All right. Welcome, everyone. I hope you can hear us okay. I'm here together with Noora, our CFO. My name is Jonas Hasselberg. I'm the CEO. We're going to go through the Q4 and Full Year Results for Proact. Everyone, you can hear us okay? I get a bit of an— Go on, fortunately. Jonas Hasselberg, I'm the CEO. We're going to go through the Q4 and Full Year Results for Proact. Everybody just bear with us a second as we get the audio correct.
Hey, there.
Is everybody muted, though?
Everybody needs to mute. I think that's the challenge.
I will ask our technician to make sure that everybody is muted. Just bear with us again. All right. This sounds better. Okay. We are going to do this the normal way. We will go through an introduction to Proact. Some of you have heard it before. We will cover the highlights of the quarter as well as the year. We will go a little bit deeper into the financials of the report.
First, a high-level introduction. Most of you know us quite well by now. Proact is now in its 31st year. We are helping customers across Europe with business-critical IT solutions. We deliver IT infrastructure to mission-critical applications for big and mid-sized enterprises across Europe. You can see our presence across Europe on the map here on the slide. We are just short of SEK 5 billion in turnover, and are about 1,100 employees.
We've had a good growth in terms of our revenue over the past couple of years. Obviously, EBITDA at a record level at SEK 351 million when we look at full year 2024. We'll see on the next slide, we're a highly decentralized business. We are organized in regions, where Nordics and Baltics is the largest in terms of turnover, followed by Central and West and U.K., which are then all divided into individual countries.
This is the way we run our business. Each region and each country is very close to their customer, quite autonomous in terms of making sure we do the right things in each market. We know the competition. We know the customers. We can adapt our offerings.
At the same time, we do a couple of things across the organization and in a more standardized, not so much centralized, but standardized way, which is particularly the way we deliver our cloud services. We do that out of four coordinated and harmonized standardized delivery hubs so that all our cloud services are delivered in the same way to all our customers.
This is an important part of our strategy so we can be close to customers through our decentralized organization, but we get scalability and can bring in a lot of new customers, a lot of cloud engagements without having to necessarily add a lot of cost to that delivery. That's the way we're organized.
We also have in two areas, security operations centers, one in the U.K., one in Germany, which enables us to, across our regions and across our markets, help our customers, making sure that their infrastructure is protected and safe from cyber threats. On the next slide, we'll show the revenue splits.
You know this already. We have four main revenue streams. Systems, it's the reseller business of hardware and software, still making up roughly half of our revenues. This is a very traditional, quick turnaround business. This is also the, let's say, a little more volatile part of our business, which we also noticed here in Q4.
Sometimes this is we have strong quarters, sometimes less strong, but over a rolling 12-month period, this is typically stable and slowly growing business. Sales cycles relatively quick, delivery cycles even quicker, and then obviously immediate invoicing.
We keep no inventory, but these are immediate customer-specific deliveries. Support services, an important part and complementary to the systems. This is where we make sure through technical expertise that the systems at our customers are running at full performance or lights are green. Slightly different business models.
These are typically three-year contracts, but with upfront payment. From a cash flow perspective, a very good business. That revenue is deferred over the period of the contract. Third, and strategically maybe most important, the cloud services of our own. This is where we deliver roughly the same functionalities: storage, compute, networking, security, backup, disaster recovery, workspace, but we deliver it as a service.
Our customers do not own and operate the underlying technology. We do it for them, and we invoice them on a monthly basis.
Last and actually least, consulting services, anything from advisory around technical solutions, architecture, installations, migration, training, typically, typically time and material engagements, as you would expect in a consulting business. We highlight on this slide a couple of areas of expertise, on that you saw at the bottom here, cybersecurity, cloud-native application development, AI, of course, and Microsoft.
These are just examples of an area where we invest in making sure that we have leading competencies and experts that really can help our customers. These are fast-moving technologies, and we need to be at the forefront to be able to help our customers. These are just four examples of areas where we invest in competence development.
On the next slide, just quickly on the market, it is a fast-moving market, and it is a growing market, which is good for us.
There's a number of underlying drivers. The digital transformation remains the main driver. What we mean by this is our customers need and demand and want to improve their own operation, their own offering to their customer, their own decision-making, automating their workflows, whatever it may be, through IT. This is obviously a big driver across segments and across our geographies. It's not new. It's been there for a long while. Still a strong driver for us.
Security, as I mentioned already, is a very strong driver as well, popping up more and more, unfortunately, as the threat levels are increasing. Sustainability and regulatory issues, now, of course, upcoming, are increasing security requirements on a lot of public and private companies that need to be fulfilled in terms of the NIS2 regulations. The last two are more technology-driven, but the technology pace is very quick.
Obviously, our customers want to be at the forefront and leverage the capabilities of cloud and leverage the capabilities of hybrid architectures. Last but not least, an ever-increasing demand for data. All these five are driving the demand for our services. On the next slide, we will just show schematically how we think that the market is accelerating in front of us. We expected this to pick up already in the second half of 2024.
That may not exactly have happened for macro-level reasons. We still think that this demand is growing when we look forward into 2025 and onwards. What we do, and you will see here on the next slide, is really deliver mission-critical solutions to our customers. What we do for our customers is fundamentally important.
If our things do not work, if our services are not up and running, typically the business of our customers will be standing still. We have highlighted a couple of examples in the past, including the need to digitize patient records, which is now a regulatory requirement in the U.K. This will help the caretakers to be more efficient in the way they meet their patients. Obviously, security requirements become incredibly important.
Here we are helping hospitals, large hospitals in the U.K., to both make sure that they are more efficient and spending more time with their patients, as well as making sure that the patient records are secure and only accessible by the right people. Software as a service are now very good examples where customers are delivering, like Fort nox, usually our favorite example, services over the web to their customers.
If our infrastructure is not running, the product to their customer is not working. These are all good examples. We have a very clear go-to-market model.
We call it the Snake here on the right-hand side of the slide, starting with the business understanding of our customers, taking them through the whole journey of transforming their IT, migrating to a modern hybrid cloud architecture, and then operating it for them, enabling our customers to spend their time on their own business and their own customers, not on the IT infrastructure.
We do that for them. We have two cases that are new for the quarter. We always bring in, of course, new customers every quarter, but these are a little bit extra fun. There's a customer in the U.K. called Teachers and Stern. It's a legal firm, relatively large.
They've selected Proact as their new vendor for their infrastructure, and we deliver that as a, through a hybrid cloud platform. The other example is a Swedish-based, part of Dole, Dole Nordic, which is the big fruit and vegetables company global. They are also running their infrastructure on top of a cloud offering from Proact.
These are both good examples of the relevance of our hybrid cloud portfolio, where we then enable our customers to really tailor the infrastructure for their particular needs by using on-prem solutions where they need, the public cloud where they need, our cloud services where that makes sense. These are also, in particular Dole, using our, what we call Container as a Service platform, which enables them to do rapid application development, which is extra interesting. We have done a lot of work.
You've seen this, with our customers around the offering, the quality of our services, the speed with which we deliver, and which is actually being noticeable in an increase in Net Promoter Score, which is great. We've upped our customer satisfaction of 3 points to 62 in terms of Net Promoter Score. Very, very strong score, which is fantastic.
Q4 then, a couple of things. We did go out, as you know, with the profit warning right before Christmas. We expected a decline in both top line and EBITDA. That did indeed happen, a little bit less so than we anticipated, which feels good. We had a bit of tailwind across three different areas that all aligned on the right side for us.
We did close a few more deals at the very end of December that we were able to deliver. That helped the result.
We had a little bit lower cost than we anticipated, which is also good. We are always very keen on cost control. Last but not least, at the end of the year, we get some of the rebates from our vendors, and they came in better than we anticipated. There were three different components that all three kind of aligned and had positive tailwind in the quarter, which dampened the results a little bit.
A bit of a decline in top line, but less so than we anticipated. Slightly better EBITDA than we anticipated, but also here a decline. However, I guess the good news, record-level intake of new cloud contracts at SEK 224 million. Also, when we summarize the year, a record year along many parameters: record revenue, record EBITDA, record cloud intake in terms of value of contract.
A good full year, to say the least, for Proact. Noora, I'll hand over to you, and you can talk a little bit more deeply about the numbers.
Thank you, Jonas. On this slide, revenue in the fourth quarter reached SEK 1.3 billion, a decrease of 6.7% and 7.2% organically. System sales decreased with SEK 97 million, 12.3% organically, primarily due to a temporary decline, mainly within business units Nordics and Central. Revenue from services business increased with SEK 4 million and organically 0.1%.
Business unit U.K. continues to demonstrate steady revenue growth driven by continued positive momentum. On the next slide, annualized recurring revenue amounted to SEK 1.8 billion in the fourth quarter, an increase with 1.9% compared to Q4 2023.
New cloud service agreements amounted, as Jonas mentioned, to SEK 224 million in the quarter compared to SEK 197 million last year. This is a new quarterly record, primarily driven by business units U.K. and Norba. A significant number of existing cloud contracts were also renewed during the quarter, highlighting the strong customer satisfaction. Next page, please.
Adjusted EBITDA amounted to SEK 80 million, a decrease of 12% compared to the same period previous year, mainly due to lower sales in the systems business. Business units Nordic and Baltic stands out this quarter with an EBITDA increase of SEK 20.5 million. Further, the cash flow and net cash position on the next slide. Our net cash position in the end of the quarter landed at SEK 330 million compared to SEK 80 million at year-end 2023.
Our strong financial performance has enabled us both share buybacks and dividend during the year, still leaving us in a strong financial position at year-end. Some more cash flow on the next slide. Strategic efficiencies and focus on the service business has driven strong cash flow development.
Cash flow from operating activities amounted to SEK 207 million, while total cash flow for the quarter reached SEK 152 million, an increase from SEK 135 million in the same period last year. The quarter was impacted by a slight increase in working capital, mostly due to timing effects.
Now some details from our business units, starting with Nordic and Baltics on the next slide. Revenues landed at SEK 717 million in the quarter. EBITDA increased with 39.6% to SEK 72 million, resulting in an EBITDA margin of 10.1%, being above the group target of 8%.
Business unit Nordic and Baltics continues to deliver stable results in the fourth quarter. Further, to business unit U.K. In the U.K., revenue increased with 5.9% to SEK 174 million. The increase is driven by good system sales.
EBITDA declined to SEK 3 million, corresponding to an EBITDA margin of 1.9% due to revenue mix shift leading to a lower gross margin. On the next slide, business unit West, revenue in business unit West decreased with 5.6% and landed in at SEK 198 million. EBITDA decreased from last year's SEK 13 million to SEK 4 million this year, an EBITDA margin of 2%.
Revenue and EBITDA both declined due to lower systems and services revenue during this quarter. Lastly, business unit Central on this slide. Revenue decreased to SEK 210 million in the quarter, mainly due to lower system sales.
EBITDA landed at SEK 6 million, corresponding to an EBITDA margin of 2.8%. Both EBITDA and EBITDA margin decreased mainly due to lower system sales and integration costs for previously acquired businesses. On the next slide, our financial targets.
In the quarter, we experienced an organic decline of 7.2%. Looking at total growth for the full year, we still have a way to go to reaching our target of 5% of organic growth and additional 5% growth via acquisitions, where we haven't made any acquisitions during a slow M&A period in the market.
EBITDA margin in the quarter was 6.7%, and last 12 months summed to 7.2%. We are closing in on the long-term target of 8%. As I previously mentioned, we are actually in a net cash position, meaning that we are well below the set level of leverage of two points.
Return on capital employed is at 19.7% for the last 12 months, just below the target, which is 20%. This concludes the financial overview of the fourth quarter. Back to you, Jonas, for some final comments.
Thank you, Noora. Yeah, I think we are in general quite positive about the market. The demand is still good there in the marketplace, and we communicated in the profit warning before Christmas that the decline in systems is temporary. We still believe that is the situation, which is good. We are looking positively to 2025.
I do remind everyone we had a very strong Q1 in terms of gross profit and gross margins last year. The comparables are tough, but overall good and positive outlook for 2025, where we think that organic growth is back in the books. Incredibly strong balance sheet, as Noora just mentioned.
We are very active on the acquisition side as well. We may have glossed over it, but with the strong position, the board will recommend an increase in dividend from SEK 2 to SEK 2.4, to the AGM here later in May. That will be a bit of a good increase in the dividend back to our investors.
With that, thank you so much. We will open up for questions. You will have to raise your hand. Daniel, always the quickest, and you will have to unmute yourself as well. Go ahead, Daniel.
Yeah, thank you very much, Jonas. I start off with a question where you ended on the gross margin. You have said or told us to be a bit cautious to extrapolate the strong one here, but now you report 24% again in Q4.
Last year in Q1, it was about 25, obviously. Do you see that you have leveled up in terms of gross margin, at least a little bit ahead of the 22%-ish we have been historically?
A little bit. Gross margin is an important lever for us, as you know, and it is a couple of things we talked about quite some time. One is the shift to services, where we do have a higher gross margin than for the systems business, and then getting scale out of our delivery, the cloud services delivery, which we have talked about. A lot of work has been done to standardize and automate and make our delivery capabilities more efficient. You do see the effect of that.
I think the only caveat maybe that I'll highlight, and it's not a huge one, but Nordics is obviously running at a very strong gross margin and also a very strong EBITDA margin. They're at over 10% in this quarter. That may be a little bit tough for the long term. We are well above eight, which is great. We can show now that we can run the business over eight.
They may not be able to run at this high level consistently. The main reason for that would be, I would think, an increase in sales cost.
Yeah.
Which doesn't hit the gross margins as much as it hits.
Of course, bottom line.
Yeah.
I see. I see. The second one on regional developments. You walked through Q4 numbers here a bit. West and Central were down organic year- over- year.
How should we think about 2025 in terms of the regions? What's your kind of different outlooks there?
I mean, I think we're seeing growth in all regions at a slightly different pace. We have good momentum already in the U.K. We think we're going to see Central and West also pick up.
For the full year, they were a little bit better than in the quarter. They were also impacted by, in particular, Central by the temporary decline in systems. I think there is growth in all our markets. We've said this many times before that Germany may be the toughest market right now for macro levels, but we still think there's growth opportunities also in Central.
Okay.
Product-wise, do you have any partnerships or collaborations you think will be more important in 2025 or maybe 2026, like any suppliers that gained lots of ground in recent market development with AI or cybersecurity that is worth highlighting?
I do not think there will be a huge mix when we look at our total mix. One thing that we do see, and I think we mentioned this also before, we talked a lot about AI over the last two years or so, and that customers would originally start dinking around, as I would call it, maybe prototyping, experimenting is a better word, in the public cloud.
We do see now people investing in their own infrastructure. NVIDIA-based high-performance compute platforms, either through a systems deal or even through us, cloud services from ourselves.
There is that little pendulum that we talked about, that people start bringing some of this AI compute power back home because it's cheaper or safer or in better control, is starting to happen at a slow pace. That'll be interesting to see for 2025, the increase of AI compute platforms.
Okay, I see. It makes sense. Finally, on the cost side, you said it came in a bit lower than you anticipated in mid-December. Anything we should be careful to extrapolate into Q1? Are there any, like, non-recurring cost reductions in Q4 that we should not extrapolate or so?
No, I think overall we're running at a tight cost level, and it showed its benefits at the end of the year. Nothing extraordinary in the quarter that you should subtract or adjust for.
I think we're coming into the year at a good cost level. Yeah, I see. And then if I may, on M&A as well, I mean, you have lots of financial headroom at least.
Yes.
Do you think or is the organization and balance sheet ready for a larger acquisition, or should we expect like the sizes we have seen historically?
I mean, it's a tricky one. We wouldn't like to do larger, because it's easier in many ways. I think the amount of work we put into a transaction is roughly the same for a smallish versus a larger. So, it's more bang for buck to do a larger acquisition. To some degrees, a little bit more stable, maybe a little bit less risk on one parameter at least, but there are fewer targets, of larger size.
We're looking across the board from, I'll just kind of round off, but order of magnitude turnover of 100 million up to, let's say, a billion or above. In all fairness, there's more targets at the lower end of that spectrum.
Yeah. Excellent. That's all for me.
Thank you very much, Daniel.
Thank you.
Anybody else? Please raise your hand. Here we go. Erik Larsson, go ahead. You can unmute yourself.
Thank you. Hope you can hear me.
Yes.
Great. I'm from SEB FYI. I just want to follow up on M&A. What's usually the main reason when you look at acquisitions, maybe you're approaching a deal and then it falls through? What's the main reason for, you know, not reaching an agreement usually?
There's been two reasons that are the dominant. Valuation, where we don't meet on the valuation.
We saw that in particular, maybe during 2023, I think there was a lot of sell and a lot of these companies were looking at are founder-owned and founder-led, so they have a bit of an emotional attachment to their companies, which is fully understandable.
They come in from a low interest, low-interest rate kind of period into a period where we saw inflation and high interest rates, which meant that their view on the valuation was not fully aligned with ours. We saw that a couple of times where we could not meet. The second one, which I find a little bit more interesting, is that we, in a couple of cases, have noticed that our cultures are not fully compatible.
It's one of those things that we spend a lot of time on, make sure that these target companies would also fit within Proact and vice versa, that we can work together in a great way. We do want to integrate these companies into our local operations, get the teams to work very closely together, and that means they also need to like working with each other.
We do quite a bit of culture due diligence as part of the process. There have been a couple of cases where we realized in the process that this may not actually work as well as we would like. Those would be the two main reasons.
Okay. Yeah. I had a follow-up on sort of the main challenges, with integration.
I guess it sounds like culture and those types of things might be the biggest.
Yeah, there's one more. If we look at now, we spent an incredible amount during the last year on finalizing the integration of a company in Germany we acquired a few years ago called AHD. There's a third component there in terms of the integration work.
They also have, or had now before they were integrated, an excuse me, portfolio of cloud services, which means they have their own processes and their own portfolio and their own underlying IT tooling, the systems, excuse me, to deliver those cloud services. It's not getting better, is it? That integration was difficult.
Is it gone?
Almost.
In terms of integration challenges, it is difficult when they have a high degree of cloud portfolio, cloud processes, and underlying tooling. The good news is we finalized that integration here over the Christmas time. All of the portfolio, all of the tooling, all of the customers have now been migrated into the Proact tooling, and we've lifted the Proact capabilities to a higher level with the help of AHD. That is a tough, tough, tough amount of work, tough challenge, but definitely doable.
Okay. That is all for me. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Erik. Anybody else? Yep. Neil, go ahead. You will have to unmute yourself.
Can you hear me, okay?
Now we do. Yes.
Okay. Just a couple of follow-on questions. In December, you referenced obviously a slightly softer systems business, but also continued weakness in Germany.
Is there any chance you could just give us an update on the German market conditions?
I think the German market conditions remain the most challenging in Europe for all the known reasons of their overall economic situation on a macro level. I still think there's a bit of growth there. If we compare our four regions, the growth rate is the lowest we expect in Germany versus the rest of the regions, and it's probably the highest in the Nordics, maybe followed by West.
If I would rank the expected growth rates here over the next year or so, I think Nordics is probably the highest, followed by West, followed by U.K., and then Germany with the slowest growth rates, but still a little bit of growth.
I think the opportunity is still there for us to have a bit of growth also in Germany.
Thank you. Just to clarify on the systems business, was it primarily a volume issue or was there some price pressure? If that situation is recovering, are both volumes and price recovering, or is it sort of?
It was a volume issue only. It happens every now and then. Some of these deals are very large. They can be in the tens of millions of SEK or many millions of euros, sometimes up to EUR 10 million. These are big deals. The sales cycles are relatively short, and as I mentioned in the beginning, we customize the system specifically for the customer, and we ship them with relatively short notice.
There is no inventory or anything else. It, we have quarters where we come in a little bit better than we expect, and we have quarters where we come in a little bit short. Usually we look at the systems business over a rolling 12-month period. It gives us a better feel than individual quarters. Q4, you should look at it as a low-volume quarter, one of those, you know, volatile quarters that happens every now and then.
Okay. Thanks. Final question, which is a much longer-term strategic question. Obviously, the margins outside of the larger Nordics region are at sort of a lower level. One presumes that scale has something to do with that. How should we think about those margins over the long term as revenues naturally do build in those markets, and how quickly could they rise?
No, our ambition is to not only run the whole company at over 8% EBITDA, but each of the regions at 8% EBITDA. We think that's definitely doable.
There's some scale in the fact that we want to shift more to cloud services. Yes, we want to grow quicker in cloud services than anything else, but we don't have to. It's not like we have to double the businesses and the regions to get there. This is within reach within our planning horizon.
Shifting to cloud, continue all that work we've done to be even more efficient and standardized in delivering our cloud services, and accelerate the sales a little bit. Those are the main drivers to achieve 8% in all our regions. We believe it's doable.
Thanks very much. Thank you.
Thank you. Good. Anyone else?
You know how to do it now. Raise your hand. Unmute. Ask. Great. If no more questions, thank you so much for listening. We will be back for our Q1 report, which is May 6. Until then, have a great time. Thank you again for dialing in and for listening. Thanks a bunch. Take care.