Sitowise Group Oyj (SITOWS) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Thank you for joining Sitowise's Q3 results webcast. I'm Mari Reponen, Head of Investor Relations at Sitowise. With me today are our CEO, Heikki Haasmaa; and our CFO, Hanna Masala, who will begin the presentation shortly. They will first review our Q3 performance. Afterwards, Heikki will discuss our outlook and progress of our strategic initiatives. Feel free to submit any questions via the chat feature below the presentation. and I will address them during the Q&A session. We kindly ask that you provide your full name when asking questions. Let's get started with the presentation. I now hand it over to Heikki and Hanna.

Thank you, Mari, and a warm welcome on my behalf as well. We'll start with the key figures for the quarter. As a whole, the group net sales declined by 8.4% and our adjusted EBITA margin was down to 5.8%. This margin was heavily burdened by the performance in Sweden, and we'll get back to that one soon. The adjusted EBITA decline was also then reflected in our operating profit, which decreased and in our leverage, which increased from the previous quarter. Cash flow, on the other hand, was improving year-on-year. Our order book totaled EUR 154 million at the end of the quarter. There were several highlights during the quarter. I'm very pleased with our Infra and Digital businesses performance, as both business areas outperformed their markets, both in terms of net sales development and also the profitability. When we look only at the business operations in Finland, meaning Infra, Digi and also the Buildings business, we had actually a double-digit adjusted profitability in total and fast beating our competition. So there, we are really satisfied. Even with all the third quarter in Sweden was still notably loss-making as we also anticipated one quarter ago. I'm really delighted to share that the turnaround actions have been progressing well, and I'm really satisfied with the progress overall there. And now we have much more solid basis for the better performance for the fourth quarter and then onwards. From the recent wins, I also would like to especially highlight the Vantaa light rail alliance, which will be a landmark project for us and supports strongly Infra business in the coming years. Overall, I'm also very happy to see our efforts in sales are bringing already results, especially in terms of tendering activity and also the improved hit rates. And that's, of course, a very good basis for the coming quarters. In September, we also completed the acquisition of LandPro and that acquisition will further strengthen our capabilities to expand infrastructure and also the energy services. And then finally, we launched our Internal Chat-GPT called Saga AI for the use of all our employees. And we can already see a significant potential to enhance the ways of working, which will be then supporting better utilization rate also going forward. During the quarter, we made significant progress in optimizing and aligning resources in our Sweden and Buildings businesses as part of our Building for the Future program that was launched in August. In Sweden, we reduced head count by approximately 10% and then reductions in project teams with low utilization rates and also actually reductions in administrative teams by even 20%. This adjustment was, of course, a hard thing to do, but are very necessary to better match our capacity to current order book level. Additionally, we are streamlining operations in Sweden into a nationwide model to enhance client and sales activity, efficiency and also agility. As always said, I'm very pleased to see that thanks to the actions taken both utilization rate and also the tendering volume in Sweden have increased clearly towards the end of third quarter. In the Buildings business area, we continued with high number of temporary layoffs and actually higher than in the second quarter and optimized our organization and processes to increase further the client proximity and also operational efficiency. We also continued these actions in the fourth quarter as the market conditions seem to be quite tough for the quarter as well. These actions under the Building for the Future program for these 2 business areas incurred one-off restructuring costs of close to EUR 1.2 million in the third quarter. However, we expect related savings of roughly EUR 3.5 million annually. This come mainly from the personnel costs to materialize in the coming quarters. This, of course, then means that also in the fourth quarter, we expect savings roughly from EUR 0.8 million to EUR 0.9 million through the permanent measures. Then as usual, we'll dig deeper to the business area performance, starting with the Infra, and this picture actually here is from the Vantaa light rail alliance, which I already mentioned earlier. During the quarter, Infra net sales increased by roughly 6%, making up already now 37% of our group's consolidated net sales. So this keeps increasing. The growth was largely driven by acquisitions made over the past year but especially by the rising demand in high-growth areas like green transition services. And this also led to an increase in personnel. However, we did face some challenges, especially with the low demand for the traditional infrastructure planning and intensified price competition. So these are related to the areas where the construction market is heavily down. Where I'm really pleased is that Infra also experienced positive organic growth now in the third quarter. And overall, the profitability was again very strong. We did encounter some pressure on our utilization rate. That was really much because of the -- some larger and more complicated tenderings. However, of course, this utilization rate is the key thing for the Infra now for the fourth quarter to improve from the current level. On a positive note, further, our order intake was up year-on-year and Infra's order book was at a good level at the end of third quarter. Additionally, we have secured this Vantaa light rail project but that's not yet in the third quarter order book, so -- because the contract was signed only in October. Looking ahead, we anticipate a quite diverse market environment for Infra with strong demand for the green transition services. And we also expect Infra to benefit from the high investment activity in the energy, industrial and also security sectors as well as sustainability services. Overall, we are very well positioned to continue the profitable growth in Infra and our future growth is supported by the acquisitions, our strong market position, stable market overall and broad expertise. Also, what is like more and more creating benefits for the Infra is the digital solutions and Infra more and more having like a common projects and also the AI experts are also creating new business and product opportunities together. Then moving to Buildings business performance. And here, I really want to also highlight the recent win. So we were selected to be responsible for the structural engineering and fire design and extensive school campus block project in Tikkurila, Vantaa. And this is the first part of the extensive landmark project. The business -- Buildings business areas saw quite heavy at 22% decline in net sales. And now the Building business comprises about 29% of our group sales. This decline was heavily influenced by the weak construction market, and especially in the new build residential housing where the market is like very close to 0 almost. Other services remained -- in Buildings remained stable compared to last year. As discussed, our focus in third quarter was on operational adjustments, and we also continued temporary layoffs in -- especially in structural design and also parts of the Building technology services to add up to the weak market situation. So there are basically 2 units which are more facing the tough situation there. Additionally, we placed a high emphasis on sales activity, and I'm very pleased with our progress in increasing tendering volumes. During the quarter, we also secured some more -- some important project wins in addition to the Tikkurila, Vantaa, there was a new industrial project with an Engineering Procurement and also Construction Management delivery model. Looking ahead, the outlook for billings remains quite weak. We expect fourth quarter still to be challenging due to the low volumes in the market and overall overcapacity in the industry. Also, several projects have been put again to hold. And that's, of course, having an impact on us as well. But we can impact by our own efforts. So concentrating on the active sales and especially on the industry, energy, public buildings and also the security critical services is a key thing for us in the Building for the Future program. I mentioned earlier. When it comes to the overall to the market change, so we consider still the timing of the construction market recovery quite uncertain. So -- and today, we anticipate that it will start to be a bit better during the second half of '25. However, of course, when we look at the medium- and long-term outlook, that remains really positive because there are certain megatrends, which are really helping us also to create the demand overall in these services. Then we'll deep -- dive deeper to our Digital Solutions business. And here is an example of a great secured win of the state-owned forestry company, road system development for maintaining information on a forest road. A great win for our Digi team here. And then -- so the net sales in Digital Solutions business area actually decreased by 3%. And then overall, the Digital business accounts for 16% of the group net sales. However, good to still remember that without the change in the reinvoicing of certain subcontracted work we did 1 year go, actually, our like a comparable figure basically here would have been that our net sales was close to 0. From the fourth quarter onwards, this change will not anymore have an impact. Demand in the private sector remained low, except for the renewable energy, forestry, industry sectors where there is good demand. Public sector demand showed signs of still slowing down due to budget negotiations and that leads to certain overcapacity and also price competition in the market. However, Digi was able to improve its average prices clearly and also utilization year-on-year. And these are the main contribution -- contributing factors that we have been able to further improve our profitabilities -- profitability level in the building -- in the Infra -- sorry, in the Digital business. However, then good to mention still that I'm also very happy about the good progress in our recurring revenue product business. So SaaS products represent more than 25% of Digi's net sales today. And the high demand for these SaaS products, especially the Louhi GIS platform and the infrastructure asset management solution, Routa, continued at the high level also in the third quarter. Digi's order intake increased significantly from the previous quarter, and the order book was at good level by the end of September. Package value modules for renewable energy and also the industrial asset management combining this Louhi and Smartlas products continued to gain traction, and this is, of course, a great thing for us. The mixed market environment continues in Digital Solutions in the fourth quarter. So we still see that the public sector faces strong budget pressure, impacting also next year's volumes. However, the demand is very much driven by the need to renovate all IT systems and also digitalized operations. In the private sector, demand is expected to remain strong among energy, industry and forestry clients. The medium- and long-term outlook remains positive due to Expertise in geospatial information systems, data management skills and also digital product offerings. And of course, in Digi, our focus is on sales activity and systematic account management and that we expect to bring positive impact to the business. In Sweden, we had several wins, especially the life science sector, where we have been now strong recently. During the quarter, net sales amounted to a bit over EUR 7 million and that's approximately 18% of the group's consolidated net sales. The decline was driven by the weak market conditions and also the low utilization rates due to the insufficient workload in parts of the business, as we also said during the second quarter. To address these challenges, we focused on the Building for the Future program as earlier discussed. And I'm really grateful for the progress what our teams have been now doing in Sweden. So we are seeing that the fourth quarter performance will be already much better than the third quarter. And still repeating that we reduced some 10% of the staff overall there and more than 20% in the admin functions. Now, of course, focus is more shifting towards the external side, I mean with that, that we focus a lot on the client and sales activity. And now we are also working with a new sales organization, including key account responsibilities and decided to start preparations for implementing the sales force CRM system, what we are already using in Finland. Our tendering activity in Sweden has been increasing and the order book in Sweden stabilized during the quarter. So these are, of course, a great signals for the future. And then in fourth quarter, we expect the marketing environment still to be challenging, especially in the housing and commercial segments where we are the most active. And -- but we expect the fourth quarter from our business performance wise, especially, I mean, the profitability to be clearly better than third quarter. With the Building for the Future program, we continue to optimize our organization resources and processes. Overall, we see that our Sweden business will return to gradual net sales growth in '25. And of course, medium- and long-term prospects are also very good, driven by the megatrends in technical consulting. Now I'd like to hand over Hanna to you, maybe elaborate a bit more on the performance in detail in the group level.

Thank you, Heikki. I will do that. Let's look at the sales activities first. So we've been focusing especially on these defined growth segments, energy, industry, sustainability and security. Due to the kind of quite typical seasonal fluctuation as well as certain order book data corrections in Sweden, the order intake was, however, down from the previous quarter. Compared to the preceding quarter, the received orders increased in Infra and Digi and a decline in Buildings and Sweden. As Heikki said, the win related to this Vantaa light rail project, which we've communicated is not yet included in the Q3 figures. The project size is quite substantial, roughly EUR 8 million. So this will be a substantial addition now in Q4. The order book totaled EUR 154 million at the end of Q3. It's important to note that this includes approximately EUR 12.5 million of projects put on hold. These mainly relate to Buildings business and the amount has been more or less the same in the preceding quarters as well. On the picture here, you can see one of our Q3 wins, which I want to mention. Here, our client is investor. It's an active Finnish investment manager and the project is about energy storage. It will create a virtual power plant by integrating battery storage across 29 properties and this will allow participating in the Finnish electricity transmission operator Fingrid Reserve Market. We are participating in this project by preparing the grant application, which was already done conducting studies and planning the implementation. The project optimizes energy storage and renewable energy and its first of its kind in Finland. So an extremely interesting project and hopefully has some international scalability potential as well. As said, our net sales during the quarter were down by 8.4% from the comparison period. The number of FTEs or employees was down by 6.6% and the decline comes particularly from Buildings. Lower FTE number and the market headwinds in Buildings and Sweden were the main drivers behind the net sales decline as Heikki has gone through in the business area updates. The utilization rate went down somewhat during the quarter, and I'll come back to that in a while. When we look at the profitability, Q3 was unfortunately clearly below expectations despite the fact that Infra and Digi had a very strong performance. The adjusted EBITA margin was 5.8%. And the key driver here was the clearly loss-making quarter in Sweden, but also the weak performance in Buildings. Other impacting factors were the continued wage and cost inflation and certain project overruns, especially in Buildings. And then obviously, also tighter competitive environment in all business areas. However, there were also factors supporting the profitability. Obviously, the positive momentum in Infra and Digi. There was a calendar effect of 1 additional working day. However, the impact was quite diluted as this was in July. And most importantly, the consistent progress in pricing and cost containment efforts that we've been carrying on for quite a long time already. As the current performance levels in our business areas is quite mixed, we hope this new table helps to understand the different parts of our group better. The table summarizes first of all, the percentage of sales of each business area during the quarter. This is kind of information we published also earlier. And then we have in the middle, summarized the market outlook for the next 12 months period. And then on the right-hand side, there are comments on the current profitability level. The market outlook comments were mainly covered by Heikki already. And as we have also mentioned on this table, we are hopeful that the market would be improving both in Digi and Sweden, while the timing of the recovery for Buildings is still quite uncertain. As we have commented also earlier, both Infra and Digi continued to deliver adjusted EBITA above our target level of 12%. And actually, this quarter was maybe a particularly strong one for both of them. On the contrary, in this quarter, Buildings was just slightly at a loss, and Sweden was unfortunately quite clearly loss-making. The actions we've taken will improve this situation. Here on this slide, the first graph summarizes the head count and FTE development, which obviously is our capacity to carry out our daily operations. As already said, the FTEs were down 6.6% on a year-on-year and the Buildings personnel going down was the main factor. In Digital Solutions, there was also a slight decline in FTEs as well as in Sweden. But in Infra, the number of employees went up, especially driven by these environmental and sustainability services and also the acquisition impact. The utilization rate on the right-hand side tells about our ability to use the available hours in projects. We did have a lower utilization rate than in Q2 and also lower than a year ago, especially the very low utilization rate in Sweden pushed this down as we were in Sweden on a level of less than 70%. But the actions taken have already started to clearly improve this. During the quarter, Digital Solutions was able to improve its utilization rate from already good level. But in other business areas, the utilization rates declined. In Sweden and Buildings, there was insufficient workload. And in Infra, the main reason was the time spent in tendering and sales activities. We do continue to put a lot of focus in improving the utilization rate across all the business areas. And as said, in Sweden, we will now see the positive effect from the adjustments in the head count we made. And also in Q4, we will most likely need to broaden the temporary layoffs also in buildings to have the required efficiency. As in the previous quarters, our liquidity remained good in the third quarter. Due to the seasonality, Q3 is typically having a low cash flow. We have the holiday periods which means that invoicing is lower, but then obviously, salaries and other costs are running normally. Naturally, the weaker profitability also caused the pressure on the cash flow. And therefore, this cash flow from operating activities before financial items and taxes was slightly negative, but better than a year ago. And this improvement was mostly attributable to the more moderate level of net working capital. Net debt increased slightly due to a bit lower cash level. The net debt to EBITDA increased, and this was mostly due to a clear decrease in the rolling 12-month EBITA after a weak quarter. As we mentioned earlier, our financing contract is valid until March '26, and we actively manage our solvency and also maintain close dialogue with our finance years. The covenant in our financing agreement is based on net debt to EBITDA. And as we've said earlier, we have agreed with our banks on a temporary easing of the required covenant level. We have already commented most of the figures on this slide, but just a couple of points on the items below the adjusted EBITA. As Heikki mentioned, and as is clear by the restructuring efforts, we had a high amount of items affecting comparability. These EUR 1.2 million mostly related to layoffs in Sweden with a small amount also from the Buildings business area where the project support function was reorganized. The operating profit was ended up to be slightly negative due to the extra amortization we made. We have had a 55% owned subsidiary in Latvia called DVG (sic) [ DWG ], which has been also struggling in the downturn, and we now made the write-down of the value of these shares. As in the previous quarters, the financial expenses also increased to some extent, mainly reflecting the higher interest rates levels than a year ago. And now I'm handing back to Heikki.

Thank you, Hanna. And okay, outlook for '24, basically, we have already covered all of this, but if I very briefly recap the main points. So there will be a mixed market environment in the fourth quarter, strong demand, especially for the green transition, security and digitalization. Building market is still very weak and also uncertain. In Sweden, we expect a clear profitability improvement from fourth quarter onwards. And our guidance remains unchanged. Finally, a few words on our progress with the strategic initiatives. And as a reminder, our strategy here as follows. So -- but sooner I'll just cover the progress with the strategic pillars. So the most innovative, sustainable and efficient. Starting with the most innovative. So during the third quarter, we made significant strides in innovation. So we focused on this new smart services and also AI-based solutions with the launch of Smartlas and Planect solutions. So this Smartlas is like a satellite-based data and AI solution for land use management and sustainability assessments. And the Planect is a climate impact assessment in zoning projects. And actually, both of these are now bringing nicely revenue and also profits. And of course, our focus is now to further scale this up and increase revenues in the coming quarters. The most sustainable our commitment to sustainability was evident in the third quarter, and we continue to develop further these offerings, what I also just mentioned and also focused heavily on the biodiversity. We made also significant progress in preparing for the upcoming EU-level our sustainability reporting requirements with the double materiality analysis. We also developed a robust climate action plan, and that includes updated climate targets and a detailed transition plan. Also in the Smart City Talks event, what we have been having on a quarterly basis, we addressed the carbon neutrality goals and also these different requirements. The most efficient -- so we target the really like a lean operating model that allows us to concentrate more client work, as has been already several times, highlighted. So -- and already what we did basically. So we implemented reforms to improve the organizational efficiency, enhance the client proximity in our Swedish and Building businesses, and these have already started to yield positive results. And we also increased the AI awareness by training our staff. I already mentioned this own Saga AI solution and then overall sharing best practices and how to optimize expert work with generative AI. So we are clearly progressing with the AI in a fast manner. So to conclude, we are really dedicated to drive positive change and deliver value to our clients, stakeholders and also the environment. And before we end today, so also like a good thing to share with you is that we'll have a deep dive on our Digital Solutions business on the 4th of December to showcase a huge potential, it has overall. Of course, we'll have a special focus on these different products so that you also get a little bit more understanding what they are and what is the impact on the business and on our clients' operations. Please join to hear more. But now we are ready for the questions. So Mari, please come back.

Thank you, audience for all the questions we have received. Let's start with the ones concerning Sweden. So what does the transition from a region-focused model to a national 1 mean in practice?

Yes. So we've had 4 different regions basically like built on the bigger cities. Now we have a national mode, meaning that we are focusing on the construction business installation business, then now increasingly also in the Infra business. And as a new item, we see that there's also in our business in Sweden, a huge potential with the environment and sustainability consulting. So this is just like initiated. So -- but of course, a bigger change is that we are just leading it, looking more widely from our -- like from a client perspective, of course, not all the clients are just like local, but they are really in the whole country. So we want to be serving our clients in the best possible manner.

Okay. And to achieve organic growth in Sweden, what internal changes and strategic initiatives are critical beyond waiting for the external market recovery?

Yes. So as I've been saying now the first step was really that we just adjusted our capacity to the current order book. But now there's full focus on the sales, client network sales and all the different measures there, I mean, activity tendering, hit rate improvement, of course, like clever pricing and so on. So that's really the thing now. And of course, we see that there is a good potential also to recruit some experts to this, as I mentioned, to some of these segments where we see growth in Infra environment. And we have already some open positions for those ones.

Okay. And in Sweden, you made some adjustments to the order book. Are there still some issues with project overruns? Or are those sort of behind us right now?

Do you, Hanna, want to comment?

Yes, I can comment that. Well, obviously, in our business, it's kind of the risk of project overruns cannot be totally eliminated. It's kind of this project management excellence is the heavy focus and we want to and try to minimize the overruns, but it's kind of nothing special to mention here that we would need to flag.

Okay. Maybe then continuing with Hanna, question about goodwill. Is there a risk that goodwill impairments could extend to your core business from the one you mentioned in the report given the weak market situation and weak profitability?

Yes. As was said in the question as well, the impairment we made was quite a specific one relating to a partly owned subsidiary. We are, as all companies who have goodwill, we are testing the goodwill regularly and don't see a need for impairment, at least at the moment.

Okay. Then about wage costs. Wage pressures and personnel costs continue to grow relative to revenue. Do you anticipate this trend continuing in Q4 and into next year? Will there be further one-off costs in Q4 and next year?

Yes. Maybe, of course, probably like fourth quarter would be quite in line with the year-to-date. Of course, some changes with the -- what we just said about with this organizational changes, what we've had in Sweden and Finland. But of course, what comes to the next year, so naturally, there will be the general increases and of course, like the amount of them is still unknown. Hopefully, they will be modest. So...

I can maybe comment a bit also on the Q4 and the kind of one-off costs that, obviously, I think the bigger ones were now in Q3 because the reductions in Sweden were substantial. But of course, given the kind of a difficult market in Sweden and Buildings, we need to be kind of active. And of course, that sort of may mean some kind of costs. But I think the Q4 -- Q3 was the bigger one, clearly.

Okay. Then a couple of questions about the future. What visibility do you have to the improvement you expect in Buildings markets in H2 '25 in the second half next year?

I would say that it's uncertain. So that's our best estimate at the moment that the market would start to gradually recover. But if we look like 2 years backwards and then think about what were the consensus basically for the next year markets, I think we all can say that, okay, they haven't really materialized like the estimates have been. So of course, we now also want to take like -- we want to learn from the past and then be a bit more careful when it comes to the planning. I mean that concretely, it means that, of course, it might be that this kind of like a weak market might continue even longer. But as said, that's our estimate that from the second half of the year, it would be a bit better.

About Sweden, given the current price competition, what do you consider a realistic mid- to long-term profitability level for the Swedish business? And how does that align with the overall group profitability targets?

Yes. We haven't now disclosed that kind of information, except, of course, like some years ago in -- 1.5 years ago in our Capital Market Day, we show that naturally our ambition is that we would have businesses with over 10% margin. But naturally, there's some gap there. But now it's more like we get back to like a decent profitability first levels first. Yes.

Then a question maybe to Hanna. Do you still have access to undrawn debt facility considering the covenant favor? And what is your overall liquidity position?

Yes. The liquidity is good, as said, we have like sort of a good cash in our hands. And yes, we do have like kind of unutilized capacity in our facility, but it's kind of given that we have cash, and we are quite careful with our kind of investments. We haven't been really drawing that for quite a while. So we've been living with the operative cash flow. And that's how it's most likely going to continue.

Okay. And then final question to Heikki. There is demand for green transition projects in Infra business. Could you elaborate on what these projects involve in practice and the growth potential they have?

Yes. So actually, there are many different ones. So maybe I'll start with like sustainability-related services. We are doing environment impact assessment then in the biodiversity, also providing studies and assessments on the biodiversity of cities or the neighboring areas and how to develop or ensure the biodiversity there. But then also we have the energy sector, which is naturally okay, renewable energy, and they are looking at -- or we have been always strong in the past also with the wind to solar and now also in the future, we aim at the hydrogen market. So of course, all of these are providing opportunities. There are several initiatives ongoing and over the projects in us, but we haven't been sharing all of them yet. Hanna, anything you maybe add?

No, I think, yes, it's like you said. So it's a kind of a combination of, for example, in the wind project, it could be a combination of like area planning, like the kind of traditional Infra planning and then these environmental services or permitting support and then kind of different needs in different projects. Then we, of course, want to kind of offer as broad service like offering to each project as possible, but then it depends really on project by project.

Okay. Thank you, Heikki and Hanna. This concludes our Q&A session, and thank you for participating today. We hope to see you in December in connection of the Digi deep dive event Heikki mentioned. And of course, in connection of the Q4 and full year results in February. Thank you.