Mentice AB (publ) (MNTC) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, and welcome to the Mentice 2020 Year End Report. The report will be presented by CEO, Göran Malmberg. My name is Stacy Hammar, and I will be moderating this webcast. After the presentation, you will be given the opportunity to ask questions to both Göran Malmberg; and CFO, Elisabet Lund. Until then, all participants are on listen-only-mode. For questions please raise your hand by clicking the hand icon located in the upper left menu. This meeting will be recorded and available with the report on mentice.com. I will now leave the web to CEO, Göran Malmberg.

Good morning, everyone. So for the fourth quarter, we're really pleased with the outcome here. In our view, a really strong order intake, largest ever. So firstly improvement on the order book and obviously, on the cash flow -- operating cash flow. So if we look at this, obviously, a 33.6% improvement year-over-year for the quarter and overall, 20% -- 21% year-over-year for the orders is super nice and something I'm really pleased about considering the difficult situation in 2020. And always obviously a leading indicator for us going into the future, a nice future. And then I have to see that we can generate growth again and doing that during these difficult kind of circumstances. So looking at -- on the left side here, breaking down a bit, the medical device industry has been what has really fueled this growth, really strong performance, up close to 90%, 88.4% compared to last year. And you've seen over the year, we have presented quite a few larger deals. But generally, the business has been really, really strong. As well, a strong fourth quarter for the Hospital segment, where we, over the first 3 quarters was very much affected by the pandemic with substantial decrease of business in all parts of the world, really. But the fourth quarter was really strong, and I think that's really promising for the next couple of quarters. Where we did close to 50% of our overall Hospital revenue for the year in the fourth quarter. Still though down from last year, but I think that's really impressive and good work by the Hospital team here and we also build pipeline for 2021. Strategic alliances up 30%. Actually, we -- yes, up 30%, while we expected or I expected way more, but the imaging partners we have, obviously, as well, been very much affected by the slow hospital sales. And I think our positions with these strategic partners have improved significantly over the year. And what is not materializing under -- during 2020 I'm certain will materialize during 2021 and 2022. So it's not like we are losing that -- losing opportunities just that is moving into the future. So overall, that's really, really nice to see. If we go down a little bit more in details on the right side here. Order intake, I think I mentioned. The order book, it's really nice to see -- I mean, we're moving up from SEK 39.8 million, SEK 66.4 million, SEK 26 million. And change in improvement of the order book, which obviously with simple math, you will also understand that the delta between the orders and the net sales will increase. But this is a development that we like to see. We want to, obviously, remove the seasonality of our business. We want to make sure when we're coming into a new period of a year or quarter that we have a larger degree of our sales done. So moving into this year with this strong order book is really nice, because we have more read down. And the basis of that is really several things. But I think the most significant one is that the subscription-related license sale have improved by a factor 3, really. And so that's obviously 1 reason. We also have some effects in the end of the year where we couldn't actually deliver systems to some parts of the world duty pandemic. But all in all, I think that's good news. Cost levels. We have kept down over the course of the year, SEK 20 million or so below last year. We had a negative currency effect overall for the year, about SEK 8 million for the quarter SEK 4.1 million. So that obviously happens a bit. Cash flow from operation significant improvement, SEK 30 million plus compared to minus SEK 38 million last year. So all in all, with the net sales. And so the EBITDA then have improved from minus SEK 12.9 million to minus SEK 4.1 million. So as a comparison here, if you look at the net sales year-over-year, you can see that if you look at the negative currency effect of SEK 8 million, and also the SEK 8 million in the subscription-based licenses that we moved into 2021, you can argue that the 2020 numbers is about the 2019 numbers. But that's probably less relevant. Okay. Anyway, really pleased with this. Really a good team effort and our ability to contact business under these conditions, doing everything actually and still maintaining this level, I think, is great. You see -- so if you look at the significant events, most of them I wrote about in the report. We completed the acquisition of vascular simulation, which is, I think, is a very important acquisition for us. We see that the integration also despite the pandemic because obviously we couldn't travel from Sweden there. But I think the integration there has been performed in a very good way their sales or our sales are integrated, and we are really prepared to move the vascular simulation solution set out to the globe really. And I think that's really going to help us greatly during this year, both by just adding an incremental revenue stream. But also by the complementary sale of physical and virtual simulation that is really a unique kind of proposition from Mentice. No one else can do this. But yes, good integration. And as I've said, the acquisition is completed now. And investor is fully integrated in the Events business. We have integrated -- sorry, implemented a new organization base going into 2021. And so we implemented a renal structure, which we -- renal leaves and the idea here is really to develop the business, to go-to-market organization in each of those 3 regions. And then in the same time, we are also improving the corporate support for product and marketing. So this is a preparation for the growth that we expect here for the coming years and where this makes all the sense. We want to build a presence and an image in each of those 3 regions in a too larger extent that we have done so far. As well, third bullet here, we did receive the ISO certification beginning of the year. That's been something we've been working with for over a year here, a lot of work on our processes and our internal structure. But it's really -- it's been a painful process, I could say, but I think it makes us a much, much more structural and also preparing us for growth. So this is a good achievement, again, doing this in this environment is something I'm really pleased with. The deals reported in the quarter from Abbott and Stryker to mention too. But really connected to the other larger deals we did during the year are all really very important for the development in 2021 and onwards. The Abbott one together with the Edwards Lifesciences one, we presented in the second quarter is really, again, a start of what we want to do in the structural heart area, which is the -- probably the largest growing area in this field. Lastly, on the Hospital side, we added 3 new countries to the list of countries. We have systems in Algeria, South Korea and Brazil, which is nice. And as well, we have a couple of strategic hospital deals with Thomas Jefferson and John Hopkins University and Hospital in the U.S. where we have a collaboration agreement, and they're going to act this reference sites. And so 2 really good name hospitals in U.S. But the hospital in Japan as well, a collaboration together with Siemens and the hospital. There's a really good reference site for us in Japan. And University Hospital in Baden, in Switzerland. Yes, moving into 2021. I would say, based on what we did in 2020, how we are prepared for the future here, I have a positive view of 2021. But obviously, it's still unclear on when we will be past the pandemic. I would expect to be 6 more months with the impact of the pandemic that we -- and I think from a travel and Congress activity, I think that we will probably act very carefully during the entire year. I don't see really that moving up anything during this year. But -- so somewhere after the summer, I expect our business to come back to normal. But I mean, I -- and we are increasing. We started hiring and recruiting again in the end of last year and moving into this year really with the new organization. We have some new resource requirements as well. But I also see this not only from our point of view. I think everyone here reading the situation the way I do as well or we do as well, I would say. We see the light in the tunnel. We see this passing in the vaccination and everything we believe we're getting back to normal. And I would say that our larger clients are acting the same way. They are also opening up for in investments. Just with the same argument. I would say that part of the Hospital business, and I would assume will still struggle for a longer period of time. If you look at the U.S. hospital market, for instance, they have been so much under pressure during 2020. And I think it will take some longer time for them to recover really. But I think all in all, most of our markets is really preparing for the time after the pandemic here. So a good view of 2021. And as I said on the first slide, I really expect strategic alliances to regain part what was lost in 2020. As you might remember, I had a larger expectation for 2020 before we went into the pandemic, and I hope that we can regain that during 2021. Looking at the drivers for us, what is important for us for 2021 and I think I've talked about this over the last year in the different reports and presentations, but this is sort of summarizing in this way -- in a different way than we did in the Q4 report. But we did bring a lot of new products to the market more than ever during 2020. And a lot of that, we all did see effects in Q4. So the first one, how with the G7, G7+ the new hardware platform, that had a not insignificant impact of our Q4 business, where we shipped something like 25 systems out to the market. And we know from the previous generation change we had that this would fuel -- this will fuel upgrades. A lot of our clients want to have the newest device. So this is going to be very important for 2021 when we move into a higher volume and the production of the G7 and G7+ will move into larger volumes. So that will clearly help us in 2021 and then obviously, the opportunities around the new haptic relies with that device that will also open up for custom development projects really leverage that kind of technology for our medical device clients. Structural heart and ultrasound, as I mentioned before, with Abbott and Edwards and others, it's a really, really key area. I mean, that therapy area is growing significantly. With a lot of new technologies coming out. And we clearly have a world-leading market-leading technology there, not just by bits, but really by leap of bounce. It really no one else that you provide image quality that we can provide and provide the combination of x-ray and ultrasound in a seamless environment, the way we can. It's super, super important for the future. Same thing with the work we did, the first launch of our cloud-based environment back in June, July of last year. We are putting a lot of effort into building content, putting more functionality in there. A lot of that will materialize during 2021. And it's a big demand for these kind of structures for how you more structurally would come back for training and provide training, is really, really important. We see that a good base for the growth on medical device side in 2020. So obviously, our larger clients and we believe we can continue to build that. And that's part of the new organization structure as well that we will really build a separate function to manage these corporate accounts or the mega clients, where I'm confident that we can significantly increase our business from these 4, 5, 6 largest clients. And I think that's going to be very important for the next couple of years growth as well. Vascular simulation, I also mentioned, both stand-alone and integrated. I mean, we believe we can move into the product development side with medical devices, a lot of interest there, a lot of opportunities. But I think short-term here, the low-hanging fruits here is really to bring vascular simulation solutions globally out, vascular simulation has been a predominantly domestic -- U.S. domestic activity. And really moving vascular simulation products out to our distribution globally. We believe we can find some good opportunities in regions like Japan, China, Europe. We put a lot of -- second to the last point here. We put a lot of efforts in the neurovascular piece. And the people that followed us for the last few years, have heard us talk about what we do in terms of auto segmentation and stuff. We talked about stroke a lot. So you will see a lot of focus on the neurovascular piece as well during 2021. And we really hope that, that will open up for new opportunities. And then last but not least, strategic alliances. As I said, we have massive interaction with this big partners in 2020, building relations, building really need for our products and building understanding for the opportunities in this. So we're moving into discussions on further integration of Phase II integration, if you may, but also further into discussions on embedding our technologies into these environments and bundling solutions and so on. So this is really my view of the most important drivers for 2021. But all in all, a really nice ability to present this -- present the quarter and present the year, I'm really proud of the team and the work we have done. And I think we have a good time coming into 2021.