Atea ASA

OSE:ATEA

Earnings Call Transcript 2022-Q2

[Steinar Sonsteby, executive]

Welcome to the Atea Q2 presentation from beautiful Oslo. Before I start, I want to encourage all of you to putting questions already during the presentation that we will take in the end of the session.

A really, really strong Q2, the best Q2 ever for Atea. This comes as we still struggle with supply chain and other imbalanced factors in the world. The demand is very strong and the supply chain becomes better and better during Q2.

And then to the numbers. Revenue came in at more than NOK 12 billion. This is up 11.5% but even higher in constant currency. The EBIT came in at NOK 281 million, which is a growth of 36.5%. And net profit even better at NOK 222 million, up more than 55%. You should believe with that kind of revenue number and growth that backlog would fall. But that's not true. Backlog actually increased during the quarter by 10%. This means that the actual booking the sales during the quarter increased by almost 20%.

But as normally, I'll leave it to Robert to give you all the rest of the good news.

[Robert Giori, executive]

Thank you, Steinar. I'd like to start by reviewing our income statement. Atea had a rapid growth in revenue and profit in the second quarter. Gross sales were a record high NOK 12.2 billion, up 11.5% from last year. The underlying sales growth was higher than reported. Currency fluctuations had a negative impact of 2.1% on gross as sales in foreign currencies were translated into a stronger Norwegian krona. Adjusting for the currency impact and an acquisition in Finland, organic sales growth in constant currency was 13.8%. Sales were strong across all lines of business.

Hardware gross sales increased by 13.5% or about 16% in constant currency, driven by higher demand for digital workplace solutions. Software growth sales grew by 10.9% or over 13% in constant currency with strong demand for cloud subscriptions. Services gross sales increased by 7.7% from last year or 10% in constant currency based on rapid growth in the consulting business. Our gross sales is then converted into net revenue based on the principal agent criteria in IFRS 15. As you may remember, at and its peer group have changed their accounting policies to comply with the recent decision by the IFRS Interpretations Committee. Under this agenda decision, sales of standard software and vendor services are recognized on a net basis with revenue equal to gross profit. After this adjustment, net revenue according to IFRS was NOK 7.6 billion, up 13.4% from last year. Organic net revenue growth in constant currency was 15.4%.

Total operating expenses grew by 2.5% to NOK 1.9 billion as higher personnel costs were partly offset by a gain from the sale of Atea's mobile service provider business in Norway. Atea had a net EBIT impact of NOK 40 million from the sale of Atea mobile in April after provisions for sellers' guarantees and other liability provisions.

With higher revenue and low growth in operating expenses, Atea's EBIT grew by 36.5% to NOK 281 million. If we exclude the impact of the sale of Atea mobile, Atea's EBIT still grew by 17.0%.

Finally, net profit after tax grew by 56.5% to NOK 222 million. Net profit growth was driven by higher EBIT plus a financial gain on foreign currency balances. We'll now take a closer look at sales and profit development across the countries in which we operate. Atea's rapid growth in sales was spread across nearly every geography in the second quarter.

In general, despite concerns about the economic environment, we're seeing a very strong market for IT infrastructure in the Nordics and Baltics. In Norway, sales grew by 18.9% to NOK 2.8 billion. EBIT was NOK 119 million, up from NOK 84 million last year as a gain on the sale of the mobile service provider business offset higher operating costs.

In Sweden, Sales grew by 15.7%, with strong demand across all lines of business. EBIT grew by 17.8% to a record high SEK 139 million. in Denmark. Sales were DKK 2.1 billion, a flat trend from a very strong comparable period last year. EBIT grew to DKK 2 million, up slightly from last year. Q2 is seasonally the most challenging quarter for Atea Denmark and the business has historically lost money in this quarter.

Atea's operating profit in Denmark in the second quarter is a very strong improvement from the longer-term historic trend. In Finland, sales grew by 22.4% to EUR 92 million. EBIT grew by 32% to a record high EUR 2.4 million. Atea Finland is now back on track after a year in which the business was impacted by the loss of a major public frame agreement. In the Baltics, Sales grew by 20.8% to EUR 36 million and EBIT grew by 21.6% to a record high EUR 1.3 million.

Atea Baltics had strong growth across all lines of business with a very high demand from the public sector. Atea also improved results in insured service subsidiaries. Atea Group functions which includes shared services and group costs, generated a net operating expense of NOK 11 million compared with an operating expense of NOK 25 million last year. The difference was primarily driven by higher profits from Atea's Logistics operations in Vaxjo.

Now we're on our cash flow and balance sheet. Atea's cash flow from operations was an outflow of NOK 507 million in the second quarter, which is an outlier from the historic trend. As you can see from this chart, Atea's cash flow from operations typically has a very consistent seasonality with a strong cash inflow in the second and fourth quarters. The decline in cash flow from operations in Q2 is based on a strategic decision by Atea to increase inventory levels during a period of extraordinary supply constraints in the electronic's industry.

Atea normally operates with a low inventory balance and procures most customer orders on a just-in-time basis with its vendors. During the past year, Atea's faced long and uncertain lead times with hardware vendors due to supply constraints. This has caused delays in invoicing projects when the shortage of a specific hardware item prevents a project from being completed. To secure inventory for customers, Atea has been procuring hardware in advance of customer delivery dates. Furthermore, Atea has acquired some buffer stock of standard PCs and other workplace items to capture market share from competitors, which are facing supply issues.

All of this has led to higher sales, but also a higher working capital balance due to a lengthening of the cash collection cycle between payment to vendors and collection from customers. Atea is now changing course and actively reducing its inventory levels. The supply chain constraints have eased greatly across most product categories since the start of 2022. As inventory levels fall, Atea expects working capital to reach a more normal balance by the end of the year. This will result in higher inflows of cash during Q3 and Q4.

Moving on to our debt balance. Due to higher working capital requirements, Atea's net debt balance grew to NOK 1.2 billion at the end of Q2 as defined by Atea's loan covenants. This corresponds to a net debt-to-EBITDA ratio of positive 0.7%. While Atea's debt has grown from last year, the company still has a relatively low leverage ratio and is well within its loan covenants, which require the company to maintain a net debt-to-EBITDA ratio of less than 2.5%. Atea has significant additional debt capacity within its covenants to pursue its growth strategy. As inventory returns to lower levels and cash is collected, we expect Atea's net debt balance to fall during the course of Q3 and Q4.

That concludes the presentation of the second quarter financials. I now hand the podium back over to Steinar to provide an update on market trends.

[Steinar Sonsteby, executive]

Thank you, Robert. A quarter to be proud of. But as Robert said, I want to give you a little bit of insight to what's going on in the market. Why is it strong? What happens with supply chain and how is Atea positioned in this time? I have spent some time with IDC so that these statements not -- are not only ours or mine, but also supported by the market analysts.

IDC came out with a report not many weeks ago saying that we are entering the digital first era or that the world has become digital first. And what is really meant by that? Well, with my words, what really happened during '18 and '19 was that everybody was available digitally at all times at any place because of the devices we have. And secondly, all we need, all information, all services were available at all times for everybody. And so digital first really is possible because we're all available to be met, to buy or to consume services and products digitally. There is no need to go through the physical route.

And this leads to completely new investments in go-to-market models, in new services, and you see it around you both as a consumer but also more and more as a person in the working life. And when IDC ask the customers, and I think we should be aware that most people will be more positive on their own position here than what they really are. But if they -- or when they ask the market, only 13% of the companies and organizations feel that they are on top of this development. This is really what fuels the investments now and in the years to come. And so when IDC looked at their predictions so they predict every quarter, December, March and now in June, they have constantly increased their growth predictions.

And the green on this slide is from February and March and the gray from May and June. And as you can see, they now predict the next several years to have 6-plus% in growth in the IT area. This is the complete IT market. If you look at the infrastructure market, the prediction is actually that the growth will be around 8%. And this is a totally different, and this is in the Nordic, by the way. And this is different than what it is some other places in the world. because we didn't really have this spike during pandemic that you saw many other places. The Nordics were more or less ready, and there is no spike to fall down from.

So what we see now is a normal aggressive but normal market. And if you look at this from a customer point of view and look at their IT budget, you will here see how much of the total budget goes to support the IT investments. And approximately 50% both of public and private has an IT budget below 2.5%. But what's interesting is that the number of customers or companies and organization that are in the bracket between 2.6% and 5% is increasing every year as we have measured this KPI. And now more than 30% of all private companies spend more than 2.6% of their total budget on IT. It's not many years ago where no one spent more than 2%. So this is also supporting the IDC prediction. So the market is strong. It's predicted to be strong going forward. So how are we positioned?

Well, again, this is a little bit of a busy slide, but what is trying to show you is actually 2 things: First of all, if you take the whole IT services market, not only the infrastructure, which we normally talk about, but the whole services market. Atea is the third biggest services player in the Nordics with 5.3% market share. As we've talked about many presentations, this is about 15% to 20% when we look at the infrastructure market only. The second information from this slide is that Atea together with Capgemini are the only 2 players in the Nordics who are green in all 4 areas that IDC follow.

So I would say, these are IDC information, I would say that we are well positioned, if not perfectly positioned to take advantage of a strong market going forward. And from the predictions, I would like just to end on this slide. And this is from another analyst firm, called Canalys, which are well known in Europe and around the world. What they say is that the customer demand for technology have never been stronger. It's never been harder than now. The biggest problem is not that the market is not strong enough. It's how we, as an industry, can meet and support that demand. How can we in a position where there is skills, there are lack of skills, there is lack of products, how can we support this high demand. They're also saying that customers really need help.

Customers lack skills, they need a safe harbor or someone to help them through this transformation. They need a trusted IT partner. And at the same time, Canalys says that the vendors, the OEMs, the producers of the products have no way to support the customers, even though some of this is produced as a service or in a service model. So they're all pointing at companies like Atea. And again, we believe that we will be able to take advantage of this going forward.

And then someone out there might say, well, we read that PC sales are down a couple of percent and so on. And that is true. The consumer market, which we are not operating in is down because of inflation and because of other issues or maybe there was a pike -- spike, sorry, in that market during pandemic. But in the business-to-business market in the Nordics, this is not the case.

And the second thing that you have to understand is that price adjustments, price increases of 5% plus is also making the market bigger, even though number of PCs, number of products is slightly down.

And so to my last slide before we'll wrap it up on supply chain. I've categorized it into 4 areas on this slide to try to help you to understand how this has developed. These are average delivery times. And so there are certainly, deliveries that are faster and there are deliveries that are slower. And these are deliveries from the producer. And as Robert were stating, we have inventory, so deliveries from Atea will be in many occasions faster than this. But let me just take a couple of examples for you.

So on the PC side, pre -- the problems delivery times of 25 to 30 days. During the pandemic, more than 150 days, now down to 45 to 60 days. It's not all the way back but it's much, much more manageable than we've seen.

On the other side, networking is still challenging, as you can see. So the mix that we have in our books right now is skewed towards user equipment. But the backlog is there. The market is strong for networking, and we will work with that going forward. So that concludes our presentation.

A second -- a first half of 2022, which is by far the strongest first half we've ever, ever had of a revenue of more than NOK 22 billion and a net profit of NOK 353 million, up more than 30%. So with that, will give you the opportunity to throw some questions at us. And we'll be happy to answer all of them. So Christian, have we had any questions so far?

[Christian Stangeland, executive]

Yes. Thank you, Steinar. We have received a few questions already. The first one goes like this. Some analysts say that number of pieces sold is down. What is your comment to this?

[Steinar Sonsteby, executive]

Yes. I was just ending the presentation saying that in the world in total, the PC sales is slightly down or predicted to be slightly down this year, but was slightly down first half. In the Nordics, that's not really the case where it's slightly up. But the business-to-business market has been strong. It's the consumer market that really brings down the number of PCs. And again, when you look at not the number of product shift, but the revenue from this market, it's up in the world because the price increase of as much as 15% on some of the products.

[Christian Stangeland, executive]

Thank you. Next question, inventory is up, and you no longer have negative working capital. What is happening?

[Steinar Sonsteby, executive]

Yes. What is happening? I think Robert was talking about this in his part of the presentation. So we took an active decision about a year ago to use the muscle that we have in the market by using some of the financial power to increase inventory. And so that has helped us when we have almost 15% growth in revenue in a difficult time, it's because we spent some financial muscles. And we now see that, especially on the PC and the mobiles and the tablets that delivery times are going down, we will decrease this. So we will have a positive development in this area going forward and a negative working capital as people are used to seeing from us. But this is an active decision, which have worked really well for us.

[Christian Stangeland, executive]

Thank you. Next question. In our view, Atea is well positioned to weather the challenging macro environment ahead given its public sector exposure. However, can you comment a bit on what you are seeing among your private sector customers? And how it differs across [indiscernible]?

[Steinar Sonsteby, executive]

So actually, when we measure the sales public versus private, it increased in the favor of public during 2020. So from 60% to maybe 66%, 67%. And that's been pretty constant during the last 2 years. So we don't see a very strong shift 1 way or the other right now. I think this is because when you look at the private sales we're doing, it's skewed more to bigger companies than the smaller companies. And so the bigger companies in the Nordics doesn't seem to decrease their investments in IT. I think on the contrary. And just on a personal note, I think this is because we're living in a part of the world with one of the highest cost levels. And so return on investment in automation or in IT is still very, very strong, but we haven't seen any changes so far. But I do agree it is a kind of an insurance to be having more than 65% of the sales to public.

[Christian Stangeland, executive]

Next question. Working capital increased significantly in the quarter. How should we expect this to develop in the next couple of quarters?

[Steinar Sonsteby, executive]

Do you want to take that, Robert?

[Robert Giori, executive]

I think we addressed that the question probably came in before we spoke about it. We expect working capital to go back down to normalized levels over the next couple of quarters as we take an active decision to bring down the inventory levels. What this means is it means our cash collection cycle normalizes, that we go back to something which is more like a just in time where right now, instead, we get payments to vendors before we're collecting from customers.

[Christian Stangeland, executive]

Why do you need to build buffer stock in PCs? This seems to be a category with quite good supply lately?

[Steinar Sonsteby, executive]

Yes. I understand people are interested in the cash flow here and the working capital. That wasn't the case only 6 months ago. And we have huge deliveries to, especially the public and especially school PCs in Norway and Sweden here in July and August. So when Q -- we're past Q3, inventory will come down also on the PC side.

But I have to remind you that only 6 months ago, we weren't able to get PCs within the next 6 months even when they were ordered. And the reason why we delivered was that we did have buffer stock or inventory. So huge deliveries in Q3, which are now in inventory, be able to guarantee those deliveries to students as they start school in the first week of school, which is the contracted KPIs, but it will come down.

[Christian Stangeland, executive]

Could you elaborate on how -- on your hiring plan going forward?

[Steinar Sonsteby, executive]

Yes. So I think I want to expand a little bit on that question. A lot of people talk about difficulties of getting right people. And they're also talking about the salary increases in the market. We, as the biggest player in our part of the region, have not seen major problems of getting people. What we all see is that there is a lack of certain skill sets. But as the biggest players, as I said, we can hire people that are younger and that we can develop and train within 3 to 12 months. And that both keeps the salary pressure down but also expands the number of people that we can recruit from.

So I know that wasn't exactly what the question was about, and I will address the specific of the question, but the hiring plans going forward will depend on the market and how fast we can get that skill set to fit the market, probably a little bit slower than the last 12 months, if I should try to give a number.

[Christian Stangeland, executive]

Is Denmark still suffering by lack of supply of, for instance, network hardware? Or is this a more normal quarter supply-wise, how do you see second half outlook for Denmark?

[Steinar Sonsteby, executive]

So 2 parts to that question. First of all, Denmark is really suffering from the delivery of networking products. As we've said before, Denmark relatively is the country with the highest portion of their revenue from networking. And again, networking is the part of our product and services set that has the highest margin. And so they do really suffer both in Q1 and in Q2. And this is one of the reasons that they're not having growth in the first -- or in the second quarter, I'm sorry.

And so we expect Denmark to start growing again in Q3 and Q4 on revenue, which will also help them on EBIT, of course. But the mix is important here. I want to just say, I don't know if everybody out there are aware of this, but we are not on the biggest frame agreement in Denmark, which is all the public on PC. That is a 4-year frame agreement that was decided in June of 2018 that we were not on for certain reasons. That is up for grabs this summer. And if we are good enough and well enough positioned to be on that contract, that will give Denmark a spike. And secondly, KMD, the acquisition will come into play during August, September, which will increase the revenue in Denmark significantly. So we see growth second half and maybe higher than the market.

[Christian Stangeland, executive]

When do you see supply chain situation normalizing for networking and server storage? What is the feedback from suppliers?

[Steinar Sonsteby, executive]

So we believe that storage and servers will normalize during this year. I'm not saying it will be exactly back to where it was before the pandemic or before the supply chain problems, but it will be normalized, just like PCs have during the last 3, 4 months. Networking, we believe, will take a little bit longer. So we'll be into first half next year before we'll see somewhat of a normalizing. Networking have always had longer delivery times than more standardized equipment, but they will -- it will normalize from what we see, from what we hear during -- or into next year.

[Christian Stangeland, executive]

How much of the strong sales growth in Q2 is explained by price increases.

[Steinar Sonsteby, executive]

Well, that is -- I don't have a number for that to give the audience. But the -- to calculate what comes from what when you have hundreds of thousands of products going out is not really that easy because it depends or it varies greatly during or over the product spectrum. But it's a significant part of it. So if I should try to give a judgment here, maybe as much as 4%, 5% percentages. So 1/3 of the growth.

[Robert Giori, executive]

One thing which tempers that is that much of what we delivered in the second quarter was actually ordered from us because of supply chain issues in the fourth quarter. And so we both established the price with a vendor and a price of the customer before the latest wave of inflation kicked in. So that temper is some of the inflation that we saw in the second quarter.

[Christian Stangeland, executive]

Is there any risk of write-down on the inventory that was built up during Q2. Do you see inventory levels fully normalizing during second half of this year?

[Steinar Sonsteby, executive]

Again, 2 parts of the question. If I take the last part first, so we don't believe that we will be back 31st of December at exactly or as low a number as we did 3 or 4 years ago. But it will be much closer than where we are right now. And we'll see an improvement already at the end of Q3, if we can follow the plan that we have. So it will fold greatly towards the end of the year. When it comes to write-downs, inventory, there is always a risk for that. But with the demand that we see right now, it's not a big concern for us.

[Christian Stangeland, executive]

CapEx was elevated during the quarter. What's going on here? And how should we expect this to develop going forward?

[Robert Giori, executive]

Much of the CapEx that we had in the second quarter was actually a postponement in data center projects due to delivery times that was coming from the first quarter into the second quarter. And so on a first full half year basis, we're on track with our expectations, and our expectation is that we would have CapEx at or below 1% of revenue or of sales still holds. We've been well below that, and we expect to be below the 1% of sales level going forward. So it's more a timing of projects and it has any change fundamentally in our CapEx.

[Christian Stangeland, executive]

Okay. I think we have received the last question here. All are complaining on increased salaries and lack of skills. How do you see this?

[Steinar Sonsteby, executive]

Yes. I think I commented a little bit on this earlier. There is a lack of skills in certain areas in the world. But we have been able to manage that, I think, better than what I see and hear from other players. That also means that the pressure on salaries are kept under control, I would say. And so we don't see any specific spikes in the salary cost per employee or on average per employee. And I think you can see this in our numbers when you see a number of higher -- new hires and how the salary increase has been. So we feel we've been able to handle this pretty well. And as you can see in our services business, it's growing greatly and faster than the number of people.

I think that concludes the Q2 presentation of Atea. We're really proud of the quarter. We hope you also like it.