Earnings Call: Q2 2021

Aug 4, 2021

Quarterly report

All right. The time is 11 sharp, and we should get started. Just to let everyone know that we are recording this press conference because we want to publish this on our website later on and that's also the reason why we will be speaking in English even though I have so far not seen an international audience to this press conference. But I would like to start with giving you a very warm welcome to this 30 minute commentary about the interim report that we published this morning. It's myself, Bjorn Karlsson, CEO of the company since 2018 and we have Daniel Lundgren, our EVP and CFO. And we will divide this a little bit between ourselves. I will give you a brief introduction to the company for those who are new to us. We will go through the interim report. I will focus on some of the business events and Daniel will focus on the numbers. And at the end of this presentation we will make sure that we have plenty of time for questions and answers. And you can ask these questions If you want to, you can write them in the chat during the meeting. If you want to feel that you need to have a quick answer, please use the raise your hand feature or will wait until the end for the Q and A session and we will take it from there. So before we get into the interim report, just a few words about Middle East and what we do. Our vision statement is to be your number one choice for tactical IT that consists of rugged hardware, software and services. And the difference between tactical IT and traditional IT is that our products and our services are made for those circumstances where the stakes are the highest, where the requirements are the toughest. And technically, where it's most difficult to handle them. And I see that we have some people entering and exiting the meeting. I hope you heard somewhat just what I said, but I would repeat a little bit anyway. So the combination of hardware, software and services regarding tactical IT versus traditional IT is that this technology is made for those circumstances where the stakes are the highest and the requirements are the toughest. That is what we do and we have been doing this since 1997. So we're a 24 year old company. We operate out of 4 countries here in Sweden, in Norway, in the UK and in the US, but we also have a partner network that spans across 30 other countries. Predominantly, as you can see on the map here, our focus countries are within the EU and selected NATO countries. We are almost 200 employees at the time of this report and everyone is working within this global niche of tactical IT, which is our special area. We were listed on NASDAQ Stockholm on June 4th this year with a ticker MILDF. And if we look at these graphs at the bottom left here you can see a little bit about the split on where we operate. You can see that we're very strong in the Nordic markets. 2020, around 6% to 8% of the revenues come from the Nordic countries. We have a growing presence in the U. S. We established a subsidiary there in 2016, also made an acquisition. That's a growing market. It's Steen also made an acquisition. That's a growing market. It's also the biggest market in the world for our products. And then we have put together Europe excluding the Nordics where we also of course have our UK subsidiary. And then we have dared to name it the rest of the world or the other countries, which is for us currently a very small part of the revenue streams. If we look at the customers, a little more than 50% of the customers are government customers and a little bit less than half of the customers come from the industry. And if we look at the revenue split on our product and if we look specifically at the hardware side, 50% of the revenues come from our own products developed here in Helsingborg, Sweden and almost 50% comes from selected and exclusive partner products that complement our portfolio. So that's a little bit of a background to the company and what we're doing. And now we want to take you through some of the highlights of the period January to June of 2021. And we have to begin, of course, with an event that took place on June 4th. So just a couple of months ago, the company was listed on NASDAQ Stockholm Exchange. This is important for this company because it's a part of the strategic growth agenda that we have. So to be on this power platform powerful platform. I also got this question from a journalist earlier today. What did it mean for the company to be listed on NASDAQ Stockholm? And what maybe surprised us a little bit what's the very, very positive effect of being better known that we see especially when it comes to our work on recruitment and on acquisitions. We have seen this as a very an extra positive that we maybe didn't see would be so great. But if we now look at these quick months for the first half of the year and look at some of the highlights. I want to talk about some of the things that are also part of the future and then I'll let Daniel talk about that have already taken place, but order intake of course is important for us because this is part of our future. And we see that for the 1st 6 months of this year, we have an order intake growth of 38%, which we are of course pretty happy with. That takes us moves us in the right direction. And even bigger growth is in our order book, which and you can also see this on the graph, which is growing with 186%. But I have to also explain that part of this growth is long term orders. So specifically, in this order book, we have the huge order we won in the United Kingdom end of last year that comes with an almost a 10 year delivery schedule. And we think that is of course a very positive thing. I just want to mention that for comparative reasons, it's good to know that some of these are stretched out in time. And finally, something I want to stress, of course, regarding the growth is our revenue growth that is 55% for these 1st 6 months. So if we look at the numbers, these are significant for us and Daniel will get into some of those details. But as you can read from the prospectus and those who know us from before, we have a rather ambitious growth plan. So it's good for us that we are also able to deliver on that in this first report for us. Look into some of the events that took place that we believe are important for the first half of the year, but maybe even more so as we move forward. I want to start with the acquisition of Norwegian company Sysund. We completed this acquisition in March. And also to step back and zoom out a little bit. Part of the growth agenda for Middef is to be very active when it comes to acquisitions. We believe that there are a great number of companies out there who could benefit from being part of the MILD family. We found one such company earlier on this year with this Norwegian company Sysund. They are working and delivering services and software. So they are expanding on build this portfolio and what we already see after this 1st month of working together is a very, very positive synergistic effect, especially on the Nordic markets from Sysund. And now we have a little bit of sound from someone who perhaps needs to be muted. Thank you. So that was important for us and it will continue to be important. We see a lot of international station opportunities with this company specifically for the software part. And the second significant event I want to mention actually happened after the 1st 6 months, just after and we have published a press release some time ago about the acquisition of a Swedish company called DEFCON, operating here in Sweden with integration services. Fantastic complement to the hardware portfolio of Milledef to have the services and integration capacity from DEFCON. So again, this goes back to the growth agenda and the strategic agenda we have for expanding the offering of Middle East. And the third one is purely organic and it's important. As you could see, I mentioned this already in the beginning, the Nordic countries are very important to this company. This is where we come from. These are home markets. This is where we hold some significant framework agreements and this is where we build our international trust. And what you see here on the picture is a picture from Norway with BuildAF equipment being installed. And you will find our hardware in Norway within vehicles like this, which is just a car, you will find it on snowmobiles and you will find it almost on any type of vehicle platform. For us, it's very important with a close relationship we had with our with our Nordic customers to work from a trust perspective, from a Nordic perspective. And then we internationalize. This has been the idea of this company since day 1 and we continue to do that. And we published 2 press releases a few months ago regarding rather significant deals on the Swedish market and on the Norwegian market. So that continues to be very important. So these things, of course, combine to create those numbers that I just shared with you some moments ago. So there's a focus in here that you can see. We are focusing on the acquisition side of the business and we are finding fantastic companies out there who just like us believe that they can become stronger within the MILDEF network of companies. We are continuing our Nordic focus where we see a growth on the market and we also see that we have a position that we should be able to leverage also going forward. And finally, just I haven't mentioned, but what we see here on the screen is also rolling 12 months numbers. And one of the reasons I mentioned this is that even as great as it is to stand here with a strong quarterly result, There may also be future quarters for this company. They are not as great as this one. Who knows if that happens? But something I would just want stresses that we look at this from a longer term perspective. There are some seasonal variations. There are some fluctuations, but we also follow this company from a 12 month or even 24 month perspective and see for those who want to go back and look at those numbers, you can see some of this growth trajectory starting out a number of years ago. And of course, we hope to continue that moving forward. But in order to get into those numbers, I want to give our CFO, Daniel Junge, the chance to talk us through both the second quarter and also the first half of twenty twenty one. So Daniel, take it away. Thank you very much, Bjorn. Hello, everyone. My name is Doner Jurgen and I'm the CFO at Millif. I will try to guide you through a short financial summary starting to focus on the first half of twenty twenty one. If we focus on the big items in the P and L. We can see, as Bjorn mentioned, that we have an increased net sales the first half year of 55%. We can see that the net sales is mainly driven by the Nordic markets, supported, of course, by the Norwegian acquisition CC and Tere in late Q1 this year. We can see the organic growth in the first half was 17% and organic driven growth was 38%, and that is mainly coming from this Norwegian acquisition of Cisint. As Bjorn mentioned, we also did an acquisition after the period has ended of this Swedish company, DEFCON. So we can hopefully expect more acquisition driven growth in the second half of this year. We can see gross margin, which is a very important figure for us when it comes to our financial performance. We can that we have been able to improve the gross margin mainly due to a combination of that the sales volume is going up and also that we have a more favorable customer and product mix that we have sold. We can see an improved EBITDA, operating profit. We have invested in additional growth and very much on the personal side to be able to take care of this growth and also be able to live as a public company. So we are in hope for more on the EBITDA row, but Still, we are in a better position than we were last year. Okay. Next slide, please. If we zoom out a little bit and look at this company from a longer trend and a longer perspective in terms of time, We can see that we now are on an all time high when it comes to net sales on a rolling 12 months basis. We can see that the last 12 months, the net sales has increased with 48%. And on the operating adjusted operating margin side, EBITDA, we can also see that we are on 17.2%, which is still overperforming against our long term financial targets that is at least 10%. And if we see a short summary of the financial position of the company in terms of net debts and our current cash position. We see that due to the new share issue here when we listed the company, we have made major improvements when it comes to our current cash position, where we have cash today of SEK354 million, We have a net cash of SEK 271,000,000. The company has also a target not to seed 2.5 times the EBITDA on a rolling 12 months basis in net debt. We have minus 3.6 times in that case. And also equity asset ratio of 73.1 puts us in a very good position when it comes to balance sheet, our future plans when it comes to adding on additional acquisitions, etcetera. During the quarter here, we also increased the revolving credit facility with SEK 25,000,000 and we today have a credit facility of SEK 50,000,000 which is unused. So a good position for taking on further growth. Thank you very much, Daniel. And that was the short commentary that we had prepared for this interim report. We have received at least 1 or 2 questions before this meeting and we are now ready to open up to questions and feedback. So to try and make this in an orderly fashion, we could use Please raise your hand or you can type a question in the chat. Feel free to ask them in your local language and we'll take it from there. And I see that we have Eric has a question. So Eric, go for it. Erik Golrang. At least a hand is raised. We are not hearing anything. Okay. Maybe it's muted. We'll try to unmute you from here. Let's see. There we go. There we go. Thank you. And thank you for that presentation, Bjorn and Donnell. I have a couple of questions. First one on the gross margin, which was quite a bit strong. We're almost up there to that record level you had ending last year, big improvement sequentially as well. And I guess that ties into the longer discussion on where your EBITDA margin sits relative to that 10% minimum target level. So question obviously, how extraordinary is mix in the quarter assuming that is what explains the strong gross margin level. That's the first question. Yes. Daniel, do you want to take this one? Absolutely. And hello, Erik. Thank you very much for your question. I would say that we are more and more moving over to absolutely over 40% in the gross margin. A couple of things for Etcetera is that more and more business to government is creating this higher gross margin. And we also see a trend where we have more sales of our own products. So if this it's nearly 50s in the long term or not. It's hard to say, but it's not unusual if we are up on these levels in the future as well. Okay. Sounds as it's sort of as a positive underlying trend, nothing really extraordinary in the quarter then. Then on the you had a number of, call it, midsized or depends on your perspective, large or midsized orders in the quarter, particularly to the Swedish Round Forks. What's the tender backlog there looking like for the 2nd mark here and as we go into 'twenty two. Was that a bit of a release from a tender backdrop? Or is there Still lots of activity. I mean there is still lots of activity on the market. What we see on the Nordic markets says that we have this thing called summer vacation, which is unfortunate, but that usually means that in July things tend to be somewhat slower on the tender side for and picks up again here in August. And this is a trend that we're used and we see it again. We also see some of this seasonality just before summer arrives where it's a little we sometimes get a couple of these significant orders just in time before summer. So nothing unusual. And we don't we see the same types of patterns as we are used to that this is picking up here in August again. So nothing really unusual on that. Thank you. Then two more questions, if I may. Sure. You flagged the increased risks in the second half year related to component shortages, saying some deliveries might pushing to 2022. What magnitude could we be talking about here? How severe are these risks? And when you say pushed into 2022, is that just the other side of year end or are we talking well into 2022? What are how big August risks you'd like? Well, if we speak more in general terms here and without trying to quantify too hard, but what we see on the market when it comes to specifically for semiconductor bonus or little electronic chips that we need to purchase in quite large volumes is that there is an uncertainty from a logistical perspective. So sometimes we see that There's a price increase. Sometimes we see that there's a lead time increase. And the problem is that we cannot accurately pinpoint that quantity in delays and what it means. So that's why we're not flagging it as something that we're saying it's going to happen, that we're saying that we're monitoring this very, very closely. And that is something and we're of course not alone in the world of this. Everyone is monitoring this closely and it's very difficult to say. But in general, for our type of product, we do not talk about elongated lead times that could be a year or so out. We're talking about lead time increases, so maybe 1 month, 2 months or even 3 months, but that's it's in the range of a quarter. It's not of the bigger significance than that. But of course, it could end up on something that should have been on this side of the end of the year and falls on the other. Too soon to say. Thanks. My final question on DEFCON Solutions. Looks like quite significant growth this year. But what's the is that a one off ish type of growth level? Or what's the growth outlook for that coming to 2022 and beyond? What we see here. If we look into the Swedish market and we look at some of the investments, some of this modernization that has been communicated politically and also by the Swedish Armed Forces. There is a fantastic underlying growth on this market. So we aim to capitalize and not be worse than the rest of the market. That's for sure. So we see that this is a trend where we have exactly this inclination on the curve or not too soon to say, but we are in growth mode on the Swedish market specifically for this type of services. Very good. Thank you for answering my questions. Thank you very much, Erik. We also have a question here in the chat and that's where do we see the highest growth potential for near and long term, I think it's fair to say that we have seen here in the near term that the Nordic markets, when you combine them, these are significant markets. We see this from a European, from an EU perspective as well. And that is our home base. So I think it's fair to say that we are going to stick to our guns and be very focused on the Nordics, but also it must be mentioned, of course, the U. S. Market is by far the biggest market in the world. It's bigger than the 10 next markets combined. So when it comes to a mid- to long term growth opportunity perspective, the U. S. Cannot be ignored. So we believe our own products have a good future in the U. S. We have we are started, but there's much more to do in the U. S. So long term, I would say the U. S. Biggest growth opportunity. All right. And now I see that Gustaf from Sievers has a question for us. The biggest for us by far. And the question was, what is our visibility into the Q4? Do we already know roughly where we're going to land? Or is it like yes, how far into the future can we see. So I'll leave the answer on that without saying too much to our CFO. Thank you very much for the question Gustaf. Let me put it like this. Where we are today in starting of the Q3. We have 80% good visibility of how Q4 will end. We have this uncertainty When it comes to if we can deliver in this year or they will slip something over to the 2022. But I would say it's no surprise for us and that Q4 is the strongest and we have a good pretty good picture of how Q4 will look this year already now. It's There is still some 1 or 2 months left to take in orders on with delivering in Q4, but 80% of sales already in the order book. Okay. Thank you. Second question. In the report, you're right. I mean the difference between 48% gross margin and around 0% for the result operating result, if you put back the quotation cost and the acquisition cost, I mean, is quite a lot. So my question is, my wife is vacuum in the background. I forgot the question. That happens. Maybe we should thank your wife. It could have been one of the toughest questions. So we We'll go for some easier questions as well. Yes. Thank you very much, Gustav. We also had one that came in writing here over email regarding acquisition and the acquisition agenda. Going forward, given the fact that we have made a couple of acquisitions that is more in the services domain. Can we expect to see more into software also related to the potentially higher margin from that type of business. And we state to what we said before that we are expanding into the domains of hardware complementing the portfolio we already have into software and into services. And if we look into our backlog of acquisition targets, there are all different sorts of companies in here. And so sometimes timing in acquisitions is not something that you choose yourself. So even though we work with this in a very structured way, we also have to be a little bit opportunistic and also take the time where it comes. So it's difficult to say, but it's fair to say that we do have companies like that in the acquisition backlog. When they will actually end up being acquisition, we'll have to wait and see. Good question. All right. We maybe have time for 1 or 2 more questions here. For. See. If we have anything here in the chat. You do not. Let's see if we have any raised hands. We do not. So then I can do my question then. Okay. Go for it. Yes, it was about the consultancy cost you mentioned in the report. Could you tell us a bit about the importance of these and How important are they? How big are they? Is that a really important cost post in your business. Thanks. Yes. I can answer that, Christoph. It's mainly due to the heavy amount of orders coming in on our R and D department. For them to keep up with the orders coming in, we have used consultancies to help the R and D department to delivering all the projects that are going on right now. Okay. All right. Then we have spend 30 minutes together. I want to thank you for taking the time to join us on this short digital press conference. Thank you for the good questions and thank you for the interest in our company. We hope to see you soon again and we're also available if you want to have 1 on 1 chats or just want to have answers to your questions. Feel free to reach out to myself or to Daniel and we'll be happy to give the answers that we can without saying too much of course. So thank you for taking this time. We hope to see you soon again out there. Take care. Goodbye. Thank you very much. Bye bye.