VNV Global AB (publ) (VNV) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Welcome to VNV Global's Fourth Quarter and 12 Months 2024 Report Conference Call. On the call today, we have Per Brilioth, CEO; Dennis Mohammad, Investment Manager; and myself, Bjorn von Sivers, CFO of VNV. As per usual, Per will start with a summary of the developments during the quarter, following by an overview of the more meaningful portfolio constituents. After that, we will open up for Q&A. [Operator Instructions] With that, I'll hand over to Per. Please go ahead.

Thanks, Bjorn. So we'll kick off with this usual sort of -- you've seen this in the report. NAV is up like 1% in dollar terms to $580 million, which is -- Swedish Krona is just under SEK 49, that's up 10% in Swedish kronas. For the year, we're down like a bit over like 13%, just under 13%, which follows down like 5% the year before. And that's all sort of negative, but it sort of feels still like a consolidation period after that sort of monstrous drop in 2022 to start the Ukraine war and all that, so consolidation period. And overall, I mean, we'll talk more about it as we go through the report here, but we really see that there's some good signs in the market pricing in our portfolio, but also elsewhere gets done at a premium to NAV rather than a discount and the companies are doing well. So although there's no dramatic sort of changes in the NAV as of this report and still sort of in some consolidation period, it really feels like something is starting to happen. But as we talked about at length, I think, and sorry for repeating ourselves, but over the course of this year, it's really been -- the focus has really been sort of to, one, get into a net cash state at our balance sheet and pay off the debt. We've sold stuffs throughout the year, first sort of portfolio around Booksy and then Gett yet to close, but we think will close in the first quarter this year. And then a smaller portfolio in these last quarters and bringing that to $148 million, and we'll come back to -- but that's very much been the focus. But now with Gett moving into sort of its closing phase, then we're really in net cash and then can start to focus on not selling assets and paying down debt, but instead investing, and as we sort of talked about again and again, really with our stock trading where it is, there's nothing that sort of compares well to it. So that's out there. And the other big sort of theme, if you will, during the course of 2024 is this trying to help the companies to get into profitability. And yes, the direction of travel is the right one, although there's, of course, more work to be done. So 81% is now EBITDA positive. We've sort of -- we've not broken out Voi now because Voi is actually EBIT positive, and then, of course, also EBITDA positive. But at the Voi level, we need to talk about EBIT because they depreciate e-scooters. So 80% of the portfolio positive in this manner. And happy about the direction of travel, but not content because our ambition really is to sort of have one of our holdings and ideally several holdings get into that sort of profitable growth and profitable to the extent that cash also goes back to shareholders. We really -- we -- the ambition is really to have one of our entities here develop portfolio -- develop into a dividend payer that can give us a stream of cash flow in good times and also in bad times, so which decreases the volatility around the portfolio and can make you able to sort of to access liquidity also when times are tough. Now I think we've started to get through that consolidation phase. But nevertheless, really this direction of travel is, of course, very, very important. Yes, balance sheet. Bjorn, do you want to run us through these next couple of slides and...

Sure. Happy to. Yes, so quarter ended with, as Per mentioned, net asset values of just below SEK 49 per share or $4.44 per share, down 1% in dollar terms over the quarter and up roughly 10% in [ SEK. ] Notably we closed the quarter with approximately $60 million in cash and cash equivalents, including small liquidity management investments and the debt now stands at $77 million, and this is the bond that we refinanced earlier this quarter. If we move to the next slide, I thought I'll just run through the main developments during the quarter in terms of fair value change and getting from the start, BlaBlaCar, largest holding was down 9% during the quarter. The valuation is, as a reminder, derived from sum of the parts valuation that we further refined during the year. The fair value change during the quarter is driven by a lower adjusted peer multiple as well as a weak euro relative to the USD. By year-end, BlaBlaCar position represents approximately SEK 17.5 per share or 36% of the NAV. Moving down to Gett, flat valuation as it's still being based on the ongoing transaction, which we now expect to close during the first quarter of 2025. Gett represents roughly SEK 7 per share. And moving on to Voi, which is the largest uplift during the quarter, up 26%, driven as we moved the valuation from last transaction-based valuation, based on the transaction in early 2024 to a forward-looking EBITDA-based model here at year-end. Voi now represents SEK 8.5 per share. And these 3 in aggregate represent roughly SEK 33 per share or just below 70% of the total NAV. Again, cash increased over the quarter to roughly $60 million. And with that short introduction to the movers of the P&L, I'll hand it back to Per to go through further down in the portfolio and then open up for Q&A.

Are you done with this slide?

Yes.

I think I guess this just illustrates what you talked about, yes, with some colors. Good. Yes. Okay. So the portfolio is something you will have seen before. The change here is the Voi on the back of this new mark is a little bit higher than Gett. And also in the portfolio, a company we may not have talked about before, but it's Flo/Palta, that they show up sort of in these top 10 at around 1%. And that's not because we bought or sold anything, but we've had them on 2 lines before, and they're really sort of the same company. Palta is the holding company for Flo. So Palta has a few different -- it's like a little VNV and they have different portfolio holdings, but the bulk of the portfolio is really Flo. So it's really the same thing. So Flo, as you remember, is the world's largest period tracker, and like a digital platform for women's health, but with the base around the period tracker, which we're very excited about and very happy that we own at least a piece of it and it shows up now. But anyway, that's not a transaction, it's just rebooking or sort of putting 2 things that are really the same thing into 1 line instead of 2 lines. We'll flick it through a couple of these different sort of portfolio holdings or give you an update. I think the background of BlaBlaCar, you all know. I think -- I mean, as Bjorn said, it's marked down during this quarter, which is really sort of a reflection of that -- the political sort of volatility for the lack of a better word, in France is having some effect because they need a law to be passed to get their income stream around energy saving certificates to come back on. So for technical reasons, that law was taken out of service in the summer. And then, of course, there's been a lack of a government to sort of process laws. And then there was a government and then now this new government is just taking time. We expect it to come back at a slightly lower level than before, but still good sort of income stream for the company. And the uncertainty, if you will, around that is, I think that's the best way to describe that the market is coming off a bit. Apart from that, there's many, many positives around BlaBlaCar, staying on this energy saving certificate point, as we've spoken about before, it's now being launched, it has launched in Spain, so -- which is very encouraging. Spain is still smaller in terms of aggregate terms in France, but still sort of a meaningful contributor cash-wise. And I'd also say that for us, financial analysts, I think it will be very productive to sort of see these kind of income streams not being a single country sort of affair, but also in several countries to sort of make it into something that's more diversified and hence stable. I think the good thing with this law being taken out of service and back on in France is that it's been -- you could say that it's been taken out in the backyard and kicked around and now it's back in a more and more robust form. So we can also sort of put a fuller value on it when we look at it as a sort of some of the parts or however you sort of would approach to sort of value BlaBlaCar. So positive that Spain is coming on as well for multiple reasons. Other than that, the acquisition of the bus marketplace in Turkey was, of course, closed and it's very positive. That company is doing really, really well. It's big, biggest in Turkey, second biggest in the world and after likely redBus in India. So these bus marketplaces in emerging markets and the fragmented nature of them really gel well with the car business, the car pooling business, that's of course, the core of BlaBlaCar. And Turkey is a very interesting emerging market, and it's big there. Speaking of India, where there is an equivalent to Obilet in redBus, is a market where the operations of BlaBlaCar really has taken off of late. I mean they've been active in India as long as we've been around the company, but it's been small. And as with marketplaces, you can't really force the growth on it. It takes -- the growth will sort of have to go on itself. But India has sort of compounded well over these years is now starting to become a big thing, unmonetized. So adding to a GMV level, but not yet revenues or even less earnings, but getting to a very, very interesting size. What else on BlaBlaCar? Yes, I mean, the company overall is doing well. I mean, [ packs ] passengers is growing. That's a good sort of good point for GMV, it's growing by about 20%, 25%. And then revenue moves around a little bit country-by-country and these energy savings certificates in France are obviously sort of lowers revenue growth there, but will come back on at some point and then get them back on. But if you look at GMV overall, some of it's monetized, some of it's not, passengers driving GMV, then you're looking at like 20%, 25%. I -- yes, I think that's sort of a quick update on BlaBlaCar. Next out is Voi. Dennis, could you run us through Voi?

Happy to. Thank you. Voi, as you all know, it's a leading European micro-mobility operator, it operates e-scooters, but also e-bikes across several -- around 100 cities in Europe. If you go to the next slide Per, the big news on Voi, which happened at the very beginning of Q4, but before we actually released our Q3 report. So we already talked about it, is that they raised a bond, first of its kind in the micro-mobility space. It's a EUR 50 million bond, 6.75% spread over Euribor, 4 year duration and part of a larger EUR 125 million framework. This will enable the company to invest into growth CapEx for the first time in quite a few years. So we're very excited about that. If we go to the next slide, again, the other big news which came out yesterday is that they closed 2024 with positive adjusted EBIT for the first time in the company's history and also the first micro-mobility company in this space to do so. They grew revenues roughly 13% on an annual basis at Voi. That growth accelerated during the fourth quarter, which was up 33% versus fourth quarter of 2023. So growth accelerating during the year. They closed the year with roughly 8 percentage points higher vehicle profit margin. The vehicle profit margin, you could think of is a good proxy for gross margin in this industry, reaching 57%. So that's revenues less charging logistics and repair costs. So quite a big kind of movement there. This all resulted in roughly EUR 17 million of adjusted EBITDA and around EUR 100,000 of adjusted EBIT. Obviously, a big milestone. The company is now fully profitable. And what's very exciting is that this growth that 13% isn't maybe a super high growth if you look at our overall portfolio, but we are very certain this growth will accelerate now in 2025 given the proceeds from the bond. So, as you can see on the far left graph here on this slide, the black bar -- so the black line saying that the average fleet size has been roughly 93,000 vehicles will grow quite significantly. And as you can see, historically, that is a good proxy for revenue growth. So we're expecting the bond proceeds to really fuel growth at Voi and to, in parallel with that, continue to see margin expansion. So a profitable year all the way to the last growth, so to speak, in 2025. So it's on the back of this that we wrote up Voi, 26% took it from the last transaction, which was an early Q1 '24 event to a model that looks at EV, EBITDA. I think that's it on Voi, sorry, one final thing. They continue to win tenders. They have the highest regulated market share in the industry still. They won tenders in France, Spain, Germany and Sweden in Q4 as well. So that's also very encouraging to see that the moats are getting stronger and stronger as we go along.

Thanks, Dennis. Going on here then, Gett. We -- yes, we -- it's taken much longer than expected to get the antitrust in Israel to approve the acquisition of Gett by Pango. Pango is one of several parking apps in the country and Gett, you know what it is. We have good reason to believe though that -- and what we understand is that our expectation is that this will close in this first quarter. And there's been some -- a lot of interaction with the authorities around this of late, which we think has been very productive. And so when we talk next time, we think this will have closed. In the meantime, the company is doing very well. And it's growing -- it's like $13 million or so of EBITDA last year 2024 and big, big cash generation. So cash and cash equivalents, so as the balance sheet is like $60 million-plus, no debt. So this is really sort of a solid company. And yes, there's -- we don't expect -- we'll own it for very long, but it's still good to see the company performing well. Next up is Numan, and Dennis, you take us through Numan.

Happy to. So Numan is an online health clinic focusing on men's health. Historically been focused a lot on issues such as -- or verticals such as erectile dysfunctions and hair loss. But now a lot of the growth and a lot of the revenues are coming from their weight loss vertical, which was launched about a year or 2 ago. They closed a very strong 2024, served more than 215,000 patients in the U.K. They grew revenues more than 130% year-over-year. If you compare December of 2024 to December of 2023, it was a 200% growth. So growth accelerating throughout the year there as well. And they are EBITDA profitable as well. A lot of this growth is obviously coming from GLP-1 related treatments, and we're seeing this growth continuing well into 2025 as well, and we expect quite significant growth also for 2025 alongside continued profitability on the EBITDA level. It's on the back of a strong 2024, continued growth in 2025 and strong peer multiple trading that we wrote up Numan this quarter. So we carry it now our 17% stake at $45 million as per Q4.

Great. Onwards to HousingAnywhere, not so much to report about there. The company is performing sort of as per expectation and it takes a long time to build sort of these marketplaces, but the opportunity is large. And there's just not that much sort of new that's happened since we spoke last time. So we'll press on here and go to Breadfast. And Bjorn, could you walk us through the update on Breadfast?

Yes. No. As a reminder, Breadfast is Egypt's leading online grocery brand and quick commerce business, deliver groceries under 60 minutes from 39 different locations. And here, I mean, the company continues to have very strong momentum, 6,000 SKUs and deliver now close to 1 million orders on a monthly basis to over 300,000 active users. We own 9% of the company and values on the basis of the transaction that happened mid last year. I think, I mean, company is doing well. Egyptian macro a little bit more stable and also the vast majority of these 39 different fulfillment points are completely profitable. So very exciting prospects here in our view. So that's the short update on Breadfast. And then also Bokadirekt, as a reminder, the leading beauty booking marketplace and SaaS service for the beauty industry in Sweden, 13,000 merchants, 2 million monthly users, strong market position, very, very dominant. They last year -- mid last year, onboarded a new very experienced CEO, Niklas Grawe, who's run Hitta previously to come in to drive further growth and profitability and especially accelerate that growth. We own 50% of the company and value it based on the EV revenue multiple model. Over to you, Per.

Great. I think that sort of concludes the stuff that we wanted to introduce to you. What I forgot to say on the overall sort of portfolio, when we look ahead -- we wrote about this in the report, but just to mention it here, too. When we look ahead to 2025, we see sort of the -- well, the bulk of the portfolio, the larger holdings here getting the portfolio to a 25% revenue growth, but we really see margins -- profit margins increasing. So at sort of an earnings level, much, much higher growth than that. So good outlook over the year that we're now in. So with that, I thought we'd sort of organize ourselves to take any of -- any questions that you may have. Bjorn, do you want to walk us through how that works again or?

Yes, sure. As a reminder, there is this Q&A function on the Zoom where you can type in your question or if you want to also raise this hand, we'll try to give you -- open up your mic. But I mean, we have some questions here to start. The first, maybe for Per question. If and when Voi or BlaBla or any other of the more mature companies IPO, what will VNV's general stance be? Do you retain the shares in the public market? Or do you strictly avoid holding listed investments?

Yes. We've -- we don't have as like a strict thing that we can never hold listed things. We don't -- there's -- one aspect to it is that since we are listed and all of you guys who can own our stock are also able to own listed stocks. It's sort of less of a point for us to sort of have listed portfolio holdings because you can invest into that yourself. In the past, we have done different things when our portfolio holdings have gone public. Sometimes we've sort of given them out on a pro rata basis, but -- and sometimes we've sort of held on to them and then sold them over time. I think for that angle -- in that perspective, which I think is sort of relevant for also for when we, sorry, when some of our existing portfolio holdings go public in the future, we sort of take an approach that if we can -- if the sort of return profile of the holding is sort of similar to what we're looking for, which is sort of -- well, really sort of 25%-ish IRRs is what we're expecting or that's when we get paid in our sort of stock option like programs. If that's present and also that we can sort of still play a role in the company that we -- if the situation has been, which is sort of typical that we've been present at the company for a long time and can be sort of a more active and value-adding owner to the company, we may stick around. But of course, you've seen us over the past sort of decade, we've been very active in buying back our own stock, and we've been very -- we can't really stay away from our own stock when it trades at a discount. So if you can sell stuff at NAV and buy at a discount, that's obviously something that's very attractive, and we've been known to do that. So that's also something. And finally, we really think it's good for our type of companies to have portfolio holdings that mature to -- yes, that grow and mature to the level where they pay a dividend to us. So we -- in such a company, Voi, for example, it becomes a dividend payer analysts, and we think there's an upside, and we're sort of obviously been very close to the company since day 0. That may be one that we keep and then hold on to it and take the dividends and sort of reduce the volatility around our portfolio through that dividend stream. And a long-winding answer, I hope it gives you some help.

Another question on BlaBla here. Could you provide some additional color on BlaBlaCar's performance outside this volatility around the energy certificates? How has the core business been doing?

Yes. So the mature markets of Europe, like France is not high growth. It's sort of flattish growth, but very stable and earnings-wise, it's sort of like a very mature, classified. In Sweden, we have Hemnet here, it doesn't grow much, but it's -- the market doesn't grow, but the company's profitability may grow and sort of very high barriers to entry, that sort of thing. So that, I think, would be a fair description of Europe overall. Obviously, Spain is growing a lot now and energy certificates is being sort of introduced and that also has a marketing effect and that's exciting. But overall, sort of the mature markets growing less, but profitable. And then you got the emerging markets, which are just killing it in terms of growth and really -- I talked about India before, this Brazil, Mexico, that are showing strong growth and -- but are yet to be monetized or very, very early in the monetization, so it doesn't really show up on the revenue side of things. But that strong growth is very encouraging because it also gets you to a state -- size state where you can -- where monetization becomes a very low-hanging fruit, so important. And then on bus -- on the bus side of things, yes, the emerging market was Obilet essentially are -- is doing very well.

And then perhaps a question on Voi for Dennis. What's our latest take on the current regulatory environment? Have there been any new developments as of late? And how does Voi's road map for tenders in 2025 look? Do they need to win new markets? Or can they deploy more scooters in their existing markets? A bit more color on that fleet development.

Sure. Happy to. On the first question on the regulatory environment, I think the trend that we've seen for the past couple of years is continuing, which is more and more cities across Europe going for tenders. This is very good for the users. It's very good for the cities and it's good for the operators because you get fewer players, the ones that are serious are the ones that have a chance of winning. You get less competition as an operator and for the users, it's obviously better because you don't need to have 10 apps just to ride e-scooters in any given city. So each operator also gets to more of a critical scale in order to be able to operate profitably. So we're seeing that trend continuing. We're seeing quite a few cities going for retenders. So cities such as Oslo, I think, is going for their third or fourth retender this year. And the good news there is that we're seeing that the tender duration -- the duration of the contracts are actually getting longer. We saw it in France, in Le Havre for instance, which I believe was a 4 year contract that Voi won in the last quarter. So a general trend of more cities tendering and that the contracts are getting longer, which is good. In terms of growth or where fleet allocation for '25 and onwards, given that the competitive landscape has kind of weakened with some shakeout, we saw the Dot-Tier deal about a year ago and with companies such as [ Bergen ] business in Europe, et cetera. We are seeing more space, more white space in existing markets. So that will be one source. But from the 100 cities we are in today, I'm certain that the Voi management team -- I know they have identified at least 100 or maybe even 200 more cities in Europe that they want to enter. Some of them are in existing countries that they're already operating in. And some of them are Eastern Europe, getting stronger in Southern Europe and some regions in Central Europe as well. Today, the stronghold is really in the DACH region, the Nordics and the U.K. and Ireland, I would say. So there's quite a lot of land to grab still for Voi. So a combination of both is probably the short answer.

And then I have another question here. Could you add some color on the $10 million of aggregate proceeds you highlighted after the end of the period in the last Q3 report, did that take place at or around NAV? So those exits all happen in the long tail. On aggregate, they exited above NAV. And we also noted in the last report that our pro forma cash would be at around $20 million at the end of Q3, including this cash. The main reason why it's not closer to $20 million here at the year-end, it's, in fact, $16 million is the big movements in FX, given the fact that our debt is SEK denominated, we bought SEK for those additional proceeds, and that's why we ended up with $16 million in cash at year-end. And with that, I think we have gone through all of the questions for now. And unless there's anyone popping up in the next few seconds, I'll hand over to Per again to finish up the call.

Great. Well, you know where to find us. So please just reach out if there's anything that we haven't covered that you want to talk about. The door is open or we'll answer the phone or the e-mail. But thanks for participating, and we'll speak to you all. Well, there'll be an annual report out before we speak again because we'll do this exercise again for the Q1, which is going to be exciting. So thank you.

Thank you.