Kreate Group Oyj (KREATE) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, everyone. I'm Mikko Laine, CFO in Kreate. Welcome to walk through our '24 results with me shortly, and I will highlight both Q4 and the full year results. As headline says, our profitability improved last year despite the revenue decreased about 14%. Good result in our opinion, taking into consideration market situation and the overall global situation, a lot of turbulence overall. Some key highlights from this page. Let's start from Sweden, the second bullet point. Our full year revenue increased almost 50% and Q4 was EUR 10 million. So strong growth there, and we are really happy with both the growth and the profitability level in Sweden. They are doing extremely well there. And the second one is the order backlog from this page that we turned the trend back upwards from Q3 levels. And also compared to last year, we are only 10% below the last year-end level. The profitability guidance, dividend, I will walk through later in the presentation. Some highlights. A few big projects. We were able to close the projects before the estimated schedule, both in Helsinki and in all region, 2 big projects. We celebrated our 10 years of Kreate journey in autumn, all the personnel were invited to party with us. And although it's only 10 years, if we calculate the companies that founded Kreate, we have almost 300 years together history. So a lot of knowledge, a lot of understanding both from the market and customers and long working history for some people over 40 years in company already. And from the new projects, we got the Koskela tram depot into implementation phase and a nice swing upwards in our order backlog over EUR 50 million from that project. If we look at our strategic targets that we set in May '24, we said that the profitability level we aim during the strategy period is above 5%. We improved 0.8% our profitability last year and now on level of 3.2%. Our guidance for this year was declining revenue. The result was minus 14%, which was in line with the guidance. And from this year onwards, we aim to achieve 5% to 10% growth every year, but the trend was downwards, but it was expected before we started the year. Indebtedness, our net debt-to-EBITDA ratio, we aim to set it below 2.5 level. The full year '24 was on 2.0, which is a good level, thinking the industry we are working and the project business that we are operating in. And dividend, I will come back to this later, but the proposal from the Board of Directors is to give a dividend of 100% of last year's results. So we are continuing the increasing dividend trend. Some operational highlights linked to strategy. We aim to be the best place for the best experts in this industry. Our employee satisfaction NPS was 49, and the number of employees is way beyond 500 already. So we are lucrative employer in markets we operate and people who work with us, the infra specialists and kind of professionals that are in this industry are happy to work with us. We want to be the most desirable partner in this industry. The customer satisfaction index measured again with NPS is extremely high, 82. And one example of being a good partner for other companies in the industry is that we won Vantaa tram project together with GRK, which is normally one of our competitors. But here, we made a team and won a major project, which is now in development phase and not yet in our order backlog at the moment. And if I take the fourth one is the selectiveness and the -- being nimble and fast what we do -- and reliable on what we do. So we aim for high profitability, and we must be agile, and we must comply with our own risk policies and guidelines that we have set for ourselves. Market is a bit kind of on 2 sides. If we look at a bit longer perspective, it seems to be rather positive. I come back to this later on. And if we look shorter term, there is still some kind of an increased competition in smaller projects, not that complex projects. But if we look at the businesses like bridges and foundation and engineering construction, green color on Q4, special foundation in KFS Finland side, also green there. So compared to the Q3 situation, it's a bit more positive view how we see it at the moment. To long-term outlook, which I mentioned certainly, here are kind of 3 topics that we see that will support our business in coming years. Military mobility, there are discussions on EU level. There are NATO requests or demands for Finnish infrastructure. And of course, we, as a nation, are highlighting certain areas and certain investments on that area, which requires infra construction in many cases. Urbanization continues. We see our rail business is growing, and there are potential big projects coming to our order backlog. And green transition, the estimation is that there will be several billions of investments only this year. And if we look the longer term, the potential that is there is huge. And we see already, especially on data center side that a lot of projects are already ongoing or in starting phases and other industries most likely will follow in coming months and years. Then back to our numbers, order backlog trend is now changed. EUR 177 million is the order backlog in total and of which about EUR 120 million, we estimate that will actualize during the year we have just started. This doesn't include yet the possible implementation phases of those big projects, which are our Tampere passenger rail yard and Vantaa tram projects. And this -- the best estimate is that the first one will turn into execution phase during the first half of the year and the second one during the second half of the year. But when it will happen, we cannot estimate in detail because we are not the deciding part on that. Then if we see what changes in general, there are ongoing on economy and market. We see that both inflation and interest rates are declining, and we are more or less on the long-term normal levels on both. And we see that, that will feed on investment side that it's more predictable and more normal situation. And we hope that the final investment decisions will take place in coming months and will support the private side demand on infra construction. And if we see the government side, the investments that the government is setting to transportation is several billions. And this we see to actualize during the second half of this year and implementation phase is mainly '26 and onwards, but positive demand impact on market overall. So we see that even though it's a bit foggy, still there is light and many different drivers that support the business development. EBITA increased 0.8 percentages and last quarter was 3.7%. And this is quite predicted result if I see it that way that the net sales revenue declined a bit, and we continue to improve the profitability of the project and keep our cost level in shape. And all those together supported the improved EBITA. Revenue side, decreased. The last quartile decrease was 6% and full year 14%. So we are starting to stabilize and turn ourselves to our guidance to turn it back to growth path. If we see the revenue distribution for the full year, a bit more than 1/3 is coming from the private sector and 2/3 from the public sector. And the private sector side will be supported if the investment starts and the share has been quite stable, a bit larger maybe earlier years, but this is rather stable overall in Kreate. Then if we see our sustainability targets that we have followed now full year, we have set the target for '25 for our occupational safety and accident frequency. We aim to improve from this year to be below 11, including our own and subcontractors who are working for us. We focus on observations that we get them and analyze them, and that's the tool to get the frequency down. If I take the footprint reducing part, we have set the greenhouse gas emission targets for ourselves. So we aim to cut Scope 1 and 2 emissions to half from the comparison year of '23, and we have set the actions and targets more detailed on that one. And our customer NPS, as I said, the target is to be over 50% over time, and then we are now on level 82. So in some areas, good development. Some areas, we have still a lot to do. And on this one, I'd like to highlight that about a month from now, we will come out with the annual result, and that is including also the sustainability report according to CSRD standards and there are more details on this topic. Key figures, I will run through some balance sheet ratios and liquidity topics, but here's the summary. Let's go further on cash flow and net working capital. Cash flow was close to 0 on '24. Main reason for that was extremely good '23 when we had EUR 26 million cash flow. And the key driver in our cash flow on top of the profitability or the result we make is, of course, the investments. We had some divestments this year. We sold the properties in Tuusula because we need some more space, and we are now tenant on that one and we'll move to another location in coming years. And the second one on top of the investment is net working capital, where we are more or less on normal level, around 0 level and because it was a much better situation and one could say, exceptional level at the end of '23. So that tied some capital, which, of course, reflected to our free cash flow. Our liquidity position is good. We have kind of a good plan onwards, and there is no dramatic or any special items behind the lower cash flow this year. Then if we look at our interest-bearing debt, net debt level is around EUR 30 million, up from last year due to the net working capital and less cash in hand at the year-end. Net debt-to-EBITDA was 2.0 level, which is below the target level of 2.5, which is a good thing. And equity ratio is 32.2% (sic) [ 33.2% ]. We have gradually coming up with the equity ratio all the time. Then if we look at the loan portfolio more in detail, the average interest rate is 6.1% at the moment. And if we look the repayment schedule, we have about EUR 3 million ordinary loan repayments and then we have commercial papers for net working capital purposes, which we utilize every now and then when needed. So the big package that we have for the loan side is maturing in '26. But this year, still the repayments are about EUR 3 million, EUR 3.5 million. Then for guidance for '25. As said earlier, we estimate that our revenue will grow and the range will be between EUR 290 million to EUR 310 million, which is approximately on the level what we said in our strategy targets between 5% to 10% compared to this year. And our profitability on absolute terms will increase, and we estimate it to be on the range of EUR 9 million to EUR 11 million compared to this year's EUR 8.8. The reasoning or justification behind is that we know what we have in order backlog, we know the projects that are on development phase. We can estimate the revenue levels from there. We continue to be picky and selective on project side, and we continue our growth in Sweden. And all these, we calculate and estimate that will improve our profitability compared to last year. And then finally, the Board's proposal of dividend. So our Board proposes for the Annual General Meeting that Kreate will pay EUR 0.50 per share dividend paid in 2 installments, one in April and one in October. This EUR 0.50 is actually same as our earnings per share from last year. So it will be 100% of the result that will be paid as a dividend if approved in Annual General Meeting. And if we compare this to our year-end stock price, it means that it's approximately 7% dividend yield. And this is now fourth time when we increase since the listing our dividend. So we have been really stable on this in our listing history. That was all from my side. Thank you for following and see you again in April when we come out with the first quarter results.