Inderes Oyj (INDERES) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Welcome to today's presentation, where we have the pleasure to present Inderes. To help us through today's presentation, we are joined by CEO, Mikael Rautanen. Today, the Q3 results you released yesterday morning, take a look at that and the expectation for the rest of the year. Let's get a little bit into the different business lines and the dynamics driving that. I also need to make a disclosure. Of course, we have both the technology and business partnership and you have an ownership in HC Andersen. So let's get this disclosure full out. As always, questions can be asked in the box down below. We will do the main presentation without any questions, but if it fits in. But don't worry, if there's any questions, we will pick them up in the end. But for now, I'll hand the call over to you, Mikael.

Thank you, Michael, and welcome, everyone. Thank you for joining the webcast, everyone watching online or the recording. So business review report Q3, let's dive in. First of all, the third quarter was a bad one, obviously. And that was mainly because that was because of the project revenue declining over 20%. Now one thing here affecting quite significantly is that last year, we had some bigger events that happened in September. And this year, those events happened in October. So that gives a timing effect affecting quite materially the Q3. So part of that is coming back in the October numbers. So a bit of a timing thing there. Also the last year Q3 was a record strong quarter for Inderes. So we were up against a really strong comparison period. At the same time, I need to admit that this year is another tough year. We're seeing cost saving pressure on our customer, which is reflected on our project revenue. So we're seeing some events being postponed, customers looking for a bit more cost-friendly options instead of doing, for example, bigger events. And that's why we did have to take down -- trim down slightly the full year forecast or guidance 2 weeks ago. So now we're guiding revenue to grow slightly or be at previous year level, and EBITA adjusted to be around 11%. Now it's not a major difference compared with our previous guidance of above 11.6%, but it's still a downgrade. And that's namely because of the project revenue on the cost side. No big -- no surprises. We remain cost disciplined, but we also continue to push forward the strategy we have chosen. We're not slowing down on the investments we need to take to drive forward the strategy and capture the value creation opportunities we have in the market that are obvious. And on the positive side, recurring revenue is still growing, and we're having good momentum on the Software side. We're growing the client base, upselling to the existing customer base. We're not seeing that we would be losing business. It's rather that the existing client base are very cautious in their spending. Positive signs on the market. Now it's been -- I'll come back to this at the end of my presentation, but it's been a quite tough market in terms of IPO activity and overall economic conditions in our core markets. We're now finally seeing some pickup and even more concrete signs of pickup, especially in the IPO front. So a lot of activity, especially in Sweden now and also some signs of pickup also in Finland, which is obviously the core market for us where we win the IPO clients with relatively good hit rate. So signs of recovery. And even though it's not a good quarter, we remain positive and optimistic about where Inderes is heading, how we're positioned in this industry and what kind of opportunities we have ahead of us given how the market is evolving and what's happening in the industry. We've been investing heavily after our IPO, and we're really well positioned to capture the opportunities in front of us. Going into the business lines. So Equity Research first. We're seeing a slight decrease in the contract portfolio. Churn has been mainly because of delistings. The customer retention, it continues to be really sticky. If we look at what's happening in the industry, this has been -- the whole market for commission research has been extremely challenging the past few years. But I think, I mean, the players who, in these situations, continue to invest and build a business with a long-term view, I think we will be in the best position when the market picks up. And obviously, there, AI is a major play. We're doing a lot of projects around AI right now where we're doing basically two things. So putting the workflows that are no longer makes sense to do with humans, we're doing those with building agents to handle those workflows and processes. So increasing efficiency significantly is what we aim for there. The human analyst is going to be still at the core of the operation, but we're going to be able to get a lot of efficiency there. And then tackling the scalability and obstacles to international scalability is another thing we're working on in the AI front. For example, more and more content that our team produces is already available in multiple different languages. So the language barriers are one example of the entry barriers or scalability barriers that we're tackling with the help of AI. So a lot of momentum going on there in the team and also excitement and also a lot of experimentation there. Community numbers. So our community remains vibrant and active. The key numbers are relatively stable if we look at the site visits. So annually, we have 20 million site visits on the Inderes platform alone, and that even doesn't count the third-party platforms through which we reach massive amounts of investors. Another AI example is the Inderes Forum, which has been a fantastic success in Finland. Internationally, we've been trying to find the recipe. First, we started off by building local forums to Finland and -- sorry, to Sweden and Denmark, and the local forums really didn't work out as we had hoped for. So we changed the strategy and now we've converted or migrated into one investment forum that is multilingual. So connecting investors, equity analysts and companies across language borders is the case here. So looking forward for a fresh start for the international growth there. So Research overall growth is challenging, but the business remains extremely sticky and revenue has been stable even though the contract portfolio declined a bit. Moving on to Events business. So really strong comparison period, Q3, and there's the timing effect of the events. Will they land on September or October? And last year was September. This year, it's October. So that brings some quarter-to-quarter volatility on that front. Then also customer cost pressure. Some events being postponed affects us on the project side. At the same time, we're seeing that the average production prices are still on the rise. So we've been able to upsell or increase our value -- increase our share of the kind of like event production value chain, which is part of our strategy there. And then on the positive side, recurring revenue is stable, and we're seeing traction in terms of number of customers picking up especially in Sweden. Now this -- when we win their companies, it's mostly these quarterly event productions that we do, which is fairly low price point to start with, but that's the spearhead that we use to get into the customers starting off with quarterly productions. Then when we build the relationship with the customer, we get into doing their Capital Markets Days, Annual General Meetings, other internal events and other type of events where there's a streaming or hybrid element attached to them. So that's been a very successful strategy in Finland. And of course, playing on that -- using that playbook also on Sweden opens up significant growth potential for this business in Sweden alone. You might remember that from the last quarterly report that we issued, we mentioned that we did a restructuring in the Sweden events business. Given our new strategy, we're implementing new operating model there and shifting the whole event operation into one Nordic operating model, in line with our strategy to build the leading Nordic IR-focused events agency. And those changes we did in Sweden, we're seeing better customer feedback, improved efficiency and also, it has freed up resources and focus for us to sales, which is, of course, really important. So we feel that, that was the right thing to do, and now we're moving on with a better focus and a much more solid foundation. On the Software front, we're quite determined in achieving market leadership in all the different product areas. So making progress toward that position. That's going really well. We launched the IR Suite, which is kind of like the unified platform that brings together the whole Inderes Interservice or product portfolio all on one technology platform. And the feedback we're getting from customers is just excellent. So instead of selling point solutions here and there, the customer can basically operate the whole Investor Relations operations through one platform. That brings simplicity, it brings cost savings. You get the synergies between the different service elements. You can build much more automation, you can build agentic workflows there and so forth and so forth. So we see that this is really not only where the industry is going, but where we can really create more value for our customers, and really make the life of being a publicly listed company easier and less painful and more cost efficient for our customers. So very good feedback from customers there. And that migration is now happening in -- starting from Finland. In Sweden, we have finalized the localization of the release distribution system. So we're up for -- ready to start selling that product as well. So that product is now available in Finland, Sweden and Denmark. A year ago we signed a significant international channel partner for the Videosync platform. Ramp-up or rollout of that project is going on as we speak, going very well, nearing completion. So that's also a major milestone for our software operation because after this, a significant part of Investor Relations events, both in -- not only in Nordics but also across Europe are going to be running powered by our platform, which is, we believe, the best platform for Investor Relations events in the world. Yes. And on the Software front, I just want to highlight what we said also in the strategy. We're making -- we'll continue to make significant investments in this business because we see interesting value creation opportunities in this part of the business.

Should we take some questions regarding the first part before we jump to the numbers?

Yes. Let's go.

Yes. The IR Suite, do you see increasing sales by the customers implemented? If I understand you correctly, it's almost rolled out by many of the Finnish customers. And I think as you also showed here on the picture, you have a widget. You don't have the AGM, but suddenly, you can connect it to that. So is it working as a sales machine also for you besides connecting all the different types of services you give? Are you seeing something by customers saying, okay, I actually don't have this that would fit into the IR Suite? So working a little bit as a sales machine.

That's the vision we have, yes. That's where we want to go, that it also supports sales. It kind of like opens up a digital sales channel towards the existing client base. So absolutely, that's where we're also driving that. Now that we have had customers for some weeks or months being onboarded to the system. I really can't say that it would be now yielding some closed deals. But at the same time, I mean the customers, especially in the SME side, small and mid-cap companies, they really seem to value their simplicity of having one supplier instead of buying bits and pieces here and there and trying to make sense out of that mess. So that is part of our pitch.

Yes. On the AI and the Research side, as -- of course, we work with it every day, so I see what is happening. But on the Research side, the next steps are that, as you said, the human task. Is that the entry-level analyst? There are 40 pages in the report that needs to describe markets and all the standard works that we need to go through as an analyst and understand. Is that the next part that you think the AI agents can take over and start producing, you might say, content? Then, of course, the analysts can then read and get more into and make better, but you have a good starting point. Is that the next steps you are seeing in the Research business?

I mean the Research workflow, you can map the workflow of an equity analyst in terms of putting up together a large report or a quarterly update report. And then you can slice that into different work parts -- workflow parts. And from there, we try to identify what are the workflows that we can automate completely or facilitate significantly with the help of agents, and those automate and then also be strict on which are the elements where you really need the human work and the professional work of the analysts. So -- and there's a lot of them as well. And then there's also the question of if there's fully AI-generated content, who's going to read it, who's going to trust it, so forth. So we still -- I want to highlight that we still believe that the human analysts, the brands of individual analysts will stay really relevant or even become more relevant in the industry when there's going to be more and more content flowing into the market. But really to build an agent form that will significantly increase the productivity of the research workflow, help analysts get rid of those like not so -- the workflows we don't enjoy. And then the second part is really help the scalability, especially in the international context. There we're seeing big leaps already.

And I guess your answer to my next question about is there's also a threat to your business, OpenAI hiring 100 Goldman Sachs entry levels. Is that -- it will be brands and by brands, we mean analysts. The final touched AI has proven according to a CTO at least by BlackRock, not being able to make alpha, not being able to have this feeling of what is a good investment, not but all the other works that you talked about. So you think that is your protection that you have built up brands, meaning analysts that actually people will listen to and have a trust for and not just looking at all the content that can be splashed out.

Yes. I mean the commissioned equity research, how we see it, it's kind of like a media business as well. I mean the community team that produces the content, they're saying that Netflix is their competitor. I mean we're competing of people's time. We're also making this industry, how we say, infotaining. Not just entertainment, but infotainment. So kind of like the educational aspect because it's going to be humans still owning the companies, and it's going to be humans running the companies that they -- these other humans own. And in between, there needs to be a link, someone who helps them to understand each other. Now -- and this goes back to the core of Inderes. We're not a banking business, we're not a transaction business, we're in the business of educating and helping investors and companies to understand each other better. That's the core of what we do. Now can we do that in a much better way with the help of AI? Yes. Is AI going to bring disruptive elements to that? Probably yes. Who's going to win that race? It's going to be the players that are more fast and more agile. Probably I would bet for companies like us that are relatively small and agile. So I think, of course, there's threats and opportunities. But with the history and DNA of this company, we've always got our edge from using new technologies and leveraging those opportunities faster than others, and being more curious on what we can do with these new technologies and tools. We've always been the underdog, the small player in the industry. And the kind of like hunger and curiosity towards these tools has always been a significant edge for this company. So I believe it's going to be -- if we can maintain that culture, it's going to go that way in the future as well.

Perfect. And then a little bit on the IPO market and the delisting. The first, there is a question here. Is it your feel that we are -- have seen the worst? Of course, there will be delistings, but that we are over the hump, you might say, about delistings of companies in the Nordic? That's the first one. We can take that.

Yes, I believe at the end of this year. 2025, it's not going to be -- we're still going to have a few IPOs this year likely and -- because there's a big pipeline of projects that have been worked on for a long time. And in a way, they're just push the button stage IPO process. So early next year...

Do we also see that in Finland now because I guess you will catch more business in Finland than in your whole...

Yes, exactly. Sweden moves first and Finland follows, I would say, as a rule of thumb. And well, I need to say like a year ago, we did say that there's a pickup coming up. And early this year, we said it's really picking up, and we saw a lot of activity and then came the Liberation Day. And everything was frozen again. And now after summer, it's picking up again. Now I need to put a disclaimer like if the market remains stable, I would bet it's pretty likely that we're going to see quite good inflow of new listings in the Nordics. But is there going to be some market turmoil again? No one knows.

No one knows that. And actually talking about Finland because I think that's where it's interesting, right, because you will catch the most business there. I think when we talked 1.5 years ago, you said there really is a very healthy pipeline of very interesting, and I guess also more mature companies than in many ways. Is that still the same? Have they all stuck on the sidelines or have they gone a little bit private? Do we still see that it's a very interesting pool you are working with on the early phases there in Finland?

Yes. I mean these companies are still in business, most of them. Some of them have been acquired or taken a different path than IPO, obviously. But I mean, I'm really active in the entrepreneur community in Finland. And I mean, like 15 years ago, entrepreneurs didn't see IPO as an option. And now, you go to talk any growth entrepreneur, most of them will say, "Well, IPO is kind of like one alternative we're going to have on the road -- down the road." So it's kind of like there's a cultural shift in smaller companies and growth companies having IPO as an option. And that's -- well, thanks for that and credit very much goes to the Nasdaq First North ecosystem that has been very -- I would say it has been a success story, but we're still in the early days. So hopefully, we can drive that ecosystem forward, not only with Nasdaq First North but also across Europe and then Spotlight and Nordic Growth Markets and so forth. So it's really about the ecosystem of capital markets and going public becoming relevant and cool again. I mean, last year -- it's more cool to go private than to go public, but I believe that's part of the cycle, just.

And I guess that's part of your business case also, making this easy because, of course, it's expensive and not been easy historically. I think we have taken what fitted into those -- the subjects, the business lines and so on. So you can take the numbers now, Mikael.

Yes, yes. Very good questions and good talk around that. Quickly just through the numbers. So Q3, this is the shorter business review. So it's not a full report. So we're taking advantage that you don't need to do the full report for Q1 and Q3 as a small company ourselves. But at the same time, we want to be as transparent as possible towards the market. So January-September revenue growth 2%, recurring revenue up by 5%, and project revenue down by 3%. And adjusted EBITA slightly below last year, 13% compared with 15% a year ago. And then in the first half, we had around EUR 600,000 restructuring costs related to the Sweden operation and some partnership agreements related to the Financial Hearings acquisition that we took a write-off on. No nonrecurring items in the third quarter. Here's the third quarter numbers. Revenue down by 7%, and that's driven by decrease in the project revenue of 28%, and recurring revenue up by 3%. International revenue stable. And well, here, you can see kind of like the recurring foundation that Inderes has. 3/4 of the revenue was recurring in the third quarter. So that's the foundation, the recurring base, and that's a really solid foundation that we have. EBITA margin 18% compared with 23.6% last year, and the decrease driven basically by top line. And 2 weeks ago, we had to lower our guidance for the full year. So previously, we were guiding for growth. Revenue growing from last year and adjusted EBITA improving from 11.6%. And now given the weakness in project revenue, we are guiding revenue to grow slightly or be at the previous year level, and EBITA margin to be around 11%. So not a significant change in our view, but still when the full year forecast is landing below your guidance, then the rule says you need to update the market. So here we are. We don't see this as really that dramatic, but -- and there are signs of pickup in the market at the same time. But we're like let's push through this year, another tough market conditions year and keep building this company in a disciplined way with long-term mindset, and things will pick up so that we get back towards the long-term financial targets that we have as a company combined revenue growth and profitability of 30%. That's the ambition. We've talked quite a bit about the IPO market and delisting market. I had a bit of background data around this. I'm just going to walk through this quickly, and then we'll jump to the Q&A part. A bit of data on the delistings in Finland and Sweden. So there is a bit of a peak here. And why? Like we always talk about the IPO activity, IPO market and the other side of coin is really the delisting side. And we have had a lot of significant customers that are like EUR 100,000 or EUR 200,000 annual revenue being taken away from the market. And obviously, for us, it means that we need to win quite a lot of new business just to remain on the same level. So that has been quite a headwind in 2022, 2023 with not many IPOs coming [indiscernible]. So if we look at the IPO activity, I would say like 2015-2020, that's kind of like probably closer to a normal run rate of the IPO activity, and 2021 was a complete anomaly, Inderes ourselves also going public that year. And then it's been a very, very quiet market so far. And this year, the first 6 months was very quiet, but now we're seeing a lot of activity, especially in Sweden picking up. But should it continue, we're hopeful about next year. And this is like really important in terms of are we operating in a growing market or a shrinking market. And market cycles come and go. We built this company still with a long-term mindset in a disciplined way. So this is the journey we're on to and that we keep building on and really the next phase for us is to -- with every of these three businesses that we have, and there's a lot of synergies between them to push for international growth. We still have some untapped potential in Finland and our Finland business is super solid on a super strong foundation, and we still can grow there. But really, the next big leap in terms of value creation for shareholders needs to happen by succeeding on the international markets. All right. So there we go.

Perfect. I think we catch most on the business line side. There's -- as always, as you all know, we will always ask share buyback program. You did it last year. Could that be on the table again this year? I know you can't comment on your cash position because you don't deliver cash flow statements or balance sheet in the interims. But your cash situation, your cash liquidity and so on, would that [indiscernible] for -- to do some besides your yearly dividends distributions to shareholders?

Share buybacks?

Share buybacks, yes.

Yes. Basically, well, that goes to the Board. But yes, we've used buybacks last year, early this year. And of course, it's in the toolbox and also stated in our payout policy that we do use buybacks.

Perfect. And then maybe on the Event business, do you see this only as macro driven? Or is there also something structurally? And it almost gets tedious always to mention AI, but I guess it's also -- AI is also starting to get inlay in the video production and so on. So do you see this as macro driven? Or is there some structural changes also in the, you might say, the Event business?

Macro driven?

Yes, Macro driven. You're meaning the customers, growing customers wanting more for their money and less expensive production. So that's what I mean by macro driven there. [indiscernible] uncertainty by customers who also affects you. Are you seeing anything structurally? Is there something changing in the event production field?

Yes. I would say the project revenue weakness is -- that's kind of like macro driven. Structurally, if we zoom out to this industry from 2020 until this year, I mean, we first saw a huge peak in demand because of the pandemic. So everything just went fully digital or virtual and huge boost in demand like we were growing like 100% at that time. And then when the pandemic goes away, it's a terrible hangover. I mean, like people [Technical Difficulty].

I think we lost the connection to Finland. Let's just have a few seconds and see if we can get him back.

Yes. And how we responded is that we transformed that business from like just webcast streaming into full-fledged hybrid events, online and hybrid events. So kind of like taking the physical event production part from the value chain as well and the streaming part and building a broader offering around that. Now that was why, after the boost in COVID, we grew revenue significantly. And when the market started to decline, we were able to maintain that level of revenue because we started to build this capability, and we were successful in upselling that to our client portfolio. And especially with the AGMs growing in that part, especially the Event production part, that really was where we were able to offset the kind of like COVID pullback in the kind of like virtual part. Now that was a, I would say, pretty good strategic move that we did. And now we're seeing that kind of like first, it was all digital, then the customers want all physical events back. And now we're moving -- like this is structural. Now we're moving towards more hybrid. And kind of like hybrid is coming back, online is also like -- with Investor Relations, especially online is coming back. And of course, we're seeing that, that is helping us as a structural trend when we look at the Events business specifically. And then within the Events, of course, Investor Relations is our core focus area. And I believe -- I mean, in Investor Relations, the world is going transparent. It's going real time. It's going democratic. You need to give the same information for everyone at the same time. It needs to be hybrid or it needs to be online. So I would not say that the Investor Relations would go to physical only because the industry like hybrid fits so well into Investor Relations and AGMs specifically. So I would say that there's like also -- outside the macro, there's like positive structural trends in the events industry for us being a hybrid and online-focused player, given like the cycles and the trends we've seen after -- in the pandemics and after the pandemic. It's been really about just quickly adapting to these really fast-changing market conditions. And I think our team has just done a fantastic job in that space, especially in building the capabilities to do these like the biggest IPOs in the whole Nordics. We're doing them end-to-end. It's been quite a push to build that type of capability. And at the same time, I mean, the customer service, the customer feedback we're getting is just fantastic. And of course, it speaks -- the market share in Finland, for example, speaks for itself in the AGM part, for example.

Okay. That was the final question. I will let you off the hook, Mikael, and see you next time for the -- I probably see you before, but we will see you next time for the full year results. May everybody, have a nice day.

Thanks.