Proact IT Group AB (publ) (PACT) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everyone. Welcome. We're going to present our Q4 results. For those of you who have seen the report, you know already that we're pretty happy. It's been a very, very strong quarter in terms of growth as well as improved profitability. So we're going to go through the quarter in quite some detail and we'll also, of course, make sure that you can ask any questions that you have along the way. We'll try to make it as clear and transparent as possible. My name is Jonas Hasselberg. I'm the CEO. I also have with me Linda Holjo, our CFO. Good morning, Linda.

Good morning.

We will be recording this session, for your knowledge, and may post it on our external website for others to enjoy on demand afterwards. We will also keep you muted. So if you do have a question, which is more than fine, but if you do have a question, please remember to unmute yourself. Good. Somebody has already their hand raised. All right. We'll get going here. So again, welcome. Here we go. So we usually will talk through the -- a little bit of an introduction to the company. Most of you know us pretty well, but it's always good to do a little bit of repetition, the market developments and then we'll dig into the developments of the quarter. So it's very much the same agenda as we usually do. You know us, we are a European specialist in IT infrastructure solutions to mid and large enterprises across Europe. We're almost 30 years old now. We serve a large number of customers across our footprint. Our revenue, as we mentioned, is growing nicely. We're now a little bit over SEK 4.7 billion and with the most recent acquisitions, we're about 1,200 people across our countries that you can see here on the map. Just in terms of the outside view, and what the world looks like, what the market looks like, nothing dramatically changing here. There's a couple of improvements that is -- that are important. But as you know, we've been looking at 3 key trends in the past. We're actually adding a fourth one which is not a new trend, but it's good to be explicit about it. It kind of cuts across everything here. But from a business perspective, most of our customers are going through what we call a digital transformation. They're trying to improve their business performance, their productivity, customer experiences, their logistics flows, whatever it may be, through IT and one important aspect of everything that our customers try to do is that data is at the core of that innovation. They try to get more value out of their data. Obviously for Proact, that's a good thing, because we have always been experts and specialists in helping our customers get value from their data, storing their data or analyzing their data or securing their data. So we believe that this is still a strong trend going forward and we're well-positioned to continue to help our customers with this. The second trend that we talked a lot about and we'll go a little bit deeper into this today is what we call the technology trend of hybrid cloud. And this is important to understand that there is no single cloud version that our customers are going to land in. They will be using the big global players like Microsoft and Amazon for certain things, they will stay in their own data centers for other things and they will be using Proact cloud services for yet other things and the important thing here is to be able to serve our customers across all the different technology needs and make it seamless to them, make it secure and make data flow in an efficient way across any technology deployments so that they can get value from it. The third trend we've talked about quite a bit, the less positive, if you will, is obviously the constant threat of cyberattacks and the importance of protecting your data. And then last and definitely not least is sustainability and we'll look at this from 2 angles. One, of course, is that we, Proact, as a company, needs to be a sustainable company and we put quite a bit of effort into this. But more importantly, maybe we believe that IT helps our customers to become more sustainable. And that's something we believe is an important trend that we should be a little bit more explicit about. You've seen in the quarter that we reported of last year that the semiconductor shortages is practically not a problem anymore. We had the first hit of this in Q4 of 2021. You remember we had a quite a few deliveries that slipped from Q4 of '21 into Q1 of '22. At the time, we said that that's going to normalize during the year of 2022 and we are exactly like we said, now pretty much back to normal levels and that's one of several contributors to a very strong Q4 that we could deliver everything that we had sold. And last, no change and nothing new here. But obviously the macro world continues to be uncertain with a lot of turmoil in terms of the war, but also inflations and recessions continue to be uncertain and we navigated as well as we can. Good. We are very customer-focused in our business. We have a strong portfolio of services. We always put our customers first and foremost, of course, and then we have a set of value propositions. We have consulting services where we advise our customers on technologies and architectures and how to get their best value out of their IT investments. We have storage solutions that our customers can store their data in cost efficient and secure ways. We have connectivity and networking solutions. Obviously typically companies are distributed. Their IT infrastructure may be hosted in the clouds or in data centers that are not where the premises are. So we need to make sure that data can flow between data centers and offices and premises in an efficient way, protecting and securing the data from whatever disasters or attack and ultimately making sure that they actually get value from their data, anything from analytics to computing power to artificial intelligence. We have a very comprehensive portfolio that we're constantly innovating. We make sure that we can serve our customers in these 5 propositions. I want to dig a little bit deeper into this. Now I will give a particular customer case here just to try to get a little bit more color around hybrid cloud. It's a bit technical, if you will. It's a bit industry -- a bit of an industry terminology, but I think it's important to understand because obviously in particular public cloud providers or hyperscalers, as they are sometimes called, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, they're growing rapidly and it's not always easy to understand how that plays to Proact's advantages. So we use the terminology hybrid cloud, which means that we believe that all our customers and, remember, we're looking at mid and large-sized enterprises, will have IT deployed in multiple ways. They will definitely be using the public clouds for things that the public clouds are good for. Obviously, basic stuff, their workspace solutions with Windows and Office and e-mail services are already in the cloud in most cases. Quite a bit of innovation is easier in the cloud because you have already available platforms, artificial intelligence, analytics, capabilities are very strong in the cloud. On the flip side, it's not always the most cost effective way of running your IT or cost effective way of storing your data. And there may be regulatory or legal restrictions where data needs to be under the legal jurisdiction of your local country, for instance, very typical in the public sector. So typically, a customer will be using the public cloud, the hyperscalers when that makes sense, they will be using Proact because we're specialist when that makes sense. And they may still have their own data centers or their own IT where that makes sense for legacy reasons or other regulatory reasons, for example. So I wanted to paint a little bit of a picture on this with a particular customer. So here's a visualization of what we mean. So on the left hand side, here on the slide, the blue, more of the traditional way customers would have their own data centers. And I don't mean own as that they own them, but they control them. They can still be hiring colocation space with a data center provider, but they own and manage their IT infrastructure themselves. In the middle here is what we call hosted cloud. So provides cloud services, and we've been doing this for many years. As you know, this could be storage as a service, security as a service, networking as a service. And then to the far right in this picture, the big hyperscalers like Microsoft and Google and Amazon that are providing global scale solutions and Microsoft 365, Azure, those kinds of services are in there. What we do as a company is we cover this whole spectrum and we help our customers to design and implement and typically then transform their applications and solutions and ultimately migrate them into more modern cloud services. But we can do it across these 3 deployment methods. So it doesn't matter, so to speak, for us whether the customers want to remain in their own data centers or leverage Proact services or go to public cloud or more typically, all of the above. And the more important thing is that these can all coexist and are seamlessly integrated. We have a customer in the U.K. They're called Canopius. It's an insurance company. They've been with us for about 10 years as a customer. They have been very traditional. They've had their own IT hosted in their own data centers. Their own team of IT technicians and IT professionals that are managing that infrastructure. Over the past couple of years starting in late '19, beginning of '20, they wanted to modernize their IT a little bit. It started with their workspace to move those into more modern workspace solutions where their own IT people didn't have to spend so much time managing it and more importantly, giving their customers more tools at their fingertips. And then they realize that it's better for their IT people to work on the IT solutions that actually brings value to their customers and let others manage the underlying infrastructure. So that's when they initiated a shift to move more and more of their data infrastructure into Proact services like PHC, the Proact Hybrid Cloud, which is a Infrastructure as a Service offering where they can put their applications and data as well as some of the capabilities of Microsoft Azure, in particular for things like driving artificial intelligence and rapid innovation of some of their services. So now they are running what we then call a typical hybrid cloud and get all the benefits of it. They get the innovation power of Azure, they get the legacy applications and regulatory support and cost efficiency of running in Proact data centers and Proact services. And they can, let's say, manage and control way -- migrate their data and transform their infrastructure from legacy into modern cloud solutions and get all the benefits and this is a very typical customer case. As we moved them into Azure, we had a great collaboration between not only the U.K., but we have our public cloud experts in the Netherlands. So this is a good example of how our distributed model of Proact works. We have our delivery hub for public cloud service in the Netherlands. And we have the local team in the U.K. that helps the customer with the day-to-day transformation and migration. So it's been a good exercise also in terms of proving the power of our distributed model of Proact. So just want to kind of paint that customer picture a little bit more clearly hopefully to help you understand what we mean when we say hybrid cloud and why it's an important trend in the marketplace. Another good news. We obviously care a lot about our customers and we measure our satisfaction. We had a record high net promoter score during 2022 of 46. It's up a couple of points from the year before. It's just great to see that our customers continue to be very loyal and happy with our services. We've seen it in a number of different ways during the year that we've talked about as well, local IT research firms that confirm that we are top, top provider in our different regions when it comes to customer intimacy and customer quality and it's also great to see it's reflected in a very, very strong NPS during the year. And then switching topics quite a bit again. We've just moved into new head offices. Obviously it's most good news for people in Stockholm and for people working at Proact. But it does mean that we've also moved our head location from Stockholm to Solna which is a small community or municipality just outside of Stockholm. But we also moved into very fresh, newly designed and purpose-built for our business offices here in Stockholm and it's just great to see the energy it creates with a team and the type of hybrid work models that we're now enabling. So that's another good milestone for us to get into very new and purpose-built offices for the team here in Stockholm. Good. That was a little bit about what happened in the quarter. I want to switch over to the numbers. I'm guessing that's what you're mostly eager to hear. So clearly a very strong quarter. We're very happy and proud of the results and the execution. Very strong growth both on total, but a 40% organic growth is, of course, very positive, largely driven by strong systems business, but also strong growth in our services. Partly visible down here by the second bullet, so ARR is annualized recurring revenue, so revenue under contracts, cloud contract or support contracts is over SEK 1.5 billion. Quite a bit up from the year before, 19% up. Strong margin development as well as a result of the growth in top line and a very strong EBITA results of over SEK 100 million. So from a financial performance perspective, clearly a very, very good quarter. Some challenges, as always. A strong TCV frankly, SEK 142 million of new contract value in the quarters is not bad, but we have a great -- we had a great quarter the year before and in 2021. So the comparisons here were tough. And then as you all know when you see it as much as we do, continued uncertainties and we do have some negative impact, of course, from the inflation that are increasing our costs in terms of energy being one of them, but also facilities and other logistics or transportation costs as examples. So a little bit of pressure on our service margins driven by inflation. So good quarter and we're very happy with the performance of the quarter, but obviously also very happy with the performance of the year and we'll dig into both of them a little bit more detail here. So with that, Linda, over to you.

Thank you, Jonas. So highlights, I think, you mentioned them. Revenues growing 53%. Of that we have systems very strong 77%, but services also strong at 23%. And the revenue growth is translating into very healthy profitability growth, 80% growth with a margin of 7.1%. And the profit before tax then consequently also growing well to SEK 86 million, a 6% margin and 130% growth. So very, very good growth and good quarter financially. So if we move into the details. So the results, of course, are driven to a large extent by the revenue growth. If we look at the -- we have the acquisitions of sepago and the ahd contributing. But even without those, it's a very healthy organic growth. We do see strong demand, that's driving a large part of it. To a certain extent, we see this as a catch-up effect from we had -- were impacted in COVID times, our customers were more reluctant to buy and they, during this year, come back to normal buying patterns and also catching up on what they didn't buy, but also just underlying healthy demand. And then the other thing is, as Jonas mentioned, as you may recall, Q4 last year, we suddenly were struck by the semiconductor delivery challenges, delivery times extended and we had a lot of backlog that we were not able to deliver. During the second half of this year, it's normalized. It started in Q3 already and now it's largely normalized delivery times. So all of that together contributing to good, very strong growth. We also have, in addition to acquisitions, positive currency effects given that we have a lot of revenues in euros in particular, with a weaker Swedish krona that's impacting positively or - yes, positively. Then the cloud contracts that you said, Jonas, it's on a high level if we look historically, but Q4 last year was on a record level. So we are not quite there. If we look more into the details, the services growing strongly across all of our services. We bought -- we buy companies, as you know, largely with big services content. So that's helped, but also organic growth in all of our services areas. Cloud revenues increasing well, support services, that's to a large extent related to our system sales, but we're seeing good demand for our high-quality support, premium support as well. And then consulting services growing both as a result of our systems business where we help with the designing, integrating, installing, but also with our cloud services, which is, to a large extent, driving also consulting demand. Recurring revenues, then you see on the right-hand side here in the graph of how that develops over time. So steady growth here, of course, not at all as volatile as the systems business, growing 19%, of which 6% organically. So over SEK 1.5 billion in annualized recurring revenue level now. And then lastly, but not least, the systems sales. And you can see on the right-hand top graph the big jump in systems sales this quarter, especially compared to last year. We see good demand, good growth in all our business units, more or less in all of our countries due to, yes, these factors that we mentioned before. Okay. So if we move to the next slide, a little bit more on profitability. The growth is primarily or exclusively, I should say, maybe a result of the increased revenues. Our gross margins in the quarter are more or less unchanged compared to last year. We do see increased margins for systems and whereas the services margins are going down. And we are, of course, seeing an impact from inflation. We are working quite a lot with price increases. In the systems, you can see that we've been able to transfer all of the price increases we've seen from our suppliers to our customers and a little bit more on top of that increasing our margins. Services, there is some effects of a little bit of delays. We have longer contracts, takes a little bit more time to implement price changes. So we're seeing a little bit of pressure on margins on that. Also we do see, in some areas, increased proportion of subcontractors because we are not able to recruit as quickly as we would like in our cloud business and the subcontractors typically are more expensive than own employees. So that's also putting a little bit of pressure on services margins. And then our SG&A costs are increasing quite a lot by 28% for comparable units. It's, of course, an effect of sales-related costs, sales commissions. Also the increased activity is driving increased travel and entertainment costs. Last year with a very weak quarter, we had the opposite effect. But also we see inflation impacting here in all areas. So we're working hard to ensure that we are able to also increase our prices to the customers to compensate for that going forward as well. And then our earnings per share, a very nice development, of course, in the quarter as well as a result of increased EBIT -- EBITA and the EBIT. Okay. Then I'll do very quickly the different business units. Nordics and Baltics showing a great result, very strong revenue growth, 52%. They've had a very strong year generally with organic systems growth of over 60%. Services, in particular, support and consulting also growing, of course, less volatile. So we don't have the huge swings as we have for systems. And we see the strong systems market in the majority of the countries, including the normalized delivery times. That revenue growth is then directly leading to increased EBITA margins and the increased -- significantly increased EBITA results. So that's Nordics. Then if we move to the U.K. Also good growth in particular systems. They were very heavily hit by the delivery times last year. So a little bit weaker comparison numbers, but still very good growth and do see good growth, in particular in cloud services and consulting services for them, support because they've had weaker systems for a while, is negatively impacted; is EBITA margin on a quite low level, higher than last year, but still lower than our average. And we see that the revenues are impacted positively. But here we do see the effect of lower services gross margins quite -- to quite a large extent impacting negatively as well as increased SG&A costs. So that's U.K. And then if we go to West. Here, we've had over quite a few quarters. We see the transformation to cloud and services going quite quickly. So we've had fairly low systems revenues for some time. In Q4, we saw a catch-up effect. So quite a lot of large deals delivered during the quarter. So 117% organic growth in systems, but then from low levels. We do still continue to see very healthy demand for services, 7% organic growth. And here, especially the cloud services business is continuing to grow very quickly. EBITA margin down to 5.5%. We do see here especially the effect of subcontractors and inflation on services, also some gross margin impact on systems actually. And then the opposite side, SG&A increasing then due to the reasons we mentioned before. But overall, still better results than last year. Then if we go to the last but not the smallest BU anymore, Central, where we have 2 acquisitions here impacting. We did the ahd, acquired in November last year, quite a large company, almost doubling our revenues and then sepago we closed in July 2002 -- '22. So those are explaining the big growth in systems and services. But you can see also organically that we have a similar trend here as to the other BUs, strong systems revenues of 27%, strong services growth of 7%. Here also, in particular, in support and consulting, ahd then is contributing primarily to large growth in managed services, cloud contracts and sepago to our consulting revenues. Here, last year, we had exceptionally strong EBITA margins due to very low SG&A in particular. We now see that's normalizing. So the EBITA margin is coming down with the increased SG&A costs, also somewhat lower gross margins. In absolute terms, EBITA is increasing with the acquisitions we've made and the organic revenue growth. So that was our last business units. If we then go to the cash flow, those of you who follow us see that we have quite volatile cash flow. And in Q3, it was quite weak, and it's almost exclusively due to changes in working capital. And in Q4 now, we had the opposite effect. So a positive change in working capital of about SEK 200 million where we did increase payables more than receivables, both increasing. Limited investments in fixed assets, SEK 13 million, did have a deferred purchase payment paid out in the quarter. In terms of financing activities, that's primarily it's the leasing liabilities and then because of the strong cash flow, we did pay back a little bit on our bank loans. So overall, strong cash flow, very strong cash position at the end of the year of over SEK 500 million. And if we quickly look at the full year cash flow, here, we see it's -- the change in working capital is evening out. It's very small current operations generating good cash flow. When it comes to investment activities here, it's primarily the acquisition of sepago that's impacting. And then in terms of bank loans, down a little bit. Leasing liabilities, of course, continued to cost money in the financing activities. But just generally, good cash flow where we were able to finance both acquisition and dividends basically through our cash generation. Okay. Let's see. Next slide then. Yes, this is the result and the balance sheet. Net debt decreased a little bit as a result of the strong cash flow then. So we're able to pay back -- sorry, a little bit of our bank loans and then stronger cash position, still have good cash position with unutilized. Jonas, maybe you need to take over.

I will, which means we will -- yes, sorry, everyone. We'll move into then the full year. Just to summarize the full year, obviously, it's been a good year -- not just a good quarter, but a good year. Good strong growth, 35% of revenue growth. And you can see that on the top right graph, 23% organically. So we're particularly very happy that the organic growth has been stable throughout the year and at good levels. Systems not only in the Q4, but across the year, good and strong, and we talked about it a few times, a little bit of a catch-up after COVID and the backlog we've delivered from 2021, but also strong underlying demand. And as we've mentioned in the beginning of the call, there is a good demand in the marketplace in general, and we believe that both systems and our services are in growing market trends. Obviously, the systems market should grow low single digits. And this past year, we're way above that and services high, if not high single or if not low double digits. So growth good in the past, but we believe they will continue to grow. Services revenue, 6% organic growth in the year and good growth in our recurring revenues, up 22% where cloud services, in particular, is growing by 30% and consulting 33%, and Linda mentioned already that the acquisition we did in Germany in July of sepago is a consulting heavy company, the vast majority of the revenues from consulting. Strong EBITA growth in the year, up 54% compared to 2021 and we have a full year EBITA margin of 6.6%, up from 5.8% a year before. And we do see a little bit of impact from the inflation as we touched on here also on the full year and SG&A organic growth driven both by sales costs and sales commissions, but also some of the underlying travel, entertainment costs as we touched on already. There's been some milestones, nonfinancial, if I may call them that, milestones that we've achieved during the year that are of importance. We mentioned sepago already. I think looking at the German market specifically is interesting a little bit. About 1.5 years ago, we were about 100 people primarily serving customers in the Bavaria and southern areas of Germany. We're now 300 people that span all the way from north to south of Germany. We have a very complete portfolio of strong strategic consulting capabilities, quite a bit of Microsoft and other cloud consulting skills that can help customers transform and migrate their business into different cloud solutions. And we have a full portfolio of managed cloud services, security services and data center services. So it's particularly exciting to see that we moved the bar in Germany, which is a very, very large IT market, of course, quite significantly during the year with the acquisitions. Customer satisfaction, I mentioned, we've received a number of awards from partners. We've received a number of good praise and accolades from research firms and customer satisfaction firms during the year. And we've launched quite a few products during the year, all in the area of as-a-service. We've launched Networking as a Service. Services we've launched something we call Monitoring as a Service and a modern application development platform that we call -- we'll nickname it, I should say, Container as a Service. So good achievements also for the year in nonfinancial achievements. And on the bottom right, you can see a graph just visualizing the earnings per share over a 10-year period. It's only visualized here because sometimes you get stuck on a quarter, but it's every now and then good to look back a little bit further into history and see how the company is developing, and it's been a positive development here over the past 10 years. Good. So I'll leave the full year and we'll just summarize then where we stand on our financial goals. So the goals, as you know from before, are around sales growth, EBITA margin, our net debt over EBITA and our return on capital employed targets. Revenue, obviously, very strong in the past 12 months, 35% growth, which is well above our target. We usually say that we should be able to do on average 10% growth year-over-year, of which half should be organic and the other half through acquisitions. EBITA, good step towards our 8% target. It's still out there in the future and we know it's doable and we believe it's doable. It's driven by the things that we speak a lot about here, the scale of our growth, the shift towards a services business and the continuous internal improvements and activities we do to drive efficiency. So those 3 combined should continue help us move towards that long-term target of 8%. Our net debt situation is obviously very positive. One thing that we have done here as part of this report is that we've lowered our return on capital employed target. So the Board decided to lower it from -- larger than 25% to larger than 20%. And the reason is with, in particular, our acquisition ambitions, we will have a hard time reaching that 25%. So 20% is more realistic target, while we continue to have an acquisition strategy or acquisition agenda as part of our strategy. Still a good bump up from last year to 17%. And then last but not least, not so much a goal, but we have a dividend target and the Board is proposing a dividend of SEK 1.85 per share, which is up from SEK 1.50 last year, and we're pretty much right in that middle I was about to say of the dividend span, but at least a little bit above the lower end. So a good increase of the dividend and still in that span of ours. So just to summarize, strong organic growth, strong total growth, strong growth in our profits, also very strong growth in our ARR, annualized recurring revenue, [ SEK 1.5 billion ]. Only a quarter ago, it was below SEK 1.5 billion. So we're up quite a bit just in that last quarter. And then as I said, a good increase in our dividend back to our shareholders. So that's the summary of the quarter. With that, we're happy to take questions.

We already have one.

We already have one. That's great.

And how does the integration of the -- that the -- this acquisition go? Is it possible that there would be more acquisitions during 2023?

So 2 questions there. So yes, the integrations of our acquisitions are going forward. The latest one, which was sepago in Germany is a consulting company. So it's a relatively stand-alone operations. We don't have to do a lot of operational integration. So that's going forward quite nicely and we'll keep the consulting team, I was about to say, intact, and I don't mean that in any other way that it will keep it as one team to have a good critical mass around the consulting efforts. That's going well. Like I said just now, we do have an acquisition agenda still in our strategy. So we want to do order of magnitude 2 per year, but you all know it's quite stochastic, optimistic. Some years, we find more. Some years, we find less, but we continue on the same path and with the same ambitions as in the past.

We have a question from [ Frederick Neilson ].

[ Frederick ] you need to unmute yourself, but go ahead.

Can you hear me?