Tecnotree Oyj (TEM1V) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

My name is Thomas Koponen, Director of Investor Relations. Today's call, I have with us today, CEO, Padma Ravichander, and CFO, Indiresh Vivekananda. The questions can be submitted in the chat or Q&A option below. We'll deal with them at the end of the presentation. Without further ado, CEO Padma Ravichander, go ahead.

[Foreign Language], welcome to our Q1 results. We're here in Dubai, myself and Indiresh will lead the call today. We can go to the next slide. Tecnotree is a global company listed in Finnish stock market, has been serving clients, telecom operators across several geographies over the last 47 years. We are located in 12 different locations globally with one purpose to create a borderless capability for our digital platform to be rolled out in various markets with great local governance, and that makes us local. Our platform has 4,500 features, is a very mature stack and supports multiple lines of businesses, both for telecom and digital service providers and boasts of about 1.2 billion subscribers using the stack across the world. Our stack is also embedded with artificial intelligence over the last several years of investments we have made in ecosystem play and AI. And today has several customers worldwide and an expanding geographical footprint that is well described in this canvas that's growing, ever growing. Coming to the Q1 performance of the company, I'm proud to say that we have had a continued stable performance in terms of free cash flow, 4 consecutive quarters of delivering positive free cash flow, EUR 1 million this quarter compared to a negative EUR 4.7 million, demonstrates that our operational effectiveness, our Think Cash Do Cash focus has definitely yielded us positive results. In a difficult economic situation, we have posted a revenue growth of 4.6% in constant currency and a 3.7% growth in normal revenue terms, which is still significant compared to the market and our competitors for Q1 of 2025. The growth in revenue has typically come from new markets and license revenue and geographical expansions. You can also see that there is a very significant reduction in the difference between constant currency and real revenue, mainly because the foreign exchange losses due to emerging market currencies has been reduced and stabilized. Our EBIT performance will meet the market guidance we have given. While this Q1 is a short quarter, I strongly believe this will continue to improve because of the OpEx reductions we have taken last year and our continued focus on cost efficiencies across the platform. Moving to the next slide. Our guidance was also about CapEx to sales to lower this to 10% to 12% starting 2025. We are well on way by reducing CapEx to sales by 7%, mainly by lowering the marginal cost of ownership and cost of service across our platform and the ability to deliver our platform faster has all helped us reduce the CapEx to sales. Our ARR remains stable being the first quarter of the year, but this is cyclical, and it will start growing in the next 2 to 3 quarters upcoming based on the healthy pipeline we have. The DSO days has been a sharp focus for the company for the last 8 quarters, I would say. And I'm proud to see that it has shown a significant improvement, and this focus will continue to stay, although I must say DSO days are cyclical in nature. As we deliver, the not due amounts of receivables go up and then they slowly get collected. The order book stands stable at EUR 70.3 million. While the growth in Q1 on the order book is high compared to Q1 of last year, we believe we have a healthy pipeline of orders, particularly both in mature and emerging markets, and I'm confident that this would convert to revenue and will help us meet our growth guidance that we have given for this year. In terms of overall performance in Q1, I'm happy to say that we announced an anchor account in Netherlands for our digital stack. This time, it's not with a telecom operator, but a private network service provider, to whom we will not only deploy our digital stack, but also our other investments in AI/ML and Tecnotree Moments and ecosystem play to help connect non-telco services on our platform and expand our digital footprint in Europe. We also had 5 go-lives demonstrating our strong delivery capability in the market and the features added to the product stack continues to grow while we also have now started working with 4 global SIs across different geographies to expand our market footprint. The number of ARR clients in terms of a subscription-based delivery model is expanding, both with existing and new customers. And our recognitions are continuing to grow in terms of brand footprint. We are recognized by TM Forum as a finalist for the ODA achievement. We were also awarded the ODA in a Box award, and we are recognized by Gartner for both our revenue and customer management in their Magic Quadrant. So this positioning of Tecnotree in a leadership position continues to grow in the market. Coming to the revenue guidance. In this quarter, the revenue definitely met the guidance overall, but the strongest revenue growth still continued to come from EMEA and APAC, while the order book definitely grew in terms of pipeline opportunities in mature markets of Europe and America. Much of the orders came from license revenue, and that is a cycle. We first acquire licenses and then the delivery revenues come after followed by ARR. So this is the approach we take, and I'm happy to see that new license revenues have been booked in Q1. Next slide. On CapEx to sales, we continue to deliver on the promise of bringing this down mainly because of the maturity of the stack but also because our marginal cost to deliver new clients has come down and our marginal cost to service and scale these clients have also come down. We also have a strong focus on how we manage overall cost of ownership and continue to reduce the CapEx spend on the product stack. The ARR revenue also helps us stabilize the CapEx to sales margins. On the free cash flow, this has been historic for the company. This is the fourth quarter and I believe across these 4 quarters, the company has booked in close to EUR 4 million in free cash flow. This is really because of very strong physical control, OpEx control that we brought in, in 2024, and the effects of that continue to bear benefits for the company. We have also invested in a lot of artificial intelligence embedded in our delivery capability that has increased our productivity and lowered our R&D spend. And we will continue to move to the ARR model that will ensure that predictive cash collections are also possible. In addition to that, the Think Cash Do Cash program has helped us ensure that we bring down the DSO days and ensure invoicing to customers continue in a very regular and punctual fashion. So with that, the guidance for end of Q1 2025 remain, we will be ahead of the market with a low to mid-single-digit growth in our revenue. Our margins will increase by 200 basis points over the course of the year, and we believe we will be able to deliver a greater than EUR 4 million free cash flow while continuing to focus on the DSO days reduction, the CapEx to revenue being monitored carefully to ensure that our investments are focused and bring us the maximum leverage in terms of revenue growth. And that way, we ensure that investors' equity is protected and well served. We have also -- I think Indiresh will expand on it. We've also reduced our exposure to foreign currency risks this quarter, and we will continue to focus in expanding our footprint in mature markets. I truly believe that the Tecnotree growth story is a very compelling one. If we can move to the next slide, mainly because we have been taking market share year-on-year compared to our competitors. While the general trend in terms of annual growth in BSS market has slowed down overall, Tecnotree enjoys a very premier position in terms of taking market share from our competitors, mainly because of the way the stack has been built bottoms up with embedded artificial intelligence, TM Forum standardized APIs, our ability to deliver these platforms faster in the global market and scale these platforms to the use of our customers in various geographies has demonstrated that we are able to take strong market share away from our competitors and continue to grow our footprint with global SIs partnering with us to move our presence in these mature markets faster. The North Star win of a new client in Europe with our positioning as a digital service provider for a private network, which is fully 5G-enabled in the Netherlands. The story of this will unfold. We have already started working with this customer, and I believe we are expanding our footprint and looking and replacing a lot of the legacy systems that are out there with our mature stack and out-of-the-box features that are very fast implementable across multiple geographies. So with that, I will pass it on to Indiresh to continue to give you an update -- a closer look at the financials for the company for Q1.

Thank you. Thank you, Padma. Good morning, everyone. As always, we walk you through the numbers for the current quarter compared to the previous one and 1 year before that. As you can see, the revenue remained stable at EUR 16.9 million compared to EUR 16.3 million in the last year, which was slightly higher than the EUR 15.5 million we had done in 2023. On the EBIT, we still are able to maintain at the same level of last year. Financial expenses, which includes all our foreign exchange losses, it's slightly lower than the last year's. And on the taxes, which are basically the withholding done by our customers when they make the payment to us has gone up slightly higher than the last year. The collection, which is one of the major highlights for us in this quarter, we are able to collect about EUR 14.3 million compared to EUR 9.5 million in the 2024 Q1 and comparable to Q1 of '23 at EUR 15 million. The next item we have to present to you is the orders which we have received in this quarter. In the Q1, we are able to get about 11.5 million new orders compared to 10 million of last year. The order backlog, which is a combination of the order received and the revenue recognized in this quarter is lower at EUR 70.3 million against EUR 74.8 million in the previous year. The earnings per share, which is constantly at EUR 0.1 across the 3 years. Can we move to the next one? Yes. One of the unique things in our industry is the long DSO days, which we have been observing for many years. And as Padma mentioned, we did have a negative cash flow for many, many quarters prior to the Q2 of last year. Since Q2 of last year, when we changed our focus into Think Cash Do Cash, which we announced in the last year, our DSO days are coming down. Again, it's cyclical in nature. The one point I want to highlight to the investors is more than 40% or even 49% of my receivables are less than 90 days, which means that while in the industry, 90 to 120 days is the normal credit period, half of my revenue, half of my receivables are still within that limit. Also, I wanted to highlight one more thing, above 1 year, which is now at 19%. Just 3 months back, it was about 24%. So we are able to concentrate both on the short term and the long overdues, and we are able to reduce in both the segments. Can we move to the next slide, please? Yes. As Padma mentioned about currency risk, we are reducing our exposure to the frontier markets. Nigeria, which has been one of the largest customers for us, naira stability in this current quarter has helped us to minimize the exchange losses. And as you know that as a side note, in Nigeria, the customer over there has shown significant increase in their profitability. And also, we understand that the local government has provided them a permission to increase their tariffs. The growth in the mature markets will reduce the impact of currency risks. As you can see compared to last year, the volatile currency exposures, which we had in Q1 last year, was about 55%. It has come down to about 45%. That was last year. And in Q1, between the volatile and the stable currency, the ratio has reduced from -- between 85% to 50%, which means that last year, my volatile currencies, which contributed 55% of my revenue -- or rather 45% of my revenue has come down to 15% in my current year, a significant decrease in the volatile currencies. Again, the other concern or the other issue we had was on the USD-Euro thing. As we can see, the Euro is getting stronger against the USD. Does it affect our performance? Yes, to some extent, it does affect our revenue. And also, we have most of our costs coming from the USD denominated and hence, there could be a natural hedge in that. These are all for what we have achieved in the Q1 of the current year. Can we move to the next slide? Here is the summary of my assets and liabilities as at the end of Q1. As we said that our focus on the product development has reached a maturity and therefore, the addition to that is going to be more stable going forward. No -- not much change from December to March of this year. The trade receivables have come down. However, there is an increase in the other receivables also. Again, this is again one more cyclical nature of our business where we provide services and recognize revenue based on the contracts which we have entered with most of the customers. However, to bill certain customers, I need to get purchase orders from them. For that thing, I saw the customers state sometime during the beginning of the year for getting their approvals and the purchase orders will come to us a little later, which will increase my unbilled in the Q1, again, cyclical in nature. However, there was a slight increase in my bank balance from EUR 16.4 million to EUR 18 million at the end of the quarter. On the convertible debentures, there are no changes. It remains at EUR 23.1 million. And there is a small increase in the other noncurrent liabilities and trade payables have also come down a little bit in this quarter. So here are the assets and liabilities at the end of Q1 of 2025. Can we move to the next slide? So we presented briefly what we have. And back to you, Thomas, for questions and answers.

Thank you so much, Padma and Indiresh. So we do have some questions from the chat. And if you guys are ready, I will read them out to you in English. So first question, order book declined, but how big is the sales pipeline? And when do you expect those deals to close?

Yes, I will take it and maybe you can add. While the order book has been muted, actually, in Q1, the order book grew compared to Q1 of last year. Q1 is generally a small quarter for us. We have a very healthy pipeline of orders and order backlog within the company, and I truly believe we will make the guidance that we've given the market. And we've also got a healthy distribution of the orders and the pipeline in terms of geographical spread, not only in emerging markets, but also in mature markets of Europe and U.S. We recently announced a win in Q2, and this will continue to happen over the course of the next couple of quarters. I truly believe the brand has scaled and stabilized, and our strategy is to gain greater market share by replacing legacy and old systems of our competitors in mature geographies as we move forward in America and Europe. And we are seeing this trend. And the investments we have made in the product stack is coming to good stead in terms of deploying the strategy. And the partnerships with the SIs, the global SI players, only expedites our ability to scale and reach multiple geographies and multiple markets in a much more expansive and mature way.

Thank you. Second question. Currency is not the number 1 reason to blame for the results anymore. Why?

Do you want to take this?

Sure. Yes. Well, yes, it's a fact that our currency exchange risks are so far has been good for us. The stability of Naira helped. However, the USD, Euro changes are still under watch. It has a little bit natural hedge, but we are still, I think, most of the contracts we have in the USD. So that can affect our numbers, but the natural hedge should help us. Again, exposure to the volatile currencies, as we explained, has significantly come down from 45% to 15%. However, the global economy, as we know, is very uncertain. We are still monitoring the situation and there are risks and inflationary pressures, we need to continuously keep an eye on that.

Okay. Next question. Clearly explain the situation concerning receivables. At what point, when transitioning to ARR, will the total receivables drop to a sustainable level or is there a risk of significant write-downs in those receivables? In those, one has decreased, the other has increased. So no major changes compared to a year ago.

Sure. Thomas, as we explained in our presentation, yes, it is. It's a cyclical in nature and most of the contractual obligations from our customers vary from 90 to 120 days. And as you can see that we have substantial receivables, which are less than 90 days, the DSO days are down. There is a very low risk of non-collection of receivables because, as we know, the customers are large telecom operators. There are risks in delay in collections, but we are confident about the quality of the thing. A lot of low-lives driving the fresh invoicing. We continue to monitor and improve the cash. Again, the other thing to bring down the receivables in absolute numbers. It's a derivative of how much revenue I book in a quarter and how much cash we collect. Just as a percentage of that, just if I need to recollect from my mind, last year it was about 80% and in Q1 it has increased to 85%. Hopefully, the trend will continue and we should be able to do better and better.

Next question. Which geographic markets showed the strongest demand this quarter?

Well, let me take that question. The strongest demand, as you saw in our results, came as always from MEA and APAC. These are growing regions. We have several orders that we are still executing and several deliveries. This quarter, we also saw a strengthening of license revenue. We have a significant order backlog in Americas and Europe, 12.1 million from 7 million year-on-year. This definitely shows that we are moving into mature markets and our demand continues to expand. However, that does not mean that there are lesser opportunities. African markets are one of the fastest growing markets in the world. It only gives us the, because of the geographical distribution, we have the opportunity to be very selective in the customers and the projects we choose and we are also being able to negotiate better payment terms. So, this is definitely the trend that Tecnotree will continue to administer going forward. In Europe, we are also seeing a geopolitical trend. Europe has been a market that was a little receded in the last couple of years, mainly because of the geopolitical situation. But today, there is an investment trend towards investing in infrastructure, network, equipment, as well as digital transformation technologies. This serves Tecnotree exceedingly well and we are seeing increasing interest in ripping out legacy products and monolithic systems and replacing them and modernizing them in order to extend their reach and digital servicing capabilities of their clients. So, we believe we have a high-quality pipe and great opportunities to come by in the upcoming quarters.

Thank you, Padma. Next question, are there any major new product or partnership launches planned for H2? You announced an insider information yesterday about Netherlands.

Well, Netherlands is a new anchor account for us. It is a telecom industry provider, but they are investing in a private network which will reach out and service clients beyond traditional Telco customers to adjacent markets to provide integrated device capability and extend the digital transformation capability and digital servicing capability to other customers. Products like Tecnotree Moments, products like our artificial intelligence embedded use cases on our platform have all been the differentiating factors for us to win this opportunity and I believe this is only the beginning of it. ISP vendors, telecom service providers are going to transcend beyond connectivity services to other types of revenue models and Tecnotree vision and investment in CapEx has been strategically poised to take advantage of these opportunities in the market. So, we are excited about what is to come.

Great. How has head count or operating spend changed and what's the plan for staffing versus cost control?

Sure. Thank you, Thomas, for the question. Yes, the headcount, there is a reduction in the trend what we are observing. We were 892 in the last year Q1 and we came down to about 700 plus at this year. This is an ongoing efficiency and the cost optimization initiatives what we are doing. If you look at my composition of the cost also, there is a slight increase in my personal cost even though our headcount came down basically because whenever there is a reduction in the headcount along with that, there are a lot of additional terminal benefits, which we need to pay at the time of separation. So there are onetime costs, which are accrued or accounted for in this Q1 that has pushed my headcount cost at the end of the quarter. But again, I believe we had given a plan that last year, the initiation what we did is going to give us a benefit of about 7 million in the whole of the current year. and we are still on line with that program, what we said.

Also, I want to say that the use of AI, not just for our customers, but also embedding AI in all the operations within the company has been an initiative that we commenced last year. It will definitely increase and enhance productivity and reduce costs. In addition to that, Tecnotree has always been a local player in that while we are global in our footprint, we look and seize opportunities for localization. When we localize, we take advantage of the cost variables that we get in the local market, and that has definitely helped us streamline our overall total cost of ownership for our customers and made us more competitive.

Thank you, Padma, for that. Next question. What actions in Q1 drove the free cash flow to become positive? And how will you maintain it?

Yes, it's not just about the one quarter. As Padma mentioned, this is not in one quarter. The plan is always in the long term, how do we manage it. If you recollect in 2023, the whole of '23, we ended up with a negative cash flow of EUR 7 million. And in Q1 of last year, we had a negative of EUR 4 million. So that is when we started initiating so many actions, the think cash do cash concept came into picture. We started collecting -- focus more on the collection. There are so many actions which we took. And slowly, the cash started becoming positive more and more. As Padma said, in the last 4 quarters, if you just take, we have had a positive cash flow of about EUR 4 million in the last 4 quarters. So that is what gives us the confidence. We are able to reduce the DSO days. We have also improved the cash collections and trade receivables by about EUR 7 million, ongoing exercise on the strategic cost control, tax planning, further penetration into the -- more into the stable market, as we said, that how our exposure to the frontier currencies is coming down. All these things are contributing to the positive cash flow. As we had given a guidance that in the current year, we expect our positive cash flow to be more than EUR 4 million. We believe we are on track with that.

Yes, we are.

Good. Let me just check if there have come any new questions. Okay. We have one more question in the chat. Trump tariffs, what effects on Tecnotree?

Well, I'll answer some and then this is -- it's an evolving question. I mean, as a global company, as I've already stated, and you've seen it right in my introduction, we are localized. So our idea is to remain global and local at the same time. and ensure that we get the best benefits of being both. Being global means we are able to bring a very consistent stack with very standard futuristic features to different markets and also benefit from different markets requirements that we pick up on the product stack. We are local. We take advantage of some of the local benefits we get by being present locally and understanding the requirements of the geography. This serves us extremely well as the new tariff regime unfolds because we are benefiting from the local governance and jurisdiction requirements. However, we feel that we are reduced in terms of our exposure to trade war in these markets, mainly because of the localization process that we have followed through several years now. The demand in the U.S., while it remains strong, we adopt an ARR market model, which is a subscription-based model, which will ensure that we mitigate the risks and we have a more consistent revenue performance. And then on tariffs, I think the impact of secondary implications of the tariff, what it does to consumer and therefore, what it does to our customers who are enterprise customers and the operator segment is very unpredictable. We'll have to wait to see how that unfolds. And having a global spread gives us some level of protection from being concentrated in one geography or concentrated only in the mature markets, et cetera, it really plays to our advantage to seize opportunities as they come in multiple markets. And the final point I want to make here is telecommunication continues and will remain an essential service. And hence, I think the demand for our product stack will continue to grow.

Thank you, Padma. I'm just checking if there have come any new questions. There's no new questions since last one. So there are no longer questions that have been sent to us beforehand or in the chat. So if there's no last minute questions coming into the chat, then I would like to invite everybody on the call to remember that Tecnotree will be at DTW Copenhagen on 17th to 19th of June. Please visit us at Booth 208. And for the Nordics and Finland here, this is the beginning of spring, so Volpes nights, I want to wish everybody [Foreign Language]. And if there's nothing that needs to be said then from Indiresh or Padma, then I would like to thank you, everybody, on the call, and we will be ending today's Q1 earnings call. Thank you so much for your time.

Thank you. Thank you.