementation services. What I mean by that is, when the SaaS revenue was impacted by COVID quite significantly in Q2 of last year because of volume consumption from customers being down on the platform, implementation services, on the other hand, continued to grow very nicely. Because we've been able to continue to do implementations with our customers even in the heart of COVID and essentially continued to record revenue and bill our customers for that work. But after that, in Q3 and Q4 particularly, we started to see, in implementation services, the fact that booking performance in Q2 and Q3 had been a little bit low. So the teams were a little bit less busy at the time. And that continued over to Q1 and Q2 of this year because it takes time from the moment that we sign a contract and the moment that we are ready and the customer is ready to start the implementation. So both because of the base effect that's going to be very favorable for implementation services in H2 of this year and because of the sales performance that we had in terms of bookings, we expect the growth of implementation services to get significantly better in the second half of the year compared to what we've done in the first half. So that should probably be around 18% to 20% for the second half of the year. Legacy products. We had a bit of a bump in Q2, but that's not really significant. Altogether, that's growing 6%, but it's almost immaterial in the business. Bookings, I'll be talking about that. But obviously, we had a very, very good Q2 in terms of growth. That's both base effect of last year, but also continued very good performance on the sales side that we saw in Q3, Q4 of last year and Q1 and Q2 of this year. So in total, 64% growth there. That gives us a business for the first semester that's mostly SaaS. Like I said earlier, 77% is what we call traffic at Esker, which is both subscription revenue and transactional revenue. I'll come back to that. Professional services is going to be 17%. It doesn't appear on the slide, but 17% of the revenue. And all the rest, license, maintenance, other, everything, is now only 6% of total Esker revenue. So mostly recurring revenue now, mostly based on SaaS. And you have the history on the right-hand side, showing essentially how the legacy businesses is just slightly going down, both in absolute value and also in respect of the overall business, and how SaaS has essentially taken over. By product type, no surprise there. SaaS is growing 26%, I said that already. Consulting, 13%. I did comment on that saying that's going to improve in the second half of the year. Maintenance license, immaterial. Maintenance goes down regularly as customers move from on-premise to on-demand. License is just a blip basically at that point. So SaaS revenue, we have this discussion about volume versus subscription. So what we call traffic at Esker, which is SaaS revenue, consists of subscription revenue, which is fixed, independent of actual consumption by customers of our services, our software. And transactional revenue, which is basically directly linked to the volume of documents that customers process on the platform. So -- and you can clearly see here how COVID impacted us in Q2 of last year. All of a sudden, subscription revenue increased drastically. And not because it increased drastically in value, but because the transactional revenue decreased quite significantly. And then we also see how quarter after quarter, it recovered. And we're now at a point which I think is quite normal compared to -- I mean, compared to what we have in our installed base, which is roughly 60% transaction or 40% subscription. Subscription. The trend of subscription services is that it's going to increase faster than transactional revenue because Esker is in the process of gradually changing its pricing structure and business model with the new solutions, focusing more on the subscription fees rather than transactional revenue, making the overall revenue more solid, more predictable and less subject to something like COVID that has impacted us last year. And that's what we see here on the second chart, which basically shows the volume of documents processed on the platform. And so that's showing it month by month. And you can clearly see COVID appearing in March and April and essentially in Q2. The sudden drop in volume, up to 30% sometimes, drop compared to the volumes that we had before, that impacted us in Q2. And then the slight recovery that we had month after month. Now you have 2 trend lines on this chart. The first one, which is the light blue one, the light blue dots, is showing the trend line for volume that we had pre-COVID. So this essentially was our trend before COVID. And we can clearly see that during Q2, we fell significantly below the trend that we had pre-COVID. And the other trend line is showing -- that's the trend line that is calculated with our actual performance up until the end of June. So you can see that the pre-COVID trend line is still slightly over the trend line that we have based on our actual results. So we still have a few customers or a few areas in the world that are impacted from a volume perspective by COVID. You may know that, for example, in Australia, they're still in a lockdown. Pretty strict lockdown, actually. And in Asia in general -- in Asia Pacific in general, I mean, the situation is not necessarily very good at the moment with COVID. But we also have some customers working in some particular industries that are still impacted by COVID, like the airline industry or restaurants, leisure in general, those kinds of things. That's still -- that's back in -- that's back operating, but it's not operating at the levels that they were operating at before. So it's minimal. It's not very significant for Esker. But that explains why our trend is still slightly below what we should have had, let's put it this way, if COVID had not been there. That's going to come back eventually as the world essentially gets back to normal. There's going to be a bit of additional growth, I think, for us in the future. But that's the picture at the moment. One thing that's very positive. If you look at Q1 and Q2 of 2021, we're more and more, for particular months, over and sometimes well over the pre-COVID trend. And that's mostly coming from a combination of the recovery of the existing base and the new customers that are getting into production and generating volumes on their own. By region. So for the first semester, Europe is about 56% of the revenue; the Americas, 38%; Asia Pacific, 6%. And in terms of growth by region, the U.S. and Europe are very similar, 23% growth on both sides. To be honest, if you drill down a little bit more, as the U.S. were less impacted by COVID last year, the 23% growth that they post this year is even more significant because the base effect was not very favorable as it was for Europe. The 23% growth in Europe is both a recovery essentially from last year and new customers going into production. So the components of growth for both regions are a little bit different. Asia Pacific, as you can see, is growing nicely, but a little bit slower than the rest of the world. And that's linked to what I was talking about earlier, the fact that, that part of the world right now is still impacted quite significantly by COVID. From a bookings perspective. On the first chart, you can see the amount of annual recurring revenue that was signed for the first semesters of 2019, '20 and '21. So you can see how H1 2020 was virtually flat, basically flat-plus, due to essentially a really bad Q2. And how we very significantly recovered from that in the first semester of '21. So growing the business -- the booking business by 63%. On the other chart, you can see how that plays out quarter-by-quarter. And that's even more -- that's -- the COVID effect is even more obvious on this chart. If you look at the orange line for Q2 of 2020, we actually saw a decrease in bookings for that quarter. whereas Q1 was growing at a reasonable pace, 30-ish percent. We went from 30% growth to minus something in Q2 of last year. And then you can see the recovery in Q3, Q4 and Q1 and Q2, just Q2 reaching almost 100% growth. Like I said, both recovery from past deals. And also the fact that companies realized that they needed to invest in their back office and the automation of their back office. And we clearly started to see that in Q4 of 2020, but we continue to see this trend, which, in our opinion, is not going to stop any time soon because there's a lot of work that is still to be done to reach a level of automation that would both give companies what they need in terms of operational efficiencies and protection against events like COVID that may happen in the future. A quick reminder. When we talk about bookings here, we talk about the average annual recurring revenue coming from those contracts that we signed, essentially the subscription fees. That's all we report on that because that's the only thing that we can be sure of. The transactional part is variable in nature, so we can't count on that, essentially. And we don't report that in the booking numbers. And that's the average annual amount. Because usually, our contracts are 3 to 5 years. And sometimes, you have a ramp-up mechanism by which year after year, or after certain events, the subscription fee increases as the contract gets older. So we take the average guaranteed value -- annual guaranteed value for Esker and we take that as bookings. Of course, the actual revenue when those deals go in production is going to be more because, of course, we would have billed professional services to do those implementations, and we would have had the transactional part that would go on top of that subscription fee type revenue. Esker combines traditionally growth and profitability. And this is the history on the left-hand side. On the right-hand side, you see the situation as it is today for the first semester. So we land at 14.2% profitability for the first semester, which is within the range that we shoot for traditionally. Let's say 12% to 15% is where we try to be consistently. So this year, we're on the upper portion of the range for the semester. And I expect this to continue to be the case for the full year for Esker. The investments in people. So like I said, 12% is the average headcount growth that we had for the semester, 13% is the end of the period growth. So it's been accelerating a little bit towards the end of the semester. Mostly, we've hired R&D people, consultants, which is understandable because we have a lot of deals that have been signed, and we need those people to make those implementations. That is going to continue. We will need even more consultants given the results that we had in H1. And what we see for H2, we'll need more consultants. And we're very busy focusing on getting the people that we need, as well as continuing to work with a few of our partners that are now ready to help us with implementations. Another area in which we've invested quite a bit in sales. That's not going to help us in 2021, but we'll need those salespeople for growth in 2022, 2023 and beyond. We have a portfolio of solutions that's getting more and more rich with a lot of modules, a lot of new features that we can sell to our customers. We need people to talk to these customers and generate those contracts that will fuel Esker growth in bookings and revenue in years to come. That was what I wanted to say about the business. About the financial statements themselves. I talked briefly about the currency effects being slightly negative. That's the traditional slide that we use. This is focusing on the U.S. dollar. That's the most significant currency for us. So the average rate, conversion rate for the semester was a little bit more than 1.20, and what we had last year was more like 1.15. So the impact of just that, is EUR 1.2 million on the revenue line and about EUR 400,000 on the operating income line. And you can simulate what it would have been on the chart just using several rates that the dollar might have. If you look at all currencies, like the British pound, the Australian dollar, et cetera, then the overall effect is negative at EUR 1 million on sales and EUR 300,000 on operating income. That's still 4% of the operating income. So once again, we've achieved those results with a slightly negative currency effects. And here's the detailed income statement. So we usually report the income statement in 2 formats. One is going to be by nature of cost. So for example, personnel and taxes or purchased goods or those kinds of things; and as well as an income statement by function that basically focuses on sales versus R&D, et cetera. So we have both formats. Obviously, up until income from operations, they're different, but then what happens next is exactly the same. You can see on the chart that, from an operations standpoint, we went from EUR 6.2 million income from operations in the first semester of last year to 9.1% (sic) [ EUR 9.1 million ], which is an increase of 47% for operations. And the net income is increasing by 40%. What I was talking about earlier, why 40% for the net income and not 50%? That's coming mostly from the exceptional items, not this year because they're immaterial this year, but mostly last year. And the events that we had that we treated as an exceptional item last year is the change of tax calculation in France, when we adopted the system that allows software to be treated essentially as patent revenue. And that triggers a lower tax rate. And we treated the effect of this recalculation on past financial years as exceptional. And so that was the reason for the exceptional income in 2020. We obviously don't have that this year. So that is the reason why we see that difference. Other than that, if you look at the detailed costs, which I'm going to do right away, that's just focusing on revenue, but I've commented on revenue extensively so I don't think I need to do more of that, sorry. Oops. The first thing I wanted to comment on is you know that Esker is capitalizing R&D and has always capitalized R&D. If you look at the first half of 2021, we capitalized EUR 4.3 million of expenditures -- R&D expenditures, which compares to a little bit less than EUR 4 million. So that's an increase of a little bit less than 9% compared to what we did last year. Obviously, those capitalized expense are then amortized. And so the net effect of capitalizing and amortizing is a little bit less than EUR 1.4 million this year compared to almost the same amount last year. So it's basically flat if you compare it year-over-year. In terms of how much of our R&D costs we capitalize, it's actually a little bit down from what we did last year, 61% versus 63%. It really depends on what exactly. R&D is working under pretty strict rules as to what you can or cannot capitalize. So it can vary slightly from one year to the other, depending on what's going on in R&D, 63%, 61% is really close, anyway. So if we go down to the revenue types that we have here, I commented on the development costs already. The other income is a tax credit that we get for R&D as well in France that tends to increase slightly year-over-year as R&D expense -- expenditures increase as well. Everything that we purchase increased as well, as you can see on the chart 27%, but that's consistent with essentially the activity levels that [Audio Gap] Personnel is linked to headcount, and I commented on that already. And the rest is linked to the business. So very much in line with activity levels. You have some detailed comments on the right-hand side. But I mean, nothing major that is worth mentioning, I don't think. If you go down below the operating income, what you're going to find is what we call financial income or financial loss. And that's basically interest income and interest expense, which are both minimal for the year. Mostly, what you can find here is foreign currency exchange profit and loss which also is minimal this year. This is a realized profit, not the translation effect that I was talking about. Or this is the realized and unrealized losses on currency translation -- on currency exchange, sorry. Exceptional income, I talked about that. The income tax rate is similar to what we had last year. And so the net income shows at EUR 7.6 million versus EUR 5.4 million, which is a 40% increase, and that's 12% of the revenue. If you look at it by functions, very much the same. The only thing that is not moving exactly like revenue is cost of goods sold, which includes -- 2 things, mainly. It's the cost for professional services, so our consultants. And you've seen that those have been increasing slightly less than revenue in terms of additional headcount because of the delay that I was talking about earlier on the revenue side as well. So as that cost has been increasing less than revenue, although the actual amount is increasing for the professional services cost, it does increase a little bit less than revenue. And so there was a bit of profitability effect there. Other than that, R&D is at 11% after capitalization. Selling expense are 29% versus 28% of revenue. The difference is going to be in anticipation of bonuses that we took into account. The year being very good, we do expect to pay good bonuses and we did account for that, particularly compared to what we had last year. Marketing is slightly down as a percentage of revenue, and that's mostly linked to the fact that we do marketing very differently now with COVID. On-site shows are very rare, so we had to sort of reinvent ourselves. And that tends to be a little bit less costly from a fee perspective, but also from a travel perspective. So -- and we had that for 6 months in 2021 versus 3 months of normal situation, let's say, or pre-COVID situation, in 2020. And 3 months of obviously, COVID-type situation. G&A, 9% of total revenue. Very consistent there. And that explains fundamentally the income from operations. Like I said, everything that's down below is going to be the same as what I have commented on earlier. From a balance sheet standpoint, there's not a whole lot to talk about, quite frankly, apart from the fact that we did pay back the government loans that I was talking about. So the cash level that appears on the assets is down about EUR 10 million, but that's mostly coming from the fact that we paid the loans back. And you can see that on the liability side, our financial liability went down from EUR 15 million to EUR 2.3 million, and that's fundamentally what I was talking about. Everything else is very much in line with the fact that the business is growing and in line with activity levels. From a cash flow statement, we continue to be cash flow positive on the business, on the operating side, and generating EUR 10.7 million worth of cash from the operations, which is an increase of 12% compared to what we did. Last year, we did invest EUR 6 million, mostly in capitalized R&D, as we usually do. EUR 6 million in 2021 versus EUR 5.4 million in 2020. We did pay a higher dividend. So that was EUR 2.9 million versus EUR 1.9 million, so an additional EUR 1 million paid to the shareholders during the semester. And we did pay back the borrowings as I was talking about earlier. So the cash level appears to be down from EUR 40 million to EUR 30 million roughly, but the net cash is actually increasing if you take into account the reimbursement of loans. 2021 is going to be a good year for Esker. It's going to be a record year. Once again, the -- we do expect the revenue to remain dynamic throughout H2 '21 as well. Obviously, gradually, as we move to Q3, Q4, the base effect for revenue and bookings is going to be less, I would say, favorable. But at the end of the day, the fact that we've been able to sign a lot of new contracts is going to continue to fuel the growth. Growth should really exceed 17% growth for the year in constant currencies, probably a little bit more than that. We should exceed EUR 130 million in revenues as well, unless something unexpected and significant happens, which I don't expect and don't want that. Bookings will also continue to grow. They're not going to grow 60% for the whole year, obviously, because of the base effect. But I do expect bookings to continue to grow in the second semester, well in the 2-digit type numbers. And that's going to continue to fuel the growth for future years as well. Profitability should be better than what we saw in 2020. If you look at the first semester, that's clear, but that should carry over to the second part of the year, and definitely consistent with what we saw in the past in the first semester. Thank you. Thank you very much for your time. Have a good evening, everybody, and talk to you soon.