Good morning. This is your conference operator, and I would like to welcome everyone to the conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, again, press the star one. Thank you. Martin Ravn-Nielsen, you may now begin your conference.
Thank you. First of all, welcome to our conference call, full year 2021. My name is Martin Ravn-Nielsen. I'm CEO of HusCompagniet. With me today, I have our CFO, Mads Winther. Mads and I look forward to give you some words and numbers about HusCompagniet's result 2021, and what we expect going forward. Please pay attention to the disclaimer on page one, and then we will move on to page two, the full year 2021 summary. We have provide a revenue growth of 20% to DKK 4,315 million. We have provided a sales growth of 24% year-over-year.
We saw higher sales rate than expected in the first six months, and the result were an EBITDA on DKK 401 million with a margin on 9.3% despite challenging market environment. We also have maintained our target on delivering that 98% of all our houses was delivered right on time. Our dividend per share is DKK 7.35. We have made a share buy back program on DKK 180 million Danish kroner completed in August, and a new program up to DKK 40 million is launched in January 2022. When we are looking in the market, the market level decreased in second half after an extraordinary high first six months. We also look into some cost inflations from materials and subcontractors.
Our visibility, I'll be honest to say it reduced for 2022 due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. When we are going to the outlook, Mads will come back to the numbers later, but overall, I can tell you that we maintain our outlook from November. The outlook is based on HusCompagniet's usual solid forecast and provides for an ambitious guidance for 2022. Current expectations for sales in 2022 are between 1,900 and 2,100 sales. We see that the market for detached houses has fallen for a period, and therefore we have some new expectations. If we are going to page three, we have a market update here. Our sales activity in 2021, the detached market level, decreased in second half after an extraordinary high activity in H1 2021.
When we're looking into the semi-detached area, we actually overall have seen a very high sales activity in 2021. We also are increasing the market share. We still have a huge potential in this segment. Our Swedish company, we also have seen a very high sales activity in the whole 2021. We are also increasing market share in Sweden, and therefore we also decide in 2021 to make some investments in more automation in the factory. When it comes to supply chains, we have of course also seen some cost pressure on raw materials such as wood, steel, and polystyrene. We also saw a disrupted supply chain. As usual, we are monitoring the market closely. The cost inflation is successfully mitigated and supply chains are so far overall intact.
Prices on materials have increased during the year, as well as we have done in our sales prices against the customers. When we're looking about the subcontractors, it have been an increased scarcity creating bottlenecks in Q4 2021. There is a high demand for contractors due to the high building activity expected to continue here in this year, the first six months. Therefore, bottlenecks are expected to improve in the last half year of 2022. On the next page, here you can see the detached demand decreasing. On the page here you can see an extraordinary high sales in the first six months. In the second half, we saw the sales decreased, and we saw a lower market level continuing on detached. It's important for me to say that the semi-detached segments, we still see a very high level.
We therefore, in February, adjust the detached organization with 28 employees to meet the expected lower demand. We see our building activity having a better flow over this year, 2022, compared to last year, and therefore not an extra pressure on single quarters in terms of building activities. On the next page, you here can see our strategy and the purpose supports our strategy. Together with customers, suppliers and other stakeholders, we will take leadership in a sustainable and digital customer journey. In our efforts to lead the future house building, we believe that it is fundamental to raise industry standards and drive continuous growth in all our business segments. We have in 2021 developed our purpose, co-creating the homes of tomorrow today. Already in the end of 2021, we've decided not to offer houses with gas heating anymore.
Instead, we offer some sustainable heating as solar cells or heat pumps, and now more than 50% what we are selling is with sustainable heating elements. Absolutely we are the market leader, and we also take that responsibility to also gain the market much more sustainable. On page six, you can see the new build advantage because from a cost perspective, new build actually has an advantage against a lot of current old houses. New build versus old build, the energy savings outweigh the increase in the interest rates. Remarkably, the model you are looking into here is from June 2021, before energy prices began to increase significantly. Therefore, new build is more competitive against buy an old and renovate market that we can see in many years.
Actually we have seen that in many years, but more and more when the energy prices is increasing significant, then we are so sure that it will give us some new possibilities in the future when the customers also seeing that case. It is absolutely one of the things that we are looking positive into in the market going forward. Yes, it is not so good when we are looking at the higher energy prices, but actually for our new build segments it can be an advantage going forward. Mads, maybe you will take to some of the highlights.
Yeah. If you go to the next page seven, here we made a few highlights on our full year 2021. As Martin said, this was a year where we delivered despite all the challenges really well. It's also a result that is a notch above our guidance previously. If we look at our revenue, we are 20% up to DKK 4.3 billion. We guided just from DKK 4.1 billion to DKK 4.425 billion, so just above what we guided. When we look at our EBITDA, we're also a notch above our guidance of DKK 401 million up 16% from 2020. It's really a big impact on that as well.
I think here at least we'll come back to sort of the scarcity as Martin mentioned, but generally here we of course, despite the challenging price increase, et cetera, we actually were able to almost maintain our margins, which we are quite proud of. Looking at EBIT, that was a little bit more above our guidance due to less depreciation and amortization, so DKK 355 million and up 61% from 2020. This is of course because we didn't have any special items which we had in 2020 due to our listing. Looking also at our free cash flow, that's also up quite significantly to DKK 237 million, up from DKK 110 million in 2020.
Looking at our deliveries, we came close to the 2,000 mark, so 1,831 houses delivered during 2021, up by almost 12%. Our EBITDA margin, as I just mentioned before, we were almost able to maintain our margin despite the big price increases, disturbance in the supply chains, but as well, especially around Q4, the scarcity of subcontractors. That we feel that we as a company handled quite well. The EBIT margin, again, please note that we have zero special items. That was 8.2% versus the 6.1% in 2020.
Our leverage ratios were also below 2 x, of course, driven by our strong activity that we saw in the full year. Moving into page eight, this is the Q4 results. Q4, a very busy quarter for us. We had a revenue that was up almost 19% to DKK 1.2 billion. We had EBITDA, which was slightly down due to lower margin in Q4. Our EBITDA again up almost DKK 50 million, so almost double, but due to no special items. Looking at our deliveries, Q4 was a big quarter for us, a busy quarter. A lot of these deliveries are also related to our semi-detached.
We should keep that in mind. EBITDA margin, as I mentioned, Q4 2% lower than in 2020. The main reason for that was of course due to the scarcities, but as well, we had some COVID rebates which also played a little bit into the quarter. Looking at EBIT margin again, up quite significantly from last year due to no special items. If we move to the next page, on page nine, this is our deliveries year-on-year. What we are especially proud of around our business is that we see, as Martin also mentioned in the beginning, we actually see that we are performing very well in 2021 on all three segments.
It's not a one-trick pony, it's basically all our segments that are doing really well. When we look at our deliveries, we are up in index in all quarters. When we then look at the middle of the page, the development from the segments, we can see that our semi-detached came with almost as many increase in deliveries as our detached. Sweden of course, as Martin also mentioned, we are automating the factory and there we will see the real effect coming during this year, but especially in 2023. If we move to the next page on sales. We of course, as Martin said, we had 2,376 sales in 2021.
We can see that index-wise it was very much in the first half year we really performed above 2020, where we can see in Q3 we came at the level of 20, and in Q4 we saw sales slowing down a bit, probably also because of the Omicron virus hitting in that period as well. Moving to the middle of the page, we can actually see that from a sales perspective, it's in the past, it would have been driven by detached only, but here we can actually see our semi-detached. Especially here you can see the effect from our Swedish business that are both seeing an improved market, but again, also gaining market share.
Basically all three segments are performing well, which of course is something that we are extremely proud of as a company. I think noting just that we sold in our semi-detached, which we are very proud of, the 387 units. I think when we were listing in November 2020, there was debate whether or not this semi-detached had some real material impact. I think what we are demonstrating in 2021 is that it actually has an impact of these 387 houses sold. 322 of them were through our B2B effort, which was really the one that we initiated in November 2020. Moving to the next page, 11.
Here we can also see an impact of what I just went through on especially the of course, the deliveries, which is what you basically see the effect from here. When you look in the future, you will see more coming from the two smaller segments. We can see when we looked in 2020, we said 90% of our business was detached. Now we can see that that's now down to 80%, not because of detached not performing. It actually was a great year from our detached business, but mainly due to that the two other segments were increasing, and we will see that continuing moving into 2022.
Also, looking at and I think our revenue growth, we can also see here that we can see good growth in detached with almost 9%, but of course, significant increases, especially in our semi-detached. When it comes to margins, we can see that our Swedish business is the one that have the highest margin given that it's prefab, which is a fairly attractive way of producing, of course, versus building out on the different plots there in as we do in Denmark. We can see that our detached business was the one that was hurt the most on margins in Q4. Whereas, we can see that we are starting to see the development in semi-detached. Moving onwards, as we are gaining more and more activity versus the build-up that we are doing along the way.
We believe this is a very good development we are seeing in our business. If we move on to the next page 12. Here we have listened to some of the feedback we have received. We have previously shown our gross backlog, which is basically reflecting the cash flow that is coming in. As you can see, we have maintained our order backlog from a cash flow perspective. We can basically see that the backlog increase from year-end is of course a lot of it detached, but as well Sweden and semi-detached. That again is demonstrating again that this that we now have three segments that are increasing in size.
Then we have added to the right, which is, I think it's quite important, the illustration, that is what is our net order backlog. By net order backlog, we mean that the meaning of that is the order backlog that you will see in the P&L and in the EBITDA. That is excluding the work in progress that we have already from our gross net backlog have already taken into the P&L. Here we can see that when we looked at the year-end of 2020 and the guidance of our 2021, there we can see we're at 48%. In the mid-year it was 67, and now we are at 63% of our 2022 midpoint guidance.
You know, a really strong backlog moving into 2022, which makes us of course quite comfortable around what we have guided from an activity level. Looking at our outlook, Martin has been through the main changes. We have in the middle of the page. I think I'll probably start with. Our 2022 outlook is of course revenue, and we have guided that we are between DKK 4.35 billion to just shy of. Sorry, it's page 13. Sorry if I didn't get that on the radar. Yeah, the next page. Yeah. Thank you very much. We are at just shy of DKK 4.4 billion- DKK 4.65 billion in revenue. EBITDA DKK 420 million-DKK 450 million.
EBIT DKK 370 million- DKK 400 million, and leverage ratios below 2x . What we have added in our assumptions for the guidance is that we of course also looking at what is happening in the world. Clearly, there is increased geopolitical uncertainty in Europe, and therefore we should note that it is increased uncertainty that we are guiding at this point of time. We are maintaining our guidance, but with noting that we are seeing increased uncertainty in Europe. As Martin mentioned, we had lower sales in our detached market in Q4. Therefore, we have taken sales down with these 300 units. It is notable. Despite that change, we are maintaining our guidance for 2022.
When you go to the next page, this is around our capital structure and dividend policy. We have not changed anything around the sort of capital structure, but around our dividend or slash payout policies, we have made a modification on our dividend policy. We have had a policy of paying out at least 50% by means of dividend. We have spoken to a lot of investors through this over almost one and a half years, and we have listened to the investors, and therefore we have modified our payout. Moving forward, we will pay at least 25% in dividend, and then we will supplement that by a share buyback of around 25%.
I think what is important for us to stress around this is that we see this still as a payout of minimum 50%. It's not a change of what we have done in the past. We are just modifying the tools, so we will have two different tools. We hope at least that we have by our history and our documented actions, we will not sit on cash. We will distribute it to shareholders. If we have cash that is up and above the 50%, we will provide those to the shareholders, either by increasing our dividends or by share buybacks or both.
We are very happy to announce that we will propose the dividends in our AGM of DKK 7 and DKK 7.35 per share, which will be paid out in April if approved by the AGM. This we believe is again, you know, a very high dividend versus our share price. We're very happy to give that back to our shareholders. Moving to page 15. Here we just to reiterate that we really feel that this money should be in the shareholders' pocket. We have actually been distributing around DKK 400 million to shareholders, either in form of dividends or share buyback. We launched a share buyback here in Q1 of up to DKK 40 million.
We will use part of those in our share program. Our shares, we'll use part of those, but the rest will be canceled. We bought DKK 180 million in the exit of EQT. So we are proposing to the AGM that we cancel 9% of our shares, and those will not uphold the dividend, which is why we come to the high amount. We will hopefully approve and distribute DKK 132 million in dividends. Just to reiterate that, we also paid out dividend of DKK 60 million in April. All of this combined is distributing around DKK 400 million to our shareholders.
Then if you look at the closing price yesterday, our market cap was just above DKK 2 billion. This is approximately 20% of our market cap we have paid back these 1.5 years, which we feel at least a little bit proud of. We hope the shareholders also feel that way. With that, moderator, we leave you over to the Q&A.
Thank you. At this time, I would like to remind everyone in order to ask a question, press star then the number one on your telephone keypad. We'll pause for just a moment to compile the Q&A roster. Your first question comes from the line of Kristian Johansen from SEB. Your line is now open.
Thank you. A couple of questions for me. First of all, in terms of your backlog coverage, you obviously indicate that 37% of your revenue guidance at the midpoint is not covered by the backlog. How can you significantly lower your assumption on houses sold without changing your revenue guidance for 2022?
Yes. Do you want us to take them one at a time? Yeah, but Kristian, I think we still feel we of course have a pretty good view on what is coming in in our pipeline, etc. We feel quite comfortable around the levels we are guided here. In that sense, remember we also have work in progress that we would benefit from in the beginning of 2023 as well. That will also play into our results in 2022. Therefore we are still quite comfortable around the levels we have guided at. Yeah. That's the response.
Your next question comes from the line of Claus Almer from Nordea. Your line is now open.
Okay. I just want to make sure I ask several questions, and I'll take them one by one. The first question goes to cost headwind and inflation going into 2022. What do you actually see? Have you raised prices enough, or would there be a margin pressure? That would be the first one.
What we look into is that we have raised the prices against the customers enough. We are looking into strong margins, what we are building for now, and also what we are calculating in what we have sold and started up building now. We are comfortable around the margins, yes.
Do you see, compared to Q4, for instance, do you see an additional cost inflation, or are your input costs starting to stabilize excluding energy costs, obviously?
We see that there still can be some cost inflation going forward in 2022. We also is aware about that when we are talking about the prices against the customers. We are absolutely in control.
Okay. Coming back to Kristian's question regarding this lower number of houses sold embedded in your guidance. What does that say about your houses sold in Q1, or is it more about uncertainty for the second part of 2022? That was the second question.
Q4 was lower absolutely. The first two months in this year is also in a bit lower level than expected. There's a lot of possibilities going forward. There also is, yes, it's another world actually looking forward. We are a bit conservative going forward and as usual you can say. Therefore we are guiding already now that it could be a lower sales.
Okay. Then just the final question. When you look at your Q4 performance, the revenue was up by DKK 190 million or around that level, but EBITDA was flattish. Why this extra revenue did not contribute with more profitability? Is that due to mix cost inflation or what's really behind that performance?
We have seen a lot of bottlenecks actually primarily in Q4 because we have a very high activity in Q4. It has given us, especially in this quarter, an extra margin pressure. When we are looking into 2022, we see a much better flow all over the year in our activity. It will also make our margins better.
I think also Claus, what happened was of course that when you increase prices throughout the year as well, then there will be months or potentially a quarter where you're a little bit behind the curve, but then there will be other quarters where we are above the curve. Of course, when we see the extraordinary situation in the world with these price increases that we saw basically in Q4 as well, right before even Ukraine, then it will not necessarily be matched month by month. What we are making hopefully clear is that we feel very comfortable around our margins moving forward. We of course cannot say what is happening with the Ukraine, et cetera.
If that suddenly changes the world significantly, it will also change our world. If things are as it is today, we are very comfortable around our margins because we saw a significant pressure in Q4, but we also saw that we will see more price increases playing into the houses we are delivering in Q1, but especially in Q2. There we feel very comfortable.
Sure. That makes sense. Just to be sure, when we look at Q1 2022, then hopefully not that same amount of bottlenecks and with the pricing in the backlog, we should see already Q1 2022 a better margin. Is that what you said, Mads?
I think I will mainly say it's Q2. You will mainly see it in Q2, Q3, Q4. There we're pretty comfortable. Q1 is still a busy month where there's still overhang from Q4. I think we wouldn't set your hopes too high up on Q1, which is traditionally also a less strong quarter from the company. It's basically around especially Q2, Q3 there you will see definitely that it will shift around.
Okay, thank you so much. That was all from me.
Your next question comes from the line of Kristian Johansen of SEB. Your line is now open.
Thank you. I do have a couple more questions. If I can keep to this time, that would make it a bit easier. Back to your assumption on houses sold. Obviously, you also showed on your slides that the level of houses sold in detached in Q4 was somewhat lower, and what you indicated for January and February seems to be along the same lines. You also state you expect a more even distribution throughout the year of houses sold. Your assumption for detached is that we should continue at the level you've sort of seen Q4, January, February, for the rest of the year? Or are you assuming any kind of sort of recovery in houses sold for detached?
We are looking into March being much better than January and February. What is important for me to say is that the land plots in Denmark has been on a very low level during COVID-19, where everybody bought houses and apartments and plots and so on. Therefore, HusCompagniet's land plots is a very low level. Now we are also coming with some very good land in the next months, and it will again give us some extra sales as we normally always have sales on customers land, third party land, and we have on our own land. We don't have so much own land as usual.
You also can see in our numbers here in 2022 that we only deliver around 10% of our revenue number of houses. It is from own land, and normally it is around 20%. Therefore we now see it going again that a lot of the land that we have developed and so on we get the municipality permissions over this year, and then we will see that gaining again.
Okay. Just to clarify, what you're saying is what you've seen here in the first two weeks of March has been better than what you saw in January, February?
Yes.
Good.
One thing also, just to mention, Kristian. I, as you know, I've been in this industry for many years. I've been a part of HusCompagniet's journey since the very beginning. I know when it is difficult out there, the customers are going to safe haven, and we see it again and again. Therefore, is it a better market out there in March compared to January or February? I don't know, but I can see that the customers are going our way.
Okay. That's obviously interesting considering, I mean, the uncertainty around geopolitical risk really increased in March. I would have thought that sentiment continued the same way.
Yeah.
Turning to these organizational changes, can you describe what kind of functions that you have cut? Similarly, I mean, if considering your guidance on how to source, do you see the need to continue to reduce your organization to adjust for some declining profile?
We are very agile. When we are seeing growth, we are preparing for that. When we are looking into the opposite, we also are ready for that, and therefore we have made that change with 28 employees in February. It has become some sales and some architects primarily, because we have a lot of houses that we will deliver in this year and therefore all our construction managers are going out on site. We still have the same numbers there. We have now the organization that can, you can say it is the right number of employees to that market that we expect going forward.
Of course, we are ready if something when we are going forward to also to 2023, what we're looking into there, then we have to revisit that again. We will do that, Mads and I, absolutely.
Okay. That's quite clear. My last question is just on gross margin for the semi-detached. We are 12.5% for 2021. Is this the run rate we should expect or can you comment a bit? I know there's obviously a huge mix effect from going from B2C to B2B, but any flavor on whether this is a sustainable level would be appreciated.
You're asking about the gross margin now, semi-detached and of course, I think that you will see this increase. I think as I also mentioned, you will see. We have always said our EBITDA margin will come up to our average level. We expect of course to come back to 2020 levels. Thereby you can say you have at least a margin, 1% margin that you should come up with. That we believe you will see when we start getting into a more normalized level. You can say that.
All right. Understood.
Again, to increase. I think that's what I'm saying.
That's clear. Great. Thank you so much. That was all for me.
I think just a point perhaps to Kristian you asked about. Martin said we expect the market to increase in March. Just to manage the expectations, we're seeing an average market level. When we say increase, it's to that level that we have seen historically as the average level for detached. We are not seeing anything in the tune of first half 2021, just so that's clear.
Your next question comes from the line of Claus Almer from Nordea. Your line is now open.
Thank you. Yeah, just a follow-up on this FTE reductions. As I have seen so far, you've only provided the average FTE for 2021, which was flattish versus 2020. These 28 fewer FTEs, what does it mean versus end of the year? Can you put some more color to that?
Yeah, you're asking about how many people we are basically, right, Claus?
Yes. Yeah. I'm trying to figure out the co-salary cost. How will that be in 2022 versus 2021?
Yeah. I think that's fair. I think, Claus, the way we would illustrate it is we are seeing this higher activity in 2022, but we don't expect to see salary SG&A increasing. In that sense, you will see higher efficiency coming into 2022. I think that's the closest we can guide you in that sense.
Salary cost 22 will be flattish versus 21. Is that what you're saying?
SG&A, yeah. That's probably what we are looking into.
Okay. Full SG&A, so no cost inflation and analyzed to be aware of not the input cost, but from the normal cost.
Correct.
Just to mention, salary is, as you of course know, many things because we also have our semi-detached houses absolutely increasing. Therefore we have to use some extra SG&A that way. We also have a clear ambition that we will develop the digitalization and sustainability, and it is also some headcounts that we are having now into our company also in 2022, that we don't have in 2020 or 2021, because those investments we absolutely are so clear that we will do because we are the market leader around the sustainability in our industry, and it'll also have some costs, but it is an investment in the future.
It is a few more things. I think we'll come back to you with a little bit more guidance on this. I understand the question, but you know, as Martin said, we will continue to invest. Of course, depending on how much we push on the pedal, you will see some of that. It will be more flattish than we've seen in the past.
Okay. That was all for me. Thank you so much.
Thank you.
There are no further questions at this time. I would like to turn the call back over to the presenters.
We will close down here now, for now. Thank you for dialing into this call and have a nice day.
Thank you. Bye-bye.
This concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect.