SNP Schneider-Neureither & Partner SE (SHF) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the SNP SE conference call regarding the full year results 2023. [Operator Instructions] Let me now turn the floor over to your host, Marcel Wiskow. Please go ahead.

Yes. Thank you, operator. Hello, everybody. Thank you very much for following our invitation to our first earnings call in 2024. The topic for today is the release of our annual report 2023. In the well known manner, we published all the relating material on our website. After this call, you will also find the presentation and a recording of this call on our website, at the section Investor Relations. With me in this call on the company side is our CEO, Jens Amail, in proven manner, he will give you an overview, summarizes the published figures and presents the outlook for the year '24. Also with us in our call, our CFO, Andreas Röderer, he will present the financials on a more detailed level. And the final part is always dedicated to the Q&A session. And with this introducing words, I will hand over as always to Jens.

Yes. Thank you very much, Marcel. Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining this call, and thank you for your continued interest in SNP. We already announced preliminary numbers on January 31. And you will see today that there are no surprises. So we are slightly better in all critical categories, order entry, revenue, EBIT, and operating cash flow. 2023 was a good year for our customers. It was a good year for our partners, and it was a good year for SNP. And this would not have been possible without the fantastic work of our global team. And it would be almost dismissive of me not to use this opportunity to also publicly thank the entire team of SNP for their fantastic work. I'm really thankful, I'm really humbled to work with such an excellent group of colleagues. So before we go into the numbers, maybe just one more comment. We have received feedback from some of you that, in these calls we do not need to go into every level of detail but rather focus on the big picture. So here, we have an overview of our core KPIs in a view with a 5-year trend. So when we start with order entry on the top left side, we reported a strong year-over-year growth here with 37%. And what's important for me here, and I will probably say this a few more times during this call. This is all in the core business of SNP and all transactions have real end customers with the demand for our solutions. When we look into some of the previous years, we had a few deals, very, very big deals with channel partners in 2019, 2020, 2021. We had a few deals, which I would consider not necessarily core business in 2022, for example, in the AMS space. So what you see in 2023. This is all within our respective core business. When we look at the revenue. And here, I'm pointing to the software side, specifically. Here, we see a year-over-year growth of 23%. Also here, again, one more time, all in our core business with own IP, no channel deals without end customers. And on top, we achieved this 23% year-over-year growth, while we had to deal with quite a significant sellout obligation out of the previous years. So you can always say 23%, this is now a lot, is this not enough. When you compare this with the average growth rate from 2019 to 2022, that's from EUR 47.6 million to EUR 56.1 million. Here, we would see a growth rate of 5.6% in spite of the big channel deals we have included here. Looking at the EBIT, we will go into some more details later, both myself and Andreas. We report with EUR 11.1 million, the best history in the -- the best EBIT in the history of the company in spite of several one-off effects, and we will comment on them later. Also operating cash flow, EUR 12.5 million, best operating cash flow we ever had. And this is even more remarkable that we had -- that the company did a factoring of EUR 5 million in Q4 2022. So if you look at this apples-to-apples plus EUR 5 million, minus EUR 5 million, the swing would actually be EUR 23 million and not only EUR 13 million. So in all core KPIs, we report here on this chart, we had the best year in the company history. So here is an executive summary of the key 2023 results. What can I highlight beyond what we have already said, maybe in the second block on Software. The Software share of our overall revenue is now 34%, which is an improvement compared to last year. And on the EBIT side, I have not commented on the EBIT margin yet. We have been below 4% in 2022. And in 2023, we had an EBIT margin of 5.5%. When we look into the fourth block, the key growth drivers, we were able to basically double -- more than double our business in the S/4 and RISE with SAP space. We saw a very strong growth in our partner business, 51% order entry and significant growth in our home market. But on top, we are very happy that we could dramatically grow the business in the largest IT markets of the world, particularly in the U.S. and in the U.K. Lastly, we raised our guidance for 2024 with regard to our revenue range. So here, we predict now revenue between EUR 215 million and EUR 225 million. The 2 other elements of our guidance are then related to revenue. And we keep the relative forecast we have communicated with the H1 numbers last year, i.e., also here the absolute figures are slightly higher as well. So here you see the key numbers in an overview. We basically already went through all of them. Maybe except when we look for here in this group, the Software order entry is only 2 percentage points better than Services. And the reason for that is that we also were able to come to a very big and long-lasting services agreements with some of our strategic customers. But we view this as very positive because we also improved our processes on the Service delivery side and these long-lasting Services deals will also have a very positive EBIT contribution as well. Looking at the Partner business, as I already indicated, when we look at order entry, we had a growth of 51% to EUR 98 million, which is significantly more than we have seen in 2022 with 13%. And when we look at the business in 2022, apples-to-apples without one-off effects, the Partner business in 2022 was growing a little bit less than our direct business. And now the ratio has changed significantly. So we have 51% in our Partner business growth year-over-year versus 37% overall. In the meantime, out of our total order entry volume, 39% is contributed by Partners. Also strategically, from a content perspective, we saw an expansion of our successful partnerships, including those with Accenture, IBM, and the All for One Group, just to name a few. And what was particularly important for us strategically, and we also invested a lot in that, is that many partners are in the meantime, fully enabled to deliver data migration project in a self-contained way to 80% or to 100%, leveraging our BLUEFIELD methodology and leveraging our Software platform. When we look at the deal bands, we see more sizable long-term agreements, which, of course, is a good indicator for a trustful and strategic relationships with our customers. I want to underline here again. And you hear that this is really important for us that these are all deals in our core business. So there is no AMS deal. There are no channel deals without end customers. So I think this is really important because if we have the success of our customers and partners as the #1 priority and not the financial engineering of a quarter, this will drive sustainable long-term profitable growth for SNP. This will drive the long-term success of the company. Maybe just a few examples, which we can mention, and most of you probably already have seen the press releases. This includes E.ON. This includes TE Connectivity in the U.S., Loh or Würth here in Germany. When we look at the order entry by region, I'm very proud that Oliver Schwede and his team delivered a very strong year in our home market in Central Europe. So we see a plus in order entry of 20%. But the good news last year is that on top, we have seen massive growth in Latin America, in North America and in UKI. Central Europe itself is now as big as the entire company revenue was a few years ago. But in terms of order entry share, now just at 52%. So still a little bit more than 50%, but already significantly less than 2022, where it was still at a level of 60%. The one region, if you could go -- stay here, thank you. The one region where I want to add, Marcel, the one region where we are struggling last year is JAPAC. This continues to be an extremely important region for us, living there for a few years, particularly in our core markets, Southeast Asia, Japan and Australia. So in the second half, in last year, we made a few changes to our setup from a process perspective and from a people perspective, and we are very confident to see better results this year. So looking at the EBIT bridge, starting from the left, starting from an EBIT in 2022, we reported at a level of EUR 6.8 million. When we look at this apples-to-apples with 2023, we first had significant currency tailwind in 2022 and massive currency headwind in 2023. And this adds up to EUR 6.8 million. Then we had a couple of positive one-off inorganic effects in 2022, for example, around SNP Poland. And this adds up to a total of EUR 3.3 million. So when we take this as a baseline, then you add, of course, the revenue growth of EUR 30 million. And from this revenue growth on this EUR 30 million, we see a growth of 44% in software. So almost half of it is Software. And what makes Andreas, who's sitting next to me, and me are very happy that in spite of the growth, we see less cost of goods sold, thanks to the better procurement processes. Andreas and team put in place some effects also through less reseller business. But overall, in spite of the growth, very positive impact on the cost of goods sold. When we look at personnel expenses, we see, of course, an increase in personnel expenses, among other things. Of course, we have now more employees. Andreas will talk about that. We are happy that we can provide higher salary payments. We, of course, based on the good performance, we also have a higher performance-related variable income. And on top of that, we also had some restructuring costs for severance packages. So of course, and this comes with the territory and the good year, we see more personnel expenses. On the OpEx side, so we are looking very critically at this, of course, every week. We saw higher travel expenses compared to 2022, which is okay and which was as budgeted, because in 2022 we still had the impact of COVID. And we also had, because of the governance model change to general meetings, we had legal expenses for the takeover bid, et cetera. So we have -- we feel comfortable with the reasons behind these increases in operating costs. So at the end of the day, apples-to-apples, the improvements would be more around EUR 14 million compared to 2022. And this does not include, again, the channel deals the company did in 2022, and it also does not take into account the sell-out we had to do in 2023. So finally, from my side, before I hand over to Andreas on the outlook. So as I already said, we raised our forecast for 2024. And the revenue now is in a range from EUR 215 million to EUR 225 million. So with the H1 numbers, 2023, we provided a range for 2024 between EUR 210 million and EUR 220 million. So we raised the outlook here. The other 2 dimensions of our outlook are in sync with the previous guidance. So of course, we want to see a year-by-year another decline in our backlog. So we want to have a positive book-to-bill ratio. And also, we say for now, of course, this is not never ending. But for now, we aim to improve our EBIT margin year-over-year. So the midpoint of the increase, the forecast now for this year is at 1.1 percentage points improvement, so from 5.5% to 6.6%. But if you would take the average from last year and this year, we would be around 1.4 percentage points. So that's it from my side. Thanks again for joining the call. I am looking forward to the discussion in a few minutes. And with that, I hand it over to Andreas.

Yes. Thanks a lot, Jens. I think your view has already been pretty detailed. So I just want to highlight a few observations in the income statement. Jens has already outlined the personnel costs. There are the 3 effects, Jens has mentioned, we have more people on board. We are pretty happy on that. We will see that later on. And we had also been able to pay good variable salaries, which is a good thing because we also had a great performance. On the other income and expenses, Jens has already mentioned the one-off effects we had in the group. I also want to dig a bit into the details of the FX topics. I think we still had a hard hit from hyperinflation impact in Argentina, roughly EUR 2 million. We also had dollar impact. When it comes to the dollar impact, we found some ways to mitigate some of the volatility for this year already starting. We had, as mentioned in the previous earnings calls already reclassified some of our loans to our subsidiary in North America. So a portion of the volatility will go away because we can going forward show it in OCI. But as I said, especially the hyperinflation topic will not go away fully also next year, and there will also be other currency impacts we have to deal with. You might wonder why we do not have an EBITDA guidance anymore externally. I think if you check carefully the difference between EBIT and EBITDA is pretty constant with roughly at EUR 10 million, and this is nothing that really we're looking at from a steering perspective because this difference is pretty constant. So we have decided to eliminate it from the external guidance. So Marcel, if you could go on to the next slide. Let's have a brief look at the revenue by segment. I think Jens has already touched a lot on that. I just want to reiterate what Jens has mentioned before. The Software segment did grow much faster than the revenues in the Services segment, and this is, of course, fully in line with our strategy. I want to say a few words about EXA. As you can see, EXA has lower revenues as in the previous year. And our question comes up. Is this a major issue for us? To make that very clear, no, it is not. Yes. We did not have an impairment risk for EXA. The company is still profitable, as you can see on the next slide. So now your question comes up. What is the issue? I think, that the selling motion from EXA is a very specific one. We are a niche player dealing with multinational companies. The sales pipeline is there, but the timing is pretty challenging for us as to predict, but we are fully convinced of the 2 main products EXA has in its portfolio, and they will come back. We also see changes in the management there. We invested in the sales place there. So we are fully convinced that EXA will come back, and this is also from a group perspective, not a major issue for us at this point in time. So now let's have a look at our segment reporting. As already indicated in the Q3 earnings call, we got better in our internal controlling processes and are now able to have a better cost allocation based on our actual profit tender structure. In the past, we had to work with estimations for some of the cost. But that differently with the new approach, we have more precise cost allocation. For comparability, we have, of course, also updated the past figures. So please note, of course, the overall amount, of course, is unchanged, but we had to allocate more costs to the Software segment based on the updated approach. For example, we are -- we try to continuously improve our CrystalBridge Software platform, and this is also done with the help of our Services colleagues, and such costs had in the past not been shown as R&D efforts, but now we can show such costs where they actually relate to. Another thing I want to highlight briefly the approach, how sales and marketing costs are allocated to the segments. Mainly based on the proportionate revenue, the segments generate has not changed. So this means, for example, the Service segment still has to absorb approximately 2/3 based on the relative revenue size of the FX topics, we have just mentioned before. So please just keep that in mind when we have a few at the segment margin then. But overall, this more precise approach will help us to better see the operational progress of our Services business, but also in our external segment reporting. For the full year 2023, we therefore, see an increase in the Services margin -- in the Services segment margin of 4.2% and the decrease of the Software margin as under the new approach, certain costs are now allocated and assigned to the Software segment. But this is nothing we worry about because we also do investments in our R&D department. If we could go to the next slide, I would like to keep that short. It's about order entry and backlog. Jens has already outlined on that. As mentioned, the biggest growth, North America and UPI. But as Jens mentioned, I actually really want to highlight that once again, we also had a pretty cool growth in CEU, our home market, with approximately 20%. And this is also something that makes me pretty happy because we can grow internationally and as Jens had mentioned JAPAC. This is something that will come back this year. We are very confident on that. There is a super big market. We really haven't touched that as we should have done in the past. And this is also good from a risk profile because we are just getting more diverse and not relying that much on one big super region here, which is CEU and even that region is growing pretty good. The backlog did grow in the same speed as the order entry, namely with 37%. Marcel, if you go to the next page, let's have a look at the order backlog. I had been asked from some of you, how stable is our order book. I think Jens has already indicated that we are doing a healthy and good business going forward. So our order book is stable. There is no nonsense in that order book. And as you can see, we have managed to grow that order book pretty, pretty cool, with EUR 50 million. And you see there are some project remeasurements, approximately EUR 7 million. This is spread across all regions. Sometimes, we just need to take something out of the T&M project. But overall, our order book is stable. There are 6 topics I have already mentioned to you. Now let's have a look on the balance sheet. So let's get started just to receivables. As you can see, the receivables increased primarily due to higher revenues in Q4. And please keep in mind, Jens already mentioned that last year, we did the factoring of receivables. So in a like-for-like comparison, the previous year's receivables would normally be approximately EUR 4.5 million. Higher I just want to mention that here, we are not doing any sale of receivables anymore. I also will touch later on the financing situation of SNP, because I'm pretty happy with. The other financial assets did go down by EUR 5 million. We have received the third part of a purchase price payment for the sale of SNP Poland of EUR 5 million in 2023. And the remaining portion, you can see here as the balance of EUR 5 million we have already received in January '24. Now let's have a look at the liability side because that there the most movements have happened and the changes are primarily related to our external financing from bank loans. As you could see on the OpEx view slide, at the end had shown at the beginning, in the past, SNP's ability to generate a positive operating cash flow seems to be pretty limited. So the financing has also been done with external loans from banks. And as you probably also know, the interest rates have now increased significantly and with that, also our interest expenses. So I tried my very best together with the finance team here to reduce our external expenses for interest. So last year, we paid back EUR 7 million of external loans. And also in 2024, we are planning to further reduce our external loans just to get our interest expenses down. And to summate up, let me state it here, I'm pretty happy SNP is very well financed for the next 2 years. If we go to the next slide, Jens has already touched on that, that's my personal highlights and thanks a lot to the entire SNP team because this was a great teamwork also and again to you, big thanks for pushing that topic and making it there to our prior one this year. As you can see, operating cash flow increased by approximately EUR 13 million. Jens has mentioned it without the factoring, the increase would have been even better. Also, the free cash flow has significantly increased. As mentioned, a portion of that cash flow has been used to get rid of some external debts to reduce our interest expenses, and it has been used to do investment into our teams to further support our growth. Last thing I want to mention here, it's about our working capital ratio. As you see, it could be better. And I can assure you, I have not forgotten that. This is something that we are working very hard on, and we will do our very best to improve that. Now let's go to the last page about the headcount. As you see, we had a significant increase in our order entry backlog. So we need colleagues to deliver that backlog and also we need people to ramp up our partners because we really plan to scale with our partners. We are growing also internationally in North America, UPI. And I have to say that here, we are very happy about that development even if that comes with increases in personnel expenses, because it also indicates that our efforts we put into our SNP brand start to pay off, yes. We are getting attrition rates lower than we have seen them in the previous year, and we are able to attract new talents to the company. We also got very good feedback in our people survey we have done last year. So overall, we are on a very good way. And as Jens has started the meeting, I just want to reiterate it here once again. We are very proud on what the team has achieved in the last year. With that, Marcel, I hand over to you.

Thank you, Andrea, for your explanation. And operator, please switch to the Q&A mode, we are open for questions now.

[Operator Instructions] And the first question comes from Yannik Siering from Stifel.

Can you hear me?

Yes.

Great. I would have 3 questions at this point. The first one is on profitability. So for 2024, 1 percentage point expansion sounds rather conservative on the margin side, given all the underlying potential of the business model. Maybe you could talk a little bit about the key moving parts here and what are your assumptions? And then secondly, on S/4HANA, very strong momentum here in 2024, especially on the order entry side. Do you see a continuation of this strong momentum also in Q1? And then the third one is on cash flow. Yes. I think you explained it well. This is really a number that we have not seen in the past. Could these results that we have seen in 2023 be kind of a new run rate post the adaptation of all the internal processes and also in light of further improvement on working capital?

Yes. Thank you very much. So the EBIT margin, Yannik is in sync with what we have provided. We said we want to improve between 1% and 2%. Again, the average -- if you take all the midpoints, the average is now 1.4% which is in the middle of the range. As Andreas said, with a strong growth, we also have to invest. We have to invest in hiring new people. We have to train them. We have to enable our partners. So this has been modeled into our EBIT prediction. And I also must say we still need to deal with some liabilities of the past. We still need to do with long-term agreements, which are not favorable for SNP, long-term lease agreements, long-term partner agreements, long-term partner customer agreements. So this is still -- these are still liabilities out of the past. We also stated always very clear that was, Yannik, the #1 feedback I have received from everybody when I started at the beginning of 2023, we want you to be more predictable. So this is the outlook we currently have on EBIT. We will do everything as we already did in 2023 to improve this during the year, but this is the model we currently see. On your second question, in terms of demand, we see for the year a continued strong demand for our Software, for our Services, and we are optimistic also here that hopefully, at one point in time, we can provide a new outlook. Andreas, maybe you cover the third question.

Yes, happy. So thanks for your question on the cash flow. I would love to see such increases, of course, again and again, believe me. At this point in time, there is on purpose no cash flow guidance because it's still pretty tricky for us to predict it, yes. We have an uncertainties how fast we have to take off in JAPAC. If we are able to deliver the same performance in growth in UTI and North America again. So there is a lot of unknown at this point in time. What I can assure you is that we stick to our guidance that we rolled out to our sales colleagues that Software needs to be paid close to delivery. I think this is something we are executing again. And this is also something that will help us in the working capital ratios. But also they had one main focus for this year will be on those old partner contracts, Jens has mentioned, because we have executable rights to payment here. And this is something we will try to enforce this year. We have good discussions with the people and partners involved here, and this is something I will really put attention to this year.

The next question comes from Hannes Mueller from Warburg Research.

Yes. And congratulations on the great figures for the year. A couple of questions have already been touched on there, but maybe 2 follow-up questions. So you mentioned a lot of the decline in the Software margin is due to internal changes in accounting and stuff like that. It seems to me from the reporting that there is still adjusted for them that a little decline in the Software margin. Could you maybe explain where that is coming from or if you see that as well? And then the second question would be on Service. So you have full order books for service, and you already mentioned you need more employees to service the demand. Do you see a bottleneck there? Or how do you see recruiting in going forward?

Let me pick up the first one on R&D. That's a good observation, and this observation is right, yes. On the R&D side, we also did investments on the R&D side because also part of our strategy, mainly in people. You can also -- if you check the one slide I have shown, you also see that there are more people in the R&D department. Of course, this also comes with cost, but also part of the strategy long term is that we also develop software that is based in the data management area. And there, we also need to do investments, and we are doing them right now. So this is the background for that.

Thank you, Andreas. And Mr. Mueller, if I can answer your second question on the ramp-up for Services. So I feel Andreas already has indicated that, that our employer branding improved within the last 12 months. So we see a strong demand this year a positive recruiting pipeline globally. Second, we focus very much on ramping up these resources, not necessarily here in Germany. But for example, in Slovakia, where we already have a very strong center of excellence and of expertise for both development and services. I was in India 2 weeks ago, where EXA has a subsidiary with 100 colleagues, which we will also use to ramp up colleagues for both services and the development. So we are optimistic that we are able to achieve what we need to achieve on the recruiting side. And the third element of my answer would be, as Andreas has already indicated, the big price and the big dream for us, of course, is that we have a strong focus on our software and our platform and partners are more and more able to deliver on this platform. And here, as I very briefly mentioned during my presentation, we have partners in Germany, like and also one -- a few more mature partners also globally out of the big EXA, who are able to deliver 80% to 100% of the data migration services on top of what they normally do in a self-contained way. So we are optimistic that we can fulfill the demand on the recruiting side with the one caveat in terms of revenue then and resulting profit, we, of course, have to do a ramp-up. But we are not concerned in terms of access to talent that we are able to deliver.

And the next question comes from Wolfgang Specht from Berenberg.

Two follow-ups from my side. First, on the Partner business that's taking more and more relevant. But you mentioned already that there are some older contracts which you are not that happy with right now. Does this mean you also expect in negotiations that, let's say, the revenue sharing with partners could somewhat go down and be supportive to your own margins? Or are there rather other topics? And the second question goes towards pipeline, definitely '32 S/4 is a big thing in the market right now. When do you expect the peak of orders from corporates on your own books to happen?

Yes. So thank you very much, Mr. Specht, for these questions. So the bigger concerns we have with partners are terms and conditions on long-term contracts. So we work through that. We try to restructure a few contracts there, but we don't expect negative impact. We expect positive impact on everything we can report in the next quarters here. On your second question, that's a big one, right? Because nobody can predict here also the policies, of course, of our friends from SAP. But the business cases, Mr. Specht, we see with our partners and customers, they go through 2032. So we go S/4 and particularly who RISE with SAP, which is fully leveraging the core capabilities we have. We are in force. We don't see any market limitations or pipeline impact within the foreseeable future. And again, the business cases with our customers, earlier they end in 2030, on average, they go through 2032.

Okay. So you're not afraid that there's suddenly a panic, everybody is looking for a partner for the migration. And you probably will not be able to deliver to all of these because of limited capacities so that more and more corporate sponsors, big IT consultants and, let's say, escape contracting with you.

So the big IT consultants, and that's the good news. They all work with our Software. So when you look at the top 20 system integrators according to Gartner, 17 work based on our platform. We have a strategic team is in place of 17 out of the 20. Yeah. So we are optimistic that together with our partners, we are able to fulfill the demand. That was a little bit the previous question from Mr. Mueller. But of course, in parallel, and this is then more related to your second question in parallel, we will build up a business which go beyond that, yes. But we are not time pressure. We want to do it now. And we will present an innovation agenda and a slightly tweaked strategy and transformation role. But we are not concerned that there will be a drop in demand in the foreseeable future. And because of our strong ecosystem, we are confident that we can fulfill this not necessarily with own resources but at least with our -- that we can enable these migrations with our Software.

And the next question comes from Lukas Spang from Tigris Capital.

Maybe we can start with the topic of working capital and cash flow. So I think it's also very positive and also congrats on the work on cash flow side. But if I look on the receivables and take it into relation to the revenue, we still have an increase in the ratio from 37% to over 38%, which is, I think, a really high number. So in these terms, what are you doing to decrease this relation and what are the measures you have implemented for that? I would do them one by one.

Yes. So maybe let me pick that up. So for example, we have a new cash collection head. We are tracking all the open items very carefully in our weekly sales procedure. So if there is an open item, it will be discussed. The regional president get emails from me to run behind that cash. We are also -- if you check our annual report, you also see that there is a big number of old receivables. There are non-current receivables. This is something we are running behind all the open items there. So it's rather operational measures because the thing for new transactions, I think the guidance that we have rolled out last year in August that has been picked up very well. It's just a matter of time until those things are better reflected and also in our working capital ratios. Now to the question. When exactly do we see it? What's the ratio of decrease. This is something I cannot predict. I just can -- running behind that, we are carefully checking that. We are sticking to our payment term guidance, and this is now understood also in our sales teams.

Yes. Okay. Then concerning the revenue guidance, if I look on the order intake, you reached EUR 266 million order entry, but your guidance for revenue is EUR 215 million to EUR 225 million. That doesn't really fit for me. I know, Mr. Amail and also you as a new management regarding the history of disappointment of the company rather guide conservative. But can you please explain a little bit this deviation from all the entry last year to your revenue guidance for this year?

Yes. Maybe I'll start and, and then you might jump in later if I miss something. So you might could do a back of the envelope calculation saying last year, we had a backlog of EUR 130 million, then just checking how much revenue we had this year and then say or then at EUR 70 million, and EUR 70 million should be a doable number. And then that would mean with a backlog of EUR 180 million, we would have something like a low end of EUR 250 million in revenue. I'm not sure if this is your way of calculating, then I just tell you how we have thought about it. First of all, we have hired a lot of new people. We need to ramp them up. We need to onboard them. We still need to do also from our best people in services, the enablement of our partners, as Jens has already mentioned and also the big order entry on the Services side comes from multiyear projects, right? It's not that the whole thing is delivered in 1 year. So some of the mechanics that worked in the past might not work with the backlog as we have seen it. But also there, it's pretty tricky to predict all that from our internal systems that we also need to invest and build up better mechanics. But this is something where we see multiyear projects that we are expecting. And that's why with what we have got here is something we feel confident.

Okay. Then a short question. Can you quantify the sellouts in the revenue for 2023?

Yes, we can quantify that. I think it's roughly EUR 7 million.

And then last question, I think it's more for Mr. Amail. You are now more than 1 year at S&P. And when we talked in this around last year, you said we should give you some time in terms of your midterm view and perspective. So now 12 months later, what can you tell us or share us about your future expectations concerning revenue growth and especially in terms of profitability, because I think also the 6.6% in EBIT margin cannot be satisfactory for a company like SNP?

Yes, I agree with that. I have never been more optimistic about our future than I am now, knowing the levers we have in the market, knowing the team much better than, of course, 12 months ago, knowing how strong our partner relationships are. So I'm extremely optimistic about the future mid- and long term. You will hear more about our long-term strategy and transformation world, and I agree 6.6%. That's the outlook for this year. We committed to improve this year-over-year by between 1 and 2 percentage points. So that's clearly not the mid- and long-term ambition Andreas and I have.

Do you think you will be able in the next, let's say, 12 months to give a more quantified outlook about the mid- and long-term perspective?

I mean it's already quantified. We said we want to grow the revenue year-over-year 10%. We want to have a positive book-to-bill ratio. So everybody can do the math, and we want to improve the EBIT margin, which I believe is very ambitious in a company where we still have a lot of liabilities, a lot of issues we need to deal with by 1 to 2 percentage points a year. So I think that's an ambitious target. And of course, we always try to improve this a little bit. But for now, that's what we see.

And the next question comes from Uwe Schupp from Apus Capital.

Can you hear me?

Yes. Mr. Schupp.

Four questions for me. I would also ask them one by one, if possible. First of all, regarding your compensation claims in the U.S. regarding some rental payment, which apparently you made in advance, I read in your annual report that there could be a verdict by the court in actually this month. So I was wondering whether you heard already something regarding the -- what is it, EUR 5.2 million or so?

You make the question one by one, Mr. Schupp?

If possible, yes.

Yes, okay. Yes. So the part -- sorry, the court appointment is come. We have provided all the evidence that we need to deliver, and we are pretty confident that we are in a good position. But beside that, I can't provide more details. This is also a topic, that is, with our Supervisory Board, but this is the status update we got in the last Supervisory report meeting.

Could there be also be a downside for you? Or is it downside, you get nothing basically 0?

No. I think, that could only be upside for us.

We have a call for everything, Mr. Schupp.

Yes. Okay. Got it. Excellent. That actually kind of brings me to my next question regarding -- especially in Q4, as I noticed there's a reasonable difference between EBITDA and the operating cash flow with earnings actually being down year-on-year and cash flow being up. I tried to look for some potential reason in the annual report, but really didn't find anything, i.e. -- so my direct question to you would be whether you build up provisions somewhere just in, in the duration of, whatever may come this year. But I guess, the sheer answer is that it was purely working capital improvement in Q4, is that correct?

So maybe from the EBITDA, if you compare, we haven't shown that now, but this is in the backup slides, you can see that there was a pretty sharp EBIT drop in Q4 compared to last year. This was primarily due to some one-off effects from the sale of SNP Poland, from some adjustments from purchase price agreement. So yes, so there are some things that are rather non-routine. So I cannot fully tie it back now to your question. But Q4 has been distorted, especially in the previous year from some one-off effects. That's why it looks not that good this year. Yes. And what we had to accrue for we have accrued.

No, I was actually meaning to give it a positive spin even because your cash flow was so strong. So it means, obviously, that your quality of earnings was quite good. But my question was more on the -- did you pull some provisions, but you apparently didn't.

Let me just put in one thing. It's also about the FX topics I have mentioned. There was a lot and a lot of hit then coming from Argentina, because especially there, the hyperinflation really started to tremendously take off in the last month of the quarter, and this is probably one of the things that look a bit strange if you look at that.

Kind of directly brings me to my next question regarding -- if you had to kind of summarize the one-offs last year, the negative one-offs, i.e., Argentina plus Poland and whatever you may have there as well. What are those one-offs in total, just roughly?

I think we have seen that on the EBIT price, it definitely adds up to EUR 10 million. I think this is what we have seen in the slide.

EUR 14 million actually, Andreas. So if you add up the negative one-off this year and the positive one-off, I always say this year, apologies. If you add up the negative one-offs in 2023 and the positive one-offs in 2022, we show in the EBIT bridge, which slide, this is on Slide 9, that's EUR 14 million. This does not take into account Mr. Schupp, the channel deals done in 2022. This does not take into account the EUR 6 million to EUR 7 million, Andreas mentioned, where we had to grow sellouts. Taking this out of the equation, the swing is EUR 14 million.

Very clear. Sorry, I was slightly late on the call, so I didn't really catch that. Brings me directly to my last question regarding -- like I don't know your company that well for such a long time, but like if you had -- could change one thing really in terms of switching of old deals, partner deals, supplier deals, whatever, like what is the most burning topic on your agenda these days? If you could kind of -- that you could change overnight if you would have a big impact?

So there is nothing which makes us nervous, Mr. Schupp. So there is not the one critical topic. We just have to do the hard work every day, put our customers first. And then we are also able to deal with a few issues we still have out of the past, which means a channel deal, where we need to do sellout, terms and conditions, in customer contracts, which are unfavorable for us, long-term lease agreements. So it's not the one thing we're dealing with. We just have to address the issues and liabilities one step at a time. Overall, we are very optimistic about the future. We are excited about the partnerships we have in place. We're excited about the relationship we have with SAP in the meantime. So again, right, we address issues, remaining issues one at a time. We focus on our customers, we focus on our partners. We focus on our employees. And with that, we are optimistic about what's ahead.

Excellent. Just going back to my first question, in case your compensation claims in the U.S. would be successful, would you go -- I mean, would that trigger a top release because it would be earnings relevant? Or wouldn't you just kind of book that under others and the currently reported in Q1?

No, no. Once we know, you know.

Yes. But just the discussion with our legal colleagues, it's so, this is tricky. It's not that clear how long that will take. But our legal position is good, but it's just a matter of time how, until we can.

Absolutely, Andreas. I'm not saying we have a solution tomorrow. But of course, once this is resolved, yes, a few topics probably need to be approved by the general meeting as well. But once this is resolved, of course, we will communicate that.

Okay. There seem to be no further questions. [Operator Instructions]

Okay. I think this was a really lively discussion. Before we come to an end, please note on your calendar that we are publishing our Q2 -- our Q1 numbers in a couple of weeks on the 25th of April, we are inviting you for the set up again at this date. And in the meantime, if you have any topics, any questions, please contact me, Investor Relations. You have my detailed number and my e-mail address. And with this closing words, I will close this call, and thanks for your participation. Bye-bye.