LeadDesk Oyj (LEADD) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, everybody. Thanks for joining our earnings call today from our 2021 first half report. I'm pleased to welcome you all on the call, and super happy to be able to present this report to you. On the call, apart from myself, we also have Pauliina Leimu, our CFO; and also Teemu Kinos, the founder of GetJenny, and I'll be handing over parts of the presentation to them then later on. As you probably know, my name is Olli Nokso-Koivisto, I'm the CEO for LeadDesk, and I'll be presenting today on the main lines. The agenda for the call is firstly, introductions to LeadDesk, so going through what LeadDesk is and what LeadDesk does. And in this part, I'll hand it over also to Teemu to tell a little bit more about GetJenny. After that, Pauliina will go through the financials of the first half. And then we'll look at rest of the year together a little bit, after which some -- then comments on the integration status and any potential future acquisitions. But I'm super happy to able to present this report to you today, and great to have you all on the call. So introduction to LeadDesk firstly. I'm well aware that most of you know the company very well, so I won't go into too much detail, but just remembering our purpose and targets. So why we exist and why LeadDesk is so needed is that there is a lot of substandard software on the market that doesn't meet the needs of the customers, of the contact center, customer support and sales agents. And there's a lot of frustration there with customer communication across the board. So what we believe is that intelligent software, and by intelligent software, we can empower customer support and sales agents to work better with the end customers. So that's our belief, and that's why we are so enthusiastic to come to work every day. And that's why we've got a so committed super team working towards the goal. Our target is to lead the European cloud adoption, so we want to take the European contact centers into the cloud. And this is the target we strive for with our country offices across 7 different countries in Europe, and why we are so enthusiastic in developing our software ever further. If we then look at the long-term targets, as we published earlier this year, our aim is to be the top player in the entire European contact center as a service market. So we want to be, and we see ourselves being the #1 in the European contact center software market in the future. And as a yardstick for this, we've set the bar very high. So we want to reach the EUR 100 million in revenues in order for us to be able to claim this position. Okay. How has the software developed and where is the positioning? So the positioning of contact center software is becoming ever clearer. There's a lot of development, a lot of great companies also in North America, in other parts of the world striving to create the best possible contact center software, and this market is really taking great shape. Where it is positioned is that if we compare the typical comparison to CRM or ticketing and support software, contact center software is where most of the high-volume [ communications ]. So contact center software is the central place for all the customer communication. That's where the communication happens, the one-to-one communication with your customers. And we offer a full stack solution for this market. In principle, what it means is that as the center of all customer communication, we've got the integrations for the channels that you use to interact with your customers, be that traditional voice calls, SMS, e-mail, web chat, messaging such as WhatsApp or WeChat or what the software system in your country is, Facebook Messenger, Instagram. Any number of channels can be integrated into a harmonized conversation, which is then handled by your agents or the automation through one of our user interfaces. So we gather all the conversations into one system, into one place, one database, one harmonized system, where then depending on the function, you can interact with your customers the most appropriate way. We support this with our engagement management systems, and we provide analytics and insight. Furthermore, as we provide all the customer communication into a central location, the integrations between your other systems can then work together in order to provide for a meaningful insight and for better process -- business decisions. So this is our positioning. And as you see here, the latest newcomer to the customer service agent interfaces is Jenny, through then this acquisition we did a little bit over a month ago. But maybe I've talked enough about our core, LeadDesk, and I know there's so many people excited to hear what the Jenny is all about. So I'll give it off to Teemu to then present GetJenny. Go ahead, Teemu.

Thank you, Olli. First of all, we could not be more excited about our future together. Joining a company full of superstars and also has the muscles to conquer Europe together. I'm Teemu Kinos, one of the co-founders of GetJenny, and we are one of the leading chatbot providers in Scandinavia. We currently provide our solutions to over 100 customers ranging from small, mid-sized companies to international enterprises. Then moving on. As many of you know that AI is probably the biggest opportunity of our lifetimes. It enables people to really focus on our more meaningful interactions, while the automation handles the more frequent conversations and tasks, ending up that there will be much, much more happier customer support workers. We believe that by utilizing the state-of-the-art AI, our customers and companies can actually deliver the next level of customer support and serve all of their customers better, not just a handful of customers that it has been before. So actually, how does the chatbots work? Every chat conversation starts with the bot. The chatbot handles the conversations as long as it's sure about the answers. Jenny works, in a way, exactly like a human agent. It continues the conversation as long as it knows the answer, but it also has quite superpowers as it can handle over 90% of the conversations by herself. But what happens when the bot is not 100% sure about the answer. First, our, let's say, one of the most popular options is that we transfer the conversation to a human agent. The transfer is seamless, and the conversation continues in exactly the same chat window that the conversation has started. In the future, we're also planning to provide an agent assist to increase the efficiency of the agents by providing them, let's say, successions on how to reply on the customer cases, so all the time increasing the efficiency of the support workers. The second solution for the transfer is that when there's no agents available at some time, let's say, during the night or when it's very busy, support times is not available. Then in this case, the bot can create a ticket or, let's say, collect a lead while creating a support ticket. And then the agents, when they're available, can come back to this client and contact them. So all the time, we are also kind of leveling up how busy the customer support workers are. So they will have kind of a, let's say, continuous workflow of new customer cases. So moving on to our clients. As you can see from this slide, our solution fits pretty much any customer, no matter the size. Since the very beginning from 2016, we have been working very industry-agnostic, providing our solution to any industry with our solution that enables the knowledge workers to build the bots without any technical expertise. As you can see from our customers that our solution scales from smaller companies to enterprise customers such as energy companies, healthcare, insurance companies or international enterprises, such as PizzaExpress. So in this slide, you can see that our solution is already working with many different kind of industries, ranging from small companies to enterprise customers. So let's talk a little bit about our real customer cases. Yrittäjät is especially one of the, let's say, excellent cases during these COVID-19 times. But starting from the very beginning of our journey, Yrittäjä contacted us, which is one of the largest non-governmental organization in Finland. It also has over 100,000 members to be in contact continuously. What they really wanted to do is to simplify their information retrieval from their websites. You can only imagine how much very valuable information they have for a different kind of support systems that Finland provides for their enterprises. But being really -- but our solution is really fast to be implemented. So in less than 4 months from the start, they were already automating more than 90% of their volumes, and this is before COVID-19 times. But when the COVID-19 hit, actually their volumes increased 8x in a matter of night. So you can only imagine that without us, their human agent would have been burdened with the amount of support request and the chats that would have been going there in 24/7. What we've been able to do is, of course, that, first of all, the level of human support has been gradually going down. But also this has led to a much, much better customer service, resource allocation, and much, much more better customer experience for their members. Moving on to our second case that we wanted to highlight in this event is Varma. Varma, the insurance company, has been with us from 2017, and they are one of our, let's say, oldest clients that has been with us. They came to us with their massive problem that before us, they were spending way too much time on recurring issues. So basically, their chats were all the time focusing on exactly the same stuff and exactly the same conversations. But when we came there, we started to automate the frequently asked questions, we started to free up the customer service agent time for more demanding customer issues, extending their service hours from 8 to 10 hours to 24/7 service, and increasing their customer satisfaction, which, of course, is one of the most important key performance indicators. They started with about 200 frequently asked questions, and they were automating roughly 60% of their chat volumes. Today, they are already automating over 85% of their chat conversations. And by utilizing us, they were able to save over 330 hours per month, which means that 2 support workers today are now able to focus on more meaningful conversations and provide the kind of a service that Varma wants to provide their customers. So what this actually means in the bigger picture with LeadDesk? As we are now working together, we are able to continue the integration work that has already started with us having the partnership already from 2019. But now, we're really able to build a deep integration with the whole solution to get all the benefits from working together. We wanted to highlight, let's say, 3 things there. First of all, the bots can work for any channel that LeadDesk is already working with from different kind of web chats, to Facebook Messenger's, to Instagram, doesn't matter. We are also able to get the efficiency by working with all the integrations, pushing the leads, working with the customer data or handling the orders. Then the third part, which, of course, utilizing intelligent automation is most important that now, we're able to use all of the data that we are collecting. This means that, of course, that the whole service now works in one system, the customer never leaves our channels, and we are able to provide the conversation from channel to channel. To put it very simply, in the future, every customer gets much, much more.

Thank you, Teemu. Thanks for the great presentation. I'm also super excited to be able to bring the whole package to our customers. And in the future then, enable our customers -- customer support and sales agents then to service their customers with meaningful, meaningful tasks, and not just the repetitive tasks that everybody typically hates. I'm very excited to bring so much meaning to customer service. Thanks. Then, moving along to the financials. So how are we monitoring our success and where are we on our development? And for this, I'll give it off to our CFO, Pauliina. Go ahead, Pauliina.

Hello, everyone. Great to be on the call with you today. So first half of 2021, here are the 4 main pillars that we focused on, on the first half. First of all, the growth in international revenue with the acquisitions we did in the beginning of the year, talking about the Loxysoft Sweden and Loxysoft Norway companies. Also, we extended our product leadership and then strengthened our enterprise sales during the first half. So what does this mean then in our financials? We had a great first half of the year. Our revenue was EUR 12 million, and we are very happy on that development through the organic growth and also through acquisitions, as mentioned. Our annual recurring revenue raised to EUR 19.1 million, which is a really, really amazing development there as well, and we are happy. Our profitability with the EBITDA was 15.5%, and number of employees also grew a bit through the acquisitions. So now at the end of the first half, our team was in 173 employees and, of course, now more with the Jenny team. So a great team now, totally, in the group. Here, you can see the revenue development since 2018 first half. And when comparing now this first half to last year, 2020, our revenue grew 94%, of course, partly through the organic and then the non-organic parts. Also, as mentioned, of the annual recurring revenue development, here is quite a jump also in the first half of the year compared to the end of last year when the ARR was EUR 12 million. So now, already EUR 7 million more in ARR. We are a European company. Our target is to be the best in Europe, and also develop our company and team in Europe. And now at the end of the first half, the international license revenue was already 69% of the of the total license revenue, partly again through organic and then non-organic growth. We are continuing our European conquer, so already finding and seeing the future possibilities inside Europe in new business areas, for example, France and Italy at some point. Here, on the left side, you can see the revenue split from the first half, how we did. So 67% of the total revenue came through License revenue. And that's, again, our biggest and the main business, the LeadDesk software to our customers. Then, of course, the telecommunication revenue was the second largest through -- from all of the revenues of 24%. And then services revenue, 9% now in the first half. And mainly, the [ crew ] in services revenue came from the acquisitions of Loxysoft companies. When we then see the right side of the slide, you can see the proportion of the largest revenue coming from top 10, so the biggest 10 customers in the first half, and thus, 18% of the total revenue. And other customers was then the portion of 82%. Here, finally, you can see some of the key figures that we have now reported in the H1. And also, I mentioned most of these, revenue and ARR, also the profitability and the employee's numbers. So we are really happy for the first half and now, it's already end of August, and we are on a good, good speed for the second half of the year also with the Jenny team and also with all of the team members and countries that we are operating at the moment. Thank you.

Great. Thanks, Pauliina. And then, I'll take a short look at the -- then the rest of the year. So we have had a fantastic start to the year now, and then there's still 4 months to go, so let's see what we come up now. So our strategy for '21, as communicated, is to focus on strong organic growth. So as -- as you all know, we've been very active on the inorganic side. But for us, that is no excuse to be then flexing out on organic growth. And we are highly focusing on strong organic growth, and we are planning all the integrations so that they have a [indiscernible] effect on our core organic figures. We also look forward to extending our offering further. Of course, there's a lot of emphasis now to GetJenny as widely used as possible and to teach Jenny all the channels that we are able to provide her, and also then look at other possibilities to extending the offering with organic means. We are focusing a lot on the integration, so there's a little bit more later on, on the phases of the integration. But it's, of course, no wonder that integrations are a big focus for us still the rest of the year. And even though we've been now very active on the inorganic growth, we are looking forward to also then continuing on that trajectory going forward and work towards those goals in the mid-term. And that, of course, does require actions. So in going forward, we can't stop the project, but rather, we must scout the market all the time. We are seeing a very active M&A market in our industry, so we must be active there all the time. Looking at our strategy for the year, our strategy always relies on 3 main pillars. So first, the most important part of the company is the people and the culture. We, as a company, and myself, personally, I don't believe that there are any companies. There's just groups of people working together for a common goal, and people and culture is where it all starts from. And this is the #1 factor in our planning. Then, of course, we must make it very clear that we are a product company. Our service revenue is now on a good level with 9%. That's a comparable level to similar companies, listed companies, for example, in the states. So that's on a good level now, but it is just 9%. And we must always remember that our product strategy and our harmonized product offering is the key to our success in the short term and the long term. Lastly, but not least, we must have a strong growth strategy. We must have a strong plan to conquer Europe, and we must execute on that relentlessly. So just some, maybe then -- individual things I want to point out from each of these. So firstly, we need to strengthen our winning culture. We've done quite a bit of growth in the last 12 months. Some of that is through our recruitment process and some of it is through M&A. We must really focus on building that winning culture and strengthening it. We are in a good position, and the culture parts have been a big part of evaluating potential M&A targets. But culture is something that you can't overinvest in as it is the people and [ order ], as we like to call ourselves leaders that we have in the company. So all our employees, they are the key to also the company's success. We need to strengthen our product leadership. We've widened our product offering quite a bit through the acquisitions, and we really need to have a harmonized [ trade ] solution for the markets. So yet again, there are no excuses from inorganic growth. We must have a strong unified product offering and a strong message to our customers about the product and the road map. There are, of course, some areas where we hope to expand our product offerings still further, both through organic and inorganic means. Lastly, we need to strengthen our growth organization, so we've been focusing on large cases lately and focusing a strategic focus on that. But of course, as with many companies, there is also the mid-sized customers. And the mid-size and small customers cannot be forgotten. Focusing on the larger ones does require effort in new ways of thinking and new knowledge that we have to acquire from recruitments, but we must keep a focus also on our SME market and strengthen that at the same time with the enterprise side. And the growth organization, meaning the customer-facing [indiscernible], we need to really put an effort into developing those also in the future, and we can't wait still on this front either. These are our three pillars going forward to this year and the years after. Lastly then, I promised to shine some light on the acquisitions and where we are there. As we've communicated before as well, we modeled our acquisitions into 3 phases. Phase 1 is securing the top line. So when we merge with a company and when we acquire a company, it's, of course, always a crisis for the other company. The customers start to speak out that what is the future, how are things going to develop and so on, and we really need to have a clear message here. So we need to secure that revenue, we need to secure the most important functions, and we need to really focus on providing a good home then for both the employees and the customers being acquired and build up that trust. The next phase is then finding out the synergies. Naturally, there are quite a bit of synergies involved, and we really need to figure out what's the best product market -- best product fit and how does that product then fit to the market. And we need to figure out how do we support, how do we build our own customer support, how do we offer the infrastructure, invoicing integrations and all of these. And this is the second phase of the integration for projects. Phase 3 is that after we've looked at the top line, we found out the synergies, then it's time to start growing the business. And where we are on this is that naturally, GetJenny, as it is only less than a month from the closing, we are still in phase 1 of the project. So at the moment, we are doing system integrations, meaning financial system integrations. We are communicating with the customers, meeting up with the customers and integrating the first parts of the organizations. So this is now the first phase, and we're there with GetJenny. With the Loxysoft deals, we are there in the synergies phase. We are looking at ways of working together more efficiently and how we can develop our ways of working. And here, as there is [indiscernible] overlap with the Norwegian team, we are a bit more further along there. And then we are -- we are in the -- we are already deep in the synergies phase with the Swedish team as well, but that is a little bit of a large team, and there's been more overlap in the customers and so on, so that's going forward now as well in the Phase 2. For Capricode, we are now turning to the growth phase. So we've been able to integrate teams, we found out quite a bit of synergies, and now, we are in the growth phase. Lastly, we have Nordcom, which is an acquisition we did a little bit over a year ago. And happily, I can say that I believe this is the last time I have to mention. Can't have the pressure of mentioning Nordcom, as it is fully integrated and it's fully part of the team. And you can follow the development of Nordcom. It is basically our latest mobile offering nowadays. So these are the phases and the states that the company is eyeing. So what kind of companies are we interested in? As said, it's only a month since the closing of GetJenny, so still early days there. But the technology trends that we are looking forward to are AI also in the future. Of course, we've got a lot of very deep knowledge now with GetJenny, and I'm super happy that out of all the chatbot and bots that we evaluated, I can happily say that GetJenny was the most advanced. My first study was in technical physics, and all this AI many times seems a bit nonsense to me, but I can happily say that GetJenny is in deep water in this sense, with technologies ranging from deeper learning, deep learning being implemented to power and empower Jenny. So I'm super happy that we have like a real AI and not just make believe there. The workforce management is very important and omnichannel, so meaning different possibilities for new channels to implement in our core system. And then lastly, of course, optimization of agent work, meaning RPA technologies and so on. These are some technologies we are super excited about and following closely, and have partnerships in as well. Lastly, I just want to highlight the key investment criteria. So firstly, we've got strong international growth, and we are continuing on that trajectory. This is supported by many, many mega trends, and is basically a global phenomenon in our industry. We are stable and profitable. As you can see from our figures, we delivered what we promised. We're scalable and efficient. We are, like one analyst put it, a third wave CCaaS platform, so we are there in the leading edge. We are providing a true cloud for our customers. And then lastly, we are an innovative pioneer. We put a lot of time and effort into bringing the best technology to our customers and we really excel on that. That's it for the presentation, and I'm super happy I could share this with you. And I will be happy to take any questions you might have.