Lime Technologies AB (publ) (LIME) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, everyone, and good morning, and welcome to Lime Technologies' Q4 update. My name is Nils Olsson. I run as the CEO of Lime and been at Lime since 2006. And today, we also have our great CFO, Magnus Hansson, with us. Welcome, Magnus.

Good morning.

Good morning. So before we sum up Q4, and so I will -- and jump into the details, I'll give you a quick sum-up here. So first of all, I'm very glad to present how we closed the last quarter. We've been talking about a good order intake in the last couple of quarters, and now we actually can see the effect especially in our subscription revenues. The subscription is growing 47% in Q4 and our ARR with 35%. In total, we delivered a growth of 22% in Q4 and an EBITA margin of 26%. I'm also very glad to see that we continue to be an attractive employer. In 2021, we have recruited more than 100 new employees, and we just finalized our onboarding session with over 30 new employees that are now ready actually to help our customers in all our markets. So finding and retaining talent, I would say, is up these days, and therefore, we need to continue to invest in one of our really core unique selling points, and that is our company culture. If we zoom out a bit and look at the big picture, I would say that the digitalization trend is accelerating, and many companies have continued looking for smart software that can help them become more efficient. And of course, in that place, we play an important role. And we are in a growing market, the CRM market. And if we look at the penetration, it's around 50% of all the companies with more than 10 employees are still lacking a CRM system. So it means that there are still many companies out there that haven't even started their CRM journey yet. I would say, in general, the demand is high. And if we look at some specific areas, we could pinpoint marketing, we could pinpoint analytics and also communication services. And for us, this is very much in line with our focus and where we have continued to invest. We have focused on our marketing automation, where we released our automated flows recently. We have been focusing on our Business Intelligence solutions. And of course, with communication, we are looking into Userlike that can strengthen that offering to both new and existing customers. So overall, if we sum it up, I would say that we are well positioned for the CRM market, and there is a high demand for our products and services. We will continue to develop and broaden our platform so that we can help our customers become even better at customer care. So if -- and just to mention here, if you have any questions, please ask them in the chat, and we will answer them at the end of this session. So the agenda for going forward, we will take a look at the order intake. We will talk about the revenue. Magnus will talk about the profit. And then we will do a sum-up of Q4 and also our financial targets. So starting with the order intake, and we have communicated this for several quarters now, and we continue to have a very low customer concentration. And it decreases to 6.8% now, and the biggest customer stands for 1.1%. And during the fourth quarter, we can welcome many new customers. Just to mention some, we have ServaNet, Sundsvall Energi and Vimmerby Energi in the utility segment. We have Stendörren in the real estate segment, Medicotrust in Denmark in consultancy business and Contimeta in Netherlands and L'ANZA in Sweden in the wholesale segment. And I would say I'm also glad to see that the pace in new sales are going in the right direction and -- yes. Looking at the revenue part, one of our most important KPIs is the ARR development. And our ARR is growing 35% in Q4 compared to last year. And subscription-wise, we are growing by 47%. And we can see that we remained the old service agreements on a quite stable level, which we are also trying to convert into new subscription model. Looking at our different revenue streams, we can see that we -- we can see them here from our 2015 when we started the transformation from up-front subscription. And we can see that subscription is the fastest-growing revenue stream with 37% last 12 months. And today, it stands for 51% of our revenue. The service agreement, as I mentioned before, is on a quite flat level, 10%. And the up-front is more or less, less than 1%, and we are not selling that anymore. And from an expert services perspective, today stands for 38% of the revenue. Looking at the revenue side, we have reached 22% in Q4, as I mentioned in the start. And if we look at the full year '21, we reached 19%. If we look at the split between our segments, Sweden grows by 9%; and the rest of Europe, 81% in Q4. And I would say, of course, we get the positive effect here of the Userlike acquisition and also that we also see a better market when it's reopening in Q4. Last 12 months, 9% in Sweden and 61% in the rest of Europe. And one big focus for us now going forward in '22 is to continue to grow and get all markets, I would say, especially rest of Europe to perform. We increased the growth in Sweden from Q3 to Q4, and we have had a good growth in our subscription, but we are still, I would say, a bit suffering from the less growth in expert services due to the staffing situation, which I mentioned in Q3. And therefore, I'm also happy to see that the recruitment process has been good during Q4. Let's talk about profit, Magnus.

Yes. Starting at the left-hand side, you can see that we reached an EBITA margin of 26% in the fourth quarter. And we are, of course, comparing to the fourth quarter of 2020 when we weren't able to have any physical sales event, physical employee events and so on. So we're quite happy to see that we were able to physically meet again during the fourth quarter. That is really important for us going forward. We also have the strong finish of 2021 led to a slightly higher variable salary paid in the fourth quarter than the quarter in 2020. And for 2021, we reached 27% EBITA margin compared to 29% in 2020. And looking at the right-hand side, you can see that during the pandemic, we had a quite-high EBITA margin of around 28%, 29%. And now we're back to what we consider a more normal and lasting EBITA margin to maintain our growth going forward, investing in sales, marketing, in product, so forth. And looking at the personnel expenses, you can see that the personnel expenses increased by 28% in the fourth quarter, of course, mainly driven by the acquisition of Userlike but also by the largest trainee program ever in August of 2021. And on the right-hand side, we have the operating -- other operating expenses, again, mainly driven by the acquisition of -- the increase mainly driven by the acquisition of Userlike. But also, we have been able to intensify marketing and sales efforts during the fourth quarter of 2021.

Thank you, Magnus. So if we do a quick summary, I would say, of the Q4, I think that we should -- we are -- I'm actually proud about how we closed this year. We had a good speed in Q4, 22% sales growth, 26% EBITA margin and our important KPI with ARR growing 35%. And on top of that, we have recruited a lot. It's a tough competition for the talent, and we continue to be a good employer and a valuable employer going forward. So we welcome more than 100 new employees. Looking at the financial targets. As you can see, we reached our sales growth target of -- we reached 19% compared to 18% as a target. Same goes for the EBITA margin, we reached 27% compared to 25%. And the capital structure is at 1.6 net debt in relation to EBITDA. And the Board proposes a dividend of SEK 2.6 per share. That is 59% of the profit. Of course, the strong financial position, the strong cash flow and the EBITA margin makes the increase possible. So if we sum up 2021, I feel that we have continued to keep our promise to deliver long-term profitable growth. I'm especially happy with our mindset that we always would like -- want to improve ourselves and that we continue to build a great company that is good of combining the performance-driven and a caring culture. So that was the last slide for now. So let's see if we have any questions in the chat.

Yes, we have a few questions. We have a question here regarding Userlike. Can you add some details on how Userlike is developing, launching in Sweden, launching in Lime Germany in terms of products? You mentioned solutions like marketing, eSigning, Business Intelligence. How are these products selling?

Yes. If we start with Userlike, the Userlike is developing according to our plan, which is good. And we can see that there is a high demand for communication solutions. We are launching our add-on now together with Userlike, which is really, really exciting. And it's called the Lime Chat. So that is soon available in the market. And I really look forward to this launch because I think it really can strengthen our product offering, both the new and existing customers, and to add more strength and also help our customers to treat their customers in a good way. We can see that the add-on sales is going good. As the question mentions, we see marketing automation, eSigning. And I think it's good that we can help our customers with taking a broader scope and help them with more things in the customer journey. So it feels very natural for us to have this kind of add-ons in our portfolio.

Next question, is opening up an office in Poland a way to counter the risk with tight labor markets and increasing personnel costs? What function are you planning to set up there? And approximately how many FTEs will be stationed?

We are opening up now in Krakow, and it's focusing on development. So we would like to hire more developers, and it's one way to actually to broaden the market when it comes to finding good talent. So I really look forward to this, and I hope that we can be around -- be a couple of developers here already in the first quarter.

Next question, you described the market as being strong. Do you expect organic growth to accelerate further in terms of growth rates in the start of 2022?

I think that the market conditions are good. And especially we could see in Q4 when the markets were opening up again, it helped us especially in the rest of Europe. We are not satisfied with the organic growth as it is today. We are moving now in the right direction, going from 8% in Q3 up to 11% in Q4, which is good, I would say, that we are moving in our own journey. And of course, the main reason for that, which I mentioned in the Q3 report, is due to a little bit higher employee churn in Q2 2020 -- Q2 and Q3. So therefore, we have now been really successful when it comes to recruiting. So my goal here is to try to improve the organic growth going forward in 2022.

Next question, could you remind us of the competitive environment in Germany, lower sales penetration than other markets? Are there many big incumbents like SAP or more regional players? Any comparison to Sweden or the Nordics would be helpful.

I would say that in general, in all our markets, that it's more or less the same competition. You have Microsoft and you have Salesforce. And I believe that that's really good because we know how we will target those competitors and also how to win because we have our unique selling points. And as you say, the penetration in Germany is especially that many companies are still using old on-prem software. So in the mid segment, there is a big opportunity for us to go in with Lime CRM especially with the flexible platform and compete with Microsoft and Salesforce. We are focusing on our 4 verticals: utility and real estate, wholesale and consultancy. And we will continue to have a narrow focus now in Germany as well. Of course, there are local competitors as well in Germany as there are in the rest of Nordics. For example, in Norway, you have SuperOffice. In Denmark, you have webCRM and so on. And there are similar type of companies in Germany as well. But especially in our target market with the local enterprises, we compete with Microsoft and Salesforce.

Okay. And that was the final question.

Okay. Thank you very much, and have a really, really nice day.

Thank you. Bye.