Exsitec Holding AB (publ) (EXS) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Welcome to this quarterly update for the Third Quarter of 2021 for Exsitec. Like the last time, we have decided to do this in English going forward. And talking now is me, Johan Kallblad, and I have been the CEO of Exsitec for a little over 11 years now; and my CFO, Anna Gustafsson, is also here with me. I think this presentation will be around 15 minutes, and it is possible to ask questions. The other hand raise function in Zoom or by sending an e-mail to [email protected]. And I will start off by talking a little bit about our business and what it is that we do and after that, we will cover Q3 financials and talk a bit about our priorities going forward. So our mission is not that complicated. We exist to help primarily medium-sized businesses use digital tools to improve their operations, and this can be things like reduce administration through automation or use data for better decision-making and for forecasting or adopting e-commerce or managing a sales force. So our approach to this is that we have made a curated selection of software products for different business use cases, and we guide the customer to a good combination of software to use. The software is cloud-based and sold through a subscription model where we have a revenue share partnership with the software developer who owns the IP. We then add integrations that we develop in-house that the customer also gets usage to through a subscription model, and then we do the customer success portion. We configure the software products. We train the users and we make sure the customer is able to get value out of the software. So we have a large professional services organization that does this. And lastly, we offer a support service that is a single point of contact for everything we deliver, and this helps us maintain a very long relationship with the customer. And the idea here is to earn trust and scale the engagement with the customer use case by use case. So it really is a land and expand model that we're operating. Looking at this one here, these are the primary software providers that we work with, the software developers. We feel we have a reasonable balance where we are not dependent on only one software developer. The largest one is Visma, however, and the largest 4 together make up 70%, 75% of the software revenue. So, we have a revenue share partnership with the software providers, where we market and sell the software to new accounts and make the customer successful in using the software over time. At this time, we have more than 2,000 companies in the Nordics as our customers, and we think going through us is a quite efficient way for a software company to reach a market of scale if they are interested in reaching medium-sized companies in the Nordics. Looking at us here, we set up the core of this business model around 10 years ago, and we've had a solid and profitable growth since we reached scale, which was around 2014. And today, we're just under 500 employees in Sweden, Norway and Denmark. And as we have become comfortable with our core business model, we've been increasingly confident in adding growth through acquisitions, and we see M&A as an interesting growth opportunity and a tool going forward also, and I'll get back to that a little bit later on. Another important DNA of Exsitec is to hire and develop talent. We don't really expect to find people that are already skilled in the exact products that we work with. So instead, we try to find great people and train them, and this is also a great culture builder. We've been named one of the most popular employers in Sweden for university graduates in the technology field the last 2 years. And this fall, we have added, actually in this quarter, Q3, we've added around 65 people into our trainee program. Most of them are in Sweden, but we also have progress in place in Norway and Denmark at smaller -- at a smaller scale. So, on a very high-level summary of the quarter is we saw extreme growth, almost doubling year-over-year. A lot, of course, as a result of acquisitions, but also a very solid organic growth. We had a lot of focus on Norway. We completed an acquisition there late Q2, the opening up of the border and so on has really fueled a number of initiatives that we do with Norway. We think that will be a good platform for future growth for us. And in general, it's a lot of back to normal operations. We've been encouraging more traveling and more physical meetings, more work from the offices. Something that's the truth in our field of work and has been for a long time is that there's a general shortage of skilled staff in the IT field. So we've put a lot of emphasis into recruiting. And this is what also we try to mitigate in our large trainee program. So, going into the financials for Q3 here. Overall growth, like I said, Q3 really strong, total growth of 97%, where 22% is organic and the rest is through acquisitions. On the organic growth, we feel that Q3 of 2020 was not really affected by COVID for us in terms of revenue, so we feel that this is real growth, and Q3 of 2020 was also a strong quarter -- or was a strong quarter. We've been seeing good market conditions overall, maybe Sweden being the strongest, year-to-date we're up 72% in revenue. Looking at the split here, something I haven't really shown before. We are organized in 5 business units, 3 of them are in Sweden, plus Denmark and Norway. The largest one is ERP in Sweden, which is right under 29% of revenue. It's the operations around Visma and Medius primarily. Also in Sweden, we have the Insights business, which is 21% of revenue. It's budgeting, data analysis and visualization using tools from Qlik and planacy and Microsoft. This is the fastest growing of our business areas right now. And the customer experience business is just over 18% of revenue, its CRM, e-commerce, custom solutions with tools from Litium and sugarcrm. Then Norway is 23% of the business. If this was in Sweden where we are divided into business units, it would primarily be in the ERP business and the same goes for Denmark, which is just under 9% of our revenue. So, looking at EBITDA results, like I said, focus was growth. And Q3 is always our weakest quarter. We did increase the EBITDA a little bit, coming in at SEK9 million compared to SEK8 million a year ago. Talking about the margin, you can see that the margin last year was a lot higher than what is normal for us. And if anyone remembers this call from a year ago, we talked about the margin being around 5% to 7% higher in Q3 of 2020 than what is normal for us, partly this was due to some one-off accounting effects connected to our IPO and partly due to COVID. So this year, we scaled up recruiting and added 65 people to the training program, and these normalized business conditions drive some more personnel and external costs also. So the profitability here is exactly in line with our internal forecast and we're actually quite satisfied with the financial results. We do think that the driver -- the underlying business model actually gradually improves margins since the revenue from recurring software licenses may require relatively little work for us. So going into that slide -- in the quarter, we actually had a solid growth in all major revenue streams, but the one growing the fastest is the recurring revenue from software. And for the quarter, this made up a little over 31% of our total revenue as compared to just under 28% last year, for a total growth of 125%. And year-to-date, we're up 106% from last year. The portion of software depends a little bit on the product mix. E-commerce, for instance, has a lower portion of packaged software revenue, whereas invoice automation has a larger portion. So this can vary a little bit over time, but the long-term trend is very clear. And looking at the total here, LTM and the revenue breakdown, onetime licenses are practically gone. The recurring software revenue is slowly but surely growing as part of the total business, LTM, we're at 29.3% of the total business. We also see a good growth in contracted support revenue, which is an add-on service to the software we deliver where we act as a single point of contact for the customer. But still, the largest source of revenue is from professional services related to implementing and maintaining the software that we sell. We don't really sell consulting services outside of our product delivery. So we are mostly dependent on having strong software sales. We're not really dependent on the overall market for IT consulting services. All right. So moving in and elaborate a little bit more on priorities going forward here. I want to reiterate this, we have no plans on becoming a software company. We're a value-added reseller and implementation partner and a good marketplace. If we want to reach a market at scale in the Nordics, you can go through us if you're a software developer and that's our place in the value chain. And we feel that this is less risk and the investment that we do, they are related to integrations between software products and to hire and develop competence. But it's a lot less risk than trying to build something that you hope that people will want to buy in the future. So we feel, of course, that the business model around SaaS is very attractive with recurring revenue streams and stickiness in the customer relationship. So it's actually one of those situations where we're very much aligned in the interest of the software developer of us and our customer. We all want the customer to be successful over time in adopting technology. So, nothing really new in terms of business priorities. We do want to increase our footprint at existing customers by having a relevant offering and making it easy for our customers to grow with us by having ready-made integrations and a single point of contact support. It's easier to buy something, an additional automation software from us if we can provide a single point of contact for the support. And then you know that it's going to work together with the other things you already have in place, and also from a partner that has earned trust, right? So, we also want to invest in people for sales and marketing and for professional services and talent development in general. We do feel that there are still significant opportunities in continuing the selective M&A, the customer base or to add to what we can do for our existing customers. So moving into M&A a little bit. It has been a priority, and is a priority going forward with M&A and we are looking for ways to get access to a new recurring customer base that can be in the target market for our current offering. And the other thing we are looking for is getting a better offering that can benefit existing customers. An example is the acquisition of Vitari in Norway that added a large amount of customers on a platform that we know really well, financial systems from Visma. We've done a good job in Sweden in cross-selling other software components into a similar customer base. So we feel that we have a good blueprint for growth here. We have completed one acquisition after the quarter when we acquired Zedcom. They are the second largest reseller of Visma.net Financials and the largest reseller of Visma.net project management in Sweden. Exsitec was already #1 in Visma.net Financials and #2 in project management. So this really affirms our market position as the market leader on the fastest-growing ERP platform in the Swedish mid-market. Zedcom also has a business in managed infrastructure services that's new to us, where we know there is a demand from existing customer base who are on a cloud conversion journey, and we think we have a business opportunity in acting as a single point of contact and be a better partner for our customers. So we paid a total of SEK65 million, partly cash and partly in liquidity. We already did a press release on this, so you can get more details there if you want. My last slide really here is in the quarterly report. As you may have seen, we updated our financial goals. The reason why is that we feel the market conditions have been very favorable and the prior goals don't really reflect our ambitions. So we also think that there is a long-term margin opportunity with a larger portion of our revenue being driven from software. So the new goal is to surpass the turnover of SEK1 billion with an EBITDA margin of 20%, sometime in the period 2023 to 2025. Our simulations show us that this should be possible to attain with the current capital structure without issuing new equity by channeling our cash flow into acquisitions. This does not necessarily mean that we will not issue new equity if the right acquisition opportunity arises. So on acceptance, we will use all the tools in the toolbox and take the best decision for the product situation ourself. And with this, I think this concludes the presentation. And if there are any questions here, please feel free to ask. You can always e-mail questions at [email protected], and I don't think we see any questions at this time. So thank you so much for your attention, and wish you all a good day and good quarter going forward.