Good afternoon, and welcome to this 2023/2024 Annual Report presentation and Q&A with Scandinavian Medical Solutions. With us today, we have the CEO, Jens Paulsen, and Head of Sales and Investor Relations, Martin Lind. First, there will be a presentation, and afterwards, a Q&A. 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 Jens and Martin to start the presentation. Jens and Martin, your line is now open.
Thank you very much, Anders, and hi to everybody. We've been looking very much forward to today to present our newly published annual report for last year, to give you a brief through some of the figures, as well as some insights from the different departments and also the look of the fiscal year we just entered and come into, so from the agenda, we'll brush over a bit of highlights, what we believe is important to dive into from the last fiscal year, a bit of our financial key figures, and then in the end, we'll do a bit of guidance expectations for the 2024-2025 year, and then ending off with hopefully a very good Q&A session with a lot of interesting questions. First of all, a bit of highlights from the year we just ended.
As also stated from the report, we ended up with a revenue of DKK 226.6 million, with the EBITDA at around DKK 21 million, which is within the guidance that we forecasted from the start of the year, which we're very pleased with, ending up where we are. It's been a year where we managed to achieve not only growing the top line, but basically also the bottom line, even though it might not seem like that from being the same EBITDA as last year. It's been heavily driven by many investments, one-time investments made in the first half year, as you can also probably see from our half-year report, as first of all, adding the U.S. subsidiary going live 1st of January.
It required us to also do some internal investments in first and foremost, our ERP system had to be upgraded, not only to running the Danish mothership, but also now our U.S. subsidiary, as well as being able to make a consolidated fiscal year into one program, which of course required a lot of external consultants and hence the costs to that. But making it effective in already the second half year, the investments we made really managed us to speed up a lot of things and also running with less financial capacity than having two bookkeeping systems, essentially. This year, we chose to also give our investors a bit more in detail about the split between the different departments and what we can share also from a competitive angle.
As you can see, the trading department is still accounting for the majority of our revenue, roughly 76%, and then the two new, fairly new business units in parts and after-sales and rental accounting for almost 24% as of this year. As we talked a bit about, this is an overview of the biggest strategic investments made in the last fiscal year. There's been, of course, a lot, as mentioned, into the ERP systems, but also a lot of one-off costs in starting up the actual subsidiary in the U.S., of course, made a significant impact on our EBITDA in the first half year, but also as outlining that going from 7.9% in EBITDA to 10.5% in the second half, ending us up at 9.3% EBITDA margin. It's really pleased for me to see that we managed for the one-time cost really to be efficient, yet still keeping the top line and the good pace in also earnings of our different divisions.
Then I will take you through the highlights from the different departments, and we will start out with the rental department. Right now, we see that the market has changed a lot or is still changing. People, they like to move from this fixed site scanners to more flexible solutions. We see that people move their capital from CapEx to OpEx solutions. And with this set, we also see that this affects our rental business in a positive way. As a new thing, we have also introduced our Pay‑Per‑Scan solution.
Maybe I can shortly explain a bit more about this whole Pay‑Per‑Scan and what it means. First of all, as we're called Scandinavian Medical Solutions, so it requires us also, when we're not developing any products, to say, okay, how can we be forthcoming and innovative and develop new solutions to our customers and bridging the issues they're facing for scanning capacity. What we've seen through the trends is, even though customers are willing to commit on short-term solutions to test out whether they are able to in-house the scanning capacity, primarily at the private clinics, is often required with some kind of funding for the startup of a rental, often via the bank, which might be difficult if the bank don't trust 100% the business case, which we essentially do.
So, offering the Pay‑Per‑Scan as what we call a risk-sharing model, where we basically put the unit there for free, but taking a cut of their scans and the revenue per month enables our customers kind of risk-free to start up and get the business running. And having with the small caveat and the option in the rental Pay‑Per‑Scan contracts that when they exceed certain level, they're actually able to take our Pay‑Per‑Scan solution and lift it into a long-term fixed solution. So this is seen as an effective tool for our customers to get started and then grow into our long-term rental solutions when they get the flow of running, basically.
And when we see this as a full picture that we have added quality equipment and these flexible solutions to the fleet, we also see that the utilization rate has really increased. Actually, at the end of the financial year, we had 100% of the fleet rented out, which is, of course, extremely positive and something we have aimed for. This also makes us confident that we have the right strategy for the future in the rental department. So really, really positive. We also, because of this, have looked into adding further assets in the fleet for the coming years, and hopefully, we will add more value to our customers with these units.
Yeah, and important to outline, it's also done in the report, but just to what is important for rental as it's living a bit out of the world from our trading and our parts and trading departments. Positive thing with rental is as long as you're doing fairly high margins on your rentals, as this is asset-heavy and investment is high per unit, then we would quickly drain our cash flow, basically in handicapping the two other departments in trading equipment and parts if it was on our own. So with the lease-back solutions that we have for our rental solutions, it actually enables us, when we're hitting the critical mass, to actually return the investment, the lease at a higher percentage, way higher than we're actually paying for the lease. A positive thing here is really that we are able to accelerate the rental department based fully on external capital.
Yes, and if we move to the highlights for our trading and parts department, then first and foremost for the trading department, we have managed to keep the momentum. We saw that first half year was a bit slower, but really here in the second half of the year, we have been able to catch up and really, yeah, managed to catch up with the business. We have also reduced the average inventory turnover, which is also extremely positive looking ahead. Some of the older units we have managed to turn and sell. So we have now the possibility to invest in newer equipment. From the parts side, we have hired in a new employee, which has also given us the possibility to expand on a geographical area, which we have not been present before.
So this has been one of our key strategies from the beginning to expand our markets as well. And it seems like this has been really a positive start. Also, we are working on a data-driven model to precise our inventory, meaning that we can now track which units are demanded in the market, and then we will make our stock from this data. So hopefully, we'll have more accurate stock ongoing from here. If we look at our U.S. department, which has also been extremely exciting to start off, then we have now already facilitated multiple sales from the U.S. department, meaning that our presence in the U.S. has actually contributed to these sales. This has been something we have been aiming for since the start, but we already see now that it actually pays off.
We have also made our first rental agreement in the United States, which we're actually, I mean, surprisingly early in the process of being present at this market, but we are extremely happy that we are already at a stage where we can support rental units in the United States. Furthermore, then we have moved our new warehouse and office in the United States. We quite early in the process saw that we need a strategic location. So we moved from the office, which we actually intended, to a new bigger office where we have our warehouse as well. This location is near an airport and harbor, which makes it strategically good and makes us able to deliver parts within a very, very short time frame. So yeah, again, very positive.
Short look into the P&L statement of the last fiscal year, just quickly to highlight what we believe is important to see here. On a one-to-one basis, not only growing our revenue, but as Martin's saying, with a really strong second half of the fiscal year, we managed to maintain the same gross profit margin roughly as we had the year before, despite not only heavy investments, but also a lot of internal time allocated from many of our key employees to actually kick off and start driving the new investment initiatives that we have. As you can see, the staff costs have increased somewhat a bit last year, and we believe now it's been a build-up phase to actually being ready for the start of the S-curve we're in for the strategic initiatives that we do have. Quick look on the asset side of the balance sheet.
I think here it's important to see that it's not because we are necessarily decreasing our inventory of rental assets as we've gone roughly DKK 10 million down. This was mainly because of two units in our rental fleet that we could see that were not really either what we call cost-efficient or high-end equipment and not really benefiting of the overall utilization rate. So always being agile and adaptive with the rental fleet, we chose to sell out these units even with a small profit more than they owed us in the books. So it's nice, and as you can see, there's a new line saying assets under construction, that meaning as of 30th of September, that's where they are when we're actually building. Leading a bit down to the part coming on the next slide for our lease-back solutions.
Prior to that, we would like to shortly highlight, as we also mentioned in the report, we believe we found a very good level for how much cash we've bound into our trading goods, meaning complete systems for trading as well as our spare parts. It is slightly lower than same time last year, yet this is a minute picture, and of course, it is moving up and down as equipment is coming in and out, yet underlying that we now found this adequate level for having not too much cash bound into the company and hence handicapping our cash flow, but secondly, also in the market we are in right now, enabling us to do rapid deployments of equipment when customers need it because they are much more now buying on demand.
Coming a bit back to our rental and lease activities, as you can see down on note seven, it's fair to explain the DKK 21 million is not related to us obtaining debt to run the business. This is simply what we call interim financing while building new rental assets because we cannot put our assets into a lease program and get hence the funds paid out before they're actually finished up and deployed on the first rental, so with this clever solution, we believe we are actually able to have an interim finance from our bank, not having rental, having to loan the money in the trading department, hence handicapping them, but getting it financed at the same interest rates and the same terms as actually a leasing, and when they're finished up and ready to deploy, that will be shifted.
That meaning as of the 30th, it's a minute picture. You can see the total lease liabilities actually sums up between the DKK 13.5 million plus the DKK 21 million. A bit of outlook for this year. Our new guidance presented, we anticipate an increase in our revenue in the range DKK 240 million-DKK 270 million with an EBITDA of DKK 24 million-DKK 29 million. We believe this is first and foremost realistic, but also showing a fair growth target, not only top line, but also start showing the investments made into the bottom line is expected. It's a long journey, so it's not that we from day one to day two will actually see a huge benefit in the EBITDA because of the investments we made are long terms. Yet it's going to work with keeping the same inventory level while still increasing our revenue with a profitable revenue increase. It will have a natural effect on stabilization and optimization of our cash flows and then in the end, our net working capital.
Yeah, and of course, as you also saw, that we are building new units for our rental fleet, as well as we are adding parts to our parts inventory, so of course, in the coming financial year, we also expect these two departments to contribute to the further growth. Furthermore, the U.S. department has now reached a level where we are actually able to sell units from the American market, so we also expect the U.S. department to contribute to the further growth of the company. That concludes what we wanted to show you today. Of course, we hope there's a lot of interesting questions on the Q&A session.
Thank you for the presentation to the both of you. Let's have the first question here. How much of your rental fleet is at the moment being rented out and what level are you aiming for?
Yeah. So as we explained in the presentation as well, 100% of the units we have in our rental fleet is now out for rental. And of course, we have more units on the way. So we try to adapt to the request we have in the market. And as Jen said, now the production time has shortened a lot. So we are actually able to build on demand. And that's what our plan for the future is as well. So we will build more units if we have the request for it.
Giving us the upside of not having to build in front and do the investments upfront, but we can actually sell rental projects tailor-made to our customers based on first building them when we actually have a signed contract in hand.
I think maybe the next question falls a bit in line of that. Does a 100% utilization rate in the rental department show that you have higher demand than you are supplying, or does it show that you first buy/lease the unit when you have a customer for it?
Yes, it's a combination of both. We do have a higher demand. It's also a lot due to adapting our fleet in the last fiscal year. So we are more proactively actually adapting our rental fleet all the time to the actual requirements from our customers. So we're not sitting on old equipment, actually dragging down the overall utilization rate, but enabling trading to sell them off with a slight profit and reuse the funds to invest in the new projects. So we won't have to be in a position where we have to pass on a good rental deal because we are simply, let's say, out of lease capabilities.
Then the next question. Can you explain why adding the lease of units is positive for the company? So far, it hasn't resulted in any bottom line results. Do you believe it will do that in 2025, looking at net income?
I think you answered the questions a bit earlier in the presentation. So now we have reached a kind of break-even point, but if we can add more units with the same costs in-house, then it will, of course, be a positive effect on the net income as well.
The analogy of rental is basically that you need to hit this critical mass with the setup we have. You will have the same capacity cost, and then it's basically just a matter of how many units and how many rentals can you build on top of that, and that will naturally spill over to have a positive. We for sure expect a rental to have not a significant, but a small positive income or contribution to the overall net income of the company in this fiscal year. Yet it is a long haul with the strategy we have. It's not foreseen that it's already in this year that we'll see that rental is contributing a lot on that side.
There's a bit of a straightforward question here. Could you accelerate the growth in the rental department further?
I would say not without compromising the risk. So of course, we could have 10 units built within four months and then hope for the best, hope that we will have a utilization rate at 100%, but it's maybe a bit optimistic. So we have to slowly build our fleet, and it has to represent the demand we see in the market. So I would say yes, we can, but not without taking a certain risk, which we are not in a position right now to do.
There are some European markets who are very known for having rentals, but in a lot different way than we are presenting or we are offering our rental solutions and the customers we are targeting. There's, of course, also a very heavy competition, and entering into that would give us a fairly big share of the cake, so to say, but we would also end all compromise, the quality and the pricing that we're offering, which we are simply not interested, so we'd rather take it step by step and actually go for the right rentals, the long term, the solid customers, whereas, as Martin's saying, it's low risk, but it's steady revenue and it's steady income.
And how is your focus divided in the future? Is that 50/50 between sales or rentals, or do you have still a higher focus on the sales department?
I think our focus is not, I mean, the focus is shared because we have people who are head of or in charge of each department. But in general, I think for the next coming year, we, of course, still expect the trading department to contribute the most to the turnover. So yeah, I think that's the best way we can answer this question.
If the Pay‑Per‑Scan solution is a bit risk-free for the customers, does that mean that you take on the risk instead?
We don't take all the risk. I wouldn't say, yeah, risk-free. You could say in their terminology, it's risk-free, but it's not because they're adding in a lot of time. Time in the end is money. So they will need to put in the energy to build up the patient flow, do the marketing, get their customers, the patients into their scanning facilities. Everybody has a top motivation here to do as many patients as possible, certainly the clinic entering the Pay‑Per‑Scan model because the more patients they're doing and the more steady flow they're getting, the more their income rises and actually enabling them to have a stable flow to utilize the opportunity to actually shift from a Pay‑Per‑Scan at a certain level into a fixed-term contract, which essentially for SMS is bringing in a lower income than a Pay‑Per‑Scan when it's up for running.
Yet we don't want to handicap our customers in maintaining them into a Pay‑Per‑Scan model because it is used as a tool to help them get the business running, where we, of course, take a higher revenue, higher income than we do from a normal rental, but shifting them from a Pay‑Per‑Scan into a fixed long-term afterwards, where we do have a 100% utilization on the particular unit then, of course, is a win-win.
Yeah. So for now, we see it as a competitive advantage to gain market share, basically. So for us, it's a way to gain market share, basically, against our competitors.
We have the final question here. In your U.S. business, do you source and buy your products within the U.S. or also from other countries? How do you believe a potential tariff from the Trump administration would affect your U.S. business?
Yeah. So it's like two questions here in one. And first of all, yes, we are able to source systems in the United States as well. We also did that before, but of course, it's more attractive now when we don't have to ship the equipment back to Europe. With that said, we still like the European quality. So our preferred market for buying systems are in Europe, but we also see good systems, especially locations in the United States. So yes, we are definitely able to buy and source systems in the United States. Regarding Trump?
We've seen there was the talks when Trump last time entered the office, similar to what we're seeing now, and we saw from the used medical business that it didn't have any effect. As we're trading mainly and importing from Europe to U.S., used equipment already manufactured, it didn't have any effect on the used medical business at that time and that we don't foresee this time either. I think it's other analogies in other sectors that are being targeted for, let's say, his campaign.
We also have to remember that half of the brands which we are selling used here in the company are actually produced in the United States. So I don't know how Trump would affect such a market, but yeah, I don't believe it would hurt us in any way in our business model.
Perfect. And that was actually all the questions. So that finalizes the Q&A for now. But before we end the webcast, I will just hand over the word for you if you have some final remarks to end with.
I'd just say thank you very much for listening in and for the very good questions. Of course, if there are any questions that you suddenly figure out afterwards, I would say don't hesitate to correct me if I'm wrong and as you can fill them into Stokk.io or directly on our investor mail. We'll always be very happy to answer the best possible way.
Perfect. Thank you, everyone, for listening in, and thank you for posting questions. See you next time.