Yes, hi and good morning, everyone. Today we are happy to present BTS Q4 report. My name is Daniel Thorsson, analyst at ABG covering the company, and with us we have BTS CEO Jessica Skon. So I'll hand over to you to present the quarter, and then we will come back to Q&A in a little while.
Super, thank you, Daniel. Good morning, BTS shareholders. Look, besides a tough year and following three tough quarters, we're very proud. We were able to keep our earnings flat with 2023, and we have a record fourth quarter. The biggest fourth quarter in the company's history, the biggest quarter in the company's history with 21% EBITDA growth. And, look, as you've become used to, BTS, over the decades, we tend to use challenging markets and times to our advantage and to set ourselves up for scale. I'm really proud that the costs, the efficiency, the internal innovations that we set out to do at the beginning of this year, even starting in Q4 of 2022, have played out pretty beautifully, according to plan. And those efficiencies set us up for scale. They were not short-term costs.
So more specifically, as I mentioned, we tend to be very creative, innovative, and move quickly in more difficult markets. So just to remind you what we did, we're now on our sixth quarter of an intentional focus on the CEOs, the companies, and the industries that are most likely to invest on the people side of change and to, you know, invest in these types of initiatives at this period of time. We innovated. Our clients are asking us for more support as they scaled at tens of thousands of people, trying to get them to be more adaptive and to change and more in the moment when they need it, more team-based, more leader-led. So we've innovated new client partnering models. We've, that includes easy-to-use micro-simulations at scale, digitized content and tools, and so forth.
We've invented new, of course, AI and generative AI services that really empower our clients' people to be tinkering and trying on a more grassroots level. I think we're bringing to the world a much different approach to consulting in terms of process and ways of working change. We also used this year, instead of short-term cuts, to upskill our talent around the world. We've done a lot of internal training and capability building, and we are feeling kind of at the next level of high performance from the team. We did a great job this year of cross-country collaboration and teaming at a level and scale that we had not done before, which allows us to smooth out, you know, resource utilization and billability across the consulting teams. So, some highlights of the fourth quarter.
So in addition to those efficiency measures playing out over the course of the year, boosting the margins in the fourth quarter, we also saw some growth improvements. The big one or the big improvement was in North America, where we're seeing an overall trend reversal. I would say, starting towards the end of the third quarter and definitely in the fourth, our software and tech clients, or at least their spend with BTS, is back to growth. We continued to have strong demand and growth from our focused sectors such as energy, CPG, biotech, and pharma. The Boda acquisition, which we made in May of 2022, continues to perform and, I would say, meet and exceed our expectations, both in terms of winning work in the BTS client base and also bringing BTS services into the Boda network.
As I mentioned, the EBITDA margin improvement for North America was due to those efficiency initiatives that we were now four quarters in in terms of realizing the benefits. We have really strong margins in the fourth quarter across all BTS market segments. If you look at the first line, North America, you can see that North America grew 8%, and their margins went from 14.2%-18%. BTS Europe is still feeling, I would say, the, you know, the client conservativism that we experienced in both the tech sector and some of the other sectors. They declined in terms of revenue in the fourth quarter, but were able to maintain a decently good margin despite that of 17.6%. BTS Other Markets is the shining star, right, of the year and of the fourth quarter, with 13% growth and improving margin from 18%-21%.
APG is back to growth, which is nice to see, and they'll be focusing on margin improvement this year. It was more of a one-time hit due to the nature of the services that their clients were asking them for. If you look at kind of the overall evolution of revenue per quarter, you can see the bars. So the orange bars, Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4, are all 2023. So at the annual level, the company grew 2% over the course of a year, BTS other markets leading the way at 8%, North America at 1%, BTS Europe -2%, and APG -3%. And if we look at the overall pre-tax profit per quarter in terms of the four quarters and over the history, look, you can see the strong ending visually, right, followed by the slump in Q1, Q2, and Q3.
If we look at the earnings as a percentage of the margin by the units for the whole year, NAM was 13.2% compared to 13.6% the year before. Europe was 13% compared to 17.9%, given that they shrunk. Other markets was 14.2% compared to 13.1%, so nice improvement from other markets for the year. APG was 0.1% compared to 1.5%. Many of you have been long-term investors in BTS, which we are grateful for, and I think you've become used to, and we certainly hold ourselves accountable for long-term profitable growth. Just to remind you or to educate the new investors, this is our historical performance. Average revenue growth of 12% since 2001 and average EBITDA growth of 15%. CAGR. In terms of the dividends, you can see the overall dividend story over the years.
We have a stable and growing dividend since our IPO, excluding the pandemic year. The goal of this is to distribute between 40% and 65% of the profit after tax in the long run. SEK 5.7 is the proposed dividend for 2023 to be distributed in two installments of SEK 2.85 each. In terms of the outlook for 2024, so we have a really wonderful cost structure in place, right? As I mentioned, the efficiencies of 2023 help us set us up for scale. They were not short-term cuts. So we've got the cost structure in place. We carry the efficiencies with us. We will obviously continue to improve our ways of working, both from a global perspective and in the individual units. Given all of that, we are expecting growth in 2024, both top-line revenue growth and earnings growth as well. Thank you.
Excellent, Jessica. Thank you very much. I start off with a few questions, and then we'll let other dialing in ask questions as well. I have a question regarding your thoughts about recruitment ahead.
Yeah.
At the end of the year, you were 6% less employees than a year ago. You are now guiding for growth into 2024. I guess utilization is quite good in the company, given that sales were flattish and a number of employees down. When will we see you coming back to recruitment mode again during the year?
Yeah. Yeah, so two part two answers to that question. One, we think we have about 5% capacity, right, in the team that we have in terms of growth. But secondarily, we, we are continuously recruiting. We did last year as well. I mean, not, not to bring the influx way up, but to find really great talent, right, senior talent who are really good in our space or can bring us a new capability or drive revenue. So we are continuously recruiting, but we've got some room from a capacity perspective still.
Okay. So you can grow without adding too many new employees in 2024.
Yeah.
Okay. Then the second question on your guidance regarding earnings growth next year. I see that licenses sales were down in 2023 versus 2022, and I guess that those come with pretty good margins. Should we expect that to increase in 2024 as well, helping the margins upwards, or how should we think about the licenses part of revenues ahead?
Yeah. Yeah, our license story is shifting a bit in terms of one of the innovations in terms of how we partner with clients. We have something called the BTS Access Pass, which our clients can then get access to their broader portfolio on a subscription basis, and it comes in two different forms. That's a very long way of saying, "I expect it to grow in 2024.
Yeah. Cool. And then my final question here before we let others ask questions as well. The start of Q1 is typically quite important and interesting because you have many sales kickoffs with customers, etc., and in the fall, you commented that your pipeline looked pretty good into Q1, in January especially. Can you say something about the start of 2024 so far? We're almost two months into the year here.
Yeah. Yeah, we typically don't give specific guidance per quarter, but I would say that the markets in general feel similar to the fourth quarter in terms of North America and most of the world, and with the client conservatism in Europe continuing, right? So if I think about kind of the noise, there, I still hear more frequently about new layoffs hitting some of the European companies and clients, some more stalls and delays there. I don't mean to leave the impression that it's a breeze at the same time, right? I mean, even in North America and other markets, we still get some delays. We win work. They won't start six months later. So it's still a mix, but it feels similar at this moment to the fourth quarter.
Okay.
Yeah, from a demand. And you mentioned sales kickoffs, so I would be remiss, but at this very moment, 45,000 people around the world are going through a sales kickoff with us doing a four-hour simulation, practicing their most important moves. So that's what I mean about, like, simulations at scale and teams preparing, running plays together, upping their game. It's happening today, so.
Cool.
Yeah.
Let's see if we have some more questions.
If you wish to ask a question, please dial pound key five on your telephone keypad to enter the queue. The next question comes from Karl Norén from SEB. Please go ahead.
Hello, and good morning, Jessica. Congrats on a good result here this morning. Just a question here on the North America and Other Markets margin, which of course was very impressive. I'm just wondering if there's anything specific positively impacting the margin in the quarter, or if you think that this is a, let's say, new sustainable level, not the Q4 level, but I mean, are there anything impacting margins positively that we should be aware of going forward? That's my first question. Thank you.
There was nothing extraordinary, right, or unusual in the fourth quarter, giving a kind of a one-time bump to margins. It was the combination of the, you know, better cost efficiencies, the smaller contractor spend, better pricing and scoping, all the stuff we've been working on. Obviously, the growth helps. So and the thing to remember.
Yeah, yeah, of course.
The thing to remember is that the fourth quarter is typically our biggest quarter in revenue, right? So.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But also, on a question on the European market, if I remember it correctly, I've implemented the same model that you did in the U.S. now, like one year ago, also in the European market to get up margins there. When should we expect that to?
Yeah.
To take sort of to see results in the figures, I would say?
Yeah, from a cost basis in the first half, right? Yeah, that's where we'll see the lift over the Q1 and Q2.
Yeah. And on the European market, it seems to be quite slow here. Is there any specific sectors where you see slow demand?
I mean, the slower demand for us is in professional services, right? I think it's a tough market for many, many companies right now.
Yeah.
I would say we've been winning in insurance and industrials. Those are the two where kind of the main wins of the last couple quarters have been in, if that's helpful.
Yeah. And then, a question on the acquisitions. I mean, you still have a quite strong balance sheet here, with a strong net cash position. Can you give us an update on your pipeline on the M&A side?
Yeah. I would say we're, we're pretty busy right now, which is great. And so looking at both opportunities for strengthening geographical expansion outside of, let's say, the U.S. and, and Europe, some tech opportunities as well. And yeah, we're, we're spending, I would say, more time than usual on it at the moment, which is great.
Sounds good. Just the last one from my side on other markets. I mean, quite strong organic growth here of 13%. Can you explain a little bit more what is driving, I mean, the strong results?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. They, they had such a good year, right? The markets that are driving the most growth, I would say, is Southeast Asia and the Middle East. It's been that way, you know. It continues to feel really strong there. We also had really nice performance from Italy and Spain. I mean, despite a tough economy there, the teams there are really doing a great job. So I think those are the main growth drivers of most of the world. South Africa came back to growth as well last year. The markets where that struggled more was Korea. I mean, a high percentage of our work in Korea was tech-based, and some of the same layoffs hit there. But we're seeing that turnaround now in terms of demand and so forth. Japan was soft. Yeah.
Okay.
Obviously.
It sounds like you expect strong demand in other markets to continue then, or strong performance sounds. So no reason why it shouldn't continue, I guess.
No. I mean, in general, other markets, if you look historically, have a softer kind of start of the year, and then it keeps growing. But yeah, no, the feeling of demand is similar to the fourth quarter right now.
Yeah. Sounds good. That's all from me. Thank you, Jessica.
Yeah.
The next question comes from Rikard Engberg from Carnegie Investment Bank. Please go ahead.
Good morning.
Hi, Rikard.
So yeah, I have one question. If you could please talk a bit about the sentiment within the tech sector in North America, how that has changed during the year and how it's looking going forward.
Yeah, it's. I would say they're moving more. There's more movement, right? They've gone from restructuring, layoffs, fear, conservatism. Let's wait and see. As a general, right, obviously you have exceptions to that, but as a general sentiment to kind of working through those initiatives, getting their profitability up and their margins up, and now kind of back to focusing on growth. We saw a lot of companies, you know, six to three quarters ago laying off a lot of the go-to-market side of the business. Now, there are still tech companies who are doing another round of layoffs. Don't get me wrong. It's not like a complete rebound of sorts. And it's still hard for, you know, startups to find capital and all of that.
But I would say there's, it's a little bit like they stalled some things they knew they needed to do, and it's the movement is a little faster, right? It's not back to boom times, but it's moving again.
Okay. So you could say that the lead time has become a bit shorter now compared to the start of the year.
Exactly. Exactly. Yep.
Okay. Great. That was all from me.
Excellent. We got a question on email as well, which related to the business climate in North America and the tech sector, which I think we responded to here with Rikard's question. But to follow up on that one, is change coming and driving business for you, particularly some words related to AI and what you can offer in that regard to help companies? Is that the driving force for you?
Absolutely. I mean, our biggest clients basically feel like they're constantly needing to adapt in order to be successful, and then they're figuring out what's the most efficient way to drive behavior change at scale. I mean, that is the core need. And I would also just say there seems to be kind of a realization that large companies should think of themselves more like elite teams, elite sport teams, and give people the chance to prepare, to practice, to run plays. Because if you don't, they don't know what you're talking about. You know, like the traditional memos of work this way, if they don't have a chance to co-author that, visualize it, practice it, they tend to not change, right?
And then in terms of AI, especially with, you know, prompt engineering and generative AI and the large language models in particular, it's much more of a, in its nature, a grassroots human-first tool now, right? You don't have to be a Ph.D. to have a, I mean, which we all know, and that actually serves our value proposition really well, which is like, trust your people, let them tinker, let them come up with how they can improve their own ways of working. And that's a lot more doing than it is telling or philosophizing. So we do a lot of training and consulting services around the adoption of AI and then shifting the ways of working around those insights.
I see. I have a question on cross-selling. You said that you were happy with that, and that enabled stronger margins, and you worked a lot with it in 2023. We can understand it works very well in the US, obviously, across regions. But in Europe, you have different languages. You have physical distance. You need to move people between countries. Is that well-functioning now? Have you reached kind of the top level you can do in terms of cross-country selling?
Specifically within Europe?
Yeah. In Europe, exactly.
Yeah. I mean, Europe made a huge improvement on this over the last three years, I would say. Have we reached our max? No. I think there's always, like, the next level of high performance. And at the end of the day, it has to do with the mindset, right, of if this is the client problem, who do we have that's the most expert in that to either apprentice a team or help them win the work and then stay involved in the project? So the more people want to partner with maybe their colleagues who they haven't worked with before, but they have the right expertise, the higher the win rates, the more fun the project, right? That's but I, I think Europe's made a lot of improvements, and.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It works well across languages and industries, etc.
Yeah.
Good. Then kind of a follow-up on that one. In the pandemic, you need to shift, from physical deliveries to virtual deliveries to a much larger extent. Where are we kind of that mix today? I remember it was like 50/50 a year ago or so. How should we expect it to develop going forward? I guess that's an enabler for cross-country deliveries as well.
Yeah, yeah, the virtual.
The virtual delivery.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Is that going to stay at this level ahead, or is it going to come down and we go back to more of a physical delivery world? How do you expect it?
I mean, physical delivery has continued to go up. I think people and company cultures just have missed each other, right? And so the lift that you get from a sense of community and the bonding and the relationship building and all that, even when you're doing really hardcore topics, I think most companies absolutely are craving and wanting. It's more of a budget issue, right? The cost of travel for 1,000 people to get together versus virtual is considerable. So the long answer is 50/50 is probably still about right, give or take. But yeah.
That feels like a good mix ahead that you can maintain, or do you expect the physical part to increase as share of revenues? Because I guess that comes with a little bit more OpEx, slightly longer lead times with traveling, etc.
Yeah, but the benefits of being together with the client are huge from a business development perspective. So I, I would personally, I would love us to do more and more in-person together with clients. The leads are they come in faster, and so yeah. I think it actually outweighs the efficiency.
Yeah. We have a second question on email here, which is a follow-up on AI. Maybe we responded to it before, but I'll read it and we'll see if you can add anything. Has the group formulated a strategy for utilizing generative AI to increase efficiency and help clients utilize their data more effectively? Do you have like a plan?
So both internally, how are we using it?
I guess so.
And then using it for clients. So.
Yeah, and also how clients can improve.
Yeah. I mean, so for our internal work, we've done quite a lot, right? Starting in May of last year, we started to build the consultants guide to AI, the BTS consultants guide. I think we're on like our 1,000th version because you keep learning and adding to it, but we did training around the whole world on that. We've had, I would call it breakthrough productivity gains in four areas of the business. One is obviously in our on the digital side, and in particular, that's the time it takes now to build practice-based bots. It used to take like 12 months. It now takes four weeks. Another one is for the first time in the company's history, we are able to provide benchmarking analysis back to our clients given the custom nature of their qualitative content. And that could have taken years to build, right?
But I mean, that was an absolute breakthrough. Another one is in the assessment side. I've mentioned this before. The speed to, like, providing reports back to clients has dropped 75%. And then in the, the part of the business that does role-specific digitized kind of high-performance training, they're getting some breakthroughs on, you know, custom video content production. It's probably no surprise there. Those are the big ones. I would say on the core general consultant base, it's an evolution. Some offices jumped in right away, and like, they're sharing now their learnings around just, you know, writing and research and all of that. We have a BTS generative AI service, but the quality of that isn't quite as high as what you can get on OpenAI because our company's size. So we don't quite have access to that yet, but we're waiting.
So I would say we took a grassroots approach where we had breakthrough productivity gains. We have shared that both at the conference in Vienna that we had in January with our teams and virtually. The next step is, like any company, would be the next level governance to ensure that those gains show up either in faster growth or in the operational efficiencies in the P&L, right, over the coming four to eight quarters. That's, that's where the rubber hits the road, right? And we find our clients going through the exact same evolution. So yeah.
Excellent. My final question is around the margin target. You raised it in 2021 to 17% when you were at 15%. Now we're closing out 2023 at 12.9%. So you have to try out 13%. How should we think about the trajectory from 13% up to 17%? What's kind of the main margin drivers except from growth volumes and scale? Are there anything else we should keep in mind?
Yeah. I mean, it's definitely still our long-term plan and stretch target. So besides the obvious things, right? You know, look, depending on kind of which acquisitions we go after, we could look at the margins that you could get there. Obviously, breakthrough productivity gains through AI couldn't be another more material one than in the past. This one might be, you know, from a real estate perspective, we're still setting and kind of evolving the strategy. But the more people are together, the more productivity gains we tend to have and higher retention. So I don't think we're going to do anything dramatic on that front. For us, the thing to remember is when we take share from the Big Four consulting firms, we are still less expensive by quite a lot.
So there is a certain discipline on pricing and then partnering models, which is more like the monthly run rates plus the Access Pass subscription thing I was talking about could be a breakthrough for us over time. Those would be the main ones.
Yep. Excellent. That was my final question. All analysts have asked questions. We're out of questions on email as well. So thank you very much, Jessica.
It's my pleasure.
Congratulations on a strong quarter.
Thank you.