Etteplan Oyj

OMXH:ETTE

Earnings Call Transcript 2024-Q1

[Juha Näkki, executive]

Welcome to this webcast presentation for Etteplan's Q1 results for '24. My name is Juha Nakki. I'm the President and CEO. And after the presentation, you will be able to ask questions from myself, and also our CFO, Helena Kukkonen, will be joining the Q&A session. A little bit about the content of this presentation. So we'll start with the highlights of the quarter, look a little bit on the operating environment, financial development during the quarter. And to the end of the presentation, look a little bit on how we did against our targets and I'll also review our financial guidance for the year. But if we get started, so with the highlights, so -- it was a difficult quarter in many respects. The operating conditions were quite tough, and the market demand was still a little bit declining. But still, we managed to grow our revenue slightly supported by acquisitions. Organic growth was slightly negative, but still a good achievement in a difficult environment. Our operating profit improved slightly, even though we were still below our targeted levels, but for these kind of conditions, a good achievement. Our operating cash flow was good, and it improved from last year as well. And we have been working quite a lot with AI. And now in the quarter, we delivered our first AI solutions or solutions utilizing AI in our technical communications solutions service area, which is very, very promising. And these are the first sort of commercial projects that we've done in the service area with AI support. And this is definitely a very, very interesting area for us and a lot of potential. And also, we continue to invest into the company. We acquired STRONGIT ApS from Denmark, which strengthened our position in Denmark and continued our acquisition streak in the software and embedded service area.

On the negative side, the demand is still quite weak, and our customers are not taking decisions to invest into new R&D or new other types of investments. So the decision-making is really slow, mainly driven by the still high interest rates and also the fact that our customers are receiving less orders and delivering more so their order books are slightly declining. So this has a negative impact on the decision-making from our customers. And as mentioned earlier, organically, our revenue decreased, which we cannot be happy with and also our EPS decreased slightly. If we look a little bit more in detail to the operating environment. So still, of course, the increased geopolitical tension is there. The sort of, globally, the certain uncertainty is still on a high level and is affecting demand and decision-making. Also the high interest rates and also the inflation rates are still having an impact on the decision-making of our customers.

As mentioned earlier, and certain customer industries are still at a quite low level on demand. There are, however, good industries as well in terms of demand. So energy seems to be quite good. And also in the electrification area, we do have quite a lot of things to do. And also, of course, the defense industry is still strong, and these are our positive drivers for the demand. If we look a little bit on different countries. So Europe. In Europe, overall, the demand situation weakened, but generally speaking, we have now started to see the first signs of improvement in the market. The feeling in the market is a little bit better. And there are first signs of market improvements even in some of the European countries. This is not the case in Finland. Finland still remains fairly weak. But if we look at Central Europe or Sweden, so, there are clear signs that there might be some improvement in the coming quarters. And in China, the situation is still difficult. And the -- of course, the geopolitical tension has increased uncertainty in China as well, and this has an impact on our business. But also there, we see that there is a little bit better outlook going forward.

If we look at the revenue and operating profit in general terms, so a small increase, 2.3% in the revenue, and our Engineering Solutions service area and our software and embedded service area is growing while the technical communication solutions was dropping slightly. And on profitability, our -- basically software and embedded solutions improving and also the technical communication solutions improving while engineering is slightly declining. But overall, an 8.1% EBITA improvement, which was okay for the market conditions. If we look at the revenue split and personnel split by service area. So, Engineering Solutions was at 54% and software and embedded at 27%. And then Technical Communications Solutions at 19%. Revenue by area, geographic area. Finland, 48%; Scandinavia 28%; Central Europe, 22%; and then China, 2% of the revenues. And personnel by area, so Finland, 49%, Scandinavia 19%, Central Europe now the second largest area for 22% and then China at 10% from a personnel perspective.

And then if we look a little bit on the revenue by customer segments. So first, I would like to mention that we have done a little bit of regrouping and reallocation of certain customers. So there is a slight difference in the in the segmentation that we are showing here compared to what we showed last year. But of course, then the relative numbers from last year have also been updated. So it gives a true picture. But energy is clearly the largest one currently at 17%. Automotive also improving to 11% driven by electrification, and now aerospace and defense also growing to 5%. So now visible, the good demand situation from the defense sector, which we have been talking about earlier, but it has not been visible in this slide earlier. But now, clearly growing, and we see a lot of opportunities and a lot of potential in these areas. But then overall, the weakness in the market showing here on the trends as well.

If we look a little bit more in detail into the financial development, so on the key figures, so a slight improvement in most of the key figures. However, earnings per share, which was highly affected by the higher interest rates and also some impacts on taxes, which took it down. So there is a slight decline and also the Managed Services Index declining slightly, mainly due to the acquisition of STRONGIT and their business model, but on other accounts, slightly increase. And if we look at the revenue development of $97.1 million of revenues sold, plus 2.3% and that organically with comparable exchange rates minus 3.7%. So clearly, difficult market. Of course, the timing of Easter this year and the vacations related to Easter had a little bit of a negative impact on this particular quarter. And also, the demand situation, of course, had an impact on the revenue development. Outsourcing agreements and acquisitions, of course, supported the growth. Revenue from key accounts was decreasing by 7.6%, showing a little bit the sort of general down turn -- downwards trend in our overall market.

If we look at EBITA, so an 8.1% improvement, so 8.4% and EUR 8.2 million in EBITA. Nonrecurring items were $0.2 million, which were mainly related to a restructuring of our organization. And in the difficult situation, of course, we did need to manage our operations, and we did take measures to improve our operational efficiency. It worked and had a positive impact on the overall profitability, but still in the weaker market conditions, so there was certain inefficiency that had an impact on the result. On EBIT, we ended up in $6.7 million, so 6.9%, and the Amortizations related to acquisitions was growing to EUR 1.5 million for the quarter and the overall improvement in EBIT was at 7% Earnings per share and dividend. Basically, earnings per share was declining by $0.01. And here, we had slightly higher taxes for the quarter. There was one correction -- or two corrections from last year and also the periodization of the tax rate or taxes -- affected the tax rate in this particular quarter. However, this should improve to the normal taxation levels for the coming quarters. So there should not be a continuous problem with the tax.

Cash flow was strong at EUR 8.1 million, and this was a good cash flow for the quarter. Of course, when the revenue is not increasing, so there is less capital tied into the business. And for this reason, cash flow was fairly strong. Personnel was at 3,847 employees at the end of the quarter, so minus 2.6% compared to the previous year. And of course, here, we have slowed down the recruitment due to the weaker market conditions. So there are still some attrition. Some people are retiring, et cetera. So we are not recruiting as actively as we have been doing before. But still, we have our recruitment engine running, and we have the possibility to accelerate the recruitment as soon as the market demand starts to improve. And at the end of the period, we had, also, due to the measures that we have taken -- we had in Finland, 106 people temporary layoff, which sort of shows the market demand situation in this quarter. Outside Finland, the number of people was increasing and 1,947 in the relative terms, increasing. In numbers slightly decreasing, but in relative terms increasing and we are moving closer to our 55% target of revenues outside Finland as well.

If we look at the service areas a little bit more in detail. So here, we have in Engineering Solutions, slightly increase in revenues, plus 1.1%. Managed Services indexed at 65%. And of course, here, the demand situation was slightly weaker, and we did have to take certain adapted measures. But with that, we were able to achieve a fairly good operational efficiency and a fairly good result. And of course, we have had in the prevailing market conditions, our offering fits the market very well. We also have offering that fits a declining market in terms of outsourcing solutions, et cetera. And clearly, the outsourcing agreements that we have made have supported the service area, and we have also signed new ones during the service -- the quarter as well.

In Software and Embedded Solutions, we had revenues of $26.3 million, so a growth of 10.1%, mainly coming from the acquired businesses, but still clearly growing. EBITA was at $2.4 million, so 9.1%. And here, the EBITA was affected a little bit by a reassessment of certain other receivables. So that had a little bit of a negative impact. Without that, the profitability would have been at a fairly good level for the quarter. And also here, unfortunately, the demand situation is still weak, and we needed to take some measures to improve our operational efficiency and the profitability was at a moderate level. But as mentioned, without this reassessment, it would have been okay for this kind of prevailing market conditions. In the technical communications service area, clearly, the demand situation was weak and getting weaker as our customers' deliveries were getting lower in volumes. So there was less work to do, and the demand situation had a clear impact from this. So the revenue declined by 3.7%, and the Managed Services Index was still high at 89%.

EBITA was still improving slightly to $1.4 million against EUR 1.2 million from last year. And here, we have clearly improved in Germany. We still have certain issues with the demand, and we had certain issues in the Netherlands. But otherwise, we see a clear improvement in our operations. We're also very excited to see the impact of AI in this service area. We are working with AI in all the service areas to develop our offering and also to develop our internal processes to improve our efficiency. But here, we have now been able to sell the first solutions, utilizing AI, and this looks highly promising. So our customers are getting a clear benefit, and this is proving to have lots of opportunities for us in the business. So we are very much looking forward to working with these opportunities with our customers and starting to improve on revenues and also profitability.

If we then look at how we did against our targets and the guidance for this year. So, on revenue, of course, we have the $500 million target still for the end of this year. Now it's fair -- safe to say that it will be extremely difficult to reach. And most probably, we will not be able to get there. But of course, we will do our best to improve on our revenue growth and move forward in the coming years towards the $500 million. Revenue outside Finland was for the first quarter now at 52%. So we are coming closer to our 55% target in Managed Services share of revenue at 65% now for the first quarter, slightly declining mainly due to the acquisition of STRONGIT and their business model in Denmark. But otherwise, no major change there. And in operating profit, we are below our target of about 10%, so at 8.4% for the first quarter, which, of course, we cannot be happy with, but under the circumstances in the prevailing market, still a decent result.

And the guidance we have given earlier is intact. So we still estimate that the revenue for the year will be between EUR 375 million and EUR 415 million. And operating profit, EBIT would be between EUR 28 million and EUR 34 million for the year. And if we look at the market outlook, so clearly, the factors that are affecting demand are the still remaining uncertainty in the market, which is mainly due to the geopolitical tension, inflation and then the high interest rates. Which are still keeping the sort of investment levels from our customers down. But there are good industries, as mentioned earlier as well, so defense industry is strong, energy sector, strong electrification needs quite strong still. So there are also areas which are fairly okay. And now we have started to see the first signs in Europe that the market could potentially improve during this year. And as the market is expecting the interest rates from the Central Bank and Europe to actually start to decline during the year. We expect that the demand would pick up as our customers get more confidence in the financing conditions, and this would lead to a better demand situation during this year. And this we strongly believe in. So that is the presentation so far. So now we can move into the Q&A session.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] The next question comes from Atte Jortikka from Evli.

[Atte Jortikka, analyst]

This is Jortik from Evli. First question on the kind of demand situation. You mentioned the kind of signs of improved activity, especially in Europe. Could you give us a bit more color on that? Is there, for example, any particular sector that is showing some kind of signs of improvement? Or where is that coming from?

[Juha Näkki, executive]

Well, we have had discussions with our customers. I wouldn't say that there is any particular segment that is up, but we have had discussions with our customers and the tone has clearly changed within certain countries and some customers have also said that now they see that the market might pick up during the sort of coming quarters. And for this reason, they will not hold back with their R&D investments anymore, but they would start to accelerate in the coming quarters. So the tone of voice from our customers is clearly different in certain European countries. Unfortunately, not in Finland though, yet, but we are positive that Finland would follow as the other markets would start to improve. So no clear signs, no signal sector, but the tone of voice from our customers is already clearly different. And if we look at, for example, the purchasing managers indexes, so they are clearly more positive than they used to be. So there is sort of a better signals from the market.

[Atte Jortikka, analyst]

Okay. That's helpful. Then kind of on the competition side, of course, this current demand situation has made the competition more intense. Do you see it in some kind of certain service areas or sectors or countries more than the others?

[Juha Näkki, executive]

I would say that it's in all service areas, of course, there is less demand and the same players are in the market. So of course, there's tougher competition and this is in all service areas currently, software, engineering, also in the TCS area. What we've tried to do is to really work with our offering and improve our offering so that we would generate more value to our customers. And this has proven to be valuable for us in the quarter. For example, our outsourcing solutions are working well. And also, there is a very good response to our AI-related offering, for example, in technical communication solutions. So with these kinds of measures in the offering side, increasing the value, we are trying our best to cope with the sort of competitive situation currently. But I would say that there is no major difference between the service areas, it's equally tight in all these service areas, basically.

[Atte Jortikka, analyst]

Okay. Then on that -- continuing on that, how do you think your market share has developed in the current market?

[Juha Näkki, executive]

Difficult to say, of course. Difficult to measure as some of our customers are now outsourcing a little bit more and the total volume has gone down. But we feel that we would have in certain areas have been able to improve our market share through our sort of different kind of offering that we have to some of our competitors. So we feel that, that is the case. Difficult to say if that is true or not, but there seems to be clear interest towards certain kind of offering, and we have been doing rather well in the new sort of offerings. So this is a feeling we have, but of course, very difficult to verify.

[Atte Jortikka, analyst]

Yes. Okay. Then final question from my side on TCS. I assume that profitability is still far from the potential of the service area. How much of that is coming from the weaker demand? Or is there kind of still issues with some kind of nonperforming units in that service area?

[Juha Näkki, executive]

As mentioned, we have certain issues in the Netherlands and this we are working with. But overall, it's mainly a demand-related issue. We have been able to move forward in certain nonperforming units. We have been reporting earlier, for example, Germany, that it has had certain difficulties after the Cognitas' acquisition. But this we seem to be able to fix now and now we are in a much better shape. And also our other units are doing as well as they can in the prevailing market conditions. As I mentioned, we see a lot of potential. It's far from its potential in terms of profitability and with the sort of new offering that we have introduced with AI involved, etcetera. So we feel that there's a lot of potential to improve on our revenue development and also our profitability. So we're very excited about that development.

[Operator]

The next question comes from Juha Kinnunen from Inderes.

[Juha Kinnunen, analyst]

Hello. This is Juha from Inderes. Some of my questions were already taken, but could you comment on the organic growth opportunities in different service areas? Where do we -- where are you expecting the growth to pick up first if the market is going to improve?

[Juha Näkki, executive]

In these kinds of situations, as we also wrote in the report, normally where it starts to pick up is R&D, and our customers will start to invest into new -- or developing their existing offering or invest into new offerings so that they would be ready and more competitive when the market picks up. And therefore, we believe that the service areas that are more working with R&D -- meaning software and embedded and also engineering, which are working more with R&D than TCS. So there, we expect the pickup to be rapid in the R&D area where -- when the market starts to pick up. In TCS, the development will be from winning market share with our more competitive offering and -- but there is more customer delivery related, and there we might see slightly longer time before the sort of delivery volumes start to pick up. So this is how we see it.

[Juha Kinnunen, analyst]

Yes, that makes sense. I have to make one housekeeping question. Your tax rate was almost 30%. I'm just making sure that this was an outlier and you are not -- you are expecting it to return close to 20%?

[Juha Näkki, executive]

Well, maybe I would ask our CFO to comment on this one. I would say that you're correct. But maybe I would like to ask our CFO to comment on this one. So Helena, please.

[Helena Kukkonen, executive]

Hello, Johan. So yes, we expect the tax rate to come down to the normal levels towards the end of the year. There were some outliers now during Q1, like taxes from -- taxes from previous year and then the highest accruals for the Q1. So those were the reasons for the high tax rate.

[Juha Näkki, executive]

Any other questions, Juha? Or. . .

[Juha Kinnunen, analyst]

Well, perhaps I will ask about geographical areas, as the STRONGIT -- Denmark seems to be quite an interesting area. So are you expecting more investments in that area?

[Juha Näkki, executive]

In Denmark... We are, of course, now with the STRONGIT, so we are very focused on integrating STRONGIT into our existing business. But we do see a lot of potential. The business model that they have fits well with us. Currently, they are working a lot with the software and embedded side and they're with partners on resourcing the businesses of our customers. But of course, in [ Etteplan ], we have the potential to sell projects and other types of services into the market that we would then deliver to some extent, outside Denmark. So this is, of course, creating lots of potential for us. And there is no reason why we should not be able to also sell services from other service areas than software and embedded into Denmark. So this is something that we are exploring. And for sure, organically, we will invest into building all the service areas into Denmark, as we have stated that we want all our service areas to be present in all the markets where we have. But of course, if we find good investment opportunities in Denmark, so of course, we will look at that as well.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] The next question comes from Emil Immonen from Carnegie.

[Emil Immonen, analyst]

I wanted to ask regarding artificial intelligence. You mentioned it quite a bit in the report and especially for the Technical Communications Solutions segment. Could you describe what kind of impact you expect from these solutions in terms of growth or profitability?

[Juha Näkki, executive]

This is, of course, difficult as we are in the very early days. It's difficult to say what kind of an impact it will have. But for sure, we see that we've invested quite a bit on it, and we have great solutions that will clearly improve our efficiency and help our customers to generate more value from these services. And it is very clear already now that this is generating a lot of interest from our customers, and there will be potential for us to win more business and also with our solutions, improve our margins. But how much is quite difficult to say at the moment. But it looks very, very promising.

[Emil Immonen, analyst]

But, sorry, if I understand correctly, it's more about doing your product and service offering better. It's more that than actually improving your own internal capabilities, safe to say?

[Juha Näkki, executive]

It is sort of both. So we are improving our own capabilities as well with AI, but that is visible then for our customers in our service solutions. So we are utilizing AI in different forms and ways. And for our customers, it will show on improved efficiency, and that will bring value for them, but it should also bring value for Etteplan when we are delivering with the solutions. So it's a win-win situation for us and the customer.

[Emil Immonen, analyst]

Okay. Excellent. And then I wanted to ask regarding your confidence on seeing improving demand in Europe, is that only relying on the decreasing interest rates or what's making you confident on that?

[Juha Näkki, executive]

Well, we believe that this has a big impact on our customers as the sort of financial conditions and financing conditions are getting more and more certain and hopefully more favorable. So we do believe that we would sort of start the investments. Our confidence level is pretty high at the moment that during the year, this will happen. When exactly will this happen? That is still difficult to estimate, which keeps our sort of ranges quite significant. But we do feel, based on the discussions with our customers and based on the signals that we have seen from the market so far, we do believe that during the year, there will be a clear improvement and the market will improve. But of course, when exactly is difficult to say.

[Emil Immonen, analyst]

Okay. And do you have any comments regarding the Chinese market and the demand outlook there?

[Juha Näkki, executive]

China is -- of course, the Western investments are low still and will probably continue to be low. But now we have been able to more and more focus on the sort of China/China businesses. So delivering to Western companies operating in China selling their product into China, and also then purely Chinese companies. So we focused our efforts more into that sector. And at the moment, it looks slightly better, at least than last year. So there's a slight improvement due to our shifted focus but also in the market. So we expect it to be better than last year, but time will tell how much better it would be.

[Operator]

There are no more questions at this time. So I hand the conference back to the speakers for any closing comments.

[Juha Näkki, executive]

Okay. Thank you very much. So of course, as expected, this was a fairly difficult quarter to start the year with. There was a little bit difficulty to estimate the demand, and the demand was clearly weakening slightly during the quarter. But I think we still did a fairly okay job in the prevailing market conditions, and if and when the market starts to turn for the better, we are ready to accelerate our growth, and we are ready to help our customers improve their business. So we feel that during the year, we will be able to move forward and clearly grow during the year and also then improve our profitability going forward. So we're looking forward to that. And of course, we are able -- willing to answer any questions that you may have, also, outside these kind of conference calls. So feel free to contact our SVP for Marketing and Communications, Outi Torniainen, and our CFO, Helena Kukkonen or myself at any time. But with that, so, thank you very much. I'll leave you to our new logo and our new brand and have a great day.