Novaturas AB (NTU1L.VS) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning. Welcome to Novaturas' Investor Relations Conference. I am Ieva from NASDAQ, and I'll be moderating today's event. We will start with the presentation from the management, which will be followed by the Q&A session. I encourage every one of you to submit your questions in the Q&A section at the bottom of the screen. For your convenience, we are recording the webinar and replay will be available on NASDAQ Baltic YouTube channel soon after the call. That being said, I'm pleased to introduce today's presenters, the CEO of the company, Kristijonas Kaikaris and the CFO, Darius Undzenas. Please, the floor is all yours.

Thank you very much, Ieva, and good morning to investors and guests. It's a pleasure to welcome you to our Q3 2024 presentation. And this quarter has been challenging. I will just quickly move the slides to the executive summary. Yes. So starting from executive summary, I want to highlight that this quarter has been challenging yet insightful offering both hurdles and opportunities as we navigate a highly competitive market landscape in the Baltics. For the first 9 months of 2024, Novaturas Group's income declined by 6.6% compared to the same period in 2023, reflecting the ongoing competition and pressures in the travel sector. This decline in revenue is consistent with our competitive environment that we have been facing since early 2024. The oversupply of flights in the Baltic market driven by intensified competition, especially in key destinations like Turkey and Greece, has impacted our margins. Our EBITDA stands at minus EUR 4.1 million for the first 9 months of 2024, which is a significant drop compared to the positive EBITDA of EUR 6.9 million recorded in the same period last year. This downturn highlights the challenges posed by oversupply and competitive last-minute pricing pressures, which we have actively been working to mitigate. Despite these financial pressures, our focus on operational efficiency led to a substantial improvement in client punctuality with delays of over 3 hours reduced from 8 instances in Q4 2023 to just 1 instance in Q3 2024, now representing less than 1% of both of our clients. Talking about customer satisfaction, it remains a core focus for us, evidenced by our Net Promoter Score reaching 51% in Q3 2024, up from 37% in Q1 2023. However, it slightly decreased compared to 55% last quarter. We have seen the benefits of enhancing the customer experience and optimizing our travel offerings. In terms of passenger volumes, we served 192,000 travelers in the first 9 months of this year, reflecting a 9% decline compared to 2023. This was influenced by market dynamics and our strategic decision to reduce dependency on high competition destinations. Notably, we have successfully diversified our offerings, particularly focusing on emerging markets and long-haul destinations. Looking at that, we are optimistic about the upcoming winter season, with the early bookings showing a positive trend. A stronger growth was recorded in Egypt, the Canary Islands and United Arab Emirates. In addition, we have observed a higher interest in exotic destinations than last year, plus 31.8% group-wise. And among the company's long-haul winter destinations, Vietnam, Mexico and Indonesia, those recorded the strongest growth. Additionally, we have introduced our new CFO to our leadership team, bringing in fresh perspectives to strengthen our financial stability and guide us through the current challenges. And now let me pass the floor to our new CFO, Darius Undzenas, to walk you through our Q3 and 9-month financials. Darius, the floor is yours.

Okay. Thank you, Kristijonas. It's really nice to join Novaturas Group management team. It's a pleasure for me, and I look forward to helping the company achieve all its goals. So I would like to start from key financial figures. So first of all, about the sales. So as we see quarterly sales did not reach the prior year level, mainly due to high competitive environment like Kristijonas said. Yes, and especially for the destinations of Turkey, which is a main summer destination and they have an impact on Novaturas' sales level. If we look to tax figures, so tax number below prior year was for 8% or 7,000 as well as lower profitability per pax compared to last year. Yes. And during Q3, Novaturas continued in optimization for reaching high growth number, to avoid as much as possible additional last minutes, driven to profit reduction. And as we see from the table, load factor was 1% behind comparing to the last year. But it's good news that we have a 1% improvement compared to Q2. And the initial figures show consistent growth in Q4. Yes. And if you look to annual sales. So in a year-over-year comparison, sales increased by 8% in 9 months compared to 2023 to 2022. But however, revenues in 2024 for 9 months was lower compared to the same period last year due to already mentioned tourism, of course. So if we look to the quarterly EBITDA, it's minus EUR 2.6 million. And compared to the last year, the same period, it's in year 2023, it was a profit EUR 1.3 million, yes. And if you look to year-to-date EBITDA performance, EBITDA is at minus EUR 4.1 million. The main reasons for these poor results remain the same, huge competition in the market is impacted, not only sales but also gross profit and margins. Gross profit for the Q3 reached EUR 3.5 million with gross profit margin standing at 5.7% and a drop in margin by 6% compared to Q3 of the last year. It gives us the company a EUR 3.7 million loss. So in general, it's the main reason of such poor result. And as a result, we saw a decrease in sales profit per pax both quarterly and annually. This was mainly due to very poor results in July, but still there are some good news is that profitability per pax has been growing since August. And in September, sales profit per pax reached EUR 42. Yes. And maybe let's go to the next slide. I will talk about expenses. So we have a good news as well here that sales and general, admin income percentage decreased by 0.2% compared to last year due to our continuously process optimization. It's not a very significant figure, but most important thing for us is the trend. So our aim is to keep that way and be most efficient tour operator in the market. However, we have some changes in sales and general, admin structure, but we are not significant slight decrease in advertising market and marketing expenses occur to adapt to lower sales. However, advanced focus on own channels and market diversity requires steady advertising and marketing expenses. So let's go to another slide. Okay. So now I would like to give you a short overview about the situation in different markets. So as we see from the table and from a figure, so nothing new. Still Lithuania keeps a leadership in Baltics states with a share of 56% from total group revenue and Latvia and Estonia split is almost equal. So if we talk about separate markets, so still we are struggling in Estonia, as all operators do, I think so because of recession in the Estonian economy, but we believe that the market has reached its lowest point, and we expect a slight increase in sales and profitability next year. So maybe Kristijonas will tell more about tax.

All right. Thank you, Darius, for the overview of our finances. Now let me move -- let me allow to provide a more detailed overview of the passenger trends that we have observed during the third quarter of 2024, and for the first 9 months of the year overall. So in Q3 2024, Novaturas Group faced a challenging landscape with a notable shift of the passenger volumes across our 3 key markets. In Lithuania, we saw a decline, serving 46,100 passengers, while Estonia followed a reduction to 17,700. However, there was a positive trend in Latvia, which showed resilience with a slight increase, reaching 15,200 passengers. Looking at the bigger picture for the first 9 months of this year, we served a total of 191,800 passengers, which reflects a 9% decrease compared to the same period in 2023 when we served 210,100 passengers. This reduction is mainly driven by the intense market competition and mainly by oversupply of flights, especially to popular destinations like Turkey, and that significantly impacted the overall demand in the market. Nevertheless, our broad destination portfolio allowed us to partially mitigate the impact and retain passenger volumes where possible. Moving forward, we will continue to monitor these trends closely. We will continue adapting our offerings to meet changing market conditions and optimize capacity planning for the upcoming quarters. As I dive a bit deeper into market dynamics, it's important to highlight how Novaturas has strategically adapted to shift in demand to ensure long-term sustainability. And one of our key focuses, it has been reducing dependency on traditional summer hotspots. Specifically the share of travelers heading to Turkey decreased from 39% in 2022 to 34% in 2024. In a similar way, Greece saw a reduction from 16% to 14%. And this strategic shift is vital in a highly competitive landscape, where these destinations face the oversupply. In contrast, we have observed robust growth in other markets. The share of passengers traveling to destinations outside our top 3, which is Turkey, Greece and Montenegro, has grown from 26% in Q3 2022 to 31% in Q3 2024. This growth also includes long-haul destinations which have been key in diversifying our offerings and catering to travelers looking for unique experiences. Our aim moving forward is to continue leveraging this trend with the emphasis on further expanding our presence in more profitable markets. And this will enable us not to only diversify our revenue streams, but also to better manage risks associated with the market concentration. Now let me focus on our customer perspective, which is a key pillar of our strategy. Regarding customer sentiment, our Net Promoter Score, which is a critical measure of customer loyalty has shown a positive trend. We achieved an NPS of 51% in Q3 2024, a significant improvement from 37% in Q1 2023, although we did see a slight decline compared to the previous quarter. This valuation reflects the ongoing efforts we are making to enhance our services and respond to customer feedback. Top-rated destinations this quarter included popular summer spots like Burgas, Antalya and Crete over 9 months. We have seen strong customer interest in Crete, Sharm-El-Sheikh and Tenerife among others. These insights are vital as we continue defining our travel offerings to meet the evolving preferences of our customers. And in the third quarter of 2024, we maintained a strong on-time flight performance rate of 77%. This consistency matches our performance from Q4 2023 and shows an improvement over earlier quarters this year. One of our major achievements have been reducing flight delays and I'm pleased to share that flights delayed by more than 3 hours dropped significantly from 8 instances in Q4 last year to just one, a single instance in Q3 this year. And these improvements are a testament to our focus on operational efficiency and customer satisfaction. Another significant trend we have explored this year is a shift of booking behavior. In Q3 2024, we observed that fewer travelers booked their trips more than 3 months in advance compared to the previous year. And this pattern of shorter-term planning indicates that customers are opting for more flexibility in the trial arrangements, likely increased availability of last-minute deals and due to economic uncertainties. Comparing the first 9 months of 2024 with same period in 2023, we saw not a significant, but 2% drop in early bookings. However, we've also noted that interest in our key destinations remains robust, particularly for the late summer and early winter trips. We are observing a growing demand of winter locations in the Canary Islands, Egypt, Dubai and especially in exotic long-haul destinations. Our focus for upcoming months will be optimizing our booking channels and continuing to adapt to these changing booking behaviors to maximize the revenue opportunities. Turning now to our distribution strategy. The third quarter of 2024 has been a mixed bag in terms of channel performances. On the positive side, our B2B sales channel, which leverages partnerships with travel agencies showed a modest increase of 1.4%. This channel remains crucial to us with its revenue share rising to 71.3% in 2024 compared to 69.3% in 2022. What is clear that the B2B channel continues to be a strong revenue driver, especially in these challenging competitive times. On the digital side, the sales through our web and GDS channels have shown slight improvements with a 1.1% increase compared to earlier quarters, and despite of major disruptions caused by our website update in 2023. Unfortunately, our own retail stores faced a slight decline of 2.6% during Q3, again, primarily driven by increased competition and oversupply of offerings driving prices down. However overall, the revenue share from our retail channels has grown from 12.9% in 2022 to 17.2% in 2024, and our goal remains to optimize each of these channels, leveraging the strength of our digital platform while also nurturing valuable relationships we have with our B2B partners. To continue on the distribution, let's discuss our web performance. In Q2 2024, we faced a temporary decline of our traffic share, which led to loss of leading position. However, by Q3, through our target strategies and improvements, we managed to recover a 3% share while solidifying our standing with 36% of the total web traffic in our sector. This strong recovery underscores our commitment to optimizing our digital presence and highlights the effectiveness of our recent initiatives. A major focus during Q3 was investing in user experience enhancements. These enhancements while developed this quarter in Q3 are set to be launched in Q4. We have prioritized these upgrades to ensure our digital platforms are even more intuitive and user friendly. By focusing on these improvements, we aim to streamline the online booking process, make it easier and more efficient for the customers to search, filter and compare their bookings. The upcoming user interface enhancements are expected to drive higher engagement and also conversion rates, supporting our objectives to boost direct sales. In addition to UX investments, we placed a strong emphasis on performance, stability and reliability. Ensuring that our platforms are resilient and quick to respond was a crucial step in reducing bounce rates and enhancing customer satisfaction, as you saw in our NPS. In today's competitive market, even minor improvements in speed and reliability can significantly impact our customer retention. Furthermore, we have been actively using performance analysis to better understand customer behavior. By leveraging data analytics, we're able to fine-tune our marketing strategies and optimize content to better align with what our customers are looking for. And these data-driven insights have allowed us to adjust our digital campaigns dynamically, ensuring we meet evolving customer expectations and maximize conversion opportunities. Looking at our distribution channels, it's clear that our partnerships with travel agencies continue to be a vital revenue driver. In Lithuania, for instance, the revenue from agency partners from our B2B channels reached a significant 38.4%, while Estonia and Latvia contributed 61.9% and 62.2%, respectively. This regional breakdown highlights the need for tailored strategies that leverage our strength in each market. In summary, our investments in digital enhancements during Q3, especially in UX improvements slated for launch in Q4, reflect our strategic focus on delivering a superior customer experience. By enhancing our digital infrastructure and aligning our strategies with customer behavior insights, we believe that we are well positioned not only to recover lost ground but also to drive sustainable growth as we move into the next quarters and beyond. Now as we approach the close of 2024, I would like to share our outlook and tactical objectives for the near future. Despite the challenges we have faced this year, we are committed to executing our strategic initiatives in driving growth and enhancing operational efficiency. In the coming months, we plan to roll out several enhancements, including the major update to our web search, in particular, capabilities and introduction of AI-powered hotel descriptions. This will also include a pros and cons feature for hotels, which will help our customers to making forward-looking decisions. And additionally, we are excited about upcoming introduction of hybrid packaging solutions, which will offer greater flexibility and value to our travelers. As we plan for the 2025 summer season, our focus will be on smart capacity planning and streamlining our operations to improve profitability and efficiency. We are continuing a dialogue with the financial institutions on possible solutions to strengthen our financial capacity, which, at the same time, will open up also opportunities to invest in further improvement of customer experience and expansion of services. We will inform about the solutions in the separate statements via the stock exchange. So our projections for full year of 2024 include serving between 220,000 to 230,000 passengers and generating a revenue range of EUR 180 million to EUR 200 million. However, given the current market conditions, we expect an EBITDA of approximately minus EUR 4.1 million and a net loss of around minus EUR 5.1 million. While these forecasts reflect the challenges we continue to navigate, we remain cautiously optimistic. By implementing these technical changes and focusing on customer-centric innovations, we are confident in our ability to stabilize performance and set a strong foundation for future growth. So with that, I would like to thank you for your trust and continued support as we work towards the brighter 2025. So now I'm happy to open the floor for any questions you may have.

Thank you for your presentation. [Operator Instructions] We have received many questions. So without due, let's start with the first one. In third quarter of 2023 company was at EUR 0.82 earnings per share. Currently, it's in negative figures. How are you planning to turn the company to be profitable?

All right. So as I indicated in our looking forward statements, so we have some tactical objectives to implement. But what is the most important is to really understand why we have experienced these turbulences in 2024. The thing is that in travel operator business, for example, the next summer season, summer '25, we basically finished planning 1.5 months ago. So by the end of the current year, we plan the next summer season. So what happened in 2023 when the market was growing and the rebouncing after the COVID turbulences, the plan for 2024 was 10% growth. And it was not taken into account that starting from 2024, actually the third and fourth quarter of 2023, we have faced dramatically increased competition in the Baltics. And with that competition and our planned ambition to grow, therefore, the commitment to aviation companies, it happened to be that in the market, there was a huge oversupply of seats. And that, as we also discussed and explained during the presentation today, has driven the prices down, a lot of last-minute offers and also some higher amount than normally it would be of empty seats in the aircraft. So we basically did an optimization back in March, but that was very much limited, if we look at the contracts and our customers. So not to disappoint the customers, not to cancel a lot of flights, not to pay big penalties for aviation companies, we had to do that optimization in rather limited space. So the planning in 2023, was overoptimistic, which led to commitments. And furthermore, it led to a drastic decrease in our gross profit. So going now to your question, the main indicator for the next year's EBITDA correction to the positive, first of all, is the smart planning, as I indicated. So we've already planned the next summer by analyzing the data very deeply. So to avoid the vast amount of last-minute discounts and also to avoid the empty seats. So planning is the first thing. Second thing is diversification of our destination. So we have rebalanced the amount of seats for the next summer from our key and most competitive destinations to more emerging markets and especially during this winter, we have increased the number of seats in the exotic destinations. So basically, the plan and diversification added with operational efficiency, which we are also implementing are main 3 factors to make EBITDA positive next year.

Does Novaturas live from business or from investors money? When it came to the stock exchange, the share price was EUR 12.

Well, I'm not sure I fully understand this question, but to answer that the money what company has and operating with is the shareholders' money. And in early 2018, company did an IPO and invested to grow the business, to repay the loans, the debts and now, yes, when the times are turbulent and difficult, we use the company money, but we are also looking at our financial results of last year once we earn the money and we have the money from operational activities we are using both. So I don't know if I understood this question, but it depends on the situation. And we haven't had any investor for the past 6 years, IPO was, as I said, in early 2018. But again, to indicate and as we also discussed during our Q2 review, we are also exploring different opportunities, including discussions with potential investors. And if there is any progress in there, I have to note we have interest from a couple of parties, we will update it separately on the stock exchange.

Could you please indicate how profitable was September in terms of EBITDA, please?

Okay. September was profitable. EBITDA was EUR 396,000 with a net profit of EUR 298,000.

Let's talk about the conflict in Middle East. Does Novaturas have a plan what's to substitute popular winter trips to Egypt with if the region becomes too dangerous?

Well, it's always a risk of geopolitical instabilities and conflicts in that region. So far, we are not seeing any decrease any issue with Egypt as a winter vacation destination. But of course, if something happens in that region with Egypt, we have other countries nearby, mostly Canary Islands and also Dubai to compensate maybe not in the same amount in the same number of seats but to compensate and direct more flights to these alternative destinations. We need to be realistic. There is no similar country with the destination like Egypt, anywhere else close by to Europe in the region. So yes, we rely during the winter season a lot on the Egypt.

Why has the digital transformation slowed and even backtracked? That is growing share of back sales via own Internet channels. Is it the customer reaction to new websites?

Yes, there are a couple of reasons. First of all, as it has been discussed already many times, the project, which was initiated some years ago and the new website launched in Q3 2023, it has some major setbacks. First of all, it seems that -- well, we saw that there were too many technical issues, a lot of the old bugs making this website unreliable and affecting its performance. So as I also explained, we have spent a lot of time and effort understanding where the issues are coming from and fixing all the critical and major bugs. So website is now stable. Second reason is that once the new website is launched, it takes time for the organic search to pick up the momentum, a lot of SEO optimization is needed. And it took time, it took time combined technical glitches and instability of our website, I mean, we had this issue coming in. Another thing that the market situation has changed. And now the competition is as big as it has never been in Baltic states joining for big discounts, also including the direct sales to e-commerce through web. As we noted, we value very much the B2B sector and our business partners, selling majority of our products and our packages to our customers. We are not going into the website discounts, which are available in the market through B2B partners. So we are trying to balance it.

Could you please break down the EUR 2.6 million EBITDA loss in third quarter between main factors that affected it. Is that competition, commitments to airlines or something else?

Well, it's basically both things. As I mentioned, competition has brought into the market an oversupply of seats. Therefore, we were too many, to be honest, last-minute deals with huge discounts. So once you have oversupply of seats in the market, your GP goes down or even goes negative. Another thing, as I also mentioned and explained how we plan the seasons and how we commit to the airlines. Yes, the second big reason was that the initial plan for 2024 growth has kept a lot of commitments with airlines, which were not possible to mitigate in a full extent. Yes, we did an optimization but only in the area, within narrow area, which was available based on the contracting conditions. And yes, that's these 2 reasons are the main reasons.

Talking about the competition. Could you please provide a bit more color on it? What is it exactly that the competitors do better? Or how they exactly hurt Novaturas?

Well, it's very difficult to comment about the competitors. But clearly, once from 2 major tour operators we are facing now five tour operators competing in the Baltic markets. The newcomers are fighting for the share usually. And as we saw in Baltics recently with lower prices. So oversupply of the seats and discounts are the biggest reasons what we are facing in this competitive market. And so to say, I think to answer your question, this is what they're doing better. They have more aggressive strategies, which also is very costly. And I'm not anticipating 2024 profitable to any tour operator in Baltics.

We have 4 more questions to go. Regarding stabilization of the balance sheet, what are the most reasonable options?

So as I mentioned, and maybe Darius will add in addition, the biggest factor for stabilization of our balance sheet is the smart planning of the summer '25. So I'm not going any deeper, I already explained about it. And of course, looking at the OpEx, we are also looking into the business processes and to the efficiency and optimization.

Yes. So maybe Kristijonas said almost everything, but it's most important to back on profitable operations. And then to increase our cash balance. Still, we are talking with financial institutions on possible solutions and it should help us.

What markets give you the highest sales profit per pax?

Well, as I have indicated, the markets that are dominating the summer season like Turkey, Greece and Montenegro, we're not performing as we hoped because of very high competition and a lot of available seats in those markets. And the rest of the markets are giving the higher sales profit, really from a competitive point of view, I do not want to disclose particular markets. But as we also indicated about early bookings of this winter, we see Egypt and especially exotic long-haul destinations, booking very well with a much higher about 30% than the previous year. And these destinations are giving us currently the highest profit.

In 2023, you planned 10% growth for 2024. How much capacity growth are you planning for in 2025 versus 2024, more, less or same level? Please quantify, if possible.

Yes. In 2023, the ambition was as rightly stated 10% growth from 2022. I'm sorry, in 2024, the growth addition was 10% from 2023. But as I mentioned and we discussed about previously during Q2 presentation, we did an optimization and we decreased 2024 levels firstly to 2023, number of seats, which was approximately 250,000 seats. But later, during the summer season, we also did -- as also our competitors were doing the same because of oversupply of seats, further optimizations in that within our scope, as I said, because our commitment to do the contracts with aviation companies, and also the customers who have already purchased as early bookings or packages or tickets to those destinations. We decreased the number to the level of what we are currently expecting to close this year as it was in my looking forward statement to 220,000 to 230,000 passengers, which is less than in 2024 by around 20,000, 30,000 passengers. And as I mentioned, our smart planning of Summer '25, we are decreasing the capacities in the most competitive destinations like Turkey, Greece, Montenegro. But we are increasing the capacities in other destinations as our metric markets also drastically less than doubled increasing the capacities in exotic destination, global destinations. But overall, our number of seats will not be growing compared to 2024, and it will also not be the same as 2024. It will be less because our focus is profit generating destinations, less seats in the loss generating destinations. And overall, smartly planning the number of seats and sales depths would allow us to decrease the last-minute sales and also decrease, which is very costly, the empty seats in our aircraft.

There is one more question left to be answered. What will you prioritize in 2025, sales growth and market share or profitability?

Clearly, as you can read from my comments and answers to the previous questions is profitability share in current market situation where we have 5 very, very strong competitors. It's very costly. So that would cost us even higher loss if we fight for the market share.

Thank you. All questions have been answered. On behalf of Novaturas and NASDAQ, thank you for joining us today. We will be closing the call now.