StrongPoint ASA (STRO) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everybody, and welcome to this second quarter presentation by StrongPoint. My name is Jacob Tveraabak. I'm the CEO of StrongPoint. And with me, as always, I have our CFO, Hilde Horn Gilen, who will be taking you through some additional financial information. As always, I would like to start with a brief description of StrongPoint, what StrongPoint does and then moving into the financial results for the second quarter. And as I said, lastly, Hilde will take you through the latter bit of today's presentation. So StrongPoint, we are a retail technology company. We have, what we call, a double opportunity in the fact that e-commerce is a global megatrend, in particular, in grocery is growing. And with that growth, you'll be seeing both the need to improve the operations and productivity in stores but also to see e-commerce business being sustainable financially for the grocers to make that business go around. At StrongPoint, we provide both these opportunities. Also, in today's environment, with high inflationary pressure, that need to improve the operations in store is even bigger. So we are a firm believer in the double opportunity for StrongPoint, both in the short term but also over the quarters for the e-commerce business. At StrongPoint, we also pride ourselves in having a very clear purpose statement and that is to bring in retail technology solutions in every shopping experience, whether that's online or off-line to create a smarter and better world. We are also, at StrongPoint, having a particular focus on grocery retail. So we have a very, very sharp production solution for the grocery retail sector. And as you can see here, we're serving all the major grocery retail companies that are out there in the 8 markets that we now serve with ALS being part of the StrongPoint group. So we've had the fortune of bringing in both Tesco's and Sainsbury in that group. So I would like to emphasize this again because in today's very uncertain business with a lot of global turmoil, there is nothing more secure than the need for people to get their food and groceries. That is why we have the grocery focus but also with a spillover effect potential to other retail verticals. You will also see, after today's second quarter results that there are absolutely the needs to reiterate the 2025 strategic ambitions we have. We are more firm and strong about what we will be achieving in 2025, namely the NOK 2.5 billion revenue but also a 13% to 15% EBITDA. I look forward to explaining more in detail how we're getting there. So then to the highlights of the second quarter. Firstly, the financial results. Secondly, we'll talk more about the customer or some of the customer progress that we are doing, and then lastly, talk about some of the very important pillars to bring us to the 2025 ambitions. In the quarter, we have achieved a very solid 28% top line growth. 28% top line growth in today's environment is nothing else but very impressive. What follows also is the fact that due to component shortages, this number would have been an additional NOK 50 million-or-so higher have not had the component shortages. So we're very proud and confident about the growth that we're seeing. In these growth [ figures ], we also have 1 month of revenue from ALS [Audio Gap] But even without ALS, we would have been achieving here a 16% growth. So again, we feel very, very strong about the achievement that the entire organization has been getting to. It's due to both large-scale rollouts of price or ESLs of cash management solutions despite having component shortages and, of course, the last bit, which is the NOK 30 million-or-so from the ALS acquisition. So strong growth, top-line-wise. If I look at the bottom line, it's more flat. It's a NOK 2 million EBITDA decline. This is, to some extent, due to the fact that there are inflationary pressures on components that we are yet to be taking out to our customers that will be taking place in Q3 and Q4. But most importantly is the fact that we are investing and continuing to invest heavily and deliberately into e-commerce. This time around, we're going to give a little bit more information than we have in the past about what is actually the commitment that we're doing in terms of investments in e-commerce. So from the 3.1% EBITDA margin in total, there is actually a tale of 2 different businesses that StrongPoint operates in. It's the in-store productivity solutions that we offer, a range of those, and it's the e-commerce logistics solutions that we offer. And having distributed the corporate or an overhead costs to both these businesses, what you see here is that we have a very healthy 10% to 11% EBITDA margin in, what we call, the in-store productivity solutions. There should be a real comfort for all the investors out there that we have a mature business that is making decent and if not good money on the solutions that we offer in the markets. What it also tells us is that we are doing deliberate and quite substantial investments in e-commerce. Whereas e-commerce in general in society has taken a bit of a dip this quarter or this times versus last year, at StrongPoint, we have maintained the same revenue from our e-commerce business as last Q2, which is quite outstanding given the COVID implications last year. That said, it's not enough to not pull down the EBITDA as a total. But we believe very firmly in the strong growth that e-commerce, in groceries, in particular, will be having over the quarters and hence, will be leading us to both much stronger top line, NOK 2.5 billion in 2025, but also to a much, much higher EBITDA margin than we're currently seeing due to the scalability of these solutions. Then final page on the financials from my end is the product mix. And what you will see here is that, well, firstly, e-commerce is increasing its fair share or its share relatively here to 10% of the total turnover that we have at StrongPoint. And you will also be observing that we have a new category called shopfitting, which is essentially ALS. We [ are ] and will be working to [ desiccate ] the figures from ALS to put them into the exact correct segments. But bearing in mind, we've only had ALS 1 month into the StrongPoint books. We've separated out that to be shopfitting currently. Moving then to customer breakthroughs that have yet to make their dents on the financial impact. Firstly, and very importantly for us, is AutoStore. We have won the first AutoStore agreement, and we did that with a Norwegian customer called ColliCare Logistics. It marks a breakthrough for StrongPoint that it's the first and also puts StrongPoint on the map not only for e-commerce logistics as a whole but for automated e-commerce logistics solutions in particular as well. So I'm very confident that this one first project will bring us additional AutoStore and micro-fulfillment center installations in the future. The 2 other customer breakthroughs that I wanted to highlight here are related to Click & Collect lockers. I think it is extremely important in today's environment to recognize that the need for cost-effective solutions, last-mile effective solutions, is high now than ever. And we know from the experience in Sweden that Click & Collect lockers is one of those very important steps to achieving that. So seeing both Interspar Austria and Coop Alleanza in Italy is a very important step in the direction of making the European community also see the value of Click & Collect lockers. Then lastly from my end, we have -- I'd just like to restate that we have now finally gotten the ALS Global or Air Link System as part of the StrongPoint family. In the U.K., ALS will operate under the name ALS StrongPoint for the foreseeable future, simply because the customers in the U.K. are used to the ALS name. With StrongPoint, we're adding that -- the size, the solutions and products also into the U.K. and Irish market, and we are very excited to have Steve Smith, one of the directors at ALS, being now the SVP and Managing Director for that business. And we're looking forward to seeing how we can get both third-party solutions but also, of course, proprietary StrongPoint solutions into those 2 countries. And then finally from my end before leaving the word over to Hilde, it's about e-commerce. We do, again, want to reiterate the very important point that we believe in e-commerce [ all ] quarters. Today's -- or this quarter's general sentiment in the e-commerce space is not what's going to be there forever. We have seen at StrongPoint that we maintained the e-commerce revenue. We expect that to grow quite dramatically also going forward. And hence, we're also both committed and feel very strongly about continuing to invest in the e-commerce logistics solutions we have. So with that, it's time for you, Hilde, please.

Thank you so much, Jacob. I will start off this -- my part of the presentation with elaborating a bit about the transaction figures of the acquisition of Air Link Group. We announced a purchase price of GBP 9.44 million. That has been translated to NOK 112 million. And we must inform you that this was based on the balance sheet at year-end last year. This year, we will be having an adjustment of that with the balance sheet of the 31st of May, which is the closing date. The purchase price was 80% cash equal to NOK 89 million and a share in StrongPoint of NOK 23 million. That represented 1 million shares in StrongPoint at the time of closing. And we have distributed 500,000 shares from our treasury, and we have issued new shares for the rest. The new shares has been registered at Brønnøysund Central Register but has not yet been distributed to the sellers as we are waiting for some VPS accounts to be created. Looking at the allocation of the NOK 112 million, we see [ identifiable ] numbers of NOK 26 million. We have analyzed the business, and we have identified intangible assets of NOK 66 million represented by NOK 56 million in customer relations and NOK 10 million on the brand that Jacob just talked about, which we find very valuable in the British market. That leaves us with a goodwill of NOK 37 million. On the right side of the slides, you see the figures of ALS in June, which we have included in the consolidated figures for StrongPoint. That was NOK 30 million on revenue and a profitability of NOK 5 million. This is above the average. So June was a very good month for ALS. So we will say that, that is not what you should expect for the whole year, but it shows the scalability of the business. If we had included ALS from the first of the year, we would actually have seen a 19% growth of the first half of the year, which is showing that we have bought a substantial new business unit to StrongPoint. Just a slide on the equity. We have issued new shares, and we have bought the company and we have paid dividend. And you see that equity ends at end of June on the same millions as it was on last year. The equity ratio has declined to 54% from 58%, but it's still very healthy equity ratio. So we're very happy about that. Looking at the rolling 12 of revenue, we see we have now, over the past 12 months, a revenue of NOK 1.1 billion, including ALS. That is a 9% growth, and it shows that we are steady. We're on a very good path on that one, Jacob, I would say. On the EBITDA, and we have a rolling 12 of NOK 49 million, which then, Jacob was explaining, heavily affected by the investments we are doing in the e-commerce business. We started off last quarter elaborating a bit more on the EBITDA and the cost side. We know that is interesting for you. And as you can see from the slide we are showing here, the e-commerce in quarter 2, the cost has increased by NOK 13 million. So it is quite heavy investments we are doing every quarter. There are also some due diligence costs in Q2. And as I talk to -- told you earlier, the net ALS contribution to the EBITDA was NOK 4.6 million or almost NOK 5 million. Our earnings per share a bit up in the quarter isolated to NOK 0.18 per share. While on the rolling 12, we are seeing a flat development from last quarter, so NOK 0.57 per share earned for the last 12 months. Looking at the cash flow. We started off the year by NOK 174 million in cash position end of last year. We add the EBITDA and the earn-out received from cash security business in the first quarter. We have acquired ALS for a net cash amount of NOK 85 million, and we have paid a dividend to our shareholders of NOK 35 million. The biggest change in this slide is the net working capital of NOK 38 million tied up in especially receivables for the first half. Our receivables are a -- are, of course, increased and so our revenue increased, so that's the logic part, and we are happy to announce that we have a very rare loss on receivables. We are actually not having any outstanding amount above 3 months old, so we are very happy about that as well. In the quarter isolated, not showing in this slide, but in the quarter, we have increase of inventory. And I would just like to explain that, that is because we want to reduce the time to market on our lockers, which we produce in China, and on our CashGuard, which we preproduce as we are waiting for components to arrive. So you will find that in Q2, our inventory has increased. We left the month of June with a cash position of NOK 50 million. So we have kind of changed the slide a bit when it comes to net debt position. We have been very cash positive for 3 quarters. Now we are back in a net debt position, but I would say it's really balanced with the NOK 25 million in debt, including IFRS. So that was my figures, Jacob. On the 26th of October, we will be seeing you again from this webcast. And we want to wish you all to send e-mail or call me if you have questions. We are more than welcome to answer them. Despite that, we would like, on behalf of StrongPoint, to wish you all a good summer. Thank you.