Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the SNP SE conference call regarding the Q1 2024 results. At this time, all participants have been placed on a listen-only mode. The floor will be open for questions following the presentation. Let me now turn the floor over to your host, Marcel Wiskow. Please go ahead.
Thank you, Operator. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for participating in our call today. This morning, we released our first quarter results for the current year. You can find the report and the corresponding corporate news, as always, on our website at the Investor Relations section. Joining me on the call from the company is our CEO, Jens Amail. As usual, he will give you a summary of the reported numbers and show the forecast for the year 2024. Also in this call with me is our CFO, Andreas Röderer. He will give you a more detailed explanation of the financials. And as usual, we will have a Q&A session at the end of our call. And with this introduction, I will give the floor to Jens.
Yeah, thank you very much, Marcel. And hello also from my side. Thank you for joining the call. And as always, thank you for your continued interest in SNP. We are very pleased with the way 2024 has started. After a year with record results in all key performance indicators in 2023, we have achieved the best Q1 in the history of the company, also here, really in all relevant KPIs. And this would have not been possible without the outstanding work of all teammates here at SNP. So a big thank you to all our global colleagues for everything they have done in Q1. Also, a massive thank you to our customers and partners for your continued trust. Our number one priority is to make you as successful as possible. And then eventually, financial figures are just the result of that. So, Marcel, let's go to the first slide.
You see here, all KPIs are moving in the right direction and actually have never been better. We started the year with a strong order backlog, and this is now even better by another EUR 6 million. We are very happy with the EBIT growth, more than 60%. For me, in a complex business, in a multidimensional complex business like we are having it, operating cash flow is always the most important KPI. We see huge improvements here. I'm very thankful to my friend Andreas here and the finance team for the partnership and the focus on that. This would have not been possible without the new processes you guys have put in place. I also must say it was really a team effort, a big management focus across the group.
This starts with terms and conditions in contracts to how we define success across the company in the different functions. So let's go to the next slide. So no need to repeat what we have already shown on the previous slide. But if we jump to the third row here, good progress in partner business and also in our business to enable S/4 and RISE with SAP. Then the fourth row here, last week, we announced small acquisitions in the services space, Trigon Consulting, nothing super strategic. And the good news is that we could finance this out of our operating cash flow. And then the last row here on the guidance, after a good Q1, we feel confident with our guidance. And since we just released the specifics on the guidance for 2024 last month, we do not see the need to already change it now.
On the Q4 figures here, you have seen these numbers. All performance indicators are moving in the right direction. If you look for a hair in the soup, the software share on the revenue side is 31%. Last year, it was on average 34%. So we did not have this one massive software transaction in Q1, as you will see later in the deal bands and the in-quarter linearity. Good progress with all strategic partners. Really strong overproportional growth here. SoftwareOne became a Gold Partner in Q1. They have a new leadership in place with former colleagues of mine from SAP, Brian Duffy, the CEO, Rohit Nagarajan, the Chief Revenue Officer. So yeah, obviously, we expect also a big SAP push and then our Gold Partner. And we're excited about the potential here with this new partner.
And also maybe I point you to the third bullet here on the right. We are enhancing our partnership with smartShift. There's very excitingly a clear expectation from SAP that we have a strong alignment with both Tricentis and smartShift. So we're very excited about what's possible here in this three-way collaboration. So this is a new slide. We volunteered in full transparency on the in-quarter linearity for the order entry. Here, we see two things: that we had a nice intensity in the sales organization already early in the year and that customers did not buy in March as much as last year. Do I read anything else into this? No. Deal bands I already mentioned. So, Marcel, I think everybody can read that. So let's just jump to the next slide immediately. Order entry by region here is one aspect I want to highlight because it's very obvious.
It's almost when you look at this slide a little bit the elephant in the room. So North America did not have a good quarter. After doubling their business last year, Q1 was not great. Also here, do I see anything systematic? No. They have a strong pipeline. And I'm very positive that we have a good year in North America. Then last slide, basically, the EBIT bridge. Also here, this time, nothing super fancy with a lot of one-off effects. Of course, revenue growth. I like the COGS, yeah, that in spite of revenue growth, yeah, we see an improvement here. So that's very exciting and also shows the results of some of the controls we put in place. And on the OPEX increase, we will be watching this very carefully over the next weeks and over the next few quarters.
But as the company is growing, of course, we see also a little bit more OPEX. But we will have a close look at that. But also here, no real red flag in Q1 either. And last but not least, as I already mentioned, we just released the numbers here in March. So no changes. And with that, thank you, everybody, for joining. And I would hand it over to my colleague and friend Andreas. So thanks a lot, Jens. If we jump straight away to the income statement. So let us start with the detailed look at the financials. As Jens has outlined the revenue already in detail, I will have a focus rather on the cost side. Let's have a look at the personnel costs. They are primarily increased due to two reasons.
As already outlined in the full-year call, we have added approximately 120 people to the group last year just to fuel also our future growth. We need to deliver our backlog. So no surprises here. And we also did some adjustments on the salary just to reflect inflation. But we are happy with the progress we are making here by putting more people in the group. We will also see that later. Then let's have a look at the other income and expenses. Jens has already outlined the EBIT bridge. But let me outline several effects that have partially netted off against each other. So this time, we had a favorable FX treatment coming primarily out of the hyperinflation effects of Argentina. As indicated in the previous-year call, the hyperinflation from Argentina, this volatility will not go away.
But we made progress and got rid of some volatility, as indicated, especially from the US dollar. I have outlined that, what we have implemented at the beginning of this year. And without that, changes of the loans towards our subsidiary in North America, we would even have higher effects on the FX side. So we took away, long story short, a bit of the volatility. But there is still some volatility that is difficult to plan coming from Argentina. Beside this, as Jens has already indicated, there had been some minor increases in OPEX coming from travel activities, really just to focus and fuel our growth also in markets like Brazil and Nordics. We had some higher marketing events. But this is more or less just a timing effect because we have started much earlier to get our customer meeting ready, which is then coming then very soon.
Besides that, as Jens has mentioned, there are no real surprises. Maybe once again, to highlight it, we took away the EBITDA KPI out of our guidance because the difference between EBIT and EBITDA is pretty constant at approximately EUR 2.5 million. So internally, we are looking at the EBIT only. That's why, just as a recap, this has been eliminated. If we go on to the revenue by segments, I will keep that short, just reiterating a bit what Jens has already outlined. So on the services side, we had a very strong revenue growth. And we see good progress on the process improvements we have initiated. Jens has already mentioned that the COGS did decline. So we have a more efficient usage of external resources. And so we have initiated a lot of things. The software side, Jens has already elaborated here.
As said, we had been lacking really the real big tickets then in Q1. Nevertheless, we are very happy with the performance that we could show. On the EXA side, there is a small decline in revenue. As you have listened carefully in Q3 and Q4, we were struggling a bit to get order entry in. But you will see on the next slide that EXA had a pretty good Q1 when it comes to order entry. And that will also soon be reflected on the revenue side. If you go on to the next slide, so order entry, as Jens has indicated, is at the new record level in Q1, although we had a very strong Q1 last year and a very strong Q4 last year as well. We see still a very strong demand on SAP S/4 and RISE with SAP projects, as Jens has already outlined.
We also see a stable growth in our biggest region, CEU, and a very high growth in our renamed or extended region, NEMEA, as well. As indicated on the previous slide, also EXA had a very good growth in their order entry. That should soon be reflected in revenue as well. Let us have a look at the order backlog bridge. To keep it short, the key message here, the order backlog is stable. We are not losing projects. Instead, we are adding order entry. We are successfully transferring order entry backlog into revenue. We had several successful go-lives in Q1, for example, also in North America. This will give us a lot of trust from customers just to fuel our business there as well. Now, let's have a look at the balance sheet.
So I'm pretty happy with the development, especially on the cash side. I think Jens has already shown the operating cash flow. We will see that later. So there's a good increase in cash and cash equivalents. On the other financial asset, we see a decline. So this decline, as already indicated in our last call, we got the last outstanding part of a purchase price payment from the sale of SNP Poland of roughly EUR 5 million. And we will also see that later in the investing cash flow. If we now go to the current receivables and contract assets, in the previous calls, there had been some questions to the working capital management. And then we can see improvements here. So let us have a look at this topic as well.
To have a holistic view on this topic, we need to bring several balance sheet positions together, namely four positions that pay into debt: current receivables, current assets, non-current receivables, and contract liabilities. So if you bring all those four positions together, I have to say I'm really happy with the developments we are seeing here. Because if you add up those four positions, you can see a net reduction of EUR 7 million. To sum it up, long story short, the EUR 7 million reduction in non-current receivables really shows our improvement in our working capital management. And later, we will see this also when we discuss the operating cash flow because this was a pretty good increase. So finally, going to the liability side, so the changes we are seeing here are indicated, as already indicated in our last earnings calls, also in 2024.
We are reducing our loans to pay our debts back, to reduce our interest expenses. So to do so, of course, we need to have a good cash flow. This is the next thing we will have a look at. Similar to the cash flow development we have seen in 2023, I'm again really happy about the numbers I see here. I think Jens has already indicated this was a great team collaboration because changing a process if no one adheres to doesn't bring any results, yeah? But I think we are seeing the results here. I'm really happy about the movements we see here. If we look at the operating cash flow, as Jens has already outlined, we see an increase of EUR 11 million. The investing cash flow did also go up because we just received that last outstanding payment term.
And now, to sum it up, now the question might come up if we can expect an operating cash flow of a similar amount also in the next quarters. Here, I would like to outline that in Q2, we are historically paying our bonus payments to our employees. So just to set expectations, the Q2 cash flow will most probably be significantly lower than what we are seeing here. But this is known because, as said, we are paying our bonuses. But let me confirm to you also, this topic has our utmost attention also in the year 2024. So finally, let us have a look at the headcount development. As said, last year, we have approximately added 120 colleagues to the team. We are seeing that we are getting more attractive as a supplier. We are very happy on that.
Also, in Q1, we added an additional 21 people to the group. Here, especially in services and sales, to really fuel our further growth. With that, I'm handing back to Marcel.
Thank you, Andreas. I will give back to our operator to open our Q&A session.
Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, if you would like to ask a question, please press 9 and the star key on your telephone keypad. In case you wish to cancel your question, press 9 and the star key again. Please press 9 and the star key now to state your question. And the first question comes from Hannes Müller from Warburg Research. Please go ahead.
Yes. Hello. Thank you for taking my question. I would have two questions to start the round. First one, on cash flow conversion, you already mentioned that you're not expecting the same cash flow in Q2. But maybe if we zoom out a bit, what type of or what kind of cash conversion do you see to be sustainable over the next two to three years? And then the second question would be on the USA or North America. You mentioned it wasn't a good quarter. Could you add some color on what happened or what you have been hearing from customers there? Thank you.
Maybe I pick up the cash flow topic, Mr. Müller. So I think at this point in time, there is so many movement in, yeah? I think we are doing investments in JAPAC, North America. So it's difficult for me at this point in time to give a clear expected conversion. The only thing I can tell you, we are expecting positive cash flows, yeah? Because our business is growing. And we have changed our payment terms. And our sales people, our sales colleagues are really just also defending those topics. That if we deliver software, that we get the cash in much earlier than in the past. So I cannot predict it precisely. But the trend is definitely there that we are getting positive.
Thank you, Andreas. On your second question, as I briefly said, Mr. Müller, there's nothing systemic, yeah? We are still a small company. If you have one deal with EUR 6 million or EUR 7 million or even more, this changes the picture immediately. This did not happen in March. We are very optimistic on the pipeline. We are very excited about how we matured the team, how we developed the team, how we attract talent in North America, how we collaborate with SAP. We're excited about Sapphire coming up early June. Nothing systemic.
That helps a lot. Thank you.
Thank you.
The next question comes from Wolfgang Specht from Berenberg. Please go ahead.
Yes. Hello. Good afternoon. Three additional ones from my side. First, on workforce utilization and employee growth, you showed a 9% employee growth at 15% revenue growth. While, let's say, the ratio of product towards service sales was rather stable or product even slightly down, this calls for, let's say, needs to add much more employees in order to fuel your growth going into the second half. So are you currently speeding up onboarding? Or do you believe you still can follow the path of rather cautious additions of personnel? Second question, on working capital, where we saw a huge improvement, do you still see some headroom here, namely on accounts receivable for optimization? Or was that kind of ideal quarter for you? And final question would be, on your customer cluster, do you see any industries currently particularly strong or rather particularly weak? That's all.
So with the working, sorry, Mr. Specht. That's it? Yeah. Okay. Then I start with the working capital topic. Of course, there is more room to improvement, yeah? If you check carefully, we have just reclassed from the non-current receivables EUR 7 million into current receivables. So this is a bit coming out of the past, yeah? But I think we made very good progress. And hopefully, we really can get some cash in also on those receivables. And we are in good confidence because otherwise, we would not have done the reclass here. There is some cleanup activities to be done. But the payment terms, as we approach our customers and our salespeople defend, I'm really happy with what we have achieved here.
If you check the contract liability side, for example, for some of the projects, we even managed to get some cash even a bit earlier than we started the delivery, actually, yeah? But so overall, we are in a good balance, yeah?
Okay.
Does this answer your question, Mr. Specht?
On working capital, yes. Maybe on the employee side would be interesting.
Yeah. I would cover the other two. So on the workforce, there is no direct correlation, fortunately, yeah? So you pointed out 15% versus 9%. I was joining the All for One Group earlier today. And I opened up the second day of the big customer event together with the Chief Revenue Officer. And what we shared with the audience there is that, for example, our collaboration with All for One Group is, in the meantime, at a point where we add business with them. But they deliver, yeah, even if sometimes business is on our paper, yeah? So we see a big, big improvement with partners, yeah? Of course, this should, midterm, also increase the software-to-services ratio. But we don't see this one-to-one direct correlation, yeah, between services, business, and own people we have here. And then on your second question, generally speaking, we are industry-agnostic, yeah?
However, of course, if there is an exciting go-live in one or the other industry, as we had in North America, for example, we see some further momentum here, yeah? But overall, we are industry-agnostic with our go-to-market.
Okay. Thanks a lot.
Thank you.
The next question comes from Jannik Siering from Stifel. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Thank you for taking my questions. Good afternoon from my side. I would also have two. The first one is on the, yeah, quite impressive growth in the partner area. Maybe you could talk about the main drivers here. Are there or were there any one-offs that would explain the more than 30% growth? And the second one, just again, on the margin, I mean, historically, Q1 margins were mostly weakish. This year, comparably, very strong. Also here, any explanation you can provide that could explain the strong number? And then, yeah, I mean, also looking at the full-year guidance that increasingly looks conservative then, probably also in light of this first-quarter performance. So maybe you could also share some thoughts here. Thank you.
Yeah. Thank you very much. I take question number 1 and 3, maybe. So on the partner business, I'm extremely proud of what the team has done in energizing our ecosystem, building up an ecosystem. And now, we are executing against this strategy, yeah? There is no one-off. This is the big dream of the company. We're extremely humbled that 17 out of the top 20 SAP system integrators are partnering with us. We have regional collaborations like we have with All for One, which I just mentioned. That's just execution, yeah, and plumbing and a lot of hard work. Again, I'm incredibly proud of what the team has achieved here on the ecosystem side. So no one-offs, yeah, on your questions.
And yeah, if you allow me to answer your third question on the guidance a little bit shorter, yes, we err on the side of being a little bit more conservative with the company history. I believe that's a prudent way to go.
Yeah. Maybe adding a few comments to the Q1 effect. As outlined, there had also been some positive FX effects included. But also, especially on the topics we have seen last year, some accruals that we have released, yeah, which made the absolute increase, just eliminating that FX topic then again. But also, we see that some of the measures we have initiated to really have a better spend control are really starting to kick off, especially on how we deploy external resources in our service delivery unit.
Services market, right?
Yeah.
Great. Thank you. That's helpful.
Thank you, Jannik.
The next question comes from Johannes Ries from Apus Capital. Please go ahead.
Yes. Good afternoon. Maybe first point or first question, you can give us maybe some more, yeah, light on the pipeline you're seeing. Has the pipeline increased in the first quarter? What are the drivers? Is it RISE with SAP, which drives the demand here? Then on the margin side, the gross margin has improved despite this weaker, not so strong software business. But I see the service margin, like you mentioned before, given the strong cost, has improved impressively in the double-digit range. Would you see this as a sustainable margin? Or is it a one-time that you achieve now a very strong margin, which is a clear move in the right direction? And is it right to assume that the software margin and the other margin, especially, which moved, given the small numbers, slightly in the negative, that they will improve over the year?
I have a final question. Maybe let's start with this two.
Yeah. So thank you, Johannes, for the question. So the key drivers are on one side, the very direct driver, of course, as you said, S/4 and RISE with SAP, RISE with SAP even more because of the complexity. And that's an area where we are very good at. So you see also a strong push of our joint positioning here with SAP at Transformation World at around Sapphire. So we are very excited about how we can enable RISE with SAP. The second big driver are, of course, macroeconomic developments, yeah? You see the company was founded to be, or in the recent history, to be a transformation company. And transformations are now happening more and more often, yeah? Companies need to be agile. And we help them to be agile. And they need to do a quick carve-out. And they need to integrate a new business unit, etc.
So this agility aspect, which becomes more and more important in the macroeconomic environment of today, is clearly also where we see a long-term growth driver for the company. So that's on growth drivers. Second, on the margin topic, first here on the services. So this is another one-off, yeah? We want to get even better, yeah, number one. And number two, on the software, yeah, it was not a thrilling quarter on the software side. However, we were growing in line from an order entry perspective, yeah, with the rest of the company, yeah? But again, I'm very confident, yeah, that we will see progress shortly as well.
Overall, as a percentage of recurring income, how high it was? Or is it at the moment?
I picked it up, Jannik, if you don't mind. So actually, we made some progress, especially on the support side. But just once again, this is not recurring revenue, which comes until the end of time. It's usually over a 3-year period. But this portion in Q1 has increased from EUR 3.4 million in the last year to EUR 4.7 million. So with our bigger deals we made last year, also this portion will now continuously drive. The cloud part of the recurring business, this is still at a very low level. But as we speak, we are actually discussing some of the products being finalized, being cloud-ready. This is then the next step we will initiate.
Great. Finally, on the split between service and software, right in my head, maybe I'm wrong, set your longer-term target to bring it more to equal for both. That's still the target despite the strong growth of the service business?
Yes. Yes. Absolutely. Yeah. And this goes hand in hand with our partner business. Again, as I said, some partners are already at a level that they deliver 100% by themselves, like All for One. This is top of mind because I joined the event earlier today. But we also have in select regions where we have very mature partner relationships, a ratio of in transactions of 80/20, 75/25. So we see it's doable, yeah? But again, this is hard plumbing work, yeah? This does not happen overnight. We are confident that step by step, we will be moving in that direction. Absolutely.
Great. Thanks a lot.
Thank you.
Okay. So at the moment, there seem to be no further questions. So if you would like to ask another question, please press 9 and the star key on your telephone keypad. I will leave the line open for a couple more moments. 9 star if you want to have another question. And we have a follow-up question from Wolfgang Specht. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Maybe as usual in these calls, any solution on the U.S. property issue or still open?
We cannot comment on that at the moment. As soon as they're in use, we will share it.
Okay. Thanks a lot.
Okay. Since we didn't receive any further questions, let me hand back over to your host for some closing remarks.
Yeah. Thank you, operator. There are no further questions. But before we come to an end, let me highlight our SNP Transformation World in summer on June 19 and 20. The two-day congress has established as a major event in the industry, attracting each year hundreds of experts, decision-makers, and IT managers. And as analysts and investors, you will gain valuable insights into our strategy and our business by client and partner presentation, experts' discussions, and an exclusive program rounded off by the Transformation World Party. And therefore, you are warmly invited to this event. You can find everything you need to know about the conference, highlights, agenda, and the registration on our website. And with these final words, we will terminate this call. Goodbye. And see you soon.