Oneflow AB (publ) (ONEF) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Okay. Good morning to all of you. It's 10 sharp, so I guess we can start. And welcome to the year-end report for Oneflow 2022. So my name is Anders Hamnes. I'm the CEO and Founder of the company. And with me today, I have Natalie Jelveh, our new CFO. Just one practical information before we get started. There's a chat. Please don't use the chat, instead use the Q&A button. And then we will get back to your questions in the end of the meetings. And we -- of course, we love questions, so please make it work. Okay. So Natalie, please?

Yes. Good morning all, and welcome to this presentation. So my name is Natalie Jelveh. I just recently joined Oneflow as their new CFO. I'm very happy to be a part of the Oneflow family. I started about 4 weeks ago, and I can say I'm very impressed both by Oneflow overall, our very talented colleagues, but strong culture with amazing products that we offer our customers. I have more than 20 years' of experience within the financial fields in the different leading positions. I have 7 years of experience within the SaaS business. And prior to Oneflow, I have also worked in public traded companies. I'm very happy to have joined Oneflow and to join their journey, and I will make sure to bring all my experience and knowledge in towards working with the team for us to continue the growth that we've had in Oneflow and for us to meet our company goals.

Thank you. So just to get started, a quick summary of the main KPIs. Fourth quarter has been tough. Also in the third quarter report, we indicated that large deals -- that the sales cycles were getting longer. So that was just a signal that -- what we saw in the fourth quarter. It has been tough. I would say even in the first quarter this year, it's still tough. It's not tougher, but it's not easier either. So it's as tough as it was in the fourth quarter, I would say. So our internal projections were higher. And if you look at our company now, with all the people that we have employed and so on, we are [ rigged ] for higher sales. So in the normal market, we would have seen much better numbers than we do today. But still, we did actually get an all-time high in fourth quarter. So net new ARR increased with SEK 10.1 million, which I'm actually super proud of because it was really, really tough out there. So we are doing very well even in a tough market. The ARR, it closed in at SEK 90.6 million for the year, which is a growth of 59% year-over-year. ARR to sales ratio, 131%, has been quite stable on that level for some time now. And due to higher churn and lower expansion sales, our retention rates are getting down. So net retention 114% and for the gross, 92%. LTV:CAC, 9.5x. So yes, we get almost SEK 10 back for each krona we invest, so which is quite decent actually. Yes. Before we get into more details on the numbers, I would just like to take the opportunity and just give you some information about the company to those that are new to Oneflow. So just 2 slides on what we do. We are an e-contract platform, an end-to-end solution for handling all your contract needs in one workspace. So you can work with Oneflow in all stages of the process, pre-sign, sign and post-sign. So in the pre-sign stage, you can build very powerful web-based templates. You can control, of course, what your colleagues and counterparties are allowed to change in the template, and you can invite counterparties and in real-time collaborate a little bit like you're doing Google Docs, collaborate in the template. We can make changes, make comments. You have an audit trail, listing, who did which change, when and what. So it's a very easy and effective tool to work with contracts, all kind of contracts. And of course, we do have signing. I know there are many companies that do signing as their core business. In Oneflow, that's more like a wheel on the car. Yes, without signing, we're not an e-signing company. Post-sign, you can manage your contracts in Oneflow. You can be notified on key events. You can filter, summarize and so on, and also since we work with HTML contracts, the data is available from the API. So you can build very powerful integrations with Oneflow to feed data in and out of the business systems, which, of course, is critical because if you think about it, when 2 companies touch, meet, there is also a contract. That's like touch point. And all contracts have data, and you want those data into your CRM, your ERP, your ATS and so on. So it is -- we are like in the center. The contract is the touch point. So we strongly believe that the data should be processable and not locked down into a PDF image, like most of our competitors believe. And throughout the process, of course, from pre-sign to post-sign, you can -- also, you'll also get information from us that will make you smarter and do a better process. We're going to give you insights on the process. So that's, in a nutshell, what we do. And sales channels, we have 3 main sales channels. Number one is what you call direct sales. And that's -- yes, like what you can expect, salespeople doing outbound and inbound approaches quite high-touch sales. Then we work through partners. We have many strong partnerships and different partner programs. And the third channel is what we call self-serve, low-touch or no-touch sales. And that one has 2 kind of flavors, what you call it marketing-driven, think about it like marketing generate traffic to a homepage. They sign up -- some of those sign up for a freemium, and then we're going to work on converting them to a paid plan. And then what we call product-driven is when Oneflow user send a contract to a counterparty, and this counterparty, of course, get a free demo of Oneflow from our user. And they decided to hit -- to click the button, convert to a free plan as well. It's -- that's a very effective way for them to get started. And if you think about it, as we speak right now, hundreds, at least hundreds of people out there get a free demo of Oneflow from one of our paying users. That's quite interesting. We have had a very packed period of releases. Actually, we do releases every week, but these are like maybe the main releases that's been done for the last couple of months. So fourth quarter, we released sign later, which means that you can send out, for example, offers or any kind of documents to engage and interact with somebody, and then when the timing is right, to make it more into a contract. And then you can convert the process into a contract process with a sign button and so on. So it's a very effective way to, for example, send offers. Video. We have had video features in Oneflow for years now, but what is new now is that you can even include video in the contracts to make it more kind of human and playful. We also launched a very powerful control center for data management. So our customers can be even more on top of all their GDPR and privacy issues. We launched Zapier, so you can actually connect Oneflow now to thousands of different other tools. We also launched or strengthened our current integrations with the Salesforce and Teamtailor and now it's two-way-sync, which is powerful. It can feed data back and forth both ways. And even SuperOffice, we have made a lot of significant improvements to that integration as well. This year, so far, the first few weeks of the year, we have launched what we call an AI Assist. So we're actually leveraging the OpenAI GDP -- GPT technology in Oneflow. So now you can, for example, when you write contracts, you can describe what contracts you want or you can describe a clause that you want, and we're going to present for you a result, which actually is impressively good. So you're going to be amazed. Try it out. That's a super interesting feature. If you want to take -- and probably contracts for consulting companies in France, try it out, write it out, and you'll get it. It's super powerful. We also made a lot of improvements to our HubSpot integrations. And now it's even more. It's actually a very strong integration from before. And normally, when we meet competitors in the door and we have HubSpot, we win almost every time, but we still continue to invest in HubSpot to make it even better and even stronger and deeper integration. Folders was launched actually this week as we already from before have what we call tags, workspaces, so you can sort your contracts in different ways, but folders just adding one more kind of dimension to it. So now you can even bucket together your contracts in different folders and organize in different like layers and so on. So it's a very -- our archive is super, super strong. We always have that from our customers. So let's dig into more number stuff. In Oneflow, we doesn't talk that much about sales on a monthly basis. We are kind of -- ARR is our north star KPI. And SEK 91 million end of the year, 59% year-over-year growth. And if you look at the graph to the right, there is a peak on Q2, Q3 2021. And this peak is also related to, if you -- 1 year earlier was the start of the pandemic, and then the sales were a little bit slower. So that's why you have a little bit peak there. So I would say that back then, maybe was a little bit higher than normal. And right now, it is a little bit lower than normal because it is really, really tough out there, and we are [ rigged ] for a different growth. And we don't believe this trend is going to continue. I'll get back to more about that in a few slides, but we still also going to stick with our long-term target of SEK 600 million in ARR by 2026, which implies that we have to grow north of 60% year-over-year. Net new ARR for the quarter was an all-time high, and it's up 45% since last year. And if you think about it, up 45% means that it's actually growth on growth. So we are growing 59%, but it's up 45% from previous year growth. The sentiment is tough. Sales cycles at the moment are longer than it used to be. The churn is higher, and expansion is also lower than it used to be. So what we believe is that typically, it is companies with a weak balance sheet, small companies with a big balance sheet or larger companies that just -- since they lay off people, they take out a few licenses. So we believe that for fourth quarter and even now in the first quarter, we are kind of wiping out what we call the weaker licenses, like a clean out, kind of. So we don't believe it to continue. We expect expansion sales to be tough for some time. But also, we have, in the end of the third quarter, increased our prices quite a lot. And we are looking on renegotiating prices and so on with customers. So yes, so new sales and expansion sales is going to be in pressure for some time, but we do not believe the churn rate to continue at the same level as it has for the last few months. We also opened up 3 new offices outside the Nordics last year. We had an office in the U.K. from May and in France and the Netherlands from September. And sales, of course, has been low last year from these offices because of the onboarding, but we expect it to be different this year, but this is according to plan. Retention rates. So we -- net retention rate end of the year of 114%, and the average for the year was 118%. And the gross retention was 92% ended the year -- for the end of the year and 93% on average for the year. So gross retention include downgrade and churn but not expansion. And net retention, of course, include also expansion. So during the first 9 months of the last year, we did not see any kind of trend break in churn and downgrades. But this changed during the fourth quarter and even we saw some signals during the third quarter. So in the fourth quarter, in absolute terms, the churn rate were double as it used to be in the previous 3 quarters of the year. And again small companies, weak balance sheets and large companies that lay off some people were the 2 categories that reduced this [ count ] for us. So we do not see any other factors than the economic sentiment for the churn. So it's not like competition now is tougher or any other reason. It is the economic sentiment that is the explanation for it. And we do expect the net retention rate to pick up again as soon as the underlying market fundamentals improve. And you can think about it, there are actually kind of 2 forces pulling in each direction for us because on the one side, you have the economy at the moment, which is pulling down. And then you have -- I mean, there are really, really strong kind of benefits for companies from an ROI point of view to deploy contract management platform like Oneflow. So with layoffs, like we've seen for the last month, comes the need for being cost effective and digitalizing the manual and resource-heavy process with contracts. So in a more -- I would say, in a more challenging economic environment, companies will have to put more focus on productivity. So 2 forces pulling in each direction. And for the last few months, the force pulling downward have been a little bit stronger, but we saw the same pattern in the beginning of the pandemic for the first, like, 2 quarters there. The negative force was a little bit stronger and then it went up back to normal again. So if you look at the number of users and the average ARR per paying seat, the average ARR per paying user was 3,100 by the end of the year, which is up 2% since the year before, and the number of paying users was close to 30,000, so 29.2 to be accurate -- 29,200, which is up 55% since 1 year before. And if you think about it, the price increase 1 year, only 2% in 1 year. It's actually quite a lot because this is the average of the total. So it will take some time before you see the effect really kick in. So the average ARR per user closed in the fourth quarter were much higher. So this is the average of the total portfolio since day 1. So we had a new price list by the end of Q3 that we started to work on in Q4. And we have done -- and we have changed prices for a lot of customers, and we are still -- and these project is still ongoing. So I would say that, so far, it's been a success. We feel that the new price list is balanced. It is reasonable. We are constantly adding new features to our product, and we increased value for our customers. And then it makes sense also, of course, that we increase the price for Oneflow. So, so far in this project, we are -- we feel that we have made a good job with our new product price list, and we don't plan any changes there in the near term. And we also expect the ARR per user to increase going forward.

So looking at the net sales for the fourth quarter, we closed at SEK 20.4 million, which is representing a growth of 59% comparing to the same period last year. Looking at the full year, we closed at SEK 69.1 million for the net sales, which is representing a growth of 59% comparing to last year. Out of this, software-related recurring revenue represents 94% of the net sales for the fourth quarter and 95% of the net sales for the full year. Our other revenues consist mainly of professional services. Now looking at the ARR net sales ratio, which is very healthy and strong for the fourth quarter, landing at 131%, which -- this is also, of course, demonstrating that we do not trade quick wins for long-time profitability and that we, of course, have a product that is self-serve, where professional services are not only -- are not strictly needed to onboard our customers. And scalability is, of course, central in our business model. Globalization is, of course, another main focus area. The shares on net sales outside of Sweden continues to grow, and we landed in Q4 at a percent of 28% compared to 18% for the last -- same period last year. Looking at the full year, the shares of net sales outside of Sweden was 25% comparing to 18% for last year, so growing. And going forward, our net sales outside of Sweden have a strong growth potential, especially as we are establishing the grounds in our new markets. Currently, we have paying users in 31 countries.

So just a few comments on our expansion. When we enter new markets, we do a very deep analysis of, of course, new markets. And we are using a scorecard, where we have, like, I think we have 4 different dimensions that we measure and [ weight ]. And so far, I feel that the decisions we have taken to go into U.K., France and the Netherlands has been right. The timing feels right. And from an operational point of view, 2002 for the company has been characterized a lot by, of course, this expansion. It's taken a lot of time, a lot of resources from our office in Stockholm, have had to travel to these new markets back and forth. And it takes time to build an unknown brand in the new market and our teams are new. But now we feel that we have onboarded most teams, so this year is going to be different. So the sales contribution so far has been very limited. It's quite interesting to see that so different every country is because you can't have one playbook for all. In some markets, I mean we can -- [ events ] works super good and in some not. Outbound is working well in some markets. In other markets, it doesn't work at all almost. So there is a very different playbook for each different market. So to conclude, the development is in line with our plan so far, and we are satisfied with our performance. We have done some great, great hires, and we are very excited about this year coming out. And also it's also very nice to see that the teams we have in Norway and Finland are up and like rolling for real now. So we are definitely in a growth phase in those markets and well established. It is also interesting to just reflect that we -- I mean, we don't need to have offices everywhere to have customers. We do have customers today in 31 countries. That's the beauty with SaaS and PLG. We have customers in New Zealand, in Belize, Caribbean and so on. So with this, of course, we don't have any outbound efforts at the moment in all these markets. We do experiment outside our markets into new markets to see -- just to learn, but that's just more experimentation at the moment.

Yes. Looking at the gross margin, we continue to have a quite high gross margin. So we're closing the fourth quarter with a gross margin of 94%, 2% down if you compare it to the same period last year. Cost of service sold is mainly related to 2 things: expenses for our sales commission to partners, which approximately stands for 3%; and the remaining 3% is connected to our hosting expenses. Our expectation is that gross margin will remain high going forward. Yes. Looking at our EBITDA. So during the fourth quarter, EBITDA amounted to minus SEK 18.8 million, which is corresponding to an EBITDA margin of minus SEK 92 million. Looking at the full year, EBITDA closed at minus SEK 46 million, which is corresponding to an EBITDA margin of minus SEK 67 million. Now this is in line with the company's plan to invest both in product development but also new markets. Our increased cost mainly consists of our higher employee cost. Looking at the group, we closed with 155 employees comparing to 105 last year. Looking at our average number of employees for the fourth quarter, we landed at 148 comparing to 91 for the last quarter last year. So increase in the number of employees is also, of course, connected with increase the cost of employees. As mentioned previously, by the fourth quarter, we have opened 3 new offices outside of the Nordics, which has been established, which, of course, also entitles a higher cost. And this is usually, of course, when you enter into new market. Initially, it's connected with higher cost. But as we start to be more established to the market, we will also see, of course, an increase in sales. Another thing that is very important to Oneflow is the Oneflow culture. And it's something that we are very proud of and it's something we consistently work with to strengthen and improve. And as we have expanded our teams, both during the pandemic but also across new markets, we made a strategic decision to invest in our cultures by bringing the whole team together for a 2-today conference. And this is, of course, to set the foundation for the teams to focus on driving profitability growth going forward. These investments amounted to approximately SEK 2.4 million, which could be considered a onetime offer, something that is not usually common looking historically at our costs. Now looking at EBIT. EBIT amounted to minus SEK 24.4 million for the fourth quarter with its corresponding to an EBIT margin of minus SEK 120 million. Now looking at full year EBIT amounted to minus SEK 65.8 million, whereas corresponding to an EBIT margin of minus SEK 95 million. Now except of the increased cost, depreciation have also increased compared to the same period last year as a result of increased investments in capitalized development work, of course, connected to our heavy focus on product development. But as planned, we will turn around profitability, aiming towards our 2026 goal of 20% on EBIT.

LTV:CAC. Okay. So we closed in at 9.5 for the year, which was down from 14.8 one year earlier. And the LTV, of course, is down due to the increased churn. And the CAC went up because of hiring and expansions into new markets, which has been very expensive for us. So -- but it is as planned. The LTV has declined according to our plan. And we do expect to see different numbers for this year when our new offices start to bring in some more sales to the equation. And also the churn, as we commented before, we think that we have like wiped out a lot of the weak [ seats ] at the moment. There might still be some more, but we are getting close to where the weaker [ seats ] will be at a very low level. So we don't believe the churn is going to continue at the current level going forward. Just also a comment on how we calculate the LTV because I know there are different ways of doing it. And so what we have not included in the LTV is expansion sales going forward. And of course, that is not correct because we do have expansion sales. It's at the moment, we have a net retention of 114%, which is low in our context. We believe it's going to increase again. But then you would just get -- if we included that component, the formula would have become much more complex, and the LTV would have been much higher actually. So to be conservative and not complicate things, we decided to use a more kind of simpler but conservative formula for the LTV, which doesn't include the expansion ARR. And the CAC includes all sales and marketing-related expenses divided on the number of new customers. So in a more challenging economic environment, the companies will have to focus on productivity. And Oneflow is very well positioned to help companies become more digital and effective and streamline all processes involving contracts. And we're not slowing down. We have a very strong financial position with more than SEK 200 million in the bank by the end of last year to 11, I think it was. And we will invest our money wisely. So despite our hunger for growth, we will never, never, never compromise our strong financial position. Always be humble and strive to make sound long-term business decisions. So last year has been extraordinary because it's extraordinary to open 3 new offices. There's been a lot of costs involved, people traveling from Stockholm to our new offices and the other way around to onboard, bring the culture, train and so on. So this is going to be a different year. And last year is not going to be an indication of how it's going to be every year going forward, so to say. So our -- we're going to remain our goals of SEK 600 million by the end of '26 and an EBIT margin of 20% the same year. Our plan is to grow organically. But of course, we are optimistic. So depending on what's going to happen going forward, there is a recession. A lot of companies, of course, have challenges and so on. We are always open to consider acquisitions if that should be interesting, but that's not our base scenario. Base scenario is organically, organically, organically and never, never, never compromise our financial position. So thank you. With that, we can get into the Q&A session.

So first question, how did price hikes for new users and also for the existing user base develop? What share of existing users have agreed to higher price? Yes, that's -- we don't provide those details, but what I can say on a general note is that when I talk to our newbies sales reps, they are very happy with the new price list, and they don't feel that's adding any capacity to the sales process for them at all, actually. So no friction there. But we have, during the fourth quarter, informed a big share of our customers about -- we had like a price adjustment of 5%. And then, of course, we do renegotiate with companies that have a very low average [ seat ] price from the past, so to bring it more up to our current price list. And overall, we are very happy with the dialogue with customers. And also during the fourth quarter, price adjustments contributed quite a lot actually to the expansion sales. And we also expect it to be the same pattern during the fourth -- during Q1 and also this year. So expansion sales should actually have been a lot higher if we had a more normal market condition, but it's been saved a little bit by the price changes. Another question, you added 52 employees in 2022. In the report, you signaled slowing hiring pace in '23. What are your plans for this year? Yes. So when we talk about hiring in the company, then we think about the new hires we're going to make. And, of course, yes, 52 new employees in last year, but we hired a lot more. Some started in January, some in Feb, some in March. So maybe this is something that we can think about from -- on our end. Maybe we should be more clear here when we talk about hiring, so we don't misunderstand each other. We are going to hire much less this year than we did last year, but a lot of the -- but we did more than 52 hires last year. So there's like a lag here. But we -- I mean, we are, of course, adjusting to the situation to the world, to everything. But still, we believe that we are going to reach our goals going forward. So you mentioned the challenging market, but ARR was still 59% year-over-year. What is the expectation in the short term? So short term, I believe Q1 is as Q4. It's not worse. It's not better. It's tough. It's really tough. So the churn is at the same level in absolute terms. And our expansion sales is partly also saved by the price changes. But still -- I mean, it's not -- we're quite happy considering the situation. We don't give any more detailed guidance on that. How much on Q4 costs were of nonrecurring character? Well, we had this seminar in Rome that costed SEK 2.4 million as Natalie just mentioned, and there have been a lot of traveling back and forth. But we haven't been more exact how many number. Would you add something, Natalie?

No. I mean we mentioned the big investment in our culture with the conference that we had, bringing the whole team together. That was SEK 2.4 million, which is quite big part of the nonrecurring cost. But also, as we mentioned, I mean, we entered new office. They are always cost connected initially with opening offices that you can consider as a [ non-accounting ] cost. However, we do not have exactly the figures, but...

We do, but we don't share it.

We don't share it. Yes. We do not share. We have it, definitely 100%, but we do not share it here.

New office contribution? Well, there have been a contribution last year. It's not been much, but it looks promising, and we are very happy where we are right now. It's been a year of learning and tweaking and iteration, I would say, to define the formula on how to sell in different markets. And U.K. is very different from the Netherlands, for example, as was France. So there is a playbook for each market. But we are going to continue with the same effort as we have done last year going forward. Do you have any more questions on your end, Natalie?

No, I think we covered all questions.

Okay. So then I would like to thank you all, and wish you an amazing weekend in a few hours.

Have a good Friday. Thank you.

Thank you, bye-bye.