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

I want to wish you very welcome to this year-end report and quarterly update from Exsitec. We are going through the financial results of 2022. And talking now, it's me, Johan Kallblad. I've been the CEO of Exsitec since 2010. And with me is also my CFO, Anna Gustafsson. I expect the presentation to be around 15 minutes, and it's possible to ask questions via the hand raise function in Zoom or by sending an e-mail to [email protected]. I will start off by talking a little bit about the business, what it is that we do. And after that, we'll cover the yearly and the Q4 financials and the priorities going forward. Looking at the business, we exist to help primarily medium-sized businesses use digital tools to improve their operations. And this can be things like reducing administration through automation and use data for better decision-making and forecasting and such. We like the medium-sized companies because they are large enough to get a really good return on their investments in automation and they're small enough to actually listen to our advice, and there are many of them. As we identify our target customers, there are around 37,000 possible customers in our markets, Sweden, Norway and Denmark, and we have around 4,000 Exsitec customers today. So what we've done to make it easier for these customers to -- these companies to invest in digital tools is to make a selection of relevant software products for different business use cases where we act as a reseller for the software company. And we do in-house development of integrations between the software products that we sell and we add professional services and a single point of contact support to keep the customer successful in using the software for a long time. And the idea here is that with a component-based approach, the implementation projects can be relatively small, and we earn trust and scale our engagements with the customer over time. So it's a land and expand business model. Typically, around 2/3 of our organic growth comes from existing accounts and 1/3 is from sales to new customers. These are the primary software providers that we work with, where we feel it's a reasonable balance where we are not dependent on only 1 software manufacturer. We have a revenue share partnership with the software providers where we market and sell their software to new accounts and make the customer successful in using the software over time. And since we have an existing relationship with around 4,000 companies in the Nordics that are our customers today, our sales and our customer success organization is an effective way to reach a market of scale. And one of the interesting things that we do is to combine the software components in a modular way. So we've created packages to fit different industries. These packages are often made up of the same foundational components with some industry-specific add-ons. The customer base is spread over quite a few different areas of operations with some clusters. We've seen a lot of growth, for instance, in the construction and installation space over the last few years. But it's a good spread throughout different industries and no one customer is more than around 1% of our total revenue. The core of this business model was something we set up around 10 years ago, and we've had a solid and profitable growth every year since we reached the scale here. And as we have become comfortable with the core business model, we've been increasingly confident in adding growth through acquisitions to be able to increase the size of our customer base faster than what we can organically. At this moment, we are around 550 employees in Sweden, Norway and Denmark. Hiring and developing talent, it's an important DNA for Exsitec, and 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 over the last 3 years. This fall, we added more than 85 people into our trainee program, most of them in Sweden, but we also have a large program in place in Norway and a smaller one in Denmark. So with that, we'll jump into the financials for 2022 and Q4, in particular. So summarizing the quarter. First, importantly, we keep a solid financial growth 19%, which is -- it does not take into account the divestment of a business unit that we did in Denmark. So comparable growth is probably somewhere 22%, 23% compared to last year. I spend a lot of time working with the new leadership in Norway, and we do see really encouraging signs of a turnaround there where we've had a weak financial performance in Q2 and Q3 in particular. And also, I'm very proud of the financial team that has handled an IFRS conversion and more details on that on the next slide. So if you've had time to look in our report, we transitioned to IFRS from the local K3 accounting principles. The reason for this is that IFRS is a preference from international investors, and we want to make it easier for them to invest in Exsitec. There are some changes in our financial reporting and metrics due to this. The main ones, looking at the income statement, is that leasing costs are deducted from external expenses and instead show up as depreciation further down in the income statement, but still included in EBITDA, leasing. We also do net reporting of revenue from software sales. So this lowers revenue, but doesn't change profits. The part of a purchase price in an M&A transaction that requires a prior owner to stay on as an employee is reclassified as a personnel cost. We often use requirements like this as part of both vendor loans and earn-out contingencies. And in our reporting, we try to show this clearly. So a reader can understand what is what here. Affecting both balance sheet and income statement is that immaterial assets from an M&A transaction is divided into 3 parts: brand and customer base and goodwill, where the first 2 are depreciated linearly. And like I said, leasing assets like office space is treated as a fixed asset being depreciated as we use it. So also some changes in the definition of operating cash flow due to the depreciation of leasing assets that comes further down in the income statement. So more on that, obviously, you can read in the report. Going into the numbers, we've spent a lot of time on consolidation in the quarter of the business, specifically spending a lot of focus in turning around the business in Norway with some changes in the leadership and a better focus on cost control. In the other markets, we had a more steady situation. Total growth of -- in the numbers of 19% in the quarter. And like I said before, these numbers are not adjusted for the divestment of the retail point-of-sale business in September of 2022 in Denmark that contributed around SEK 5 million to SEK 6 million in Q4 of 2021. So true growth around 22%, adjusting for this divestment. For the year, overall growth, 43%. Organic growth throughout the year has been around 10%, with a number varying a little quarter-by-quarter. It's understated for the quarter on the first page of the year-end report since, like I said, we don't account for the divestment in Denmark. But calculating organic growth in an integrated business is not an exact science. So it's actually been pretty stable throughout the years in terms of new sales. And we could have grown more. We've struggled a bit with personnel turnover and especially in acquired units. Early in the year, we covered some of this by using subcontractors, but later in the year, we'll focus more on training new staff. The market demand has not really changed over the years, but it's been on a healthy and stable level throughout with the exception of e-commerce, where we feel that the demand has been weak in the later part of the year. Going through in a little bit more detail as in our business units here. Sweden has a really strong quarter with good growth, solid earnings. EBITDA margin is a fraction lower than last year, which is entirely caused by weaker demand in business unit specialized in e-commerce that we acquired in Q2 of 2022. We think long-term growth in business-to-business e-commerce is a great opportunity for us. But in the short term, it's not great. What is -- it's not a disaster either, but it's not performing on the level that we wanted to. So what is great, however, is the stability and growth in financial automation software where we sell products from Visma, Medius and Planacy. Norway is weak compared to 2021. But as you can see here, we have been on a negative slope for some time and it's actually turned around. So comparing to the last quarter and last quarters, we see good improvement. My view is that the leadership with support from Sweden has initiated a tremendous turnaround. What's happening is that we have had good growth in cloud solutions for some time, but we've had a large dependency on legacy software where the new revenue streams have not been enough to compensate for the older ones. And cost control has not been in place to adjust for that, but we think we're very well positioned and we should see a strong improvement year-over-year going forward in Norway. In Denmark, we divested our retail point-of-sale business in the end of the third quarter, which would have contributed somewhere SEK 5 million to SEK 6 million to revenue. So growth is actually not bad. We have not, like I said before, done a pro forma of the old financial numbers here. So we see actually us reaching the same revenue even though we divested a business unit. So really nice organic growth there. And operational EBITDA is not great with a lot of investment in new sales, but we do feel pretty good to have done a reformatting of the business while making money. So if I summarize profitability in Q4, it's normally a pretty good quarter. This was our best Q4 to date with an adjusted EBITDA of SEK 21 million -- SEK 28 million. The margin dilution was in the Norwegian business that performed around SEK 4 million worse in Q4 '22 compared with the same period in '21. But the speed going out of the quarter is a lot better than what we had going in. All in all, we do feel good about the quarter and the year. We've had a lot of things to work with concerning both personnel turnover, primarily in acquired units and a weaker performance in Norway and the reformatting of the business in Denmark and the conversion to IFRS accounting principles, and we still closed out the year with solid growth in earnings. To be honest, quite a few things that happened, didn't go fully according to plan, but the stability in the business model is a strength, and we feel that we are in really good shape going into 2023. License growth, again, seems a bit slow in Q4 compared to Q3. There were some effects of changes in Norway here that affects the numbers. The comparison with maybe SEK 1.5 million. And again, also a negative effect from divesting the retail point of sales business in Denmark of around SEK 3 million. And these numbers are absolute and not pro forma, the historical numbers. So with a fair comparison, growth was around 6% to 7% quarter-over-quarter in Q4 compared to Q3. Elaborate a little bit more on the priorities going forward here, I wanted to share some information. I don't share that much because I've been getting a lot of questions on the general market conditions. So I thought it might be of interest to share a little bit about our sales pipeline. This is a picture of our sales pipeline in our CRM for -- concerning new sales month-by-month and the size of the pipeline over the last couple of years. We do see the sales pipeline being quite strong and quite stable with an overall positive trend. We had something of an explosive growth in 2020 to 2021 when we came out of the first phase of the pandemic. This was driven also by M&A, but also growing underlying market. Right now, it's not explosive growth, but still very healthy. Again, this is for concerning new sales and new commitments. The bulk of our revenue is in existing customers doing what they already did and this does not -- this is not covered in this graph here. The difficult factor we saw in Q4 was that the deals took on average almost 50% longer time from lead to close. This is based on around 300 deals. So a fairly large data set. We did do the same number of deals for the same order value. So I guess it's fair to say that we have to work harder for the same outcome, but it's an outcome that's not really a cause for concern. We feel the overall market is pretty good. Another interesting thing that has the potential to affect us a lot going forward, especially in Norway. We have a large customer base, both in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, running the European financial system, Visma business as the core of their operations. This is a very functional and flexible software, but it's running on private installation and not in the public cloud. It also requires an installed client and it's not browser-based. And during 2022, Visma in Norway made a limited launch of the next-generation software here that has the same core and functionality that runs on the cloud with a browser-based user interface. We need to retool some of the back end in the existing implementations. But for the user, this is very attractive to get the modern user experience and no more upgrade projects without having to convert or lose data and having to reimplement and retrain in functionality. So this is the largest customer base we have with around 600 customers in Norway, 350 in Sweden and 80 in Denmark. We've run 10 customers in a pilot, and we have some 15 to 20 project commitments with more than 10,000 hours of project work to look forward. So a really interesting initiative from Visma that has the potential to affect us a lot going forward. So looking at business priorities for 2023 as we leave 2022 behind. Obviously, a lot of challenges and uncertainties in the world around us. But what has remained strong all year is the demand for digital solutions, and we don't see this changing, rather the opposite. Our sales pipeline is strong as it ever is -- as strong as it ever has been. So we will be mostly restricted by execution. The internal challenges we had in 2022 were, to a large extent, results of large acquisitions in 2021, where we didn't have enough control of the business in some cases and also failed in terms of corporate culture, resulting in high personnel turnover and a huge need to find and train new people. Going into 2023, we think that we're in really good shape. There will be challenges, of course, but we have a lot to work with on developing existing accounts even if the M&A activities slow up and the new sales take longer time. So no real changes in terms of strategy. We're executing on a business model we've implemented and refined for over 10 years. So we do think we should be able to continue on a long-term profitable growth journey. Closing in here. We need to change our dividend policy because the old one was based on cash flow from operations, which actually changes quite a bit due to IFRS. So it's not a sound basis for a dividend policy. The Board has adopted a new dividend policy saying that the dividend should be 40% of the profit after taxes and take into account consideration our financial position, capital structure and growth opportunities. And the dividend proposal for 2022 is SEK 1.75 per share. It's up from SEK 1.50 per share last year. And this concludes the presentation. And if there are any questions, please feel free to ask. You can also always send an e-mail to [email protected], and we'll answer it as best as we can.

We had a question from [ Karl Nurimi ].

Hello, can you hear me?

Yes, I can hear you.

Great. A couple of questions from my side. Maybe if we start with the organic growth here. A little bit lower than what we're used to see here in Q4 and you say it longer sales cycles, et cetera. Do you think this was more of a one-off effect in Q4? Or should we expect a bit slower growth also during the first half of 2023?

I think there are 3 things affecting the organic growth that made it seem lower. One is actually probably a mistake or something that we didn't have time for because we spent a lot of time doing IFRS conversions and some of the [ prices ]. So we didn't bother actually to do go in and do a pro forma. We divested a business unit that affected and we actually cover for that with organic growth. So actually, we start on minus because of the divestment, we should maybe have taken that out of the comparisons. But the numbers are the numbers. So I mean, we're fine with that over time, but that does affect us in Q4 because we owned that business unit up until the end of Q3. So that's one portion. That's a few percent there, maybe 3%. The second one is capacity restrictions in terms of where we actually early on in the year, we relied a little bit we had customer engagements where we relied on subcontractors. And actually, I'm not a huge fan of using subcontractors for other than specific needs. So as we [indiscernible] through those -- some of the existing customers, sometimes you have to do a delivery using subcontractors because you can't honor the agreement you have with the customer and -- if you don't have enough staff. But sometimes you can actually -- over time, you have to make sure that you balance your delivery time to the time where you can actually complete the delivery. So we've relied less on subcontractors in the latter part of the year and try to rely more on training and finding people organically, and that has limited and delayed some of the project deliveries. So that's also something that we don't -- that does not worry us really going forward. Thirdly is the overall demand. And there, we do see one of the business areas. So we have 4 business areas in Sweden. And one of the business areas is around the e-commerce space. We don't work that much with e-commerce like business-to-consumer e-commerce, even though there's some of that. But this -- we want to work with business-to-business e-commerce, but we see a weakening demand there compared to what we expected. So that's in one of our business units, we do see a weaker demand. And that's probably fair to assume that it will be a little bit weaker for some time. So yes, so a little bit of -- some 2/3 probably internal -- one thing is probably just how we do the reporting and how it [indiscernible] organic growth. One part is actually a temporary thing where we move from subcontractors to using our own staff, and it takes some time to train and develop. And the third one is probably [indiscernible].

Yes. Because I have maybe a follow-up, but it's more kind of related to the spot on acquisition, because when I look in the report, it seems like it contributed with some, I think, SEK 42 million, SEK 43 million for the year from May to December. But it also with a loss, it seems like, at least from the reporting side, I don't know if -- can you confirm that spot on with the loss for the year or how should we see it?

Some of it I think is the contingencies for the spot cost. But that's spot cost...

And it's fair to assume, I guess, that the margins were down in the spot on year-over-year?

Yes.

Yes. Okay. And then one more on the margin side, I guess, looking into the next year, we have salary increases, et cetera. But I guess we should expect an improvement ...

Congratulations, Karl.

Yes, maybe not for me, but we'll see. But I mean, we will see improvement in the margin in Norway? It seems like or it seems like you're on the right track there I think. And then I mean Sweden is, in my view, doing quite well for this year and also in Q4 here. But what should we expect maybe more on the margins in the different regions?

Yes. We don't offer guidance on margin really going forward, but we can say that the priority is to -- so I do think we've taken good strides in Norway already, and we'll see that come to fruition during next year, and that affects us. I mean even in the Q4, on the overall the total margin has actually affected negative 2% by the performance in Norway, but the performance has actually turned around and it's a lag in the performance. It's a lag here, but it actually in comparables to total margin is -- in the total business is down around 2% based on the performance in Norway Q4 2022 compared to 2021. So we should expect that to improve and that negative effect to be removed, right? And then in the rest of the business, we are -- as for like the e-commerce business that has not performed great. We are -- I mean, we're focusing obviously organic growth in the areas where we do feel that the market is better. So I mean -- but this is -- it's always like that. If you have many different businesses -- if you have many different units and you sell many products, they can't all be top performing all the time. So I mean, it's always -- it's going to be something else that's not great. But we -- our ambition is to improve margins next year even in the businesses that are not -- don't have the specific situation that we had in Norway. So yes.

That's very clear.

I was afraid I was a little bit unclear ...

No, no. I think it was --- it feels quite reasonable. But I mean, yes, given your exit rate in Norway, it seems like it should be -- and also with the Visma cloud launch, it should be going better, I guess.

Yes, that will be something we will work on for the next 4, 5 years. The conversion, this is not easy. The smaller projects can maybe do a conversion in a week or two, but the larger ones will be 6 months or 9 months.

And will that also support your top line to quite a good extent?

It will support our top line in the consulting services. And then it will actually -- as I'm sure you are aware as being an industry analyst, the cloud products, the older installed products typically had a revenue model where there was a lot of revenue on -- when you deployed the license and when you did the first installation, whereas in a cloud world, you move into a linear model where usage is driving the revenue. So it should, over time, but that takes time to convert through that. But there is potential to increase top line in -- temporarily during the period where we do the conversions for a few years and then ongoing perpetually for -- in the new -- in the license model -- in the [indiscernible] based license model. So yes, sure. Do we have any more questions?

No, no more questions.

Thank you very much for the questions, and thank you for participating in this call. So looking forward to seeing you all going forward. And thank you.