Vertiseit AB (publ) (VERTB) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hi, everyone. Welcome to this earnings call. Vertiseit has today released its year-end report for the fourth quarter of 2024. My name is Jonas Lagerqvist, I'm CFO and Deputy CEO for Vertiseit.

And my name is Johan Lind, I'm the CEO of Vertiseit. So as Jonas said, we are now really happy to present the year-end report. And it's also -- Q4 is actually the first quarter where we also incorporated the latest acquisition of Visual Art into the figures. So this is the first time you actually see how does Vertiseit look like stepping into the new year.

And on today's agenda, we will walk through the Q4 financials. We will highlight some business highlights during the quarter. We will also elaborate on the Visual Art integration, which has been going on during the quarter. And we will finish off with a Q&A session where everyone can join in and get their questions answered. So please use the Q&A function in this webinar. And we will answer questions by the end of the presentation. So we have today released the interim report for the fourth quarter, year-end report 2024. And ARR is reported at SEK 275 million, which is, of course, a significant increase both compared to last year and previous quarter, mainly due to the incorporation of Visual Art in this quarter's numbers. The acquisition was finished on the 2nd of October, meaning that this quarter is the first where we actually have consolidated Visual Art into Vertiseit Group financials. By this quarter, we can summarize more than 13 years or 52 quarters of the straight sequential ARR growth, something which we are really, really proud of. Compared to last year and adjusted for currency effects, we had a year-over-year ARR growth of 19% when looking at it from a straight organic perspective. When taking the additional Visual Art ARR into account, the growth compared to last year was almost 70%. EBITDA is coming in on a level of SEK 33 million for the quarter, corresponding to a margin of 16%, which is a decrease compared to last quarter, but also expected due to the revenue mix that Visual Art adds to the group, which has a larger portion of systems sales. Cash EBITDA, which means profitability after taking investments into product development into account coming in at SEK 21 million or a margin of 11%. In connection with the acquisition, we took up some financing at our bank, leading us into a net debt position of approximately SEK 200 million, which is well within the company's covenants. Cash flow for the quarter was strong from operations, but due to the fact that Q4 is always quite systems heavy quarter as well as we had quite heavy sales by the end of the quarter, meaning that working capital increased, but is expected to be corrected during the first quarter in 2025. So SaaS-wise, we had a currency adjusted quarterly net growth of 3.6%. So somewhat a little bit softer growth during the quarter. But given the fact that the integration work that has been ongoing that Johan would elaborate on. We think it's quite understandable. But churn rate is still on really like controlled levels. The net revenue retention, meaning how much we grow on existing customers, is still in the vicinity of 110%. As we can see by the SaaS metrics, somewhat slower growth isolated in Q4 due to the focus has been more or less on the integration. Net revenue retention still on really, really good numbers. And what is actually really good to see is that average revenue per brand when taking all the new Visual Art customers into account increases significantly, meaning that we now have a significantly higher revenue per brand, which is very much in line with our strategy to focus on larger customers with larger potential.

And talking about that, the customer mix is actually something that we present for the first time in the report. So the single largest brand represents 5% of the ARR. The top 10 brands in our portfolio of customers represent [ 33% ], and the 100 largest customers represent [ 75%.] And that's very much in line with our strategy. As you know, we have like 1,500 brands altogether. And the top 100 represents [ 75% ] is really key because it's a number that we actually can serve really well and I think that's key to have a high annual net revenue retention and have happy customers in the long run. We also shared for the first time split by customer segment. So as we presented in the report, Visual Art had 2/3 of the revenue in a very important segment, Food and Beverage. On the group, it now represents 25%. In Food and Beverage, you have the restaurant and QSR segment, subsegment. You have the subsegment of grocery and convenience stores. And all of those are really, really strong in our portfolio. Second up is automotive, followed by a variety of consumer retail. Travel and Transport is everything from airports, to ferry lines, to public transport in some cases. And financial services is banks, real estate, et cetera. The business highlights of the period is, of course, was communicated directly after New Year. And that Visual Art signs with KFC U.K. It's a really nice agreement with -- that covers 1,000 restaurants, more than 5,000 licenses for a 3-year period. It's a pure SaaS and consulting. The ARR on the licenses are SEK 5 million. And it really points into the direction of where we want Visual Art to be. We want to expand with this top-tier global QSR brands into new markets. And we think that will be a significant driver for our growth going forward. So talking about Visual Art and integration. We have worked like really, really hard. As you know, it's only been a quarter more or less since we brought them on board. And the whole team of both Vertiseit and Visual Art have done a tremendous job into the actual integration. So by the start of the new year, we have implemented basically all of the group IT platforms. I think you can -- we have it on the slide here. We are now live with Salesforce for CRM, CPQ. We have a business [indiscernible] in place for like how many legal entities.

There are a lot. So we have plus 25 entities at the moments.

And BrightAnalytics for financial reporting. For BI operational KPIs, the unified licensing management is in place. So by mid-April, all licenses in Visual Art was actually incorporated into licensing. So now that is done and all invoices are now automatically invoiced through the group-wide platform. Management system framework is in place. And of course, we fine-tune all the processes and routines and instructions is an ongoing task. Contract management in place, HR management, recruiting tools. We are now in the same Microsoft tenant, manage like documentation, et cetera, in a unified way. So this is now in place. So it has been a really, really intense period, but we are super happy that we performed that in like more or less a quarter compared to more or less like 1.5 years with MultiQ. So I think we are in really good shape now when it comes to bringing in acquisitions to fuel the growth going forward. Part of the integration is, of course, more than culture, people, processes and tools, it's also like tech. And the platform integration has also progressed really well. So as we said, Visual Art brings a really, really strong development team, strong tech to the group. What we have done is that we combine the resources of Visual Art and Vertiseit. So a lot of development resources have gone from Visual Art into the grid team, together with technology, especially within playout and device management. And then we also bring resources into Grassfish. So going forward, we have now doubled up the resources in product development basically. And Visual Art will, in the future, run on the Grassfish platform so that we run 3 business brands on 2 platforms on one back-end stack, the IXM Grid.

Now we will open up for Q&A. So please go ahead and ask questions should you have them.

I can see that Fredrik Nilsson, analyst at Redeye, would like to join the call.

I want to start with the revenue and basically all kinds of revenue. I mean the Q4 numbers were quite high relative to the pro forma for the full year. I mean, is that mainly due to seasonality? Or do you see a strong momentum in systems perhaps also? Could you elaborate a bit on that?

Do you want to take that, Jonas?

Yes. There are a lot of seasonal effects, especially in terms of systems when we're in Q4. So it's naturally a strong system sales quarter. But apart from that, I would say that the business, both the old Vertiseit business and the additional Visual Art business is progressing according to plan. And when we compare now what we see in the actuals compared to what we anticipated throughout the due diligence, everything is coming out as expected and in some quite important cases, also better than expected.

Okay. Great. And regarding Visual Art and now moving to the Grassfish platform. I mean, as I understand it, you were very happy with the technology that came with Visual Art. And now you, in some way, I mean, take it away, perhaps you could put it, but I guess that's not the case really. So perhaps if you could elaborate a bit on what will Grassfish bring to Visual Art and what will Visual Art bring to you and your full IXM platform.

So the main asset that we bring in from Visual Art to the group is technology that we now build upon in the grid. And the key elements there where Visual Art were particularly strong was the playout technology and device management is really the application that you run on the edge. And when it comes to the actual platform, we also add in the grid, we add now a unified design system and so on so that you can build both shared components, but also product specific components for both Dise and Grassfish. So I should say that, that's really like the foundation. So a lot of the tech will be like key assets for the group that we brought in from Visual Art.

Okay. Great. Last question from me. Regarding the U.S. market, Visual Art has an office in Chicago and Dise now establishing in Atlanta. I mean, why different cities? And what can we expect from you in North America in this year?

Good question. So with Dise, it's really that we are 100% relying on the partner channel. So it's not possible to buy licenses directly from Dise and it's also super important that there are no leakage when it comes to information about possible opportunities, et cetera, between Dise and the other group business brands, Grassfish and Visual Art. So we prioritize to run Dise really separate from the others. And when it comes to why Atlanta, we want to be close to Scientific Games as the first, like really major customer in the U.S. market that expands really rapidly and where we see a huge opportunity to capture to have that foundation and also, of course, serve the new partners that we communicated in last Q report. So that start -- to start to build like a local momentum with local partners there. With Visual Art on the other hand, and now the Visual Art's activities on the U.S. market related to food and beverage will, of course, also benefit Grassfish as it will be the Grassfish platform going forward. And it's concentrated now in Chicago, as you say, and really on -- that's the home of McDonald's as an example, but it's also really focusing on the QSR and the convenience store space as we go right now.

Okay. And then we have a specific system sales regarding the business model and how it's structured due to the fact that we only have SEK 10 million of inventory compared to like SEK 110 million in sales during the quarter. And that is a good example of how we've structured the business model given the fact that we -- in the system sales, we hardly ever touch the hardware. So we have agreements with distributors on each market, meaning that the hardware leaves the distributors and goes directly to site for installation by our partners. And then we have -- our payment terms are more favorable from our distributors than we provide to our customers, meaning that even though we grow, we do not increase our working capital that is like in the normal case. And due to Q4, we might -- there might be some working capital increase due to like a peak. But in the normal development of that revenue segment, we do not increase any working capital. And actually, the inventory level of SEK 10 million is also too high. So that's also a focus area for us to decrease. And a question regarding a comparison of the integration of Visual Art to the integration of MultiQ. What similarities and differences can we see?

I think when we brought MultiQ in, we didn't have the foundation when it comes to ERP infrastructure basically. So we needed to reinvent that at the same time as we did the integration. So I think the work that we did with the MultiQ integration really laid out the foundation for this integration. So it was basically the same tasks. Core challenges were the same to strengthen up like license management, et cetera, and figure out like how do we streamline and get synergies out of our operations. But the key difference was that we had so much stronger processes and platforms into play so that the playbook was not like under construction. It was ready to be used.

Now we have a very, very good like blueprint in place, and we also prove to ourselves that we can, in a very short amount of time, actually perform quite extensive integration work, which is really positive going forward. And we have a question from [indiscernible], who asks if the KFC deal had been able to perform for Visual Art on a stand-alone basis or if it is a first sign of revenue synergies?

No, to be honest, I think they would have been landing that deal either way, to be honest. But the good thing is that it also shows that the model that we have worked with to increase the share of SaaS revenue in relation to consulting and specifically systems, it really aligns with that strategy. So as Visual Art grows outside of the Nordics, we can expect them to follow like the pattern that we have followed in the rest of the group, where we have a larger share of SaaS basically.

In what cases have Visual Art KPIs surprised you on the upside?

That's a good question. Like I think on the upside, you can see that they have like a strong revenue per brand. I think that the impact it had on the whole customer mix was good. You can also see that the concentration towards like food and beverage was a little bit stronger than we anticipated. I think the expansion on their top brands is really impressive. And I also think, in general, sales activities and the opportunity pipeline is better than we anticipated.

Yes. I think we can -- I mean, to conclude on findings, I would say that even though we had high expectations on people, on customers, on tech; I would say, in all of these aspects, we've been positively surprised. Yes. So we are really, really happy that we actually could come to an agreement in that. Okay. What are the key elements in increasing profitability? And when will you be back to a normal profitability level?

So we don't do like real guiding. So I won't give you a date. But I think before we are on track with the same type of profitability, like revenue stream, it will take like half year. And then the last thing is, of course, to get a slightly better revenue mix between the revenue streams, and it will take longer time. And then the third pillar is, of course, to realize internal synergies that we have now in so many aspects from purchasing, supply chain, finance, marketing, whatever it might be, that there are much, much synergies and effects to gain there.

Yes. And I think it's also important to point out that this is not a dominating cost synergy case. We really, really want to keep as much of the momentum and the strengths in Visual Art as possible to keep fueling the growth going forward.

And at the same time, put the resources where we get like the best results. And I think that is key.

Okay. A follow-up question on the revenue mix. When will you be back on a SaaS share of revenue of more than 50%.

That's a good question. I say that somewhere like in next year, I want to give you a month, but during -- not during this year, but during next fiscal year, yes.

Okay. That was the last question. Do you have any concluding words on the Q4.

No, but it feels really, really great now to have like everything incorporated to have the figures in place. Now we can start tracking the business as we are used to and have the full visibility. And I think we are in a really, really good shape with the strong momentum stepping into the new year.

Yes. Really looking forward taking home 2025. So we will meet again after publishing our report for the first quarter. Thank you very much.

Thanks so much. Have a good day.

Bye.