Good morning, and welcome to this Q1 presentation and Q&A with Konsolidator. With us today, we have the CEO and CFO. First, there will be a presentation, and afterwards, a Q&A, where the management team will answer questions submitted via Stokk.io. There have already been pre-submitted questions on Stokk.io, and the Q&A is still open so that you can submit questions live as well. I will now hand over the mic to Konsolidator to start the presentation. Your line is now open.
Thank you. My name is Claus. I'm the CEO of Konsolidator. I will, together with Jack, present the Q1, together with with some of other insights about the Konsolidator. Let's get started. As always, we will, we would normally do this within about 15-20 minutes. Right now, I haven't got-- I cannot remove the slide, so just a second. I have a technical issue here.
Okay.
Hmm.
Hmm.
Anything? Okay. I'm sorry, I'm trying to get the technical working. Let's see whether working now. Yes, now it's working. I'm sorry for that. As always, we will have this presentation in 15-20 minutes, and then we will answer some questions. I know some of you have been here before, but no matter what, I will start to give a small introduction of the Konsolidator, who we are, and then I will go into what we believe is the most important for us right now, and that is the different growth initiatives we have in starting up on since Q4, Q3 last year. I'll give you an update on that before Jack, he will take us through the numbers for Q1.
So that's the agenda for today. But for you who does not know Konsolidator, then we are a SaaS company founded in 2014. We are listed on Nasdaq First North. We have a headquarters in Copenhagen, and now we also have a sales office in Madrid in Spain. At the moment, we have 258 customers in 21 countries, and have an ARR of a little bit less than DKK 20 million , and 25 employees here in Copenhagen, and now four in Spain, probably growing to six in Spain within the foreseeable future. Our vision, that is to be the preferred financial consolidation tool in the world.
So we have always had ambition of going out- growing outside Denmark, and that is still our vision, and we are still trying to fulfill that vision. We are a financial consolidation tool. I will not go deep into this, but just so you understand, we are very strong in one particular things which we believe is very important for finance functions, for our groups, and that is to always have the accurate numbers whenever they do their financial consolidation, no matter whether that is for the monthly reporting or for the annual report.
So, so our software is doing this very important task, which is, on one hand, is very complex, on the other hand, is scalable because it's the same kind of methodology you are using all over the world, and that's the reason why even we are fairly small company, we are in 21 countries. So, so, so that is what we do, and we will continue doing that. All right. Let's move into to what I believe is the most interesting about the Konsolidator, especially for you as an investor, and that is our growth initiative. As we have announced, now we have Iberia is on the map, and that's of course what we believe is the most interesting right now, but we have some other things as well.
So today, we will present some of these growth opportunities, and the first one, that is what we call direct sales. Direct sales for us, that is when some customer, potential customer, a group, wants to hear more about Konsolidator. They either reach out to us or we reach out to them, and then we have a sales meeting, and then we convert that sales meeting, hopefully into a customer. That we call direct sales because that requires that we have a sales rep sitting in our office and doing the sales meeting. That is the way we have been growing so far for the first 10 years, and I would say 99% of our revenue is coming from direct sales.
But, we are slowly moving towards, what we're calling, a partner strategy, where Microsoft Dynamics 365 is, our most important channel. And we have made that strategic decision because in order for us to grow through the entire world, we need a more scalable solution, than doing it through the direct channel. So, from last year in August, where we hired the first, partner manager, we have been very active in generating both knowledge, and awareness of Konsolidator, in the partner, community. As I said, we are mainly focusing on, Microsoft, channel, where Business Central and F&O are the, those that are resonate best with Konsolidator and those, users of, Business Central and, F&O.
So that is where we are putting the most of our energy and efforts, but we do also have other partners that are in other segment than D365. But that is an area where we believe we will grow a lot. We have signed up, I think it's five partners in so far who are actively selling and promoting Konsolidator in their community. We don't have the first customer through this network yet, but we believe that's gonna be one of our strong growth ways in the future. Then we have Iberia, and you have seen that on a company announcement.
We have entered a joint venture with a strong team in Madrid, who are covering the Iberian market, that means Spain and Portugal, but will also covering the South American market. So all market that speaks Spanish and Portuguese will be handled by Konsolidator Iberia. Spain, which of course is the largest country in Iberia, is very interesting. Spain is also moving to more and more towards cloud, and we just resonate very well with both the current, but also the future customers in our segment. So we have a very high hope and expectation for Iberia. Of course, it will take some time before we will see a result.
They started up in April first. But now they are spreading the word, the words, and the awareness is increasing in Spain, which we can see on visits on websites and on other tools. So we have, again, very high expectation, and we believe that we will start to see the result coming in after the summer. Iberia, they will work on both a direct and a partner strategy. So, so they actually are incorporating both number one and two in this slide. And then, we also just announced that we will do some more in Sweden. Sweden is our second largest market, and we used to be very successful in getting new customers from Sweden.
But our former country manager, he left the company two years ago, and since then, the growth has been much, much lower. But now, Peter, who was the former country manager, has returned as a sales partner, so he will start up tomorrow, May first, as you can say, a very strong partner in Sweden. He will focus on Sweden, but will also cover Finland, where he will both, of course, secure high growth, which we are used to in Sweden, but also, you can say, maintain a close relation to partner and the community around customers and that ecosystem in Sweden.
So very high hope for that market again, which has been low growth, no growth in the past two years, but hopefully we can get back to the same growth pattern we saw from 2019- 2022. It has just started, will start tomorrow, so we do not expect to see a strong growth in Q2, but hope to see some new customers from Sweden after the summer. Yes, and then you can say some of the things that we also believe a lot in that is what we call Konsolidator BI. The world are moving into expecting more data, and Power BI has also entered the world of finance.
So our finance department have seen that, having access to a large amount of data, can generate some very strategic value for the companies, our customers. So we have seen a very, very high interest in adding other data sources to their reporting than just Konsolidator. So we have launched Konsolidator BI, where we both make Power BI report on top of Konsolidator, but also where we create a data warehouse and also a data lakehouse, where other sources from the finance departments are entered, so you can make advanced both analytics and reporting. Konsolidator BI is not an ARR tool at the moment, it's a consultancy and one-time fee, but we believe that it's very interesting for various reason.
One reason is that it generates income to us, which of course always is nice, but maybe more than we create more value to the customers, so both the stickiness and also you can say the happiness of Konsolidator, we believe will increase, so it will also reduce churn. So we believe there are many aspects in Konsolidator BI, even is not an ARR generating income, at least at the moment. Normally, we have always said that we are only interested in ARR because that's what is scalable in the world. But Konsolidator BI is something that we believe is extremely relevant for our customers and also with the Konsolidator's adding into this data warehouse and these data sources.
So therefore, we would believe that we will see an increased income from this segment in the future. Again, we've just started it. We didn't see any income from it in Q1, but we do believe that we will see some income from it already in Q2, that the response from current customers is very high, and we do have a lot of meetings where we present this solution to our customers. So, so we are also optimistic around Konsolidator BI. Yes, so that's the growth opportunity we are working on right now. There are others, but they are much, much earlier in the pipeline. We're calling that the research projects. So these five we have been working on for half a year.
Of course, direct sales has always been there, but the four others we have been working for since Q3, Q4 last year, and now they are, you can say, out and in operation. So, but. And we, as I said, hope to see result, few results in Q2, but then from after the summer. Yes, of course, if there are questions regarding this, we can take that in the Q&A session. Cool. Moving into to finance, where I will hand over the microphone to Jack.
Thank you, Claus. I will move on with the financial highlights for Q1 2024. It's been yeah, a quarter with growth. We got a little technical issues again.
Yes.
Oh, there we go. There we go. So I think we still have a little technical issues here, but, let's see if... But anyway, I'm gonna talk about the revenue. On your right, there is a table which is also in our in our Q1 reporting. The revenue has increased by 8%, primarily, due to the increase in our subscription revenues. We had a little decrease in our onboarding and consulting revenues. If you go further down, there is a line called the EBIT. The EBIT has decreased. The EBIT loss, I mean, so it's been improved by 7%, and the primary reason for this improvement is the increase in revenues.
The cost is pretty much the same as it is, it was in Q1 2023, and we also have the same average number of employees as we did a year ago. Moving on, I'm sorry about, Oh, there's something happening now. Sorry about that. Moving on. Yesterday, we announced that we have seen interest from investors and also from the board of directors and management in order to increase our capital with DKK 6 million. This is also the reason why we have moved our reporting deadline from May 8th to the 26, so that the board of directors and management could invest as well.
This capital has also will improve our equity, which was negative on March 31st, and will also improve our cash position. Moving on to, maybe I say the use for with this is going to to Iberia. It will cost some money to start up Iberia. It'll take some time before they are up and running, and it will also use for the other projects, as Claus mentioned. For the cash flow, we've it's the operating cash flow is impacted by a finance payment, which is DKK 5.5 million higher than last year, and the investing activities is down, which is investing in our software.
The SaaS metrics, do I say it one more time, Claus? And a couple of times. Is the sales for this quarter, the new sales, have been okay, but we've been hit by the churn as the churn is 13.2% on an annualized basis, so that has hit us hard. The ARR has increased on a year-to-year basis on 4%, but only zero since the beginning of the year. First quarter is always a slow quarter, where all our customers groups, they are preparing their annual report. So it's a harder quarter for new sales. Moving on to our outlook.
As you probably also noticed, we are still keeping, maintaining our outlook and, which is due to to the fact that, the initiatives we believe are very interesting and will be able to, to
give us the ARR of DKK 24 million-DKK 28 million for 2024. Yes, and this concludes my walkthrough. And now to the Q&A.
Perfect. Thank you, both of you. Let's move directly into the questions, and have the first question here. So the first question is, seven new customers in a full quarter seems like quite a low number. When are you expecting to see an increase in that number?
Yes, that is, seven is low, and is also lower than we expected. Normally, Q1 is, is difficult, because, our customers are fairly busy with the, with the annual report. But even that, then the seven is, is low. Q2 is normally a fairly strong quarter. So, so just from that, we believe that the, the number will be higher than, than seven in, in Q2. But what I think is more important, that is when we are getting back to the very high growth, which we used to. It's not a big secret that 2022 and 2023 was a fairly low growth for us, where we were used to more than, yeah, close to 100% growth on annual basis. Then the 2022 and 2023 was, much lower.
So, you can say the more interesting answer that is, when are we getting back to the very high growth numbers? And, that is exactly the reason why we have these growth initiatives. For you that might not follow us closely, then we raised capital last year in April, and then with those capital, we initiated a strategy where we adjusted the strategy and found these growth opportunities, which we now are seeing that is getting into life, into operation. So hopefully, as I also said before, we do not expect to see a lot of those new initiatives creating results from in Q2. So, that will come after the summer, so that we will see in Q3 and Q4.
But still, back to the original question, we do expect more customers than seven in Q2.
Are you seeing the churn and growth trend from Q1 continue into Q2?
Yes. Yeah, I think I already answered on the growth. On the churn part, churn has been tricky for us for a little bit less than two years now. We are working actually, maybe you cannot see it, but we are actually working very hard on this. What we have done is that, we have 250-something customers, and until now, we've only had one customer success, and we have realized that is... that's too few. I mean, one person cannot cover 260 customers. So we have hired one more customer success, who will start tomorrow.
So as from tomorrow, we'll be two in customer success, plus, you can say, those sitting in the onboarding team who are onboarding new customers, they are, of course, also having a close contact with the customers. So, we do expect that the churn will drop. It has to drop. I mean, 13%, as Jack said, that is way too high. Before we saw the increase in churn, we were about around 5%-6%, so we want to get back to 5%-6%. We believe that that will not happen in Q2, probably not in Q3, but we do expect that we'll see that the engagement of a new customer success, more focus on making customers happy.
Actually, also, the Konsolidator BI, which I talked about, is also something that caused churn, which we also believe now will reduce. So to sum all this up, yes, we do believe that we will grow more in Q2 than in Q1. Yes, we do believe that churn will reduce, maybe not in Q2, but then at least from after the, after the summer.
Maybe that also goes a bit hand in hand with this question, but the next question is: What makes you so sure that you will see an improvement to churn later in 2024, and what level do you expect?
Yes, I think, I mean, the way, I mean, our churn works is that we have a termination notice, which is different. So, and we report churn when the customer do not pay more. So therefore, we know a little bit more about the future than you know, because we know who actually have terminated in Q3. One of the reasons why we do not report that is because, I mean, bankruptcies and stuff like that can, of course, also have an impact on churn. So even that we know who has terminated in Q3, we do not know the actual number because some other unforeseen things can happen.
But that is, of course, one of the reasons why we are more optimistic about the future, but also because now you can say some of those customers we have lost the last one or two years was maybe one of some of those customers that did not use our product that much and maybe were a little bit outside our ideal customer profile. So I think now that we are a little bit back to the core customers of Konsolidator and therefore can also expect a lower churn in the future.
You've also touched upon the next question here. For a period, the biggest issue you have been discussing has been the churn level, but the customer acquisition level also seems low. What are you doing to get this number up, and why should investors feel confident that this will happen?
Yeah, good question. I mean, there's no doubt that the direct sale, which I touched upon, I mean, that when we started Konsolidator, I had the ambition of going global and being a huge global company. Then we knew from the start that direct sale would be difficult. Have a direct sales in Thailand and Congo is a bit difficult. So, so in order to growth in, you can say, remote part of the world, from Denmark, we need another channel. That we have known always. And now in line with our ARR has increased, now we have around DKK 20 million in ARR, then you can say the denominator is large, so growing high numbers on direct sale would both be difficult but also expensive.
So you can say the optimism is that we have found new growth path. Of course, we then need to show some result on those growth path, but our optimism can be seen in our guidance that we are still only at DKK 19.4 million, but we still expect DKK 24 million-DKK 28 million this year. So we are optimistic about that some of these new growth initiatives will generate some results already this year. Because obviously our direct sales cannot move from 2019-20 24, that would be a little bit too optimistic. So that is where you should find your optimism is in that we can get back to the high growth.
I also think you have touched upon the next question here, but can you explain which initiatives you have made to increase ARR growth and especially profitability?
Yes. We haven't touched upon profitability, but I think that's relevant because, yes, we have the direct sales, we have the channel, we have Iberia, and we have Sweden. That's four growth initiatives. So that's on the revenue side. On the cost side, which of course also is need to include in order to move towards profitability, that can be seen in channel growth, is fairly cheap in customer acquisition as its partners are doing the selling. Sweden, that's a partnership, so we don't have the cost to Sweden. And Iberia is actually a joint venture, so that's also you can say a lower cost part of that.
So, so all three of these elements that are example of how you can growth at a lower cost. So, so if those growth channels become successful, then you can also see the profitability moving closer, as the cost for those growth initiatives are lower than direct sales.
Maybe you can explain a bit about the structure in Sweden. As I understood it, it was an employee or former employee that is the partner in Sweden. How is that set up, and can that be duplicated elsewhere?
Both yes and no. The structure is that Peter, that's his name, the sales partner, he has shown that he can sell Konsolidator. He generated 90 customers in three years when he was a country manager. That he has shown he knows Konsolidator, he understands the product, he understands the market, he knows the ecosystem, and he has a good reputation. He's a good guy. That is always difficult to copy to other countries, right? Well, he has that. What is different is that he's a partner, we do not pay his salaries and office rent and the sales cost, that he does himself.
But then he gets a cut of the income that he generates. That's a, that's a, you can say, normal partner structure. Then because it's him, he's getting all the inbound leads that we are receiving. So whenever someone is going into our website or something like that, then Peter, he will get the leads. So in that respect, he's treated a bit different than other partners. Other partners do not get that, at least now. Might be for the future, but right now that's a, that's a model we only working with in Sweden, because he has proven that he can convert leads to customers. So, yeah.
Yeah. A lot of companies are struggling with partner strategies, never really getting it off the ramp. How do you work with partners, and what are you looking to do to be successful in the partner channel?
That's right, and that's probably also the reason why we've been so slow in starting this up. We started up a couple of years ago, where we engaged a board member who has experience from Microsoft. Microsoft customers in Business Central and F&O, formerly Navision and Axapta, has always resonated very well to our product. The segment of Navision Business Central customers is also the segment for our ideal customer profile. So there's always been a close con—you can say—relation between us and Microsoft, and that was the reason why we engaged this Microsoft guy two years ago. So we have some, you can say, knowledge about how to build a partner channel, which definitely is not easy. And you have to be patient.
We started with the partner manager we engaged August last year, and that is, what is that? seven, six, seven months. We haven't got any customers yet. Normally it doesn't take six to seven months to get the first customer, but that is normally in the partner channel. We are impatient, patient. So we are moving on, and then we have our own way of working with partners that we believe is successful. Concentrating mainly on Denmark, but are slowly expanding to other countries as well.
Why did you choose Iberia as the place for your next sales office compared to other potential locations and countries?
That's a very good question. Because they reached out to us.
Mm-hmm.
So, I mean, the managing director down there, Peter, he reached out to us, end of last year, and we had the brief conversation and built it on a model, and the fit was very well. It was good from the start, good conversation. So, and he convinced us that that would be a strong move. So, that was actually, as you can say, an inbound lead and not us reaching out to them. So, yeah, good question. Why Iberia? Yeah.
And then we have the final question here. At the end of Q1, you had DKK 246,000 in cash. How will you bridge potential shortage of cash between now and the capital increase?
Well, as the capital increase is in process, then we expect to get the money within a week or two. So there is no bridge at hand, you could say.
Yeah. Okay, perfect.
Can I just comment a little bit on that?
Yeah.
I think it's extremely important when you invest in a company like Konsolidator, or SaaS companies in general, that you are familiar with this term called default alive and default dead. Default alive means that you have a cash flow deficit, but you have enough money in the banks to cover that deficit, then you're default alive. Default dead, that is when you have a cash flow deficit that is higher than what you have on the bank. So you can say since last year, April, we have always run default alive. So now we will increase, we make a capital injection of DKK 6 million, so that will make us default alive.
And now we have enough money, as Jack said, to cover the expenses to mainly Spain, but also some money to fund to get Peter started in Sweden, and also some additional funds to get the partner channel moving. So that's the three main thing that this DKK 6 million will cover, and that's should be enough. That's expected to be enough. So if new opportunities arises in the future, we will not be afraid to ask the capital market to inject more money in order to always be default alive. But the money we have here, that's enough for the current projects that we have.
That finalizes the Q&A. We have no more questions left. Before we end the webcast, I will just hand over the mic for you if you have any final remarks to end with.
No, I think we've covered a lot. I mean, we are a company that see ourselves as a growth company, and we hope and expect to be back on the high growth path again during 2024.
And thank you for joining on such short notice as well. So... That's right.
Thank you. Have a good day.
Thank you. Have a good day.