Good morning, and welcome to Profoto's Q3 Telco presentation. My name is Amanda Åström, and I am Head of Investor Relations. Today, I have with me our CEO, Anders Hedebark, and our CFO, Carl Bandhold. I will now hand over to Anders, who will start off by giving you some highlights for the quarter.
Good morning, everyone. Thank you for listening in. So our Q3 highlight is that we had a healthy profit margin with an EBIT of 35%, but sales was down with the 27% for this quarter. So, this presentation will change the order a little bit, and we will start with going through the figures, and I will hand over to Carl. Please, Carl.
Thank you, Anders. Yes, as Anders mentioned, sales declined organically by 29% to SEK 172 million. The drivers behind this, I think Anders will cover a little bit more later, but, you know, as many companies, we are facing challenging macroeconomic conditions, which is impacting, you know, the will of our customers to invest in the short term. And we can see this trend across regions. Also, at Profoto, we don't really like to blame the market. So, another factor behind the weak sales is that we have not introduced any new products for the last year, whereas we normally introduce a couple of larger products every year, and we will discuss this a little bit later.
At this level of sales per quarter, it is a little bit challenging for us to reach all the way up to our EBIT margin targets of 25%-30%. So EBIT margin for the quarter was 20%, which, as Anders said, is still healthy but not up to our targets. I think on a positive note, our gross margin is staying high and actually improved by one percentage point to 70%, which again, yes, a positive. Looking at the last 12 months, sales declined 3% to 813 million SEK, and the margin for the last 12 months came in at 29%. So we're still, you know, clearly within our target range, when you look at one year's performance.
Going back to the quarter and looking at performance across our regions, it's clear that, you know, we're facing the same challenges across our region, both Americas, APAC, and EMEA. We see that the macroeconomic climate and the lack of product introductions is impacting the demand for our products. Talking a little bit about our operating model, you know, as I think many of you know, we have a capital light operating model, and over time, our cash conversion, operating cash conversion is quite high, you know, between 50% and 100%, and averaging somewhere around 70-75%. In the second quarter, we were down to 20% because of some timing issues on receivables and payables. Now in Q3, we were back to better level of at 54%.
Continuing a little bit on the operating model and how you can see this is now in our financials. You know, in this quarter, we have added two metrics to our quarterly report, Return on Operating Capital and Return on Capital Employed, to highlight that we have a capital-efficient operating model and looking at performance on return on operating capital over time, you can see that it's really, really high. Even in a weak quarter like this, we have 57% Return on Operating Capital, which again, is very good. Another aspect of our balance sheet is that we have, you know, rather negligible debt of SEK 88 million and very low leverage, which is really positive because it gives us the flexibility to continue to invest in product development and to continue pursuing M&A opportunities.
So, this gives me a lot of comfort in these uncertain times. Summarizing the financial section of the presentation then, our target for net sales growth organically is 10%. At the moment, we're quite far from that, unfortunately. And at the current sales level, as I mentioned, it is challenging, too, for us to reach all the way up to our EBIT margin targets. So we're not happy with where we are on our financial performance, and I will now hand over to Anders to discuss, you know, how we're managing this situation. Thank you.
Thank you, Carl. So let me start with taking one step back and talking about Profoto. Since the IPO in the stock market, we communicated what Profoto is, and Profoto is the leader in the global niche in content creation. We are basing our sales on that the brand is used by the very best photographers in the world. We have a very long history of growth and profitability, and more than 50 years of experience. We were founded in 1968. Our focus is to bring out the new products to the market and focus on what the customer are needing, follow the customer needs and the preference of the customers. We drive the company like entrepreneurs. We all have, and all employees have an entrepreneurial spirit and drive.
So, we are the world leader in lighting products for studios and professional photographers, and we are active in the large image and content creation market, where we are the leaders in one smaller segment, which is called photography lighting solution. We are making products, innovative products, that are flashes and light shaping system that are used by the very best photographers, studios, and brands all around the world. We sell everywhere, where great photography is made, so we have a global distribution. We focus on high organic growth and high margins. This means that we need to invest heavily in innovation and new products. We do this, we focus on exactly this, because everything else we try to outsource, and this is also driving our operational efficiency.
This also means that we need to always hire the very best staff. So, for 20 years, we have had approximately one or two launches per year, and this has driven the organic growth, which has resulted in a +10% growth over the years. And this is in a market where, which has been growing 3%-5%. And we can see this, that in a large share of sales is coming from new products. This graph is showing sales from products that were launched the last three years.
Now, we have had no major large product introductions the last 5 quarters, and you can see the result of this is the slight fall from 65%-51% between 2022 and the last 12 months. This is one of the reasons why we are seeing a lower or a decrease in sales this quarter. What are we doing to actually counter this then? So we continue what we're doing. We continue to invest heavily in R&D. We continue to talk with customers and bring out start new product development projects. Because now when I'm looking back, even if it was right at that time during the pandemic, 2020 and also 2021, to lower the investments and to lower the cost in the whole company.
When looking back now, we can see that this has resulted in a hole in our launch pipeline. But already in 2021, we took the decision to actually increase the product developments, investments, and with a higher efficiency that we had prior to the pandemic. So now, for the future, our target is to exceed the number of launches in a time frame from 12 months to 36 months, looking ahead. And the reason for this time frame is that R&D project for us is approximately three years or up to three years. We are investing in the three areas that we earlier communicated, and as you remember, our core is the black area in this image. It is light shaping for professional still photographers, and this is the core, this is what we've done since 1968.
We have two growth areas that we are also investing in. We have communicated quite a lot and done quite a lot in the e-com workflow solutions area, where we are adding much more software to our product offering, software combined with hardware. And the third area that we're looking into is continuous light or light shaping for moving images. That is everything from smaller video productions to a large film productions. And we are investing, and we are having projects and talking to potential acquisition targets in the three areas. The other thing that we're doing, we are working hard with the customers. We are and all of us, and I am on my own, also spending even more time with customers.
We are traveling more, we are visiting more retailers and large studios to discuss future investments and promote our product offering, which is now based on hardware and software combination. This is it. To the left, you could see an image from the trade show Bild in New York, in Jacob Javits Center, which was held by our largest dealer, B&H, and it was really great, actually. I was somewhat hesitant for trade shows since a couple of years, but actually, this trade show is one of the best trade shows since the last 10-15 years that I visited. I worked myself in the booth, talking to customers, and actually looking into their interest and discussing their interest in light shaping for content creation.
And we could clearly see that we had a lot of interest for our products and for the industry as a whole. So, we not only discussed products sales at the moment, but also we gained a lot of input for new product development. So the market for visual content creation is very vibrant. It is lot of interest that we could see in this market at the moment. And that is it. Thank you very much.
If you wish to ask a question, please dial star five on your telephone keypad to enter the queue. If you wish to withdraw your question, please dial star five again on your telephone keypad. The next question comes from Amar Galijasevic from Carnegie. Please go ahead.
Good morning, guys. Maybe I missed it earlier, but could you provide us some more color on what you currently see in the market in terms of demand, and if anything has changed so far during the start of Q4 year compared to the tougher climate we saw in Q3?
What we currently see is that it's the same trend continuously. We see a demand. It's normally Q3 is Q4 is slightly higher demand coming into the end of the year season, but the market is the same as it has been during the year, I would say.
Okay. Thank you for that. Just a question here, trying to understand how we should interpret your goal of reaching the historical rate of releases?
Yeah.
So you say you need to reach, you know, 1, 2 releases per year in the coming 12 months -36 months, which is quite a wide time span.
Yeah.
Could you provide us any more color on, you know, is that more tilted towards the end of the time period, or should we interpret that as, you know, you don't expect to have any major releases in the coming 12 months? If possible, to just get some more color on that. Thanks.
The color is that we, during the pandemic, we saved cost, and we restructured, as you know, the company in the way that we became fewer people, and that's why we could see that investments in 2020 was lower than the one in 2019. And we see that and then we so started slowly in 2021 to increase the investments in R&D, and we started a project. Some of them we launched a couple of quarter, four quarters ago. The last major launch was end of Q2 last year, last day of Q2 last year.
And since then, we've had launches of accessory, but not major lights, and this is important because when we launch major lights, we're also doing stock fill of the whole distribution chain. So we will always see a good sales increase in the beginning of the launches, slightly off the launches or during launches. And the projects are normally between 2.5 years -3.5 years. So that's why you should expect during next year to see more launches, and that we at least would do 1-2 launches per year following that, or more, actually, since we are more efficient also nowadays in our product development than we were historically prior to the pandemic.
Okay. And then just to understand here, so when you launched the last major release here, Q2 last year-
Yeah.
Did you know that you wouldn't have any big releases in the coming, you know, five quarters, or has there been any delays on the way?
So, I mean, product development is like this, that you need to pass technological hurdles, and sometimes you do this much as you expect or faster, and sometimes it takes longer time. So, some projects, we have several projects obviously going at the same time. So some projects has followed the timeline, and some projects has been delayed because of tech hurdles that we needed to pass. And this is not only bad because it also means that it is not so easy to actually bring out that kind of product.
Mm-hmm.
So, but I'm very, very confident with the operations in R&D that we're having at the moment.
Okay, thanks. That's super helpful. Just a final one on, on the gross margin for me here. So it's been around 71%, 72%, 70%. Has anything changed there in terms of, you know, input prices or what, what's the dynamic there? What should we expect, going forward?
I mean, we don't really talk about what we expect going forward, but what we see in the gross margin in the quarter is a little bit higher input prices on some of the components, but less cost related to sort of disturbances in the supply chain, and that has netted out. So we're at a good level, we feel, about 70%.
Okay. Thanks very much, guys.
Thank you. Thanks a lot.
The next question comes from Karri Rinta from Handelsbanken. Please go ahead.
Yes, thank you. Thank you for taking my questions. Firstly, following up on the gross margins, you mentioned in the release that you have intensified your effort when it comes to sales and marketing, and you will probably continue to do that. So, what exactly have you done or plan to do? I know that you probably are not cutting prices, but are you sort of incentivizing retailers to become more aggressive on promotions, bundling, or any of those types of measures? And do you expect those to have any impact on your gross margins? That's my first question.
First, impact on gross margin, not really.
No, well, I mean, we have done... we did some of that already in the spring.
Yeah.
We have done that also in Q3. If you follow us online, you can see those kind of things, and that's already baked into the gross margins where we are at. So I wouldn't expect more impact than you've already seen.
No, so what we're doing is to continue in this quarter what we did last quarter. We had some price promotions where we had buy this and get an extra that.
Mm.
and that we will continue to do. Then the reason for this is that we get the attention of the dealer staff when we do that. That is number one. Number two, that we do is that we have increased our efforts in doing qualitative events, especially in the U.S. market, that we're now bringing out in all other markets. And for us, we changed the way of doing marketing so that we're actually ensuring that all the activities that we do are profitable. But at the same time, this is sometimes hard, but we have increased heavily the last three months-
Mm
In number of that kind of activities. And this is like a, we have a photographer with the dealer gathering 10-20 customers and showing how our products are working. And this is, it's always and nearly always very good for us, and we could measure that through product registrations on our web. So that is what we're trying to do all over, all over the world at the moment.
All right. That's very helpful, Karri. And then the other focus area now, investment in new product development. So again, the same question: so do you add your own headcount, or do you hire more consultants or more sort of external work? So how exactly should we expect this to hit your operating expenditures in the next 12 months?
No, I think that we are on a healthy level of R&D headcount at the moment, and the expenditure or the investments in R&D. We don't see a major increase because historically, you see the increase in the figures that we showed-
Mm
... that we have increased the investment. And that I'm very confident that this will result in new launches in the future. But things take time.
And then the final question related to R&D and this slide where you show your core growth and two growth areas. So in the last three years, how have you allocated your R&D budget to core and to these growth areas? And we have been talking about light shaping for quite some time. So-
Yeah
Can you share a ballpark number of how much of your R&D budget have you put into light shaping since?
Not, not really.
Yeah.
Now, the reason is that one of them is that when we invest in products, they could go into all three or two of the areas, because the products that are selling to individual photographers, which is the core, also is selling to e-com and vice versa. And the same thing goes with. We know that if we would launch products in LED products for film and video production, a lot of e-com, as well as individual photographers will buy those. So that is one of the reasons. The other reason is that we really don't want to communicate exactly how we allocate the resources for a lot of reasons. So but we are investing in all of those areas.
But you can see that most of the money goes into to our historically flash products.
Yeah, so if I would say that, that because you have invested so much, so much for LED products that are, that you still haven't launched, that you haven't had the budget to keep up your core portfolio, then I would be wrong?
No, no, that's not the case. That is not the case. So, don't worry about that, Karri. So I've been in this industry now for more than between 25 years and 30 years. Our legacy and we see a lot of interest for xenon flash products. We are developing our xenon and flash capacitor charging technology in order to-
Mm
-to actually make this more efficient. We are not moving over to only new areas like... The new areas for us are software as well as LEDs. But we're, for instance, adding LED light into the flash products.
All right. And then finally, a small detail. These trade fairs can sometimes be expensive, so was this new New York trade fair in Q3, and was it expensive enough for you to attend that it had a, I don't know, a noticeable-
No.
-impact on Q3-
No.
-profits?
No.
No.
It did not. So this is affordable. It is not, and this is the reason is that it's not the trade show companies doing this, it is B&H, our large dealers. We have a great contact with-
Mm.
with B&H. They are our biggest customer, as you know, and they are also driving the industry in a very good way.
It is very clear that the purpose of the event was to sell, to sell.
Yes. And yes, it was to sell, and it is-
For them and for us.
Yeah. Normally, you know, you're not allowed to sell at trade show historically. But now trade shows, that was one of the reasons why trade show disappeared in our industry. So this was good. We needed to fill their stock during the trade show, during the first day, because they didn't have enough of how much we sold. That could be an indication how good it was, it could also be an indication of that they didn't have enough stock. So, but in the end, we saw a lot of interest. We see some hesitance, as you know, we clearly communicated, of customers taking the decision. But as I said, this is the best trade show I've been the last 15 years.
Yes. Okay, thanks. And then just finally-
Yeah
... APAC, the deviation to my expectations was the highest in APAC. So is it China, is it Japan, or is it the whole region that was weaker than expected? I think we mentioned this before as well, we were hoping for a pickup, better pickup in China, as I think with many companies. But we have not really seen China performing better than other geographies in terms of, you know, demand. So that may be a little bit below expectations, but it's consistent with what we saw in Q2.
All right. And you're correct. Pretty much every company is saying the same about China. All right, thank you. Those were all my questions.
Thank you, Karri. Thank you.
Great, I have also received a written question here. Could you please give a split of sales between customer groups, for example, how large part of sales comes from the e-commerce workflow solutions, and is there any significant difference in the band from an end market perspective?
First of all, we don't communicate the whole of Profoto as one business segment, so we don't share that. Secondly, it is not easy to do on the customer level since we're selling indirect.
Mm.
We are not able to do that, unfortunately.
But, talking about demand-
Mm-hmm
... and our perception and discussions with, you know, e-com studios, professional photographers, the dynamics are very similar. So to Anders' point, we get a lot of interest. There's a lot of content being created.
Yes.
That is clear. But this economic environment and the higher interest rates makes our customers cautious to invest. And I think one dynamic we see here, which Anders mentioned as well as, you know, when we do, like I said, Karri, we do some bundling and activities, our customers come back and buy our products. But we need to create some reason to buy now, basically, in this market environment.
Mm.
This is also, again, why it's so important for us to introduce new products. We and the R&D team is working really hard on that, and we're quite hopeful about what we will be able to introduce over the next 12-36 months again.
So all in all, sales is down. We have a healthy 20% profit margin, EBIT margin. Our return on investment capital is over 50%, and we feel confident for the future, given the pipeline and investment that we're having in new product introductions. So, thank you very much. Do you have any more questions, please?
No, we have not received any more questions. So thank you for joining us today. And a gentle reminder about our fourth quarter report, which will be published on February 6th. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.