Sitowise Group Oyj

OMXH:SITOWS

Earnings Call Transcript 2023-Q1

[Mari Reponen, executive]

Welcome to Sitowise's Q1 result presentation.

My name is Mari Reponen, and I am Head of Investor Relations here in Sitowise.

I have here with me our CEO, Heikki Haasmaa; and our CFO, Hanna Masala, who will shortly start the presentation, but before that, I will briefly give you some technical instructions.

Here you see our agenda for today. And as you can see, after the Q1 performance, we will discuss how our strategy execution has started. If you wish to comment or ask questions, you can do that via the chat box under the presentation. I will go through the questions you have sent after the presentation. We kindly ask you to provide your full name also when asking questions.

And now we continue to the presentation, and I will give the floor to Heikki and Hanna.

[Heikki Haasmaa, executive]

Thank you. Thank you, Mari. And welcome to the First Quarter Result Webcast.

Here is this year's first quarter in a nutshell. The market around us has clearly uncertainties, but we are very happy with our strong performance during this quarter. As in the previous quarters, we can report strong growth, as our net sales increased by 14% year-on-year and the organic growth was 4% year-on-year. Our order book was EUR 176 million. This is slightly below the level of the year-end, but we consider the order book to be on a good level. The decline mainly comes from our Buildings business and from Sweden.

What I'm really happy about is our first quarter profitability which was clearly better than a year before with our adjusted EBITA margin of 11.8%. We'll go through the factors behind this development in more detail shortly. It's also worth noting that our unadjusted profitability increased even more than the adjusted figures, as we had clearly smaller amount of items affecting the comparability than last year.

We had our annual client survey during the first quarter, and I'm happy to see that the levels stayed on the same good level as the year before. So NPS was 32. Of course, I would like to thank our clients for their trust at Sitowise.

One of the highlights of the quarter was naturally the launch of our updated strategy. I'm very delighted to see the inspiration and excitement that it has brought, and at the end of the presentation, we'll come back to how we are progressing overall. We also completed an important acquisition after the quarter. And next, Hanna will tell more about that one.

[Hanna Masala, executive]

Thanks, Heikki. I'll do that with a pleasure. And nice to be here again.

Indeed we announced the acquisition of Infrasuunnittelu roughly a week ago. Infrasuunnittelu, which means infra design in English -- that's what the name says. In other words, it provides expert services in environmental and civil engineering. With this acquisition, we got 17 new colleagues. And the main office is in Kajaani in Eastern Finland, where there is a lot of activity in, for example, mining industry. Infrasuunnittelu is overall active in road, street and water management as well as in regional designs. It also produces wide-ranging survey data sets for its clients. And the net sales of Infrasuunnittelu have been roughly EUR 1.5 million. We feel that this acquisition very well strengthens our competencies and capacity to serve the industrial client segment, which is really good considering the outlook in this particular segment at the moment.

Here we can see the top line development of all the business areas. Each business has its specific characteristics, so I'll go them through quickly one by one. In the Buildings, net sales was flat year-on-year. Due to the challenging market environment, the organic growth was negative, but the acquisitions, especially Rakennuttajakaari last summer, contributed to the net sales. When it comes to Infra, the growth was almost fully organic; and this, we'll consider a great achievement. One factor to the positive development has been our focus on developing the pricing and project mix, and this is showing results.

The growth of Digital Solutions, which was as high as 70% compared with the previous year, is to a large extent coming from the acquisition of Bitcomp last summer. This was the SaaS provider, but also the organic growth was good. And overall, the performance in Digi is very strong. The Swedish business also grew well. And especially, if we take into account the weakening of the Swedish krona, if the growth would be looked in constant currencies, it would have been as high as 27%. And this is a nice mixture of M&A impacts and organic development.

And now back to you, Heikki.

[Heikki Haasmaa, executive]

Thanks, Hanna.

Then let's deep dive into our business areas in more detail. So starting with Buildings: The weakness in the construction industry is impacting our business, and the outlook has not improved. The increasing interest rates and the general real estate market development has also started to impact the renovation market, which has slowed down faster than expected. We still have a good order book for Buildings and have also taken actions to adjust our capacity through different vacation arrangements and also limited temporary layoffs.

In the infra market, we continued to outpace market growth, which is really good. Some parts of the infra market show signs of weakening demand, such as road projects and also the foundation works for house construction, but demand for energy and environmental projects relating to the green transition is growing strongly. Also the order book for the -- Infra remained strong.

In Digital Solutions, we had a strong growth overall. Bitcomp's largest current product, LeafPoint, is a SaaS solution targeted at forest industry customers. This is now in rollout phase and has progressed well. Overall, we see a very good market demand for our digital business overall. And the order book remained strong. In this business, the competition for good people is continuous, but we have been quite successful in our recruitment activities and have continued to focus on them.

In Sweden, we are facing a mixed market that is affected by inflation and rising interest rates. Thanks to our positioning toward commercial, industrial and also institutional buildings, the local housing market drop had only a minor impact on the business. During the quarter, we saw a small drop in the order book, but at the same time, we see increased activity in early-stage projects, which is a good signal going further.

When we look at the growth on the whole Sitowise level. We continue on double-digit growth figures, which is well in line with our target. As Hanna already described, net sales growth was driven by both organic growth and also the acquisitions made last year. And overall we can be satisfied with the 4% organic growth, taking into account that Buildings business area suffered from the market downturn and showed negative organic growth. In other words, Infra, Digi and Sweden have been performing really well. And our organic growth was driven both by pricing and also increased volumes. Good to mention also that we benefited from the additional working day year-on-year.

The group's order book decreased by 2% from the year-end, so year-end of '22. The decline was due to the weak market situation in the Buildings business area and a small decline in the Swedish order book. In Digi, the order book remained at the strong level of the previous quarter. And in Infra, the order book increased. When we compare to the end of March '22, our order book increased by 2%. Overall, we consider our order book to be at a good level.

Then I would like to share a couple of examples of recent wins. The first example is from the Buildings business area, which won a tender for new construction in the middle of the Meilahti hospital area in Helsinki. The new build will comprise facilities such as Helsinki University Hospital's central pharmacy and kitchen and 4 underground parking floors. The second example relates to Infra and the several environmental assessments of wind power projects the team started in first quarter. Infra also won a tender for the design of the Lielahti-Lakiala rail project, which is a part of the main rail line between Helsinki and Oulu, which is here example number three. And the last example comes from Sweden, where the number of [ early-phase pre projects ] were trending up. And one of the projects won during the quarter was a pre-study on the next phase of a pharmaceutical factory for dermatology company Galderma, all really great wins.

Let's go through 3 things that are important in our technical consulting business. So the first graph shows our head count and FTE growth, which tells about our capacity to grow. Sickness absences play a key role in the picture, [ as those reduce ] available capacity. And then the utilization rate, in the third graph, tells about our ability to bill available hours.

In first quarter, we had a small increase in the FTEs, which has a minor positive impact on business. The sickness absences were down from the comparison level, which also had a positive impact. In first quarter '22, we had a high sickness absence rates due to COVID-19. The first quarter utilization rate was down, and there are a couple of drivers for that. Firstly, the difficult market environment in Buildings business area was reflected in the utilization rate. Secondly, utilization rate is, by nature, lower in our Digital Solutions business than in other business areas. And when the share of Digi of the group's business also grows, the group's utilization rate is impacted. And thirdly, changes in project and tender mix impacted utilization in this quarter too.

Now back to Hanna.

[Hanna Masala, executive]

Thanks. So as already mentioned, we are very happy to report a strong adjusted EBITA this quarter. It was EUR 6.6 million versus EUR 5.2 million last year. Obviously the strong growth contribute to this, but to summarize, there were other important factors which are worth noting. First, we have succeeded in improving the pricing and controlling the rising costs. The agreed salary increases did not yet impact us almost at all during Q1, but the impact will be shown from second quarter onwards. And I'll come back to this on the next page. Also the recent acquisitions gave a positive contribution to our performance. Then I would also like to point out that there have not been any bigger issues in the project management, so the operations have been going well in that respect as well.

Secondly, and this is important even if might first sound small, the 1 extra working day compared to the year before has a positive impact on the first quarter. This situation will be different for the remaining quarters of the year, as we will have 1 working day less than in year '22 in each of these. And then the third factor has quite obviously been the market uncertainty which impacted us, and we expect it to continue doing so.

Now I'll give a bit more details on the differences between the first quarter and the rest of the quarters of the year. We obviously have also the typical seasonality in our activity level, with the third quarter being usually the lowest due to the summer vacations, but these factors should be considered on top of that. As said, we had 1 working day more in Q1, but there will be 1 less in the other quarters.

The collective bargaining agreement negotiations have been completed in both Finland and Sweden during the past months. And these agreements mean a roughly 4% increase in salary costs in each of the countries during the year. This is not yet burdening the first quarter profitability, as the new salaries become effective from April onwards. The Finnish agreement included a onetime payment for the employees amounting to roughly 1% of the annual salary. This was paid in March, so this is included in the cash flow, but we periodize the cost, so for the rest of the year, from March to December '23, as the payment relates to the annual agreement. So only a small part impacted the costs in Q1. From the second quarter onwards, the full impact of the increases will be visible, so you should expect higher personnel costs.

Quick comments on the indebtedness. As you can see, the net debt amount was slightly lower than at the year-end, and the leverage is now again below our long-term target level of 2.5x. As we already mentioned when we reported the full year numbers, we extended our financing agreement with 2 years. The financing package originates from 2 years ago when Sitowise was listed on the stock exchange, and now it has maturity until March '26. And the terms remained the same as earlier for the extension years.

We are comfortable with the current balance sheet structure. And our good operative cash flow gives us a possibility to continue on our growth path.

Here you see a set of key figures. And most of them, we have already covered in other parts of the presentation, so I'll just make one additional note relating to the net result. As you can see, this was more than 3x the result last year, in the same quarter. And beyond the operative performance improvement, the contributing factors are the lower items affecting comparability, which Heikki already mentioned in the beginning; and also somewhat lower net financial expenses.

Now back to Heikki.

[Heikki Haasmaa, executive]

Thank you. We continue to strive to remain the most profitable in our industry. And we have 4 main priorities to improve further our profitability, which remain the same as presented earlier in the result webcast.

Firstly, as inflation is high, we look carefully at all the levers to further improve pricing. At the same time, we put a lot of effort on the cost containment in all parts of our organization to respond to the challenge we have. I'm happy with the progress what we have had during the first quarter with both of these. Secondly, there's a clear focus to improve further the billable project work. And yes, in practice, this means that we need to stay very close to our clients and ensure that our work adds value to them. Here we need to improve.

Thirdly, we continue to look at new ways of working. As part of our strategy, we launched the smartest ways of working. And we believe that Sitowise's unique digital platform Voima and our motivated employees and strong management culture create a solid foundation for this. The work has started well and we will share more highlights later on. And then the fourth item, we already see positive profitability improvement contribution from the recent acquisitions and expect to see that going further as well.

Then about the outlook and guidance. So firstly, demand for our services is supported by megatrends urbanization, renovation backlog, digitalization and climate change. They are creating a lot of boost. There are still several uncertainties in the market which may continue to impact our clients' short-term decision-making, but we don't see that they impact so -- a lot our business. Demand for the digital solutions remains strong. And the outlook remains stable in Infra and Sweden. In Building business, we see that the year will be a challenging one due to the construction market downturn.

Then good to mention there are also the other impacting factors in '23, as Hanna already pointed out: so cost inflation then less working days than in '22, potential currency fluctuations and also higher interest expenses. For all of this, we have mitigating actions progressing well.

And then our guidance. It remains unchanged but good to repeat. So our estimate is that our net sales in euros will increase compared to '22 and that our adjusted EBITA margin will be broadly at the same level as the adjusted EBITA margin was last year.

In recent weeks, we have also received new members both to our management team and to Sitowise's Board of Directors. And this is something I'm really happy about. Anna Wäck started to lead our digital solutions last Friday. She joined us from the position of head of global offering, pricing and sales development in KONE's global maintenance business. And Anna brings with her a forward-looking business development thinking with an analytical, client-focused and solution-oriented mindset.

The gentlemen in the middle and right are Niklas Sörensen and Mats Åström, who were elected to the Board of Directors in our Annual General Meeting in April. They both have extensive experience from technical consulting industry; and Niklas, also from green transition and digitalization; and Mats, from financial services strategy and M&As. Their expertise will be valuable when we continue to carry out our strategy.

And now actually it's good to move on to our strategy for the next 3 years and, first, recapping what that is all about. Our strategy builds on our clients' needs, our core competencies and the achievements of our previous strategy period that ended last year. As part of our strategy process, we defined for the first time our company purpose, which is empowering passionate experts to solve complex challenges. It means that we at Sitowise go to work to solve problems for our clients. And this has been taken really well both internally and externally. Our 5 values, on the left side, remain unchanged and build the foundation for our company culture. Our vision was revised to reflect the direction we want to [ grow ]. We want to redefine smartness in cities. And to reach this vision, we will build our expertise on innovation, sustainability and efficiency.

And we have defined further 6 strategic focus areas that guide the strategy execution. The first 3 ones are the growth engines, so creating new smart services, accelerating growth in Sweden and expanding digital solution business. And the next 3 are the enablers for the growth: becoming a thought leader in sustainability, being the most well-known and desired employer and then finding the smartest ways to work. We'll discuss these in more concrete terms in our Capital Market Day.

After the strategy launch, I've been on internal strategy road show with other management team members in our offices in Finland and Sweden. These pictures are from Tampere, where we visited in March. I can say that it has been really encouraging to see that our employees, clients, investors and other stakeholders have welcomed the new strategy; and its 3 strategic pillars, most innovative, most sustainable and most efficient, all of them very positively. And this gives us a good momentum to proceed with the strategy implementation.

Today, the plan is to share a little bit highlights from all of these strategic pillars, starting with the most innovative.

So our goal is to develop and engage our people and partners to innovate smart solutions that accelerate the industry transition. We want to expand smart city solutions in all our business areas. We continue building scalable SaaS business. And then we want to enrich design environment and processes with new solutions. And after the strategy launch, we have strengthened our existing pipeline for the new smart services. All business areas are involved in this work. And we focus on cross-business area solutions that would help our clients to succeed in their businesses. We are also preparing for Sitowise's innovation competition that will be launched in June.

And the third example I want to mention here is a DataMust project which started in first quarter. The aim of the DataMust project is to accelerate carbon neutrality in the built environment, promote the development of secure solutions and optimize the energy consumption of digital infrastructure. The project is funded by Business Finland and is part of the -- Nokia's Veturi program. And it's a joint project including several companies in addition to us.

Sustainability has been in the core of our -- all our operations already in the previous strategy period. And we truly believe that we can make an impact. We want to lead the way to sustainable future by understanding our clients' existing and also the emerging needs and by solving them. Sustainability is an integral part of our expertise and all client projects.

When talking about sustainability, we have 3 focus areas: firstly, focus on developing new sustainability know-how. During the strategy period, we want to grow our strategic and data-based sustainability services for the built environment. At the same time, we consider extensively how sustainability affect our existing expertise and everyday work. How will we make all our projects more sustainable? This will be done with our sustainability tool, which will be -- which we will develop according to our client needs. And thirdly, we will make sure our own operations are as sustainable as possible.

The most efficient. We will optimize our ways of working, including sales, customer processes, tools and also meaningful data creation and usage, to provide the best value for our customers and to maintain the industry-leading profitability to be able to grow and develop. After the strategy launch, we've been focusing especially on the smartest ways to work and sales excellence streams, which are also areas that will be benefiting from our ongoing ERP and CRM projects. In addition, we continue to develop Voima. So our digital platform. And here our focus is that in addition to gaining additional internal efficiencies on our clients and the ways in which Voima could be used in client work for their and our mutual success.

We have set clear goals and KPIs to monitor our progress in each strategic area. They are related to, for example, revenue growth and our clients' perception on us. And we'll report on the progress in these areas later a bit more.

And here is just a summary of our strategy once more. So who we are is presented on the left-hand side. What we want to reach is on the right-hand side, and where we focus on are at the bottom. And we will discuss all in more detail in our Capital Markets Day, which will be held on 7th of June. And we hope to see you there.

Thank you. And now it's time for questions.

[Mari Reponen, executive]

Thank you, Heikki and Hanna. And yes, we have received some questions. And let's start with those related to the market environment.

[Mari Reponen, executive]

So the first question is that do you think that the worst is behind us in Buildings.

[Heikki Haasmaa, executive]

It's tough to say. And now we see that, at least during the next months and quarters, maybe the situation is not at least improving. So we still might be seeing a bit tougher times ahead.

[Mari Reponen, executive]

And what about Infra, is that picking up or continuing as it is?

[Heikki Haasmaa, executive]

We are confident with the overall gain from market growth. And as I said also, we've been clearly outpacing the market growth in that sense. Of course, I also mentioned a couple of items where the market has been a bit declining like -- inside the Infra business like road projects, but still overall when we look at the Infra business, it's growing well. And we are confident with that one.

[Mari Reponen, executive]

And how about Sweden? Is Sweden showing signs of slowing down? Or how would you summarize...

[Heikki Haasmaa, executive]

Yes. In Sweden, it's a bit of like a mixed picture. So clearly we see that in the commercial and also the institutional side there is growth and overall like in the Infra side. Then the local housing is down. And if you think about our position: We are focusing a lot on the commercial and institutional side, and that's why we see that the overall picture for us would be pretty stable.

[Mari Reponen, executive]

Okay. And then we have a question about the 1 work day more in Q1. So how much did it affect our -- your profitability -- or our profitability...

[Heikki Haasmaa, executive]

[ Yes, do it ].

[Hanna Masala, executive]

Yes, yes. I think that's actually shown in our report where we show the bridge between the full growth and the organic growth. And the impact was almost EUR 1 million, slightly less than EUR 1 million, so it has an -- a meaningful impact.

[Mari Reponen, executive]

And then question about the billing ratio, if you could sort of recap the reasons behind the decline and -- during Q1.

[Heikki Haasmaa, executive]

Yes. There are basically like kind of 3 different reasons. So the first one relates to building segment. And once the market is there tougher, then it has also an impact on us because we cannot always allocate the work in a best possible way. And that's one element and that has been also the reason or way like the last 2 quarters as well. Then as I mentioned, our Digi business is growing well, which is really good. By nature, the utilization rate is a bit lower than in other business areas. Once the share for Digi grows, then of course, it has an impact on our group utilization rate as well. Then the third thing is that, of course, now we've been focusing a lot on the customer activity and tendering activity to improve further order book and our, like, guaranteeing that we have enough work in the future. So of course, that takes a bit of time. Then also the project mix has a bit of impact. So there are several different reasons, but of course, a clear thing is that we want to improve it, clearly, further.

[Mari Reponen, executive]

Okay. And then a question about head count. Do you see your head count moderating or decreasing because of the Buildings business outlook?

[Heikki Haasmaa, executive]

So in the Buildings side, we've had a bit of decline, but then when we look at the other business areas, there's a need for talent. And we continue to focus on the recruitment activities, so when it comes to the, like, overall or group level, we see that there's going to be increase also in the FTE.

[Mari Reponen, executive]

Okay. And those were the questions today. So thank you, Heikki. Thank you, Hanna. Thank you all who viewed this webcast. And we hope to see you in the Capital Markets Day in June or, at the latest, in connection of our half year results in August. Thank you.