Earnings Call: Q4 2020

Feb 16, 2021

Good morning, and welcome to Lime's Q4 Update. The headline for this presentation is long term profitable growth before, during and after the pandemic. My name is Erik. I'm the CEO at Lime. And also, our COO, Nils Olsen will be presented today. Yes, thank you. Perfect. Let's start then. We have accomplished 17% growth during 2020 and 29% EBITDA margin. That means that we reached CHF 339,000,000 in turnover CHF 99,000,000 in EBITDA. During the last 20 years, we have performed long term profitable growth. In average, 90% growth per year with 25% EBITDA margin in average per year. We are a SaaS company and with a subscription price model. And today, more than 60% Our revenue are recurring, low risk. And we have a low customer dependency With more than 5,000 customers, a sticky customer product, creating a lot of value for our customers, And the 10 biggest customers stands for less than 8% of the revenue. When you talk about Lime with people and the market, They probably and hopefully say that we have a strong corporate culture, high engagement among the employees. And in total, we have 300 employees in the Nordics and since last year also in Netherlands. The agenda for today, first, I will talk about the investments we have done during 2020 and also during the Q4. After that, we will talk about the business climate and order intake in Q4, the P and L, both the sales but also the profitability. And during the Q4, we have also updated our financial targets. And in the end, we will give you a short summary of the quarter. So let's proceed then to the investments. Early in the COVID 19 situation in the pandemic. We decided to be act in the crisis like a tiger attack when the danger appears. And we try to use all the opportunities that appears in the crisis. During the whole year, we have recruited a lot of people. We have invested a lot in sales and marketing. We have opened up a new office in Netherlands. We have invested in new product releases, and product development. And I'm very proud how we have handled the crisis so far. And I'm very, very sure that all the investments we have done will pay off, especially when the crisis is over, and then we will have a high speed and high pace going forward. As I said, we have recruited a lot of people. And during last quarter, we have recruited 25 new employees, And they started their onboarding, their Traneet program in early January. Actually, the first time in the Lime's history, we do the onboarding the 3neet program, digital. We have received good feedback from the new employees. I think we have done it pretty very good with good quality and also Efficient. However, for me, it's very, very important to meet in person. That's how we build a strong corporate culture, a great team spirit among the employees. So I personally can't wait before we can meet again. So when the society opens up, Then we will gather all employees and meet and do something fun together as a team. During 2020, we have had more than 5,000 people applying for job at Lime. We have recruited 75 new employees. We had 45 who began in August and 25 now in January. Almost everyone has an university degree and more than 50% of the people we have recruited are women. We put a lot of effort into recruitment process, but also the onboarding. The onboarding, almost everyone participate in our 20 program during 10 months, a combination between practical work and theory and lessons. And both when we do the recruitments and also the onboarding. That's how we keep and develop our core values, our corporate culture. And this is how we keep and increase our engagement levels within the organization. Today, we always measure employee net promoter score, and today, the score is 37, A small decrease compared to last quarter. And the reasons behind that is that most of our colleagues and the employees are Getting a lot of tired to work remote and not being together and meet the customers and meet their colleagues. So we can't wait until we can meet again and work from the offices and meet our customers. And then I'm pretty sure that the score will go up again. We are affected by COVID-nineteen as a company. The order intake during the spring when the pandemic came to Europe in the mid February, actually 1 year ago, went down, especially to new customers. We had a pretty tough business climate the whole spring until May. Then in June, We felt that the business climate got a little bit better and became better and better month by month. During the summer, many of our customers decided to have extended holidays And we saw the same trend now during Christmas. And of course, that affected the growth. During the whole year, we saw that sales to new customers, the processes were longer and also some of the processes were paused. However, in overall, the business climate is getting better and better and we have had a good profitability during the whole year. So our overall feeling is that we have handled the crisis in a good way. We are proud about our strategy to see the crisis as an opportunity. We have had good growth. We have had good profitability. However, we can do more. Let's look into the business climate then in Q4 and the order intake. Nils? Yes. Thank you, Erik. And as Erik mentioned, our customer concentration is low and we continue to decrease it. And today, our top 10 customers stands for 7.4 percent and our biggest customer stands for 1.3% of our revenue. And we are not depending on one customer. We are doing deals with many customers and many companies. And We have continued the same pattern the last quarter and closed many deals with both new and existing customers with a slightly increase towards our existing customers within our 4 verticals. Perfect, Nils. Thanks for that. And let's look into the revenue then. If we're looking into the annual recurring revenue growth, We can see that the subscription had a good growth during the Q4, growing by 20%. The service agreements have slightly decreased, down with 4%, But in overall, a good growth in annual recurring revenue despite the COVID-nineteen crisis. Also, when we look into the revenue streams, we can see that the subscription have had a good growth, 23% during the last 12 months. We also see that the service agreements on a stable level, more or less flat. That front, the blue one, we're not selling any upfront licenses anymore And that means that the transformation from upfront over to subscription is more or less over. And then we have the export services. As I have said before earlier, Approximately 60% to 70% of the export services revenue coming from existing customers. A stable revenue stream, really good to have in a crisis like this. And we've had a stable growth during the whole year. If we look at the total growth, 14% in Q4, Organic, 13. And in total, the whole year, 17 total growth, 14 organic. If we look at the split between the market, we can see that Sweden had a good pace, 15% growth in Q4. However, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Netherlands, they are more affected by the restrictions and the lockdowns in those countries only growing by 8%. We are pretty sure that the growth will take off again when the societies open up again. So, we look forward to that. Also during the last 12 months, we can see Sweden, good growth, 17%. However, the rest of Europe, only 16%. We can do much better than that. If we look into the profitability, we have seen an improvement in the profitability since Q4 last year, quarter by quarter. And during 2020, we reached 29.3%. And also during the quarter, the 4th quarter, we see a good improvement from 24.3% last year up to 31.4% in Q4 2020. We have a good scalability in our business and we can see that when we look at the personnel costs expenses or personnel costs Compared to net sales, the percentage going down, 52.3% in Q4 compared to 56.9% in Q4 last year. And we see the same trend the whole year. If we look at the other operating expenses, we can see also the same, a good scalability. And also in numbers, the expense is going down. And here, we can see that we have a slightly Positive COVID-nineteen effect because we're not doing so many travels, not so many conferences and we see a positive effect on that one. Approximately 8,000,000 during 2020, But of course, that's also if we do more travels, meeting more customers, that will also affect the top line. In percentage, 15.6% in Q4 in other operating expenses. And you see that's NOK 52,600,000 compared to NOK 54,900,000 in total during the whole 2020. During last quarter, the Board of Directors I have decided to update our financial targets. The first one, when we look into the sales growth, We used to have organic growth as target. We have done acquisitions in the past and we plan to do acquisitions going forward and we think it's better to include acquisitions in the target going forward. However, this is very important to say, the main growth driver for us at Lime will still be organic growth. So we raised the target and adjusted target from organic to total growth from 15% up to 18%. The EBITDA margin, Lime's objective in the medium term is to achieve an annual EBITDA margin above 20 5%. We used to have 23%, so we increased this one. The capital structure, The net debt in relation to EBITDA should be less than 2.5%. We achieved that one And we also achieved the dividend policy to pay out 50% of the net profit. If we compare our new financial targets with our performance 2020. So we should have a total growth above 18% and we reached we accomplished 17% during 2020. We are not satisfied with 17%. It's an okay level because we have a COVID-nineteen situation, we have a crisis. However, in the mid and long term, we should achieved more than that. The EBITDA margin, Lime's objective in the medium term is to achieve an annual EBITDA margin above 25%. We reached during 2020, 29.3%. High levels. We would like to use our profitability also going forward to invest in growth, to invest in organic growth. That's why we're not expecting the same levels going forward as we have had during 2020. The capital structure, the net debt in relation to EBITDA should be less than 2.5%. We are at 0.1, we have a strong, strong cash flow, good profitability, a great a good balance sheet. We can do investments here. We can do acquisitions and we can invest in organic growth going forward. And the dividend policy, the dividend policy is to pay out 50% of the net profit. The Board of Directors has proposed to pay out 53% of the net profit, an increase from NOK 1.53 per share last year up to NOK 2.53 per share this year. Let's do a summary then. Investments. We continue to invest in growth. And during the Q4, we invested in sales and marketing. We recruited a lot of people and we invested in product development, more product releases than ever before. The growth, A good growth rate and improvement compared to Q3, 14% in total growth in Q4 and 17% total growth 2020 despite COVID-nineteen. The profitability And adjusted EBITDA margin of 31% in Q4 and 29% during 2020, 24% 23% same period last year, a good improvement here. And we have updated, Adjusted and raised our financial targets. And we have also raised the dividend and our proposal to pay our dividend up to SEK 2.5 per share. Thanks for listening. Any questions? Yes, we have a few questions. So, Very open ended question, but how should we reason on growth in 2021 from Camille? We have new financial targets, and we would like to achieve our financial targets in the medium term. Of course, that depends on how the COVID-nineteen situation develops, but we're not satisfied with 17%. We would like to be above 18% and that's why we have updated our financial targets. And the main growth driver will be organic growth. Should we expect export services revenues to be weakened by the pandemic in H1 Subscription sales, should it see some pent up orders? We expect the same conditions and the same market Conditions, as we have seen during the second half here, slightly improvements, better We think and hope that the business climate getting better and better month by month, but we expect the same Business the same provisions and we expect the same development both in subscription and export services. How do you think cost will develop in 2021 when the pandemic ease? 29% EBITDA Margin is very strong. Is it representative for 2021 and 2022 as well? Let's go back to the new financial targets then. As we said, we have raised the financial targets, the EBITDA margins from 23% up to 25%. We will not expect the same high levels as we saw during 2020. We would like to use the profitability to invest in organic growth, So not up to 29%, but an improvement compared to the financial targets. In terms of M and A, what kind of functions do you feel you're lacking on your platform? We're looking to Add ons, acquisitions to improve our product portfolio, both to existing customers but also new ones. Right now, we're looking to functionality like chatbots, forums and that kind of functionality. We're also looking into document handling, e signing functionality and better reporting and that kind of Additional to that, we also evaluate the possibility to acquire platforms in new countries. Maybe there are a lot of local CRM vendors in all countries in Europe and Maybe one of them could be a platform for Lime in a new country. It could be Germany, it could be UK, it could be Belgium, for example. That's something we're looking into, the possibility in that one. Could you give us an update on the Netherlands? Yeah? Niels, maybe you can do that. Yeah. Netherlands, of course, is affected, as Erik said, by the close downs that they have at the moment. But I would say that we have increased the Team now with the recruitments in January. So we recruited 3 more people in January. And we also managed to close A couple of deals in last quarter 2020, which was very positive for the team in the Netherlands. So in total, we are right now more or less 8 persons working in Netherlands. We invest a lot in sales marketing in the country. We have started recruitment for the 3E program in August And we are satisfied with the performance and activity levels we have had during the second half of last year. So we the timing to open up Netherlands was totally right. It's easier to recruit people when everyone else not recruiting. So we are really positive about the development in Netherlands. Has The second lockdown in Q4 2020 created some pent up demand for 2021? And if so, what do you believe is the lead time for that Demand to end up in orders. We saw that after in November when we came into the 2nd lockdowns In all the countries, more or less, we saw A slower order intake during the 1st weeks, then it became better again both in the end of November and in December. Also, the beginning of the year has been pretty good. So we are as I said, we see that the business climate is getting better and better, that's our feeling. But still, we are in the middle of a crisis and we keep on fighting. I believe, As I mentioned, we are affected. We are our position on the market is to be very local, being very present, We're building up at very tight cooperation together with our customers, and then we need to be visiting our customers. So I believe when the societies open up again, that will be good for Lime and their growth. Could you quantify how much corona has impacted sales negatively? What do you think of the overall market growth in Q4? And what about H1? It's hard to say how much. Of course, as I mentioned, My feeling is that we and the numbers shows that we're not doing the same amounts of new deals as We expected before the COVID-nineteen, but we haven't set a number how much we have lost in the COVID-nineteen crisis. We are very, very busy. We had handled the crisis day by day. We try to Optimize every week and every day, that's how we do this and I think that's the right way to do it also going forward. So we will not set any numbers how much we have lost. And some final questions here. Can you take us through what kind of OpEx investments will be made ahead for margins to come down. When we're talking about investments, we're talking about recruitments. So we plan to recruit a good mixture between product developers, sales reps and consultants. So that's the thing we will continue with and that's and we also see, as I have said before, We see a strong correlation between how we recruit today and the growth the next coming 3 years. So if we Do a great and good recruitment process, then that will be good for organic growth the next coming 3 years. So that's how we think, and we do this in the long term. So the investments, the next coming half year will be in recruitments and personnel costs. Can you comment on the final question then? Could you comment on employee churn during the pandemic and if you see any risks of ramp up in there. Yes. We see that the inflation going down pretty fast in the pandemic. If you have a job, you keep that job. We also see that many of the competitors on the market. They are passive. They are not recruiting as many as before and that's also helping us in the decrease in the inflation. However, there is a risk that this number is going up when the pandemic is over and when the societies open up and when competitors start recruiting. But we try to use this opportunity also to show what kind of employer we are. We are stable. We have stable revenue streams. We have good profitability and we give them good Salary increases and so on and good benefits also in the crisis. So we try to show What kind of employee we are also in this crisis, a stable one? Okay. One final question, sorry. Companies working from home as that Created increased demand for good CRM systems. And do you believe, as it might become even clearer, that you need good systems when working remote? Yes, I believe that's sure. And so I believe the demand will increase going forward because when people working from home remote, they need better software to follow-up then, please, and also for them to Corporate between them, please. They also need that. So in overall, the new behaviors will be good for CRM market, And we believe the growth will be in the mid- and long term will be higher than before the crisis. Thank you, everyone, and thank you for listening, and have a nice day. Thank you. Bye. Bye.