Airthings ASA

OSE:AIRX

Earnings Call Transcript 2021-Q4

[Oyvind Birkenes, Chief Executive Officer]

Hello, and welcome to Airthings' Fourth Quarter Presentation of 2021. I'm Oyvind, the CEO. And with me today, I also have our CFO, Magnus. Please send your questions in the chat. There's about 20 seconds delay. But if you also have the chance to run down here to Felix, it's also open here and some nice coffee is being brewed. So please, you're welcome also to join in person. So I just want to remind everyone about the purpose of Airthings to empower the world to breathe better. And this is very important for our team, and we are very focused on this purpose. And Airthings should be good for people, good for the planet and good for business. The air we breathe has much bigger impact on our health and well-being than we think, and more and more people are starting to see this, and we certainly see these activity levels are increasing rapidly for Airthings on many, many fronts. So we are continuing to grow the company strongly despite huge challenges with supply. We added almost NOK 100 million of revenues in 2020 and ended the year of NOK 311 million of revenues. Looking at the share in Americas is about 73% in 2021, which is a bit down from 77% that we had in 2020. And that's because we're growing more in other regions. In the Consumer segment, we have been adding more retailers. We have been growing with more stores into existing retailers like with Home Depot has been very strong growth for us. We also now added new ones like Takashimaya with their flagship store in Singapore, there's a lot of activities there in the Consumer segment. If you look at Airthings for business, we are growing widely with existing partners and customers. Like INFOGRID, very important partners for Airthings. And then we're also adding new ones. And there's a range and more than 100 partners of Airthings. And our new key one that we just added was ABEC of U.K., which is now actually doing building control with Airthings' systems across buildings in the U.K. We also see a record amount of brand awareness over the last few months. We have lots of PR web traffic and awards. We have been to some key trade shows with CES and HR and we're really seeing the momentum. End of the year, we had 139 employees at Airthings. So we added 31 during the year. So we had another quarter with record high revenue, NOK 97.1 million, which is up 16% year-over-year. We reported in the third quarter presentation that there is a risk for the fourth quarter revenue window because of unpredictable supply and we ended up just below the guided window. We had about NOK 10 million of revenues that's spilled over to the first quarter. We had a lot of volumes coming from our factories late in December. And we got bandwidth challenges with our logistics partners over the last week of December. And unfortunately, that caused spillover effect from fourth quarter into the first quarter. We have shipped more -- we decided to ship more into Airthings for business in Q4 as well to prioritize shipments there that were very important for us. And the Consumer revenue got a bit of a higher hit end of December. But also now, we have a good start of the Consumer now in the first quarter, a kick start. Gross margin was hit by component cost as we reported as well and guided product mix and campaigns. And we guide now the current quarter, first quarter of 2022 between NOK 80 million to NOK 90 million. I would like to say that these delivery challenges that we have experienced over the last 6 months have been very tough. It's been an emotional [ talk ] on the team. And we have had sales teams that have been working so hard to make deals and close their quarters, and then we end up not being able to deliver. We have been working days and nights to find components anywhere in the world. I'm spending much more time on that than other things that we should do. So that's been a really tough period, I would say. I've been traveling around now in January to meet our key suppliers to really make sure we can nail in and get the components we need. Things look brighter right now, that's for sure. But surprises can still happen in the current market conditions. Looking at some of the highlights of the fourth quarter. So we had the all-time higher revenue with NOK 97.1 million. We had consequential growth every quarter -- consequential growth every quarter of the year of 2021. And we have delivered 45% year-over-year growth for the year despite all these supply challenges. It could be a lot better, but still it's strong revenue growth. For the year, we had strong gross profit margin of 64%, also despite these higher and component costs. Some of the highlights certainly is the launch of the View series, where we see an extreme amount of demand. We also are seeing a lot of activities on the web shop. We're getting web sessions. It's a record high and also sales on our web shop has been record high over the last few months. We have delivered to most of the schools that we won in Quebec. This has been a very big product, the biggest product ever for Airthings for business, and we learned a lot through this. And some of the schools, we also are feeding back to their building management system to control the HVAC systems. I've been a very interesting project, and it's going very well. We have gone into some new retail partners, retail channels in the Consumer segment. We just added MediaMarkt in Austria, B&Q in the U.K. and rolling out that now this year and then Takashimaya in Singapore. And we were rated by Frost & Sullivan, and they see Airthings as the most innovative company in the air quality segment. and also rated us among one of the highest growth companies in the air quality segment. That's very good. And then when you look at things that were not so bright, it was this undelivered backlog of NOK 10 million that's built over from Q4 to Q1. And the NOK 30 million hit we had in the second half that we have reported previously. This also -- this revenue hit also caused our EBITDA margin to be lower than anticipated in the fourth quarter. And there's a quarter delay in the bounce back of EBITDA to go in the right direction. So I'll provide an update on the segments. So the Consumer segment, the Airthings for Business and also our Pro segment and go a bit more into details. I'll start with Airthings for Business this time. It's the 11th quarter with consecutive quarter-over-quarter growth for Airthings for Business. Sales revenue of NOK 28.5 million, which is 442% year-over-year growth. Also very strong year-over-year growth for the year with about 350%. The total revenue for Airthings for Business, the share in 2021 is now going from 6% in 2020 to 20% in 2021, and this is just going to increase moving forward. We shipped about NOK 15 million of revenues into Quebec for the school project, but we still have a very strong underlying growth from a broad range of partners and customers in everything of business. It's a very long tail and we see a strong growth in all of this. And we also see that the ARR share of revenue is increasing, and we will see increased gross profit margins with Airthings for Business into the future. And if you look more into Airthings for Business, we now have getting close to 30,000 active devices in the field. So these are devices that we are getting service revenues for and that are operating actively. And this number is growing every day. I also want to highlight a new WELL project, very interesting project with Landsec and NG Bailey in London. Landsec is one of the largest commercial property development companies in the United Kingdom. And this is a WELL project for 19 buildings, really modern high-end buildings in London. And this is a beginning and this product can be much larger into the future. And as Landsec is saying here "With Airthings, we can encourage and ensure the safe return of employees back to the office. Not only that, but will enable us to pursue our WELL Portfolio Program, which showcases our commitment to wellness and sustainability."This is going to be more and more important for more and more building owners and facility managers moving forward into the future. Very interesting. Going into the Consumer segment. So revenue at NOK 62 million. And so we had a very strong third quarter, and then we went a bit down quarter-over-quarter in the fourth quarter. Full year revenue of NOK 224 million for the year, which is 25% up year-over-year. This could have been much better if we didn't have the supply challenges, especially on View Plus. Gross profit margin was very high in the third quarter, went to about 58% in the fourth quarter. And this is really the fluctuations we see every quarter in the Consumer segment. Some quarters, we have very high gross profit margin. Some quarters, the gross profit margin is lower. And this is based on variations in product and channel mix, but they also were hit by some component cost inflation in the fourth quarter and that we started really to have a noticeable effect. We also had some deals, so we also have that -- and some campaigns in the fourth quarter, like with the Black Friday and Black Week. Also, we had the Amazon deal of the day. But we also -- we only run those campaigns on products that we have enough supply of, of course. Looking at the Professional segment. Sales revenue to NOK 6.7 million, up 44% year-over-year and a gross profit margin of 75.2%, and we see that there's higher activities in the Pro segment now, which also are helping the service revenues coming from this segment. So we had a big step-up in the recurring revenues in the fourth quarter. We now have ARR of NOK 24.6 million by end of 2021, which is up 132% year-over-year. We have still very strong gross profit margins from the service revenues, and we now guide the first quarter to end between NOK 27 million to NOK 32 million of ARR. So we see as the service revenues are taking a bigger share of our revenue that's also going to support higher gross profit margins into the future. In the fourth quarter, we reached a milestone that's very important for our company, for what we do and also certainly for the employees. We could now document that we save more energy with our solutions than Airthings emits as a company. We have analyzed the total CO2 emission of Airthings throughout our value chain. So we're looking at the total environmental impact of Airthings as a company, and we also used a third-party company to support us in this analysis. The largest contributions to our CO2 emissions is really the electronics we produce. And also when we have to do very -- kind of quick and fast shipments with [ higher ] freight to the U.S. because of supply chain challenges. But we now see also that more and more of our customers are saving a significant amount of energy with our solutions. We have only been able to document this for a few customers because its requires a lot of work, and we're going to do this better and more automatic in the future. So only by analyzing a few of our customers were able to find that we have saved much more than the 1,900 tons of CO2 that we emitted as a company back in 2020. And the way we do this is by monitoring air quality, occupancy and climate in buildings. We make buildings smarter with our solutions. We provide building insights where facility managers and building owners can take actions very easily. And we also control buildings more and more by actually connecting our data into the building management systems. By this, we can do more demand-based ventilation, heating and cooling and reducing energy, saving CO2 emissions and certainly also reducing costs. And we, at Airthings, we are very ambitious when it comes to the sustainability program, and this is really the core of what we do. Another highlight that has happened over the fourth quarter is that now is data-driven solutions for greenhouse gas mitigation is now defined as a classification in the EU taxonomy. We believe this will be a very strong driver for growth across Europe in the future for Airthings for business. We also got a silver status from EcoVadis. EcoVadis is one of the world's most trusted sustainability rating companies, and they are rating more than 65,000 companies across the world. It evaluates environment, labor and human rights, business ethics and sustainable procurement. We set a goal, but we exceeded our goal and went directly to a silver rating, which was awesome. And we were rated higher than 78% of all the other companies in the industry. There's a few companies that get silver rating first time they go through this for sure. We are very proud of this. But for us, this is just a step on our way to empower the world to be better on a much larger scale into the future. Then I want to send it over to our CFO, Magnus and he's going to take us through more of the details of the financials.

[Magnus Navdal Bekkelund, Acting Chief Financial Officer]

Thank you, Oyvind. I will take you through the financials in more detail. We recognized sales revenues of NOK 97.1 million for the fourth quarter corresponding to an increase of 16% compared to the same quarter last year. Global component shortage and logistical challenges affected the delivery capacity in the quarter. And thereby caused a lower revenue than guided. However, sales revenues for the full year came in at NOK 311.1 million, an increase of 45% compared to 2020. Cost of sales came in at NOK 39 million for the quarter, which reflects a gross margin of 60%, which is in line with the guidance we gave in connection with the third quarter update in October. We expected to see fluctuations between quarters due to global semiconductor market, competition and product and channel mix. We reported a sales gross margin of 64% for the full year despite higher component costs. Operating expenses for the quarter increased 23% year-on-year, mainly driven by increased personnel expenses as number of employees have increased from 109 -- 108 to 139 during the year. Marketing campaigns and office leases are the main drivers for increase in other operating expenses. Approximately 50% of the total depreciation and amortization relates to amortization of goodwill recognized as a result of the Airtight acquisition in 2020. The reported net loss for the quarter was NOK 16.6 million, and we reported a net loss for the year of NOK 70.4 million. Moving to the balance sheet. We reported NOK 692 million in total assets, down from NOK 742 million last year, mainly due to reduction in cash and cash equivalents. The net loss for the year increased tax losses carried forward and consequentially increased our deferred tax asset. We have increased our inventory of products where we have the required components. In addition, we have a strategy to secure key components well in advance to secure supply in a pressed global semiconductor market. Further, we closed a significant number of deals in December, increasing the accounts receivables with 75% compared to 2020. Reduction in non-current liabilities is driven by a reduction in long-term provisions linked to the social security tax component in the employee share option program. Deferred tax liability is presented as part of the deferred tax asset at year-end. The last item I would like to highlight is current liabilities, which have increased due to the company growth. The balance consists mainly of accounts payables, accrued expenses in addition to accrued revenues related to subscriptions being recognized over time. We ended the year with an equity ratio of 86%.. We reported a cash balance of NOK 372 million at year-end, down NOK 23 million from the third quarter. This is mainly driven by a negative cash flow from operating activities due to net loss before tax, partly offset by a positive change in the working capital. Lastly, please note that we will change our accounting principles, which means that the audited annual report for 2021, will be prepared in accordance with IFRS. Adjustments due to the transition from Norwegian accounting principles to IFRS will be specified in the annual report. The annual report is a key deliverable in the uplifting process to the Oslo Stock Exchange main list, which is scheduled in the second quarter of 2022. With that, I leave the word back to you, Oyvind.

[Oyvind Birkenes, Chief Executive Officer]

Thank you, Magnus. So I'll do a quick summary and the outlook. So for the fourth quarter, we had record sales revenue despite sales being limited by component supply and logistical issues. And we had around NOK 10 million of revenue that slipped from over last week of December into the first quarter. Gross profit margin of 60%, reflecting product and channel mix in the Consumer segment, especially and also now seeing some inflation in component costs always during the fourth quarter, there are some campaigns that also drives down some of the Consumer gross profits. We have very strong momentum for Airthings for Business with now 442% year-over-year growth for the fourth quarter and a significant growth in Annual Recurring Revenues. We also launched now a View Radon and View Pollution [indiscernible] View series of products, and we launched that now beginning of January at CES in Las Vegas, which had driven a lot of activities and press for Airthings over the last months. So if you look at the year overall, some of the key highlights is certainly the launch of the View series of products, and we see very strong demand from those products. Also in Airthings for Business, we were able to also create a View CO2, which is specifically for the Airthings for Business segment with 10 years of battery lifetime, which is now creating a lot of attention, especially across Europe. We have certified our products for several key markets across Asia Pacific, in India, in Singapore, in Hong Kong, in Australia, and we are starting to see more and more activities across those new areas. We have expanded our footprint in a lot of more retail channels in 2021, rolled out to 4,000 stores with Walmart and CVS. We signed a strategic agreement with Carrier Corporations, which we're seeing more and more results from, which is going to be exciting now also in 2022. And we have built up our team strategically. We added more than 30 people, 31 new talents during 2021. A lot of these people be higher from around the world. key talent from around the world and many of them, they move to Oslo. It's really a good people we are getting to the team and also building up our international culture. We're also adding people out in the field sales offices across Europe and North America. Our brand awareness is growing rapidly. And the web traffic to airthings.com has increased a lot, and we now ended the year with more than 2 million unique visitors. Also during 2021, we launched Air for Kids, which is used by more and more schools and students in English-speaking countries, teaching people about the importance of fresh and clean air. We did our first sustainability report, a very extensive report in 2020, and we're now saving more CO2 through our solutions than we are releasing as a company. And we are coming with an sustainability report also now within the next couple of months. We started -- we kicked off the year with 2 great trade shows in Las Vegas. So started with CES, which is the Consumer Electronics Show, it's really based most focused on the consumer market, early January. It was a bit hit by COVID and people certainly some limited number of people attending. But we had a great show. We got lots of attention and a lot of good PR from this. We also followed this with AHR, which started -- yes, it was in early February, which is the largest trade show within HVAC, for heating, ventilation, air conditioning and proptech in the United States. We have so many customer meetings, meeting with new partners, hundreds of new leads and there was lots of learnings from both of these shows. I was at these shows myself in person. And I can certainly say that it was very busy for Team Airthings during these great times in Las Vegas. Outlook. So we see the first quarter of 2022 revenues estimated between NOK 80 million to NOK 90 million, corresponding to a growth of about 50% for the middle of that range. ARR is expected to grow to between NOK 27 billion to NOK 32 million during the first quarter. And we see a very exciting long-term outlook for Airthings. as we are become the global leader in indoor air quality for both homes and businesses. Consumer is kick started with a strong backlog, and we are seeing increased market demand really driven by our View Plus series, and we are continuing to expand our channel and stores and channels that we are selling our products to. We're going to do more than NOK 600 million of revenue in the Consumer segment by 2024. And with Airthings for Business, we are really built this to be a significant business now. It's going to grow -- continue to grow fast moving forward. and building on these record sales levels that we got now in 2021. The margins -- gross profit margins will improve for Airthings for Business as we get service revenues as a higher share of total revenues. And we really see that this partnership model is helping us to scale things for business. We're going to do more than NOK 400 million of revenues, and that's a goal for Airthings for Business by 2024 with more than NOK 200 million of service revenues. And our long-term goal is to have EBITDA margins of more than 25%, and we are moving very strategically in order to reach those goals. So with that, I'm going to open up for any questions.

[Magnus Navdal Bekkelund, Acting Chief Financial Officer]

Okay. Again, we have 7 questions from the online audience. Oliver Chelan, SEB. Can you provide an update on the supply situation? Do you see any indication of this throughout 2022?

[Oyvind Birkenes, Chief Executive Officer]

Yes. So the supply situation has been very challenging. And it looks better I think the first quarter, we have been challenged with volumes through January, but we are seeing more and more volumes coming through our factory and also we are securing more and more of the components that we need. So I see first half much more positively than I did some months back. And so it looks better. But also, this situation is a bit unpredictable because some of the components companies, they might set that date and then suddenly, they move the date, and that makes it unpredictable. But it looks much better now than it did a few months back. So I believe we can provide significant growth in 2022.

[Magnus Navdal Bekkelund, Acting Chief Financial Officer]

Next question from Henri [indiscernible] Arctic. Can you give some more color on the softer gross margin? The cost for the NOK 10 million order that was pushed from Q4 to Q1 will be booked in Q1. right? Or does this also affect the Q4 cost?

[Oyvind Birkenes, Chief Executive Officer]

So when it comes to the recurring revenue, the service revenues, so what sets kind of the gross profit margin there. So we -- there is the cloud services, and we provide more and more features in our cloud advanced analytics. There's going to come even machine learning algorithms running there. So that drives some of the costs in our service revenues. And there's also a cost for communication. We have 4G, 5G communication up to the cloud, et cetera. But still, the gross profit margins from the service revenues is north of 80%, and that's certainly where we're going to keep it moving forward. The next question was about the NOK 10 million spillover. So the NOK 10 million spillover of revenue is affecting both Consumer segment and Airthings for Business. and also somewhat Pro, but mostly on the Consumer segment. And yes, we are shipping that backlog in the first quarter, but also if we had more inventory in the first quarter because we could have done even better. But first quarter certainly looks much better now when it comes to production than what it did in the -- in the fourth quarter.

[Magnus Navdal Bekkelund, Acting Chief Financial Officer]

And one final follow-up question in terms of the Q1 guidance. Do you have any comments on your expected development in your Consumer segment and Business segment for Q1?

[Oyvind Birkenes, Chief Executive Officer]

So we are guiding now NOK 80 million to NOK 90 million, and we -- I certainly believe we're going to see strong year-over-year growth. So that's 50% year-over-year growth, if we hit the midpoint. And year-over growth will be strong, I believe, both for Airthings for Business and the Consumer segment in the first quarter.

[Magnus Navdal Bekkelund, Acting Chief Financial Officer]

Next question from Felix Hinderman from GMX in Switzerland. When do you expect the end of the shortage of critical components? Does COVID with help to acquire new clients in Airthings for Business due to increased awareness?

[Oyvind Birkenes, Chief Executive Officer]

Yes. So the component situation, there is not much more to say than things looks better now than it did quarter ago. We have secured more components, but still, it's a bit unpredictable. So it's hard to promise something in the future, but I'm much more positive now than I was a quarter ago. When it comes to the second part was, yes, COVID. We certainly see that the COVID has had a very big effect on the awareness of air quality. We also have seen projects being delayed because people are not in office. But now we're starting to see more activities also in commercial real estate when people are getting back to the office. So yes, it has had a positive effect on the awareness of Airthings for Business. And I think now we're at a new level where people in a much bigger sense are aware of how important good air quality is, and this is going to drive our growth moving forward.

[Magnus Navdal Bekkelund, Acting Chief Financial Officer]

Three questions from Eirik Oritsland in ABG.

[Oyvind Birkenes, Chief Executive Officer]

Take one at a time then.

[Magnus Navdal Bekkelund, Acting Chief Financial Officer]

Yes. Can you share your thoughts around gross margins for the first half of 2022?

[Oyvind Birkenes, Chief Executive Officer]

Yes, we don't guide on gross profit margins. So we have component costs that are bit higher. So that will have some effect. And then we have this quarter-over-quarter fluctuations in gross profit margin. But our ambition is still to keep very good gross profit margins [indiscernible] so throughout 2022.

[Magnus Navdal Bekkelund, Acting Chief Financial Officer]

Should we also expect to see continued negative effects of 2 to 5 percentage points?

[Oyvind Birkenes, Chief Executive Officer]

Yes. So there will be some effects, some percentage points effect on gross profit margin. And I believe we'll keep it within 60% to 65% for the first quarter. But it's hard to say exactly where it's going to end up because it's very dependent on the product mix and channel mix.

[Magnus Navdal Bekkelund, Acting Chief Financial Officer]

A final question. Can you give us an update on the tenders out in the market for Airthings for Business?

[Oyvind Birkenes, Chief Executive Officer]

Yes. There's many, many tenders ongoing. Some of them are very small and some more than larger. Some of them is not a good fit for Airthings, so then we don't go after them and others are very good fit. We have sold to many, many schools besides Quebec. But Quebec was a special, very big project, and we are certainly looking at other projects with that size as well. But we have shipped and sold to numerous schools across U.S. and Europe as well during the last couple of quarters. And we see the activity levels in schools and tenders is just increasing.

[Magnus Navdal Bekkelund, Acting Chief Financial Officer]

Thank you. Two questions from Christoff Bjornsen in DNB. Can you give some more color on the development in Airthings for Business beyond the Quebec project? And how are you expecting this business to look in 2022 versus 2021?

[Oyvind Birkenes, Chief Executive Officer]

So we are very positive about Airthings for Business. The underlying growth from our partners and customers are just continuing to grow every quarter. We will see that underlying growth is going to continue. That's how we see Airthings for Business. And then there will be some of those big rollouts as well that will happen at certain intervals. So we are very positive with the outlook for Airthings for Business.

[Magnus Navdal Bekkelund, Acting Chief Financial Officer]

What are the key new go-to-market partners? And what will it do for the revenues for the next 6- to 12-months?

[Oyvind Birkenes, Chief Executive Officer]

So in Airthings for Business, we are getting new and more partners regularly. We also just signed now an agreement with AprilAire, which is going to be very exciting. But all these partners we sign off in the B2B space, things take time. So we need to be patient as well. But the good thing is that we see this is a very broad range of partners that grow every quarter. So we are working very actively regional with regional partners and also more global partners to speed this up and also work actively with existing partners to see how can we grow their business faster. So -- but in the B2B field, there is long sales cycles, you have to train people, to show the go-to-market strategy throughout the -- throughout their sales teams as well. And that's really the focus that we have.

[Magnus Navdal Bekkelund, Acting Chief Financial Officer]

A final question from the online audience from Kristof [indiscernible]. Can you give an update on how we are tracking versus your medium- to long-term ambitions launched at the Capital Markets Day? Are you still feeling comfortable?

[Oyvind Birkenes, Chief Executive Officer]

Yes, we are. I mean we could have done so much better last year because of the supply challenges. But I believe things will be better now in 2022. So we are still tracking to meet those goals that we set forward in 2024 with NOK 1 billion in revenue and NOK 200 million in ARR.

[Magnus Navdal Bekkelund, Acting Chief Financial Officer]

No further questions from the online audience.

[Oyvind Birkenes, Chief Executive Officer]

Any questions from people here? No? Then I will say thank you very much, and we are super excited to come and present the next quarterly update in -- when is that, Magnus?

[Magnus Navdal Bekkelund, Acting Chief Financial Officer]

May 5.

[Oyvind Birkenes, Chief Executive Officer]

May 5. See you then.