Good morning, and welcome to this half-year presentation and Q&A with Scandinavian Medical Solutions. With us today, we have the CEO and Head of Sales. 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 Scandinavian Medical Solutions to start the presentation. Your line is now open.
Thank you. Hi, and welcome to the presentation and Q&A for our consolidated half-year report, which we are gonna briefly go through today. The presentation will be in around 12-15 minutes, where we will be mainly focusing on, of course, a bit of deep dive into the half-year report and the analysis behind. The agenda today is a bit of the highlights of a half-year report, a bit of financial overview, looking into the different departments, and then we'll end up with a Q&A session. Looking into the highlights of our first half year, the management, it's important to say, is very pleased with the numbers that we presented, that we're gonna go a bit deeper into afterwards.
We took this year in with a revenue guidance around DKK 210 million-DKK 230 million, and with a EBITDA of DKK 20 million-DKK 23 million. We emphasize that it's, we still believe, despite the numbers for the first half year, a bit lower than, let's say, 50% of our guidance, that we are still on track for meeting our financial guidance for the full year. As Martin will shortly explain a bit deeper into the next slide, this first 6 months of our fiscal year has been very heavy on internal investments, opening a new U.S. department, as well for the infrastructure of the company.
Yeah. So, as Jens briefly mentioned, then we have made some investments this first half year, and that has, of course, affected our EBITDA. But we see it as a positive thing that we have already made these investments, which will be a part of securing the future growth of the company. First of all, as you may have noticed, then we have moved into the U.S. market, so our former CEO in Denmark, Jens Krohn, have physically moved to the United States. The reason for moving over there, because we already had business in the past with the United States, is that we want to get deeper into the market.
So by being presented in the market, we have the opportunity to shorten our delivery time, be more cost-effective, we can have a storage capacity over there so our customers can actually visibly see the items, and have them delivered more or less next day. So we expect a lot from this department in the future. Jens Krohn is the right person to start up. We have seen it here in Denmark. He developed this company, this department here in Denmark, so we know he has the capability of doing it. Jens has a long history with customers in the U.S., and he's a well-known name over there, so that has been the main reason to send him as the first person to build the ground over there.
Of course, that requires some investments, and this has also affected this first half year, but we see it as an investment in the future. So, that's the first highlight of the year. Then we have developed or introduced a new ERP system in the company. This also is to secure the future growth of the company. We simply have grown bigger, have to deliver more data, more accurate data. So to ensure that we are effective, accurate, then we have made this investment a bit before planned, but again, we see it as a positive thing because we are growing fast, and we want to be able to secure the company to the future.
So this has all been one of the investments this year. Then, last but not least, and then we have hired in some new employees, mainly in our rental fleet, and we will be talking about this on one of the first slides. As you see in the picture, we have Jakob, who's hired in as the new sales lead in our rental fleet. Jakob was hired in end of last year and has been really already been a success, I would say. We have some a lot of new leads on our rentals. We also have some more units already rented out than when we look back at last year, so a bigger rate of rented equipment, so that's very positive.
Today, we have also made a kind of breaking point, so we are break even on our cost for the rental fleet, meaning that we're actually earning a bit more than we are spending on the fleet, and we still have a lot of units both to rent, but a big market to enter. So, already now to be break even with this department is really, really positive in our opinion.
It's important to say that we are sooner on a breakeven point than we actually forecasted with our rental department. So without having a full utilization on our fleet, being at breakeven with the investments being done upfront, is really a what we would say is a milestone for the company. I'll deep dive a bit more into it on the next slide, but it's important to say any debt and/or leasing you'll see in our financial highlights are solely related to financing our rental portfolio. So that's also a very positive thing, that despite having anything on the leasing, that we are still with a not a fully utilization on a breakeven point much sooner than what we expected.
Then we have had a focus on our inventory as well. We have had some question about the value of our inventory. Last year we had some comments that people thought it was a bit high. We're actually very happy about the value of the inventory right now. We have focused a bit more on the parts department, so being able to have the right parts on the shelf to be able to cater to the customers immediately, that's really, really important in that business. Many of our customers have service contracts in the market for systems, so they need the parts to be delivered within one, two days to ensure the uptime they have on their contract with their clients.
So we have focused on having the right parts on the shelf, so we're able to deliver next day. And this also, of course, requires that we invest a bit more in specific units, which we have data proving that they are requested in the market. So this has been one of the investments we have made as well. You don't really see it in the numbers because we just lowered our trading inventory a bit and higher our parts inventory. But as a company, we see it as a really, really positive thing that we are able to cater to more customers at an urgent need.
Looking a bit into the financial overview, as you can see, the first six months of our fiscal year, we grew the revenue with 7%, which is, of course, for the fast reader, less than what we guide for the full year. Yet, as our company is very, let's say, conservative, structured around that we are not, even though we have a very strong continued order book, we never celebrate, and we never take in for account a sale until the risk transfer has actually been made. As some of our equipment, especially in equipment, is you can see from our press releases as well, are quite heavy, percentage-wise, out of DKK 102 million.
It can fluctuate a lot whether they are on one side or the other of the half year. And that's why what we can look into from the order books, we're still firm on maintaining the guidance for the full year. Our gross profit percentage-wise is more or less the same as for the last full year result percentage-wise. So we are, let's say, on target there for the coming six months of the company. Our staff cost, as you've seen, as Martin also briefly mentioned, has had an increase, and that is solely related to actually making the company ready for the future growth that we've seen.
So we believe now that we've found the right level of staff costs, and the team we have around SMS to be prepared for the coming growth going onwards. This, of course, these increased costs, one-time investments and setting up new departments, ERP systems and so on, of course, has a natural impact being carried out in the first half year, despite a growth at 7%, will have an impact on the EBITDA. Looking a bit into our balance sheet, on the assets, we see the rental assets, for one of the highlights is more or less the same as it was from the full year. Has not been carried out any new investments so far in our rental fleet.
The slight decrease is mainly related to the depreciation of our rental assets. For now, we are not actively looking into adding more systems into our fleet, only when it's on customer-based, tailor-made rental solutions from our long-term contracts. As Martin said, our inventory of trading goods, you can see, is more or less the same. It's very much what we say, what's the right name for? The minute of closing, as we are not a producing factory.
Yeah, so it's like a snapshot.
Yeah.
At the moment we closed the first half.
Exactly. And it can fluctuate a lot. Just out of April, we are roughly DKK 14 million lower on the inventory for trading goods. So that is just to highlight a bit on the level of how much it can fluctuate when goods are coming in and when they're actually going out to the customers... as we have a very strong order book continuously, that's why we believe we found a very good level for our inventory going onwards. On the liabilities of the company, you can see that there's an increase in what we call debt to financial institutions, as Martin shortly mentioned. This should be seen as actually a short bridge financing until our latest units that came in last fiscal year.
They're actually being activated and, then this is slowly transformed up to, to the lease liabilities. So looking from a net cash point perspective, this is not negatively impacting our possibilities of still trading, more equipment, in both trading and in parts. That was what we had for presenting. Of course, looking very much forward to some, some interesting questions, hopefully.
Perfect. Thank you for that, Jens and Martin. Let's move directly into the questions. The first question here is from Mikkel Kierkegaard, who asked: how many full-time employees was employed at the end of H1? You state the average number to be 25, and you normally also state the end-of-period number, but it seems like it is not included in this report. And question number two, around full-time employees, how many do you expect to be at the end of the year?
Yeah. So, the number we have at the end of first half year is 26 full-time employees. And, for this year, we do not expect to be many more people, so it will be more or less the same. We always look in the market. If there are some opportunities, we grab them, but, but we do not have plan to hire a lot of people, this year.
So right now we are, of course, actively looking for a new chief accountant or CFO, if you may. And that will be replaced with the interim CFO that we have running right now to cover the position until we found the right candidate. So the additional hires that we're looking into doing for the company is solely replacing the interims that we have on the list, so to say.
The next question: You state that key investments has had a negative impact on EBITDA in H1. Can you quantify how big the impact is from the ERP system and the U.S. startup costs, and additionally provide insights in where in the P&L these costs are included?
Yeah. Unfortunately, we are not allowed to share the actual percentage or numbers of each of these key investments that's been done in the first half year. But we can go as far as explaining that the majority of the impact here and the key investments are related to the U.S. department startup and our ERP system. Of course, starting up a new department is of course involving a significant startup cost, which we are not foreseeing getting into the second half of this year.
Naturally related also, as Martin said, that we are pushing forward, actually implementing the new ERP system is also now that is a consolidated report, meaning that we're not only reporting on the European, but also being able for the full year to actually implement in our accounting system, to have the U.S. department, and that instead of being behind and trying to solve, then we'd rather want to be proactive also with our ERP system and make sure that it was set up at the same time as we actually activated our U.S. department and being able to run everything in one system to optimize. That, of course, then, let's say, double impacted the EBITDA on this year.
But we thought it was the right time to do it simultaneously as starting up the U.S. department.
And then it is, of course, important to say that we also expect, you know, a something to be, you know, paid out from, from these investments. So right now we have made these investment, and, some of them are one-time investments, some of them we have some future cost on as well. But for example, in the U.S. department, of course, we expect, the, the department to also contribute to the, to the numbers, for ongoing. So, so these investments are, you know, seems a bit more heavy now, but we expect a lot from them in the, in the future as well.
A follow-up question around the U.S. department: Do you have an expected ramp-up time in the U.S. before you believe the department is fully operating and profitable as a standalone department?
We could accelerate the business, but it's all about doing it the right way. So, Jens have built SMS here in Denmark, and I think you could compare it a lot to the business here. Of course, there's been some challenges in the United States. You need some permissions, you need some... yeah, a lot of paperwork has to be done, and of course, that has been taking a lot of time and effort in the beginning, but now we are at a good point where we can actually start to store equipment, and then we have a sales normally time on 3-6 months. So that's where we expect, you know, the first sales to be going through.
Your gross margin has fluctuated between 14.4% and 23% in your semi-annual reports, ending at 17% in this H1. Could you give some comments on where you expect to see a normalized gross profit margin going forward? Should we look in the low end of the historic numbers, or on the high end, or somewhere in the middle?
I think the answer will be somewhere in the middle, but of course, we adapt to the market. So we have had the opportunities to take some strategic sales this half year, which has affected the margin in some way. But as you know, a whole perspective, we have thought that this has been the right way to run the business. So we always look at the risk factors, and if there's low risk, we would rather take the deal, gain market share, than sit on our hands and wait to make better margins. So yeah, we have a bit of aggressive market strategy, but we have seen it worked out before.
Yeah, we don't expect it to be lower than the numbers you see today, but we are looking into the market and see which opportunities we have to expand the business.
Of course, then it's a bit of a flight seat principle, as you're not manufacturing the goods. If we have one piece of product requested by a customer and two other neighbors in a supply and demand position, then of course, it's better to make the sale and do it strategic, because we have the foundation and the muscles to actually do it. Then if we're not doing the sale, the neighbor would do. So, of course, it will always fluctuate a bit on when we're doing the strategic deals. Yet, we see it as a positive trend that we're actually in a position where we can do because we are covering such a big market share than we were just two years ago.
Yeah, and furthermore, we have expanded our product line a bit, so we have moved into selling a bit different modalities than we have done before. And in a startup period where you are trying to gain market share for this modality, you also have to be a bit more aggressive to gain the customers and to show what you're capable of. So this has already also affected the gross margin a bit. But then again, the strategy I've had before is that to be aggressive in the beginning, gain market share, gain customers, then we're able to show what we are capable of doing, showing our quality, and then slowly but steady, we can improve the gross margin on the products.
Your EBITDA margin has been on a gradual decline since 2021, and ended last financial year at 11%, which was also lower than your midpoint guidance during the year. What is the main driver in the decreasing margin and also the lower-than-guided margin? And should we expect to see a margin pickup in 2024, 2025?
We had some effects from the COVID situation, especially on our CT scanners, and it has been the same for all our competitors in the market, that there was a lot of CT scanners coming out in the market after COVID, which reduced the price a lot, so that had a negative effect on our margin. Of course, we have, you know, been looking at the situation, made the strategic moves that we had to, so that had affected the margin in the past. We do not expect this to continue in the future. We also we already saw have seen a stabilization of this CT market. So definitely that has been one of the key factors for a lower margin.
And then as a supplement, of course, as the business is growing, then it would be probably too much to think that the EBITDA margin would be able to keep up following something like 20% of the revenue. But as we're growing and conquering market shares, of course, also having the capacity costs of the company that is required both on the inventory level, but also the staff, and what else required to run the company today, it just naturally requires an increasing revenue to gain the same bottom line, which will then, of course, if you're looking from a percentage point of view, lower it a bit.
But, if we're looking solely at this year, being able to, what we believe is, is really positive, presenting, and guiding for such numbers, where this is one of these milestone years for, for SMS, where we are introducing our first broad department, yet still, guiding with coming up with, with not only a positive EBITDA, but actually what we believe is quite a good, EBITDA, and as well for the, for the first half year, we're very comfortable in, in, in the future looking ahead of us.
When looking at these strategic sales that you make during the year, do you have any numbers on, how many new clients or how many, actual clients that you address during a year? Or is it something that you expect to be able to produce in the future for investors to follow the number of clients that you actually have?
Yeah, it's not something we have measurements internally on new and existing customers, but it's not something we have discussed to share yet. That's something we can either take on a personal email or call. If somebody's interested, then we can discuss this further.
Your net cash is -DKK 15 million. One should expect that opening in U.S. would be an additional drag on cash. Would you consider raising more equity?
No, not for now. There's a good factor behind, as also shortly presented in the financial overview, is that any debt is solely relating not to the trading but to our leasing activities of our rental fleet. Also, the big part of the U.S. department is actually what we were historically when buying systems overseas has been forced to actually take them to our European warehouse to do a firm check, make sure every packaging was right, to have it under control before shipping to our U.S. clients, which of course made it both from a financial but also from a time-wise perspective, a bit double work.
Where we now are able, with our U.S. department and warehousing, actually to ship the same equipment directly, which is destined for the U.S. market, which is of course optimizing. So it's a bit of, let's say, reusing the same warehousing and inventory, which we already had. It's just whether which direction we are sending it to. So we don't necessarily see the U.S. department that we will have to invest another DKK 20-30 million into additional warehouse for there, because we already been investing into this inventory. So in that sense, we're not worried about our cash situation at all.
Maybe you can explain a bit more about the debt, what you mean about the leasing, so?
Yeah, the leasing is a sale leaseback on one of our equipment, as it's some. You see, we have a rental fleet with a value of roughly DKK 42 million right now. The upside there is that we have a very good leaseback situation, so we're not harming our cash situation in having to take it from the trading department and actually handicapping them into being able to trade less goods or taking the right strategic purchases when they arise. The bank debt is what we call a bridge financing. Basically, it's DKK 21 million, and it's solely related to having a bridge finance until they're activated on the first long-term rental, these heavy units, and they will actually then automatically go into as a lease debt.
When you say on rental that you are not at full utilization yet, can you say anything about what level you are at? Is it 80%, 90%, or what level are you at?
For the first half year, we can share that much, that we were at a 69% utilization, so there's still room for it. Our fleet consists of different types of rental units. There's the ones destined for the long-term rentals, and there's also these ones that's, that's for what we call the ambulances in our industry, is where the customers requires 4, 8, 12 weeks of rental. Then they are the ones, where you cannot forecast as such when they're being rented out, because typically when customer approaches us for short-term rental, it's something they needed yesterday because they have a breakdown, or something like that.
Getting these units activated more into the market, higher the utilization, would then, of course, also have a very positive impact, not only on the rental department, but also the company's growth, profit, and revenue.
Yeah, we see that with the arriving of Jakob that we have a really, really strong pipeline in the rental, so a lot of activity is going on. So we see a positive future regarding the utilization rate.
We are at the last question here: Would you expect that the time of growth, growth rates above 30% is over for now, or is it possible to achieve these levels again once U.S. has been established?
Yeah, so the plans in the U.S. is also to go deeper in the market, and that, that also means that we expect a better, gross margin from the products sold there. So for now, we have been selling a lot, to the big, big resellers over there, but to get deeper into the market, sell to small resellers who have service contracts, usually, smaller, companies who do installation and such, then we will also have a, a better gross margin there. But as I also said before, that then we're looking at, at a market which is dynamic, so if we see some strategic, movement, which we think has to be done to, to gain market share, gain new customers, then, then we are also, not scared to, to do so. Yeah, I think that's...
You know, we cannot talk about future guidance, but I think that's the closest we can tell to, yeah-
Yeah.
... that you know our expectations.
Perfect. And that was all the questions, so that finalizes the Q&A. But before we end the webcast, I will just hand over the word for you, if you have any kind of final remarks to end with.
I think, first of all, thank you very much for the time, Nikolaj, and for the good questions. We hope they are been answered to fulfillment to your request. As Martin said, don't hesitate, should there be any follow-up questions from our presentation, Q&A session today, always more than welcome to send us an email and give us a call, and we'll answer it the best way possible.
Yeah, and then I'll add on that, we expect in the near future also to make a deep dive in our U.S. department. So yeah, keep your eyes on our investor mail, and there will be news about when and where this presentation will take place.