Welcome to the DATAGROUP SE Conference Call on the financial statement 2020, 2021. At the moment, all participants are on mute. The floor will be open for questions after the presentation. If you would like to ask any question, please press the hand symbol or type your question into the question box. The presentation you're about to see is also available for download in the investor relations section on DATAGROUP's website. I would now like to welcome Mr. Max H.-H. Schaber , CEO of DATAGROUP.
Hello, everybody. Good morning. For me, personally, it's a memorable occasion because it's my last presentation of annual results as a CEO of DATAGROUP. Next, please. I want to show you our new management team. I personally will resign as CEO at the end of the annual shareholder meeting 2022, which is on the tenth of March this year, and I will run for the supervisory board. My successor will be Andreas Baresel, who is actually Chief Production Officer of DATAGROUP. He is with DATAGROUP since 2012 in top positions and came to DATAGROUP with an acquisition of Consinto in year 2012. A new guy on the block is Oliver Thome as CFO. He's on board since the first of October 2021.
He's a very experienced guy with many years of management and financial experience in the IT industry. As of the first of April this year, Dr. Sabine Laukemann will join the management board as Director of Human Resources, Organization, Strategy and Legal. Sabine also is more than 20 years with DATAGROUP. She organized all these things around bringing DATAGROUP to the stock market and is a very experienced person. She also runs at the moment Human Resources department. I'm very glad to have her in the board. Next, please. What I can show for the last year and for a number of last years, that we nearly always overachieved our forecasts.
You can see on this slide that the dark red is the realized revenues, and the light red is the forecast we did. Only in the year 2019, 2020, we reduced our forecast, and we couldn't achieve our forecast figures. As you can see, this was surely based on the one hand side, COVID influences, and on the second hand, it was the IKB problem, but what we solved in a very good way now. Next please. Also, in the important figure, EBITDA, we could overachieve mainly all our forecasts.
What I want to say for the year 2020/2021, that, the figure of EUR 67.3 million realized EBITDA is nearly not influenced by any tailwinds. What means that it is a real, operational, organic growth in EBITDA, and, this shows you the strength of DATAGROUP to achieve these high, margin, guidance, we gave ourselves. What I can say, all we can see today, is that it will go on the trends, to a better EBITDA as in the past. Next, please. In detail, you can see that we, could overachieve our, guidance, in revenues. We had an impressive growth of 24.1% in revenues.
We also had a slightly better growth in EBITDA, which is a very good sign. If EBITDA in percentage-wise is growing faster than the revenue, it will gives a better net earnings, which you can see. This growth of 8,400% nearly is surely not based on this only 1% growth of EBITDA, but it is also based on a very strong organic growth, and it is based on some tax issues we had last year. We can show now a good EPS, a good net result, which will let us to a very nice dividend we will show you later. Next, please. What is the reason for this record results?
We have several pillars who drive it. First of all, the development of DATAGROUP market units has exceeded our expectations. All these companies, all these units are doing very well in their regions. This is one of the strategic points of DATAGROUP that we are in the region onsite with our customers and you can see that this is working very well. Also, we got new customer contracts which came revenue effective, in particular, the prominent case BIT Düsseldorf, formerly IKB Data or Financial IT Services GmbH.
You remember that we have had some problems in the last years, and now we could realize effectively revenues and EBITDA out of these big contracts, and we are on a very good way in this. Also, we have had a broad variety of sales successes and significant expansion of existing customer situations, which is a very important part of the growth strategy. You remember, I always said, if we get a CORBOX contract and we could hold it over four years and more, it will grow. We will grow in the customer itself, and that is what happens now, and led us to a good organic growth of 7.7% last year. We got 18 new customers.
The biggest of them is Hella, which brings us more than EUR 15 million a year. New revenues, unfortunately, it's not included in last year's figures. It will come up this year and into the next year. You remember it needs a long time to bring a contract to a real recurring revenue stream because these transition things are very hard to do. In last year and in the actual year, it will grow. DATAGROUP will grow on this basis very fast. Also, we could renew 42 contracts, which is very important that we don't lose our customer base. We have a very little churn in terms of revenue figures.
Some little customers decided to go to another provider, but the bigger ones, big means from EUR 1.5 million to EUR 2 million a year, they stay with DATAGROUP, and you can see it at the numbers that we managed that very well. Also, I mentioned it before, we could expand 27 contracts, which is above our expectations, and so we are very bullish for the future. Next slide, please. I will show you at some points what we did in terms of sales. Last year, we got one of the biggest wholesale bakeries as a new customer. It's a four-year contract, in total EUR 10 million and EUR 2.5 a year, which is a perfect size of a CORBOX contract for us.
We also have a new customer in the financial services sector. We have a very good public administration success over the last years, which is another new public cloud service customer. This is a customer which runs only public cloud. But what we see is that the customers who run the public cloud services with DATAGROUP will bring even the same, sometimes even more, revenues and profit like it was before with only DATAGROUP data center-based services. This is a very, very good thing because it shows us that we can do more business, more profitable business in the future without investing these huge data center investments we did in the last years.
You can imagine that we will be able, in the future, to grow our EBIT margin because a significant part of revenues will be based on public cloud services. Logistics is, let me say, a home turf for DATAGROUP. We have some logistic companies, and this is a very interesting contract, five years with EUR 5.1 million a year, which counts up, you can do it, to EUR 25 million in total, which is very interesting for us. We stick to our guidance not to have customers which are bigger than 5% of the concern of the group profit and not of the group revenue. This will bring us stability and will eliminate bulk risks also in the future.
We also had a new real estate customer, two years with EUR 2.3 million a year. Aviation industry, a full outsourcing deal in the size of, well, of EUR 5 million. We have a smaller contract in measurement and testing. You can see we have no cluster risk and even no sector risk, and hardly any economic risk, which let me sleep very well. Thank you. Next slide. I will hand over to Andreas. Andreas will show you on which basis DATAGROUP will grow in the future. It's yours.
Thank you, Max. Besides this order, intakes, I'm happy that we can report about further impulses for growth, which we see in the started fiscal year already, and which will help us to continue our growth in the next years. Next slide, please. First, we can really say COVID-19 drives digitization in Europe and in Germany also. There we have direct positive effects in connection with providing the IT infrastructure platform and the IT support for the vaccination centers in Baden-Württemberg and Hessen. There we deliver direct support in managing the whole COVID-19 situation in these two German countries. We are happy to do this support. Besides this, of course, these services also deliver good, very good results.
For our existing customers, we see a lot of projects for the renewal and the expansion of the workplace infrastructure. These customers do stronger mobile working initiatives, and we still have a good project flow for these initiatives. Third point, we see an increased need for IT security based on a strongly growing number of cyber threats and attacks. Out of our point of view, this will keep on the next years and will be one of the big issues for the IT industry. I come back later on this. Then we also have a digitization trend for all business processes to work paperless, to work on a digital basis.
That has and also will in the future improve the performance of Almato, our digitalization company, very good, in the areas of RPA, so robotic process automation, the automation of business processes, but also for digital assistants, intelligent apps, and machine learning and AI services, which is Almato providing to a wide customer base. Next slide, please. I can show you here some examples for exactly this, the digitalization on the rise. As I said, we have a quite good order entry at Almato with all these technologies. For example, we have an additional contract for our banking customer. We there do a low-code development on the Microsoft Power Platform.
Microsoft Power Platform is a public cloud or Azure-based platform where you can optimize business process without intensive coding, and we can easily automate and digitalize business process, for example, banking customers there. We also have two contract prolongations, one for our retail customers. There, we have extended the mobile apps for the branch management. We have included a self-checkout functionality, something you see in more and more retail branches now. We have included this in the app. You go to the store, you can use your app for the self-checkout. It's a very smart way to improve branch processes here for our customer.
Further, another contract prolongation for a telco provider where we do robotic process automation for several years now, and they also have prolonged the contract with EUR 1 million for this year. Besides these three examples, we have other really innovative AI-based services and projects in place. For example, we have the management of electronic shelf labels that are no more paper labels on the shelves. That they are really electronic and they can be controlled remotely, so changing prices, changing information text on the shelf. We are doing this project for a retail customer. We use by this controlling his branches, and he can do a kind of a dynamic pricing then.
You can imagine that's quite interesting in this way to also not only in the online business, also in the branch business, to do on and run dynamic price models. Another example is the automatic processing of incoming tickets for the IT service desk. The AI there reads really the email text which is coming in from our users. The AI recognize the topics which are mentioned in the email and does the automatic processes and the classification of the tickets automatically. About nearly 90% of the tickets can be handled by this way automatically, and you can imagine that's a big improvement and also a big improvement in the lead time of ticket duration. Next slide, please.
For Tchibo, which is also a big German retailer with depots in supermarkets, but also with own shops. Almato has a reliable customer with them, and Almato has proven really to be a good partner for digitalization and also expanded their cooperation to a large number of business processes for Tchibo now. They do on one hand the mobile depot management, that's how they call these depots inside the supermarket. You have a depot manager, and he's using our apps to manage a lot of depots in a large number of supermarkets where he's responsible for. We did a significant extension of the customer apps also for Tchibo.
We provided our own tablet version, implemented a receipt scanner, and also adapted the new corporate design. You see here an example for the electronic shelf labels. I already mentioned this project. As a fourth example, we do the hosting and the operation for the central application for workforce management. Not only providing the solution, also hosting the solution and operating it on a daily basis. It's more or less like a SaaS, Software as a Service model, what we do here. Next slide, please. Another very hot topic at the moment, I mentioned it already, is information security. You see here the point from Arne Schönbohm.
He says, "With regard to information security, we are really on red alert at the moment." Arne Schönbohm is the President of the German Federal Office for Information Security, and that's his opinion when he was presenting the 2021 annual report. The situation in IT security has really dramatically changed. I would say even in the last 12 months, we have a significant extension of cyber attacks. You read it in the all media at the moment. It's also for DATAGROUP a quite important topic. You see here our security objectives we are following when we provide our services. First of all, it's the availability of IT services, infrastructure and data, of course.
We have to protect the data from unauthorized access, so we have to ensure the confidentiality of data. We have to ensure that the IT systems ensure the integrity. Of course, especially in Europe, the compliance with legal requirements, like the data security is very important. There are high penalties if you don't follow these rules. We also have to ensure all this rule set. Next slide, please. We do this by a comprehensive IT security approach, which we have strengthened in the last two years, I would say, by really extending our security capabilities and also extending our service portfolio in this area, to also ensure the IT security for our customer situations. How do we do this?
We have a comprehensive and efficient information management system as a basis for information security. We have incorporated the IT security also on board level within DATAGROUP. We run with all DATAGROUP companies and a corporate security board, where company security managers from all companies come together and manage the daily topics. That is managed by a highly qualified risk and security team we have in our central IT governance. To ensure the technical aspects of security, we run our own security operation center, so-called SOC, or sometimes also there are these centers are cyber defense centers called, and they do or they have an extensive security tooling.
Also, we have extended in the last months because more and more tools become important there to ensure security. By this, we protect the CORBOX platforms by a proactive detection in case of cyber attacks. We, of course, also have internal control systems and structures in case of an emergency to deliver a proper crisis management. Of course, we hope that we don't need it, but in case you should be prepared. Data protection management, I've already mentioned, we have a data protection concept which fulfills the rules which are here in Europe relevant and also, of course, have a data protection officer and implemented data protection guidelines. Additionally, we run continuous tests by external specialists on possible vulnerabilities.
They more or less take the view of an external hacker and try to find out if there are any vulnerabilities on DATAGROUP systems. By this, we also can ensure if something, there's a weakness somewhere, we can close it before the bad side, I would say, identifies this vulnerability. Next slide. That's out of our point of view are further improvements on the further growth, which is possible, and especially IT security I think will drive also the outsourcing trend in the next years as our customers more and more can't manage these things on their own anymore. I think that also will drive our business and the CORBOX, some new CORBOX customers. Okay, thank you.
Shortly, our colleague Oliver Thome will present more information on the record results of the financial year.
Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to welcome you to DATAGROUP's balance sheet press conference for the past financial year. My name is Oliver Thome, and I'm CFO at DATAGROUP since the first of October last year. Next slide, please. I'm pleased to first explain to you the selected profit and loss figures to you. In the past fiscal year, we were able to significantly increase the revenue by more than 24%. The gross profit could be increased by almost 20%. On the other hand, it's very nice to see that the personnel costs only rose by around 13%. We were able to translate the good sales and cost development into a significant increase of our profitability.
The EBITDA could be developed by 25% to EUR 67 million instead of the year before. The EBIT even by around 39% to EUR 29 million. The net income of around EUR 21 million was achieved, thanks to an optimized tax ratio. Next slide, please.
You can see the increase in goodwill in the selected key balance sheet figures. This is due to the acquisition of URANO and BIT Oldenburg, former dna in the past fiscal year. What's very important for me is to show you that supported by the strong operating cash flow, the net debt only increased by EUR 24 million. For us, very important and we feel comfortable that the equity ratio increased significantly to around 22%, thanks to the strong results of the past year. Next slide, please. In the cash flow statement, you can primarily see the already mentioned strong increase in the operating cash flow, driven by the good operating earnings.
The cash flow from investing activities essentially shows the company acquisitions I already mentioned, with an effect of about EUR 36 million. Very important is the CapEx investments on the other hand were significantly reduced compared to the previous year and only amounted to EUR 11 million instead of EUR 22 million one year before. This is essentially the effect of the central production strategy what Andreas just explained that has been consequently implemented over the past few years. The cash flow from financing activities was mainly driven by the repayment of promissory note loan with nearly EUR 12 million. Overall, this leads to a change in cash and cash equivalents of -EUR 19.8 million compared to the previous year. Next slide, please.
This slide shows you the reduction in investment in relation to the service revenues, which I have already explained in the cash flow statement. We were able in the investment rate to reduce this to 2.9%, and this is a comparable level we just had in 2017. The acquisition, this is what Max Schaber said of BIT Düsseldorf, formerly IKB Data, required investments in the second data center, which is reflected in the figures of 2019 and 2020. The investments were optimized in 2022 on the one hand on streamlining the organization and consolidating the production units as well as the targeted centralization of office spaces in cities like Hamburg. Next slide, please. Our EBIT target.
On this slide, I would like to show you our medium-term profitability target, and this is in EBIT measures at 9%. We will achieve this by further reducing our CapEx costs I just explained to you, and this leads you know to an optimized depreciation. In addition, we will use the new situation caused by COVID, and we have now more flexibility in our workspaces, and this will bring us to reduce our office spaces in relation to our business. We will further continue to work on increasing our profitability of our subsidiaries, especially these units that do not have already reached the required level of profitability.
What Andreas just showed in his presentation is that we use the digitalization trends and the possibilities of optimizing our own profitability with digitalization, so that we think and we believe and optimize our business operations and increase our profitability with this point as well. Next slide. Let us have a look at the share information. Next slide, please. Those of you who have been with us for a long time know the excellent development of our share price. In the past fiscal year, especially, the share price developed very, very positively and the estimates of most analysts continues to show the very good potential of our share. Next slide, please. The consensus. There, I think we can summarize it with we keep what we promise.
The turnover, the EBITDA, and the net income exceeded the estimates of the consensus 2021, and we will, I can promise you, continue to work hard to lead the company profitable into the future. Next slide, please. There you can see that, the management share purchase of the last years show and underlines the price potential we see as management in our DATAGROUP.
Next slide, please. The shareholder structure and stock structure, there were only a few changes in the past fiscal year. We are very stable with our majority shareholder, Max Schaber and his HHS Beteiligungsgesellschaft. Next slide, please. Upcoming events. We will continue to actively present our company to existing and potential investors at roadshows and conferences. We want to underline the attractiveness of DATAGROUP shares. Next slide, please. We have come to the end of the presentation, and I would like to thank you for your interest, and I can hand over to Max Schaber again. Thank you very much.
Sorry.
Sorry. Please.
The floor is now open for questions. If you would like to ask a question, please press the Hand symbol. You will then be unmuted and able to ask your question. Alternatively, you can type your question into the question box. We already have the first questions from Mr. Edwin de Jong. The first is: Can you give an idea of the trajectory towards the 9% EBIT margin?
Oliver, do you want to answer this question?
I can try to. I think the right timeline for achieving our goal of 9%, we cannot give you the exact date or the exact year. I think with the pillars I just shown, which with which we want to realize this, with the reducing CapEx situation and optimization of our depreciation, with the optimization of the profitability of our now underperforming companies and with the optimization of our rental spaces, office spaces, we are very comfortable with this goal, and we think we will achieve this.
Let me add some words to this. What we see at the moment is the actual figures we will publish in a few weeks show us that we are on a very good track to achieve this, but we cannot. You know DATAGROUP as a very secure company in terms of guidance, and so we don't want to promise the 9% for this year, but we are very bullish to do it soon.
The next question is, at what level are the former FISS units performing, and what has been the improvement in the margin over the last year?
Okay, I will take this question. FISS is on a very good way. It's BIT Düsseldorf is on a very good way. We are better than we guided than we planned. If you remember, there was a three-year period which is underlaid, but with some money we put on the side in our balance sheet last year. The good news are the revenues and also the EBIT and EBITDA figures are in line without using all these things we put on the side. We have room for very good results reaching the null line earlier than expected.
It brings this year around EUR 5 million losses, and at the end of the year we will reach the null line. Yeah.
His third question is, are you comfortable with the consensus of the analysts?
Ha. This is a hard question. There is no reason to reduce. What we traditionally do is to give a guidance for the actual year at the annual shareholders meeting, which will take place at 10th of March. At that time, you can see what we want to do this year.
The next questions are from Mr. Knut Woller.
Hello, can you hear me?
Yes.
Excellent. Thank you. A couple of questions. The first one on organic growth. You had, I think, the best organic growth in the last fiscal year in many years.
Yeah.
How confident are you to be able to maintain this organic growth? Or do you see a risk of slowing organic growth this year?
Let me answer directly. We don't see a risk. We cannot promise this 7.7%, but it will be above 5% with a high security.
Thank you. The second question, the HPE contract ended last fiscal year.
Mm-hmm.
If I remember your wording correctly when you signed the contract, which it still should have a contribution of more than EUR 20 million at the end of the last year. With Hella contributing EUR 15 million or north of EUR 15 million, there still seems to be a slight delta between the HPE contract and Hella. How do you think you'll be able to offset this headwind?
Yeah. The good news is that the contract is lasting another nearly two years from now, because there was a kind of an option which was taken by DXC. I don't know the figure exactly. Probably, Andreas, you can give me the exact figure of the size of the contract now, but it is above EUR 15 million a year. It's nearly more than EUR 20. What is the very good news? What are the very good news? We developed the company where this business is in to a very strong part of DATAGROUP, so we don't expect any real negative influences about that.
Excellent. Congratulations on the prolongation of the contract.
Thank you.
The third question on the other operating income, there was a tailwind year-over-year on the back of higher reversal of provisions in the other operating income. Should we expect other operating income tailwind also in the current fiscal year? Or don't you expect any tailwind in other operating income this year?
It depends a bit if we need some tailwind. We have some things in our, let me say it in German, "Geldspeicher". We did some "Rückstellungen".
Provisions.
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Provisions in the last years we did not have used yet. It could be possible if we need it to use these, but we didn't until now.
In your presentation, you now formulated an EBIT margin target of 9%. If I remember correctly, in previous presentations you had a target of north of 9% for 2022/2023. Should we interpret this as a reduction of this target, or-
No reduction. It is the 9% was the level we always talked about, and it might be a bit above 9%, north of 9%.
North of 9 is confirmed, not a reduction?
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
The last question would be on the CapEx side. You highlighted that your CapEx declined, which is of course true, just looking at the numbers. On the other hand, we saw that the leasing outflow increased substantially year-over-year. This is also tied to the operating business, suggesting, at least out of my perspective, that the overall cash requirements are still at a similar level as they were in the year before. How should we think about CapEx in combination with leasing in 2021/2022?
I will hand over this question to the financial department. Oliver, could you answer it immediately, or will you give it to your department?
I think the answer is not given in one minute because it depends on the development of our business and how we will or how we can realize our business. I would suggest that we will answer this question later. I'm fine with this, and I can give you some more details for this. Reducing our CapEx is our strategy, and we will reduce it to push our EBIT more. This will be realizable.
Is it then fair to assume, Oliver, that you will continue to shift from CapEx to leasing?
This depends on what the customer wants to have.
Mm-hmm.
We are not in the situation that we choose this. This is given us by contract, but I will give you some more details therefore.
Mm-hmm.
After this.
Okay. Thank you very much.
Let me-
That would be the end of my questions. Yeah.
Yeah. Let me add some words to this. Very important is how we can manage the cash flow and the investment. There could leasing be a good way to improve the cash flow. What we always do, we always aim for our EBITDA margin of around 15%-16%. What we see actually is that it is growing slightly, even if we use leasing as a financing aid.
Mm-hmm. Thank you.
Next up, we have a question from Mr. Gustav Froberg.
Hi, everyone. This is Gustav Froberg from Berenberg .
Hi. Morning, Greulich.
Morning. I have a couple of questions, please. First one, just on the extraordinary write-offs that you mentioned in the presentation. Could you please talk me through those again, the EUR 3.15 million, what they are and why they occurred?
Oliver, can I hand over to you?
Yes, sure. At first, we have a situation which is with our office space. There we have a location which, with the change of our new office situation. Is it possible to mute your microphone? Because you, I can hear you very, very loud.
Yeah, sorry about that.
Okay, no problem. The first one is optimization of our rental space where there was no need to have such a big office situation. This causes to make some provisions, and this is shown in this position. The second big thing is caused by our centralization strategy for our data centers, which is with extraordinary write-offs from decentralized data centers to bring them to our central data center of DATAGROUP. This is not recurring, and so we show this to you.
We did have done this when there was no need for our EBIT had been with EUR 3 million more than what we show with EUR 29 million.
All right. Super. Just a question on capital intensity as well. Again, could you help us understand the impact that you expect on your depreciation expense for 2022? How should we think about that in terms of the magnitude of the decline now that you've cut your CapEx?
This is one of the points that Max Schaber just mentioned, that the detail of our expectations we show on the annual shareholder meeting. Because you have to see that the depreciation has three main pillars. The first one is the development of our CapEx costs. The second one is how the leasing of our own use and the cars or rental spaces and as well the depreciation for purchase price allocation. These three pillars together is the position we will give you in our annual general meeting.
Okay, super. Final one for me, just on M&A. What does the pipeline look like on the M&A side for you this year? Yeah, just any color on M&A and your expectations there would be great.
Oliver, you, do you want to answer?
I can do. Yes. The M&A pipeline is filled. You know, we are as the wished partner, and this is very important for us to get this feedback from the M&A side, from the Mittelstand companies in Germany, because we do not handle like a PE, you know. We speak their language. So we are looking, and we are in progress in concrete M&A targets. But you can imagine we cannot talk about this.
Let me.
Sure, no problem.
Let me add some words to this. This was a department I was responsible for in the past, and I handed it over to Oliver. What we see is that Oliver is doing very well and very. He figured out very interesting targets. For example, we might shift a bit our target localization in direction of high quality and high technical things to round up our technical expertise in total. We will see some volume acquisitions, and we also will see some technical expertise acquisitions, which will lead us also to a higher profitability in the future.
It's very interesting in the moment to see the pipeline and to see what's going on and what's on the screen.
Super. That's all from my side. Thank you very much.
At the moment, we have no further questions. If you would like to ask a question, feel free to use the hand symbol or type your question into the question box. There is a follow-up question from Mr. Knut Woller.
Thank you. Just briefly on factoring, can you provide us with an update how factoring developed year over year in the last fiscal year?
Oliver, it's your turn.
Yes, it's very stable. The factoring as a tooling of financing. You know, we can use it, but we have very proper situation in our liquidity, so that it's only an instrument we can use, but there is no need. I think the volume in the year is around EUR 10 million-EUR 15 million.
Thank you.
We have no further questions. Thank you very much for participating in our conference call today. The call will be made available on DATAGROUP's website. Mr. Schaber?
Yeah. Okay. Thank you to the audience, and I'm very proud to have such qualified colleagues, and they will lead DATAGROUP to a perfect future. I will promise that my family office will stay within DATAGROUP, and we will give you always some information about that, about our engagement in DATAGROUP. I'm very bullish about the development of the company. Thanks to you, thanks to my management team, and let's see very bullish in the future. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.