Otovo ASA (OTOVO) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Otovo's quarterly presentation. My name is Anders Rønold, Head of Investor Relations. Today's presenters are Andreas Thorsheim, CEO; and Lars Ekeland, CFO. First, Andreas will talk through the quarterly highlights and business updates before Lars will present the financial results. Finally, Andreas will provide an outlook for 2021. If you have any questions during the presentation, please share them in the chat, and we will answer them in the end. I will now give the word to Andreas.

Thank you very much, Anders, and thank you to previous and new shareholders for attending this minor historic event, Otovo's first quarterly presentation as a company listed on the Euronext Growth Stock exchange. So to reiterate what Otovo is. Otovo is a marketplace for energy installations. And our aim is to use our unique method to build the European #1 in the residential solar energy category. To homeowners, we're the easiest way to get solar panels on your roof. Our customers go to their local Otovo website, otovo.se.it.es, they input their address and then our software will do what the human being does when doing a site visit, measuring the size of the roof, its orientation, the amount of sun that hits it and figuring out how many panels will fit and what type of savings that can provide to the consumer. In short, our software makes it as easy to buy solar panels on your roof as buying a pair of shoes or a shirt online. We are building out a unique network of solar energy installers. It reaches from the north of Scandinavia to the tip of Italy and Southern Spain. Together, our installers cover an area that now contains a population of 200 million people. And these guys install panels every single day of the quarter. This quarter, we completed more than 600 installations on roofs across Europe. The price we're fighting for is huge. If we look at the larger, more advanced solar energy market, like the Netherlands, California, Australia, Hawaii, they typically have a penetration of solar energy on households between 12% and 30%. That is far ahead of what we see in Europe currently, where the large markets typically have a penetration between 1% and 4%, which leaves us a lot of room to grow this business. Now turning to the highlights of the quarter. And I'm happy to say that Otovo, which is an ambitious high-growth company returns to growth after a challenging 2020. We're reporting revenue up 7% year-over-year compared to the first quarter of last year, coming in at NOK 38 million in the quarter. The number of net projects sold in the quarter is up just shy of 50% to 815 projects, and the value of our pipeline has expanded by 29% compared to the first quarter of last year, coming in at NOK 66 million. In addition, our installer network has grown by 47% in the last year, and now the tally stands at 340 installer companies. This quarter has also been marked by our successful private placement and subsequent listing on Euronext Growth Stock Exchange, and that provides both visibility and the runway for future growth and a path to profitability. We finished the quarter with a solid NOK 284 million cash position. We're also continuing our efforts to build a pan-European product and organization. During this quarter, we've expanded our consumer offering in many ways, expanding our leasing offering, introducing batteries and setting up an entirely new guarantee product. And in the same period, we've also recruited 3 very strong general managers for our business units in Scandinavia, Italy and France. Now to the main points of what has happened to our business during the quarter. We now have a presence in Italy and Poland. Poland having launched at the end of 2020 and Italy soft launching during March and coming out in fall now in April, and both currently show strong early sales. France lands a record sales quarter as the technical and business model integration with Otovo after our acquisition of In Sun We Trust gets completed, and we're very happy to see that. Market shares also is our best month in terms of the number of monthly installations with more than 300 installations installed in a single month. And I think that goes to show Otovo's ability to operate at a high pace of installation and gives us hope and confidence for the months ahead. On the product side, we've launched our leasing offering in Poland and France. And based on our high confidence on the quality of the work that the installers provide, we productified an Otovo Guarantee that is made available for all Otovo customers in Europe, and we expect that to boost our current version from an interested customer to a customer who actually becomes a sale, signs a contract. Behind the curtain, we've also improved our installer onboarding software, and that helps us increase our coverage geographically and the competitive pressures on the platform that lower the prices to our consumers. In terms of our operations, we've soft launched a battery offering while we entered Italy, and this offering will be fully live in Q2 and is expected to be deployed gradually into more markets in the quarters that lie ahead of us. The number of installers on the platform is up 47% to 340, standing at 231 at the same time last year. And then finally, on the business side, we come in with the cost per watt peak, a central measure of cost performance in installations in the residential and utility scale solar industries, which is down 16%, and 21% down on nonhardware, which is kind of the benefit of the platform, 12% down on hardware elements, which is more the benefit of global supply chains. In terms of sales in our markets, this has been a quarter of overall strong traction in sales. We're up just shy of 50% year-to-date. The number of units sold increases from 546 to 815, mostly driven by new countries that add volumes fast and the Scandinavian market where the declines have stopped. I'll get a little bit back to that. A majority of our sales are now outside Scandinavia, and I believe that really emphasizes our development into a true pan-European platform for energy installations from being a mostly Scandinavian business only a few quarters ago. Now zooming in on Scandinavia, the sales decline that we experienced during 2020 has stopped. March 2021 is ahead of March 2020, and the outlook is better for the rest of the year. Increased -- we've also increased our marketing and sales capacity in response to a rebound in the market that we've been seeing at the start of the year as market conditions in both Norway and Sweden have been improved with higher electricity prices, less uncertainty on subsidies and grid -- tariffs, and that materializes into better expectations for sales during Q2 with an expanded and strong sales team in Scandinavia. In Spain, this is the fifth quarter of operation and sales growth is up by 3x compared to last year. And we've strengthened our sales staff during the quarter and in anticipation of continued growth. France just keeps growing quarter by quarter and has a net sales acceleration that is quite neat from 2020 on the back of our technology and business model transition to the turbo platform that we completed out of last year. Poland showed strong sales with very short installation times. And the outlook in Poland is also good because the period we've been in now has been a bit a limbo period between the previous subsidy program and a new one that announced to take effect in July, but we've been selling really well in this limbo period, and that builds our expectations for the rest of the year. In Italy, we're off to a good start with a very strong General Manager in place, and he continues to build his team in Milan and he launched officially in April. But as we were testing the market, some sales were booked during the entry preparations in March. So in total, we delivered a strong sales quarter with 815 projects sold. Assuming a bit in on the product development that we've been doing in the quarter, we've gradually been rolling out our leasing offering to more countries. And this quarter, we saw the leasing offering being introduced in Poland and in France. And that means that customers can now go solar with zero upfront payment and at a low monthly fee. This is a new product that will take some time to get absorbed in these markets, but we continue iterating on making the leasing offering as attractive as possible to Polish and French consumers. When people buy solar panels, having trust in the quality of the workmanship and the equipment is essential. This is an equipment that stands on your roof for 25, 30, maybe more years. And so being convincing in the sales pitch, it's a really high importance and feeds directly into the conversion from an interested customer to a paying customer. And so creating a framework where we can provide good guarantees, where we can display the guarantees that are often given by mandatory rules on their workmen and the guarantees on the equipment. That allows us to provide something we call the Otovo Guarantee, that we think will be really helpful to our sales teams in coming quarters. And as I said, behind the scenes, we've improved our installer onboarding software that facilitates recruiting and installer life on the platform. Now with regards to the installers, we've added 60 installer companies during the quarter, and the tally now stands just above 340 installer companies, a nice increase and our second best quarter in terms of recruitments ever. That growth is driven by depth of coverage in Poland and reaching almost the entire Italian population by the end of the quarter. And of course, we continue driving the competitive pressures on the platform. The hardware cost is down 5% in Scandinavia, 24% in Spain, while the non-hardware cost is down 16% in Scandinavia and 31% in Spain, which brings the total cost per project down 10% in Scandinavia and 26% in Spain, a number we're very proud of. And when you're building a scaling organization, you need strong people and I think I'll cap of this part of the presentation with an introduction to some new faces that will help build Otovo going forward. So just yesterday at our Annual General Meeting, the shareholders voted to add Josefin Landgård from Sweden to our Board of Directors. And she has a background as a former CEO and COO of Kry, a leading provider of remote health care consultations and I guess many of you already have that app on your phones. Actually is also a current founder of a company called Mantle. She brings years of experience in product marketing and operations on a fast scaling platform that has a presence internationally. And I think that strengthens our board as we go into the same type of journey with Otovo. And in Solar, our General Manager lineup, [indiscernible] Fabio joined us in Italy, Jean in France. And as we announced yesterday, Daniel Munnich who joined us from BCG to take charge of the Scandinavian market will join us during Q2, and that completes a really strong team of general managers and functional managers in Otovo that will drive our growth going forward.

Thank you. So zooming in on financial highlights. Revenue is up by 7% from Q1 last year to 37.6% -- NOK 37.6 million. We have strong results in Spain and France. These are partly offset by Scandinavia that had a weak sales quarter in Q4, which typically flows into the income and revenue in first quarter. The Q4 market in Scandinavia was due to uncertainty about subsidies in Sweden and grid tariffs in Norway. Both these have been clarified in December, and we see better sales numbers in Q1. Poland, Italy had their first installations in Q4 and Q1, respectively, in quite small numbers so far, but showing good signs for future fortunes. On the gross margin, we're at 15.1%. This is down 1.3 percentage points from first quarter last year. We have new markets coming in, where we typically start at the lower margin to boost sales and also campaigns in Scandinavia in the soft market has moved the margin somewhat down. We also have France transitioning from commission sales very typically have a fee and 100% margin to the Otovo business model, where you see margins at 10% to 15% and increasing in more mature markets. In the sales, we have increasing margins, and we expect to continue to increase margin throughout the year and expect to be on a group gross margin at 18% towards the end of the year. On the EBITDA, we were at minus NOK 37.4 million compared with minus NOK 22.1 million last -- first quarter last year. We have some listing related and other nonrecurring cost items that amount to NOK 8 million. That influenced the EBITDA number. Of these personnel cost is NOK 7 million and other operating expenses account for approximately NOK 1 million. On the personnel costs, we are up by NOK 11 million compared with the first quarter last year. We have a headquarter costs up by NOK 2 million. Spain, France, Italy and Poland, account for approximately NOK 5.5 million. And then we have cost of share programs at NOK 8 million. Of this NOK 4 million is the front-loading of costs due to accelerated vesting of shares in -- after the listing on Euronext Growth. And we also have a NOK 2 million increase share price that influence the social security. On other operating expenses, we are up by NOK 4 million compared with the first quarter last year. 3 of those 4 are related to new markets. And the last 1 million is temporary costs in headquarter ahead of listing, where we had some additional staff. At the cash position, we are at comfortable NOK 84 million, as Andreas said, after successful fundraising and listing on our Euronext Growth in the first quarter. Looking at the pipeline and what we call the pipeline is projects that are sold but not yet installed and not in the revenue yet. So we have a group pipeline that is up by 29% compared to first quarter in 2020. If we compare with last quarter for 2020 were up by 67%. Scandinavia pipeline is a little bit down with the first quarter last year, but show a very strong rebound from fourth quarter 2020. Then Spain maintains pipeline from last quarter is obviously up a lot since first quarter last year that was first quarter Spain was in operation and France delivers record high pipeline into second quarter. Poland, we do mostly intra-quarter installations which means that most of Polish sales will be reflected in the revenue in the same quarter, which leaves a relatively small pipeline into the next quarter from Poland and Italy is just soft launched. We expect it to build the pipeline during Q2. We have some small projects in the pipeline as Andreas said, from the soft launch. On this slide, we show the bridge between incoming pipeline sales in the quarter. Revenue in installed projects that are booked within the quarter and outgoing pipeline. So at the left on the figure, you see incoming pipeline into Q1 was NOK 39.5 million. We had net sales of NOK 62.3 million. Then we installed and booked revenue of NOK 37.6 million. And then there's some currency adjustment effects, which adds on, and then we have an outgoing pipeline of NOK 66.1 million. Then for the -- this will typically go into the next quarter's revenue. So rule of thumb is that 65% to 75% of the incoming pipeline is installed in the subsequent quarter and then the remainder of that pipeline fell into the quarter after that. In addition, we have 15% to 20% of quarterly sales installed within the same quarter, leading to the remaining revenue in that part. This is a starting point, and then there's obviously there's operational nonoperational factors that may impact this rule of thumb. You have the mix of countries, where some are faster, others are slower. Seasonality winter is not good in the North, and also subsidy schemes or other administrative issues may impact this picture. But based on the information we have today, we are expecting revenues for next quarter to come in at around NOK 60 million to NOK 65 million.

Thank you, Lars. So to finish off, we see a very strong '21 ahead of us. We reiterate our full year forecast given in February during the listing process, where our aim is to end the year with EUR 29 million in revenue. Now Scandinavia, of course, remains a bit of a challenge, but it will improve year-over-year in the next 3 quarters as we respond to more positive market. And I have confidence that we can put in marketing and staff in the market that has increased demand. Poland is ahead of our internal estimates and is on track for a repeat of what we did in Spain in its first year of operation, which is great. The good thing about Poland is that it will have a faster effect on the P&L as there are no administrative stops in Poland and projects get installed very quickly after sales. France and Italy and Spain progressed as anticipated and will continue to grow during all of 2021. Now with regards to the gross margin, we target to come out of the year with an 18% gross margin speed. Between where we stand now and that time, we will be -- our gross margins will be diluted by growth in new markets in the near term. We expect that to pick up during Q3. So we come out of Q4 above 18% and gives us a launching pad to increase our margins further into 2022. In total, we believe this sets us up for a very strong 2021 and with an exit pace that gives a nice speed into 2022. Thank you for listening. I thank you, Anders, and the chat maybe has some questions for us now. So we'll be happy to take questions now.

Yes. So the first question, Andreas, why don't you give financial numbers split by countries?

I'm not saying we'll never do that. But I think when you look at the size of the price we're fighting for, this is a valuable market. We have competitors that are big utilities, small installers, and some of them may be following this webcast and certainly reading our material. And our view is that the disadvantages with regards to giving away our positions to the competition outweigh the benefits of information. I think Lars and I have talked about it in a way that hopefully lets our shareholders understand how the dynamics of our business works, but we don't want to be too explicit on our movements in individual markets to give away a competitive advantage.

Could you give us a percentage share of how many sales were on leasing?

I think we need to be conscious about the fact that India is traded on OTC and will not be delivering Q1 results. Their first report is in the first half of 2020, will be delivered in July. So in the meantime, we plan not to give out leasing numbers. We previously said that in Spain, we sell about 50% in leasing. And that in Scandinavia, we've been at about 1 in 5 zone.

Next question. How confident are you on your 2021 revenue targets? Do you have any sales visibility beyond Q2? Or have you assumed similar growth patterns in Italy and Poland as were seen when you entered Spain?

This -- the great thing about our market is that we have a short sales cycle. But that also means that we have a short sales visibility. So we typically invest in marketing this week that will turn into leads today and the next few weeks. That gets converted into sales sometime in May and then installations if it's in Poland in late May or June; if it's in Spain, maybe August, September. So we now, as Lars explained, in the pipeline, we have a fairly good picture of what we can install in Q2. We know what our sales pace is in the first 3 weeks of April. But beyond that, we don't have any firm visibility. We just have the experience of having launched multiple markets before and seeing signals of where we are on track or not. And so our communication around this is that Spain and France are growing. We don't see any barriers to their growth. We're saying that Scandinavia is finally at par with where we were last year, and we'll hopefully expand from there. And then Italy and Poland, very early days for Italy, Poland has now done 3 months of operation and is tracking like Spain did at that stage last year. But these are the kind of the small kids of the family. And of course, we don't know yet how they will be when they grow up. But the totality here is that we have a portfolio that is progressing well, and that gives us confidence for 2021 as a whole. We're done a quarter of the calendar time. But in terms of the solar market, this is just the start of the year. Q2 and Q3 are the strong sales quarters typically in this industry. So we -- and we go into those 2 quarters with a lot of confidence and sales teams bring their sales bell frequently. So we're happy about that.

Good. Final question. How do you see Scandinavia develop in 2021?

I think we've tried to add some color on and feeling about that. We think the Swedish market is well clarified. Now we've invested in our sales staff during the quarter. So we're optimistic about growth from 2020 in Sweden. And Norway is -- had sort of a perfect storm last year with low energy prices. Uncertainty about grid tariffs reduction in the renewal subsidy, a lot of bad news at the same time. And that news is turning into old news. The attractiveness of solar energy in Norway remains good. And we keep our market share in this market. So it's a bit hard to say what will happen to this market in Q3, Q4. But we're confident that we'll be picking off every customer that is available in the Norwegian market in this period.

Thank you very much. That was all from today's quarterly presentation.