Talenom Oyj (TNOM) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hi, there. You are welcomed to follow Talenom latest report from H1 this year. My name is to Otto-Pekka Huhtala, and I'm the CEO of Talenom and here is Matti Eilonen.

Hello, everybody. My name is Matti Eilonen. I'm the CFO of Talenom.

And I will start from the conclusion of the last period and continue its strategy. But what are you going to tell for us?

Obviously, I'm going to tell you about figures. First, the group figures following by the country specific figures.

Okay, let's go. Let's see. Here is our main topics of the latest period. Our main objective was to improve profitability this year, which has materialized as planned. And our revenue increased about 7% and growth slowed down due to lower acquisition activity level and economic downturn in Nordic, especially in Finland and also Sweden. The other topic is profitability was improved by the efficiency measures in Finland and higher business volumes in Spain as we have told this earlier. So we can see now results also in Spain. And the third one is the acquisition pace has been significantly slowed down. And what we have done for this year is that we will focus for improving our profitability, and we see the results here. And also we are making capabilities that we could grow faster future, and we are like making the -- creating the basement of the organic growth. And shortly of strategy and European accounting market. So we see that the market size is around EUR 100 billion, and Finland is 1% of that. And our market share in Finland is close to 10%. And digitalization is accelerated by many structural changes. Labor shortage together with increasing regulation forces us to seek more effective practices. So there is no other way to do these jobs because of the regulation increase. And we don't have more people to do the job, but the job is increasing. So we have adopted new technology here in this industry. So we see that the digitalization will continue because of those reasons. And the other one big driver is this e-invoicing, which will be as a mandatory way to send and receive e-invoices in near future. And especially in Spain, this will be mandatory in '25 and '26. And it will have the big impact for our business, positive impact. And we will use this momentum. We want to use this momentum because we have seen same kind of digitalization transformation before 10, 15 years ago in Finland. Our vision is unbeatable accounting and banking services for small and medium enterprises. And our [indiscernible] strategic base for that, and we have our own technology, our own software, our own platform, and we have so long know-how of this accounting service industry. And we have rolled these two things together. So it means that we can really offer very easy to use solutions and software to our clients. There is only features for our clients. There is not like engineer's features like accounting and expert features. And we have also our own software for accounting, so it means that we have improved our own internal efficiency via automation. And that means that we have more time than competitors with our clients and our clients would be happy. So this positive spiral will continue and based for our blue ocean strategy. We have proven strategy and a strong track record of this digital transformations. Beginning of 2000, our business in Finland based for traditional accounting businesses, so all this made via paper. And the next 15 years, we developed our platform and made capabilities that we could start doing all things via digitally. And during this period, we also developed our processes, first, we developed our process and after that we developed our own software that we can now offer for an end user for appliance and for accounting. And this second period, '16 to '20 was time when we got the results out from the digitalization, and our EBIT margin like tripled in the next 5 years. And now we are going to do the same also in new countries. We started our first business in Sweden in '19. And now we are implementing our own technology there. In last 5 years, we have invested so much for acquisitions. And those were offices EBITDA margin has been like 10%. Compare our Finland business, EBITDA margin has been hurt at places. So that's why this relative EBIT margin has decreased. And also, we have invested for the people and technology to adapt it in new countries. So that's -- it has also pressured a little bit our margin. And next slide, we see that how this revenue share of Talenom has improved. And today, over 30% of revenue comes outside of the Finland. And this will continue as we have thought. Some words of strategic progress. The first thing for us, which is so important is so improving operational efficiency. And now we see, as I told, this profitability was improved by the efficiency measures launched in '23 in Finland and higher business volume in Spain. And the other one is platform rollout in Sweden. And we have been also many integration projects there in Sweden ongoing. And the other projects has closed and are ready. And now we can focus only for the [ late ] and the biggest project, Talenom accounting, rollout. And our goal is to migrate at least 50% of our regular reporting customers to our own system during this year. And while we are going to implement our software, you can see more benefits later when Matti is telling more about figures. And organic growth is the third one. And to strengthen organic growth, we continue to develop the digital purchase path and made key hires to support growth. And we are seeing some positive effect from the digital marketing and this easy to buy digital buying processes. And we are getting all the time more and more new customers via digitally. This was shortly my presentation, and Matti will continue from that. Thank you.

All right. Thank you, Otto. Let's move on to figures. Let's start with revenue figures and the group level figures. The growth was a little bit on a lower level because of very much lower acquisition activity as earlier. Also, the economic downturn has slowed down our growth. Growth was 6.7% on the full period and 4.5% on the last quarter. And the growth came mainly from the acquisitions in Spain. At the same time, the economic downturn in Finland and Sweden has significantly slowed the organic growth. I will go more into the details and more deep reasons behind of that slowdown in the country-specific figures. One of our main targets for this year was to improve profitability, and that's what we got. And we are very pleased that our EBITDA raised up almost EUR 20 million, and also the relative profitability went up from 27% to 29%. Also, the operating profit was improving on an absolute level and also on the relative level. The main reason for improving the profitability was that in Finland, we started the efficiency measurements and profitability improvement plan in 2023 spring, and that has now come through that the profitability is improving all the time. Also in Spain, the growth of the -- in business volumes has enabled the profitability development well. In Sweden, we are in a little bit different situation. We have many integration projects going on there, which are now finalized during the Q2 and also that we are implementing our own software there. So those are the reasons in Sweden, which dragged down the profitability on a group level. Let's move on to country-specific figures. First, Finland. And the net sales development in Finland, it was a little bit declining 1.7% on the full period and the last quarter 3.6% declining. And the main reason was that the economic situation has developed negatively in Finland, and that has a reflection on our growth as well. It means that the business volumes of our customers has been decreasing and that has caused the transaction volumes decrease. And that has led to the decrease of revenue per customer in volumes and also that we have made price adjustments on different business fields. In many customer industries, the business operations have been contracted significantly. And we have been prioritizing our customer retention so that we can be in a better position when the economic upswing will start at some point. Also, we have seen a lot more business closures and bankruptcies if we compare it to the past. At the same time, our sales has worked well, and we've been getting new customers all the time. And if we look at the volume of the new business contracts and the sales of that and compared it to the losing customers, it has been positive all the time and developing well. So the main reason for this decrease in net sales is this economic development, which is going on in Nordics, in Finland and in Sweden, especially. Usually, these downturns and upswings, they come with -- for us in our revenue with a slight delay, let's say, 6-month delay. Okay. Then profitability development in Finland. We are very pleased that the EBITDA has been developed well. It was EUR 18 million last full period and also the relative profitability jumped up from 35% to almost 40%. So this is a good and solid proof that what kind of profitability we can do in Finland with the high automated processes and highly efficient business processes, which are led very well. So this is really good news and also gives us confidence that what we can do in other countries. And this is what we want to duplicate in other countries as well. Okay, let's move to Sweden then. Sweden net sales developed quite steady. It was increasing with 1.4% and a little bit decreasing on the last quarter. The market in Sweden is pretty much the same, as in Finland, in accounting industry. And also, those markets overall are basically in the same kind of situation. The recession is going on and the same kind of drivers were in Sweden as in Finland. So this has also led to the situation that the business volumes of our clients have been decreasing in Sweden, and that led to the situation that the revenue per client is lower for us. All right. Let's move on to EBITDA development then in Sweden. In Sweden, we have many kind of things going on, and we didn't want to drive the profitability strongly in Sweden. We had many integration projects, which we wanted to finalize and we got them finalized in Q2. And also very important project for us is implementing our own software. So we didn't want simultaneously drive strong profitability in Sweden. And in Sweden, the EBITDA fell down from EUR 1.4 million to EUR 400,000 and then on the last quarter from EUR 600,000 to EUR 400,000. But we chose this path because we want to be better in the longer term and our own platform is the key to that success. Here is a little bit reason behind of thinking that why we introduced the longer-term profitability improvement plan instead of a short term. The first line here is the EBITDA level in Finland, which goes around 40%, and it's a good and solid proof that what we can achieve on the profitability side when we have really good automated accounting processes, really efficient processes, which are led very well. And the lower line is the profitability measured by EBITDA at the moment in Sweden. And as we can see, there is a huge gap, over 30% of gap. And we see no any technical reason or any other reason that why we couldn't make the same kind of progress in Sweden. Of course, that will demand organic growth on the site, so that we can grow our revenue faster than the costs are raising. But this is the reason why we are implementing our software in Sweden and that unfortunately, means at the moment, a little bit lower profitability and it's pressing down the profitability. This -- our own software will also give us the opportunity to have value-added services and offer those services to our customers. So it's a really good thing in many ways. Okay. Then Sweden -- I'm sorry, Spain and Italy figures. Italy is really a small part of this and the majority comes from Spain. And as you can see, really strong growth, 130 -- 163% full period, 134% on the last quarter, and it came mainly from the acquisitions in Spain. But at the same time, we have been developing our capabilities of making organic growth, and we have good evidence that we can do that in Spain. Small but very important detail about Spain is that the e-invoicing directive is coming -- is going to be mandatory in Spain between 2025 and '26, developing -- depending on the size of the company. And this e-invoicing directive means that all the companies should be able to receive and send e-invoices. And we believe that we have unique solution for this where we combine software really easy and basically for free software for those actions that you can deliver e-invoices and the accounting services with the same package. And we think that this will boost up our demand even more in Spain. Then the EBITDA development in Spain. We are very pleased that we got positive figures in Spain and the EBITDA raised up about EUR 1 million in Spain. And we believe that we can do strong progress in the profitability side also in Spain. Then the outlook and the guidance. Guidance is unchanged. We are expecting to have EUR 130 million and EUR 140 million of revenue, EBITDA between EUR 34 million and EUR 40 million, and operating profit is expected to be about EUR 14 million and EUR 17 million. Thank you, and then we can move on to questions.

Thank you. As a reminder, you can post your questions in the chat or you can use the raise hand function to ask questions with voice. We have one question here. What's behind the growth in number of personnel?

Number of personnel, Matti?

Number of personnel has been growing because we have made quite a few acquisitions in autumn last year. So that's basically the reason behind of the personnel growth.

And at the same time, we see that in Finland, personnel volume has decreased and in Spain, it has increased. So yes, not so much totally increased.

Then the next question. Regarding acquisitions of intangible assets, how do you see dynamics for coming years? Will these investments grow, stay or decrease?

You mean acquisitions. So our strategy is now that we will move our growth basement towards organic growth. So we hope that we consider situation that 2/3 comes from the organic growth and 1/3 could come from the acquisitions. And totally, we could grow over 30%. This is our midterm goal because now, we have told that this year, we will really make our core -- [indiscernible] core in all countries. So it means that this year, we don't do so many acquisitions, maybe some more, but not so much. And we want to integrate heavily all offices to Talenom and make like all things running well in all countries. And after that, it's easier to integrate some office when we have like better our core in all countries. But I see that we don't continue any more acquisitions in Finland. And if we continue, it will happen in Spain and maybe in Sweden.

Thank you. Then in your opinion, what is optimal organic growth rate for your business percentage per year in normal economic environment?

In best case, it is 18.6% in Finland. And we see that 20% could be possible to achieve organically. And we have a plan for that, and we are implementing this kind of strategy just now. And we could see this kind of volume, if everything will roll out as planned; '26, this will happen.

Thank you. It seems that we don't have any further questions at the moment, so back to you.

Okay. Thank you for all participants, and see you in Q3 report. Have a nice summer holiday.

Thank you. Bye-bye.