Talenom Oyj (TNOM) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, everybody. You are welcome to Talenom Annual Report Release of 2020. I will start in Finnish. And after me, Antti Aho, our CFO, will continue in English. And after all, you can ask any questions by web chat. My name is Otto-Pekka Huhtala, and I'm CEO of Talenom. [Foreign Language]

Hello, everybody. This is Antti Aho, Talenom's CFO speaking and presenting you Talenom's financial statement and some highlights from the year 2020. To put it shortly, the main highlights from last year. We maintained our profitable growth despite this special corona year. Our operating profit improved by 24% and our net sales increased by 12%. We launched new services in October, as we told in our Capital Markets Day already. We also kept investing quite a bit in our existing software to make it -- keep it modern and to bring some new features as well. Our guidance for this ongoing year, 2021, is from -- our revenue from EUR 75 million to EUR 80 million. And our operating profit, we expect to be between EUR 14 million and EUR 16 million. Today, our Board has made its proposal for dividend, which is EUR 0.15 per share. Okay. Before going into more detail in these matters, I'd like to remind you of our vision, which we updated a little bit last year. If you look at the picture, we can see there this sun shining with words Joy of Entrepreneuring, which is kind of like our slogan or mission statement. We want to do whatever makes our customers', entrepreneurs' lives easier and more joyful. In the picture, we can see Sweden and Finland as green countries, meaning that we have our operations there. And then we can see arrows pointing to other countries in Europe, which means that we are actively studying the European accounting business and plan to enter new markets as soon as we are ready to do that. If we zoom into these red arrows, they tell us what we aim to bring to these other countries. We can see the words: automation, easy routines and care services. These are Talenom's core strengths which we have built throughout our almost 50 years' history. And when we have been studying other markets, we can see that with these same strengths we can expand even internationally. About the text, we raised this word, banking services, which means that we take quite seriously our new venture on building banking services and connecting them seamlessly into our service offering. To sum up our strategic -- the main points of our strategic -- strategy, we see there the automation. Automation is important in many ways for our strategy. First of all, of course, with automation, we can improve our efficiency, reduce mistakes and all that. But maybe even more importantly, the automation makes it possible for us to bring more value-added to our services to spend more time on customers' needs, help them to understand their finances, which after all is the most crucial part of the accounting business and what we can deliver to our customers. We have been working a lot on this -- in improving our customer experience mainly by spending more and more time in proactive contacts with our customers. And as our experiences saw the customers really like this more consultative approach instead of just working in the back-office with the legal stuff. We aim to grow both organically and through acquisitions, and we have a fairly good track of both already. We have, for some 10 years, been working on this organic growth model. And during the past couple of years, we have been more and more active in acquisitions. The digitalization makes the acquisition market more and more enticing. And many small accounting businesses, they are looking for a bigger partner to help them through this transferral phase from the manual accounting to more digital process. Internationalization, as I already mentioned, the market looks pretty much the same in most European countries, very fragmented, opening us sources for growth. And yes, we expect to see more market entries in the future. The small company concept opens us also a new market in which we have not been so active in the past, pretty much because of the sales cost. With our new small company model, we have this digital distribution channel, and we expect it to make entering small company segment profitable instead of using our traditional sales approach. The banking services and financing services delivered from -- the accounting office is something new in the industry. And according to our own studies and also some external studies, we have learned that the companies would really appreciate if they could get banking services from the same desk than accounting services, and that's what we are working on. About the figures, if you look at first row, our net sales increased 12.4%. It's a good figure. Of course, it's not what we expected when the year began. The corona changed a little bit our plans basically in 2 ways. Our organic sales went down a little bit because it was tough to get sales meetings with potential clients. On the other hand, we have some transaction-based products and invoicing on those also went down as -- when the economy in overall turned down. However, we performed okay, and partly, the acquisitions helped us to keep our growth rate reasonable. We -- in total, we carried out 6 acquisitions in Finland and Sweden and also got some new locations like Gothenburg and Malmö in Sweden. Our operating profit improved quite nicely by almost 24%, which was pretty much due on the savings in the fixed costs and also the automation taking place in our customer base. On the other hand, the profitability was slightly pressed down by the fact that we were, of course, expecting more sales to come. And when it didn't come, we had some costs and personnel costs and other, which we couldn't fully adjust to this lower income. So there is some impact on that. And on the other hand, when we have made more and more acquisitions during last year and the year before, as we have seen, the EBIT level of the acquired companies is lower than ours, and then there is some extra integration costs going on before we reached our normal level of profitability. So putting all that together, I think we did quite well on this profitability last year. A couple of words more on the internationalization. In Sweden, we made some more acquisitions last year. And our first goal in Sweden was to grow big enough to enable a profitable localization of our own software. So at the moment, we are mostly using a Swedish software in the market. But now, as we have more customer base there and -- it makes sense to bring our own software there, and I think we have reached now at that point in volume. In Swedish market, we also aim to launch our small company concept called, KontoKalle in Swedish, a similar service then this TiliJaska in Finland, and this is planned to take place during this year. Yes. And then about our small company concept and our new services which we launched in the end of last year. For those of you who are not yet familiar with TiliJaska service, it's a free accounting application, including banking services and the accounting services in a model that scales from 0 to 100, we could say it. So when the companies are small, they usually want to do a lot themselves because they have a lot of time but little money. But when the companies grow, they start buying more and more services, and then we can smoothly grow our service offering as our customers grow. So it brings a lot of flexibility and also opens this small company segment to us, which is actually some 40% of the total market in Finland, in which we haven't been so active earlier, and this is, of course, very interesting from our perspective. We also launched this light entrepreneur concept last year, which means that those who don't have a company but every once in a while do something, kind of, piloting entrepreneurship, call them light entrepreneurs. We have a service for them where they can very easily and at a very low cost to take care of their invoicing and their legal applications. So this is actually the first step for many to start as an entrepreneur -- to start as a light entrepreneur. So now we can cover -- our services cover their way from the light entrepreneur to a -- our current premium service model. Yes. And the banking services, now first available in TiliJaska service but, of course, we plan to bring them to all our customers. And as some of you may have noticed in the papers, opening a bank account may take a long time and actually cost quite a bit of money as well. So if we can successfully do this for our customers, I think that -- our mission statement, joy of entrepreneuring, is more and more true and makes customers' lives much easier as well. About the guidance, as aforementioned, EUR 75 million to EUR 80 million in revenue expected for this year and EUR 14 million to EUR 16 million in operating profit. If you look our future in a long term, what are the main drivers of profitable growth as we see them. First, this internationalization. Of course, we have encouraging experience from Swedish market that many things that work in Finland seem to work in Sweden as well. So we are curious to learn and enter some other markets as well. Our cornerstones in entering new markets are, they say making entrepreneurship easy, automizing a lot and taking care of the customers, not only of the tax office and this legal site. We continue our organic growth. Hopefully, the corona is soon over and we can -- we get back to our normal level of organic growth. On the other hand, we continue acquisitions. And this digitalization of this accounting sector makes a momentum for this year or maybe next year and we want to be very active in these years. Yes. And the small company concept opens a new market base and this light entrepreneur service as well. We have seen in Finland that some companies focusing only on this light entrepreneurship service have grown quite nicely and maybe we can take our own market share of that market as well. The banking services, we believe, okay -- of course, the banking and financing services, they will bring new revenue, but also they make our existing service offering more enticing from customers' perspective, and we believe that it will help our organic growth as well. About the shares and shareholders, as we can see, the value of the traded shares has grown quite nicely. It seems that it has doubled every year. Hopefully, the same happens this year. And also, the number of shareholders has increased quite nicely from last year's 4,000 to this past year's almost 7,000 shareholders. So nice progress there as well, as also in the valuation of the share. A couple of words of this corporate responsibility. We are in service business. And for long, we have understood that when we are a Great Place to Work, as we have been certified in -- many years in a row by the Great Place to Work organization, this is also a great place for our customers to be. When our employees are happy, we are more innovative and our people stay longer and their smiles are also noticed by our customers. We also pay a lot of attention on the -- in educating our people. We hire a lot of people from schools directly, and we have our training programs for them. And we also encourage our people to complete this industry-specific examinations, KLT and PHT examinations. And as we can see, the number of these graduates at Talenom is increasing steadily, thanks to our efforts on that field. About the environmental aspect, we are measuring this paperless office improvement, which means that here, we measure the amount of receipts handled from start to end in digital format. And as we can see, the figure has grown from 77% to 83%. So nice improvement there as well. The accounting sector, as a business environment, as mentioned, a very fragmented market. It's a growing market as well as those. This figure tells us even despite of this financial crisis and whatever we have had during this almost 20-year time span, we can see that the market has been growing, and it even seems that the growth is accelerating. Our assumption is that the couple of last years are explained of the fact that when the accounting offices digitalize their services, they start charging for the software. On the other hand, more -- so the software companies' invoicing often goes through the accounting offices. That might be one explanation. Then there are -- there have been always these price increases. And yes, these at least -- and maybe in the past years, there have been some governmental issues like adapting the income register which caused extra work for accounting offices and therefore, higher increasing revenues. Yes, about EUR 1.2 billion market, and our market share 4.8%, roughly. A couple of words of the megatrends which we think help to implement our strategy. First, the digital transformation of the accounting and banking sector enables us to produce and distribute our services with more efficiency and also bring some new services, of course. This platform economy, which we have seen to take place in many other industries as well, we can see also having an impact in our business. More and more people globally are employing themselves as entrepreneurs, which, of course, increases demand for financial management services. Then this legislative changes. For example, the e-invoicing directive means that the companies can demand from other companies, electric invoices, which, of course, boosts the digitalization of accounting business as well. On the banking side, the Payment Services Directive, PSD2, obligates the banks to open their interfaces for other players like accounting offices. And this makes it possible for us to kind of -- to -- more easily to bring banking services as a part of our own service offering. Then the Basel regulations which have tightened the solvency requirements. For example, they create new need for different kinds of financing channels which -- like our financing products represent. Yes. This was my presentation. And I think now it's time for questions.

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