Esker SA (ALESK) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, hello, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Esker Half-Year Press Conference where we are going to present and discuss our half year 2023 results. So my name is [ Zaena ], I'm Executive Assistant. And here with me to present the results of the Esker CEO and founders, Jean-Michel Berard; our COO, Emmanuel Olivier; and our CFO, [ Cathrine Blass ]. So today, Jean-Michel, Emmanuel and Cathrine are going to explain how the company performed during the first half of 2023. So we will start by sharing the key highlights for Esker, and we will provide you in a deeper dive into the 2023 first semester financials. So you will be able to submit your questions using the panel on the side or you can raise your hand, so we can turn your mic on. So let me now hand over to Emmanuel and an overview of the half year 2023.

Thank you, [ Zaena ], and good evening, everyone. Can you hear me, okay?

Yes.

Okay. Perfect. So I'm going to give you a quick summary an explanation about our performance for the first semester of 2023. Starting with just basically a summary of the most important point. So the first thing to -- that I would like to talk about is how the growth dynamic was strong in the first semester of 2023. We had 16% overall growth in revenue, 15% if we take into account the currency effect. Usually, it's the dollar versus the euro, 20% growth in SaaS revenue, 19% with the currency effect and 11% growth in implementation revenue or implementation services or 10% with currency effect. So that was quite dynamic. There was a lot of questions as to how the economy would affect the first semester in the end, it turned out, okay, I would say, and we were able to grow significantly. That growth was equally shared between Europe and the Americas, 16% each. So no particular difference to be noted there. As part of this growth, we had approximately 2%, which was due to our ability to revalue customer contracts due to inflation. So most of our contracts are indexed on some sort of CPI index. That contributed to the growth for the first semester, around 2%. I'll come back to that a little bit later. From a booking performance standpoint, that was also a question mark going into 2023 as to how our customers would react to all the uncertainties that you can see in the world at the moment. The reality is we were able to deliver a very solid performance in terms of bookings for the first semester, 18% growth versus 2022 with some geographical differences. Europe, outside of France was particularly successful with very, very significant deals closed, both in Germany and on the U.K. market. So growing 135% in bookings for the first half is excellent performance from those regions. The U.S. which has been performing consistently well for over 1.5 years, continued on that strong performance, delivering 6% growth in the semester. The weaker point for the first semester was France, where we actually had a very, very challenging first quarter where bookings were actually down 36%. And that's due to you may or may not know that there's a change in regulation that's expected on the French market concerning e-invoicing. And there was a lot of let's say, uncertainties around exactly how that change was going to be implemented by the government. And that started towards the end of 2022, and it was particularly strong in Q4 in Q4 '22 and Q1 '23, causing essentially companies to take a wait and see any attitude. And until they knew better about what was going to happen, it was very hard for them to commit to any project. And that was the reason for the very low performance on the French market for the first quarter of the year. That was a little bit better in Q2. France going back to slight growth, 6% growth in the second quarter, delivering overall a decrease of 9% in terms of booking on the semester. The second semester is expected to be extremely strong on the French market despite the fact that the French government ended up postponing that change in regulation, announcing that just before the summer without exactly saying by how long they were postponing the application of that new regulations. So we're speculating, we're thinking at Esker that the delay would be about 18 months, but we don't know. Nothing has been announced yet. They need to -- apparently, they need to go back to the parliament and rediscuss that. So we really don't know when that law is going to be implemented. But the reality is and it's counterintuitive in a way, but the reality is that companies have not stopped their effort to comply with the new regulation. I think we know enough of the changes that will happen and this is what we're actually saying to the market, I mean you should not postpone your efforts to comply because in the end, everyone's going to have to comply. So the fact that we have a delay is more an opportunity that you should take to essentially do those projects well. And without the stress that was expected around those projects. And the reality is we're seeing customers actually decide and commit on those contracts. So we expect H2 on the French market for bookings to be very strong. From a profitability standpoint, clearly, profitability is down in the first semester compared to last year, it's down 24% compared to last year or EUR 3 million. Out of that EUR 3 million, EUR 2.6 million come from essentially an accounting entry that has to do with something that I talked about -- and I'm talking about for the third year in a row, actually, which is the accounting for tax that we need to pay to the French government on stock-based compensation, stock options or free shares. That accrual is based on -- of course, the number of shares that are given, but it's mostly impacted by the share price. And so in 2021, end of 2021, the share price was really high. So we had to take a significant expense on the P&L for 2021 to accrues for that potential expense. In 2022, that was reversed almost entirely in the first semester. Leading to a EUR 2.2 million positive impact on the first semester of 2022. And of course, now in 2023 comparing the performance with 2022, where we do not have this positive impact, and it's making -- look like our operating profit is declining sharply, where it's actually a little bit different from that. If we restate our operating income and correct it from that tax thing, it's still down by 4% only and EUR 0.4 million. And there are main reasons behind this, of course, I go back to this during the presentation. The main points are: one, scope entry, Market Dojo, this is a company we acquired in 2022 start-up type company, high growth and not profitable yet. So the fact that we had to account obviously for 6 months of operations to Market Dojo in 2023 versus only 1 month in 2022. That creates an additional loss fundamentally linked to that business for about EUR 0.5 million. So that's the first thing that's impacting the corrected operating profitability. Second thing, obviously, we continue to hire during 2022, a little bit during 2023. We slowed down recruitments as we were getting into 2023 being a little bit more conservative. But people who were hired in the first half of 2022, actually joined in the second half of 2022 and are now accounting for 6 months of expense as opposed to less than that. Obviously, in 2022, well that creates an increase in FTEs in the company, and that is essentially an additional EUR 4.9 million of expenses that we have to account for in 2023. Third thing is inflation. So on top of the fact that we had more people, we also had to pay them more. And I'll come back to that, the effect, the price effect, if you will, on personnel charges, personnel expenses is EUR 2.3 million, which is significantly more than what we usually see in terms of average salary increase. Finally, inflation also played the part on other costs, other than personnel cost, infrastructure, events and everything got increased. We all know that, and the estimate impact on that is well. Is about EUR 1 million for the semester. That means that net income is also down 26% or EUR 2.7 million, essentially driven by operating income. There's nothing else significant outside of operations that should be pointed out at this point. The company has a lot of cash on hand, EUR 47 million on the balance sheet. If you subtract the financial debt, you get to EUR 34 million net cash that we can utilize to finance our operations or potentially do acquisitions. And this has been driven by very strong operating cash flow performance for the semester, 47%, up from last year or EUR 4.3 million higher than what we saw in the first semester of 2022. This is driven by very strict control of DSO and also by the fact that we had a partner Quadient in 2022, who was late in its payment in the first half of 2022, and they were on time this time. And so that actually is helping on the cash flow side. That allowed us to finance an increased dividend. Dividend paid to shareholders went up 27% or about EUR 1 million and that we were able to finance that with our own resources. In terms of our 2023 outlook for the full year, we're still thinking that we're going to grow between 14% and 15% organically outside of any currency impact, obviously. At this level, profitability should be between 11.5% and 12.5%, and this is to be compared with 11.1% that we're showing for the first semester of 2023 and 12.6%, which is what we had for the full year of 2022, obviously impacted by inflation as I just described. So now going a little bit into the detail. This is just the revenue numbers that you know already. So SaaS growing 20%, professional services 11%. Legacy product is something that I didn't mention. They're down. They've been down consistently. This is the on-premise software that we essentially just maintain for existing customer base and which is pushing gradually customers away from it because clearly, we're focusing on this as part of the business. So the decline is natural and will continue into 2024. Our business model is strongly recurring. The fact that the on-premise part is continuing its decline means that SaaS is now 83% of company revenue complemented by about 15%, which is coming from implementation services almost entirely focused on the on SaaS solutions, obviously, it's making SaaS now almost a pure player in terms of SaaS and cloud software. By product type, again, SaaS plus 20%, 10% for implementation services and minus 39%, I said that already. By region, I mentioned the very consistent growth between Europe as a whole, including France and the Americas, 16% on both sides. And Asia Pacific performing a little bit less in terms of growth, still growing 8%. This is linked to delayed deals that we saw especially in Asia at the end of 2022 at the beginning of 2023 as well. That was offset by a very strong performance of Australia and New Zealand. So leading to 8% growth the situation was a little bit better at the end of the semester, and that should improve by the end of the year. Bookings were strong. I mentioned there, 18% growth for Esker with differences by zone. So I mentioned the U.S. just performing consistently well or having more and more challenging base effect, that will essentially be even more the case in Q3, as Q3 last year was an exceptional quarter for the Americas. This is the record basically. So we should probably see probably slight decrease of bookings for the Americas in Q3, and that's going to be offset by Q4 as the base effect is going to be reversed since a lot of deals were accelerated into Q3 last year, Q4 was a little bit was actually lower than Q3, and we should see the opposite in 2023. So overall, we should see a solid performance for the U.S. for the entire year. With that slight difference between Q3 and Q4. France was down 9% for the reasons that I explained. We now think that despite the fact that the government has postponed that regulation, companies, like I said, are not going to slow down their decisions, and we expect H2, so to be very strong for the French market in terms of bookings. And clearly, France will be growing for the entire year, even growing significantly for the entire year, so very optimistic about that. Europe was very strong. Europe outside of France was very strong for the first semester, especially in the U.K. and Germany, where significant deals were signed. I don't necessarily expect that rate for the second part of the year. But the pipe is there. The trend is there, and Europe continues to possibly perform over the average for the company, so that's very good. And Asia Pacific, mentioned that as well, we should see an improvement coming from Asia for the second part of the year, still growing 9% in terms of bookings. So overall, a very solid performance. I'd like to remind everyone that we measure bookings by essentially the average amount of subscription revenue, which we're going to charge the customer over the duration of the contract. Our contracts are usually 3 years. So we averaged the subscription revenue, and that's what we use to measure the bookings. It should be noted that it's been our consistent accounting policy to charge the acquisition cost for those contracts to the year of signature, which means that the more we sign short term, the lower the profits. So that's kind of a -- this is something we need to be aware of for H2 in terms of profitability. Because it's counterintuitive as well. The more we signed in terms of contracts that the more -- the heavier basically in terms of cost, it's going to be for Q4. That is something that's true every year. So I'll just remind everyone about this because this is something to take into account. So let's analyze the variation in profitability that we've seen in 2023. So on this chart, what you can see for the first line is the level of profitability that we published. So it's 11.2% for H1 2023, 16.9% for H1 2022. So that's a decline of 5.7 points of profitability and 13.5% is what we published for the entire year of 2022. So that is 2.3 points higher than what we did for the first semester of 2023. So I explained already that the first reason for that is that accounting for our accrual for tax that we need to pay on stock-based compensation. And here are the numbers basically. So it's an expense in 2023 of nearly EUR 400,000 and it was actually a profit or a reduction of expense of more than EUR 2.2 million in H1 of 2022. And it was a positive impact as well for the full year of EUR 1.4 million. So obviously, that explains a lot of the change here in profitability. So if we recast the operating income, from that take that unusual effect. Then profitability for H1 2023 is at 11.6%. And 13.9% in 2022 and 12.6% for the whole year. So the decline is limited to 2.3 points between the semesters and 1 point versus what we did last year. Then we have another significant event here is the scope entry for Market Dojo. I mentioned the fact that its start-up company growing fast and losing money. We have them for 6 months in operations in 2023, EUR 600,000 is how much they lost in the semester. It was only EUR 100,000 last year because it was only 1 month. So if you correct the performance from the scope entry of Market Dojo then the profitability is 12.3% in 2023 versus 14.1% in 2022 and 13% for the full year. So the remainder of the decline essentially is 1.8% semester to semester and 0.7 points between what we did in the semester and what we did full year last year. So this is what I'm going to focus on, that 1.8-point and 0.7-point, trying to explain why we had a decline in profitability in the first semester. So the first thing is headcount. We are growing, we're hiring people. Headcount at Esker in the first semester was up 13% compared to what it was in the first semester of 2022. So that 113 more people on average during the semester compared to what we had last year. The first reason for that increase is, again, Market Dojo's scope entry, 28 people. If we correct that increase from that entry, we get to 10% increase in headcount, which is actually very reasonable compared to the growth that we've seen in the first semester of 15%. But still, it's an additional expense, and we did invest significantly during the semester, particularly in R&D, in sales and in marketing and customer satisfaction, which is extremely important longer term for the business at plus 33%. Those -- this increase in average headcount use -- I mean, mostly comes from hirings that were made in the first half of 2022 or at the beginning of the second half of 2022. And it's just basically a math effect on the average in 2023 compared to 2022 because we have already started to slow down recruitment at the end of last year, and we've continued that in 2023. This means that the increase in headcount in the second half of the year and in 2024, should be lower, helping us to improve profitability and get back to our standard in terms of profitability, if not higher. The other factor here that increased salary costs or personnel costs is inflation. And here, I basically have shown graphically the set of cost increase, the expense increase between H1 2023 and H1 2022 for personnel in general. So that is EUR 11.1 million that I have to explain. The first reason why that increased by EUR 11.1 million is headcount. I just talked about it. That's 44% of the increase. This is the green bar that you see on the left-hand side. The second reason why it increased is salary increase, including inflation. So we made the decision at Esker last year to basically reflect the level of inflation in the raise that we were giving to people focusing on keeping the talents that we had because we were seeing an increase in employee turnover, essentially due to competition on the market and pressure on salaries fundamentally. So we decided to respond to that, deciding that it was better long term for the company to keep the people even if we had to pay them more. So we basically had to decide to take the short-term hit just because longer term, it was much better to focus on keeping our talents and it actually worked, as you'll see on the next slide. But in the end, it's a EUR 2.3 million additional expense at least half of it is true inflation. Then we have Market Dojo entry for 9% of the increase of EUR 11 million and that tax accrual, which I talked about is included in that number as well. So that explains what we had this increase of cost semester to semester. As we turn over is what I just talked about. You can see that at the mid-2022, we saw a sharp increase of employee turnover from about 9% up to almost 16% in Q3. It was down in Q4 and down again in Q1 and Q2 of 2023. A lot of it had to do with the salary policy that we implemented which, yes, is a cost for the first semester and for 2023, but it's also a way to retain the talents that we have and not slowing down the growth opportunity, the growth trend that we're on at Esker. Inflation also is reflected in the price that we charge to existing customers. And this is what you can see on this chart, you can see that quarter-after-quarter, the effect of the revaluation of existing contract actually increases to a point that it reaches about 2% of company revenue in the second quarter of 2023. So a few points that I'd like to make on that. One, unfortunately, 2% increase of the revenue does not pay entirely for the increase of cost that we just discussed. So that's why we're having that tension on the profitability. The other thing is it's continuously increasing because in the contracts that we have with customers, we basically are able to reflect inflation at the anniversary date of the contract. So essentially, there is a delay between the point that inflation is actually happening and we have to increase salaries and the point that we can actually increase customer contracts. But it is growing quarter-after-quarter, as you can see on the chart. So essentially, as we get into the second half of this year and 2024, we should continue to see the positive impact of contract revaluation continue to improve. And I have to admit that it's true that we come from a period like a 20-year period without inflation. So it's true that we've been a little bit too soft sometimes with some customers and agreeing to not revalue or not revalue immediately contracts. So some contracts, we cannot increase short term. We will be able to increase them a little bit later. But I think it also explains why the impact of inflation on revenues a little bit lower than the impact from cost that we're on it. This has changed the policy has been changed. There is no contract with an existing or new customer that is being signed this year without an inflation clause. So that means basically CPI indexed. So this is giving us the full income statement that you can see on this chart. This is the French presentation on which you can see personnel and related taxes being almost EUR 55 million versus EUR 44 last year and that's the EUR 11.1 million increase that I was talking about explained by the things that I just discussed. You can also see the external purchases being up 20% or EUR 4 million. Part of it is due to growth. I mean we're growing, so we do more activity and that costs more. But growth is only 15%. That increases 20%. And the difference is due to inflation in general. That is the EUR 1 million that I was talking about a little bit earlier. You can see operating income is down 24%. This is what I started with, and EUR 9.8 million or a bit more than 11% of revenue. Everything that's down below the financial income, exceptional income is almost immaterial. Income tax is consistent with what we saw in the past, and that leads to net income being EUR 7.5 million versus EUR 10.1 million last year. That is the international presentation of the P&L. So the numbers are the same. It's just the presentation of operating income, which is a little bit different. It's by function as opposed to by nature of cost. On this, you can see the cost of goods sold increased due to volume and inflation but increased less than other costs that are more in control of that. And that means, especially for implementation services where the conservatism in headcount happened probably a little bit earlier than in the rest of the company. And so that means that gross margin is actually up from 69% in the first semester of last year to 71%. And in 2023, down below all the various departments see sharp increases basically of cost and that's due to exactly what I was talking about, the headcount increase and inflation leading to profitability, which I discussed already. On the balance sheet side, nothing much to mention. Goodwill remains what it is. We didn't -- that wasn't an acquisition this year. So it's essentially what it was last year. Financial assets, they do include EUR 4.8 million of long-term cash investments, which are really cash, but for some strange reasons from an accounting standpoint, we have to include that in long-term assets where we can really mobilize that when we want it should really be added to the cash level that you see at the bottom at nearly EUR 42 million. But it is included in this line, and I think it's worth mentioning. Accounts receivable changes in line essentially with activity levels and DSOs are stable. We actually saw an acceleration of DSO due to -- we had an incident last year with one our partners that was late at the end of June in payment for a significant amount of money and that wasn't the case this year. And so that actually helped improve our cash flow situation as we'll see in a moment. On the liability side, nothing much. I mean all the changes are fairly consistent and completely explained by activity levels. There is no significant change or variation that is worth spending time on. Consolidated cash flow statement. This is what I was talking about cash -- operating cash flows are up from EUR 9.2 million to EUR 13.5 million or a 47% increase. That's due to fundamentally the profitability of the business and also good control on DSO, plus no incident with partners as we had, unfortunately, the year before. That allows us to finance our investments, which are, again, fairly stable compared to last year, there was no acquisition. So actually, the investment -- the cash used in investment is actually down for that reason, and entirely financed by operations. That also is financing the level of dividends that we paid to shareholders at EUR 4.5 million compared to EUR 3.5 million the year before. All in all, that means that the cash on the balance sheet is up by EUR 1.2 million. In short, we had very solid revenue growth in H1, and we -- that allowed us to confirm our guidance for the full year at 14%, 15% growth, organic growth outside of currency impact. The booking performance was also strong despite some different performance in different geographies, but overall, we were able to grow the booking performance for the first semester and that wasn't a given in this environment. Bookings are expected to be very strong for France in H2. That's going to be partially offset by a more challenging base effect in the Americas for Q3, as I explained. But it will be better in Q4. So overall, the performance should be strong in the U.S. Again, we definitely see a decrease in profitability in H1, but a lot of it was expected because it's largely linked to that accounting entry for tax and to inflation that we've seen for the full year of 2023, the fact that we've already started to slow down recruitment is going to increase or show better in the second half of the year and in 2024. So that's going to help us to get our profitability level back to where it's supposed to be. And so we're forecasting 11.5% to 12.5% profitability for the full year, which is to be compared with 12.6%, which we had in 2022. So that's essentially on my end.

Thank you all for your time, and I wish you a good evening. Thank you all again, and talk to you next time. Thank you.

Thank you. Have a good evening. Bye-bye.