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

Hello, and good morning, everyone, and welcome to Lime Technologies Q3 update. My name is Nils Olsson. I've been working at Lime since 2006 and been running as CEO since '21.

Hi, I'm Maria. I joined Lime in November last year, so I've been here for almost a year now. Feel free to write any questions in the chat, and we will answer them in the end of the session.

Thanks for that, Maria. First of all, let me give you a little bit of background of Lime for our new listeners, and then we'll dig into the Q3 report more or less. So looking at this graph, we've always been running Lime with a very long-term perspective. And I think that has left us with a fantastic footprint, as you can see. In more than 20 years, we have grown in average 19% per year with an EBITA margin of 25% in average per year. And I think that's something to be really, really proud about. But no matter how big we've been and how our numbers turned out, we more or less have had the same goal since the beginning, and that is to help our customers to become really, really strong in sales and customer care so they can help their customers in a good way. And I would say as a supplier, we are the strongest when we combine really good expertise and on-point software to solve business-critical problems and also to become a natural part of the companies' core processes. So when more or less the customer feels that we have fully understood their business, packaged the solution in the right way, we know that we have succeeded. We have done this for many years now and scaling our business into 6 markets. We have 10 offices. And since 2020, we started up Netherlands, in Utrecht. We have Germany, in Cologne. And we also welcomed you to [ latest part ] of the Lime Group. So today, 6 markets, 10 offices and a little bit more than 400 employees. And looking at our customer base, we have 80,000 users approximately and 6,500 customers. And just looking into some of the key success factors, as I started with, long profitable growth, many years delivering both good profit and good growth. We have a sticky business model. So around 60% of our revenues are recurring, which means that it's a stable, reliable business model. We have a sticky customer base. So the top 10 customers only stands for 6.8% of the revenue, and biggest customers stands today for 1% of the revenue. And something that I'm really, really proud about is that even if we are growing, we also managed to have a really strong culture, which combines performance and care. So let's start with looking into Q3. And before we jump into the details, I'll give you a little bit of overview of Q3. And starting with some numbers. We delivered, I would say, a really strong quarter with profitable growth still in a tough market. Revenue growth ends up at 19%, with an EBITA margin of 26% and also a strong ARR growth of 16%. And throughout the quarter, I think that we see still a good order intake, and I'm also a little bit happy about that we combined good growth in both our revenue streams. We have Expert Services, the consulting business, and also combining that with good growth in our subscriptions. So looking at the business climate here. And I would say that in this type of business climate, there are, of course, many different challenges that we face on a daily basis. But you can also look at it from another perspective and looking to what kind of opportunities that we, as a company, can grasp in this type of climate. And with the market offering that helps companies to become better in sales, streamline their operations and also to really, really help them to create strong relationships with their customers. We have a really attractive product portfolio that actually can solve business-critical system. And in that way, I would say, sometimes, you can say that CRM is even more relevant in a little bit tougher business climate, because we need to really focus on keeping customers but also to come -- become and have improvement in sales. Second, I would say that it's also a good opportunity for us. I think that we have seen that on the employee churn. We are at historically low levels today. We are at around 6% rolling 12 months. And of course, if we can manage to have our colleagues on board for a longer time period, we also become more efficient, while we also continue to recruit in a good way. We see that the candidate market is still strong. We have a good pipeline for candidates, and we will continue to recruit going forward. Looking at some long-term customer relationships, we say that we can help our customers building strong relationships their customers, but it's also something that I feel really proud about. We have 6,500 customers, and I'm really happy that we continue to have a close cooperation and continue to develop together with our customers. In this quarter, we see Rejlers, NTEX, Pollex, that has been customers for over a decade, that we can help them throughout the customer journey and be relevant -- even more relevant today, I would say. Looking from a little bit of business perspective, I've been talking about this before. So if we look at the business processes, we still see a little bit longer sales processes and we have more decision-makers involved in the deals. It's more or less similar to what we've seen earlier this year. And I think that there are no big tendencies that, that actually will change the last quarter as well. So that's something that we expect more or less the same type of business climate now in the last 3 months. But despite that, I think that we did a good quarter, good intake. And something that I'm happy about is that we see a bit of improvement in the markets outside of Sweden compared to previous period. I will give you some examples later on. And I really hope now that we can maintain this pace going forward. I mean 1 quarter is nothing. But if we can continue doing this, I think that, that gives us a great opportunity going forward. Also, if we look at the Swedish home market, we are happy to welcome several new customers, and we do good deals within our focused verticals -- real estate, utility, wholesale and in the consultancy industries. And we also see the same pattern as we saw in Q2, that we continue to see a little bit larger deals to be closed. Last point, something that I think is important to talk a little bit about, culture. And I would like to mention our new leadership program that we launched in '22. And we are a fast-growing organization. We have ambitious goals. We have a strong culture and we constantly want to develop our existing employees. And of course, get the new ones, since we recruit a lot, up to speed in an even more efficient -- effective way. And now most of our managers have completed the training, and I think that we can see already positive effects from that investment. And in this type of business climate, I think it's easy to really cut off this kind of investments. But I must say that I think that in tougher times, good leaders and really brave leadership are even more important than in good times. So we must be able to raise the bar for our employees. We need to practice what we preach and in order to continue to deliver profitable growth, both today, but also going forward in the long run. So looking at the agenda, we have the order intake. We have revenue, looking into that. Maria will talk about the profit. And then we do a sum up with our financial targets. And of course, we had -- we leave some space here for questions going forward. So starting with the order intake. And as I communicated before, we have a low customer concentration. It continues to be low. Top 10 customers stand for 6.8%. Biggest customer, 1.1% of our revenue. And of course, in the tougher market conditions, I think this is very good for us. We are not depending on one or a few big customers, but we are making deals with many, many customers in different geographies and industries. And as I mentioned in the beginning, we -- the order intake was good in Q3 and, we closed more deals outside of Sweden compared to previous period. And if we should mention some of them, I think it's really nice to see that we continue to grow within the Membership segment as we welcome the Danish Association of Social Workers; the Norwegian utility company, Notnodden; and also, a nice deal in the Netherlands with KLG Europe. And also, if we look into our Finnish market, we see that we do several deals in the quarter. Looking at our home market in Sweden, we also -- we made nice deals, especially, I would say, in the focus verticals and the size of the deal is continuously increasing. And in the real estate segment, we welcome Bostadsbolaget. We have in -- and also see that we continue to build a quite good pipeline and a stable pipeline in the utility segment. On the consultancy side, we welcomed Optilon as a new Lime customers in Q3. So looking into the revenue. We have -- we start off with the ARR development, and so of course one of our most important KPIs. And we can see that our subscription alone is growing 21% compared to Q3 '22. Looking at the service agreements, we can see that they decreased a bit at 18%, and this is in line with our strategy. We are converting customers now with the old upfront agreements into new subscription, and that's a project that will continue for a couple of more years. But in total, it builds up an ARR of 16% growth in Q3. Looking at our different revenue streams. We see the development from '16 and forward. And we started a transformation more or less from upfront to subscription already back in 2015. But we see that the subscription is steadily growing, 22% in Q3 and 20% last 12 months. And today, it stands for 54% of our revenue. The service agreement is still there, it stands for 6%. But as I said, we continue to transform those into subscriptions. We don't do more or less any upfront deals, and it's less than 1% today. As I started with, we have a good growth in both our revenue streams, and that's when I talk about subscriptions and in Expert Services. And Expert Services is growing 25% in Q3 and today stands for 39% of the revenue. And going forward, our goal is to continue to grow Expert Services, but in the long run decrease as a part of the total net sales. From a revenue perspective, looking at the growth, we reached 19% in Q3 and the last 12 months is also 19%. Looking at the split between the segments, Sweden is growing 16% in Q3; and the Rest of Europe, 27%. So we see a little bit of improvement in Q3 in -- compared to Q2, which I'm happy to say. Last 12 months, Sweden stands for 17% and the Rest of Europe is 24% growth. And over time, we would like to build a more international company. So there is still a focus on building Lime on a more international scale, of course. So looking into some of Maria's slides, let's look into the profit.

Yes. Thank you, Nils. EBITA in the third quarter reached 26%, which is in line with the same quarter as the year before. Looking at the latest 12 months, Q3 2023 is a 25% -- 25.5% compared to 25.7%. So it's in line with the last quarter's margin and our financial targets. Looking at the right-hand side, we have the latest 12-month EBITA development. As you can see, we reached a higher EBITA margin of around 29% during the pandemic. Now we are back to normal and lasting level to support our future growth, investing in sales, marketing, staff or products and so forth. The last 3 months in Q3 '23, we have reached an EBITA of 26%, and we are now able to invest more in future growth. Since we have good growth in our revenues, we have a positive underlying pressure on the EBITA margin. As we have already communicated, we will continue to prioritize long-term growth over short-term profitability. To add a comment, as some of you noticed this morning, the Swedish News Agency, [ Nyhetsbyran/TT ] published wrong comparative figures on our EBIT margin, and it has also been picked up by Dagens industri in their headlines. It has now been corrected, but I just wanted to clarify that our EBIT margin is year-to-date 20% compared with 18% for the last period last year. So it has also increased. Looking at our OPEX development. On the left-hand side, we have our personnel expenses. That is the largest expense in our profit and loss. Looking at the personnel expenses in relation to net sales, the latest 12 months in Q3 '23 is at 55% compared with 56% in Q3 '22. The 23% increase in our personnel expenses is for the latest 12 months is explained by that we have invested more inventory activities, staffing and compensation and benefits. The investment in our employees is contributing to a lower churn and better pace, especially in Expert Services compared with previous years. Looking on the right-hand side, we have our operating expenses. As you can see, we have our operating expenses has increased with 14% in the quarter and 12% in the last 12 months. The increase during the past 12 months is due to that we have invested more in future growth by marketing physical sales events and product development. Over to you, Nils.

Perfect. Thanks for that, Maria. And then a short summary here. So if we look at the different goals, we see that we have sales growth target that should be above 18%, and we are at 19% today. We had the objective of an EBITA margin that should be above, we are at 26%. And looking at the net debt in relation to EBITDA, we have a goal that should be less than 2.5, so we have 0.8. And we had a dividend in -- of 55% of the net profit. So more or less above our financial targets. And look into some questions and see if we have any questions popping up here from the audience.

Yes. This first question is regarding net cash flow. The question is, you discussed the free cash flow, which is negative in Q3. So the answer to that is, in this report, we have the current operations from -- the cash flow from current operations is SEK 5.8 million compared with SEK 17.7 million for the last period. The variation is mainly due to trade receivables, as 30th of September was a Saturday in 2023, where most of our payments -- so most of our payments were received early in October instead. And that is where we have the biggest due date of the period. Next question is for you. Could you give some flavor on different countries and how they're performing in Rest of Europe?

Yes. If we start with the Nordics, I think that we, in general, on the home market in Sweden, we have performed really well. Looking at the Norwegian market, we are focusing mainly on utility and real estate companies. And I think that we continue to have a quite good growth in the Norwegian market, and it's been quite stable now for a couple of years, actually. The Finnish market, we have had some -- yes, we are working with the Finnish market, and I'm glad to see now in Q3 that we are picking up the pace. We have a good team on board in the Finnish market. We have enough sales reps. Good stat on the Expert Services side. So I think that we would like to keep the momentum that we had in Q3 now for the rest of the year and, of course, going forward. Denmark, I'm happy to say that we now launched the Danish team in the membership segment. Important for us to build up that vertical, and that's something that we've been discussed earlier in the Q2 call as well. We closed Läkarmissionen in Q2, and we also closed with Ruter Dam. So building a stronger brand. And I'm happy to see that we have a couple of membership customers now in the Danish market. So maybe that will be something to continue to work on going forward in the Danish market. If we take the Netherlands, also a good deal in Q3. We, of course, would like to keep up the momentum and have a little bit -- the volume of deals, that would be nice if we could close more deals on a regular basis. It's a little bit up and down from month-to-month or quarter-to-quarter. Germany, we have had a the [indiscernible], I've been discussing. We've been working with that. We were not satisfied with the growth in '22. So now we've seen better progress, I would say, throughout '23, and that's something that we are working closely with to pick up the pace again. We have still a lot to do. We are not really want to be. But we see improvements all the time, which I think is the most important part. And we are building pipeline from the Lime CRM perspective in Germany as well. So that's a little bit flavor on the different markets.

Thank you, Nils. How is the low growth in the economy affecting your business?

I think we are -- we have a good offering in our product portfolio that can really help companies both in good and tougher times. In that case, I would say CRM could be more relevant or are more relevant even in a little bit tougher market in general. So in that way, I would say that we help our customers with really business-critical processes, and that's something that is equally relevant in tougher times and in good times. And it also, I would say, managers focus more on the existing customer base in tougher times. And then we are really relevant there as well because CRM is about -- both about finding new customers and attracting new ones, but also to keep and grow existing customer base. So in that sense, I feel that we have a good position to continue to work with going forward.

Could you give some flavor to the different verticals, how they are performing?

Yes, I think we have done a good journey this year in -- on both utility side and on the real estate vertical. I think those are the 2 ones that really stands out, that we have had a good flow of new deals coming in throughout the whole year, and also that we see that we are -- we have a really relevant offering. I'm happy that we closed Optilon in the quarter for the consultancy vertical, but we don't really have the same pace there as in the other verticals at the moment. Wholesale is more -- a little bit more bread-and-butter deals that we do those more on a regular basis. But the one that stands out is more on utility and real estate. .